I cleared my head and felt my senses sharpen. Tried to think of Tom Hatch as a creature I was hunting. To feel him out there, wherever he was. Just another animal.
A dog started to bark. Homer.
I inched forward, skirting the dog yard, I thought. I couldn’t see the light of the lamp or feel whether the ground under my feet was ice or snow. Couldn’t tell if Hatch was across the yard or inches away. I put my hands out, certain I would bump into him, I flinched at the thought of it. The wind shifted, pushed at me like a palm, urging me forward. Something inside me give way and I broke into a run, hoping I was headed the right direction. Moving blind through the snow. Closer to the house, to the gun. Fast as I could, till I run directly into Hatch.
His hands grabbed me, his fingers round my arm, his other hand clutched my coat. I think he shouted. His voice taken by the wind. I tried to pull loose, but he held fast, fingers digging into my arm. He towered over me, so tall his face seemed miles above me, too far away to make out in the dark and the storm. His body pressed against mine, same as when he’d took Jesse behind the barn.
My free hand in my pocket, fumbling.
His hands searching. The palm of his glove, sudden and rough against my cheek. His hot breath on my skin.
I drew my knife out, windmilled my other arm from his grip. Unfolded the blade. I understood without thinking hard that the blade wasn’t long enough to slice through all his layers and still pierce the skin.
Tracy? The voice faint in the wind.
No! I heard Jesse say, his voice ringing out inside me.
My knife the only bright thing in the white and the black. It gleamed as I slashed, a straight line across his neck that opened like a mouth.
Tracy, said Helen.
She didn’t fall. Her arms dropped, then she raised one hand, put it to her neck. For a second I seen her clear, and she seen me. Then the wind rose again and the snow hid her from me, so the memory I have of her looking down at her own palm, studying the blood that run out of her, I know I must of only imagined that. I had sliced a hundred necks, drained the life out of countless animals by knowing exactly where to cut. It is a fast way to kill, only a matter of seconds, the blood stops going to the brain and the animal is quickly gone. No time for Helen to gape at me, a question in her eyes.
But plenty of time for me to understand what I done.
I folded in half and let loose a stream of vomit, it splattered against my boots and the snow on the ground went yellow with it. My insides heaved, everything solid in me coming loose and the earth rising up, the ground itself rolling and cracking and opening under me and swallowing me. I wished it would.
She was only a shape on the ground. Her eyes filling with snow. A black puddle growing under her.
I tell myself what I done next, I done on account of I owed her something. After taking her life, I meant to carry her with me, like a burden.
I knelt next to the shape of Helen. Crouched over her.
Drank.
18
I find myself in a cool, dark barn, my fingers round the udder of a cow, and my pop’s hand over mine, his breath tickling my ear as he tells me, Giver her a squeeze, the milk’ll come slow at first, there she goes— The musty, pleasant smell of the barn and the solid flank of the cow and the milk hits the bucket with a metallic hiss and Pop lets go, he don’t smile easy but now he grins and a joy wells up in me so intense I nearly topple over.
The sun setting over fields of hay behind my family’s house and lighting everything orange and yellow and the queer longing it fills me with, unexplainable and palpable.
My brothers and sisters, shouting from other rooms, fighting or laughing, the stench of my oldest brother’s room, dank and sharp, like dirty socks and sweat and something I can’t quite place. The hothouse heat cut by a cooling breeze, the five of us lined up on the screened-in porch and trying to sleep but waking each other with pinches and fart sounds and giggles till Ma pokes her head out and tells us, Settle down, her voice dressed up in its stern outfit but still amused underneath.
The quiver in my belly when the boy with black hair brushes past me in the hallway at school. The heaviness of my private parts, a dampness, when I think about him, touching myself.
A thunderstorm raising the hair on my neck, the feeling of my ma’s arms round me.
Other things, everything. A fish flopping on a grassy bank, pride and regret at the shot that killed my first deer, the warm tang of beer on my tongue, my whole self buzzing with coffee, bleary eyed, the words in my nursing books fuzzing together. My own hand stopping a man’s blood, pressed against his chest, and the mothball smell of the closet I hide myself in, giving into a minute of crying the first time a patient dies on my watch.
I cry, too, overwhelmed, at my first sight of Alaska, the mountains here grander than anything I’ve seen back home.
And I make the bed I’ve slept in, a bed that isn’t mine but where I have come to feel at home. Voices float up through the floorboards, children who don’t belong to me but who I care about, have grown to love, the boy who is generous and kind and easy, and the girl who is wary but quick, who wears her longing for her mother on her sleeve. And then he steps into the room and my pulse quickens and I could stay here, in this room, be part of this family, forever, if they see fit to let me.
Days and months and years of love and hate and want and boredom and fear and contentment. A lifetime in one drink. The last drink, her last heartbeat. Her lifetime coursing through me, no longer coursing through her, as all round us the snow swept the land and howled like a wounded dog.
19
In the morning, I woke to the sound of a dog whimpering. I sat up, my whole body sore down to the bones, and snow cascaded off of me. Homer rose, too, licked my face, he had curled himself next to me in the night.
The sky was clear and blue, by the faint light and the position of the sun just above the trees I could tell it was still morning but late, near about ten. Sometime in the night the wind had finally died, there was drifts about three feet deep against the barn and nearly burying the dog houses. I was lucky, the drift that had formed over me and Homer had acted like a blanket, kept us warm as I’d slept.
The new snow had all but erased Helen. The only part of her visible was her eyes, froze open. The light in them gone.
At first, I stayed pinned to the ground, wanting to look away from her but unable to. There was a wave rising, towering above me, weighted with the reality of Helen, dead beside me, and my knife, coated in her blood, and Dad, oblivious on the trail, and Scott, at school now but home by four thirty that day. The hole I had tore in their lives. A wave, building and building, it would crash down on me soon and when it did, I wouldn’t be able to swim against it, it would carry me away, useless and flailing.
But I could do something now. Before it crashed. I couldn’t right what I done, but I could move.
I wrenched myself up from the ground and led Homer inside, fed both dogs. Then drug out a sled, the one I’d meant to race with that year, and got out the rigging I’d need for just two dogs. Two retired dogs who hadn’t pulled a sled in ages, but the memory of it lived in their bones, they was still strong.