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THERE ARE TWO ways the story gets told. In one of them, there’s a girl all alone in the wild. She’s brave and resourceful. It’s an adventure story, a triumph. And there’s a footnote at the end, a mention of a paramilitary group, of three deaths—or four, if they count my father—and not much explanation. That story is inspirational. People want books about that story, they want TV specials. They still call sometimes. I’ve stopped answering.
The second story is about a group of bad men. Domestic terrorists, the story calls them. Men with guns and bombs and plans for mayhem, who dodged the FBI by moving north and going quiet and hiding evidence where no one would look. It’s a story of thirty-nine arrests, of two separate manhunts, of FBI agents and cops and politicians taking credit for dismantling a criminal network. In that story, I’m the footnote. Rarely even mentioned. I’m just a source of information.
I’m glad. The stories overlap, but few people realize it. Which means that few people ask too many questions about those last days on the ice. Everyone who had to know agreed it would be best for me—quiet, strange, traumatized me—to keep the whole story of what happened and of what I did out of the media. They didn’t bother asking me one way or another.
That second story fills in some of the gaps in what I knew. The way it was explained to me is this:
When my dad was younger, before he had me, he got involved with a group of men all high on the same ideas. They wanted to be self-sufficient; they wanted to be left alone. At the beginning there were only a few of them, and mostly they just hunted and fished and drank and talked.
Then a new man joined them, a man who didn’t just want to talk. Albert. He started to take charge. He had a warrant out on him for something boring—dodging taxes, I think. They got stopped on a trip, out on a road in the middle of nowhere with a cop who’d just meant to let them know they had a busted taillight. There were three guys in the truck, and my father was one of them. The cop ended up dead. Dad was just in the car, that was all, but years later when they had a hundred members and more murders to their name, when they had pipe bombs and automatic weapons hidden under floorboards and were blackmailing people for money, they still had that day to hold over him. That dead cop whom he hadn’t even said a word to.
So they used him to hide things, when the FBI was tearing apart every piece of property they’d ever set foot on. At first it was just money he was supposed to hold on to. Then there was a raid on Albert’s house, and they basically dumped everything that was in his safe into a box and ran like hell.
That was the way it was explained to me, sitting in a cold gray room with a can of perfectly chilled Coke cupped in both hands, which I couldn’t get down but was as good a thing as any to stare at so that I wouldn’t have to look at the woman explaining it all. She was a federal prosecutor. She was polished, from her smooth brown hair to her buffed fingernails to her slim-but-practical heels. I had trouble meeting her eye. She had this look I was getting used to but still hated, balanced between pity and horror. It came with whispers. Did she really...?
Sometimes I looked down and for a moment I was startled that there wasn’t blood under my fingernails, still. Not even dirt.
I had a funeral for my father. Not a funeral, really, since there wasn’t a body. A memorial. The social worker’s idea, taken up by my new foster parents. They bought me a black dress with sleeves that went down to my wrists, and black tights. I slicked back my hair to show the scars on my face and I stood in an empty chapel while a preacher said kind words about a man he didn’t know, a man who would have hated every mention of God and heaven in the service.
They think I’m wounded, but there is a difference between a wound and a scar. I’m done bleeding. I’m tougher now. And if these scars sometimes make things stiff, make it a little harder to move smoothly through a conversation or the routines of normal life, they just keep me from forgetting.
I have friends again. My old friends, Michelle and Ronnie, even though it took weeks for them to learn not to ask questions, and a few new ones. I see Scott every few weeks, and Will sends me emails with jokes and pictures of cats. I even managed to track down Griff (took a lot of dead-end calls to small Alaskan towns before I got a lead), and not long after, I got a lumpy package in the mail from him with yellow snow boots and a souvenir shot glass and a box of smoked salmon in it, clearly all bought in a panic at the same shop. I went to visit him and his daughter and told him it wasn’t his fault, but he didn’t believe me.
My life is full of people now, and even if I’m not the girl I was before the lake, before the accident, I’m alive and almost whole. I am where I belong, and most days I feel it.
Although sometimes—
Sometimes when I turn my head a certain way, so my deafened ear blots out the noise of city streets and babbling voices, when I find a moment of sudden silence, I shut my eyes. And in that moment I am back in the woods, back in the lake. My forest around me, a kingdom that I understand. A place that does not love me and that I do not love. But we don’t expect love from each other, the wild and me. We only want to survive.
And I did. And I will.
My name is Jess Cooper, and I am still alive.
