Heroes of the Frontier

III

BUT THIS WAS NOT YET a land of mountains and light. What they’d seen so far was just a place. There were mountains, some, but the air was jaundiced and the light plain. The little oval window that faced forward presented the real Alaska to her: a parking lot, a wigwam, a sign telling passersby that the wifi was free. It was seven a.m. She looked down to find her children awake and exploring the cabinets.

“Let’s have some breakfast,” she said, and they dressed and walked across the gravel parking lot to the diner. Inside there were a pair of firefighters, a man and a woman, both seeming managerial in age and demeanor. Their shirts said they were from Oregon.

“Thank you for your help up here,” the waitress said to them, refilling their coffee. Periodically Josie would catch other diners nodding to the firefighter table, closing their eyes in gratitude.

Paul and Ana ate eggs and bacon, Ana sitting on her foot, vibrating. Josie had told her that there was no plan for the day and this, to Ana, seemed to unleash all possibility of mayhem.

“How’s the food?” Josie asked Paul.

“Fine,” he said, and blinked his long-lashed eyes. His lashes were spectacular, and no matter what happened in his life he would have them, and these lashes would imply to all he was gentle and kind and, framed by his ice-blue eyes, that he was intelligent and wise and perhaps saw the future. Paul was an extraordinary-looking person, his face a long oval of polished stone, his eyes startling from forty feet.

It was hard to see Ana, though, because she existed as a blur. She did not stop moving, even while eating. She’d been born four months premature, had entered the world weighing just over three pounds, was beset by a series of gothic afflictions — sleep apnea (being the occasional twenty-second delay between breaths), necrotizing enterocolitis (intestinal problem causing swollen belly and diarrhea), a bout with sepsis, then a blood infection, a half-dozen other full attacks on a creature the size of a shoe. But she got stronger daily, was a beast now, still underweight, still having something in the eyes that said Holy hell what happened? But aha! I’m here! You couldn’t kill me! but somehow her head had grown huge and heavy, and every day she seemed possessed by the need to prove she belonged here and would use her days fully, recklessly. She woke up ecstatic and went to bed reluctantly. In between she took five steps for everyone else’s one, sang loudly songs she created and which made no sense, and also attempted at every opportunity to cause herself harm. From a distance she resembled a perpetually drunk adult — bumping into things, yelling randomly, making up words. She could not be trusted in parking lots, near electrical outlets, near stoves or glass or metal or stairs, cliffs, bodies of water, vehicles of any kind, or pets. At the moment she was swaying back and forth like a buoy, doing a sitting dance to music only she could hear. In her left hand was a piece of toast, and surrounding her mouth like a messy new galaxy was syrup, eggs, grains of sugar and a film of milk. Now she stopped moving, and took in her surroundings in a rare moment of what could be construed as contemplation.

“Do they speak English here?” she asked.

“Yes,” Paul said to Ana, then gently said, “We’re still in America.” And then he patted her arm. The boy was freakish in his devotion to her. When Ana was one, two, three, Paul insisted on helping put her to bed, and every night created some new song for her to lull her to sleep. “Ana is sleepy now, Ana is sleepy, all the Anas in the world are so sleepy now, they hold hands and drop away…” He was a startling lyricist, really, at four, five, six, and Ana would lie there staring at him, her eyes unblinking, sucking on her bottle, listening to every word. And his artwork! It showed a different level of devotion: he signed everything he created Paul and Ana.

They ate their breakfast, Josie sitting across from her children, staring at the heartless landscape of blue sky and white mountains, and remembered Carl once saying, joking but not joking, that their children had their genders confused. Paul was exquisitely sensitive, thoughtful, maternal. He didn’t wear girls’ clothes but he did play with dolls. Ana liked motorcycles and Darth Vader and had hit her giant head on so many things, falling, ramming, that her skull was wildly misshapen and lucky to be covered with her riot of red curls. Paul listened, cared more for people than objects, and was wounded deeply by the thought of any suffering endured by any living soul. On the other hand, Ana really did not care.

Then there was the matter of honor. Though his father was an invertebrate, Paul was already a great man, a tiny Lincoln. A few months ago, for his after-dinner treat, he chose a tiny packet of peanut M&Ms from the candy left over from Halloween (Josie kept it in the cabinet over the fridge). There were six M&Ms inside the packet, and Josie said he could have four. Josie took Ana to bed, while Paul ate his treat in the kitchen so Ana wouldn’t see or want some of her own. The next morning on the counter, Josie found the packet with the two extras in it. Paul was so honest that he wouldn’t sneak the last two and eat them — something Ana, or Carl, or even Josie, would likely do without a second thought.

Finished with most of her food, Ana left the booth and ran to a gumball machine, which she yanked on hard enough to bring it down — it would have gone down if it weren’t bolted to the floor. Josie could not remember Ana ever seeing a gumball machine before, so how was it that she knew exactly how to harm one? And what had she imagined would be the results of her efforts — broken machine, a floor of glass and gum, punishment inevitable? What was the appeal? The only explanation was that she was receiving instructions from extraplanetary overlords. That, and Ana’s tendency, once a week, to look at Josie with otherworldly eyes, old eyes, knowing eyes — it was unsettling. Paul was always Paul, self-contained, earth-bound, but Ana, sometimes, would stop being a child and look at Josie, her mother, as if to say, For a second let’s stop pretending.

“Can you get her and bring her back?” Josie asked Paul.

Paul slid out of the booth and went after her. Seeing him coming, Ana grinned and ran toward the bathrooms. In seconds there was a loud crash, an odd delay, then Ana’s wail overtook the diner.

Josie rushed to the bathroom and found Ana inside, on her knees, holding her chin, screaming.

“She was standing on the toilet and fell,” Paul said.

Paul always knew. He knew everything — every event, every truth involving Ana. He was her personal coach, her historian, assistant, caretaker, governness, guardian and best friend.

“I’ll get a first-aid kit,” Paul said. Josie knew her son, only eight, could do this. He could find a waitress, ask for the first-aid kit, bring it back. He could answer the phone, could run into the grocery store to buy milk, could go to the end of the street to pick up the mail. He was so calm and reasonable and composed that Josie considered him, most of the time, her peer in parenting and also, possibly, some shrunken reincarnation of Josie’s own pre-breakdown mother.

Josie lifted Ana to the bathroom sink, looked under her chin and found a tiny red line. “It’s just a scratch. There isn’t really any blood. I don’t think we need a first-aid kit.” She held Ana close, feeling her rabbit heart thrumming as she heaved and choked on tears.

Then Paul, who had returned with the kit, gave Josie an urgent look, a clenching of his teeth, meant to convey that he knew there was no blood, but that Ana would not stop crying until some remedy was placed on her chin.

“There’s got to be a good band-aid here,” Paul said, and at this, Ana’s eyes opened and followed his quick long-fingered hands as he opened compartments. Finally he arrived at the right one. “Found some,” he said, and held up a clump of simple, if oversized, bandages. While Ana watched, no longer crying — in fact rapt, holding her breath — he pored through the band-aids like a normal boy would do with Magic cards, baseball cards. “I think this one,” he said, and took a small one from its wrapping. “Maybe we should put some cream on first. What do you think?”

Josie was about to answer but realized Paul was talking to Ana, not to her. Ana nodded gravely to him and insisted that he, not Josie, put on the cream. In seconds he had some kind of lotion in his hands, and was rubbing it between his palms.

“Let’s make it warm first,” he said. After it was whatever temperature he deemed right, he applied it to her chin with the utmost delicacy, and Ana’s eyes registered a pleasure so great they had to close. After the cream was spread evenly, he blew on it, “so it dries quicker,” he told Ana, ignoring Josie utterly, and then carefully attached the band-aid to her chin, pressing it lightly on both adhesive ends. Then he stepped back and assessed his work. He was satisfied, and now Ana was calm enough to speak.

She asked for a meal.

“You want a meal?” Josie asked. “You haven’t finished your breakfast.”

“No!” Ana roared. “I want a meal.”

“A meal?” Josie was lost.

“No, a meal!”

Paul tilted his head, as if he was on the verge of understanding.

“Are you hungry or not?” Josie asked.

“No!” Ana yelled, now about to cry again.

Paul looked to Ana, his eyes probing. “Is there another way you could say it?”

“I want to see it!” Ana wailed, and immediately Paul understood.

“She wants a mirror, not a meal,” he told his mother, a flash of delight in his ice-priest eyes. Ana nodded vigorously, and a smile overtook Paul’s face. This was treasure to him, this was joy. All he wanted was to know his sister better than anyone else.

Josie lifted her so she could face the small mirror hung high over the sink. She showed Ana the wound, fearing she’d wail again, shocked by the bandage overtaking her chin. But Ana only grinned, touching it lovingly, her eyes alight.

—

They got back on the road, heading south toward the Kenai Peninsula, with an eye toward Seward, about which Josie knew nothing. The kids sat at the banquette in back, Josie unsure exactly how that was safe, given the walls of the Chateau were dangerously thin and the benches of the banquette had seatbelts as old as herself. But the kids were loving it. Ana couldn’t believe she didn’t have to be in a car seat. She felt like she was getting away with some fantastic heist.

Ana yelled something from the back. It sounded like a question, but Josie couldn’t hear anything. “What’s that?” Josie yelled.

“She asked if you ever lived here,” Paul yelled.

“In Alaska? No,” Josie yelled over her shoulder.

Ana thought her mother had lived everywhere. It was Josie’s fault; she’d made the mistake of mentioning her travels before their births, her many addresses. Her kids were too young for this, both of them were, but she found on too many occasions that she couldn’t help it. When they’d heard mention of Panama in a documentary about the canal, she told them she’d lived there for two years, explaining the Peace Corps, the village on a hill where she and two others with no particular training in mountainside irrigation tried to help the residents with mountainside irrigation. She couldn’t help herself, and assumed her kids would forget it all. Ana forgot most things, but Paul forgot nothing, and as if to thwart her efforts to write the past in disappearing ink, he made his own copy, like some tiny deranged monk. They knew that after the Peace Corps and before dentistry school she’d gone to school, briefly, to train seeing-eye dogs (she dropped out after a month but the prospect held great fascination for them). They knew about Walla Walla and Iron Mountain, two of the four places she’d lived as a child. She thought it too soon to tell them about how she’d emancipated herself at seventeen, about Sunny, the woman who supported that insurgency and took her in. They occasionally wondered about Josie’s parents, where they were, why they didn’t have biological grandparents, why they only had Luisa, Carl’s mother, living in Key West. They knew something about London, the four months in Spain — that period of whiplash moves, driven by whim and calamity. Why was it important to her that they know she’d been somewhere, had done more than dentistry? Was it wonderful to have changed so many times? She suspected it was not wonderful.

Now Paul was talking, but he was quieter than Ana, and Josie heard little more than wisps of consonants and vowels.

“I can’t hear you!” Josie yelled.

“What?” Paul yelled back to her.

The Chateau was rattling and heaving and drowned all voices. By its nature a recreational vehicle carried along all manner of kitchen items — in this case, secondhand castoffs of Stan and his white-carpet wife — and every dish rattled, every glass clinked against every other glass. There were plates, and tea sets, and coffee cups, and silverware. There was a coffeemaker. There was a stove. There were pots and pans. There was a wok. A blender. A mixer in case anyone wanted to make a bundt cake. All of these were contained in cabinets, cheap lightweight cabinets like they had at home, but at home these cabinets were not hurtling through space at forty-eight miles an hour, carried on ancient shocks and tires. And because the vehicle was a dying machine, even the cabinets were poorly assembled and only casually attached to the vehicle. The sound, then, was like one would hear during an earthquake. The silverware shook like the chains of some restless ghost. And the cacophony grew far louder when they slowed down or sped up, or drove over an incline or decline or bump or pothole.

IF NOT YOU, THEN WHO? a lighted sign on the side of the road asked, and Josie felt found and accused until the sign changed to read DON’T PARK ON DRY GRASS and she realized these were messages meant to prevent forest fires.

After an hour, Josie pulled over. Going from forty-eight to a stop was a task akin to holding back an avalanche. All the weight was carried in the rear, so the front of the car heaved and shuddered, the wheels shaking. They parked in a wide lot by the water, but Josie’s nerves were shot.

She climbed up from the cab and sat on the couch opposite the banquette. She told Paul and Ana they had the unique opportunity to help with an extraordinary project. They were intrigued.

“We’re putting the kitchen in the shower,” she said.

Intuitively they understood.

Ana opened the cabinet under the sink and found a pot. “Like this?” she asked, heading for the bathroom.

“Wait,” Josie said, “let’s get towels first.”

So they lined the shower floor with towels. Then they wrapped plates and glasses and put these on the shower floor. When they were out of towels, they opened their duffel bags and wrapped plates and silverware in clothes they could spare, and they placed each bundle on the shower floor. They emptied the kitchen of plates, pans, cups and glasses, put them all carefully in the shower, and closed the door. When Josie started the Chateau again, and pulled back onto the highway, the sound was wonderfully muffled and she appeared to her children some kind of mastermind.

“What if we need to cook?” Paul asked.

“I don’t want to cook,” Josie said.

She didn’t want to drive, either, the road giving her no peace, only faces. She saw the smooth handsome face of the young soldier in whose death she was complicit. No, she thought, give me another face. She saw the yellow eyes of the cancer-ridden woman who stole her business. No. Another. Carl, grinning on the toilet. No. The face of the woman’s lawyer, her son-in-law, cruel and mercenary. Josie finally arrived at the onion-skinned face of Sunny, a face she tried to conjure when she sought peace. For a moment her mind rested there, on Sunny’s bright black eyes, imagined Sunny running her bony fingers through her hair — Josie had allowed it even though she was a teenager and furious at the world — and then and now, for a moment, she felt something like calm.

—

In the afternoon they made it to Seward, and Seward felt like a real place. It was muscular and clean. It sat at the end of a great fjord, freezing water stampeding in from the Gulf of Alaska. The town’s main strip was lousy with souvenir shops, tinkly glass shelves full of cartoon abomination T-shirts, but on the outskirts, Seward was raw, an actual place of business. Fishing boats came and went, and tankers, and small container ships, and they all passed through the narrow inlet called Resurrection Bay, a name for grizzled explorers and saints.

They arrived at an RV park outside of town, and parked facing a wide seaweed-covered beach. Across the water, half a mile maybe, there was the Kenai range, a wall of immaculate mountains — sawtoothed, silver and white, monumental and defiant. Along the shore were occasional stumps of trees rising from the sand, petrified in white.

“Stay here,” she told the kids, and walked to the park office.

The man at the desk asked for her name and address, and Josie wrote it down, scribbling her name illegibly, giving him a PO Box she’d memorized from a credit card company, and then paid in cash. She had the vague sense that when Carl realized what she’d done he might come to find her and the children, or send someone to find them, but then again the man had never held a real job (this new one in Florida didn’t count) — could he really assemble and carry out a reconnaissance mission? He’d gotten halfway through the triathlon he’d trained for. Maybe he’d get halfway through finding her.

When Josie walked back to the Chateau, she found an irate man.

“This is not your spot!” he roared. Idling behind the Chateau was another RV, this one new and far bigger and with a Norwegian flag flying from its antenna. The Norwegian’s face was red, his hands held behind his back as if to restrain them from doing some Norway-specific harm to Josie. He had been rehearsing this, it was clear. He’d been building a good head of steam for the fifteen minutes she’d been gone. Now, she was sure, he would mention her children.

“And you leave your children driving!”

She looked up to find that Paul was in the Chateau’s driver’s seat, and Ana was on his lap. All four of their hands were on the wheel.

Josie had some thoughts. She thought how much she loved her children, how they looked like little delinquents, even though Paul was angelic and Ana had never hurt anyone but herself. She wondered why this Norwegian would come four thousand miles to look at Alaskan fjords. It was perverse. Norway was better, cleaner. And didn’t they give you things for free in Norway? Health care and the like? Go home.

Without a word, she got into the Chateau, shooed her children into the back, and ceded the spot to the angry Norwegian. All the spots on the shore were taken, though, so they drove around the park until they found a berth in the woods. It was fine, still less than a few hundred feet from the water, but where the shore was bright and facing the illuminated mountains, the woods were dark, dank, hinting at Tolkien and trolls.

Josie had spent a week there, in Norway, with Paul when he was two. It was a conference on teeth whitening. How strange the Norwegians were with Paul! (Carl stayed home, thought he might be getting sick, didn’t want to risk it. A paragon of a man.) So in Oslo, and especially on that ferry trip through some pristine fjord, the Norwegians acted like she’d brought a wolverine on board. Paul had been a well-behaved toddler, a little citizen, almost effete, almost too mature, but on that ship he’d been a pariah. He opened his mouth and it was as if he’d ruined the journey, the very sound of his voice some kind of American dirty bomb.

Josie had heard every musical and thought an addition to the canon should be called Norway! It would feature a chorus of women in the same all-white outfits — everyone she’d met in Norway wore all white, and they all had the same suspiciously tanned skin, the same narrow black glasses — all these Norwegians pretended to be happy people, civilized people, singing benign songs about fjords and state-sponsored culture funded by oil, but meanwhile they were trying to eliminate all children so they wouldn’t have to share their limited amounts of white cloth. As she performed teeth whitenings, Josie often mused about the musical, picturing the finale, all the white-clad Norwegians singing some song with electronic accompaniment. Why did she do this? She spent her idle time conceiving of musicals that would never be. It was the only medium that could properly express our true madness and hypocrisy — our collective ability to sit in a theater watching lunatics sing nonsense while the world outside burns.

The teeth-whitening conference had otherwise been a boon — the treatments were like printing money. A patient was in the office for about an hour, ten minutes of which involved Josie — the hygienists could handle most of it — but she billed seven hundred dollars and everyone was happy to pay it. Thank you, Norway!

They got out, and Josie removed the electrical hookup from the side compartment — basically a thick extension cord hidden in a rickety particleboard door near the rear wheel. She plugged the vehicle into the outdoor outlet and, not bad, they had electricity. She led Paul and Ana to the shore, avoiding the Norwegians, who were now taking pains to be friendly, standing over their weak grey fire, waving.

The bay was full of otters. Ana and Paul had already spotted them, fifty yards from shore. What child doesn’t love otters? Josie sat on one of the ancient white tree stumps and let the kids go out on the waterline to get a closer look. The otters were maniacal they were so cute, swimming on their backs, holding actual rocks on their stomachs, using them to break open actual clams. Such an animal could not be conceived by any self-respecting creator. Only a God made in our image could go for that level of animal kitsch.

Now Ana was on the ground. Now Paul was examining her hand. This was Josie’s preferred method of parenting: go someplace like this, with grand scale and much to be discovered, and watch your children wander and injure themselves but not significantly. Sit and do nothing. When they come back to show you something, some rock or mop of seaweed, inspect it and ask questions about it. Socrates invented the ideal method for the parent who likes to sit and do very little. Through judicious questioning, her children could learn to read and write right here, on this beach in Seward. Of course they could. Read the name of that ship. Quick, read that warning on the side of the water taxi. Read the notes about voltage on that outdoor plug-in.

The air was clear. They were by the water, and the fire danger here was low, or at least lower, and somehow the winds that carried the burnt air were heading in some other direction. Josie breathed deeply and raised her closed eyes to the sun. She heard the complaints of some shorebird. The movement of gravel somewhere in the parking lot. The long shush of a breeze moving through the forest behind her. The crisp entry of a paddle into the bay. Now the squeal of a child. She opened her eyes, assuming it was Ana, hurt again, this time more seriously. But Ana and Paul were still where she last saw them, and now were stacking stones. She turned to the other side of the beach and saw another family, two parents, two children, all dressed in bright lycra and waterproof windbreakers. The children, about the same size as Josie’s, were upset about a trio of dogs, strays, circling the family like some kind of 1950s greaser gang. The family had no idea what to do.

The adults of the group looked to Josie, outraged and imploring, assuming the dogs were hers. That these uncollared feral dogs were somehow hers. Because she looked feral? Because her children looked dirty, mangy, wild — the kind of people who would bring dogs to the beach to harass beautiful people in matching lycra. These were the people Josie had come to Alaska to escape.

These were the breed of people who had overtaken Josie’s town, had overtaken the kids’ school. No one seemed to work; everyone had matching lycra and found time to be at every one of the three or four hundred yearly events at school. How could someone like Josie have a job, and be a mother, and yet not be a failure, a pariah, at this average school in this average town? She had been led to believe that having a job in the U.S.A. meant working forty hours a week. Debate it if you will — we should work less, we don’t work enough, so much time at work wasted with online pornography and break-room grinding — but still, forty hours a week is the expectation, the norm, the key to the national prosperity. But the schools, and these children, and their activities, and the parent-organizers of these schools and activities, and most crucially their judging eyes, were preventing the working of forty-hour weeks, and were thwarting this prosperity, and the answer to the question of decline in the U.S. might very well be these parents, their judging eyes, these schools, these activities. Was it not a generation ago when there were four one-hour school activities a year that a parent was expected to attend? There was the parent-teacher conference in the fall, its twin in the spring, there was the fall — no, autumn—music production, the spring music production. That was all. Maybe a winter program, but never two in one semester. Maybe a school play. Maybe a recital. But in any case there were four events considered mandatory, and most were at night, after work. Otherwise the family’s breadwinners or breadwinner was at work forty hours a week, was a hero to make it to any of the four events, was a champion if she or he managed to attend the games on the weekend, was a verifiable saint to coach a team, but in any case the parent could be considered a paragon for attending just three of the four mandatories, period, full stop.

But now there is something else. Now there are, creeping like a well-intentioned but ultimately suffocating and murderous weed, these new and vague half responsibilities, which are choking the life from all growth in this garden, which could also be considered human productivity and the national GDP. These optional things, these middling things, they sneak and kill like rust on flora. Like communism. No, not like communism. The communists knew balance, and worked hard. Did they work hard? No one is sure. But these other parents and their judging eyes: When do they work? Their jobs are attending these events. That is their work, they imply, and they also imply that you, and your actual work, are fine but also neglectful and sad. They don’t say that, though. They say, Don’t worry if you can’t be there, at the mid-fall solstice sing-along, the late-winter sledding-song craft fair and potluck. Not a big deal with the mid-spring parent-student doubles badminton under-the-lights evening funmaker. No problem with the mother-daughter pajama party on every third Wednesday movie day Sound of Music bring your own guitar or lyre. No need to bring treats on your child’s birthday. No need to come in for career day. No need to swing by the opening of the new art studio which features real clay-throwing technology. Don’t care about art? Not an issue. No need, no need, no need, it’s fine, no problem, though you really are selfish and your children doomed. When they are first to try crack — they will try it and love it and sell it to our culture-loving children — we will know why.

And so Josie calculated, for her own amusement and for some likely future deposition, the hours it would take to actually attend all of these middle-mandatory events in a given November, and she arrived at just over thirty-two hours. That would sum up the time in the school, on campus, watching and cavorting, thanking and congratulating. But wait. Consider the time to get from and back to work, through traffic, against traffic, everything, all the tragedy of driving at all, it added up to forty-six hours. Forty-six hours in one month to attend the daytime and nighttime events, all of them optional, for which you are not expected, no problem, no worries, everything is optional, your children are doing so wonderfully, don’t worry, we know you need to work, Josie.

Josie did have to work, because there were the kids, and Carl did not know how to generate income, personally contributed no funds whatsoever — his mother Luisa supported him, though she was anguished about it, and she paid for Ana and Paul’s things occasionally, too. It did not help that Josie had not taken on another dentist into her own operation, she was a fool not to, and it did not help that she offered her services on a sliding scale. None of it helped. All of it was ill-advised, and proved she should not have started a business, should not be living with her children in that town, with those gleaming people who balanced joy and obligation effortlessly. Every time she would attend some event, some cupcake soiree, some ceremony of the cupcakes of the oral presentation of the choral club, she saw them. All of them. The dads were there, the moms were there. They were all there, and when she saw them, inevitably and firstly, they would want to talk about the last event, the one the week before or the day before. The event she did not attend. Oh, it was great, they would say. The class killed it. They killed it! The parents would say this with wonder, with wonder at it all, the things these kids do, that these young children are capable of, and while saying this, they may or may not be aware of the shiv they were sliding between Josie’s ribs. They may or may not have any idea. But then they would turn the knife: And your son, they would say, wow, he was the star. Another twist: I think I have him on film, at least for a second. I’ll send you a link. Was this an Ohio thing? Was it happening everywhere? Was it helpful that Paul sang both “The Long and Winding Road” and “In My Life” in some daytime talent show that Josie hadn’t gotten proper notice of? It was not helpful. One parent said, afterward, Better you weren’t there. It was too sad seeing Paul sing those words. She really said this. Meaning this eight-year-old understood the words, connected them somehow to Josie’s split with Carl. This happened.

The wonderful apex of it all was the email from a woman, another mother, a week later. “Dear Josie, As a service from the school community to our working parents, we’ve started an innovative program we call All in This Together, whereby each student whose parents can’t be at schoolday events is “adopted” by a parent who can be. This parent will take extra time with your child, will take pictures at events and post them, and in general give the child the support enjoyed by the students who…” The email went on for another page. Josie scanned to the bottom to see who had been assigned to her children, and found it to be this woman, Bridget, who she remembered being precisely the kind of mother she’d never leave her children with — loony-eyed and fond of scarves.

Josie had chosen this kind of environment. She had left her former tribe, the searching ranks of Peace Corps alums, to go to dental school, to move to Ohio, to come to live in this suburb, among stable people — so stable they were willing to “adopt” her children during the school day — but she remembered her other people, other friends from the other life, those still roaming the planet like the undead. None of the Peace Corps friends had had kids. One had spent a year in bed, her healthy limbs unable to take commands (she’d since recovered). One had moved back to Panama, another learned Arabic and found some mysterious consulting job in Abbottabad and claimed to have watched the bin Laden raid from his rooftop. One was dead of an apparent suicide. A now-married couple ran a llama farm in Idaho, and had asked Josie to come, to move in, to be part of their commune (It’s not a commune! they insisted), and Josie had almost done it, or had almost thought about considering it, but yes, the rest of the ragged race of Peace Corps people were still wandering, unwilling to stop, unwilling to live in any traditional or linear way.

Only Deena, a mother of a boy in Paul’s class and manager of a pet food store, understood, seemed to have any past at all. Josie had mentioned her emancipation to another couple and they had not been able to hide their horror. They’d never heard of such a thing.

“I didn’t know that was possible,” the man said.

“I ran away once,” the woman said. She was wearing capris. “I slept at a girlfriend’s house and came back in the morning.”

Another time, at Moms’ Night Out — no three words more tragic — Josie had mentioned the Peace Corps and Panama, how she’d known someone, Rory, who had managed to become a heroin addict there. Josie thought she told the story in a funny way, an American smuggling drugs into Central America, but again there was the chasmic silence that implied Josie was bringing some hint of apocalypse to their fine town.

But Deena understood. She was a single mother, too, though her husband was not a deserter, but dead. He’d been a contractor in the Nigerian delta, was kidnapped, ransomed, freed, and, upon returning to the U.S., died two months later of an aneurysm. Deena’s other child, also named Ana but spelled Anna, was adopted, and between that and the dead father, Deena, too, had been threatened with Anna being adopted by the scarf woman from All in This Together.

Josie and Deena talked about being the only people in the school that anything had ever happened to. Josie felt right telling Deena anything, but she hadn’t gone far into her own childhood, her parents’ broken world. Those were untouchable years. It was one step too strange, so with Deena they left it at the particular absurdities of being a single parent — the making of money to pay children to watch their children so they could make money to pay these people to watch their children. The confiding in their children, complaining to them, lying too long with them at bedtime, telling them too much.

“We should move to Alaska,” Deena said one night. They were at Chuy’s, a burrito place where the kids could run around and scavenge and Josie and Deena were free to have their mojitos and take off their shoes. Deena was watching her daughter spill a basket of chips on the floor, pick them up and eat them. She didn’t move a muscle to help, she didn’t utter a word in admonition.

“Why would Alaska be any better?” Josie asked, but the idea stuck in her mind, in part because Sam lived there.

—

On the beach, the family in colorful new windbreakers disappeared behind a boulder down the shore, and Josie’s relief was great.

Ana approached carrying something carefully with two hands. Paul was right behind her, then by her side, his hands hovering around hers, ensuring that whatever it was they’d found would not fall. Josie stood, hoping to discourage them from dropping it in her lap. “Look,” Ana said with the utmost solemnity.

“It’s a head,” Paul said.

And now the stray dogs were among them, sniffing the head. Josie’s kids barely took notice of the dogs, and the dogs seemed to have no interest in eating or harming the skull.

“One of dem otters,” Ana said, and waved toward the bay. She had a skull in her little pink hands, and Josie noticed with horror that it had not been picked clean. There was still cartilage on it, and whiskers, and fur, something viscous, too. Josie conjured Socrates and thought of a question. “Why in hell did you pick this up?” In solidarity, the dogs lifted their heads to Ana and Paul, then ran off.

—

At night they went to a real restaurant in town. Josie retrieved the velvet bag from under the sink, retrieved six twenties, feeling it illogical but inevitable that she would spend most of them that night.

When they hit the main strip, they saw that a cruise ship had docked and Seward was full of identical couples in their seventies, all wearing slight variations on the same windbreaker and white sneakers. The town had been breached, the restaurants had surrendered, and Ana was running through the streets again. Josie and Paul caught her and Josie tried to appease her with a piggyback. No. Her little body, all muscle, moved like a barracuda: bending, twisting, anything to be free, so she let Ana run on the sidewalk. No negatives motivated her. Josie threatened to take away her Batman sticker book. No effect at all; she knew there were others. Josie told her she’d never watch another DVD; she had no sense of the future so she didn’t care. But if Josie said she’d get something, some dessert, some object, she would toe the line. She was the purest sort of materialist: she wanted things, but didn’t care about things.

The restaurant they went to was the cheapest one they could find, but the prices in Alaska were science-fictional. Josie looked at the menu as they were waiting to be seated. Every pickle was twenty dollars. This was what she had tried to avoid. Back home Josie was so tired, so bone-weary of spending money. It crushed the spirit. Every day she found herself at the drugstore or grocery store and always the bill was sixty-three dollars. She would go into Walgreen’s for milk and Ana’s nighttime diapers and somehow would end up spending sixty-three dollars. Always sixty-three dollars. Sixty-three dollars, three or four times a day. How could that be sustained?

But this menu, in the brightly lit hellhole they found themselves in, wanted more than that for dinner. Josie did a rough calculation and knew she would spend eighty dollars for dinner with her two children, neither of whom would care one way or another if they ate here, or ate mud and grubs dug from shallow holes. Ana, always happy to puncture the pretense of any situation, found her opportunity. After the busboy wiped down the table, Ana wiped it again, with her own napkin, saying, “Oooh yeah! Ooooh yeah!” She made it uncomfortably lewd. Josie laughed, so Ana did it three more times.

Paul, though, was in a contemplative mood. He looked at Josie with his ice-priest eyes.

“What?” she said.

He said he didn’t want to talk about it.

“What?” Josie asked again.

Finally he beckoned her closer, promising a secret. Josie leaned over the table and a plate tilted, knocking against the wood.

“Where do the stray dogs go at night?” he whispered, his breath hot in her ear. Josie didn’t know where Paul was going with this so said, “I don’t know.” Immediately she knew this was the wrong answer. His face crumbled and his eyes, so pale and cold, told her he wouldn’t sleep for weeks.

She’d forgotten Paul’s thing with strays. Back at home, he’d heard about stray cats — there was some demented socialite in their town who had made the homeless cats’ plight her calling, and the ads were all over the buses and in the local newspaper, offering shelter and the HIGHEST QUALITY MEDICAL CARE! for these strays — and Paul made Josie put milk out every night for any wandering felines who happened to be passing by their home. Josie had also made up a story about how they often dropped by their house on their way home — there was an Underground Railroad for the strays, she’d explained, and they were one of the participating homes. The fiction lasted weeks, and it was Josie’s fault. She’d made up the Railroad, so had to make up the milk-being-available, and had to empty the milk at night, watch Paul check it in the morning, discuss it with him over breakfast, and so how had she forgotten his concern for these wayward animals?

Later, after she’d paid for dinner — eighty-four dollars, everyone involved going to hell — and while Ana ate an ice-cream sandwich on a bench on the boardwalk, Josie clarified some things for Paul while entertaining herself a bit, too. The stray dogs, she said, all live together in a clubhouse. And this clubhouse was built by Alaskan park rangers because the stray dogs, being pack animals, prefer to live together. They’re fed there, she said, three meals a day, by the rangers — omelets for breakfast, sausage for lunch, steak for dinner.

Paul smiled shyly. Someone who did not know Paul would assume he knew this was all made up, that his smile acknowledged the absurdity in all this — the silliness of his concern for the strays and the madness of his mother’s explanation — but this was not the meaning of Paul’s smile. No. Paul smiled because something that was wrong in the world had been righted. Paul’s smile confirmed the true north of the moral world: How could he doubt the preeminence of order and justice? His smile confirmed rightness. His smile laughed at his temporary doubt in this rightness.

Ana was finished with her ice-cream sandwich, and handed the wrapper to Josie on her way to inspect, a few feet down the pier, what seemed to be a bloody fish head. They were near the cleaning station, where the fishermen weighed and gutted their day’s catch. The boardwalk was pink with watery blood and a last fisherman was finishing his day. Ana stood below him and looked up, then down at the head of the fish, its silver skin stained with bright plasma. She picked it up. She picked the head up.

“This yours?” she asked him.

Before he could answer, she’d dropped the head, and, in an incredible feat of dexterity and fine-motor skills, kicked the head, on the fly, into the dark water below. She laughed, and the fisherman laughed, and Josie wondered just how this child was hers. “What’s my name?” Ana asked the frothing water where the head had disappeared. Josie had not taught her this expression, and Paul certainly didn’t know it. But Ana had said this before, and had also said “You want this? You want this?” And “What’d you expect?” These confrontational phrases she insisted on yelling to rocks, trees, birds. She often spoke disrespectfully to inanimate objects, and often walked around practicing gestures, facial expressions, like a clown preparing backstage.

The fact of Ana’s existence, and her will to live and run and break things and conquer, was all attributable to her birth. After living for a month in a plastic box, and spending her first two years looking like a withered old man, she shed her preemie skin like Lady Lazarus and became a world-ender. Carl had long before abdicated any responsibility. When they first brought Ana home from the hospital, Carl thought it a good time to start training for his triathlon — there was suddenly such urgency to it — and Josie soon gleaned he was not likely to be instrumental in Ana’s care. So she deputized Paul. Your sister is very small and not strong, she told him. When she comes home she’ll need your help. They talked about Ana’s homecoming every night and every night Paul seemed to take his impending responsibilities more and more seriously. One night she found him on the floor with a hand vacuum, cleaning the room waiting for Ana. He was three. Another time he’d found an old greeting card, a burst of balloons on the cover, and dropped it into her empty crib. Josie’s intent was to be sure that Paul, a sensitive boy but nevertheless a boy, would be careful not to accidentally smother tiny Ana, or break tiny Ana’s bird bones, but instead she created this boy who came to understand his role as something akin to caretaker of the world’s most delicate orchid. He slept in her room, on a mattress next to, and then under, her crib. By the time Ana was three months old he knew how to feed her and swaddle her. When Josie or Carl did either he sat nearby, adding frequent notes and corrections.

Ana grew stronger, and by two she was running without fear or limit, though she was still Pinocchio-thin and her eyes were circled in pale blue shadow — temporary evidence, Josie hoped, of her traumatic journey thus far. As she grew in confidence and awareness of her power of ambulation and self-determination, as she became more aware of herself and the world, she became less aware of Paul. He sensed it and felt betrayed. There was a time when she was two and Paul five, when he came to Josie, anguished. “She won’t let me hold her,” he wailed. He was on the verge of tears, while Ana barely knew he lived in the same house. Reaching full strength, she had no interest in anyone, really, least of all him. She wanted to see things, to roam, to climb and plummet. She was attracted to the shiny, the moving, the blinking, the rustling, the fur-covered. Paul was none of those things so he held no interest.

But something happened when she turned three, and after that Paul was known. Now when she did something, usually something dangerous, she wanted Paul — Paulie — to watch. Paulie, Paul-ee. Paul! Eee! Watch. Watch. Watch-watch-watch. Paul acted aggrieved by Ana’s demands but satisfying them was his life’s calling. He loved her. He brushed her hair. He clipped her toenails. She still wore a diaper at night and she preferred that he put it on. When Josie would wrap a towel around her after a bath, Paul would rewrap it, tighter, more carefully, patting it down just so, and Ana had come to expect this.

Now, as they stood on the deck stained in pink fish blood, an older man was suddenly too close and was talking to them.

“You kids like magic?” the man asked. He seemed to be leering. These lonely old men, Josie thought, with their wet lips and small eyes, their necks barely holding up their heavy heads full of their many mistakes and funerals of friends. Everything these men said sounded hideous and they didn’t even know it.

Josie nudged Paul. “Answer the nice man.”

“I guess,” Paul said to the mountains beyond the man.

Now the old man was delighted. His face came alive, he dropped twenty years, forgot all the funerals. “Well, I happen to know that there’s a magic show tonight on our ship.”

The man owned a ship? Josie asked for clarity.

“I’m just a passenger. I’m Charlie,” he said, and extended his hand, a pink and purple tangle of bones and veins. “Haven’t you seen the Princess docked here? It’s hard to miss.”

Josie came to realize that this stranger was inviting them, herself and her two kids, the three of them unknown to this man, onto the cruise ship docked at Seward, where, that evening, there would be an elaborate magic show featuring a half-dozen acts including, the old man was thrilled to convey, a magician from Luxembourg. “Luxembourg,” he said, “can you imagine?”

“I want to go!” Ana said. Josie didn’t think it mattered much that Ana wanted to go — she had no intention of following this man onto a magic-show ship — but when Ana said those words, “I want to go!” Charlie’s face took on a glow so powerful Josie thought he might ignite. Josie didn’t want to disappoint this man and her daughter, who continued to talk about the show, what tricks a man from so far away might be capable of, but was she really about to follow this old man onto a cruise ship in Seward, Alaska, to see a Luxembourgian magic show? She couldn’t deprive them, she knew. They had only one grandparent, Luisa, who was spectacular but who was too far away, so Josie frequently succumbed to these grandparent manqués, who bought her children balloons and gave them candy at inappropriate times.

“We’re allowed to have guests, I think,” the man said as they walked the gangplank. The kids were astounded, stepping slowly, carefully, holding the ropes on either side. But now their host, this man in his seventies or eighties, was suddenly unsure he could have friends over. So Josie stopped and her kids peered down into the black water between the dock and the gleaming white ship. Josie watched as Charlie approached some man in a uniform. A few dozen elderly passengers went around them in their windbreakers, small bags of Seward souvenirs dangling from their arms.

“Let me talk to this man,” Charlie said, and motioned them to hang a few yards back from the door. Charlie and the man turned around a few times to inspect and gesture at Josie and her children, and finally Charlie swung around, telling them to come aboard.

The ship was garish and loud, and crowded, full of glass and screens — the décor was casino crossed with Red Lobster crossed with the court of Louis XVI. The kids were loving it. Ana was running everywhere, touching delicate things, bumping into people, making elderly women and men gasp and reach for walls.

“I think it starts in twenty minutes,” Charlie said, and then again looked lost. “Let me see if we need tickets.” He wandered off, and Josie knew she was a fool. Parenting was chiefly about keeping one’s children away from unnecessary dangers, avoidable traumas and disappointments, and here she had dragged them to Alaska, and had driven them around unchosen parts of the state, and then to Seward, where no one had recommended they go, and now she had them following a lonely man onto a ship designed, it seemed, by the insane. All to see magic. Luxembourgian magic. Josie paged through the years of her life, trying to remember a decision she had made and was proud of, and she found nothing.

Finally Charlie returned, holding the tickets in his hand like a bouquet. “Are we ready?”

There was an escalator, an escalator inside a ship. Charlie was ahead of them, and rode upward while looking back at them, smiling but nervous, as if worried they might flee.

The auditorium seated at least five hundred and all within was burgundy — like being inside someone’s liver. They sat in a half-moon booth near the back, Paul next to Charlie. A waitress in bright red hurried by and Charlie made no move to order anything. Josie asked for a lemonade for the kids and a glass of pinot noir for herself. The drinks arrived and the lights went down. Her glass was the size of a crystal ball, and was nearly full, and Josie felt kissed by the anonymous and irrational generosity of humankind. She relaxed, anticipating a few hours of not having to do anything but sit and watch in silence, getting harmlessly plowed.

Charlie had a different plan. The show started, and Josie realized that Charlie intended to talk throughout. And the words he wanted most to say were “See that?” For Ana, the answer was always “See what?” so they made a beautiful pair. Charlie would notice something that every member of the audience had seen, and then would ask Josie and her kids if they’d seen it, too. Ana would say “See what?” and Charlie would then explain what he had seen, talking through the next five minutes of the show. It was wonderful.

The first magician, a pretty man in a tight silk shirt, had, it seemed, been told to make his act more of a personal story, so his monologue returned again and again to the theme of how he had always welcomed magic into his life. Opened the door to magic. Said hello to magic. Or how he had learned to appreciate magic in his life. Did he say he was married to magic? Maybe he did. It all made little sense and the audience seemed lost. “Life is full of magic if you look for it,” he noted, breathlessly, because he was moving around the stage in a thousand tiny steps, as a woman in a sparkly one-piece bathing suit vamped behind him with long strides.

The pretty magician produced some kind of flower from behind a curtain, and Josie struggled to see this as magical. She and Charlie clapped, but few members of the audience joined her. Her children didn’t clap; they never clapped unless she told them to. Were they not taught clapping in school? The magician was not impressing this audience, though who could be easier to impress than five hundred elderly people in windbreakers? No, they were waiting for something better than carnations produced from screens.

Josie began to feel for this man. He’d been a magician in grade school, no doubt. He’d been pretty then, with lashes so long she could see them now, fifty rows back, and as an adolescent, apart from his peers but not concerned about this, he and his mother had driven forty miles to the nearest city, to get the right equipment for his shows, the right boxes — with wheels! — the velvet bags, the collapsing canes. He’d loved his mother then and had known how to say it, maybe with a flourish, and his unguarded love for her had made his apartness unimportant to him and her, and now she was so proud that he had made it, was a professional magician, traveling the world making magic, welcoming magic into his life. All that, Josie thought, and these elderly assholes wouldn’t clap for him.

Josie downed half her pinot and gave the pretty magician a whoop. If no one else appreciated him, she would. Every time he asked for applause, which was often, she yelled and whooped and clapped. Her children looked at her, unsure if she was being funny. Charlie turned to her and smiled nervously.

Now the long-legged woman was helping the pretty magician into a big red box. Now she was turning it around and around. It was on wheels! Everything in the act had to be on wheels, so it could be turned around. It was a rule of magic onstage that everything must be turned around and around, to prove there were no strings, no one hiding just behind. But in its absence did the audience ever wonder about the turning around? Did they ever ask: Um, why hasn’t someone turned the box around? Turn the box around! My god, turn it!

Now the sparkly assistant opened the box. The pretty man was not in the box! Josie whooped again, clapping over her head. Where had he gone? The suspense was fantastic.

And now he was next to them! Suddenly a spotlight was on their table, or near it, because the pretty man was next to them. “Holy shit,” Josie said, loud enough that the pretty man, whose hands were outstretched, again asking for applause, heard her. He smiled. Josie clapped louder, but again the rest of the audience didn’t seem to care. He was up there, she wanted to yell to them. Now he’s here!

You fuckers.

Up close she saw the magician was wearing a tremendous amount of makeup. Eyeliner, blush, maybe even lipstick, all seemingly applied by a child. Then the spotlight went dark, and he stood for a moment, next to their table, hands up, while a second magician appeared onstage. Josie wanted to say something to the pretty man, a heaving silken silhouette a few feet away, but by the time she arrived at what she would say—“We loved you”—he was gone.

She turned to the stage. The new magician was less pretty.

“This is the one from Luxembourg,” Charlie whispered.

“Hello everyone!” the new magician roared, and explained he was from Michigan.

“Oh,” Charlie sighed.

The Michigan magician, red-haired in a white shirt and stretchy black pants, was soon in a straitjacket and was hanging upside down twenty feet above the stage. He explained, his breath labored and his arms crossed like a chrysalis, that if he did not escape from the straitjacket in some certain amount of time, something unfortunate would happen to him. Josie, trying to get the attention of the waitress, had not caught exactly what that consequence was. She ordered a second pinot, and soon some part of the contraption holding the magician was on fire. Was that intentional? It seemed intentional. Then he was struggling in an inelegant way, ramming his shoulders against the canvas jacket, and then, aha, he was free, and was standing on the ground. An explosion flowered above him, but he was safe and not on fire.

Josie thought this trick pretty good, and clapped heartily, but again the crowd was not impressed. What were they waiting for? she wondered. Fuckers! Then she knew: they were waiting for the magician from Luxembourg. They did not want domestic magic, they wanted magic from abroad.

The man from Michigan stood at the edge of the stage, bowing again and again, and instead of the applause growing, it dissipated until he was bowing in silence. Josie thought of his poor mother, and hoped she was not on this cruise. But she knew there was a very good chance the Michigan magician’s mother was on this cruise. How could she not be on this cruise?

Now a new magician appeared. He had a high head of gleaming yellow hair and his pants were somehow tighter than the pants of his predecessors. Josie had not thought this possible.

“I hope this guy’s from Luxembourg,” Charlie said, too loudly.

“Hallo,” the magician said, and Josie was fairly sure he was from somewhere else. Perhaps Luxembourg? The magician explained that he spoke six languages and had been everywhere. He asked if anyone in the audience had been to Luxembourg, and a smattering of applause surprised him. Josie decided to clap, too, and did so loudly. “Yes!” she yelled. “I’ve been there!” Her children were horrified. “Yes!” she yelled again. “And it was great!”

“Lots of visitors to Luxembourg, I am pleased,” the magician said, though he didn’t seem to believe those who had applauded, least of all Josie. But by now, her spirit dancing in the glorious light of her second overpoured glass of pinot, Josie believed she had been to Luxembourg. In her youth she’d backpacked through Europe for three months, and wasn’t Luxembourg right there in the middle of the continent? Surely she’d been there. Did that one train, the main train, go to Luxembourg? Of course it did. She pictured a beer garden. In a castle. On a hill. By the sea. What sea? Some sea. Puff the Magic Dragon.

The magician from Luxembourg did his tricks, which seemed more sophisticated than those of his predecessors. Maybe because they involved roses? Before him there had been only carnations. The roses, this was a step up. Women holding roses appeared in boxes, boxes on wheels, and the man from Luxembourg turned these boxes around and around. Then he opened the boxes, and the women would not be there; they were somewhere else. Behind screens! In the audience!

Josie clapped and hollered. He was wonderful. The wine was wonderful. What a good world this was, that there was magic like this on ships like this. What an impressive species they were, humans, who could build a ship like this, who could do magic like this, who could clap listlessly even for the magician from Luxembourg. These fucking assholes, Josie thought, trying to singlehandedly make up for their sickening lack of enthusiasm. Why come out to a magic show if you don’t want to be entertained? Clap, you criminals!! She hated these people. Even Charlie wasn’t clapping enough. She leaned over to him. “Not good enough for you?” she asked, but he didn’t hear.

Now Luxembourg was gone and a man was making his way onto the stage. He was rumpled, his hair reaching upward seven different ways, and he was easily twenty years older than the others. Another man. Where were the women? Were women not capable of magic? Josie tried to conjure any female magician she’d ever seen or heard of and couldn’t. My god, she thought! How can that be? Scandal! Injustice! What about Lady Magic? Lady Magic, yes! Why do we allow all these men, all these silken heavy-breathing men, and now this one, this rumpled one — he made no effort at all to be pretty like the others. He had no lovely assistant, and, it soon became clear, he didn’t intend to do any magic. Goddamn you, Josie thought, guessing all the magic was over. And did she have money for another drink? She had about twenty-five dollars, she guessed. Maybe the drinks were cheaper onboard than on Alaskan soil. She had to count on it. She looked for the waitress. Where was the waitress?

There was only the rumpled man standing at the edge of the stage. Now he was telling the audience that he’d worked for some time at a post office, and had memorized most zip codes.

Holy crap, Josie thought. He’ll get murdered. What kind of world is this, she thought, when a man from the post office follows Luxembourgian magic and why were they, she and her kids, on this ship in the first place? With incredible clarity she knew, then, that the answer to her life was that at every opportunity, she made precisely the wrong choice. She was a dentist but did not want to be a dentist. What could she do now? She was sure, at that moment, that she was meant to be a tugboat captain. My god, she thought, my god. At forty she finally knew! She would lead the ships to safety. That’s why she’d come to Seward! There had to be a tugboat school in town. It all made sense. She could do that, and her days would be varied but always heroic. She looked at her children, and saw that Paul was now leaning against Charlie, asleep. Her son was asleep against this strange old man, and they were in Seward, Alaska. For the first time she realized how Seward sounded like sewer, and thought this an unfortunate thing, given Seward as a place was very dramatic, and very clean, and she thought it very beautiful, maybe the most beautiful place she’d ever been. It was here she would stay, and train to become a tugboat captain at the school that she would find tomorrow. All was aligned, all was right. And now, looking at her son sleeping against this man, this old man who was leaning forward, listening to the post office man talk about the post office, she felt her eyes welling up. She took a final sip from her second pinot and wondered if she’d ever been happier. No, never. Impossible. This old man had found them, and it could not be coincidence. This town was now their home, the site of this ordained and holy reunion, and all the people around them were congregants, all of them exalted and now part of her life, her new life, the life she was meant for. Tugboat captain. Oh yes, it had all been worth it. She sat back, knowing she’d arrived at her destiny.

Onstage, the post office man was telling the audience that for anyone who gave him a postal code, he could tell them what town they were from.

Josie thought this was some sort of a comedy bit, that he was kidding about the postal job, but immediately someone stood up and yelled “83303!”

“Twin Falls, Idaho,” he said. “Unincorporated part of town.”

The crowd erupted. The cheers were deafening. None of the magicians had elicited this kind of enthusiasm, nothing close. Now ten people were standing up, yelling their zip codes.

Josie, despairing for the waitress who had not returned, downed half a glass of water, and that act, the dilution of the holy wine within her, took her away from the golden light of grace she’d felt moments before, and now she was sober or something like it. Tugboat captain? Some voice was now speaking to her. What kind of imbecile are you? She didn’t like this new voice. This was the voice that had told her to become a dentist, who told her to have children with that man, the loose-boweled man, the voice who every month told her to pay her water bill. She was being pulled back from the light, like an almost-angel now being led back to the mundanity of earthly existence. The light was shrinking to a pinhole and the world around her was darkening to an everywhere burgundy. She was back inside the liver-colored room and a man was talking about postal codes.

“Okay, you now,” the postal man said, and pointed to a white-haired woman in a fleece vest.

“62914,” she squealed.

“Cairo, Illinois,” he said, explaining that though it was spelled like the city in Egypt, it was pronounced “kay-ro,” the Illinois way. “Nice town,” he said.

The audience screamed, hooted. It was a travesty. Now Paul was awake, groggy and wondering what all the noise was about. Josie couldn’t bear it. The noise was not about magic and tugboats: it was about zip codes.

“33950!” someone yelled.

“Punta Gorda, Florida,” the man said.

The crowd roared again. Ana looked around, unable to figure out what was happening. What was happening? Postal codes were making these people lose their minds. They all wanted to have their town named by the rumpled man with the microphone. They yelled their five digits and he guessed Shoshone, Idaho, New Paltz, New York, and Santa Ana, California. It was a melee. Josie feared people would storm the stage to rip his clothes off. Go back to sleep, Paul, Josie wanted to say. She wanted to flee, everything was wrong about all this. But she couldn’t leave because now Charlie was standing up.

“63005!” he yelled.

The spotlight found him and he repeated the numbers. “63005!”

“Chesterfield, Missouri,” the postal man said.

Charlie’s mouth dropped open. The spotlight remained on him for a few seconds, and Charlie’s mouth stayed open, a black cave in the white light. Finally the light moved on, he was in darkness again — as if a spirit had held him aloft and suddenly let go, he sat down.

“Hear that?” he said to Paul. He turned to Josie and Ana, his eyes wet and his hands trembling. “Hear that? That man knows where I come from.”

—

Afterward, on the gangplank, Charlie offered to walk them back to the Chateau. Josie declined, and kissed his cheek.

“Give Charlie a hug and say thanks,” she told her kids.

Ana rushed in and hugged Charlie’s legs. He put his hand on her back, his fingers spread like the ancient roots of a tiny tree. Paul moved closer but stopped, hoping, it seemed, that Charlie would fill the distance between them. Now Charlie was on one knee and his hands were outstretched. Paul shuffled toward him and Charlie brought him in, and Paul’s head dropped onto Charlie’s shoulder with something like relief.

“Let’s write letters,” Charlie said into Paul’s hair.

Paul nodded, and pulled back, as if to see if Charlie was serious. Josie knew Paul would obsess about these letters, and she was terrified by the possibility that she would have to offer their address to this man.

“How?” Paul asked. “Can we send a letter to a ship?”

Charlie didn’t know. He fumbled in his pocket and brought out what turned out to be an itinerary. “Just take it,” he said to Josie, and she saw that on it was the ship’s every port of call.