by Katy Regnery
“Come with me.”
He doesn’t move much, just wiggles from my hold, cups my face with his warm hands for the first time ever, and says...
“No.”
Then he kisses my forehead, turns around, and closes his door.
And me? I’m left standing in the hallway, frustrated beyond belief, my heart more full than it’s ever been, with no other option than to head back to my own bed...alone.
***
We watch A River Runs through It after mass and dinner on Christmas Eve, and when it snows on Christmas morning, my brother and I take out the toboggans with Kristy and Cody and go sledding before opening presents.
Cody gives my parents a framed picture of me racing my all-girl team. I have no idea when he took it or how he got it so beautifully framed, but I can tell they’re very touched, and my father promises to find it a great place in the waiting room of his office.
To me, he gives a sterling silver husky charm on a sterling silver bracelet, which he clasps lovingly around my wrist, and I promise never to take off. And for the first time I can ever remember, I wonder what it would feel like to receive a smaller jewelry box, holding a ring instead of a bracelet, and something inside of me thrills at the possibility.
Later that evening, after we’ve packed for our seven o’clock flight and I’m standing on the back deck, looking out over the moonlit mountains, Cody joins me.
“Hey,” I say, grinning at him. “Did you finally escape from my father’s lecture about giving sled dogs probiotics?”
He smiles, putting his arms around me from behind and resting his chin on my shoulder. “Your dad’s an amazing man.”
“I agree,” I say, covering his gloved hands with mine.
“You were really lucky, Juliet,” he says, “to grow up in a family like this one. Your parents are phenomenal. Your brother’s awesome. You have it all.”
“Now that I have you, I do,” I say, leaning back against him.
“Except our lives are going to diverge, come January,” he says.
I take a deep breath. “Do they have to?”
“Yeah.” His breath is soft and warm against my neck when he speaks. “You go to school in Minneapolis. My home is in Nome. Nineteen dogs, remember?”
“I remember,” I say, because I know that his life wouldn’t be easy to uproot. Not emotionally, and not actually.
“I can live on what I get from Uncle Sam and the pipeline,” he says, referring to his disability pension, which is significant, and the annual payout by the state of Alaska, “but it’s not a fancy lifestyle. This house?” he says, “Your parents’ lifestyle? I can’t offer you that. If that’s what you want—”
“I don’t know what I want,” I say. “I thought I did. I thought I wanted to be a vet in Missoula, working at a family practice with my dad and brother, but now...”
“I think that is what you want,” I tell her. “I’ve seen you with your dad...with your brother. You belong here. This is your home, darlin’.”
I turn around in his arms, unable to keep useless tears from filling my eyes. It felt so good, so right, to tell Cody I loved him. But what’s the use of loving someone if you can’t be with them? If you can’t build a life with them?
“I don’t know how to say good-bye to you,” I tell him.
He takes a deep, jagged breath, though his arms stay firm and strong around me. “We don’t have to say good-bye yet. Still three weeks and change before the Qimmiq and a few days together after that. We still have four weeks.”
“I know, but then...”
“How about we figure out then when then comes along?” he suggests.
“I’m a planner,” I say. “I don’t know if I can do that.”
“I’m asking you to live in the moment with me,” he says, looking deeply into my eyes. “I’m asking you for the next four weeks. Can you give them to me? Because I’ll give every second of them to you.”
I clench my teeth together and force myself to swallow over the terrible lump in my throat. Can I give them to him? Can I love him totally and absolutely for four weeks, and then walk away from him when it’s over?
“I’d rather have four weeks of wonderful than forty years of nothing special,” he says. “I’ll live on it for the rest of my life.”
This man—this good, sweet, strong, kind man who served his country and lost so much—is asking me for time. He’s asking me for the gift of time. And I can’t—not even to stall the inevitability of my broken heart—say no to him.
“Me too,” I whisper, resting my cheek on his shoulder, and imagining our hearts beating in time. “The next four weeks are yours, Cody. All yours.”
And may God help me move on with my life when they’re over.
***
Cody
She’s keeping up with me like a seasoned racer, I think, looking back at Juliet, and her seven-dog team, over my shoulder. It’s New Year’s Eve, we’re back in Nome, and I think we’re almost ready for the Qimmiq.
She’s got the commands down pat: “Gee” for “go right,” “Haw” for “go left,” “Whoa” for “stop,” and “Easy” for “slow down.” My girls already knew the commands, but listening for them from Juliet, and following her instructions, took them a couple of weeks to gel. They accept her as their musher now. And damn, but it’s exciting to see.
As we race through the miles and miles of snow-covered trails behind my house, building up our endurance and bonding with our teams, I have plenty of time to think.
And despite my pleas to live in the moment, all I think about is the future.
Like most teenaged boys, the idea of getting married and having kids was a terrifying prospect to be avoided by double-bagging my wang and triple checking that my partner was on birth control. No way I wanted to be pinned down by premature fatherhood.
And by the time normal thoughts of a wife and children would have emerged—in my late twenties or early thirties—I had completely dispelled the notion of finding someone who would accept me as I am.
But underneath it all—in the deepest and most desperately lonely recesses of my heart—I always wanted what I didn’t have: to be part of a nuclear family, with a stable mother and father, and happy kids to whom my wife and I provide a loving, nurturing childhood.
Since meeting Juliet, I find that long-suppressed desire softly and tentatively reasserting itself. She loves me and I love her, and the idea of creating a life with her—a child—is so heady that sometimes the very fantasy can steal my breath away.
“Haw! Haw!” she yells, and I look up to see Cheyenne turn right, her neon-green booties moving so fast against the white snow, they’re a blur. Olympia and Phoenix, strong dogs and militant rule followers, pull the rest of the team in the direction Cheyenne chooses, and Helena, ably anchoring the sled, keeps the raw strength of Augusta and Juneau from leading the whole team astray on a whim. It’s a tight configuration, and my girl handles it effortlessly.
What would this look like as a...life? I indulge the fantasy for a moment, letting my brain conjure sweet images of a life with Juliet: racing together all over Alaska and the northern United States, two little ones whom we teach how to handle the dogs. She could maybe get a job working with Jonas—Lord knows he has his hands full now and then and would probably welcome another vet stepping in to help. We could make the loft into a nursery for the kids and spend nights in front of the fire making love. Summer days on the beach, sticking our feet in the Bering Sea, and yearly visits to her family in Montana.
My fantasies come skidding to a halt right there.
I remember Juliet’s joyful reunion with her father at the airport and the way her mother greeted us at the front door of their house. Braydon and Juliet have a tight bond, I recall, remembering them racing toboggans down a snowy hill. Once a year with her family wouldn’t be enough—wouldn’t be nearly enough, either for her or, I realize with some surprise, for me.
Her family is a concrete foundation. It was the beg
inning that gave Juliet the character, strength, and confidence to be the woman she is. Her father’s good humor, kindness, and love. Her mother’s ethics, nurturing, and cheerfulness. Would I want to raise my own family with such limited access to the one that created a person as marvelous as Juliet? Once a year just wouldn’t be enough.
But the flights from Nome to Missoula aren’t cheap, I have a responsibility to my dogs, and I don’t have unlimited resources. I paid for my house outright, and I don’t carry any debt. But I get just under forty thousand dollars a year in disability pay from the federal government and another two thousand dollars a year from the state of Alaska. Living frugally on that amount means I don’t have to get a job, not that I’d be well-qualified for much anyway, since I have such limited use of my hands in most conventional settings.
That said, a guy from the Nome Visitor’s Center corners me at the Klondike at least once or twice a year and asks me if I’d be interested in offering Sled Dogs Visits and Tours. He claims he can charge $299 for a three-hour tour, 80 percent of which is mine to keep and promises that he could book a minimum of a three dozen tours per year. I turn him down every time, because I’m really not interested in a bunch of strangers turning up at my place year-round to gawk at my hands and mess up my training schedule. But now I wonder if an additional ten thousand dollars a year might be worth a little inconvenience. Hmm.
“Whoa! Whoa, girls!”
Ahead of me Juliet stops her team to take a drink from her water bottle. The girls lounge or roll in the snow, ready to keep going but also getting weary after a four-and-a-half-hour workout.
“Whoa, boys!” I stop my team beside hers. “You’re looking good, woman.”
She’s red cheeked and out of breath. “Oh, yeah?”
I nod. “Oh, yeah. Love watching you go.”
“I love racing,” she says. “But I’m nervous about three straight days and two nights on the trail. It’s a lot.”
“Yeah. But I’ll be carrying most of the overnight supplies, and I’ll stick close to you. Remember, we don’t have to win. We just have to finish. We can take our time.”
“I know. But the nights...the distance...I’m just...I hope I’m ready.”
“Next week,” I tell her, throwing meat strips to the dogs, “we’ll do a couple more overnights, okay? You’ll be fine by January thirteenth. I promise, darlin’.”
She grins at me, chewing on a piece of reindeer jerky. “Hey, you know how it’s New Year’s Eve?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, I was thinking we could feed the dogs as soon as we get in—you know, get it over with—and then maybe, instead of going to the Klondike, we could stay in? Have some dinner...drink some wine...maybe watch a movie?”
“You don’t want to go out? Are you tired?”
She shrugs, looking down, but before she does, I catch the furrow in her brow, the frown lines around her lips. “Race is in thirteen days. I leave in twenty-one. I think I just want you to myself as much as possible between then and now.”
“Then let’s stay in,” I tell her. “Just you and me.”
***
I make steaks and baked potatoes for dinner, followed by ice cream with chocolate sauce, and Juliet chooses Shakespeare in Love for our after-dinner viewing pleasure, saying that she needs to watch the movie that inspired my favorite dog’s name.
But spooned on the couch, with the beautiful love story playing out on the screen in front of us, I can feel her melancholy. When we were in Montana last week, standing outside on the deck, I asked her to live in the now with me. But I’m realizing, day by day, that that was a selfish and unfair request. She is a self-proclaimed planner, and by asking her to “live in the moment,” I was also asking her to shut up about the future. Asking someone not to talk about something doesn’t mean it isn’t eating away at them every moment. I can feel her sadness and despair, and my request is forcing her to bear it alone, rather than sharing it with me.
I turn off the TV when the credits start rolling. We’re alone in the dark room, the potbelly stove casting shadows on the wall.
“Flip over,” I say. “I want to talk to you.”
When she does, her face is a mask of sorrow, and I am furious with myself for letting things get to this point.
“About what?” she asks, her voice thin and weary.
“The future.”
She blinks at me. “You asked me not to. You want to live in the now.”
I shake my head. “Not anymore. Talk to me, Juliet.”
“I t-tried,” she says softly, “not to think about January twenty-second, when I’m back at school, and you’re here all alone getting ready for the Iditarod, but—I’m so sorry, Cody—I can’t stop thinking about it. We have no plan to ever see each other again after I leave...but I love you. I c-can’t...bear it.”
I lean forward and press my lips to hers. “I’m so sorry I made you keep this all inside.”
“I’m not asking for—for, you know, a ring or a—oh, God!—anything like that. I just...just want to know we’ll see each other again.”
“Of course we will,” I tell her.
“How?” she asks. “How does that look? I’m in Minneapolis until early April, then I’m working at my dad’s practice until June. Then back to Minneapolis for graduation.”
“Okay,” I say. “Maybe we plan to get together in June? After your graduation?”
“Five months?” she asks, her eyes wide and glassy. “That’s a long time!”
Agreed. “Hmm. Do you have a spring break?”
“Um...yeah. In March. I think it’s the ninth to the thirteenth.”
I take a deep breath, and my eyes shutter closed.
“What?” she asks. “What is it?”
“That’s the Iditarod. It starts on the seventh.”
Her face falls. “So you’ll be busy the week I’m free.”
“You could volunteer,” I suggest.
She clenches her jaw together, on the verge of tears, because she knows as well as I do that I won’t have a moment to spare with her whether she volunteers or not.
“I—I could ask Jonas and Rita to watch the dogs again in April,” I say quickly. “When you go back to Montana, I could come and spend a few days.”
“Sure...” she says, her voice resigned. “We can spend a few days together every few months.”
“Once you graduate,” I say, “you could come back. You could spend the whole summer here.”
She stares at me intently for a moment, and for a second, I can almost see her mind whirring. “Or you could come to Montana and spend the summer with me.”
“But the dogs—”
“Bring them,” she says quickly, looking me dead in the eyes, a slight challenge in her expression. “Fly them to Anchorage and drive them down to Missoula. I’ll come back and help you.” She lips her lips. “Oh, my God, Cody! I didn’t even think of it...but we could stay at my dad’s cabin in Lincoln! The horse paddock could be used for the dogs...we could even help him spruce it up a little while we’re—”
“Juliet, I don’t even know if it’s drivable from—”
“It is! I’ve checked,” she says. “You can drive from Anchorage to Montana. Through Canada. No problem.”
“It’s got to be three thousand miles.”
“Twenty-five hundred,” she says. “Six days. Four hundred and twenty miles a day...give or take.”
“You’ve been looking into this,” I say.
“I won’t lie to you,” she tells me. “I’ve been looking into anything that would buy us more time together, though I hadn’t thought about the cabin until now. I’d been thinking in terms of us staying at my parents’ house...which is its own kind of torture.”
I’m still trying to get my head around her plan. “You want me to bring my dogs to Missoula this spring?”
She nods. “Yes.”
“And then what?”
“I’ll help you bring them back here in the fall.”
I lean up on my elbow. “Let me just get this straight...You’re suggesting I fly myself and my dogs to Anchorage, buy a mobile kennel, buy a truck, meet you, drive six days through the Canadian wilderness, and live a few months at your father’s cabin in Montana before doing the whole thing again.”
She gulps softly. “Yes.”
I can’t help it.
I laugh.
I laugh at her because this idea is so ridiculous, so impossible.
“Juliet! Do you have any idea what that would cost?”
“Well, I—”
“Flights for me and the dogs to Anchorage? Over three thousand dollars, easy.”
“That sounds extreme.”
“It’s not. It’s part of what I have saved up to get to the starting line at the Iditarod,” I tell her. “A truck? Even used, but decent enough to make that journey? A good ten thousand dollars. A Dog Box with twenty kennels and a hitch for transport? Another fifteen hundred dollars. Not to mention the trip itself—hotels and meals for us and them? More money I do not have!” I stare at her for a second. “Are you kidding or crazy?”
“Crazy, I guess.” Her face goes blank, and she wiggles out of my arms, sitting up and putting her back to me. She continues softly: “Unless we win the Qimmiq. The purse is ten thousand dollars.”
“We can’t—” I rub my face with my hands. “Juliet. We cannot win the Qimmiq. We’re rookies.”
“Right,” she murmurs, standing up. “Dumb idea. Crazy me.”
I hear her footsteps recede down the back hall and instantly feel like a monumental asshole for crushing her dreams. But seriously? Seriously? Her plan is crazy. It’s totally nuts, right?
I have ten thousand dollars saved up to enter the Iditarod. That’ll cover the cost of getting me, my sled, and my dogs to Anchorage the night before the race, and everything I need—both on my sled and for checkpoint drop bags—to race back to Nome. It’s all I’ve got saved for this. The rest of my money is allocated toward my everyday expenses: food for me and my dogs, maintenance on my home, my truck, gas, et cetera. I definitely do not have an extra fifteen thousand dollars lying around to spend on a Montana vacation, no matter how much I want to be with Juliet. It’s ludicrous. Impossible.
