The Tenth Circle

The Tenth Circle

“I was there once,” Charles said, surprising her. “Oh, I been lots of places you wouldn't think: to California, and to Georgia, when I was in the army. And to Oregon, when I went to school.”

“College?”

Charles shook his head. “Boarding school. Back before they made it a law to have education in every village, the government used to ship us off to learn the same things the whites did. You could pick your school . . . there was one in Oklahoma, but I went to Chemawa in Oregon because my cousins were already there. I got sick like you can't imagine, eating all that white food ... melting in that heat. One time I even got in trouble for trying to snare a rabbit with one of my shoelaces.”

Laura tried to imagine what it would be like to be sent away from the only home you'd ever known, just because somebody else thought it was best for you. “You must have hated it.”

“Back then, I did,” Charles said. He dumped the contents of his pipe and kicked snow over the embers. “Now, I'm not so sure. Most of us came back home, but we got to see what else was out there and how those folks lived. Now some kids don't ever leave the village. The only kass'aqs they meet are teachers, and the only teachers who come up here either can't get hired in their own towns or are running away from something . . . not exactly role models. The kids today, they all talk about getting out of the village, but then when they do, it's like Bethel . . . only a hundred times worse. People move too fast and talk too much, and before you know it, they come back to a place they don't want to be . . . except now they know there's nowhere left to run.” Charles glanced at Laura, then tucked the pipe into his coat pocket. “That's how it was for my son.”

She nodded. “Daniel told me about him.”

“He wasn't the first. The year before him, a girl took pills. And earlier still, two ball players hanged themselves.”

“I'm sorry,” Laura said.

“I knew all along that Wass wasn't the one who killed Cane. Cane would have done that, no matter what, all by himself. Some people, they get down in a hole so deep they can't figure out what to hold on to.”

And some people, Laura thought, make the choice to let go. Although it was only two o'clock, the sun was already sagging against the horizon. Charles headed back up the steps. “I know this place must seem like Mars to you. And that you and me, we're about as different as different could be. But I also know what it feels like to lose a child.” He turned at the top landing. “Don't freeze to death. Wassilie'd never forgive me.” He left Laura outside, watching the night sky bloom. She found herself lulled by the lack of sound. It was easier than you'd think to grow accustomed to silence.

* * *

When the Jesuit Volunteers tried to raise Kingurauten Joseph's body temperature by cutting off his frozen clothes and covering him with blankets, they found a dove fashioned delicately out of bone, a carving knife, and three hundred dollars in his boot. This was a cash economy, Carl told Trixie. That was Joseph's health insurance, wadded up in his sock.

Trixie had just come in from her rotation on the riverbank, and she was still frozen to the core. “Why don't you two warm up together?” Carl suggested, and he left her watching over the old man.

She didn't mind, actually. While the mushers raced from Tuluksak to Kalskag and Aniak and back, the volunteers were mostly catching some sleep. But Trixie was wide awake; she'd slept on the trail with Willie, and her body was all mixed up with jet lag. She remembered how every year when it was time to turn the clocks back, her father would insist that he was going to stay on daylight saving time and keep the extra hour, so that he'd get more work done. The problem was, when he took the additional minutes every morning, he'd conk out in front of the television earlier at night. Finally he'd give in and live on the same schedule as the rest of the world.

She wished her father was here right now.

“I've missed you,” he answered, and Trixie whirled around in the dark classroom. Her heart was pounding, but she couldn't see anyone there.

She looked down at Joseph. He had the broad, chiseled features of a Yup'ik and white hair that was matted down in whorls. His beard stubble glinted silver in the moonlight. His hands were folded over his chest, and Trixie thought they couldn't have looked more different from her father's - Joseph's were blunt and calloused, the tools of a laborer; her father's were smooth and long fingered and ink stained, an artist's.

“Aw, Nettie,” he murmured, opening his eyes. “I came back.”

“I'm not Nettie,” Trixie said, moving away. Joseph blinked. “Where am I?”

“Tuluksak. You nearly froze to death.” Trixie hesitated. “You got really drunk and passed out on the K300 trail, and a musher quit the race to bring you in here. He saved your life.”

“Shouldn't have bothered,” Joseph muttered. There was something about Joseph that seemed familiar to Trixie, something that made her want to take a second look at the lines around his eyes and the way his eyebrows arched. “You one of those juveniles for Jesus?”

“They're Jesuit Volunteers,” Trixie corrected. “And no. I'm not.”

“Then who are you?”

Well, wasn't that the $64,000 question. Trixie couldn't have answered that if Joseph had held a gun to her head. It wasn't even a matter of giving her name, because that didn't explain anything. She could remember who she used to be - that picture was like an image sealed into a snow globe, one that went fuzzy when she shook it too hard but then, if she held her breath, might see clearly. She could look down at herself now and tell you how surprised she was that she had come this distance, how strange it was to discover that lying came as easily as breathing. What she couldn't put into words was what had happened in between to change her from one person into the other.

Her father used to tell her the story of how, when she was eight, she'd awakened in the middle of the night with her arms and legs burning, as if they'd been tugged from their sockets. It's growing pains, he'd told her sympathetically, and she'd burst into tears, certain that when she woke up in the morning, she'd be as big as him.

The amazing thing was, it did happen that quickly. All those mornings in middle school she'd spent scrutinizing her chest to see if it had budded the slightest bit, all the practice kisses she'd given her bathroom mirror to make sure her nose didn't get in the way on D-day; all the waiting for a boy to notice her . . . and as it turned out, growing up was just as she'd feared. One day when your alarm clock rang, you got up and realized you had someone else's thoughts in your head ... or maybe just your old ones, minus the hope.

“Are you sure you're not Nettie?” Joseph said when Trixie didn't answer.

It was the name he'd called her before. “Who is she?”

“Well.” He turned his face to the wall. “She's dead.”

“Then chances are pretty good I'm not her.” Joseph seemed surprised. “Didn't you ever hear about the girl who came back from the dead?”

Trixie rolled her eyes. “You're still trashed.”

“A young girl died,” Joseph replied, as if she hadn't spoken at all, “but she didn't know it. All she knew is that she went on a journey and reached a village. Her grandmother was at the village, too, and they lived together there. Every now and then, they went to another village, where the girl's father would give her fur parkas. What she didn't know was that he was really giving them to her namesake, the girl who'd been born just after his daughter had died.”

Joseph sat up gingerly, sending a potent wave of alcohol fumes toward Trixie. “One day, they were going home from that other village, and the girl's grandmother said she'd forgotten some things. She asked the girl to go get them. She told her that if she came to a fallen evergreen tree, even though it might look like she could go under it or around it, she had to go over it instead.”

Trixie folded her arms, listening in spite of her best intentions.

“The girl backtracked to the village, and sure enough, she came to a fallen tree. She tried to do what her grandmother had told her, but when she climbed over it she tripped, and that was the last thing she remembered. She couldn't figure out the way back to her grandmother, and she started to cry. Just then, a man from the village came out of the qasgiq and heard weeping. He followed the noise and saw the girl who had died years ago. He tried to grab on to her, but it was like holding only air.”

Of course, Trixie thought. Because the more you changed, the less of you there was.

"The man rubbed his arms with food, and then he could grab her, even when the girl fought him. He carried her into the qasgiq, but they kept rising off the floorboards. An elder rubbed the girl with drippings from a seal oil lamp, and then she was able to stand without floating away. They all saw that this girl was the same one who

had died. She was wearing the parkas her father had given to her namesake, all those years. And wouldn't you know it, after she came back, her namesake died not long after that.“ Joseph pulled the blanket up to his chest. ”She lived to be an old woman,“ he said. ”She told people what it had been like in Pamaalirugmiut . .

. the place back there, obscured from their view."

“Oh really,” Trixie said, not buying a word of the story. “Let me guess: There was a white light and harp music?” Joseph looked at her, puzzled. “No, she used to say it was dry. People who die are always thirsty. That's why we send the dead on their way with fresh water. And why, maybe, I'm always looking for a little something to wet my throat.”

Trixie drew her knees into her chest, shivering as she thought of Jason. “You're not dead.”

Joseph sank back down on the mat. “You'd be surprised,” he said.

* * *

“It's not too cold to keep me from going for a walk,” Aurora Johnson said to Laura in perfect, unaccented English, and she stood there, waiting for Laura to respond, as if she'd asked her a question.

Maybe Aurora wanted someone to talk to and didn't know how to ask. Laura could understand that. She got to her feet and reached for her coat. “Do you mind company?”

Aurora smiled and pulled on a jacket that fell to her knees but managed to zip up over her swollen belly. She stepped into boots with soles as thick as a fireman's and headed outside. Laura fell into step beside her, moving briskly against the cold. It had been two hours since Daniel had left, and the afternoon was pitch-dark now - there were no streetlamps lighting their way, no glow from a distant highway. From time to time the green cast of a television set inside a house would rise like a spirit in the window, but for the most part, the sky was an unbroken navy velvet, the stars so thick you could cut through them with a sweep of your arm.

Aurora's hair was brown, streaked with orange. Long tendrils blew out from the edges of her parka's hood. She was only three years older than Trixie, yet she was on the verge of giving birth.

“When are you due?” Laura asked.

“My BIB date is January tenth.”

“BIB date?”

“Be-in-Bethel,” Aurora explained. “If you live in the villages and you're pregnant, you have to move into the prematernal home in the city six weeks or so before you're due. That way, the docs have you where they need you. Otherwise, if there's some kind of complication, the medical center has to get the anguyagta to fly in a Blackhawk. It costs the National Guard ten thousand bucks a pop.” She glanced at Laura. “Do you just have the one? Baby, I mean?”

Laura nodded, bowing her head as she thought of Trixie. She hoped that wherever Trixie was now, it was warm. That someone had given her a bite to eat, or a blanket. She hoped that Trixie was leaving markers the way she had learned ages ago in Girl Scouts a twig broken here, a cairn of rocks there.

“Minnie's my second mom, you know,” Aurora said. “I was adopted out. Families are like that here. If a baby dies, your sister or aunt might give you her own. After Cane died, I was born and my mom sent me to be Minnie's daughter too.” She shrugged. “I'm adopting out this baby to my biological mom's cousin.”

“You're just going to give it away?” Laura said, shocked.

“I'm not giving her away. I'm making it so she'll have both of us.”

“What about the father?” Laura asked. “Are you still involved with him?”

“I see him about once a week,” Aurora said. Laura stopped walking. She was talking to a Yup'ik girl who was heavily pregnant, but she was seeing Trixie's face and hearing Trixie's voice. What if Laura had been around when Trixie had met Jason, instead of having her own affair? Would Trixie have ever dated him? Would she have been as crushed when they broke up?

Would she have been at Zephyr's house the night of the party?

Would she have gotten raped?

For every action, there was an opposite reaction. But maybe you could undo your wrongs by keeping someone else from making the same mistakes of misjudgment. “Aurora,” Laura said slowly, “I'd love to meet him. Your boyfriend.”

The Yup'ik girl beamed. “Really? Now?”

“That would be great.”

Aurora grabbed her hand and dragged her through the streets of Akiak. When they reached a long, low gray building, Aurora clattered up the wooden ramp. “I just need to stop off at the school for a sec,” she said.

The doors were unlocked, but there was nobody inside. Aurora flipped on a light switch and hurried into an adjoining room. Laura unzipped her jacket and glanced toward the gymnasium on the right, its polished wooden floors gleaming. If she looked closely, would she still see Cane's blood? Could she retrace the steps Daniel had taken all those years ago, when he ran away and into her own life?

Laura was distracted by the sound of... well, it couldn't be a toilet flushing, could it? She pushed through the door that Aurora had entered, marked Nas'ak. Aurora was standing in front of a serviceable white porcelain sink with running water. “That one's sitting on my bladder,” Aurora said, smiling.

“There's plumbing here?” Laura glanced around. On the upper lip of the bathroom stall, various items of clothing had been draped: bras and panties, long-sleeved T-shirts, socks.

“Just in the school,” Aurora said. “On any given day, the line'll be out the door with girls waiting to wash their hair. This is the only place it won't freeze solid.” She gave Laura a chance to use the facilities - use wasn't really the word as much as relish or give thanks for - and then they struck outside again. “Does your boyfriend live far away?” Laura asked,

wondering what might happen if Daniel returned to find her missing.

“He's just over that hill,” Aurora said, but as they crested the rise, Laura didn't see any homes at all. She followed Aurora inside a picket fence, careful to stay on the trodden path instead of hiking through the drifts that were hip-high. In the dark, it took her a moment to realize that they were walking to the far end of a tiny cemetery, one scattered with white wooden crosses that were almost entirely buried in snow.

Aurora stopped at a cleared grave. A name was engraved on the wooden cross: ARTHUR M. PETERSON, June 5, 1982-March 30, 2005. “He was mushing, but it was the end of March, and he went through the ice. His lead dog chewed through the lead and came to our house. I knew the minute I saw the dog that something was wrong, but by the time we got to the river, Art and the sled had both gone under.” She faced Laura. “Three days later I found out I was pregnant.”

“I'm so sorry.”

“Don't be,” Aurora said, matter-of-fact. “He was probably drinking when he went out on the trail, like usual.” As she spoke, though, she leaned down and gently swept the cross clean of its most recent dusting of snow.

Laura turned away to give Aurora privacy and saw one other grave that had been carefully cleared. In front of the marker was a collection of ivory - full mammoth tusks and partial ones, some nearly as tall as the wooden cross. On each tusk, numerous flowers had been carved in exquisite detail: roses and orchids and peonies, lupine and forget-me-nots and lady's slippers. It was a garden that had been bleached of its color and none of its beauty, flowers that would never die, flowers that could bloom even in the most inhospitable climate.

She imagined the artist who'd crafted these, walking through sleet and hail and ice storms to plant this endless garden. It was exactly the sort of romance and passion she would have expected of Seth, who had tucked poems into the flustered leaves of her date book and the prim mouth of her change purse.

Wistfully, Laura let herself imagine what it was like to be loved that deeply. She envisioned a wooden cross labeled with her own name. She saw someone fighting the elements to bring gifts to her grave. But when she pictured the man weeping over what he'd lost, it wasn't Seth.

It was Daniel.

Laura brushed the snow off the marker, wanting to know the identity of the woman who had inspired such devotion.

“Oh, I was going to show you that one,” Aurora said, just as Laura read the name: ANNETTE STONE. Daniel's mother.

* * *

Trixie had gone AWOL. She couldn't say why she felt guilty about this, especially since it wasn't like she was really supposed to be working the Tuluksak checkpoint in the first place. She ran beside Willie in the dark, small puffs of her breath leaving a dissipating trail.

As promised, Willie had come back to the school, although Trixie hadn't really expected him to. She had planned to leave his coat behind with one of the volunteers when she got ready to leave

- whenever and toward wherever that would be. But Willie had arrived

while Trixie was still babysitting Joseph. He'd knelt down on the other side of the snoring old man and shook his head. He knew Joseph - apparently everyone did in an eight-village radius, since Joseph didn't discriminate when it came to where he'd go on a bender. The Yupiit called him Kingurauten - Too Late - Joseph because he'd promised a woman he'd return, only to turn up a week after she'd died.

Willie had come to invite Trixie to steam. She didn't know what that meant, but it sounded heavenly after shivering for nearly two days straight. She'd followed Willie, tiptoeing past Joseph, past the sleeping Jesuit Volunteers, and out the front door of the school.

They ran. The night was spread like icing over the dome of the sky; stars kept falling at Trixie's feet. It was hard to tell if it was the uncovered beauty of this place that took her breath away, or the seize of the cold. Willie slowed when they came to a narrow road lined with tiny homes. “Are we going to your house?” Trixie

asked.

“No, my dad's there, and when I left he was drinking. We're going to my cousin's. He was having a steam with some of his buddies, but they're leaving for a city league basketball game downriver.”

Several dogs that were chained up outside houses started to bark. Willie fumbled for her hand, probably to get her to move faster, but if that was the intent it didn't work. Everything slowed inside Trixie: her heartbeat, her breathing, her blood. Although Janice had tried to tell her otherwise, Trixie had believed she would never want another guy to lay hands on her again. But when Willie touched her, she couldn't really remember what it had felt like to touch Jason. It was almost as if one canceled out the other. She knew this: Willie's skin was smoother than Jason's. His hand was closer to hers in size. The muscles in his forearms weren't thick, the product of a million slap shots they were lean and ropy, almost sculpted. It made no sense, given their upbringings, but she had this weird feeling that she and Willie were equals, that neither of them was in control, because they were both so skittish in each other's company. They stopped behind one of the houses. Through the buttery light of the windows, Trixie could see a sparse living room, a single couch, and a few young men putting on their coats and boots. “Come on,” Willie said, and he tugged her away. He opened the door to a wooden shack not much bigger than an outhouse. It was divided into two rooms - they had entered the larger one; the other room lay through the closed door directly ahead of Trixie. Once the sound of his cousin's snow machine winnowed away, Willie shrugged out of his coat and boots, gesturing to

Trixie to do the same. “The good news is, my cousin already did all the hard work tonight - hauling water and chopping wood. He built this magi a few years ago.”

“What do you do in it?”

Willie grinned, and in the dark his teeth gleamed. “Sweat,” he said. “A lot. The men usually go in first, because they can handle the real heat. Women go in later.”

“Then how come we're here together?” Trixie asked. Willie ducked his head. She knew he was blushing, even if she couldn't see it.

“I bet you take girls here all the time,” she said, but she was only half joking, waiting for his answer.

“I've never been with a girl in the steam before,” Willie said, and then he shucked off his skirt. Trixie closed her eyes, but not before she saw the bright white flash of his underwear. He opened a door and disappeared inside the adjoining room. Trixie waited for him to come back, but he didn't. She heard the hiss of rising steam.

She stared at the wooden door, wondering what was on the other side. Was he trying to show her how tough he was, by taking the real heat! What did he mean when he said that he hadn't been with a girl in the steam before? Did he take them other places, or was that an invitation for her to follow? She felt like she had fallen into one of

her father's comic book universes, where what you said was not what you meant, and vice versa.

Hesitantly, Trixie pulled off her shirt. The action - and Willie's proximityimmediately - made her think about playing strip poker the night of Zephyr's party. But nobody was watching this time; there were no rules to the game; no one was telling her what she had to do. It was entirely different, she realized, when the choice was up to her.

If she went in there in her bra and panties, that was just like wearing a bikini, wasn't it?

She shivered only a moment before she opened the stunted door and crawled inside.

The heat slammed into her, a solid wall. It wasn't just heat. It was a sauna and a steam room and a bonfire all rolled together, and then ratcheted up a notch. The floor beneath her bare feet was slick plywood. She couldn't see, because of all the steam. As the clouds drifted, she could make out a fifty-five-gallon oil drum on its side with a fire burning hot in its belly. Rocks were nestled in birdcage wire on top, and a metal container of water sat beside it. Willie was hunkered down on the plywood, his knees drawn up to his chest, his skin red and blotched. He didn't say anything when he saw her, and Trixie understood why - if she opened her mouth, surely her throat would burst into flame. He wasn't wearing anything, but the region between his thighs was only a shadow, and somehow, she was the one who felt overdressed. She sat down beside him - in that small a space there wasn't much choice - and felt him wrapping something around her head. A rag, she realized, that had been dipped in water, to cover her ears and keep them from burning. When he knotted it, the skin of his upper arm stuck to hers.

The orange light that spilled through the cracks in the stove door illuminated Willie. His silhouette glowed, lean and feline; at that moment, Trixie wouldn't have been surprised to see him turn into a panther. Willie reached for a ladle, a wooden stick wired to a soup can. He dipped it into the bucket of water, pouring more over the rocks and causing a fresh cloud of steam to fill the chamber. When he settled down beside Trixie, his hand was so close to hers on the plywood that their pinkies touched. It hurt, almost past the point of pain. The room had a pulse, and breathing was nearly impossible. Heat rose off Trixie's skin in the shape of her soul. Perspiration ran down her back and between her legs: her entire body, crying.

When Trixie's lungs were about to explode, she ran through the door into the cold room again. She sat down on the floor, warmth rolling off her in waves, just as Willie burst in with a towel wrapped around his waist. He sank down beside her and passed her a jug.

Trixie drank it without even knowing what was inside. The water cooled the lining of her throat. She passed the jug to Willie, who tipped his head back against the wall and drank deeply, the knot of his Adam's apple following each swallow. He turned to her, grinning. “Crazy, huh?”

She found herself laughing, too. “Totally.” Willie leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. “I always kind of figured that's what Florida's like.”

“Florida? It's nothing like this.”

“You've been to Florida?” Willie asked, intrigued.

“Yeah. It's just, you know, another state.”

“I'd like to see an orange growing on a tree. I'd pretty much like to see anything that's somewhere other than here.” He turned to her. “What did you do when you went to Florida?” It was so long ago, Trixie had to think for a moment. “We went to Cape Canaveral. And Disney World.”

Willie started picking at the wooden floor. “I bet you fit in there.” “Because it's so tacky?”

“Because you're like that fairy. The one who hangs out with Peter Pan.”

Trixie burst out laughing. “Tinker Bell?” “Yeah. My sister had that book.”

She was about to tell him he was crazy, but then she remembered that Peter Pan was about a boy who didn't want to grow up, and she decided she didn't mind the comparison.

“She was so pretty,” Willie said. “She had a light inside her.” Trixie stared at him. “You think I'm pretty?” Instead of answering, Willie got up and crawled back into the hot room. By the time she followed, he'd already poured water over the rocks. Blinded by steam, she had to find her way by touch. She drew her fingers over the rough run of the wooden floor, up the joints of the walls, and then she brushed the smooth curve of Willie's shoulder. Before she could pull away, Willie's hand came up to capture hers. He tugged her closer, until they were facing each other on their knees, in the heart of a cloud. “Yeah, you're pretty,”

Willie said.

Trixie felt like she was falling. She had ugly chopped black hair and scars up and down her arms, and it was like he didn't even notice. She looked down at their interlaced fingers - a weave of dark and pale skin - and she let herself pretend that maybe there could be a light inside of her.

“When the first white folks came to the tundra,” Willie said,

“the people here thought they were ghosts.”

“Sometimes that's what I think I am, too,” Trixie murmured. They leaned toward each other, or maybe the steam pushed them closer. And just as Trixie was certain that there wasn't any air left in the room, Willie's mouth closed over hers and breathed for her.

Willie tasted like smoke and sugar. His hands settled on her shoulders, respectfully staying there even when she itched to have him touch her. When they drew back from each other, Willie looked down at the ground. “I've never done that before,” he confessed, and Trixie realized that when he'd said he'd never been with a girl in a steam, he'd meant that he'd never been with a girl. Trixie had lost her virginity a lifetime ago, back when she thought it was a prize to give to someone like Jason. They'd had sex countless times - in the backseat of his car, in his bedroom when his parents were out, in the locker room at the hockey rink after hours. But what she had done with him compared in no way to the kiss she had just experienced with Willie; it was impossible to draw a line to connect the two. She couldn't even say that her own participation

was the common denominator, because the girl she was back then was completely different from the one here now.

Trixie leaned toward Willie, and this time, she kissed him. “Me neither,” she said, and she knew she wasn't lying.

* * *

When Daniel was eleven, the circus had come for the first and only time to the tundra. Bethel was the last stop for the Ford Brothers Circus, on an unprecedented tour of bush Alaska. Cane and Daniel weren't going to miss it for the world. They worked odd jobs - painting an elder's house, putting a new roof on Cane's uncle's steam bath - until they each had fifteen dollars. The flyers, which had been put up in all the village schools, including Akiak, said that admission would be eight bucks, and that left plenty of money for popcorn and souvenirs. Most of the village was planning to go. Daniel's mother was going to hitch a ride with the principal, but at the last minute, Cane invited Daniel to go in his family's boat. They sat in its belly, the aluminum sides cold against their backs and bottoms, and told each other elephant jokes on the way down. Why is an elephant gray, large, and wrinkled?

Because if he was small, white, and round, he'd be an aspirin. Why does an elephant have a trunk?

Because he'd look stupid with a glove compartment.

Six thousand people from all over the delta showed up, many coming just after midnight so that they could see the MarkAir Here fly in at dawn with the performers and the animals. The circus was going to take place at the National Guard Armory gym, with the bathrooms converted to costume changing areas. Cane and Daniel, running ragged around the edges of the activity, even got to hold a rope as the big top was pitched.

During the show, there were trained dogs in ratty tutus, and two lions named Lulu and Strawberry. There was a leopard, which waited for its cue outside the big top, drinking from a mud puddle. There was calliope music and peanuts and cotton candy, and for the little children, an inflatable house to jump in and Shetland pony rides. When Shorty Serra came thundering out to do rope tricks with his monstrous horse, Juneau, the beast stood on his hind legs to tower over everyone, and the crowd shrieked. A group of Yup'ik boys sitting behind Daniel and Cane cheered, too. But when Daniel leaned over to say something to Cane, one of them spit out a slur: “Look at that: I always knew kass'aqs belonged in the circus.”

Daniel turned around. “Shut the fuck up.” One Yup'ik boy turned to another. “Did you hear something?”

“Want to feel something instead?” Daniel threatened, balling his hand into a fist.

“Ignore them,” Cane said. “They're assholes.” The ringmaster appeared, to the roar of applause. “Ladies and gentlemen, I'm afraid we have some disappointing news. Our elephant, Tika, is too ill for the show. But I'm delighted to introduce . .. all the way from Madagascar . . . Florence and her Amazing Waltzing Pigeons!”

A tiny woman in a flamenco skirt walked out with birds perched on each shoulder. Daniel turned to Cane. “How sick could an elephant be?”

“Yeah,” Cane said. “This sucks.” One of the Yup'ik boys poked him. “So do you. And I guess you like white meat.”

All of his life, Daniel had been teased by the village kids for not having a father, for being kass'aq, for not knowing how to do native things like fish and hunt. Cane would hang out with him, but the Yup'ik boys in school let that slide, because after all, Cane was one of them.

These boys, though, were not from his village.

Daniel saw the look on Cane's face and felt something break loose inside of him. He stood up, intent on leaving the big top.

“Hang on,” Cane said.

Daniel made his gaze as flat as possible. “I didn't invite you,” he said, and he walked away.

It didn't take him long to find the elephant, penned up in a makeshift fence with no one to watch over it. Daniel had never seen

an elephant up close; it was the one thing that he had in common with kids who lived in normal places. The elephant was limping and throwing hay in the air with its trunk. Daniel ducked under the wire and walked up to the animal, moving slowly. He touched its skin, warm and craggy, and laid his cheek along the haunch.

The best part about his friendship with Cane was that Cane was an insider, and that made Daniel one by association. He'd never realized that it could go the other way, too, that their acquaintance might make Cane a pariah. If the only way to keep Cane from being ostracized was to stay away from him, then Daniel would.

You did what you had to, for the people you cared about. The elephant swung its massive head toward Daniel. Its dark eye winked; the loose-lipped drip of its mouth worked soundlessly. But Daniel could hear the animal perfectly, and so he answered out loud: I don't belong here either.

* * *

It was still dark out the next morning when the cargo plane arrived, puddle-jumping from village to village to pick up the dogs that had been dropped by mushers along the trail. They'd be flown back to Bethel where a handler could pick them up. Willie was driving his cousin's pickup truck to the airstrip, and Trixie was in the passenger seat. They held hands across the space between them.

In the flatbed were all of Alex Edmonds's dogs, Juno, and Kingurauten Joseph, who was being transported back to the medical center. Willie parked the truck and then began to pass the dogs to Trixie,

who walked them over to the chain-link fence and tethered them. Every time she returned for another one, he smiled at her, and she melted as if she were back in the steam again.

Last night, after the steam had died out, Willie bathed her with a rag dipped in warm water. He'd run the makeshift sponge right over her bra and her panties. Then they'd gone back to the cold room, and he'd toweled her dry, kneeling in front of her to get the backs of her knees and between her toes before they'd dressed each other. Fastening and tucking seemed so much more intimate than unbuttoning and unzipping, as if you were privy to putting the person back together whole, instead of unraveling him.

“I have to take my uncle's coat back,” Willie had said, but then he had given her his own lined canvas jacket.

It smelled like him, every time Trixie buried her nose in the collar.

The lights on the airstrip suddenly blazed, magic. Trixie whirled around, but there was no control tower anywhere nearby.

“The pilots have remotes in their planes,” Willie said, laughing, and sure enough ten minutes hadn't passed before Trixie could hear the approach of an engine.

The plane that landed looked like the one that had flown Trixie into Bethel. The pilota Yup'ik boy not much older than Willie jumped out. “Hey,” he said. “Is this all you've got?” When he opened the cargo bay, Trixie could see a dozen dogs already tethered to D rings. As Willie loaded the sled dogs, she helped Joseph climb down from the back of the pickup. He leaned on her heavily as they walked to the runway, and when he stepped into the cargo bay, the animals inside started barking. “You remind me of someone I used to know,” Joseph said.

You already told me that, Trixie thought, but she just nodded at him. Maybe it wasn't that he wanted her to hear it but only that he needed to say it again.

The pilot closed up the hatch and hopped back into his plane, accelerating down the airstrip until Trixie could not tell his landing

lights apart from any given star. The airstrip blinked and went black again.

She felt Willie move closer in the dark, but before her eyes could adjust, another beacon came at them. It glinted directly into her eyes, had her shielding them from the glare with one hand. The snow machine pulled up, its engine growling before it died down completely and the driver stood up on the runners.

“Trixie?” her father said. “Is that you?” 8

In the middle of the Alaskan tundra, staring at a daughter he could barely recognize, Daniel thought back to the moment he'd known that everything between him and Trixie was bound to change. It was, like so many of those minutes between a father and a little girl, unremarkable. The season might have been summertime, or it could have been fall. They might have been bundled up in winter coats, or wearing flip-flops. They could have been heading to make a deposit at the bank, or leaving the bookstore. What stuck in Daniel's mind was the street - a busy one, in the middle of town - and the fact that he was walking down it with Trixie, holding her hand.

She was seven. Her hair was French-braided - badly, he'd never quite gotten the hang of that - and she was trying not to walk on the breaks in the sidewalk. They reached the intersection, and like always, Daniel reached for Trixie's hand.

She very deliberately slipped it free and stepped away from him before she looked both ways and crossed by herself. It was a hairline crack, one you might never have noticed, except for the fact that it grew wider and wider, until there was a canyon

between them. A child's job, ostensibly, was to grow up. So why, when it happened, did a parent feel so disappointed?

This time, instead of a busy street, Trixie had crossed an entire country by herself. She stood in front of Daniel, bundled in an oversized canvas coat, with a wool cap pulled over her head. Beside her was a Yup'ik boy with hair that kept falling into his eyes.

Daniel didn't know what was more shocking: seeing a girl he'd once carried on his shoulders and tucked into bed and wondering if she'd committed murder, or realizing that he'd hide in the Alaskan bush with Trixie for the rest of his life if that was what it took to keep her from being arrested.

“Daddy . . . ? ” Trixie launched herself into his arms. Daniel felt a shudder work down his spine; relief, when you came right down to it, was not all that different from fear.

“You,” he said to the boy who stood a distance apart, watching them with a guarded expression. “Who are you?”

“Willie Moses.”

“Can I borrow your rig?” Daniel tossed him the keys to the snowgo, a trade.

The boy looked at Trixie as if he was about to speak, but then he dropped his gaze and walked to the snow machine. Daniel heard the lion's growl of its engine, and the high-pitched whine as it sped away, and then led Trixie to the truck. Like most Alaskan vehicles, this one would never have passed inspection in the lower forty-eight. It was rusted clean through on the side panels; its speedometer was stuck at 88 mph, and first gear didn't work at all. But the light over the rearview mirror did, and Daniel turned that on to scrutinize his daughter.

With the exception of dark circles under her eyes, she seemed to be all right. Daniel reached up and pulled off her wool cap, revealing a sleek cap of black hair. “Oh,” she said when his eyes widened. “I forgot about that.”

Daniel slid across the bench seat and pulled her into his arms. God, was there anything more solid, more right, than knowing your child was where she ought to be? “Trixie,” he said, “you scared the hell out of me.”

He felt her grab a fistful of his coat. He had a thousand questions for her, but one sprang to the surface first, the one that he couldn't help but ask. “Why here?”

“Because,” Trixie murmured, “you said it's where people disappear.”

Daniel drew away from her slowly. “Why did you want to?” Her eyes filled with tears, until finally one spilled over and ran to the point of her chin. She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Daniel held on to her, as her thin body started to shake. “I didn't do what everyone thinks ...” Daniel threw his head back and winged a prayer to a God he'd never quite believed in: Thank you.

“I wanted him back. I didn't really want to fool around like Zephyr told me to, but I was willing to do anything if it got things back to the way it was before Jason broke up with me.” She swallowed hard. “When everyone left, he was so nice at first, I thought maybe it had worked. But then everything started happening so fast. I wanted to talk, and he didn't. When he started... when we started ...” She took a ragged breath. "He said that this was exactly what he needed . . . a friend with benefits. And that's how I realized

that he didn't want me back. He just wanted me for fifteen minutes."

Daniel didn't move. Surely if he did, he'd shatter.

“I tried to get away, but I couldn't. It felt like I was underwater, like when I told my arms and legs to move, they didn't work fast enough, strong enough. He thought it was a game, me fighting just a little bit, like I was still playing hard to get. He pinned me down and . ..” Trixie's skin was flushed and damp.

“He said, Don't tell me you don't want this.” She looked up at Daniel in the halo of the overhead light. “And I... I didn't.”

* * *

Trixie had once seen a science fiction movie that suggested we all had doppelgangers, we just couldn't ever run into them because our worlds would collide. It was like that, now that her father had come to rescue her. Just this morning, walking back with Willie from the magi, she had entertained the thought of what it would be like to stay in Tuluksak. Maybe they needed someone to be a teaching assistant. Maybe she could move in with one of Willie's cousins. But with her father's arrival, the world had jarred to a stop. He didn't fit here, and neither did she.

She had told him her secret: that she was a liar. Not just about being a virgin and playing Rainbow . . . but even more. She'd never said no to Jason that night, although she'd told the DA she had.

And the drugs?

She was the one who'd brought them.

She hadn't realized, at the time, that the guy at the college who sold pot to the high school kids was sleeping with her mother. She'd gone to buy some for Zephyr's party, in the hopes that she could take the edge off. If she was going to be as wild as Zephyr planned for her to be, she needed a little pharmaceutical help. Seth was out of pot, but Special K was supposed to be like Ecstasy. It would make you lose control.

Which, in a completely different way, she had.

This much wasn't a lie: She hadn't taken it that night, not on purpose. She and Zephyr had planned to get high together, but it was a real drug, not pot, and at the last minute, Trixie had chickened out. She'd forgotten about it, until the DA brought up the fact that she might have had a drug in her system. Trixie didn't really know what Zephyr had done with the vial: if she'd used it herself, if she'd left it sitting on the kitchen counter, if someone else at the party had found it first. She couldn't say for a fact that Jason had slipped it into her drink. She'd had so much to drink that night - half-empty cans of Coke left lying around, screwdrivers with the ice cubes melting - it was possible that Jason had had nothing to do with it at all.

Trixie hadn't known that adding drugs into the legal mix would mean Jason was tried as an adult. She hadn't been looking to ruin his life. She'd only wanted a way to salvage her own. It was not a coincidence, Trixie thought, that no and know sounded the same. You were supposed to be able to say the magic word, and that was enough to make your wishes - or lack of them crystal clear. But no one ever said yes to make sex consensual. You took hints from body language, from the way two people came together. Why, then, didn't a shake of the head or a hand pushing hard against a chest speak just as loudly? Why did you have to actually say the word no for it to be rape?

That one word, spoken or not, didn't make Jason any less guilty of taking something Trixie hadn't wanted to give. It didn't make her any less foolish. All it did was draw a line in the sand, so that the people who hadn't been there to witness it - Moss and Zephyr, her parents, the police, the district attorney - could take sides.

But somewhere along the line, it also made her realize that she couldn't blame Jason, not entirely, for what had happened. She had thought of what it would be like when the trial started, when it was a hundred times worse than it was now, and Jason's lawyer would get up in court and paint Trixie as a complete slut and a liar. She had wondered how long it would be before she just gave in and admitted they were right. She'd started to hate herself, and one night, when the dark had folded itself around Trixie like the wings of a heron, she wished that Jason Underhill would drop dead. It was just a secret, silent thought, and she knew better than anyone at this point that what was not said aloud didn't count. But then one thing led to another: Jason was charged as an adult, not a minor. Jason ran into her at the Winterfest. And then, before she knew it, her wish had come true.

Trixie knew the police were looking for her. We'll take care of it, her father kept saying. But Jason was dead, and it was her fault. Nothing she said now - or didn't say - was going to bring him back.

She wondered if she would be sent to jail in Jason's place, and if it would be horrible there, like you saw in the movies, or if it would be full of people like Trixie, people who understood that there were some mistakes you never got to erase.

While her father explained to the Jesuit Volunteers that they were about to lose a fake staff member, Trixie sat in the truck and cried. She had thought that by now, she would have been bone dry, a husk, but the tears didn't ever stop. All she had wanted was for something to feel right again in her life, and instead, everything had gone impossibly wrong.

There was a knock at the window of the truck, and she looked up to see Willie, his fingers stuck in a bowl of something pink. He scooped out a bit with his middle and index fingers as she unrolled the window.

“Hey,” he said.

She wiped her eyes. “Hey.”

“You okay?”

Trixie started to nod, but she was so sick of lying. “Not so much,” she admitted.

It was nice, the way Willie didn't even try to say something to make her feel better. He just let her sadness stand. “That's your dad?” he asked.

She nodded. She wanted to explain everything to Willie, but she didn't know how. As far as Willie had been concerned, she was a Jesuit Volunteer, one who had been stranded by the storm. With him, she had not been a rape victim or a murder suspect. How did you tell someone that you weren't the person he thought you were?

And more importantly, how did you tell him that you'd meant the things you'd said, when everything else about you turned out to be a lie?

He held out the dish. “Want some?” “What is it?”

“Akutaq. Eskimo ice cream.” Trixie dipped her finger in. It wasn't

Ben & Jerry's, but it wasn't badberries and sugar, mixed with something she couldn't recognize.

“Seal oil and shortening,” Willie said, and she wasn't in the least surprised that he could read her mind.

He looked down at her through the window. “If I ever get to Florida, maybe you could meet me there.”

Trixie didn't know what was going to happen to her tomorrow, much less after that. But she found that in spite of everything that had happened, she still had the capacity to pretend, to think her future might be something it never actually would. “That would be cool,” she said softly.

“Do you live nearby?”

“Give or take fifteen hundred miles,” Trixie said, and when Willie smiled a little, so did she.

Suddenly Trixie wanted to tell someone the truth . . . all of it. She wanted to start from the beginning, and if she could make just one person believe her, at least it was a start. She lifted her face to Willie's. “At home, I was raped by a guy I thought I loved,” Trixie said, because that was what it was to her and always would be. Semantics didn't matter when you were bleeding between your legs, when you felt like you'd been broken from the inside out, when free will was taken away from you.

“Is that why you ran away?”

Trixie shook her head. “He's dead.”

Willie didn't ask her if she was responsible. He just nodded, his breath hanging on the air like lace. “I guess sometimes,” he said, “that's the way it works.”

* * *

It was bingo night at the village council offices, and Laura had been left alone in the tiny house. She had read every Tundra Drums newspaper twice, even the ones stacked in the entryway for disposal. She'd watched television until her eyes hurt. She found herself wondering what kind of person would choose to live in a place like this, where conversation seemed abnormal and where even the sunlight stayed away. What had brought Daniel's mother here?

Like Annette Stone, Laura was a teacher. She knew you could change the world one student at a time. But how long would you be willing to sacrifice your own child's happiness for everyone else's?

Maybe she hadn't wanted to leave. Daniel had told Laura about his wandering father. There were some people who hit your life so hard, they left a stain on your future. Laura understood how you might spend your whole life waiting for that kind of man to come back.

It was a choice Daniel's mother had made for both of them, one that immediately put her son at a disadvantage. To Laura, it seemed selfish, and she ought to know.

Was it tough love, putting your child through hell? Or was it the best of parenting, a way to make sure your child could survive without you? If Daniel hadn't been teased, he might have felt at home on the tundra. He might have become one of the faceless kids, like Cane, who couldn't find a way out. He might have stayed in Alaska, forever, waiting for something that didn't come. Maybe Annette Stone had only been making sure Daniel had an escape route, because she didn't herself.

Outside, a truck drove into the yard. Laura jumped up, running out the arctic entry to see if Daniel and Trixie had returned. But the truck had a bar of flashing blue lights across the top of the cab, casting long shadows on the snow.

Laura straightened her spine. You'd do whatever it took to protect your child. Even the things that no one else could possibly understand.

“We're looking for Trixie Stone,” the policeman said.

* * *

Trixie fell asleep on the ride back to Akiak. Daniel had wrapped Trixie in his own balaclava and parka; she rode the snow machine with her arms around his waist and her cheek pressed up against his back. He followed the setting sun, a showgirl's tease of pink ribbon trailing off the stage of the horizon. Daniel didn't really know what to make of his daughter's confession. In this part of the world, people believed that a thought might turn into an action at any moment; a word held in your mind had just as much power to wound or to heal as the one that was spoken aloud. In this part of the world, it didn't matter what Trixie had or had not said: What Jason Underhill had done to Trixie did count as rape.

He was also painfully aware of the other things Trixie had not said out loud: that she hadn't killed Jason; that she was innocent.

In Akiak, Daniel revved up the riverbank and past the post office to reach Cane's house. He turned the corner and saw the police truck.

For just a moment, he thought, I have reinvented myself before, I can do it again. He could drive until the gas ran out of the snow-go, and then he would build a shelter for himself and Trixie. He'd teach

her how to track and how to hunt and, when the weather turned, where to find the salmon.

But he could not leave Laura behind, and he couldn't send for her later. Once they left, he would have to make sure they could never be found.

He felt Trixie stiffen behind him and realized that she had seen

the policemen. Even worse, when the officer got out of the car, he understood that they'd been seen, too.

“Don't talk,” he said over his shoulder. “Let me take care of this.”