Though Not Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  She opened the book again and found a list of amounts preceded by dollar signs, which upon further study revealed themselves to be licensing fees for the various businesses in operation in Ahtna, more of them than she would have thought. Federal funds were conspicuous by their absence. If the locals wanted law, they could pay for it. A bank, two stores, three saloons, a draper, a dry goods store, a garage, and two hotels were all assessed quarterly fees in sums that appeared to be commensurate with the amount of income their business generated. There was a Mrs. Beatrice Beaton’s Boardinghouse, another triple-barreled name a little too euphonious to be true. By the size of the license fee, Kate thought Mrs. Beaton might perhaps be renting her beds by the hour, and not empty, either.

  She was charmed. It was the picture of an entire community on one page, and so rapt was she in this snapshot of what was essentially a frontier town that she hadn’t felt the cold stealing into the room through the open door. The brush of rip-stop nylon on the door frame, the scuff of Vibram rubber soles on the wood floor, these registered, but too late, and for once her famous reflexes failed her.

  She raised her head and looked toward the door, and as she did so the sixteen-inch piece of firewood coming around in a two-handed swing smacked her square on the side of the head.

  She didn’t even remember falling down.

  Six

  The plane landed fifteen minutes ahead of schedule and they had to wait for a gate at the John Wayne Airport, which bore no resemblance in size or traffic to the one-horse terminal Jim remembered. When the seat belt light went off he got to his feet, relieved that his legs still worked. He followed the signs to baggage claim, waited fifteen minutes for his suitcase to be the last bag on the carousel before the “Last Bag” sandwich board came out, and climbed in a cab to give the driver the address of the house where he had grown up.

  Palm trees—he remembered the palm trees. The strip malls were new, and the sky looked less blue than it used to. He looked at the umber hills against the horizon, puny compared to the Quilaks. Which ones were they? The San Gabriels? The Santa Monicas? For the life of him he couldn’t remember.

  He didn’t remember this much traffic, either, a cacophony of cars, every tenth one a convertible, every eleventh one a Hummer. They inched along, getting caught at three successive lights. A drive that should have taken twenty minutes was going to take twice that long. Where the hell were all these people going? At this hour of the morning, why weren’t they at work? A siren sounded somewhere behind them, and cars bad-temperedly wedged themselves to either side of the road so a cruiser with lights and siren going full out could edge past and drive down an exit.

  An image of the dirt roads of the Park flashed through his mind, the wide, gray Kanuyaq running beside them, the great, ferocious peaks of the Quilaks elbowing their way over the eastern horizon, backed by the hot pinks and nugget golds of a rising sun. He thought of the peace, the clear, almost pure silence, that came with that view. He had never used the siren on his rig. He couldn’t remember the last time a Park rat had used his horn. There was no road rage because even if you were mad at someone who cut you off—and where on a Park road was there enough room to cut someone off?—you knew him and he knew you and you weren’t going to flip off someone who would be buying you a beer at the Roadhouse that evening.

  He repressed a strong urge to tell the driver to turn around and take him back to the airport.

  Something wailed out of the radio that reminded Jim of the last practice session of the belly dancers at Bernie’s. The driver was watching him in the rearview mirror. “Where you from?” he said.

  “Alaska,” Jim said.

  “Wow, no kidding, Alaska? How cold is it up there now?”

  “Not very.”

  “Is it true that it’s dark up there all the time?”

  “Half true.”

  “What’s that sexy governor of yours up to these days?”

  “She quit.”

  The driver gave up.

  When they finally got to it, the neighborhood hadn’t changed much. Tall, canopied trees turned the wide, leisurely streets a dappled green. The sidewalks were edged with manicured grass. No house was so small it didn’t need a staff of two or more to run. There had been some rehabs, a neo-Greek temple here, an ersatz Tuscan villa there, but when the cab pulled into the driveway the old home was still true to the fake Mexican roots of the developer who had built it, with its stucco walls, tiled roof, and thick cloak of magenta bougainvillea drooping over the heavy Spanish doors.

  He paid the cabbie, hefted his suitcase and his daypack, and walked to the door, where he hesitated for a full minute before pushing the doorbell. The days when he’d just walked in were long gone.

  The heavy wooden door opened. “Hi, Mom,” he said.

  “James.” He was offered a cool cheek to kiss. “Please come in.”

  He stepped into the tiled hallway.

  “Maria,” his mother said, “this is my son, James. Please take his bags to the guest bedroom and then bring us some lemonade on the terrace.”

  “Si, señora.” The Latina almost curtsied and hurried away with the bags.

  “This way, James.”

  He followed her through the house and out a back door to a sunlit terrace paved with broad flagstones, in between which had been planted some bright green moss with tiny white flowers. There was more bougainvillea and a variety of leafy trees and flowering shrubs arranged artfully around a winding path of more flagstones, right up to the eight-foot stone wall that restrained the yard from spilling out into the street. It looked very beautiful. Compared to the Park, it also looked very domesticated.

  He looked at his mother. An upright five foot nine, a carefully maintained one hundred fifteen pounds, she had always epitomized the Duchess of Windsor’s dictum that one could never be too rich or too thin. Any renegade drooping or sagging was covered in raw cream-colored silk tailored to fit those slender arms and those long legs, and her feet were clad in brown leather sandals consisting mainly of a few thin straps that even to his uneducated eye shrieked designer prices. Her hair was the same white blond it had always been, although now it brushed her shoulders in a disciplined pageboy, the wings curving gently beneath the square jaw that was so obviously his own. Her makeup was subtle, and her rings, watch, and earrings delicately and expensively made. Her fingernails, filed to perfect ovals, were coated in a discreet clear polish, and no shred of cuticle dared to rear its ugly head. The wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth were very faint, and the skin of her neck was smooth and firm. She’d had some work done, but then she lived in the work capital of the world. It was probably the law in LA that you had to have work done. She was seventy-nine. She didn’t look a day over sixty.

  “You look great, Mom,” he said, because one of them had to say something.

  She looked at his T-shirt and jeans, her gaze lingering on his scuffed boots. “Thank you,” she said.

  “I have a suit in my bag,” he said.

  She raised beautifully shaped eyebrows. “I would hope so.”

  He had to unclench his jaw to ask his next question. “When is the funeral?”

  “The day after tomorrow. There will be a memorial for everyone at the church, and then a graveside service for family.”

  “There’s only you and me.”

  “Followed by a reception at the club.”

  The club. Of course.

  Maria brought the lemonade in a frosty pitcher and two tall glasses.

  “That will be all, Maria, thank you,” his mother said. Maria genuflected herself off the terrace. His mother poured.

  “Monday, Mr. Abernathy will come here for the reading of the will.”

  He thought of the four long days between the funeral and the reading of the will. “Why? We both know what’s in it.”

  She ignored him. It was one of her best things.

  “Tell me about Dad,” he said.

  She took a deep breath and let it out very
slowly and deliberately. Whatever he thought of her, he had never doubted that she loved his father. “A year ago,” she said, “he began to lose strength in his hands. He started dropping things. I wanted him to go see his doctor. He wouldn’t hear of it, said it was nothing, that it would pass.”

  He watched her face in profile, the mouth unsmiling, even stern. “Then he began to tire halfway through our evening walk. So I made the appointment and I drove him there. They did all the usual tests. Nothing checked all of their little boxes. Dr. Mortimer said if he had to make a bad guess that it would be amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.”

  “Lou Gehrig’s disease.”

  “Yes.”

  “Last year?” he said.

  She turned to look at him and answered his real question. “He forbid me to tell you. You may believe that or not as you choose, but it’s true.” She paused, as if she were debating whether to say what came next. In the end, her own ironclad sense of propriety won out. “I don’t think he could bear the thought of you seeing him like that.” She faced forward again, duty done. “He was reasonably active until, well, until last week, really, capable of walking, if slowly. Talking. Breathing.” She swallowed, her first and only sign of distress. “And then I think he just … stopped. He developed a staph infection, though he had no open wound near the infection and he hadn’t been near a hospital or even the doctor’s office for two weeks before that. I almost think it was deliberate, although I couldn’t tell you how. They tried antibiotics, but the infection wouldn’t respond to them, and his organs began to shut down. Things progressed very rapidly after that. He went into the hospital on Friday night. He died Sunday afternoon. I was with him.”

  Jim saw that his hand was clenched on the table. He forced it to relax. “I wish I could have been here to say good-bye.”

  “Had I known he was dying, I would have called you sooner.”

  It was as close as he’d ever get to an apology.

  “He told me to tell you,” she said, “right before…” She stopped.

  “Tell me what?”

  It was hard for her to get the words out, and it showed. “He wanted you to know he was proud of you.” Her mouth twisted for a moment only, before being smoothed back to its usual firm line.

  He would take what he could get. “Thank you for telling me.” He got to his feet and walked to the edge of the terrace so she wouldn’t see the tears in his eyes.

  A well-mannered car purred past on the other side of the wall. A door somewhere opened and closed again with no unseemly haste or force. The leaves rustled in the breeze. Some fortunate bird that had found its way from the smog-choked environs outside into this comparative paradise gave song. The setting sun cast longer and ever more illusive rays across the mossy stones of the path.

  “How long did the swimming pool last after I left?” he said.

  “Three weeks,” she said, and he turned to see a tight smile on her face.

  Maria came out again. “Dinner is ready, señora.”

  The interruption didn’t matter. They understood each other perfectly.

  They always had.

  Seven

  The sea around her was thick and black and bottomless. It felt like she would never reach the surface. When she did, after a long and painful swim that stretched her muscles and strained her lungs, the waves slapped at her face, rough, urgent, sandpapering her skin. She moaned.

  She heard a siren. She moaned again.

  The slapping of the waves increased. So did the volume of the siren. “Stop,” she said, “please stop.”

  She opened her eyes, or tried to. One was swollen shut, the other almost so, and the lids were gummed with some sticky substance, the subject of determined removal by Mutt’s tongue.

  Mutt was standing with her forepaws on either side of Kate’s head and her rear paws on either side of Kate’s hips, engaged in a vigorous cleaning of Kate’s face. In between licks she would raise her head and growl at the door, a rumbling, menacing sound designed to terrorize anything standing outside of it, up to and including an F-15.

  The decibel level of the siren moderated and became the fearful whine Mutt alternated with the ferocious growl.

  Kate put up an arm to try to fend her off. “ ’S okay, girl,” she said, or that was what she had meant to say. Her mouth felt as if it were full of sawdust. “Mutt,” she said, “knock it off.”

  Mutt kept licking and whining and growling and snapping her excellent and very pointed set of teeth.

  A stray thought occurred to Kate. At least with the licking, her face would be clean of all the blood.

  Blood. What blood? And why blood?

  She thought about this for a while, but someone kept shouting at her. That was annoying. “Shut up,” she said, and then couldn’t remember if she’d only thought the words.

  She heard her name. “Kate?”

  “Uh,” she said. She was pretty sure she’d said that.

  “Kate, can you call her off?”

  “Uh,” she said.

  “Kate, work with us now. You have to stand her down. She won’t let us in the cabin.”

  “Uh,” she said.

  “Kate, come on, wake up.” The familiar voice put some English on his tone. “Kate. Snap out of it, dammit.”

  Mutt’s growl that time had to have registered on the seismometer at the Alaska Volcano Observatory. Matt Grosdidier swore later that the door of Old Sam’s cabin reverberated beneath his hand.

  “Mutt,” Kate said, and this time managed to raise a reassuring hand to Mutt’s head. “ ’S okay, girl. I’m all right.”

  Her hand missed Mutt’s head by six inches. Mutt whined at Kate and growled at the door.

  Kate tried to raise her hand again, and connected this time with Mutt’s neck. She knotted her fist in Mutt’s thick gray mane and gave her a shake that was feeble at best. “Mutt.” She tried to sit up and couldn’t, only partly because Mutt wouldn’t move. Kate made a tremendous effort and achieved near coherent speech. “Mutt, babe, you need to relax. I’m still here.”

  Mutt wouldn’t be moved, so Kate got her other arm up around Mutt’s neck and used her to pull herself to a sitting position. After about a year, she got there. It took another year to shove Mutt to one side, so that Kate was between her and the door. Moving one hundred and forty pounds of half wolf half husky was never an easy proposition, and when the one-hundred-and-forty-pound half wolf half husky was ready, willing, and eager to take out someone, anyone, for the damage done to her human, the problem increased exponentially. Kate cajoled, cursed, and shoved, and finally managed it, although Mutt wouldn’t move more than six inches away and remained on stiff legs, hackles raised, that low, menacing growl continuing to rumble from her throat.

  Kate, exhausted, leaned against her, one arm still hooked loosely around Mutt’s neck, and worked on mustering enough energy to get to her feet. If that was ever going to be possible again. Her head hurt so bad it might be dangerous to increase its altitude even by five feet. Maybe she should just lay down again. She couldn’t remember why she’d wanted to get up in the first place.

  Movement near the door caught the corner of her eye. At the expense of pain that shot all the way down her spine, followed by a wave of nausea, she turned her head and saw Matt Grosdidier poking a nervous nose inside the cabin. “Kate?” he said in a tentative voice.

  Oh yeah. That was why. “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s safe to come in now.”

  A tentative footstep sounded on the floor. Mutt gave a sharp warning bark right over Kate’s head, baring her teeth at Matt.

  One giant step backward and he was once again on the correct side of the door. There was some nervous whispering. There seemed to be a lot of other people behind Matt but she couldn’t see their faces in the dark.

  When had the sun gone down? The last she remembered it was full daylight.

  “Kate?” Matt said.

  “Mutt,” Kate said tiredly. “Enough. Sit.”

  There was a
long pause when nobody moved. Kate opened the one eye still working and glared at Mutt. “Sit,” she said again, this time with enough force to be felt.

  Yellow eyes narrowed, but Mutt sat. She took her time, and no one was fooled into thinking she had relaxed her guard.

  Kate, making another tremendous effort, resulting in another throb of pain and another wave of nausea, turned her head again to see Matt just inside the door, the daypack with the red cross on it in his hand. Behind him she could see the faces of Mark, Luke, and Peter Grosdidier and Harvey Meganack. There might have been others. She closed her eyes again.

  “Kate, stay with me. If you pass out again, she’ll probably go berserk. Again.”

  Kate opened her eyes every morning, no reason she couldn’t do it now. Was there? She hoisted her eyelids into their original upright and locked position. “Okay.”

  Matt advanced. Mutt’s growl increased in volume. “Mutt, you know me. It’s Matt. You know I’m not going to hurt her.” His foot slipped on something and he lost his balance and swore. Mutt amped it up. “Come on, girl, stand down. It’s okay. I’m going to help Kate, and then you can have her back, I promise.”

  And then Matt was kneeling next to Kate, and to his credit he didn’t flinch when Mutt thrust her muzzle at him, that growl sawing back and forth like a hacksaw through rusty iron. He’d opened the daypack before he came into the cabin so he wouldn’t have to fumble around with the zipper, and the alcohol swabs were ready to hand.

  “You did a great job of cleaning her up, Mutt, good girl, nice girl, please don’t rip my face off, girl, nice girl, I’m just doing a little cleanup work here, good girl.” Mutt backed off a fraction of an inch and without changing his tone Matt said, “Jesus, Kate, what the hell happened?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. The smell of alcohol stung her nostrils and she flinched at Matt’s touch. “Somebody hit me.”