The Best American Short Stories 2015 (48 page)

ARIA BETH SLOSS

FROM
One Story

M
Y FATHER MADE
it as far as Little Iceland. That was the name of the iceberg they found his notebook frozen into, interred like a fossil. At least that was the name written on one of the last pages of his notebook, under a sketch of what might or might not have been the iceberg. There was the question, in those days, of what to name. The impulse was to lay claim to each new fragment of the unknown. Label everything. But icebergs do as they please. They form and break so quickly, it is possible to claim one one day, only to watch it divide itself out of existence the next.

What my mother said: we do what we can to make things stick.

My father was an explorer. Every few years, he packed his things—clothes, boots, notebooks, tins of food—and kissed my mother goodbye. She watched from the steps of their cabin in northern Idaho as he hoisted his bag onto his shoulder and set off down the path to the main road. When he got to the gap in the trees where the path bent back like a hairpin, he stopped and waved, a figure no bigger than her thumb.

He came close to dying enough times she stopped keeping track. Back then, people traveling to the places he did disappeared because of all kinds of things: exhaustion, hypothermia, trichinosis, bears. For a long time, my father was lucky. The things that went missing were largely expendable: food, sled dogs, scientific measuring tools whose cost got chalked up to an expedition's overhead. Still, some things are irreplaceable. By his thirtieth birthday, the only fingers remaining on his left hand were his ring finger, index finger, and thumb.

But my father was a stubborn man. He had an internal compass, he said. It just kept pointing north. Once, at my mother's insistence, he went to see the local doctor in Coolin. The doctor frowned: “Strange,” he said, shaking the thermometer. “Let's try that again.” But my father laughed and hopped down off the examining table. He'd always known ice ran through his veins, he said. It was only a matter of time before the rest of him froze.

One day my father did what anyone might have predicted. He hoisted his pack onto his back, waved through the gap in the trees, boarded the train that wound through the Selkirk Mountains, got off in Seattle, and was never heard from again. My mother waited years, but the body was never found. For that reason she went on for a long time believing he might come back. When I was younger, and thought love was something the world owed you, I had to hide in my room when I wanted to cry over it, this great unfairness.

The sea captain who found my father's notebook frozen into the side of Little Iceland came all the way to northern Idaho to hand-deliver it to my mother.

We all thought very highly of your husband, he said. The world could use more men like him.

My mother nodded. She said the notebook had clearly been left there intentionally. It was stuffed inside a specimen jar, stoppered, carefully sealed with wax. The pages were in perfect condition, she pointed out, the words only a little smudged here and there.

The sea captain nodded. The balloon could have landed anywhere, he said, sunk anywhere. The water would have carried the party's belongings miles from where they died. With time, their bodies would have been dispersed in this way as well.

Or, my mother said, he could have deliberately thrown it overboard.
A clue
, she called it, as though the whole thing—my father, the balloon, the years of waiting, all of it—was no more than a puzzle waiting to be solved.

Every love story begins with a discovery: amidst the ordinary, the sublime.

This is how it begins.

My mother and her sisters were crossing the road in the town of Sumpter, North Dakota, when a buggy stopped in front of her and a man leaped out. He wore a tall hat, wide red suspenders. His boots were covered in mud, his coat filthy and ragged along the hem, but he walked up to my mother as though they'd known each other all their lives.

“Good afternoon.” He stood there, smiling at her.

My mother had never seen a smile like his. It was a smile like a magician's, full of hidden wonders.

“Allow me to introduce myself,” he said, tipping his hat, and her sisters giggled into their handkerchiefs.

My mother had never set foot outside of Sumpter. Her family was close-knit, clannish, five girls born to a Virginia preacher who'd ended up in a dusty town in the middle of nowhere because the Lord commanded him so. His wife liked to remind anyone who would listen that the Lord hadn't commanded
her
to go anywhere. She would have stayed in Virginia forever, if anyone cared. She would have stayed there till the end of time.

There wasn't much for my mother and her sisters to do in Sumpter. They spent long afternoons sewing on the porch, watching the dusty streets turn copper-colored in the sun.

But my mother was not quite like her sisters. She'd been taken to the town physician frequently as a child, because she did strange things to her body even God couldn't seem to explain. She ripped the nail clean off her thumb once because, she said, she wanted to see her hand plainly. She took a pair of scissors to her braid and chopped the whole thing off, the curls that remained so short her ears showed through like little shells. She slipped out to where the prairie grasses grew high as her shoulders, pulled her dress over her head, and ran through those arid, sweet-smelling fields until her legs buckled under her; she lay there a long time, breathing hard into the hot alluvial soil, letting the bloody taste of it settle across her tongue. She didn't know how to read, but she spent long hours bent over the Bible, moving her lips in a way that might have suggested to anyone who didn't know her that she was praying. She had desires she didn't have words for.

No man will want a wild woman for a wife
, her mother told her, not unkindly.

A wild man will
, my mother said, and her sisters laughed, because the way she said it made it sound true.

At night, my mother sneaked out to sit on the porch. She needed to breathe, she told her sisters. She couldn't for the life of her understand how anyone slept cooped up like that. She curled herself into the rocking chair, still as a cat. Counted the stars in the sky, memorized the pinprick pattern they punched into the blue. With a little concentration, she found, she could float up among them. Vanish from the porch, the still, too-close air. In the wink of an eye, escape.

This was one of the first things she told my father when he came to call on her the next day.

I should warn you
, she said, eyeing him as she used her pinky to coax a sugar tornado up from the bottom of her glass of lemonade.
I have a habit of disappearing
.

But he just tapped his chest and smiled his magician's smile.
Ask me what I do for a living
.

This is how it begins.

My father, Thomas Hamblen, stands on the narrow strip of shoreline. Overhead, the sky burns a brilliant blue. It is late August, and a breeze ripples the surface of the lake. The air at this early evening hour is already cool, but comfortably so. Even a man unaccustomed to the cold could spend the night outdoors without complaint.

My father eases himself down in front of the water, stretching his back against the gravelly sand. He wears a long-sleeved shirt and cotton pants. Slowly, deliberately, he removes his socks.

He has been home for five days. He is afraid he might be losing his mind.

Over the course of the past fifteen years, my father has traveled to the Arctic and back a total of three times. He came within an estimated sixty-odd miles of the North Pole—so close, he tells my mother, he could taste it. He went first as a boy, chosen for his speed and agility. Later, because he retained a boy's hunger for the unknown. He goes where few other men dare. He does so willingly, eagerly. For this reason, he is respected by other explorers. Admired, even. This does not protect him from anything.

For example, loss. He has lost so much by this point it hardly registers when he loses it all over again, his memory stretched over time to a dangerous thinness. What did he lose? A fellow expedition member. A photograph. Ammunition. Mementos—lockets, pocketknives, letters. They slid into the water when an ice floe cracked, or they fell out of his jacket, or he traded them for something necessary, something that in the moment drew the line between life and death. There are nights he lies, sleepless, beside my mother and tries to add it all up: five men, sixteen dogs, five pounds of dried meat plus ten pounds of beans, two notebooks . . . but it is a futile exercise. He gives up and goes back to counting sheep. Easier arithmetic. Or he gets out of the warm bed and goes into the kitchen, where he pours himself whiskey after whiskey, drinking until the numbers disappear.

There are moments on his expeditions, trekking across snow so brilliant its light seems thrown from some alien sun, when my father stops abruptly, drops his head in his hands. He pretends to cough, to sneeze, to wipe at the tiny icicles forming at the corners of his eyes. He has to, to hide what his companions on these long journeys cannot see: he is in love. His face, like a schoolboy's, would give him away.

Now he lies back against the damp stones and watches the setting sun bleed into the blue. Clouds shuttle back and forth, pinking up around their edges until they glow like flesh in candlelight. High above the pine trees, a pair of sharp-shinned hawks turn lazy circles, scouting out mice and voles.

My father shuts his eyes, squeezing until red stars explode against the black.

He blinks, and the sky opens above him like an invitation.

What did the Pole taste like?

Like dirty metal. Like salt. Like this, he tells my mother, and she waits, eyes closed, lips parted for a kiss.

The months between expeditions are never easy. In the absence of imminent disaster, my father finds himself listless, irritable. His appetite vanishes; his body softens like fruit. Days pass and he loses himself in their passing, the predictable sameness of one morning to the next. He loses hours to sleep, or to some strange fugue state between sleeping and waking from which he starts as though from a nightmare, finding himself in the middle of some small task he has no recollection of having begun. He walks outside to fetch water from the creek and wakes with an ax in his hand, his head leaning against the rough, sweet-smelling trunk of a white pine. He opens his battered copy of
Origin of Species
and finds himself on the shore an hour later, left hand aching, as though feeling the loss of those fingers anew. He finds a pencil and sits on a log, copying lines into his notebook until the pain ebbs from his palm.
Great as are the differences between the breeds of the pigeon
. . . he switches the pencil to his right hand, forcing his wrist to curve in a way still unnatural. Over the years, the muscles in those fingers have gained only a little more fluidity, but he keeps at it.
Anticipate the worst
, a fellow explorer once told him—this one of the men now gone, succumbed to something or other in lands unknown.
The only surprise should be finding yourself alive
.

One afternoon a few weeks after he arrives home, my father goes into the kitchen and puts his arms around my mother. He is not a man given to regret, but on this afternoon, the world honeyed by the warm September light, he feels suddenly heavy with it, a sadness that sits on his chest like a stone. He tells my mother he has been a fool to leave her all these years. He says she is what he thinks of every night he is gone. That she is what saves him. When he is with her, he tells her, the cold that has a hold on his body retreats a little. Retracts its claws. He is nothing without her, he tells her. A no one. He is hardly a man at all.

Please
, he says.

Forgive me
, he says.

For a moment, she stands perfectly still. Through the window, the pine trees are moving their feathered branches in the breeze, the cool, clean smell of them so strong she can feel the rutted surface of their bark beneath her hands, feel the sap lacing itself stickily across her palms.

Then all at once—chattering, her voice too loud—she ducks out from under his arm.
Look!
she says, pushing up her sleeve. Look how strong she's gotten! She makes him feel the sinewy muscles along her shoulder. She has been chopping wood all spring and summer. She put up ten jars of huckleberry jam and ate enough fresh berries she worried her skin might turn blue. There were bears up along the mountainside where the huckleberries grow. She counts off on her fingers: a family of four, two young ones, a mother and three cubs, a solitary giant—male, she thinks. She crept away—so, so quietly—and made it home with her store intact. She caught trout in the stream and dried and smoked it for winter. She made friends with their neighbors in the next cove and has been taking the coach with the wife, Bernice, into town for supplies every few weeks. She stitched a new quilt for their bed. She taught herself how to crochet. She embroidered three separate pillows, one for each chair. She went swimming every afternoon, for hours and hours—See how strong she is? How brown? She thrusts her arm out again. Only two bad storms, and what little damage there was she cleaned up easily. The sun after this long winter a blessing, she says. The sun its own God, she says, making heaven out of—she shakes her head, brushing something off the front of her dress. Heaven, she says. End of story, she says.

He looks at her and sees she is desperately unhappy.

The sun sails from one side of the lake to the other. As it mounts, the air grows heavy with heat. The birds thin out. They retreat into the woods, though the pair of hawks remains, riding air currents carelessly back and forth. When they sight something—a fish sliding under the surface of the lake, a mouse scrabbling through the tangle of huckleberries—they release a thin, high whistle. As the afternoon stretches on, the air cools, and other birds begin to reappear—loons and grebes, the tiny gray-tailed Grunter finch. My father watches the birds coast back and forth, retreating and advancing toward land. By the time the sun begins to slip toward the lake, the bats have joined in, dim shapes flicking back and forth across the water, sailing low to scoop up the bugs congregating just above the surface.