It took him almost fifteen minutes to reach the homestead road, and five more minutes to get to the house he’d called home for the last few years. Two decades ago, when his mother’s family had homesteaded out here, the land had been remote; over the years, town had crept closer, spread out. Fairbanks might be in the middle of nowhere, fewer than 120 miles from the Arctic Circle, but it was the second largest city in the state and growing fast because of the pipeline.
He drove up the long, winding, tree-shrouded driveway and parked in the huge, plank-sided garage/workshop between Uncle Went’s ATV and his snow machine.
Inside the house, the walls were roughly hewn planks that looked messy in the combination of light and shadow. His aunt and uncle had always intended to drywall them but never had. The kitchen was delineated by L-shaped polished wood counters set atop green cabinets that had come from an abandoned house in Anchorage, one of those “dream” homes built by lowlanders who couldn’t last through their first winter. A bar with three barstools separated it from the dining area. Beyond that was the living room; a big plaid sectional （complete with movable footrests） and two well-worn La-Z-Boy chairs faced a window that overlooked the river. There were bookcases everywhere, overflowing with books; lanterns and flashlights decorated almost every surface for when the power went out, and it went out often, with so many big trees and bad weather. The house had electricity and running water and even a television, but no flush toilets. Truthfully, no Walker ever cared. They’d all been raised with outhouses and were happy to live that way. People down south had no idea how clean an outhouse could be if you took care of it.
“Hey, you,” Aly said, looking up from the sofa. She was doing homework, by the looks of it.
Matthew dropped his gear bag by the door and propped his hockey stick in the arctic entry—a corridor full of coats and boots that separated the outside from the inside. He hung up his coat on a hook and kicked off his boots. He was so tall now—six-foot-two—that he had to duck to enter the house.
“Hey.” He plopped down beside her.
“You smell like a goat,” she said, closing her textbook.
“A goat who scored two goals.” He leaned back, laid his head on the sofa back, stared up at the big wood crossbeams that traversed the ceiling. He didn’t know why, but he felt nervous, a little raw. He tapped his foot, played an arpeggio on the worn armrest with his fingers.
Aly stared at him. As usual, she had applied her makeup sporadically, as if she’d lost interest halfway through the process. Her blond hair was drawn back into a messy ponytail that hung a little to the left. He had no idea if that was intentional. She was beautiful in the natural, rough-hewn way of Alaskan girls, who were more likely to hunt on the weekends than go to a shopping mall or movie theater.
“You’re doing it again,” he said.
“What?”
“Watching me. Like you think I’m going to explode or something.”
“No,” she said, trying to smile. “It’s just … you know. Are you having a bad day?”
Matthew closed his eyes, sighed. His older sister had been his salvation; there was no doubt about that. Back when he’d first moved here, when he’d been unable to deal with his grief and been beset by terrible nightmares, Aly had been his steadying hand, the voice that could get through to him. Although it had taken time. For the first three months, he pretty much hadn’t talked at all. The therapist they sent him to was no help. He’d known from the first session that it wouldn’t be a stranger’s hand he’d reach out to, especially not one who talked to him as if he were a kid.
It was Aly who had saved him. She never gave up, never stopped asking how he felt. When he finally found the words to express himself, his grief had shown itself to be bottomless, terrifying.
He still cringed at the way he’d cried.
His sister had held him when he cried, rocked him as their mother would have done. Over the years, the two of them had fashioned a vocabulary for grief, learned how to talk about their loss. He and Aly had talked about their pain until there were no words left to say. They’d also spent hours in silence, standing side by side on the river, fly-fishing, and hiking rough trails in the Alaska Range. In time, his grief had turned to anger and then drifted toward sorrow, and now, finally, it had settled into a lingering sadness that was a part of him, not the whole. Lately, they’d begun to talk about the future instead of the past.
It was big, that change, and they knew it. Aly had been hiding out in school, using the classroom as a shield against the hard realities of life as a motherless girl, and she’d stayed here, in Fairbanks, to be at Matthew’s side. Before Mom’s death, Aly had dreamed big, of moving to New York or Chicago, someplace that had bus service and live theater and opera halls. But, as with Matthew, loss had rearranged her from the inside out. Now she knew how much family mattered and how important it was to hang on to the people you loved. Lately she’d begun to talk about moving back onto the homestead with Dad, and maybe working with him. Matthew knew that his presence here was holding his sister back. It could go on this way forever if he let it, and a part of him wanted to do just that. But he was almost eighteen years old. If he didn’t push his way out of the nest, she’d stay next to him forever.