Glaciers (7 page)

He looks at Isabel as they pass and adjusts his glasses. She is close enough to reach out and touch his arm, and she almost does, but pulls back. He looks at her and the color in his cheeks rises and she knows he is ashamed. The look she must be giving him. She doesn't care.

She wants to say, What did you think was going to happen? But she won't, not right now. She feels foolish. A sort of fury flows through her and makes her weak in the knees. Her heart pounds. Her fortune on his desk, not sweet at all.
Trying to flirt with him. He said nothing, this morning, all week long. How long has he known? He would not look at her, stirred his coffee and did not look at her. Opened his mouth and did not tell her.

All the other office doors are open, all the seats turned toward the hall, no voices or typing, all the others listening. Ahmed, who shares Spoke's office, must have told some of them. He comes out of Nate's office, solemn. Nate follows. They both pause at the door, watching.

When Spoke and the head librarian have disappeared around the corner, Isabel watches Molly's freckled, manicured hand push open her door across the hall. Molly and Isabel look at each other.

Two women who mean nothing to the world, Isabel thinks. They stare at each other. The glow draining from Isabel's cheeks, the joy of the dress,
folded into the little cellophane bag on her desk, gone. So trivial, that moment in the shop, in the mirror. He will never see her in the dress.

Molly's eyes widen and she mouths
What the fuck?
As if Isabel should know. Molly's lipstick is worn away from lunch, her jaw clenched. She looks like she's about to blow up at someone.

Isabel could implode.

We mean nothing, she thinks, looking at Molly looking at her. We will survive and continue to mean nothing. He will go back to the war and kill or be killed. We might appear in his dreams along with girls who went to his high school, girls who lived next door, girls who shop and work and drink beer at summer parties, girls he slept with or wanted to sleep with, girls who want to save him or be saved by him. When he dreams of them, he will open his mouth to speak and these girls will go off like bombs. Boom. Pieces of girls everywhere.

Isabel rests her head on her arm against the door. She stands there, staring down at her feet in her shoes on the cheap carpet for minutes—she loses track of time and breath—until Peter comes around to collect cash.

I'm going to the liquor store for whiskey. Let'em write us up, he says, who gives a fuck?

Back Pocket

She waits, fusses with papers in her office, slowly gathers her bag and sweater, composing them on her arm carefully, so that she can walk out with him. One by one the others leave. She listens to all their goodbyes.

 

The afternoon passed in a stunned, vacant stare. At first they all pretended to work—Spoke busy becoming absent, removing everything he brought with him—then their boss went upstairs and they didn't bother. Isabel stayed on the edge, just out of reach.

At four o'clock they all gathered in the break room and poured whiskey into mugs for a mostly awkward farewell toast.

Ahmed, always one to speak for others, gave a short, graceless speech about the fucked-up beauty of America, which concluded:

It's pretty much a mixed bag, you know? But you're one of the good ones. We need you in the mix.

Isabel stood across from Spoke, silent. Spoke smiled amiably and listened, but seemed to Isabel like a door slowly swinging closed over a worn arc of floor. When he looked at Isabel—their eyes meeting across the table for the last time—she tried to smile but tears filled her eyes, and he looked away.

 

Isabel's office is the last on the way out of the building, so she watches each of her friends leave. Nate nods at her as he passes. Peter says, What a fucking
day, and Isabel agrees. Molly lugs her things from her office, then drops them in the middle of the hallway and grabs Isabel, hugging her. Isabel lifts her arms and wraps them around her until Molly suddenly pulls away, wipes her nose on her sleeve, picks up her belongings, and heads quickly up the stairs and out the door. Ahmed is the last to go, shaking his head. They all leave Spoke where they will remember him, and Isabel thinks that she could have done that, too. She could leave without a word, after his silence all day, all month.

She listens to him leaving. Waits in her office door, staring at the floor, until she hears his footsteps turn in her direction. He stops next to her, leaning on the wall.

You were waiting for me, he says.

I was? She tries to be coy but it comes out with too much emotion behind it and sounds angry and defensive.

Sorry, she says. I'm not very good with subtlety.

No, he says thoughtfully, but your way is better.

He reaches into the back pocket of his jeans and pulls out her fortune. She feels herself blush, seeing the way he holds it in his palm, examines it.

I didn't know, she says. I'm going to a party tonight—I thought you might come with me. It seems—I don't know—shitty now.

How could you have known?

He reaches into his pocket again and pulls out an identical, tiny slip of white paper with red print. He hands it to her.

Your journey will take you to faraway places
.

Her mind gets stuck on the word
faraway
. Staring at it printed on the fortune, it seemed less like an adjective and more like a proper noun, like its own country.

She holds the fortune in her hand, unsure whether he means to give it to her.

He puts her fortune back in his pocket. So she does the same with his. Then he gestures to the door and they start walking toward the stairs. They pause at the top, his hand on the metal door latch. He seems to be considering what he should say to her. She thinks about what is on the other side of the door: a postcard of a city.

She curls her hair behind her ear. He shifts his bag to the shoulder opposite her.

Walk with me? he asks.

Okay, she nods.

Around the building and down the brick steps. He unlocks his bike and they walk away together through their city, the ticking of his bike keeping time.

Pausing at a corner as the commuter train pulls to a stop in front of them. When he looks at her she feels a crash behind her rib cage.

How did you end up in the army? she asks.

She doesn't know why, but out it comes weighted with anger and grief. It sounds like an accusation, but to it is a confession: of all the things she thought about soldiers before she met him—that they are emotionally damaged uber-jocks, not people who listen to early U2 records and eat vegetarian Chinese food and talk about pacifist science fiction; and of the fact that she loves him for it—for being unexpected, for making her think differently, for setting her thoughts on the future, the quaint narrative she nurtures of the two of them in the world together; and that she cannot fathom why, after all he went through to arrive here, in this city, at the same time and place as Isabel, he would go
far away
to kill people, or worse, to blow away altogether this time.

He looks up the sidewalk, measuring some distance up the street.

Stepping off the curb, he lifts his bike and she watches their feet descend, her black leather slip-on next to his worn blue Converse.

They've walked for nearly a block when he stops short and looks at her. They are in the middle of the sidewalk, face to face, between a tobacco shop and a trash can. Everything they've never said flows into the narrow space between them. Isabel feels the passing of time acutely, like a flood coming and only so much time to gather up the most important things.

She looks at him, thinking how tall he is, how her nose would fit neatly into his clavicle if she walked right into him. A few people walk around them, pass. If she were other people, she would silently tell them to
fucking move, yous
. But she doesn't care. The streetlights have changed, leaving them alone on this stretch of city block. Pigeons scuttle around the trash can, then begin to wander nearer their unmoving feet.

I didn't feel like I had many options, he says finally. I wanted experience and I wanted to get out of my hometown for a while.

That's an answer. Is it true?

Yeah. Yes. All true.

But that doesn't really tell me, she says.

It's a long story, he says.

I want the long story.

He just looks at her intensely and for a moment she thinks he might kiss her. Then he nods and they walk.

The food vendors across the street are packing up their carts, washing down their counters and tables, cooling off in the breeze, sipping sodas or having a smoke.

Their arms touch and her skin vibrates. He pulls away slightly. Maybe he doesn't want to be so close to her, she thinks. Or maybe he does not want her to know how much he wants to touch her.

So she moves closer to him, again, letting her bare arm brush against his. He doesn't move away this time.

Thaw

When Isabel was small, her father worked on the Alaskan North Slope for what seemed like months at a time. It was actually two weeks on, two weeks off, but time seemed to go on longer then.

In the winter, the Slope was a dark, starry place, with a colony of busy fathers working in the snow and ice. In the summer, the light never ended, and they measured one hour to the next by the beeps on their digital watches, eating periodically from vending machines. Isabel knew about the vending machines because when her father came home he always brought a candy bar for Agnes and Isabel to share.

The girls couldn't sleep summer nights, because of the light slipping in from outside. And on nights when their father was coming home, they waited up for him and the candy bar. She remembers running into his arms; the cold petroleum smell of his work clothes.

But when they asked questions about where he had been and what he had been doing, he said very little. Only their mother told them what they wanted to know about oil underground and the dividend checks the family received every year.

 

One winter night, their father came home early. His left hand was wrapped in bandages like a fat white mitten. There had been an accident; his hand was smashed. After a couple of days, they removed the bandages to take pictures, pictures Isabel can still draw up in her mind: horizontal blue lines where fingernails should have been; swollen, flat, crooked
fingers that all curved in the same direction at the middle joint.

Daddy, why are your fingers going west? Isabel asked. Having just learned how to use a compass, she believed left was always west.

There was no answer. He thought he would never play guitar again.

 

Years later, in Portland, their father began to tell them his stories. They trickled out of him, as if his past were slowly melting: the early days of long winters snowed in at the homestead; his father shooting the first moose to wander down the driveway in the fall; moose sandwiches for months; working summers as a teenager, cleaning trash and outhouses in camp grounds (banging a big aluminum spoon against the garbage pails to frighten off bears); leaving home at sixteen to play music with feckless friends; his father getting their band a gig at a bar
(brothel) in Kenai, not asking how his father knew the owner (madam); searching piles of fish heads for a human hand at the cannery one summer; the fishing boat he sank all his money into; the friend who sank the boat; and, eventually, working on the North Slope.

There were only two places to work, he said: the canneries or the Slope. He had worked both. It was an explanation and an apology. Though for what, Isabel still wasn't sure. He always seemed to be flying away from them when they were little girls. Isabel thought that he believed this was the reason their mother stopped loving him. That was an easy explanation, but the apology was more complicated.

There was the pipeline and the oil that thrummed through it. There was evidence of harm all around—as close as the end of his arm. Beyond, there was the spill that coated the sea and the coastline and all the animals. Then there was
the thaw, the threateningly deep, vast thaw: a lucid dream of a legacy for children who know better but cannot stop it.

Isabel cannot read magazine articles or books about the North. She cannot watch the nature programs about the migrations of birds and mammals dwindling, the sea ice thinning, and the erosion of islands. And she does not want to know what has happened to her great-grandmother's house by the woods, sold years ago to people who let gutted cars rot in the front yard.

When she thinks about her northern childhood now, she thinks of her father, flying to the Slope with all the other fathers, toiling in permafrost. She sees him in his work coat and heavy boots, hardhat over a woolen skullcap, slipping coins into the slot of a vending machine, pressing the button and hearing the clink and the drop, reaching his undamaged left hand through the metal flap for the candy bar.

Rest and Gladness

She stares at the windowsill in his apartment: spores and insect husks. She hears him at the sink, then his footsteps across the room. He stops next to her and looks out the window and hands her his cold, scuffed metal water canister.

She smiles thanks.

Sorry I can't offer you anything else, he gestures to the nearly empty room.

Where did you sleep last night? she asks.

Sleeping bag.

They sit on a camp blanket spread under the window, and look into the room together.

She drinks and hands the bottle to Spoke, who takes a long swig. Isabel watches the way his throat expands and contracts as he swallows. She is closer to him than she has ever been. She notices more about his face. He lets his beard grow a little, so that from a distance the skin beneath disappears. Now she is so close she can see the individual whiskers, which are brown and red and blonde, and the skin underneath.