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I pace around, opening the cupboards, running my hands along the shelves. I find a couple of bottles of beer at the back of one cabinet, and a dented can full of rusty nuts and bolts. Mostly I find dust and more dust, but my hand catches against the edge of an envelope on the topmost cabinet, so far back I have to stand on my toes to reach it.
I tug at it and two more envelopes come with it, each one torn open with the letter still inside. Two of them just have Carl Green written on the outside, in two different kinds of handwriting. Griff must have brought them up.
The third is stamped, with the address printed neatly (the address in Alaska where Dad never went), from the Washington State government. That one I open first, even though I figure I know what it’s about: me. Informing Dad about Mom’s death and that he now had custody of me.
The letter looks like it’s been crumpled up and then smoothed out again. I imagine him balling it in his fist. I try to imagine what his face must have looked like when he found out, but I can’t. I have to look at the photos again just to get his image fixed in my mind.
I sit cross-legged on the floor to read the two other letters. I can’t tell which was older, so I open them in the order they were stacked.
Carl—
I can’t thank you enough, you really saved my bacon or at least my kneecaps. I should be able to sell the house and get the money back before winter. You said that was plenty of time so I am hoping you weren’t lying. I will be up again with the cash when I have it and some of that swill beer you like too. Don’t get eaten by a grizzly or nothing before I get back up there
Yours, Jed
Some of the words are scribbled out, and the sentences are wobbly and differently sized. Jed is obviously not used to writing out his thoughts, but what’s there is clear enough.
Raph’s conversation with Dad comes back to me, clear as if they were talking just outside the door. Dad must have given Jed the money he was supposed to be holding on to for Raph. Kneecaps sounds like a loan shark, or whatever they’re called. So that’s what Dad meant when he said he’d have the money back; Jed was going to bring it. Had brought it, I’d bet, in that plane of his. That’s why he came. He kept his word. He’d been a real friend. He could have helped me.
Too late to think about that now. I shake my head and open the other letter.
It isn’t really a letter. Just a note. Found these, thought you might like them. The page is folded around two photographs.
The first is my dad and me. Christmas. That last Christmas. On the floor in front of the tree, surrounded by all those presents he shouldn’t have bought. I’m grinning up at the camera, he’s grinning at me.
And the other photo—
I shut my eyes, bite my lip, open them again, because it’s hard to look. It hurts.
The other photo is of my mother. She’s young. Standing at the edge of a trail, the woods behind her. Her hands cup her pregnant belly, framing it, and she’s laughing. The sun is in her eyes. It casts the shadow of the photographer—my father—across the trail beside her.
I stare at the photo for a long time. Then I take down one of the photos from the wall, open up the frame, and tuck the photo inside. Griff and his salmon go on the counter; Mom and Dad’s shadow go on the wall. I sit back down, lean my head against the wall, staring at the photo.
I sit like that for a long time.
•••
THE REST OF the day I don’t do anything at all. Once I’ve cleaned and bandaged my feet, I loaf around and play fetch with Bo and eat. Bo isn’t great at fetch. When I throw a stick, he looks at me and sighs, then trots slowly across the cabin floor, and then looks back with the stick in his mouth like there’s something wrong with me. Then he comes plodding back and thrusts it into my hand as if to say, Here. Hold on to it this time. Sheesh.
It’s the most fun I’ve had in months.
The second day I do some math. Well, it’s more like counting and guessing. I can stretch sixteen jars of food and the beans into maybe twenty days, I figure, and still manage decent meals. Any less than that I’ll get weaker, and I’m as weak as I can be without just keeling over. No point in rationing myself to death. So say three weeks for the sake of neatness, and that leaves, oh, four or five months of winter without food?
I have no idea when in winter Raph and Daniel would be back. I have to be ready for them to arrive in a few weeks. I have to be ready for it to take months. And I don’t have nearly enough to get me that far.
“Well,” I say in a lofty tone, “this is quite the conundrum, Bo. We shall need to put our best minds on it.”
Bo looks up from chewing on a stick, decides I’m not doing anything interesting, and gets back to it.
At least I have shoes I found under the bed, even if they’re massive. I’ll have to take them apart and remake them before I can wear them; for now, I wrap my feet back up and stump outside.
I haven’t even looked at the shed out back yet, so I make my way over to it. I entertain fantasies of stacks and stacks of canned food, but force myself to keep reality firmly in mind. The door is crude: instead of a handle or a latch, it has a hole through the wood and the frame, a chain looping through both with nothing but a carabiner to hold it shut. I unhook the carabiner and pull the chain free, then fit three fingers through the hole and tug.
The door is stuck against its frame. I pull, my arm protesting, and then grit my teeth and yank. It pops open. I almost spill onto my butt, but I hang on grimly and get my feet under me.
The inside is dim and dry. Hooks descend from the rafters. Knives and tools hang from pegs on the walls. Something dark and brown stains the table against the back wall. Blood. This is where Dad did his butchering.
I walk around the room, touching my fingertips to the sharp objects Dad must have used again and again. Things for slicing and puncturing and cutting. I don’t know what all the blades are for. I don’t even know how to skin a rabbit properly.
