Chapter Eleven #2
“The worst part—” I say, and then stop, because I’ve said this sentence to myself so many times that I know exactly what comes next, and I’m not sure I can say it out loud without it sounding different than it does in my head at three in the morning.
“The worst part wasn’t the license. I could have rebuilt it, I was good enough, somewhere else, with time, and I know that about myself even now.
I’m not asking for reassurance on that point. ”
The shovel handle is cold through my gloves.
“The worst part was that I picked every one of them. My father, Marcus, the people I signed for without reading what I was signing. Every choice I ever made about who to trust with something real, I was wrong... every... single... time.” I hear the words land in the cold air, and they sound exactly as bad out loud as they do in my head.
“So, when people say you’ll trust again, you’ll know better next time, what they don’t understand is that I thought I already knew.
I was certain. I had evidence. And it turned out the evidence was also something they’d arranged. ”
I hear him stop working.
When I make myself look over at him, he’s turned toward me. I’ve seen most of the expressions he’s shown me since he woke up in this cabin. This isn’t any of them.
He’s furious.
Not at me.
“What they did to you was a sin,” he says.
Not a metaphor, or the loose secular version of the word people use when they mean a shame or a waste.
He says it the way he said harder room, with the authority of someone reporting a finding, not offering an opinion.
Something about the absolute steadiness of it moves through me in a way I don’t fully understand.
“Not a small one,” he says. “Not the kind that fades.”
I almost laugh, because the alternative is something I’m not prepared to manage out here in the cold. “You sound very sure about that.”
“I am.”
“On what authority?”
He looks at me for a long moment, and then he looks down at his hands, at the gloves covering them, and something moves across his face. It’s private, old, and slightly rueful. “I’m still working that out.”
We stand in the cold with the creek path almost clear. Bear has planted himself on the snow between us, looking from one face to the other with the expression of a dog who understands more than he’s supposed to and has decided not to say anything about it.
“He was your fiancé,” Prophet says. Not a question.
“Yes.”
He doesn’t say anything else. No, I’m sorry. No, that’s awful—no attempt to make what happened smaller by putting words around it.
My eyes are wet. I don’t know when that started. I turn back toward the cabin, finding a reason to look in that direction, something to do with the woodpile, and I press the back of my wrist against my eye, and it comes away damp. I keep walking.
Behind me, I hear his shovel go still. “Lily.”
“I’m fine.”
A pause. Then, quietly, “I know you are.”
Not of course, sorry, the good, plain version of it, the one that doesn’t argue with me or make me defend the claim. I keep walking, and the snow is deep enough between the cleared path and the woodpile that I have to lift my feet with each step, giving me something to concentrate on, which helps.
By the time I’ve reached the woodpile and put my hand against one of the stacked rounds for no reason at all, I can breathe normally again.
Alaska is very still around me. The post-storm stillness is its own specific quality, different from ordinary winter quiet.
It’s not just the absence of wind, but an absolute hush, as if the storm used up all available sound, and the world has to generate more from scratch before anything can move through it—every track from before the storm has been erased.
The crater is gone, buried under new snow, smoothed back to nothing.
The lynx print I’d been checking near the second snare every morning for a week is gone.
I hear him come up behind me. He doesn’t touch me, but stops, close enough that I can feel the warmth of him against the cold air on the back of my neck.
“You picked me,” he says.
I turn around.
“You did,” he says. “You pulled me out of a crater when you didn’t have to, you brought me into your home, and you made a decision about who I was before I knew it myself.” The corner of his mouth moves slightly. “I don’t think your picking is the problem.”
Something in my chest loosens, something that has been held for so long I’d forgotten there was any tension in it. “You’re a fallen angel with no memory who arrived in my yard on fire,” I say. “The bar was different.”
He’s quiet for a second. “First time you’ve said that.”
“It’s what you are.”
“I know.” Something shifts in his expression.
“Just wondered when you’d get there.” Prophet gives a small shake of his head.
“The bar was the same. You trusted your read of me. You were right.” He pauses.
“They made you doubt that. Made you think the failure was in you, so you wouldn’t look too hard at where it actually was. ”
“Come on,” I say, because the woodpile isn’t going to restack itself. “I need you to hand me rounds.”
He picks up the first one without a word, and we fall back into the work, and the silence between us now is a different thing from what it was an hour ago.
It’s not empty or weighted but something else.
It’s the kind that exists between two people who have just handed each other something real and decided not to drop it.
The sun hits the snow at an angle that turns the whole clearing into something that hurts to look at directly. It’s that particular post-storm brilliance Alaska produces when she’s finished with you and wants you to know it.
Bear finds a stick somewhere under the new drifts and brings it to Prophet, drops it at his feet, takes three steps back, and waits with absolute confidence.
Bear has never once doubted the world will provide what he needs.
It is, in its way, the most useful quality I have ever encountered in another living creature.
Prophet picks up the stick and throws it farther than it needs to go. Bear explodes across the snow, ears flat, his whole back end involved in the effort. The sound he makes when he catches it is pure, uncomplicated satisfaction.
I stand there with a round of wood in each hand and watch them.
Five years ago, I came to Alaska because I wanted to be alone. I built a life around it.
For the first time since I got here, I’m not sure I want that life anymore.