Chapter 8 #2
"I know." She holds my gaze without flinching, and the irony of that, this woman who jumps at loud noises staring me down in my own kitchen, puts a crack in every argument I'm holding. "I'm telling you it doesn't work on me."
The first instinct is resistance. The roads are dangerous. Someone hurt her. Keeping her off that pass isn't control, it's common sense.
But the resistance runs straight into my father's voice, saying the exact same words with the exact same certainty. The taste of that recognition is bile.
"The roads are dangerous." A third time, and the repetition is its own surrender because I can hear myself running out of ways to say it that don't prove her point. "You should have heard it from me. Before I told Bryan. Before I decided for you."
My arms stay folded. My teeth stay locked. Every line of me says that ground wasn't given. It was taken.
"I've had enough men make decisions about my life to last several lifetimes," she says. "I don't need another one. Even one I like."
The 'even one I like' lands like a fist to the sternum. "If you decide to drive off this mountain," I say, "I'll tell you the route. I'll check your tires. And I'll spend every minute after you leave wanting to follow you."
"That's controlling."
"That's honest. I said I'd let you decide. I didn't say I'd like it."
She picks up her mug. Her hand is steady now. She drinks, watching me over the rim, testing whether what I gave her was real or rehearsed.
"For the record," she says, "if I decide to leave in a blizzard, that's my terrible decision to make."
"For the record, I'll be the one shoveling your truck out of a ditch."
"I don't get stuck."
"Everyone gets stuck."
"Not everyone has my motivation."
The word reaches bone. Motivation. She means survival.
She walks past me toward the main room, close enough that her shoulder brushes my arm. The scent of her skin, warm under the flannel, stays in the air after she rounds the corner. The kitchen smells like her now. That's going to be a problem too.
I don't follow her. I go outside.
The cold burns my throat on the first breath. I walk the perimeter of the lodge and check the generator housing. The fuel lines are solid. The tie-downs on the equipment shed haven't budged. The snow is packed hard from the storm and my boots leave shallow prints that fill in behind me.
Kendall's truck sits where she parked it, the cab half-buried under drift. The engine block will be cold. If she tried to start it right now, it'd take a while to turn over, and she'd need to dig out before she could move.
She knows that. She's counted the steps from the bedroom to the truck and the minutes it takes a cold engine to turn over. The woman who leaves a packed bag within arm's reach of the pillow has calculated every step between the bed and the tree line. She's still here. She chose to stay.
I tighten the straps on the shed, check the padlock on the fuel storage.
Through the kitchen window on my way back in, I catch her in the main room.
Knees pulled up, spirometer on the arm of the chair.
She breathes into it, checks the gauge, and does it again.
Not ten times an hour. But she's doing it.
She's in my lodge, using my sister's equipment, sitting in my chair. The possessive inventory runs itself before I can stop it.
Upstairs, the routine is mechanical. Fresh towels in the bathrooms, fireplaces banked, windows sealed against the cold. I reach her door. It's open.
The room is neat. Bed made, flannel sheets squared at the corners. The spirometer's case sits on the nightstand beside a blister pack of anti-inflammatories.
The bag is on the floor beside the bed. Exactly where I knew it would be.
Her boots are lined up beside it, toes pointed toward the door.
Her coat is folded on the chair, not hung in the closet.
The bag is heavy and full, everything she owns reduced to what fits in a duffel. The packing is muscle memory.
My mother packed a bag. The memory arrives fully formed.
I was barely old enough to drive. I came home from school and found her in the bedroom with a duffel on the bed.
She was folding clothes with the focused speed of a woman running a countdown only she could hear.
She saw me in the doorway and stopped, her hands still on a blue sweater.
She unpacked the bag that night and put it back in the closet before my father got home. Not long after, she was gone. Without the bag. In the car, in the storm, with Amberly in the backseat.
My mother didn't leave because my father hit her. She left because one night staying got more dangerous than running. Staying cost more than going. By the time she ran, there was no plan left. Just the car, the storm, and Amberly.
Kendall hasn't made that call yet. The bag says she hasn't decided. The boots say she's ready. The fact that she's downstairs breathing into a plastic tube instead of behind the wheel says she's chosen today. Not tomorrow. Not the day after. Today.
I step back from the doorway. I don't touch the bag. I don't enter the room.
The door to my office closes behind me. The laptop takes too long to boot. Every page loads like it's being delivered by hand.
I type her name into the search bar. Kendall Jackson.
The results are thin. No social media. No professional listings. No digital footprint of any kind. The name is clean because it's not real.
I try variations. K. Jackson, Alaska. Kendall Jackson, Anchorage. Kendall Jackson, Sitka. The search returns a winery, a real estate agent in Juneau, and a high school soccer player in Fairbanks.
The missing persons clearinghouse is next. Alaska's database is public and searchable. The interface hasn't been updated since the early 2000s. I filter by date range, last two weeks. Gender, female. Hair color, auburn.
Three entries. Two are minors from prior months.
The third is recent, filed out of Anchorage less than a week ago.
Missing: Female, 29, auburn hair, last seen departing Anchorage en route to Sitka via prior arrangement. Reporting party: husband. Name of reporting party: Gary Simmons.
The photo loads slow on the satellite connection, top to bottom in bands.
The woman in the image has longer hair, past her shoulders, styled and maintained. She's thinner in the face, sharper, and the smile she's wearing for the camera is a performance. The lighting, the angle, the tilt of her chin. Everything about the composition is controlled.
It's Kendall.
The woman in my kitchen this morning grinned at a joke about soap and couldn't stop herself. The distance between that face and this photograph is years of learning which expression keeps a man's hands at his sides.
Gary Simmons. Husband.
I search the name. Gary Simmons, Anchorage. The results populate.
Business owner. Board memberships. A charity gala photo, black tie, holding a glass of wine with the easy confidence of a man who has never been told no by anyone who mattered.
Philanthropist. His name on a hospital wing dedication page.
His name on a community foundation board.
His name everywhere, attached to money, and where there's that much money there's reach.
Hospital wings bear his name. His wife flinches at the sound of a dropped pan.
That's all I need. I close the laptop. My hand stays flat on the desk.
I can hear Kendall moving through the main room. A chair shifts. A log settles in the fireplace. The ordinary sounds of a woman who doesn't know I just learned her husband's name.
Bryan finds me an hour later. He comes to confirm the morning patrol and stops in the doorway of my office. He reads the look on my face.
"What," he says.
"His name is Gary Simmons." I open the laptop and turn it toward him. "Anchorage. He filed a missing persons report."
Bryan crosses to the desk and reads. The scroll is slow and methodical, and his face doesn't change. Bryan's face never changes when he's working.
He straightens up. "What do you need?"
"Nothing." I close the laptop. "Yet."
Bryan holds for a beat, nods, and leaves. The door clicks shut behind him.
I sit in the quiet with the name behind my eyelids and the sound of Kendall's voice saying 'funny thing about cages.'
Gary Simmons built his cage out of charity galas, hospital wings, and a name big enough to make doctors look the other way. He put his wife inside it and left marks that Amberly found on a clinic table in a town he's never heard of.
I'm going to find Gary Simmons. I don't need a plan for what comes after.