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I FELL ASLEEP in the car, lulled by Griff’s tuneless singing, and when I woke up he was shaking my shoulder.
“Passport,” I realized he was saying.
“What?” I said.
“Your dad said you have a passport. You need to get it out,” he said.
I sat up, rubbing at my eyes. My bad leg had stiffened up from sitting crammed in the car for so long. I kneaded it and peered around. We were behind a couple of other cars in some sort of line. A border checkpoint. “Where are we?” I asked.
“Heading into Canada,” Griff said. “You need your passport.”
Confused, I dug around in my bag until I found it. It was full of stamps. My mom used to take me all over the world. Paris and London and Bangkok and Hong Kong. We hardly ever got far from the airport, but I got little tastes of everywhere.
We got to the front of the line. Griff rolled down the window, and a man in a baseball cap and windbreaker leaned down to squint inside.
“Good afternoon,” he said. “How are you two doing today?”
“Good,” Griff said, more of a grunt than a word. I just gave him a crooked smile that could have meant anything. I knew it exaggerated the scars on my cheek. It tended to stop questions dead.
Griff handed over the passports. “Got one of those letters, too,” he said. He reached across me and popped the glove box. It was stuffed with paper napkins and wet wipes, along with more receipts and a folded, crumpled paper, which he held out to the border agent. “About the kid.”
He looked at our passports, then at the letter, frowning slightly. I couldn’t tell if it was a something’s-wrong frown or just a paying-attention frown. “What’s your reason for visiting Canada today?” he asked.
“Just visiting,” Griff said. “Friends, I mean. Visiting friends.” I couldn’t tell if he was nervous or if this was just more of his odd self. I did my best to look normal. I didn’t know why we were heading into Canada, either, but I didn’t want to get Griff in trouble.
“This letter says your father’s given permission for you to travel with Mr. Dawson,” the border agent said, looking me in the eye. “Is that the case?”
I blinked, then realized that Mr. Dawson must be Griff. “Yeah,” I said. I didn’t sound completely convinced. I mean, I hadn’t read the letter, and I hadn’t talked to my dad for more than two minutes on the phone in the last ten years. “Yeah, he did. We’re visiting friends.”
He looked at me for another long moment. It made me afraid, even knowing he was probably just looking out for me. He was like the lawyer who handled my mom’s will and the pilot who flew me up to Alaska. Men who saw my scars and wanted to step up and protect me, even if they couldn’t figure out anything to protect me from.
“All right, then,” he said. He handed our passports back to us after a little more examination, and we filtered our way through. In five minutes we were out the other side and in Canada. Griff relaxed, and I gave him a puzzled look.
“Why are we in Canada?” I asked.
“It’s where your dad is,” he answered. That was all the explanation I got for hours.
GRIFF DROVE TOanother airfield. This one was even smaller than the last. It was private, tucked away next to a lake where Griff’s bright yellow plane waited, its bulbous floats keeping it crouched on the water like a bug.
In a building—not quite a cabin—beside the tarmac, he served us a dinner of fat, sizzling sausages on buns with yellow mustard and no ketchup, which I thought might be more of his odd obsession with yellow but turned out to just be because he ran out.
“The legendary Sequoia Green,” he said. I didn’t correct him. “Your daddy’s one of my best friends. He saved my life once. We were rafting, you see, and we hit a big rock. I fell in, and he fished me out. So he saved my life.”
Griff didn’t tell very good stories. The way my dad told the same story, Griff and I laughed so hard we had to hold our sides because our ribs hurt, and Griff snorted beer out his nose and into his beard and then we all laughed about that. Only now I can’t remember how he told it, and even if I did and I wrote it down it wouldn’t be as funny, because Dad’s just like that. Dad makes people laugh. It’s why Mom married him even though she shouldn’t have, even though anyone could see that.
Dad made people laugh. Past tense. He died and I’m alone, and no one is coming for me. Pretending won’t bring him back. But in that moment with Griff at the airfield, Dad was an entirely different kind of gone. He was hovering in the future, not lost in the past. Somehow it worked out to nearly the same thing.
But meanwhile, Griff and I were eating our sausages and he was telling terrible stories and saying weird things. Things like: “God loves everybody, and when you die he can finally tell you direct. That’s why heaven’s so nice.”
And: “I don’t think a person should get married until they’ve punched someone and been punched at least once.”
And: “You ever see a moose run sideways?”
When Griff asked you questions, you didn’t have to answer. He’d move on before you could even think it through. He did all the talking for the two of us, which suited me fine. I was still trying to figure out what I felt about all of this, and what I should do. Like, say, run for help. But once you get talking with Griff, the notion of him hurting you goes right out the window. And it wasn’t like I had anywhere else to go.
“We’ll leave in the morning,” Griff told me, slurping down coffee. “Not enough light left today.”
