Still Points North

by Leigh Newman

  The saleswoman undoes the whole bouquet. Then adds another iris. Then repackages the paper, the plastic. Then reaches for a sticker.

  “Peut-être encore une de plus,” I say. “Ou cinq de plus?”

  Not a blink from the saleswoman. Off comes the plastic and paper. In go five more irises. On goes the paper. On goes the plastic. “Ca c’est mieux,” I say. “Mais.”

  She pauses.

  “Cinq de plus?” I say.

  She dismantles the whole bouquet yet another time. On goes the plastic, the paper. In go five more irises. I’m not quite sure why she’s not yelling at me. “But where did you learn French?” she says.

  “I used to live here” is my standard answer—a simple, easy answer that’s not exactly true. I learned French in Alaska, from my babysitter, a Frenchwoman who had married a commercial fisherman. But only toddler French. The grammar I learned in Baltimore, where I’d been too petrified to actually speak French in French class. In the suburbs of Paris, at seventeen, at yet another sister school of my girls’ school, I learned that héro had nothing to do with Superman or heroes of any kind, but that my host sister had a serious heroin problem and that was why we were spending our nights skulking around the deserted streets of the banlieue.

  At nineteen, after leaving Alaska and then Stanford, I learned ancien français by enrolling at the University of Paris—Jussieu, where I spent my days in the library, reading Lancelot du Lac, the only one in my class to do so, because as, it turned out, French students don’t study, they spend their time making out with Americans at Tex-Mex bars near Les Halles. Besides, nobody speaks ancien français. It’s medieval, for God’s sake.

  Modern French I learned in New York at twenty-one, from a group of French banking interns who spent their nights clubbing and their days at work kissing one another hello and going for lunch. Slang French, argot, I learned from the same group at age twenty-three, while living at their summer houses in France, once I got fired from my New York editorial job for being what can only be described in retrospect as a hopeless employee.

  So really, all in all, I learned French in Alaska, Baltimore, New York, Paris, Montpellier, Bretagne, and Mayenne. All in all I’ve never lived in France for more than eight months at any one stretch, which brings up an old confusion for me yet again at age thirty-two, a confusion that even I must understand has something to do with the reason why I can’t stay in any one place or with any one person: How long do you have to live somewhere for it to be home?

  “I moved around a lot,” I say. “I had a babysitter … in Alaska?”

  The saleswoman looks up, one exquisite eyebrow raised.

  For the first time in my life, I flop into the whole, long story, which can’t be told, apparently, without going into my parents’ breakup. Then my breakup. Luckily, it’s in the middle of the afternoon. The shop is empty. People buy flowers in Paris after work, on the way to dinner parties, where, by the way, it’s impolite to bring wine. The saleswoman adds more ribbons, more plastic, more gold stickers as I blab and blab and blab, occasionally interjecting and asking me questions that force me to blab some more. “Comme c’est intéressant,” she says, when at last I’ve stopped talking. “And what are you here to learn now?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I just feel at home here. I feel safe for some reason.”

  She smiles. She’s going to laugh. She is going to say, But this is not your home, dear. You are just another silly American with a mediocre accent and certain, exceptionally affected cultural pretensions. After which, a loud, ugly gong will go off and she will point dramatically to the door and I will be forced to slink out.

  But she continues to smile—pleasantly, charmingly. Then she reaches into a bucket and presents me with one of the stately lilies that she had the good sense not to let me buy.

  Instead of a gong, a lightbulb goes off—not unlike the one that went off when I figured out, in third grade, that all those crisp letters on the page, when shoved together, made words. Why shouldn’t this woman let me feel that I belong here? I’m not bothering anybody. I’m just being happy. I have the right to be at home in Paris, struggling down the sidewalk with a bloated bouquet of irises the size and height of a sixty-pound king salmon. Even if—let’s face it—I do have another home. And, sometimes, I still miss it.

  CHAPTER 15

  A Tablecloth in the Wilderness

  Anchorage is the only place I know better from the air than from the ground. This was due to the loran, a prehistoric instrument on Dad’s cockpit panel, part compass and part odometer, that looked, essentially, like a Radio Shack digital clock—a flat panel with a series of knobs and flickering backlit orange numbers and letters. My job as the Great Alaskan Copilot was to monitor the loran for our direction and position, then affirm its accuracy by looking out the windshield. In this way, I—and I alone, at age eight—would keep us on course.

  Now that I’m an adult, I understand that while flying, you should never rely on the actual landscape or the surrounding sky. Clouds lie. Especially during storms, when the plane can flip upside down and plummet toward the ground without your being able to see or feel it. Dad invented my little job, both as a way to keep me from vomiting all over him due to airsickness and to teach me how to map the terrain where we lived.

  My impromptu flight from Paris has taken three long, soul-shredding days (Paris to New York to Milwaukee to Seattle to Anchorage). As the jet finally gets in range, I look out the window. First comes the cold, gray, chopped expanse of Cook Inlet. Then the pine trees of Fire Island. Then the long, sandy tidal flats, which end at Campbell Lake, our lake, a narrow curved water-runway that feeds into the sea. New arrivals to Alaska often walk out on the tidal flats, not realizing how easy it is to get stuck in the heavy, silt-rich mud, or how fast—and unforgivably—the tide rolls in.

  To the west lies the brackish stink-marsh for duck hunting, to the east the downhill slopes of Alyeska. Directly ahead lies Anchorage, the light and glass and haze of the city rising up from a low valley set between five massive snow-slashed mountain ranges. The reflection of these mountains, plus a wisp of cirrus cloud and pink sunset light, races over the windows of the skyscrapers and hotels—gilding the façade of downtown with a frosting of wilderness.

  On the family deck, Dad has the barbecue smoking with welcome. Abbie is mixing a bowl of my favorite lemon rice. Jack swoops down for a hug, impossibly tall. I’m a little bewildered. My younger brother is supposed to come up to my waist, just barely, on tiptoe, and pee in any available houseplant if he can’t make it to the potty (a trick I taught him). Instead he is talking about SATs and duck hunting and high-school girls and our other brother, Daniel, who is now at UCLA in California.

  We sit down at the picnic table. The sky is white. The wind flickers through the aspens. This early in June, the lake is flat and glassy mineral-colored, as if the ice were still there, holding the water in place. A duck bustles by with a line of fresh chicks—a short line. A weasel has set up house by our shed and is eating most of her eggs.

  Dad passes the platter and smiles.

  Abbie offers me the lemon rice and smiles.

  Jack cracks open a Fresca and smiles.

  All this beaming, loving attention makes me feel so acutely huge and ugly and failed. Even if my family doesn’t know yet that I’m getting divorced, it feels like they do. Why else would I be here? I only come up at Christmas. Maybe they think I’m upset about Nana. Maybe Dad figured everything out at her house, while she was dying. I’m such a jackass. I’m the Great Alaskan Jackass.

  “Wow,” I say. “I didn’t even know you could buy Fresca anymore.”

  Dad is looking at me—correction, studying me. He’s even squinting. “It’s a quality soda. For the calories.”

  Abbie says, “Somebody’s watching their weight.”

  Jack says, “I like root beer. Why can’t we buy root beer?”

  Do they understand how many times we’ve had this conversation? Which is actually
a conversation about Dad’s wacko yet obsessive fear of getting fat. As well as Abbie’s rapidly dwindling patience over the last few months as Dad has, no doubt, stomped around, dieting and muttering and accusing people of making intentional crunching noises while eating pretzels just to taunt him. Jack’s request for root beer is never going to happen; unlike Daniel and me, he has never committed to truly harassing other people.

  In short, nothing has changed since Jack was in diapers and Daniel was in pull-ups and I was in an ambitious yet ill-fitting teenage bikini, spraying them with a hose from the deck. Worse, all of it reminds me of Lawrence and me eating at the hot dog stand in Amherst, able to discuss our dying marriage with words that referred to ketchup and chili toppings.

  I’ve forgotten the under-conversation that goes on during family dinners. All that knowing. All that unverbalized past and understanding. My skin prickles. I cringe in my deck chair, plotting the quickest way out—such as jumping up and saying, I’m on a story, I have to cover big Anchorage hotels. So I need to go check into one right now!

  Before I can say anything, though, Dad reaches over and slaps my back. “I tell you what, how about you and me go fishing?”

  The Naknek is a thirty-five-mile-long river. And yet somehow Dad brings the plane down on the same spot where we went caribou hunting seventeen years ago. Is he thinking of that sad, blood-soaked trip—and my part in it? Thankfully, I don’t have time to ask. The sky is murky, the tundra leaden underfoot, the mosquitoes a black rage around the plane. It’s been a rainy summer, apparently. We set up our rods and packs, and start moving fast.

  We walk the tundra at a solid pace, collapsing every once in a while into sinkholes up to our thighs and crawling back out of the muck. This is not nearly as hard as I remember. We hit a patch of dense, green alders. Dad passes through the branches, holding them for an extra beat to keep them from whipping back into my face. It’s a strange thing, being tall in the alders, and being able—so effortlessly—to keep up. Was I too busy daydreaming when I was young? Or was I just too little to keep up the pace?

  I remember slowing down a lot to see if Dad noticed that I wasn’t right behind him. Then, if he didn’t notice, slowing down some more and some more until he was very far ahead, too far ahead, the lure on his rod clinking as it hit the top branches of the bushes. At which point I’d think, furiously, It’ll be his fault if I get eaten by bear. He left me behind. Which seems a little like a setup, in retrospect.

  At the end of the brush, we come out at a shallow wisp of a stream. A fish breaks the surface just as the clouds open up and the world goes dazzled with sunlight. To the east, the mountains slope up, purple with afternoon light, peaked in late snow. To the west, the tundra flushes into the distance, blending into the wide, rolling sky.

  I’ve forgotten how freeing it feels to be surrounded by all this vast, open hugeness. It’s a physical sensation, as if there were suddenly extra room in your lungs, a gush of undiscovered oxygen.

  We step into the stream and walk up it like a sidewalk, casting to the right and left. A rainbow jumps on my line. Not more than six inches. I release her. Dad catches a Dolly, the same size, and releases her. On we slosh. It’s quiet, except for the hiss of line, the riffles of current. I’ve forgotten how quiet it gets out in the bush. I’ve forgotten the sharp, cranberry smell of the tundra and the way the water over the rocks looks like what it actually is, liquid ice.

  Lawrence so artfully called it gin-and-tonic water when he came up to meet Dad four years ago. I wish he were here now, mentioning casually how many rainbows he’s caught, then adding, “Not that it’s a contest.” Then laughing behind my back as I charge around, double-counting his fish and tallying up our respective totals, “not to be winning the contest we’re not having.”

  But—even if it’s a new feeling for me—so what? Missing him is selfish. Look what I’ve put him through. Look what I’m about to put my dad and Abbie and my brothers through. They love Lawrence. They love him so much that, the first time he visited, they offered him the legs off the barbecued mallard—a succulent morsel that we all usually bicker over, and not in a charming, just-kidding way. How do I tell them that they won’t see him again?

  Upriver, Dad works his way over some boulders. I catch another rainbow, then a Dolly, and another Dolly. The stream widens into a river. Dad has something on the line ahead. His rod is bent. He fights the fish toward the bank. The river gets a little wider. He keeps fighting, moving not to lose the fish on a boulder. The current starts to pick up, the water to deepen.

  Ding goes the little wilderness buzzer in my head. But I slosh on, keeping an eye on Dad and his fish. The riverbed is rocky, not muddy, making it easier to find purchase with the toe of my boot. I feel out each step before taking it, leaning forward against the current—when, just like that, the bottom drops out and the water licks up around my waist, where it turns with such force it’s hard to keep upright. I’m a little worried about it snapping my rod tip; water does this, when moving fast enough. I sling the rod over my head and stumble on.

  Dad pulls himself up on a tiny island in the middle of the river and lands his rainbow, waving to me. I can’t hear him over the roar of water, but I drag myself up onto the island. It’s more of a gravel bar, really, with some bushes and dead logs.

  Dad tosses the fish back in the river. “Why didn’t you move over to the bank?”

  “You were waving. I thought you were waving at me to come over.”

  But he’s already pacing. We examine the crossing on the nearest side. The island has forced the water into a narrower channel, creating a deep, raging torrent of current, swollen by rain. We examine the other side. Ditto.

  We’re stuck. We stand around for a while, discussing what an almost funny situation this is. We can’t go back the way we came—we were moving with the current then; now we’d have to move against it. Night is falling. The water is not going to die down in the morning or in a week or in a month. And nobody knows where we are. The only solution is to try leaping over to the bank of the river, somehow, now, before we think too much. Acting in some situations—okay, not in a marriage maybe, but situations involving windchill and shelter and long-term food sources—at least changes the game before the game gets to your head.

  About halfway down the island is a fallen birch, drowning in the current. It’s a young, slender tree, just barely clinging by its roots to the island, but unattached to the bank. Dad backs up. “Once I’m across, I’ll rig up something sturdier,” he says. “Just don’t do anything dumb.”

  He takes a running start, jumping off the island, trying to use the birch as a narrow, sinking support that he can very, very quickly hop across. Except that it sinks the minute his foot touches down, and he slides into the water, rolling to the center of the tree, where he’s too far for me to reach.

  He holds on to the trunk, his body submerged, his head above the surface. The current ravages around his shoulders. His face goes red and set and grim. I stand there, not doing anything dumb. His head slips under, his hands still holding on to the branch. But I stand there, not doing anything dumb. He’s flailing underwater, his waders ballooning, pulling him in deeper.

  Dad lets one hand go. If he inflates his life jacket, he’s going to float up into the branches of the tree and trap himself and drown. And if he doesn’t, he’ll stay underwater and drown. And if I jump in now and try to save him, we’re going to drown together. Which is exactly the dumb thing he ordered me not to do. Which I understood from the minute we spotted the fallen birch and swollen water. Because Dad and me, we’ve spent a lot of my life not dying together.

  “Dad?” I say. He can’t hear me. He can’t breathe. He’s drowning, while I stand there on an island, not doing anything dumb. I rip off my jacket then back up, to get some speed, because speed is what I need to jump and dive and reach Dad without being pulled immediately downstream. And I run—

  Just as Dad does the impossible. In one concerted burst of will, he heave
s himself down deeper in the current and then back up and over the trunk. After which he jumps, swims, gropes, leaps through the river onto the opposite bank, where he is now lying, puking water out of his nose and mouth. He stays there awhile, panting. I act casual, as if I’d just been lounging around here on this log, the whole time, not directly disobeying his orders. He sits up. “Come on now,” he says, and holds out his hand.

  I throw my pack over. It lands in the branches of the drowning birch. Dad gets a stick and fishes it out. And then I back up as far as the island will let me and run and dive, hands first, crashing into the river where my father is lying like a piece of human rope, his feet braced between alder roots, ready to catch me by the wrists. He grabs me. He pulls me out. We sit for a minute, exhausted, marinating in the feeling of being safe and alive—if drenched.

  Night is falling. The temperature drops. On cue, the first icy splat of rain. We move into the alders out of the wind, where we make a fire. Dad pulls a collapsible camp chair out of his pack.

  A collapsible camp chair? It unfolds like an umbrella, into a seat and four legs. It’s the kind of thing that old men sit on at college bowl tailgaters or on the sidelines of a lacrosse game, the kind of thing that perhaps you might consider leaving on an island before jumping into a lethal swollen stream. Dad sits down, dripping, leaning his elbows on his knees. Then he gives me an injured look. “My hips hurt, okay?”

  I rummage through my gear. I have a tent, bug dope, granola bars, and one package of Mountain House chili mac, dehydrated into a solid foil brick. I pull the rain cover of the tent over my head and start fumbling with poles and pockets, trying to keep the tent dry and off the ground, trying not to think about the sleeping bags that we left in the plane because this was supposed to be a quick day trip. It is terrifically cold. Tonight is going to be like sleeping on winter concrete. Except wetter.