My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

JIM SHEPARD. Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay

TWO AND A HALF WEEKS AFTER I WAS BORN, ON JULY 9, 1958, THE plates that make up the Fairweather Range in the Alaskan panhandle apparently slipped twenty-one feet on either side of the Fairweather Fault, the northern end of a major league instability that runs the length of North America. The thinking now is that the southwest side and bottom of the inlets at the head of Lituya Bay jolted upward and to the northwest, and the northeast shore and head of the bay jolted downward and to the southeast. One way or the other, the result registered 8.3 on the Richter scale.

The bay is T-shaped and seven miles long and two wide, and according to those who were there it went from a glassy smoothness to a full churn, a giant’s Jacuzzi. Mountains twelve to fifteen thousand feet high next to it twisted into themselves and lurched in contrary directions. In Juneau, 122 miles to the southeast, people who’d turned in early were pitched from their beds. The shock waves wiped out bottom-dwelling marine life throughout the panhandle. In Seattle, a thousand miles away, the University of Washington’s seismograph needle was jarred completely off its graph. And meanwhile, back at the head of the bay, a spur of mountain and glacier the size of a half-mile-wide city park—40 million cubic yards in volume — broke off and dropped three thousand feet down the northeast cliff into the water.

This is all by way of saying that it was one of the greatest spasms, when it came to the release of destructive energy, in recorded history. It happened around 10:16 P.M. At that latitude and time of year, it was still light out. There were three small boats, carrying six people, anchored in the south end of the bay.

The rumbling from the earthquake generated vibrations that the occupants of the boats could feel on their skin like electric shocks. The impact of the rockfall that followed made a sound like Canada exploding. There were two women, three men, and a seven-year-old boy in the three boats. They looked up to see a wave breaking over the 1,700-foot-high southwest edge of Gilbert Inlet and heading for the opposite slope. What they were looking at was the largest wave ever recorded by human beings. It scythed off three-hundred-year-old pines and cedars and spruce, some of them with trunks three or four feet thick, along a trim line of 1,720 feet. That’s a wave crest 500 feet higher than the Empire State Building.

Fill your bathtub. Hold a football at shoulder height and drop it into the water. Scale the height of the initial splash up, appropriately. Imagine the height of the tub above the waterline to be 2,000 feet.

When I was two years old, my mother decided she’d had enough of my father and hunted down an old high school girlfriend who’d wandered so far west that she’d taken a job teaching in a grammar school in Hawaii. The school was in a little town called Pepeekeo. All of this was told to me later by my mother’s older sister. My mother and I moved in with the friend, who lived in a little beach cottage on the north shore of the island near an old mill, Pepeekeo Mill. We were about twelve miles north of Hilo. This was in 1960.

The friend’s name was Chuck. Her real name was Charlotte something, but everyone apparently called her Chuck. My aunt had a photo she showed me of me playing in the sand with some breakers in the background. I’m wearing something that looks like overalls put on backward. Chuck’s drinking beer from a can.

And one morning Chuck woke my mother and me up and asked if we wanted to see a tidal wave. I don’t remember any of this. I was in pajamas and my mother put a robe on me and we trotted down the beach and looked around the point to the north. I told my mother I was scared and she said we’d go back to the house if the water got too high. We saw the ocean suck itself out to sea smoothly and quietly, and the muck of the sand and some flipping and turning white-bellied fish that had been left behind. Then we saw it come back, without any surf or real noise, like the tide coming in in time-lapse photography. It came past the high-tide mark and just up to our toes. Then it receded again. “Some wave,” my mother told me. She lifted me up so I could see the end of it. Some older boys who lived on Mamalahoa Highway sprinted past us, chasing the water. They got way out, the mud spraying up behind their heels. And the water came back again, this time even smaller. The boys, as far out as they were, were still only up to their waists. We could hear how happy they were. Chuck told us the show was over and we headed up the beach to the house. My mother wanted me to walk but I wanted her to carry me. We heard a noise and when we looked we saw the third wave. It was already the size of the lighthouse out at Wailea. They got me into the cottage and halfway up the stairs to the second floor when the walls blew in. My mother managed to slide me onto a corner of the roof that was spinning half a foot above the water. Chuck went under and didn’t come up again. My mother was carried out to sea, still hanging on to me and the roof chunk. She’d broken her hip and bitten through her lower lip. We were picked up later that day by a little boat near Honohina.

She was never the same after that, my aunt told me. This was maybe by way of explaining why I’d been put up for adoption a few months later. My mother had gone to teach somewhere in Alaska. Somewhere away from the coast, my aunt added with a smile. She pretended she didn’t know exactly where. I’d been left with the Franciscan Sisters at the Catholic orphanage in Kahili. On the day of my graduation from the orphanage school, one of the Sisters who’d taken an interest in me grabbed me by both shoulders and shook me and said, “What is it you want? What’s the matter with you?” They weren’t bad questions, as far as I was concerned.

I saw my aunt that once, the year before college. My fiancée, many years later, asked if we were going to invite her to the wedding, and then later that night said, “I guess you’re not going to answer, huh?”

Who decides when the time’s right to have kids? Who decides how many kids to have? Who decides how they’re going to be brought up? Who decides when the parents are going to stop having sex, and stop listening to each other? Who decides when everyone’s not just going to walk out on everyone else? These are all group decisions. Mutual decisions. Decisions that a couple makes in consultation with each other.

I’m stressing that because it doesn’t always work that way.

My wife’s goal-oriented. Sometimes I can see on her face her To Do list when she looks at me. It makes me think she doesn’t want me anymore, and the idea is so paralyzing and maddening that I lose track of myself: I just step in place and forget where I am for a minute or two. “What’re you doing?” she asked once, outside a restaurant.

And of course I can’t tell her that. Because then what do I do with whatever follows?

We have one kid, Donald, named for the single greatest man my wife has ever known. That would be her father. Donald’s seven. When he’s in a good mood he finds me in the house and wraps his arms around me, his chin on my hip. When he’s in a bad mood I have to turn off the TV to get him to answer. He has a good arm and good hand-eye coordination but he gets easily frustrated. “Who’s that sound like?” my wife always says when I point it out.

He loses everything. He loses stuff even if you physically put it in his hands when he’s on his way home. Gloves, hats, knapsacks, lunch money, a bicycle, homework, pencils, pens, his dog, his friends, his way. Sometimes he doesn’t worry about it; sometimes he’s distraught. If he starts out not worrying about it, sometimes I make him distraught. When I tell these stories, I’m Mr. Glass Half Empty. Which is all by way of getting around to what my wife calls the central subject, which is my ingratitude. Do I always have to start with the negatives? Don’t I think he knows when I always talk about him that way?

“She says you’re too harsh,” is the way my father-in-law put it. At the time he was sitting on my front porch and sucking down my beer. He said he thought of it as a kind of mean-spiritedness.

I had no comeback for him at the time. “You weren’t very nice to my parents,” my wife mentioned when they left.

Friends commiserate with her on the phone.

My father-in-law’s a circuit court judge. I run a seaplane charter out of Ketchikan. Wild Wings Aviation. My wife snorts when I answer the phone that way. My father-in-law tells her, who knows, maybe I’ll make a go of it. And if the thing does go under, I can always fly geologists around for one of the energy companies.

Even knowing what I make, he says that.

Number one on her To Do list is another kid. She says Donald very much wants a little brother. I haven’t really heard him address the subject. She wants to know what I want. She asks with her mouth set, like she’s already figured the odds that I’m going to let her down. It makes me what she calls unresponsive.

She’s been after me about it for a year now. And two months ago, after three straight days of our being polite to each other — Good morning; How’d you sleep? — and avoiding brushing even shoulders when passing through doorways, I made an appointment with a Dr. Calvin at Bartlett Regional about a vasectomy. “Normally, couples come in together,” he told me at the initial consult.

“This whole thing’s been pretty hard on her,” I told him.

Apparently it’s an outpatient thing, and if I opt for the simpler procedure I could be out of his office and home in forty-five minutes. He quoted me a thousand dollars, but not much out of pocket, because our health insurance should cover it. I was told to go off and give it some thought and get back in touch if and when I was ready to schedule it. I called back two days later and scheduled it for the day before Memorial Day. “That’ll give you some time to rest up afterward,” the girl who did the scheduling pointed out.

“He had a pretty big trauma when he was a baby,” my wife reminded her mom a few weeks ago. They didn’t realize I was at the kitchen window. “A couple of traumas, actually.” She said it like she understood that it was going to be a perennial on her To Do list.

So for the last two months I’ve gone around the house like a demolition expert who’s already wired the entire thing to blow and keeps rechecking the charges and connections.

It was actually flying some geologists around that got me going on Lituya Bay in the first place. I flew in a couple of guys from Exxon-Mobil who taught me more than I wanted to know about Tertiary rocks and why they always got people salivating when it came to what they called petroleum investigations. But one of the guys also told the story of what happened there in 1958. He was the one who didn’t want to camp in the bay. His buddy made serious fun of him. The next time I flew them in I’d done my research, and we talked about what a crazy place it was. I was staying overnight with them, because they could pay for it, and they had to be out at like dawn the next morning.

However you measure things like that, it has to be one of the most dangerous bodies of water on earth. It feels freakish even when you first see it. It’s a tidal inlet that’s hugely deep — I think at its center it’s seven hundred feet — but at its entrance there’s barely enough draft for a small boat. So at high and low tides the water moves through the bottleneck like from a fire hose. That twilight we watched a piece of drift-wood keep up with a tern that was gliding with the wind. The whole bay is huge but the entrance is only eighty yards wide and broken up by boulders. Stuff coming in on the high tide is like on the world’s largest water slide. And when the tide’s running the other way, when it hits the ocean swells, it’s as if surf’s up on the north shore of Hawaii from both directions at once. We were two hundred yards away and had to shout over the noise. The Frenchman who discovered the bay lost twenty-one men and three boats at the entrance. The Tlingits lost so many people over the course of their time there that they named it Channel of the Water-Eyes, water-eyes being their word for the drowned.

But the scared guy had me motor him up to the head of the bay and showed me the other problem, the problem I’d already read about: as he put it, stupefyingly large and highly fractured rocks standing at vertiginous angles over deep water in an active fault zone. On top of that, their having absorbed heavy rainfall and constant freezing and thawing. The earthquakes on this fault were as violent as anywhere else in the world, and they’d be shaking unstable cliffs over a deep and tightly enclosed body of water.

“Yeah yeah yeah,” his buddy said, passing around beef jerky from the backseat. I was putt-putting the seaplane back and forth as our water taxi at the top of the T. Forested cliffs went straight up five to six thousand feet all around us. I don’t even know how trees that size grew like that.

“You have any kids?” the scared guy asked, out of nowhere. I said yeah. He said he did, too, and started hunting up a photo.

“Well, what’s a body to do when millions of tons avalanche into it?” his buddy in the back asked.

The scared guy couldn’t find the photo. He made a face at his wallet, like what else was new. “Make waves,” he said. “Gi-normous waves.”

While we crossed from shore to shore they pointed out some of the trim lines I’d read about. The lines went back as far as the middle of the 1800s. The experts figure the dates by cutting down trees and looking at the growth rings. The lines look like rows of plantings in a field, except we’re talking about fifty-degree slopes and trees 80 to 90 feet high. There are five lines, and their heights are the heights of the waves. One from 1854 at 395 feet. One twenty years later at 80 feet. One twenty-five years after that at 200 feet. One from 1936 at 490 feet. And one from 1958 at 1,720.

That’s five events in the last hundred years, or one every twenty. It’s not hard to do the math, in terms of whether or not the bay’s currently overdue.

In fact, that night we did the math, after lights-out in our little three-man tent. The scared guy’s buddy was skeptical. He was still eating, having moved on to something called Moose Munch. We could hear the rustling of the bag and the crunching in the dark. He said that given that the waves occurred every twenty years, the odds of one occurring on any single day in the bay were about eight thousand to one. There was a plunk down by the shore when something jumped. After we were quiet for a minute, he joked, “That’s one of the first signs.”

The odds were way smaller than that, the scared guy finally answered. He asked his buddy to think about how much unstable slope they’d already seen from the air. All of that had been exposed by the last wave. And it had now been exposed almost fifty years, he said. There were open fractures that were already visible.

So what did he think the odds were? his buddy wanted to know.

Double digits, the scared guy said. The low double digits.

“If I thought they were in the double digits, I wouldn’t be here,” his buddy said.

“Yeah, well,” the scared guy said. “What about you?” he asked me. It took me a minute to realize it, since we were lying in the dark.

“What about me?” I said.

“You ever notice anything out here?” he asked. “Any evidence of recent rockfalls or slides? Changes in the gravel deltas at the feet of the glaciers?”

“I only get out here once a year, if that,” I told him. “It’s not a big destination for people.” I started going over in my head what I remembered, which was nothing.

“That’s ’cause they’re smart,” the scared guy said.

“That’s ’cause there’s nothing here,” his buddy answered.

“Well, there’s a reason for that,” the scared guy said. He told us he’d come across two censuses of the Tlingit tribes living in the bay from when the Russians owned the area. The populations had been listed as 241 in 1853 and 0 a year later.

“Good night,” his buddy told him.

“Good night,” the scared guy said.

“What was that? You feel that?” his buddy asked him.

“Aw, shut up,” the scared guy said.

What’s this thing about putting people to use? What’s that all about? What happened to just loving being around someone? Once I got Donald up off his butt and made him throw the baseball around with me, and asked that out loud. I only knew I’d done it when he said, “I don’t know.” Then he asked if we could quit now.

“Did you ever really think you’d find someone that you weren’t in some ways cynical about?” my wife asked the night we’d decided we were in love. I was flying for somebody else and we were lying under the wing of the Piper that we’d run up onto a beach. I’d been God’s lonely man for however many years — twelve in the orphanage, four in high school, four in college, a hundred after that — and she was someone that I wanted to pour myself down into. I was having trouble communicating how unusual that was.

That morning she’d watched me load a family I didn’t like into a twin-engine and I’d done this shoulder shake I do before something unpleasant. And she’d caught me, and her expression had given me a lift that carried me through the afternoon. That night back in my room she made a list of other things I did or thought, any one of which was proof she paid more attention than anyone else ever had. She held parts of me like she had never seen anything so beautiful. At three or four in the morning she used her arms to tent herself up over me and asked, “Don’t we have to sleep?” and then had answered her own question.

Around noon we woke up spooning, and when I held on when she tried to head to the bathroom, we slid down the sheets to the floor. She finally lost me by crawling on all fours to the bathroom door.

“Well, she’s as happy as I’ve ever seen her,” her father told me at the rehearsal dinner. Twenty-three people had been invited and twenty-one were her family and friends.

“It’s so nice to see her like this,” her mother told me at the same dinner.

When I toasted her, she teared up. When she toasted me, she said only, “I never thought I would feel like this,” and then sat down.

We honeymooned in San Francisco. Here’s what that was like for me: I still root for that city’s teams.

I’ve always been interested in the unprecedented. I just never got to experience it that often.

Her family is Juneau society, to the extent that such a thing exists. One brother’s the arts editor for the Juneau Empire; another works for Bauer & Gates Real Estate, selling half-million-dollar wilderness vacation homes to second-tier Hollywood stars. Another, go figure, is a lawyer. On holidays they give one another things like Arctic Cats. Happy Birthday: here’s a new 650 four-by-four. The real estate brother was 11-and-1 as a starter and team MVP for JDHS the year they won the state finals. The parents serve on every board there is. Their daughter when she turned sixteen was named Queen of the Spring Salmon Derby. She still has the tiara with the leaping sockeye.

They didn’t stand in the way of our romance. That’s what her dad told anyone who asked. Our wedding announcement said that the bride-elect was the daughter of Donald and Nila Bell and that she’d graduated from the University of Alaska summa cum laude and was a first-year account executive for Sitka Communications Systems. It said that the groom-elect was a meat cutter for the Super Bear supermarket. I’d done that before I’d gotten my pilot’s license, when I’d first gotten to town, and the guy doing the article had fucked up.

“You don’t think he could have checked something like that?” my wife wanted to know after she saw the paper. She was so upset on my behalf that I couldn’t really complain.

It’s not like I never had any advantages. I got a full ride, or nearly a full ride, at St. Mary’s in Moraga, near Oakland. I liked science and what math I took, though I never really, as one teacher put it, found myself while I was there. A friend offered me a summer job as one of his family’s set-net fishermen my junior year, and I liked it enough to go back. The friend’s family got me some supermarket work to tide me over in the winter, and it turned out that meat cutting paid more than boning fish. “What do you want to do?” a girl at the checkout asked me one day, like if she heard me bitch about it once more she was going to pull all her hair out, and that afternoon I signed up at Fly Alaska and Bigfoot Air, and I got my commercial and multiengine, and two years later had my float rating. I hooked on with a local outfit and the year after that bought the business, which meant a three-room hut with a stove, a van, the name, and the client list. Now I lease two 206s and two 172s on EDO 2130 floats, have two other pilots working under me, and get fourteen to fifteen hundred dollars a load for round-trip flights in the area. Want an Arctic Cat? I can buy one out of petty cash. At least in the high season.

“So are we not going to talk about this?” my wife asked last week after her parents had been over for dinner. We’d had crab and her dad had been in a funk for most of the night, who knew why. We’d said good night and handled the cleanup and now I was lunging around on my knees trying to cover my son in Nerf basketball. He always turned into Game Fanatic at bedtime. We’d hung a Nerf hoop over the inside of the back door to accommodate that need. He took advantage of my distraction to try and drive the baseline but I funneled him into the doorknob.

“I’m ready to talk,” I told her. “Let’s talk.”

She sat on one of the kitchen chairs with her hands together on her knees, willing to wait. Her hair wasn’t having the best day and it was bothering her. She kept slipping it back behind her ear.

“You can’t just stay around the basket,” Donald complained, trying to lure me out so he could blow by me. He was a little teary with frustration.

“I was going to talk to Daddy about having another baby,” she told him. His mind was pretty intensively elsewhere.

“Do you want a baby brother?” she asked.

“Not right now,” he said.

“If you’re not having fun, you shouldn’t play,” she told him.

That night in bed she was lying on her back with her hands behind her head. “I love you a lot,” she said, when I finally got under the covers next to her. “But sometimes you just make it so hard.”

“What do I do?” I asked her. This was one of the many times I could have told her. I could have even just told her I’d been thinking about making the initial appointment. “What do I do?” I asked again. I sounded mad but I wanted to know.

“What do you do,” she said, like I had just proven her point.

“I think about you all the time,” I said. “I feel like you’re losing interest in me.” Even saying that much was humiliating. The appointment at times like that seemed like a small but hard thing that I could hold on to.

She cleared her throat and pulled a hand from behind her head and wiped her eyes with it.

“I hate making you sad,” I told her.

“I hate being made sad,” she said.

It was only when she said things like that and I had to deal with it that I realized how much I depended on having made her happy. And how much all of that shook when she whacked at it. Tell her, I thought, with enough intensity that I thought she might’ve heard me.

“I don’t want another kid,” Donald called from his room. The panel doors in our bedrooms weren’t great, in terms of privacy.

“Go to sleep,” his mother called back.

We lay there waiting for him to go back to sleep. Tell her you changed your mind, I thought. Tell her you want to make a kid, right now. Show her. I had a hand on her thigh and she had her palm cupped over my crotch, as if that, at least, was on her side. “Shh,” she said, and reached her other hand to my forehead and smoothed away my hair.

Set-net fishermen mostly work for families that hold the fishing permits and leases, which are not easy to get. The families sell during the season to vendors who buy fish along the beach. The season runs from mid-June to late July. We fished at Coffee Point on Bristol Bay. Two people lived there: a three-hundred-pound white guy and his mail-order bride. The bride was from the Philippines and didn’t seem to know what had hit her. Nobody could pronounce her name. The town nearest the Point had a phone book that was a single mimeographed sheet with thirty-two names and numbers on it. The road signs were hand-painted, but it had a liquor store and a grocery store and a superhardened airstrip that looked capable of landing 747s, because the bigger companies had started figuring out how much money there was in shipping mass quantities of flash-frozen salmon.

We strung fifty-foot nets perpendicular to the shore just south of the King Salmon River, cork floats on top, lead weights on the bottom, and pickers like me rubber-rafted our way along the cork floats, hauling in a little net, freeing the salmon’s snagged gills, and filling the raft at our feet. When we had enough we paddled ashore and emptied the rafts and started all over again.

Everybody knew what they were doing but me. And in that water with that much protective gear, people drowned when things went wrong. Learning the ropes meant figuring out what the real fishermen wanted, and the real fishermen never said boo. It was like I was in the land of the deaf and dumb and a million messages were going by. Someone might squint at me, or give me a look, and I’d give him a look back, and finally someone else would say to me, “That’s too tight.” It was nice training on how you could get in the way even when your help was essential.

How could you do such a thing if you love her so much? I think to myself with some regularity, lying there in bed. Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? is usually my next thought. “What’s the day before Memorial Day circled for?” my wife asked a week ago, standing near our kitchen calendar. Memorial Day at that point stood two weeks off. The whole extended family would be showing up at Don and Nila’s for a cookout. I’d probably be a little hobbled when it came to the annual volleyball game.

“Should you even have kids? Should you even have a wife?” my wife asked, once, after our first real fight. I’d taken a charter all the way up to Dry Bay and had stayed a couple of extra nights and hadn’t called. I hadn’t even called in to the office. She’d been beside herself with worry and then with anger. I’d told her to call me back before I’d left, and then when she hadn’t, I’d been like, Okay, if you don’t want to talk, you don’t want to talk. I’d left my cell phone off. That I’m not supposed to do. The office even thought about calling Air-Sea Rescue.

“Bad move, Chief,” even Doris, our girl working the phones, told me when I got back.

“So I’m wondering if I should go back to work,” my wife tells me today. We’re eating something she whipped up in her new wok. It’s an off day — nothing scheduled until tomorrow, except some maintenance paperwork — and I was slow getting out of the house and she invited me to lunch. She was distracted during the rinsing-the-greens part, and every bite reminds me of a trip to the beach. She must notice the grit. She hates stuff like that more than I do.

“They still need someone to help out with the online accounts,” she says. She has an expression like every single thing today has gone wrong.

“Do you want to go back to work?” I ask her. “Do you miss it?”

“I don’t know if I miss it,” she says. She adds something in a lower voice that I can’t hear because of the crunch of the grit. She seems bothered that I don’t respond.

“I think it’s more, you know, if we’re not going to do the other thing,” she says. “Have the baby.” She keeps herself from looking away, as if she wants to make clear that I’m not the only one humiliated by talks like this.

I push some spinach around and she pushes some spinach around. “I feel like first we need to talk about us,” I finally tell her. I put my fork down and she puts her fork down.

“All right,” she says. She turns both her palms up and raises her eyebrows, like: Here I am.

One time she came and found me at two o’clock in the afternoon in one of the hangars and turned me around by the shoulders and pinned me to one of the workstations with her kiss. A plane two hangars down warmed up, taxied over, and took off while we kissed. She kissed me the way lost people must act when they find water in the desert.

“Do you think about me the way you used to think about me?” I ask her.

She gives me a look. “How did I used to think about you?” she wants to know.

There aren’t any particular ways of describing it that occur to me. I imagine myself saying with a pitiful voice, “Remember that time in the hangar?”

She looks at me, waiting. Lately that look has had a quality to it. One time in Ketchikan one of my pilots and me saw a drunk who’d spilled his Seven and Seven on the bar lapping some of it up off the wood. That look: the look we gave each other.

This is ridiculous. I rub my eyes.

“Is this taxing for you?” she wants to know, and her impatience makes me madder, too.

“No, it isn’t taxing for me,” I tell her.

She gets up and dumps her dish in the sink and goes down to the cellar. I can hear her rooting around in our big meat freezer for a Popsicle for dessert.

The phone rings and I don’t get up. The answering machine takes over and Dr. Calvin’s office leaves a message reminding me about my Friday appointment. The machine switches off. I don’t get to it before my wife comes back upstairs.

She unwraps her Popsicle and slides it into her mouth. It’s grape.

“You want one?” she asks.

“No,” I tell her. I put my hands on the table and off again. They’re not staying still. It’s like they’re about to go off.

“I should’ve asked when I was down there,” she tells me.

She slurps on it a little, quietly. I push my plate away.

“You going to the doctor?” she says.

Outside a big terrier that’s new to me is taking a dump near our hibachi. He’s moving forward in little steps while he’s doing it. “God damn,” I say to myself. I sound like someone who’s come home from a twelve-hour shift and still has to shovel his driveway.

“What’s wrong with Moser?” she wants to know. Moser’s our regular doctor.

“That was Moser,” I tell her. “That was his office.”

“It was?” she says.

“Yes, it was,” I tell her.

“Put your dish in the sink,” she reminds me. I put the dish in the sink and head into the living room and drop onto the couch.

“Checkup?” she calls from the kitchen.

“Pilot physical,” I tell her. All she has to do is play the message.

She wanders into the living room without the Popsicle. Her lips are darker from it. She waits a minute near the couch and then drops down next to me. She leans forward, looking at me, and then leans into me. Her lips touch mine, and press, and then lift off and stay so close it’s hard to know if they’re touching or not. Mine are still moist from hers.

“Come upstairs,” she whispers. “Come upstairs and show me what you’re worried about.” She puts three fingers on my erection and rides them along it until she stops on my belly.

“I love you so much,” I tell her. That much is true.

“Come upstairs and show me,” she tells me back.

That night in 1958 undersea communications cables from Anchorage to Seattle went dead. Boats at sea recorded a shocking hammering on their hulls. In Ketchikan and Anchorage, people ran into the streets. In Juneau, streetlights toppled and breakfronts emptied their contents. The eastern shore of Disenchantment Bay lifted itself forty-two feet out of the sea, the dead barnacles still visible there, impossibly high up on the rock faces. And at Yakutat, a postmaster in a skiff happened to be watching a cannery operator and his wife pick strawberries on a sandy point near a harbor navigation light, and the entire point with the light pitched into the air and then flushed itself as though driven underwater. The postmaster barely stayed in his skiff, and paddling around the whirlpools and junk waves afterward, found only the woman’s hat.

“You know, I made some sacrifices here,” my wife mentions to me later that same day. We’re naked and both on the floor on our backs but our feet are still up on the bed. One of hers is twisted in the sheets. The room seems darker and I don’t know if that’s a change in the weather or we’ve just been here forever. One of our kisses was such a submersion that when we finally stopped we needed to lie still for a minute, holding on to each other, to recover.

“You mean as in having married me?” I ask her. Our skin is airdrying but still mostly sticky.

“I mean as in having married you,” she says. Then she pulls her foot free of the sheets and rolls over me.

She told me as she was first easing me down onto the bed that she’d gone off the pill but that it was going to take at least a few weeks before she’d be ready. “So you know why I’m doing this?” she asked. She slid both thighs across me, her mouth at my ear. “I’m doing this because it’s amazing.”

We’re still sticky and she’s looking down into my face with her most serious expression. “I mean, you’re a meat cutter,” she says, fitting me inside her again. The next time we do this, I’ll have had the operation. And despite everything, it’s still the most amazing feeling of closeness.

“Why are you crying?” she whispers. Then she whispers, lowering her mouth to mine, “Shhh. Shhh.”

Howard Ulrich and his little boy Sonny entered Lituya Bay at eight the night of the wave, and anchored on the south shore near the entrance. He wrote about it afterward. Their fishing boat had a high bow, a single mast, and a pilothouse the size of a Portosan. Before they turned in, two other boats had followed them in and anchored even nearer the entrance. It was totally quiet. The water was a pane of glass from shore to shore. Small icebergs seemed to just sit in place. The gulls and terns that they usually saw circling Cenotaph Island in the middle of the bay were hunkered down on the shore. Sonny said it looked like they were waiting for something. His dad tucked him in bed just about ten, around sunset. He’d just climbed in himself when the boat started pitching and jerking against its anchor chain. He ran up on deck in his underwear and saw the mountains heaving themselves around and avalanching. Clouds of snow and rocks shot up high into the air. He said it looked like they were being shelled. Sonny came up on deck in his pj’s, which had alternating wagon wheels and square-knotted ropes. He rubbed his eyes. Ninety million tons of rock dropped into Gilbert Inlet as a unit. The sonic concussion of the rock hitting the water knocked them both onto their backs on the deck.

It took the wave about two and a half minutes to cover the seven miles to their boat. In that time Sonny’s dad tried to weigh anchor and discovered that he couldn’t, the anchor stuck fast, and let out the anchor chain as far as he could, anyway, got a life preserver onto Sonny, and managed to turn his bow into the wave. As it passed Cenotaph Island it was still more than a hundred feet high and, extending from shore to shore, a wave front two miles wide.

The front was unbelievably steep, and when it hit, the anchor chain snapped immediately, whipping around the pilothouse and smashing the windows. The boat arrowed seventy-five feet up into the curl like they were climbing in an elevator. Their backs impacted the pilothouse wall like they’d been tilted back in barber’s chairs. The wave’s face was a wall of green taking them up into the sky. They were carried high over the south shore. Sixty-foot trees down below disappeared. Then they were pitched up over the crest and down the back slope, and the backwash spun them off again into the center of the bay.

Another couple, the Swansons, had also turned into the wave and had had their boat surfboard a quarter mile out to sea, and when the wave crest broke, the boat pitchpoled and hit bottom. They managed to find and float their emergency skiff in the debris afterward. The third couple, the Wagners, tried to make a run for the harbor entrance and were never seen again.

Four-foot-wide trees were washed away, along with the topsoil and everything else. Slopes were washed down to bedrock. Bigger trunks were snapped off at ground level. Trees at the edge of the trim line had their bark removed by the water pressure.

Sonny’s dad was still in his underwear, teeth chattering, and Sonny was washing around on his side in some icy bilge water, making noises like a jungle bird. The sun was down by this point. Backwash and wavelets twenty feet high were crisscrossing the bay, spinning house-sized chunks of glacier ice that collided against one another. Clean-peeled tree trunks like pickup sticks knitted and upended, pitching and rolling. Water was still pouring down the slopes on both sides of the bay. The smell was like they were facedown in the dirt under an upended tree. And Sonny’s dad said that that time afterward — when they’d realized that they’d survived, but still had to navigate through everything pinballing around them in the dark to get out of the bay — was worse than riding the wave itself.

A day or two later the geologists started arriving. No one believed the height of the wave at first. People thought that the devastation that high on the slopes had to have been caused by landslides. But they came around.

My wife fell asleep beside me, wrapped over me to keep me warm. We’re still on the floor and now it really is dark. We’ve got to be late in terms of picking up Donald from his play date, but if his friend’s parents called, I didn’t hear the phone.

One of my professors at St. Mary’s had this habit of finishing each class with four or five questions, none of which anyone could answer. It was a class called The Philosophy of Life. I got a C. If I took it now, I’d do even worse. I’d sit there hoping he wouldn’t see me and try not to let my mouth hang open while he fired off the questions. What makes us threaten the things we want most? What makes us so devoted to the comfort of the inadvertent? What makes us unwilling to gamble on the noncataclysmic?

Sonny’s dad was famous for a while, telling stories for magazines like Alaska Sportsman and Reader’s Digest with titles like “My Night of Terror.” I read one or two of them to Donald, which my wife didn’t like. “Do you like these stories?” he asked me that night. In the stories, Sonny’s mom never gets mentioned. Whether she was mad or dead or divorced or proud never comes up. In one he talks about having jammed a life preserver over Sonny’s head and then having forgotten about him entirely. In another he says something like, in that minute before it all happened, he’d never felt so alone. I imagine Sonny reading that a year or two later and going, Thanks, Dad. I imagine him looking at his dad later on, at times when his dad doesn’t know he’s watching, and thinking of all that his dad gave him and of all that he didn’t. I imagine him never really figuring out what came between them. I imagine years later people saying about him that that was the thing about Sonny: the kid was just like the old man.