The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  Just as suddenly as all the activity had arrived, there was nobody on the bank of the river. Trixie looked north, but she couldn’t see Finn Hanlon and his team anymore. She looked south, but she couldn’t tell where she and Willie had come from. The sun had climbed almost directly overhead, washing out the ice so that it made her eyes burn even to pick out the trail from the field of white.

  Trixie sank down beside Juno on the straw and scratched the dog’s head with her glove. The husky stared up at her with one brown eye and one blue, and when he panted, it looked like he was smiling. Trixie imagined what it was like to be a sled dog, to have to pull your weight or realize you’d be left behind. She pictured how it would feel to trust your instincts in a strange land, to know the difference between where you had been and where you were going.

  • • •

  When the river froze in the winter, it got its own highway number, and at any given time you would see rusted trucks and dogsled teams driving over the ice in no particular direction or parallel course. Like most Yup’ik Eskimos, Nelson didn’t believe in a helmet or goggles; to brace himself against the wind on the old man’s snow machine, Daniel had to crouch down close to the windshield. Laura sat behind him, her face buried against the back of his coat.

  In the middle of the river was a stationary white truck. As Daniel slowed the snow-go, he could feel Laura relax—she was freezing, even if she wasn’t complaining. “This must be a checkpoint,” he said, and he got off the machine with his thighs still thrumming from the power of the engine.

  A dreadlocked white woman unrolled the driver’s side window. “Kingurauten Joseph, for the love of God, go pass out in someone else’s backyard.”

  Kingurauten was Yup’ik for too late. Daniel pulled down the neck warmer that covered his nose and mouth. “I think you’ve got me confused with someone else,” he began, and then realized that he knew the woman in the truck. “Daisy?” he said hesitantly.

  Crazy Daisy, that was what they’d called her when she used to run the mail out to the native villages by dogsled back when Daniel was a kid. She frowned at him. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Daniel Stone,” he said. “Annette Stone’s son.”

  “That wasn’t the name of Annette’s kid. He was—”

  “Wassilie,” Daniel finished.

  Daisy scratched her scalp. “Didn’t you bug out of here because—”

  “Nah,” Daniel lied. “I just left for college.” It was common knowledge that Crazy Daisy had gotten that way by running with Timothy Leary’s crowd in the sixties, and that she’d pretty much fried the functioning parts of her brain. “Did you happen to see a snow-go pass by here with a kass’aq girl and a Yup’ik boy?”

  “This morning?”

  “Yeah.”

  Daisy shook her head. “Nope. Sorry.” She jerked her thumb toward the back of the truck. “You want to come in and warm up? I got coffee and Snickers bars.”

  “Can’t,” Daniel said, lost in thought. If Trixie hadn’t come past Akiak, then how had he missed her on the trail?

  “Maybe later,” Daisy yelled, as he turned the ignition on the snow machine again. “I’d love to catch up.”

  Daniel pretended not to hear her. But as he circled around the truck, Daisy started waving like a madwoman, trying to get his attention. “No one’s passed by this morning,” she said, “but a girl and boy came through last night, before the storm hit.”

  Daniel didn’t answer, just gunned the engine and drove up the riverbank into Akiak, the town he’d run away from fifteen years earlier. The Washeteria—the place they’d gone with their laundry and for showers—was now a convenience store and video rental shop. The school was still a squat, serviceable gray building; the house beside it where he’d grown up had two dogs staked out front. Daniel wondered who lived there now, if it was still the schoolteacher, if she had children. If basketballs still sometimes started to bounce in the gymnasium without being set in motion, if the last one to lock up the school building ever saw the old principal who’d killed himself, still hanging from the crossbeam in the only classroom.

  He stopped in front of the house next door to the school, a shack with a slight pedigree. A snow-go sat in front of the building, and an aluminum boat peeked out from beneath a blue tarp. Paper snow-flakes had been taped to the windows, as well as a red metallic crucifix. “Why are we stopping?” Laura asked. “What about Trixie?”

  He got off the snow machine and turned to her. “You’re not coming with me.”

  She wasn’t used to this kind of cold, and he couldn’t slow down for her and risk losing Trixie for good. And a part of him wanted to be alone when he found Trixie. There was so much he needed to explain.

  Laura stared at him, struck dumb. Her eyebrows had frosted over, her eyelashes were matted together with ice, and when she finally spoke, her sentence rose like a white banner between them. “Please don’t do this,” she said, starting to cry. “Take me with you.”

  Daniel pulled her into his arms, assuming that Laura thought this was a punishment, retribution for leaving him behind when she had her affair. It made her seem vulnerable; it made him remember how easy it was for them to still hurt each other. “If we had to walk through hell to find Trixie, I’d follow you. But this is a different kind of hell, and I’m the one who knows where he’s going. I’m asking you . . . I’m begging you to trust me.”

  Laura opened her mouth, and what might have been a reply came out only as a smoke ring full of what she could not say. Trust was exactly what they no longer had between them. “I can go faster if I don’t have to worry about you,” he said.

  Daniel saw true fear in her eyes. “You’ll come back?” she asked.

  “We both will.”

  Laura glanced around at the rutted street with snow-go tracks, at the public water receptacles at the base of the street. The community was silent, windswept, frigid. It looked, Daniel knew, like a dead end.

  “Come with me.” He led Laura up the set of wooden stairs and opened the door without knocking, entering a little antechamber. There were plastic bags stuck on nails in the frame overhead, and stacks of newspaper. A pair of boots toppled to the right, and a tanned hide was stretched on the back wall, beside the door that led into the house. Lying on the linoleum was a severed moose hoof and a half rack of frozen ribs.

  Laura stepped hesitantly over them. “Is this . . . is this where you used to live?”

  The interior door opened, revealing a Yup’ik woman about sixty years old, holding an infant in her arms. She took one look at Daniel and backed away, her eyes bright with tears.

  “Not me,” Daniel said. “Cane.”

  • • •

  Charles and Minnie Johnson, the parents of Daniel’s one and only childhood friend, treated him with the same sort of deference they might have given any other ghost who sat down at their kitchen table to share a cup of coffee. Charles’s skin was as dark and lined as a cinnamon stick; he wore creased jeans and a red western shirt and called Daniel Wass. His eyes were clouded with cataracts, as if life were something poured into a body, a vessel that could hold only so much before memories floated across the windows of consciousness.

  “It’s been a long time,” Charles said.

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve been living Outside?”

  “With my family.”

  There was a long silence. “We wondered when you’d come home,” Minnie said.

  The Yupiit did not speak of the dead, and because of that, neither would Daniel. But he had less practice with silence. In a Yup’ik household, ten minutes might pass between a question and the answer. Sometimes you didn’t even have to reply out loud; it was enough to be thinking your response.

  They sat around the kitchen table in the quiet, until a young woman walked through the front door. She was clearly Minnie’s daughter—they had the same wide smile and smooth hickory skin—but Daniel remembered her only as a young girl who liked to story-knife—using a butter knife in