Alaska

by Sue Saliba

  ‘i go along with terrence usually,’ em said, ‘even if i don’t agree with him. but this time i don’t think i can.’

  the water in the kettle turned to steam. the green of em’s eyes were the green that mia remembered as a child – glass-green, but tired now, strained.

  ‘what is this about?’ mia said.

  that was when terrence arrived at the top of the stairs. he’d been down in the laundry below with his fishing maps and refrigerated bait. em looked at him. he was clutching a tiny hook between finger and thumb. he opened the sliding door to the front deck and disappeared onto it.

  and mia felt something flood her body. a feeling from childhood, a physical memory of em’s protection, there she was at seven years old, climbing into bed with em against the blackness of the night; and again, at nine, a child, behind her thirteen-year-old sister, hearing em tell the police woman at the front door that no, she was fifteen and she had a job down at the supermarket on hobson street and she could care for herself and her little sister while their mum went into hospital again, she could cook, clean and make sure mia was dressed and well enough cared for to go to school. she was responsible, an adult. and the policewoman nodding at last and turning back to the blue-and-white car parked on the stone road out front, leaving the girls to survive a week on their own in the house before their mother returned.

  mia sipped the hot chocolate em had put in her hands. terrence had come in from outside. he was sitting on a chair in the lounge room, threading and rethreading fine line through the eye of the fish hook. em almost stretched out her hand to mia, and mia was reminded of that moment when she had taken em’s hand earlier that afternoon across ethan’s doorway.

  there, another memory from childhood came to her. em’s guidance, em’s gentle steering of her away from danger, from the wrong people; wrong people not in any bad sense, but just people em knew would lead mia on a path too reckless to return from. there was that boy, adrian, who climbed fences and arrived at mia’s back door in the middle of the night. ‘come out on the milk run, see the stars,’ he’d say. he was ten, mia was eight.

  ‘he’s not the right person to be around,’ em told mia. and she was right, other boys threw stones at him and chased him down the back streets because he wore purple tank tops and liked playing elastics with the girls. ‘other kids won’t like you,’ em said.

  and mia knew this. the more she saw adrian, the more she sensed the distance growing between her and her little group of friends in second grade. all the same, she felt bad – even awful – when em began to tell him that, no, mia wasn’t home when he came to call on her. and she stayed quiet in the place em had instructed her to, behind the bedroom door, with her eyes fixed firm on em’s polished shoes, one beside the other beneath the wardrobe door, ready for the next day, prepared.

  how right em was, of course. mia’s little group of friends did return to her and she was no longer alone when she sat in the reading corner of the classroom or when it was wet and windy in the playground and the teacher let them eat their lunch indoors, she didn’t run through the streets in the early dawn with adrian and see the sky, private with stars above them, but she didn’t feel rejection and embarrassment in the brightness of day. and that was something: to feel comfortable, to feel safe.

  em’s hand was close to hers, resting on the kitchen table, when mia heard christian’s cry through the roof above her. he was calling for his mother, and for the first time mia did not hear his cry as an intrusion, but as an invitation.

  ‘i could go to him,’ she said quietly to em.

  em lifted her eyes and almost smiled.

  how strange it was to climb the stairs, one small flight and then another, to em and terrence’s bedroom. mia halted at the door. there was christian lying on the bed, restless. he must have been told to sleep.

  ‘why are you calling out? what is it?’ mia said.

  she expected him to scream louder, but instead he was quiet and looked back at her.

  ‘you know,’ she said – and she stepped towards him –

  ‘you know i used to scream out all the time too. my mum said, when i was a little baby, i was the loud one, the difficult one, and your mum, she was easy, never caused any trouble …’

  ‘mia, let’s go for a walk,’ em said. she’d come up the stairs behind mia, and mia felt herself jump, suddenly surprised.

  ‘we could talk then,’ em said.

  mia looked at christian and noticed, for the first time,

  that he had the same slightly crooked mouth as her, and eyes that mirrored mia’s too.

  ‘can we take christian?’ she said.

  ‘if we rug him up well,’ em answered.

  so mia helped him up while em brought a tiny padded jacket and a long thick scarf and a woollen cap. together they dressed him and lifted him down.

  ‘we’ll go to the forest,’ em said.

  mia imagined, then, that christian was a tiny elf or a fairy, and she squeezed his little hand.

  how quickly they left behind the house and the car, the driveway, the little pots of flowers em had placed in a perfect line beneath the kitchen window.

  deeper and deeper into the forest they went.

  leaves, branches, stems. at last em stopped at a birch tree and she said, ‘i don’t know what to do, mia.’

  mia looked at her.

  em lifted her hand to her face. ‘this is where they want to build it,’ she said.

  ‘build what?’ mia asked.

  em looked back at her. ‘the new pipeline.’

  mia saw christian beside her then. the shadow of a fern rested on his cheek.

  ‘pipeline?’

  ‘yes. alaxoil, the oil company up north, they want to put another pipeline through fairbanks and they think this is a good place to put it.’

  mia looked at the forest.

  ‘really? and what do you think?’

  ‘they’ve offered us good money for the house and terrence wants to take it.’

  mia sensed there was more; there was something em was not saying.

  ‘and what about you?’ she asked. ‘what do you think?’

  ‘i’m thinking about christian,’ em said.

  mia nodded, she saw a paw print, recent in the soft ground.

  ‘i’m thinking he has his friends here in the neigh-bourhood and i’d like him to go to school just down the road at antlers’ point, there are some wonderful teachers there and i know the parents around here …

  well, it’s a bit rough in the main town if we had to move there.’

  mia was very still.

  ‘what do you think, mia? of course it would be noisy during construction if we stayed and there would be maintenance trucks coming and going and the security fence they want to build around it will be unsightly.’

  there was something that wasn’t being said, that was being avoided.

  ‘what do i think?’ mia said aloud.

  she looked at christian with his coat and his scarf and his thick, thick cap and she took one of his little hands and peeled the woollen glove from it. she bent both of them – herself and him – to the ground. his tiny fingers touched the earth where the animal had been; a wolf, mia imagined.

  ‘i think,’ she said, and she was as surprised by her answer as em was, ‘that you can’t have beauty without danger.’

  em looked at her, puzzled.

  mia spoke again. ‘i think,’ she said, ‘that you can’t have life – deep rich life – and absolute safety.’

  ‘so what do you think i should do about the house?’ em said.

  ‘i think you should do what is natural for someone you love.’ she looked at christian and she saw him framed by the spruce and ferns and branches. and then she looked again; no, he wasn’t framed, he was enmeshed, he was part of them and they were part of him. christian – in that moment’s glimpse – had become the forest.

  mia did not go home with em then. she said she would stay in the forest. she watched her sister and h
er nephew diminish in the distance as they made their way back to the house. christian hesitated as his mother turned to leave, and he stood there just for a moment in the widening gap between his mother and aunt, before scurrying away.

  this place is familiar, mia thought, as she went deeper into the forest – the darkening trees, the skeletons of blueberry bushes, the presence of the deer all around. it was here, she said to herself at last, that it happened. she was right, there, in front of her, was the clearing where she’d first met ethan. he’d stepped out of the brush soundlessly as if from a fairytale, and perhaps he was. there had been their easy, almost magical encounter, so different from mia’s usual introduction to strangers. yes, it was here that something had begun.

  it had started and continued and then been overshadowed by em’s promise of security.

  you can’t have beauty without danger. mia’s words had sprung from somewhere covered over in her, whispered alive by the forest. you can’t have life and absolute safety.

  she knelt at the edge of the clearing and for the first time that day, she felt the cold enter her, but she was not frightened, she didn’t even tense herself against it. instead she let it fill her, and she waited.

  not for very long, as it happened, since he had never been far away.

  and then, he appeared. it was ethan to be sure, although she did not come across him as she had on that summer morning, but saw his figure moving behind the screen of the trees without shadow, passing by.

  mia wanted to call to him, but she felt something between them, like a veil, so she followed him back along the path she had come on, until she stopped a little way off from the birch tree em had taken her to and she stayed very still and watched.

  how odd; yes, it was ethan, and he was stopping at this very same place. stopping and reaching out and touching the tree and then looking at the ground and the sky like he might be asking something.

  and then he kicked the ground and mia pulled herself tighter behind the blueberry bush and made her way as quietly as she could from the forest.

  where would she go? back to em’s? it didn’t seem right. it seemed like something else was meant to happen. all the way back, she looked for signs along the road, something that might take her on another path. but there was nothing, only the confusion of ethan punching his foot into the earth and christian pausing against his mother’s will and em stubborn to all the forces of wind and beauty around her. and mia, who was scurrying from the shelter of tree and bush and unworn track to watch and report on all she saw. none of it made any sense as she trudged back to em’s. not in a coherent way, not in a way that could be put together in one resolved picture. not yet.

  and here was where she usually flew into story – fearful if she did not believe in something, if she did not invent something solid, she would fall and fall and fall.

  but this time, something told her to be open, look, it said. don’t decide yet, look and feel and see.

  and she did. she felt the cold and she felt the dim sunshine, she felt the stones beneath the soles of her shoes and she heard her own breathing, and she thought of her mother, ill and sad and lonely, and even that thought she did not push away, or the fear and sadness that arose with it. she was alive, not in any manufactured sense – simply alive.

  all the things mia might have passed by once – ugly, or beautiful or part of scenery – were simply present.

  so that she walked past em’s house, unafraid and curious. and further along the road she came to a tiny cabin beyond a little path from the street, that she hadn’t noticed before.

  it was wooden and quiet and seemingly unoccupied, except that mia caught the rustling movement of something on its verandah, it would have been nothing unusual if she hadn’t been so used to the tidiness of em’s house.

  she moved closer, it was something being shifted about in the wind, she approached cautiously, although there was no need, it was a piece of paper, a page of the local newspaper blown away from the rest of the news.

  she should have laughed – her heart was racing at the sound of a page of print blowing in the wind – but she didn’t. she felt the wide-awake curiosity that had come to her from the forest and she read the page as naturally as if it had been handed to her. death of a forest, it said in bold, unmistakable print.

  DEATH of a FOREST

  wolves, deer, lynxes, eagles,

  if you love our animals, if you

  love our beautiful forest, please

  help us stop alaxoil killing it.

  come to our first community meeting

  to stop the alaxoil pipeline from

  destroying our environment.

  fairbanks library. wednesday,

  22nd september, 6 p.m.

  organised by jessie mcpherson.

  mia folded the piece of newspaper and then folded it again, it went into her pocket. safe, retrievable, if you love our beautiful forest, it said. now she was ready to go back to em’s.

  she was ready to make sense of everything, or nothing – and act from a place within her that was screaming to be known.

  if only it would scream loud enough, if only it would not fade. she opened the door to em’s house and the silence frightened her. nothing to be frightened of, she thought. she remembered the forest and then she thought again: yes, there was something to be frightened about – there was much to be frightened about. there was also something to be joyful and courageous and strong and hopeful about. yes, it wasn’t one or the other – it was both and all of these things. dark and light mixed up together.

  and somehow fear – if she could just sit with it – might be a gateway. somehow.

  this came to mia as she walked into the house. it was as if this opening of the door, that finding of the near-hidden cabin, the afternoon in the forest, em’s words, ethan’s unexplained appearance, terrence’s controlled anger, christian’s promise – all had to fit together in a certain way to bring this moment to her.

  and there was another thing, missing in mia’s thoughts at the surface, but present in the darkness below, as strong a force as any – her mother.

  she walked down the passage and through the lounge room, opening the glass door to where terrence had walked with his hook and string.

  she stopped, looking over the balcony, and then sensed terrence behind her.

  ‘million dollar view,’ he said.

  she bristled at the sound of his voice.

  ‘yes, it’s valuable,’ she said, and then she turned and faced him. ‘if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘what else could i mean?’ he said.

  she was about to answer, to say something about the magic of the forest, and then she stopped herself. yes, fear was there, but not in its old way, tightening her, shutting her down. instead it whispered, be alert, be watchful; for if you’re patient, you’ll see something revealed.

  ‘where’s em?’ mia asked.

  ‘em’s resting, lying down. she’s got a lot on her mind, and she doesn’t need to be disturbed.’

  disturbed?’

  ‘yeah, disturbed.’

  there was something provocative about the word,

  about terrence’s tone.

  ‘disturbed by what?’

  ‘by silly ideas, mia.’

  ‘what do you mean?’

  ‘you know what i mean. when she came back from your little walk …’

  ‘yes?’

  ‘she seemed filled with childish ideas, completely unrealistic.’

  ‘like what?’

  ‘like wanting to stay here to live near the forest, for christian’s sake.’

  mia was surprised – almost as surprised as she was to feel wide, wide awake and to feel her fear still with her, not telling her to run, not telling her to fall into story or anger or blame or sorrow or anything else, simply giving her the energy to see the truth clearly in front of her. ‘excuse me,’ she said as she made her way past terrence. part of her felt the impulse to tell him that she was going to s
ee em and another part felt no need to say anything at all. she was clear and strong and knew what she had to do.

  she walked towards the stairway to em and terrence’s bedroom – one step at a time – all the way to em.

  em was not resting, not in the way that terrence might have hoped. she was lying on the bed with her eyes closed, but she was completely awake. mia knew this as surely as she knew there would always be a connection between them, an undercurrent, no matter what surface paths they might take.

  ‘em,’ she whispered.

  em ignored her, so mia said out loud, ‘em, you promised you’d do something for me.’

  there was silence. mia sat gently on the bed, em at her side.

  ‘em, you said if i wanted to, you’d drive me back to ethan’s this afternoon.’

  that was when em opened her eyes.

  ‘i don’t want to go back there,’ mia said. ‘but i do want to go somewhere else.’

  yes, somewhere else. not right now, but when the time arrived. ‘i want you to drive me to the library in a few weeks.’

  em didn’t ask why, she simply nodded, but when mia said that perhaps em could take christian too, em said no.

  ‘i’ll drive you there and i’ll pick you up afterwards,’ em said. ‘that’s it.’

  mia might have felt completely alone then if she had not thought of the forest and the deer, and of ethan. yes, ethan. she was curious about why he’d been in the forest earlier and she wanted to see him, to be back in his house with him – how magical and comforting that would be. but something told her that she must go to the meeting first, that she must hear of the threat to the forest and how it might be saved before she could see him again, it was as if certain forces had to align themselves in a particular way so that she could make sense of everything, was that it?

  ‘lie down,’ em said. she had moved across to make room on the bed beside her.

  mia would have once nestled in without hesitation, her print on the mattress eclipsing terrence’s. but now she stayed where she was.

  ‘no,’ mia said. she offered her hand to em, but stayed sitting upright.

  em took mia’s hand and closed her eyes again.