“I felt sorry for the fish,” Jamie says, “not the worms. I still do, but I’ve made peace with it.”
Wallace nods again. “You have to live the way you want,” he says. “That’s what I did. No other life seemed honorable to them because theirs was such a wretched hardship. They thought anyone who lived another way was too big for their britches and must be immoral.”
Now Jamie is confused. “Who thought that?”
“Our parents, of course. You remember. You were the same way.”
Wallace has him mixed up with Addison. “Was I?” Jamie says.
“Of course you were. If you hadn’t left, I might never have thought of leaving. But you had to go to sea.” Wallace pats his hand. “Tell me something else.”
Though Jamie isn’t sure whether Wallace is talking to him or Addison, he tells him, trying to make the story sound funny, about the two men who’d come to his apartment and nearly drowned him, how he’d assumed they’d been sent by Barclay Macqueen when in fact they’d been emissaries of Mr. Ayukawa, whose daughter had run away, probably with some man.
“We’ve all had mishaps,” Wallace says. “Then what?”
In the mountains, he’d begun painting obsessively. Even before he’d had a mattress or a functional stove, he’d stood in the ruined little shack and worked.
“I’d had an idea about incorporating the curvature of the earth into my paintings, and I’ve been building from there. I’ve been making landscapes that are sort of…folded. Have you ever seen how the Japanese fold paper?” There is a sketch pad on Wallace’s nightstand, and Jamie rips out a page, tears it carefully into a square, folds a crane.
“A bird,” Wallace says, holding the delicate thing in his trembling fingertips. “Did the man pay you for the painting?”
Jamie had laughed on the Ayukawas’ doorstep, laughter that stung and buzzed in his sinuses like turpentine vapors. He’d bent over with his hands on his knees, wiping away tears. “She ran away?” he’d said.
To Wallace, he says, “He paid me more than we’d agreed on. I think he felt guilty.”
“Good,” Wallace says. “Good.”
In five days, he is dead. There is a will, leaving the house in Missoula to Jamie and Marian. He wishes to be buried in Denver.
Jamie delays writing to Marian, whom he feels obscurely estranged from, writes to Caleb instead. He does not intend for Caleb to go to Alaska to tell Marian the news, but that is what Caleb does.
* * *
—
“What’s the closest you’ve ever come to dying?” Marian asks Caleb. They are lying in her bed, in her cabin outside Valdez. He has been with her for three nights; she doesn’t know how long he will stay.
She had sprung for a double bed to celebrate her return to her real name, and they have never had so much space to share. Sprawled on his back, he says, “I don’t know. I don’t think you can know.”
“Isn’t there something in the past that chills you to think about?”
“Not one thing in particular.” Facetiously: “It takes more than death to scare me, Marian.”
“Do you remember after Trout died how I flew to Vancouver?” She tells him about the skipping engine, the crevasse, the cold. That was when death had felt closest, she says, but maybe she’d actually been closest when she was a baby on the sinking Josephina. She would have died and never known anything about it, never known what a ship was, or an ocean, or a fire. She wouldn’t have known what death was.
Caleb said he thought all living things knew about death, at least enough to struggle against it.
“Or maybe I came closest some other time,” she said, “and didn’t even notice.”
The first night, after he’d told her Wallace was dead, after they’d walked along the shore, watching the sea lions and bald eagles, she’d drawn him into bed. She hadn’t been with anyone since Barclay, and memories of him came as sharp intrusions of panic and claustrophobia. She hadn’t told Caleb what Barclay had done, but he seemed to have an instinct. He held her gaze when he came, offering her his helplessness. The second night had been better, and the third, and on this, the fourth, she’d almost believed she’d returned to the time back before Barclay, when she and Caleb had made love with simple urgency. Almost. She can never go back.
He is broader than she remembered, solid, a man.
A little impatiently, he says, “It’s too much to think about: everything that might have happened but didn’t.” But, in the same brusque tone, he says to the ceiling, “There was one time when I was a kid. Gilda had a man. Usually I ignored what she did, but that night I couldn’t take the sound of them. I decided to go to your house even though it was snowing hard. It didn’t even occur to me to worry about finding my way, but the snow was piling up. I couldn’t see the shape of the ground to get my bearings. I couldn’t see anything, really. The wind was up. I’d been walking for much too long, but I didn’t want to admit I was lost, not that admitting it would have changed anything. I knew I shouldn’t, but I sat down to rest.” He stops.