Go away, I said and closed my eyes.
He went away, the floorboards creaking underfoot and the hinges on his bedroom door complaining. Still, he was there. Inside me. The closest I could be to anyone, hearing the voice in his own head narrate, feeling relief at taking off the too-tight shirt and pulling on a sweatshirt instead. He was there, a room away, yet louder than my own thoughts.
20
Dad didn’t win the Iditarod that year but he done all right, come in eighth with a team of fifteen, no more dogs dropped after Rohn. He finished in nine days, fourteen hours, twenty-one minutes, and three seconds. He didn’t tell me how running this particular race brought back the memory of Mom, aching and comforting at the same time, how the distance of months and the changes those months had brought somehow made the loss of her not exactly okay, but tolerable. He didn’t tell me, because he didn’t need to.
The whole of his existence rushing at me before he even come inside the house the day he returned. At the sink, I scrubbed a plate for long minutes, even though I had polished it clean, concentrating on not sensing Scott, who was in the den, shoveling ashes from the fireplace. Unprepared to be pummeled by the pleasant fatigue and the gratitude for home that preceded Dad inside.
I staggered, dropped the plate into the sink full of water, and gripped the edge of the counter.
Whoa, there, Dad said when he seen how my legs buckled. You’re not still feeling poorly, are you, Trace?
Concern reaching for me like hands, and numbers clicking through his mind, he always forgot if the clinic’s phone ended in an eight or a nine. And an absence tugging at him.
Helen leave this morning? he asked as he led me to the table.
I dropped into a chair, my stomach plunging. Grateful this openness didn’t go two ways, that he couldn’t know what was in my head, because along with the dread of him discovering Helen was missing, and the guilt over what I done, now I understood I wouldn’t just feel my own loss and regret and horror at what I done. I would feel his, too.
It didn’t make sense. Dad and I had always been close in the way of two people who work alongside each other or who like the same things. The dogs brung us close, racing, the woods, even the times he showed me what he knew about hunting or shelter building. All that linked us together, but not the way drinking would of. Yet now I was as close as I could get to him. I had the same sudden access to him as I had with Scott.
She wasn’t here, Scott was telling Dad. I haven’t seen her since Chris Lester’s mom dropped me off Friday. Did she come back after you got sick again? he asked me.
I didn’t tell her, I mumbled, then added that I didn’t feel so well now, I thought I would try to nap a bit, and I stumbled up the stairs, leaving Scott and Dad downstairs to wonder about Helen. While their unspoken thoughts and feelings trailed after me like tendrils of smoke.
I stopped in the bathroom first. The only way I had been able to get Scott out of my head the night before had been to sleep. I was wide awake now, despite how I felt, like someone had wrung out my guts. I rummaged round inside the medicine cabinet till I found an old prescription bottle, a picture of a truck on its side with a line drawn through it. May cause drowsiness. Alcohol may intensify this effect. Use caution when operating a car or dangerous machinery. I swallowed two pills without water, then flopped onto my bed, didn’t bother getting under the covers.
My dreams was my own, no one else’s. I know because I dreamed of Helen, her body sinking slow into the icy water. Her eyes, filled with snow.
I skipped dinner, though I woke enough to hear Dad describing the race to Scott. He recounted each leg of the run from Willow to Nome, though he didn’t sound as animated as he’d done in previous years. He was distracted, worry fretting his brain, plucking at it like fingers that couldn’t still themselves. Till finally, in the middle of a sentence, he got up and dialed the phone. His fifth call to Helen that day. I listened to ringing through his ears, till her answering machine picked up. Hello, you’ve reached Helen Graham’s residence. I can’t come to the phone right now . . .
Think maybe I’ll drive out there, he said to Scott.
Can I come?
The whole house suffused with their distress. Suffused. I rolled the word round in my head, not a word I would normally use, but a Helen word, a word I had got from her. I closed my eyes and buried my face in my pillow, didn’t stir when Dad knocked on my door, and when he and Scott was long gone, I went downstairs to find the note he’d left me on the table. Gone to Helen’s, back soon. Love you.
My head finally my own for a spell. Clear. The thoughts inside it only my own. My arms and legs limp with relief. I roused them, shoved my feet into my boots and went outside. For the first time since my trip to the lake, I sought out the trail. Run into the trees.
I needed to find a way to disconnect myself from Dad and Scott.
I stayed in the woods long past when I should of come home, at first hunting, setting snares, then waiting in the sublime silence of the woods, reveling in it. Near about midnight, it begun to snow, slow, soft flakes that wafted to the ground. It covered the tracks of animals and masked the sounds of them in their dens. I rose finally and plunged deeper into the wild, looking for traps I had set. I found one triggered, then another, the animals already dead but I drunk from them anyway. Filled my head with random minutes from their lives. I was quickly full, but I kept running, searching, and when a vole darted across the trail I was quick, I snatched it before it vanished in the underbrush. Its whole short life rushed through me. Then the silent wood again, and my silent head. Escape, finally.
When I come home, I found that Dad and Scott had returned with company. The Village Safety Officer’s car was parked outside, engine still running against the swiftly dropping temperature. The snow had stopped.
Stepping inside the house was like turning on three radios all at once, all at full volume. All three minds, Scott’s, Dad’s, and the VSO’s, exposed. I waded unwillingly into the stream of their existence.
There you are, Dad said, and there was relief I was home and irritation that I had gone out without telling him. Worry about Helen, weighing heavier on him now that he knew she hadn’t showed up at work, neither, something the VSO had told him, the VSO whose attention was like a mirrored ball, each face reflecting upon a detail, a scrap of information, a face, my face, marking me as an unknown, noting that he would have to make time to ask me questions, the way he had asked Scott, whose fear had escalated though he was trying to tamp it down, a boy sitting on the lid of a cage that contained a rabid bear, willing and eager to eat him whole.
Stop it, I hollered. Or only whispered, since the three of them ignored me.
We found her Jeep about thirty-five miles south of here, parked on the shoulder of the highway, the VSO told Dad. This was after someone at the clinic went to her house to check on her. She’d missed— He glanced at the small notebook in his hand. Two shifts. Coworkers said that wasn’t like her.
Dad shook his head. No.
We sent search and rescue out, in case she broke down and got lost somehow.
She wouldn’t of left the highway in that case, Dad pointed out.
The VSO nodded. Still, worth a look. Didn’t find any sign of her, though.
So, what now?
I had crept across the room, nearly to the stairs, but now I felt every face of the VSO’s attention turn to me, the glare of it hot as the sun.
When did you last say you saw Ms. Graham?