Since she is herself again, she writes to Caleb, tells him where she is, encloses a separate letter for Jamie, asks for his address since she can’t imagine he’s still in that flophouse in Vancouver.
Jamie has left Vancouver entirely, Caleb reports, and gone into the mountains to be, he thinks, an art hermit. The decision was sudden and he wouldn’t say why, but he seems fine. I guess all three of us were meant to live in splendid isolation.
She considers flying to see Jamie but finds she doesn’t want to leave Alaska, is frightened by the thought of crossing back into her old life. So maybe she’s not quite herself again, not that she’s foolish enough to think there is one fixed version of a person.
In time she heads south to Valdez, forms a loose partnership with a pilot who supplies the high-altitude lode mines in the Wrangell and Chugach Mountains. He’s worked out a method for landing on glaciers. If the light is flat, he makes a low pass and drops something dark—anything, a gunny sack or a branch—onto the ice to help with depth perception. He shows Marian how to look for the undulation in the surface snow that means buried crevasses, how to slip sideways on landing so the skis are at a right angle to the slope and the plane doesn’t slide away over the edge.
In Valdez, since she keeps skis on the plane all year for glacier landings, she takes off from mudflats when the tide is out. She learns to rock side to side in her seat as she throttles up to help pry the skis free from the ooze. To the mines she delivers the usual meat and flour and tobacco but also dynamite and carbide, steel and lumber and spools of cable, barrels of oil, all manner of machine parts. Once she has a pair of prostitutes as passengers, once a member of Roosevelt’s cabinet. Once she flies an orphaned grizzly cub to Anchorage, bound for a private menagerie.
People like to remind her that she is from outside. You can’t become an Alaskan. It’s just not possible. She is not one of them, but still, she feels she belongs.
* * *
—
Denver, spring of 1937. Jamie edges around the bedroom door, and Uncle Wallace, sitting propped up with pillows, squints uncertainly.
“It’s Jamie,” Jamie says. “I came to see you.”
Wallace’s face cracks open with delight. “My boy,” he says. “How wonderful.”
Jamie grasps Wallace’s hands, sits on the edge of the bed, catching the sweet odor of morphine. “How are you?”
“At death’s door.” Wallace pats Jamie’s cheek, the patchy blond scraggle that grows there. “But you’re not a boy at all with this beard. It’s been at least a year since I’ve seen you—is that possible?”
“I suppose it is,” Jamie says. They have not seen each other in more than five years. Five years since he’d put a frail, trembling drunk on the train to Denver.
“And where is—where is—”
“Marian’s in Alaska. She’s a pilot.”
“She’s the reason I’m here, you know. Her and her husband. Is he in Alaska, too?”
“He’s in prison.”
Wallace seems unsurprised. “Good,” he says, but mildly, as though he’d been told the weather was fine.
Wallace’s housekeeper, stout and matronly, pushes the door open with her rump, backs in with a tray of coffee and sliced cake. “Thought you might like a hot drink and something to eat, Jamie, after your journey.”
“This is my son, Jamie,” Wallace tells her, patting Jamie’s arm.
“I’ve met Jamie,” she replies. “I let him in. He’s your nephew.” To Jamie, she says, “He gets confused. Especially about names, things like that. Details.”
“I’m not confused,” Wallace says bitterly, but when she holds a cup of water to his lips, he smiles and takes a docile sip. She touches his forehead, and Jamie wonders what they have been to each other.
“Tell me something,” Wallace says when she’s gone. “Anything. Dying is boring. Regale me with tales from outside this room.”
Jamie tells Wallace about the mountain cabin where he lives, once abandoned, a half-day’s walk from the nearest settlement. He’d repaired the roof and floor, recaulked the gaps between the logs. He keeps a garden and chickens for eggs; he fishes in a nearby river, has learned to can vegetables and smoke fish, to plan ahead for the winter. “You remember I wouldn’t fish before?” he asks Wallace.
“Yes,” Wallace says vaguely, nodding. “The worms, wasn’t it?”