She was never the same after that, my aunt told me. This was maybe by way of explaining why I'd been put up for adoption a few months later. My mother had gone to teach somewhere in Alaska. Somewhere away from the coast, my aunt added with a smile. She pretended she didn't know exactly where. I'd been left with the Franciscan Sisters at the Catholic orphanage in Kahili. On the day of my graduation, one of the sisters who'd taken an interest in me grabbed both of my shoulders and shook me and said, “What is it you want? What's the matter with you?” They weren't bad questions, as far as I was concerned.
I saw my aunt that once, the year before college. My fiancée, many years later, asked if we were going to invite her to the wedding, and then later that night said, “I guess you're not going to answer, huh?”
Who decides when the time's right to have kids? Who decides how many kids to have? Who decides how they're going to be brought up? Who decides when the parents are going to stop having sex and stop listening to one another? Who decides when everyone's not just going to walk out on everyone else? These are all group decisions. Mutual decisions. Decisions that a couple makes in consultation with one another.
I'm stressing that because it doesn't always work that way.
My wife's goal oriented. Sometimes I can see her To Do list on her face when she looks at me. It makes me think she doesn't want me anymore, and the idea is so paralyzing and maddening that I lose track of myself: I just step in place and forget where I am for a minute or two. “What're you doing?” she asked once, outside a restaurant.
And of course I can't tell her. Because then what do I do with whatever follows?
We have one kid, Donald, named for the single greatest man my wife has ever known. That would be her father. Donald's seven. When he's in a good mood he finds me in the house and wraps his arms around me, his chin on my hip. When he's in a bad mood I have to turn off the TV to get him to answer. He has a good arm and good hand-eye coordination but he gets easily frustrated. “Who's that sound like?” my wife always says when I point it out.
He loses everything. He loses stuff even if you physically put it in his hands when he's on his way home. Gloves, hats, knapsacks, lunch money, a bicycle, homework, pencils, pens, his dog, his friends, his way. Sometimes he doesn't worry about it; sometimes he's distraught. If he starts out not worrying about it, sometimes I make him distraught. When I tell these stories, I'm Mr. Glass Half Empty. Which is all by way of getting around to what my wife calls the central subject, which is my ingratitude. Do I always have to start with the negatives? Don't I think he knows when I talk about him that way?
“She says you're too harsh,” is the way my father-in-law put it. At the time he was sitting on my front porch and sucking down my beer. He said he thought of it as a kind of mean-spiritedness.
I had no comeback for him at the time. “You weren't very nice to my parents,” my wife mentioned when they left.
Friends commiserate with her on the phone.
My father-in-law's a circuit court judge. I run a seaplane charter out of Ketchikan. Wild Wings Aviation. My wife snorts when I answer the phone that way. My father-in-law tells her, who knows, maybe I'll make a go of it. And if the thing does go under, I can always fly geologists around for one of the energy companies.
Even knowing what I make, he says that.
Number one on her To Do list is another kid. She says Donald very much wants a little brother. I haven't really heard him address the subject. She wants to know what I want. She asks with her mouth set, like she's already figured the odds that I'm going to let her down. It makes me what she calls unresponsive.
She's been on me about it for a year, now. And two months ago, after three straight days of our being polite to one another — Good morning. How'd you sleep? — and avoiding brushing even shoulders when passing through doorways, I made an appointment with a Dr. Calvin at Bartlett Regional about a vasectomy. “Normally, couples come in together,” he told me at the initial consult.
“This whole thing's been pretty hard on her,” I told him.
Apparently it's an outpatient thing, and if I opt for the simpler procedure I could be out of his office and home in forty-five minutes. He quoted me a thousand dollars, but not much out of pocket, because our health insurance should cover most of it. I was told to go off and give it some thought and get back in touch if and when I was ready to schedule it. I called back two days later and lined it up for the Saturday before Memorial Day. “That'll give you some time to rest up afterwards,” the girl who did the scheduling pointed out.
“He had a pretty big trauma when he was a baby,” my wife reminded her mom a few weeks ago. They didn't realize I was at the kitchen window. “A couple of traumas, actually.” She said it like she understood that it was going to be a perennial on her To Do list.
So for the last two months I've gone around the house like a demolition expert who's already wired the entire thing to blow and keeps rechecking the charges and connections.
It was actually flying some geologists around that got me going on Lituya Bay in the first place. I flew in a couple of guys from ExxonMobil who taught me more than I wanted to know about Tertiary rocks and why they always got people salivating when it came to hunting up petroleum. But one of the guys also told the story of what happened there in 1958. He was the one who didn't want to camp in the bay. His buddy made serious fun of him. The next time I flew them in I'd done my research, and we talked about what a crazy place it was. I was staying overnight with them, because they could pay for it, and they had to be out at like dawn the next morning.
However you measure things like that, it has to be one of the most dangerous bodies of water on earth. It feels freakish even when you first see it. Most tidal inlets are not nearly so deep — I think at its center it's seven hundred feet — but at the entrance there's barely enough draft for a small boat. So at high and low tides the water moves through the bottleneck like a blast from a fire hose. That twilight we watched a piece of driftwood stay ahead of a tern that was gliding with the wind. The whole bay is huge but the entrance is only eighty yards wide and broken up by boulders. Stuff coming in on the high tide might as well be on the world's largest water slide, and when the tide running out hits the ocean swells, it's as if surf's up on the north shore of Hawaii from both directions at once. We were two hundred yards away and had to shout over the noise. The Frenchman who discovered the bay lost twenty-one men and three boats at the entrance. The Tlingits lost so many people over the course of their time here that they named it Channel of the Water-Eyes, “water eyes” being their term for the drowned.