Alaska

by Sue Saliba

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Sue Saliba lives on Phillip Island in Victoria with her husband Bruno, her two cats Minou and Charbon, and her dog Sally. She has previously published short stories and poetry, the young adult novel Watching Seagulls, the children’s book The Skin of a Star, and Something in the World Called Love, which won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for young adult fiction and an APA Design Award for Best Children’s Cover. Sue has taught secondary-school English, and Creative Writing at Melbourne University and RMIT University. Her website is www.suesaliba.com.

  For all our animal companions

  Contents

  Sky

  Forest

  Snow

  Acknowledgements

  mia’s heart made a sound that no one heard

  except for mia

  late one night when she woke from dreams into darkness.

  ethan was asleep beside her, and em was a forest away. outside it was night and dark and alaska. the sky was upside down.

  mia lifted the heavy blankets so she could free herself from the bed. ethan did not stir. he was lying face towards the wall. she went to his wardrobe and dressed herself in a jumper, a jacket and her jeans. she pulled the fur-lined boots em had given her onto her feet and she felt her way down the stairs, through ethan’s house, to the front door.

  it was winter now and there was snow everywhere, it hadn’t been like this when she had first arrived three months earlier, then it was summer and endless light. she couldn’t sleep in the little room her sister em had made up for her without a blanket over the window to keep out the sun. now she stepped into stillness.

  something had woken her and she could not go back to sleep.

  alaska was an anonymous somewhere else, an escape from school in melbourne and from the mother mia was ashamed of. when em had phoned to say the ticket was finalised mia had felt instant relief, now she could tell the year twelve coordinator she was leaving to be with her sister in fairbanks, alaska. it wasn’t that mia hated school and it wasn’t that she loved it. she just wasn’t sure where any of it might lead her and, above all, she wasn’t sure how any of it might lead her back to em.

  ‘you can leave school for now,’ em had said, ‘as long as you go back and finish year twelve.’

  ‘yes,’ mia had replied, but she was actually more interested in what em said next.

  ‘you needn’t bother packing many clothes, mia. it will soon be winter here and nothing you can bring will protect you. you can borrow some of my clothes, after all, we’re the same size.’

  actually, they were different sizes and always had been. mia sensed it from the beginning, but she never said anything. when em still lived at home, mia would sneak across the gap between their beds at night, there she’d lie with her chest gently against em’s back, legs exposed to the cold, blanketless air. there was never enough room for both of them, but mia didn’t let em know. instead she stayed stiff and awkward all through the night, uncomfortable, but close to em, just as she wanted.

  the clothes, though, would be a blessing – she hadn’t walked in em’s clothes since her sister had left for alaska five years before. of course they would be too tight, too restrictive, but mia would somehow get around that. she could leave a zip undone, a button unbuttoned. after all, she was not unfamiliar with pretending.

  and it was that pretending that might explain how she could smile so brightly while her mind felt nothing – as if, at these times, there existed a disconnection between outer and inner, a shutting off, and the key to her happiness lay in warding off pain, or dodging it, or pushing it into the shape of something else – like shame or anger or even hope.

  hope – yes, that’s what she felt when she met ethan, surely it was. there was mia, newly arrived in alaska, and already lost inside the forest between em’s house and the patch of blueberries em had directed her to, a thorn inside her hair. ethan stepped into the green that surrounded her, so thick she could barely see the sky.

  she should have been surprised but she wasn’t – a stranger emerging out of the leaves and branches and moss. he held a metal bucket with two rainbow-coloured fish inside, they had just enough water to keep them alive.

  ‘i didn’t expect to find anyone here,’ he said calmly, as if he might be talking to a friend or a sudden stray deer.

  ‘i’m em’s sister,’ mia said, em was everything mia knew of alaska. surely everyone must know of em.

  ‘i don’t know em,’ he said.

  and there, what should have been a moment of disconnection became one of attraction. mia bent her head to see inside the bucket although she already knew the fish were straining to remain submerged. she’d heard them, faint but distinct, thrashing against the metal.

  ‘i caught them in the forest,’ he said.

  she laughed. ‘fish that swim through forest?’

  ‘yes, why not?’

  ‘why not?’ she echoed.

  she’d heard stranger things, like her mother’s version of love, love explains all things, her mother said. but so much remained inexplicable – and unforgivable – like her mother’s illness, although illness was not the right term since people didn’t choose to be ill and undeniably her mother’s condition was something of her own choosing.

  ‘is your mother normal?’ mia asked ethan. they were sitting on his lounge-room sofa with his family photograph album open across their knees.

  ‘you know, can you go out with her and feel okay … in front of other people? ‘

  it was five weeks since they’d met each other.

  he hesitated. ‘sometimes she wears too much jewellery,’ he said, with a tone of uncertainty.

  and mia pulled him closer, what a perfect response. he really did belong to another world with his innocence of shame, he was as remote from her childhood life as alaska was from melbourne, and perhaps more. what a wonderful distance to travel, she slid her hand behind her back, then, and undid the only clasp on her skirt.

  it was the first night she stayed with him.

  in the morning the next day, everything was still. even ethan’s breath that she’d felt against her skin all night seemed to have disappeared. it could have been like the stillness of morning in her mother’s house, but it wasn’t. mia told herself it wasn’t.

  here, there was possibility, not just the abandonment of the night before. she looked at ethan, his sleeping face. if she had crept to the window and pushed aside the curtain, she would have seen a sky that in summer barely faded all night, a simple sun circling its horizon as if the mechanics of the world could be changed after all.

  instead she looked at ethan. he was as unlikely a resident of alaska as she was. ethan alvares, a portuguese-speaking man who’d grown up in mozambique. when mia had looked at the photographs of his brothers, his parents, his younger sister, she’d felt excited. perhaps it was his stories of mammoth african owls or the drama of his family fleeing a violent revolution to arrive as refugees in california. or perhaps it was something else. certainly when she looked at the photographs she saw hands that reached out to each other, smiles, eyes that suggested a lifetime of trust.

  ethan kept sleeping, mia admired that, since she’d lost the ability to sleep long before em had left home to live in alaska, this quiet landscape at the other end of the world, in the half-painted house amongst the thistles and weeds that she’d shared with her mother and em, mia had woken every few hours of the night, sometimes it was because of rain against the louvre slats of the window or sometimes it was one of the cats, skinny and silent in the room. but usually it was her fear, simple and gaping, that woke her. it screamed: be careful, be vigilant, be ready.

  ethan shifted in the bed. he pressed his face deeper into the pillow. mia wondered if he might sleep forever. she wondered if he might understand
her fear if she were to tell him, perhaps whisper it to him as he lay beside her right now. but she stopped herself, no, he wouldn’t understand. how could he? he was the one who deserved to be fearful. he was the one who had been driven from his childhood home, had sailed frantically across treacherous seas, landed in a country where he could barely speak the language – and yet he slept peacefully. she, who had none of these outward reasons to be scared, she was the one who was fearful. it shouldn’t have run like that, not according to logic.

  but then logic didn’t run everything. mia had already encountered that truth. when they were children, em had told her that the dog they’d found, dirty and lame in the gutter, licked mia’s hand only to swallow the salt.

  ‘he’s been nutritionally deprived,’ em said. she was twelve and had just started studying chemistry. ‘he’s trying to build up his iodine levels.’

  even then, eight years old and without the words and explanations em could so readily conjure, mia knew her older sister was wrong.

  ‘salt?’ mia said.

  ‘yes, absolutely. salt.’

  it was only later that mia read in a library book someone had left between two seats at the local bus stop that dogs lick the hands of humans to invite them into their pack. the licking of the hand is a selective and intimate gesture.

  the dog had long since disappeared by then, gone the way of all the animals – cats, guinea pigs, mice and birds – who came into their childhood home. stricken, diminished – they grew sick and eventually faded away.

  nothing, nothing back then, seemed to hold on to life.

  mia was responsible for the graves, and afterwards, always, em would supervise the cleaning of the house. they’d scrub and scour after each death. there was much to clean. the black that patterned the bathroom wall, the grease that lined the tiles of the kitchen. dust, mould. dirt that rimmed the edges of the kitchen table and every window and every glass and cup and saucer. they polished, swept, mopped and scraped. it was only when their mother appeared momentarily in the doorway that they’d stop.

  she didn’t like their cleaning, she felt insulted by it. it was as if they were saying, we have to do this because you don’t.

  critical, that’s what their mother called them, and she would return to her room and lie under her eiderdown.

  she didn’t understand her daughters’ need to erase the landscape they thought entrapped them. she should have understood since it was her own example, her own illness, that had taught her girls to love escape. night after night, with every sip, with every emptied cask of wine, she left her daughters far behind, she travelled somewhere else and neither em nor mia could reach her.

  ‘what about if we tip it all out?’ mia said one night. ‘then she wouldn’t drink anymore.’

  em shook her head. they were sitting facing each other on their separate beds in their room. mia’s feet couldn’t yet reach the floor.

  ‘it wouldn’t work,’ em said. ‘and besides, it isn’t about the alcohol, after all.’

  mia twisted her feet. there was something immensely uncomfortable in what em said. but mia couldn’t say why. mia felt the same frustration she had when the dog licked her hand. the frustration of knowing she would have to wait for the time – who knew when – she’d stumble upon the right words.

  ‘it’s about escape,’ em said.

  and mia was surprised, although she shouldn’t have been since em’s feigned rationality was often a wilful blocking of some deeper truth beneath.

  i’ve had to silence all other voices with that one of reason, mia had found written in em’s diary.

  it was the day after em had called the ambulance to take their mother to the hospital. the sisters had found her unconscious on the bathroom floor when they’d come home from school. mia had fallen helplessly beside their mother and cried, em had found the right telephone number and called the ambulance.

  that’s how they were – or they were the places em and mia had learnt to run to. one to the head and one into her dreams, half wishes and emotions. and happiness eluded them both.

  how beautiful ethan looked when he woke up, and how frightening. a lifetime away from mia’s experiences. ‘i thought you might sleep forever,’ she said.

  he was amused, or at least he smiled like he had five weeks ago when she’d asked him about the fish in the forest.

  whether he knew it or not, she was casting him in a role, building a story around him, creating a tone. it was what she’d done for herself: mia, the devoted younger sister of em; mia, the emotional daughter of her alcoholic mother. what particular places she inhabited, what awful territory she guarded.

  ethan lifted his hand to her face so she was aware of the warmth of his fingers, the sight of his wrist, its strange elegance.

  ‘did you dream?’ he asked.

  ‘no, i was just thinking,’ she said.

  he was puzzled, drew the tips of his fingers across her lips as he watched her.

  ‘i dreamt about the snowy owl that passed over here last fall when i was building the house,’ he said. ‘you’ve never seen anything so beautiful. everything was starting to turn to winter, the trees were like sticks. it was already getting dark by five in the afternoon, and she came flying right across here.’

  he lifted his hand towards the roof.

  ‘it’s true,’ he said, laughing. ‘she was the only thing alive, that’s how it felt. everything else was going to sleep, slowing down, but she wasn’t stopping, she passed by just for a minute, not long before the first snow. the only white spot in the whole dead landscape.’ ‘what happened … in the dream?’ mia said.

  ‘she came back. the bird came back to the house.’

  mia was silent, she felt like she did when she woke into the night.

  ‘i could make you breakfast,’ ethan said.

  she nodded, grateful for the sudden familiar ground beneath her. and he moved to get up, perhaps relieved as well.

  ‘a special alaskan breakfast,’ he said.

  ‘really, anything will do.’

  he made her blueberry tea and sourdough toast, with some kind of glaze smudged across the bread that took its name from the last of the summer wildflowers. and when they were finished he left to shower and she slipped into her simple blue skirt and pale top of the night before and looked at the room where they had eaten. it wasn’t a kitchen, more the beginnings of a dining room where you might one day put a family table and some chairs.

  ‘i’ve always wanted to create my own house,’ he’d said the night before as he’d shown her the stairs up to the third floor. ‘i guess that’s why i studied engineering: to see how things are built, how they go together.’

  she could have heard his explanation of why he was an engineer in a hundred different ways but she heard it in one. she heard that he was interested in the relationship between things. and with that, the idea of creation and space.

  have you read the poetics of space? she wanted to ask him. it was one of her favourite books, written by a french philosopher and full of descriptions of spaces intimate and vast, natural and fabricated: nests, castles, the tiny homes of sea animals. but she stopped herself. no, what if he looked at her askance, what if he looked at her in a way she didn’t want?

  ‘it must be exciting to be an engineer,’ she said.

  he glanced at her, half-frowning, half-laughing, and pushed his elbow gently into her side. ‘come downstairs,’ he said.

  and she did. she followed him, and she was happy because for now he was whatever she wanted him to be, uncontradicted, undisputed, completely her own creation.

  this was mia’s downfall and her joy, that she could imagine anything into existence: fairies, deities, the imminent return of her father who had left the family when mia was eight and never re-appeared. a thread, that was it. you might call it a lifeline because it kept her going, it stopped the fear from completely overwhelming her. but it also did something else. it robbed her. she wasn’t sure how, not yet, but she knew it mad
e her smaller, like all addictions and habits. yes, it stopped the pain but it took away possibility, the capacity to sit and wait and watch and witness all the variety of her life, the chance that she might take a path completely new to her.

  ‘i can drive you back to em’s a different way, if you like,’ ethan said. he’d just emerged from the bathroom, showered. ‘you might want to see the last of the arctic poppies before they disappear for the winter.’ ‘no, let’s go back the way we came last night. i want to remember it, so that i can think of it again …’ she stopped before she gave herself away. she felt she’d already said too much. she didn’t want him to know that she would be going over and over last night in her mind again and again, reliving each moment in a story she could hold and keep when she was alone.

  ‘let’s go then,’ he said and wrapped a scarf around her neck before she could refuse. ‘you’ll need this for warmth.’

  he was right, it was already getting cold so quickly. back in melbourne, winter came slowly, predictably, with months of changing colour, a gradual dimming to grey. but here in fairbanks there was speed and a ruthless drama to the seasons. the very same road they had driven along the day before might look like a different landscape the next day.

  ‘where do all the animals go with the trees changing so quickly?’ mia said.

  they were passing a line of birch trees, luxuriant when she’d met him, now already bare.

  ‘wherever they’re meant to – holes in the ground, sheltered cliffs, warmer countries further south.’

  ‘and what if they told themselves something else … because they didn’t want it to be winter?’

  he was confused, as if the idea had never occurred to him.

  ‘i mean what if they wanted something different from what is there around them? could they wish their surroundings away?’

  he brushed his hand against her arm and then returned it to the steering wheel.

  ‘it could be possible …’ she stopped herself.

  she thought of her own attempt to wish away the memory of her mother appearing drunk and dishevelled in the school courtyard outside her classroom window, it had been the last period of the day and her mother had appeared with the lunch mia had forgotten. when mia had looked up from her french textbook, there she was, weaving her way across the quadrangle towards the year-nine language block, no, mia had thought, it can’t be.