The Tenth Circle Read online

He unzipped his jacket. Before they’d left, he’d packed a duffel full of winter gear; he and Laura were pretty much wearing everything they’d brought all at once. It was cold in Maine, but nothing compared to what it would be like in the Eskimo villages.

  The woman hung up. “Hi. Can I-” She broke off as the phone rang again.

  Frustrated, Daniel turned away. Impatience was a trait you developed in the lower forty-eight, an attribute that a child who grew up here didn’t possess. Time wasn’t the same on the tundra; it stretched to elastic lengths and snapped back fast when you weren’t looking. The only things that really operated on a schedule were school and church, and most Yupiit were late to those anyway.

  Daniel noticed an old man sitting on a chair, staring. He was Yup’ik, with the weathered skin of a person who’d spent his life outside. He wore green flannel pants and a fur parka. “Aliurturua,” the man whispered. I’m seeing a ghost.

  “Not a ghost.” Daniel took a step toward him. “Cama-i.”

  The man’s face wrinkled, and he reached for Daniel’s hand. “Alangruksaaqamken.” You amazed me, showing up unexpectedly.

  Daniel had not spoken Yup’ik in fifteen years, but the syllables flowed through him like a river. Nelson Charles had, in fact, taught him his very first Yup’ik words: iqalluk…fish, angsaq…boat, and terren purruaq…you suck the meat off an asshole, which is what Nelson told him to say to kids who made fun of him for being kass’aq. Daniel reached for Laura, who was watching the exchange with amazement. “Una arnaq nulirqaqa,” he said. This is my wife.

  “That kind’s pretty,” Nelson said in English. He shook her hand but didn’t look her in the eye.

  Daniel turned to Laura. “Nelson used to be a substitute teacher. When the native kids got to go on field trips to Anchorage that were subsidized by the government, I wasn’t allowed to go because I was white. So Nelson would take me on my own little field trip to check out fishnets and animal traps.”

  “Don’t teach these days,” Nelson said. “Now I’m the race marshal.”

  That would mean, Daniel realized, that Nelson had been here since the start of the K300. “Listen,” he said, and he found himself slipping back into Yup’ik because the words, thorny on his tongue and in his throat, didn’t hurt quite as much as they did in English. “Paniika tamaumauq.”

  My daughter is lost.

  He didn’t have to explain to Nelson why he thought that his child, who lived a whole country away, might have wound up in Alaska when she went missing. The Yupiit understood that the person you were when you went to sleep at night might not necessarily be the person you were when you woke up. You could have become a seal or a bear. You might have crossed into the land of the dead. You might have casually spoken a wish aloud in your dreams and then found yourself living in the middle of it.

  “She’s fourteen,” Daniel said, and he tried to describe Trixie, but he didn’t know what to say. How could her height or weight or the color of her hair convey that when she laughed, her eyes narrowed shut? That she had to have the peanut butter on the top side of the sandwich and the jelly on the bottom? That she sometimes got up and wrote poetry in the middle of the night because she’d dreamed it?

  The woman who had been on the phone stepped out from behind the table. “Sorry about that-the calls have been crazy. Anyway, the only kids coming through here I didn’t know are the Jesuit Volunteers. One girl flew in late, because of the snowstorm, but by now, they’re all up at Tuluksak, manning the checkpoint.”

  “What did she look like?” Laura asked. “The girl who was late?”

  “Skinny little thing. Black hair.”

  Laura turned to Daniel. “It’s not her.”

  “This girl didn’t have a warm coat,” the woman said. “I thought that was pretty crazy for a kid who knew she was coming to Alaska. She didn’t even have a hat.”

  Daniel remembered Trixie sitting in the passenger seat of his truck in the middle of the winter as they drove up to the high school entrance. It’s freezing out, he’d said, and he handed her a hunter-orange wool stocking cap he’d used when he was out cutting wood. Wear this. And her response: Dad, do you want people to think I’m a total freak?

  There had been times, when he lived in Akiak, that he would know things before they happened. Sometimes it was as simple as thinking of a red fox and then looking up and seeing one. Sometimes it was more profound: sensing a fight building up behind him, so that he could turn in time to throw the first punch. Once it had even wakened him out of his sleep: the sound of a gunshot and the echo of basketballs thudding when the bullet upset the cart they were stored on.

  His mother had called it coincidence, but the Yupiit wouldn’t. People’s lives were as tightly woven as a piece of lace, and pulling on one string might furrow another. And although he’d dismissed it when he was a teenager in Akiak, he recognized now the tightening of the skin at his temples, the way light moved too fast in front of his eyes a moment before he pictured his daughter, not wearing a hat, or anything else for that matter, shivering in what seemed to be a haystack.

  Daniel felt his heart jump. “I have to get to Tuluksak.”

  “Ikayurnaamken,” Nelson said. Let me help you.

  The last time he’d been here, Daniel hadn’t wanted anyone’s help. The last time he’d been here, he’d actively pushed it away. Now he turned to Nelson. “Can I borrow your snow machine?” he asked.

  The checkpoint in Tuluksak was at the school, close enough to the river for mushers to settle their dogs in straw on the banks and then walk up to the building for hot food. All mushers racing the K300 passed through Tuluksak twice-once on the way up to Aniak and once on the way back. There was a mandatory four-hour rest and vet check during one of those stops. When Trixie and Willie arrived, a team of dogs was idling without its musher down at the bank of the river, being watched over by a kid with a clipboard who asked if they’d run into anyone else on the trail. All but one of the mushers had passed through Tuluksak, detained, presumably, by the storm. No one had heard from him since he’d checked in at Akiak.

  Trixie hadn’t really spoken much to Willie this morning. She had awakened with a start a little after six A.M., noticing first that it wasn’t snowing and second that she wasn’t cold. Willie’s arm was draped over her, and his breath fell onto the nape of her neck. Most humiliating, though, was the hard thing Trixie could feel pressing up against her thigh. She had inched away from Willie, her face burning, and focused on getting herself fully dressed before he woke up and realized he had a boner.

  Willie parked outside the school and climbed off the snow machine. “Aren’t you coming in?” Trixie asked, but he was already tinkering with the engine, not seeming the least bit inclined to finesse an introduction for her. “Whatever,” she muttered under her breath, and she walked into the building.

  Directly in front of her was a trophy case that held a wooden mask decorated with feathers and fur and a loving cup with a basketball etched onto it. A tall boy with a long, horsey face was standing next to it. “You’re not Andi,” he said, surprised.

  The Jesuit Volunteers who were in charge of the checkpoint at Tuluksak were a group of college-age kids who did Peace Corps-style service work at the native clinic in Bethel. Trixie had thought Jesuits were priests-and these kids clearly weren’t. She asked Willie why they were called that, and he just shrugged.

  “I don’t know about Andi,” Trixie said. “I was just told to come here.”

  She held her breath, waiting for this boy to point a finger at her and scream Imposter! but before he could, Willie walked inside, stamping off his boots. “Hey, Willie, what’s up,” the tall boy said. Willie nodded and walked into one of the classrooms, heading toward a table set up with Crock Pots and Tupperware. He helped himself to a bowl of something and disappeared through another doorway.

  “Well, I’m Carl,” the boy said. He held out his hand.

  “Trixie.”

  “You ever done this before?”

  “Oh, sure,” Trixie lied. “Tons of times.”

  “Great.” He led her into the classroom. “Things are a little crazy right now, because we’ve got a team t