Gunflint by Ashley Shelby

      My father popped Nicorette gum like ludes. They came in boxes of twenty, and at Sam’s Club, the boxes came in large cardboard cartons, two hundred boxes of gum a carton. My father preferred the orange-flavored gum, but he could make do with original flavor in a pinch. Tiny squares of foil and plastic occupied every crevice of the driver and passenger sides of the front seat. I brushed a few empty packets off the armrest and buckled in.

     “Won the book,” he said.

     “Which book?”

     “Sweeps. November.”

     “Congrats,” I said.

     “Yeah.”

     “It was Dick Grinch’s last book, too,” my mother shouted from the backseat.

     “What, he’s retiring?”

     “Nope,” my father said. “Two million from L.A., and he took it. It was his last book in town.” My father was a local television anchor who’d been with the same station for nearly twenty-five years. He was well known around town, and very well liked. A good journalist, a guy who got out from behind the anchor desk regularly, the type of guy who might win a Peabody for some piece about oil spills or Romanian orphans, then host the Holidazzle Parade downtown or something. Folks liked him. He let his hair go white, except for brief and unfortunate dealings with Grecian Formula, widely discussed in the local newspapers—“Gosling’s Grecian Gaffe” and “What’s faker than a TV anchor pompadour? A dyed TV anchor pompadour.” Overall, though, Dad was the man in town—except for the ten o’clock show, which he always lost to this guy Grinch. Grinch had been at the rival station for about fifteen years and had never done anything except anchor and preside over butter-carving contests at the state fair. He was pretty. That was enough to win books anymore. The demographic loved him.

     “I never liked Grinch,” I said.

     “Now Billie,” my mother said. “Be generous.”

     “Only time he gets out from behind the anchor desk is to take a shit,” I said.

     “Think she might be my daughter?” my father called back to my mother.

     “Whatever,” my mother said. “I’m reading.”

     May hadn’t come home for Christmas so my mother had decided that Christmas would be spent anywhere but home, except the dog had to come, and she had to sit in the front seat. But she hadn’t wanted to sit in the front seat because my father had one of those expensive big cars that was good for off-roading (except no one ever did any off-roading in it) and had features like an ass-warmer built into the passenger seat. The dog couldn’t find a comfortable position and so kept jumping in the backseat with Mom and me.

     “Well Jesus, somebody get up here already or else I’ll be the asshole chauffeur,” my father had shouted at us.

     We passed a taconite harbor outside of Duluth, where the houses were perched on cliffs, slightly inclining over the lake like passers-by straining to get a better look at an accident.

     “What do you know about taconite, Billie?” my father asked.

     “Nothing.” I heard my mother’s explosive sigh from the backseat.

     “Mining 101. Tac is a low-grade iron ore made into steel,” my father said. “Long time was considered a waste rock. Not used. Shit. Worse than shit, cause shit can be used to fertilize. Tac was useless. But when the natural ore took a hike, suddenly you had to make steel out of shit.” My father spit out a wad of nicotine gum, a small gray stone by this time, into his hand, let the window down a little and tossed it out.

     “Nice,” I said.

     “That’ll become part of the highway, four days, tops. It’ll become part of the asphalt. Highways across the country are made up of gum.”

     “Reminds me of the game Candyland you girls used to play,” my mother said absently.

     “It’s exactly like Candyland,” my father said.

     May had come home after college, found a little apartment in uptown Minneapolis, brooded in coffee shops, done some babysitting and dog walking and met Mom for drinks every night at a suburban bowling alley where the bartender called Mom “Delly” after his dead wife, and treated her to sixteen ounce Buds. One day May bought a used Acura, packed the trunk, and, without telling Mom, drove to California to be with her ex-boyfriend, a boy who shaved his armpits and dealt pot. My mother took to her bed for weeks, sobbing, and compulsively grooming Pinky, our dog. Although I was in New York, slaving away in a window-less office high above the East River transcribing documentaries and participating in unfortunate, ambiguous relationships with strange men, and even though there were moments when I thought perhaps I wanted to come home, especially recently, my mother never called to ask me to come home the way she did May. My mother was in mourning, I knew.

     But so was I. There was a man back in New York, in a quiet, empty apartment not so far from my own, and we no longer spoke. It had been a friendship that had taken root as quickly as a noxious weed: deceptive flower, ruined habitat, everything else choked out, and my life eroded to the point that the only thing that lived in it was him. There was an ex-boyfriend—his—and a deaf, overweight cat—also his—and a thousand unspoken, confused inclinations to vanquish one another and to succumb to each other that coalesced into slavish devotion, and, finally, hatred.

     It had been three months since I’d committed an unspecified transgression, one for which I’d blindly and uncharacteristically apologized after the first month of silence. For whatever I’ve done, I wrote to him, I’m sorry. I miss you. His hatred of me was impatient, but durable. Over three months, my despair became hatred, too. But my hatred was patient, and for that reason, I knew my revenge would be fully formed, unlike his, which had proved hurried and imperfect. I just needed one more element, and it was that last component that was the most elusive: the desire to carry out the revenge. I knew that desire would only appear in the place of the hope of reconciliation, and somehow that hope hadn’t died in me yet. It was my involuntary hope that was proving durable—perhaps more durable than his hatred. But I was determined to extinguish hope, and maybe all it would take would be a very cold climate.

     The Gunflint Lodge had started as a small fishing camp in the 1920’s, when the trail was first built for loggers. My father had once done a news story on the famous Justine Kerfoot, matriarch of the lodge, of the trail, of the whole Minnesota north woods. He said she’d died at the age of ninety-four, hours after returning from her daily seven-mile, snow-shoed journey to check her line of fox traps.

     As we neared the end of the Gunflint Trail, the roadside lights began to buzz and flicker on. I rolled down the window a crack and let the smell of cold northern night stream into the car. Pinky lifted her nose to catch the fresh air, her ears flattened against her head and her eyes closed.

     “Now Billie,” my father said. “Get used to the idea of solitude.”

     “I think I’ve got a pretty good grasp on that concept, Dad.” My father was not one to follow up on vague statements unless they were made about him. And even then, if he sensed they might be unflattering, he’d pretend he hadn’t heard them. He reached over to the radio and turned it off.

     “What I’m saying is that there’s not going to be a soul at the Lodge after we check in. They’re letting their folks spend Christmas with their families. They let us come up here as a special favor to me.”

     “What about food?” I asked.

     “ They’ve pre-cooked our meals, left ‘em in the fridge. We’ve got the whole joint to ourselves. They’ll check us in and then hand us the key to the kingdom, Billie. ‘Cause it is a kingdom. You’ll see that right away.”

     A sharp right off the trail, past the volunteer fire station, the frozen creek, cabins eleven, ten, one, and two, and a left at the Kerfoot cottage, and we pulled up to the Lodge. Pinky whimpered, and my mother placed a benevolent palm on the dog’s head. My father opened the door of the car, and as he was about to slam it shut, he froze. He cocked his head, and smiled.

     “Wolves,” he said. I got out of the car and listened. A doleful wail seemed to come from just beyond the stand of birch that lined the service road. In answer, the sled dogs penned just past the outfitters on the hill next to the creek began yowling.

     “I learned how to call wolves when I did that story on that National Geographic photographer living up near Ely,” my father said. “He used to stalk ‘em; could call them just by cupping his hands together and howling. Sounded more like a yowl, actually. But he did a lot of romancing of those wolves up there. One of the most beautiful things I’d ever heard was the sound of an alpha male answering that man’s call across White Iron Lake.” We three were quiet for a minute.

     “Wolf’s nose,” I said to my mom, and she laughed. My father frowned at us and walked into the lodge to check in. It was a shady move on my part, making fun of my father, but it was the only thing I did that my mother enjoyed, one of the only things I did that drew her attention.

     Growing up, every Halloween, I’d watched as May dressed up as a princess, a fairy, a ballerina, a poodle-skirt wearing bobby soxer, and Annie. Every year my father helped May into her roles by painting exaggerated, arching eyebrows over her tiny brow, by anointing her temples with glitter, and by roughly rubbing rouge into her cheeks, barking at her when she winced: “Getting pretty isn’t all fun and games, May!” I sat on the sofa during these annual makeup sessions, affecting great boredom. As a child, I’d watched May perform plays for our parents (“Torture Theater”, my father called it) while I was relegated just off-stage as “lighting manager”, gripping flashlights in my hands and wielding them like a man on an airport runway. My sister skipped across the back deck, turning cartwheels, pretending to blush, and trying out other talents at frenetic speed, as if my parents’ attention was something that gave diminishing returns.

     May had been encouraged to be a girl. She’d worn dresses to school. She “did” her hair in the morning before catching the bus. Mom gave her “baby manicures” every Saturday night during The Facts of Life. But one Halloween, my father suggested he help me with my costume.

     The dining room table had been pushed to the left wall and a single chair was placed in the middle of the room.

     “This is going to be very hard on her, Bill,” my mother called from the kitchen. “You know how she gets.” My father’s stage makeup kit, a relic from his Air Force days (he never told me why an airman would need a makeup kit), was open on a plant stand next to his elbow. That evening, I’d watched as my father turned May into Mary Lou Retton (“just a very light gloss on the lips; she is a very natural girl, you know”). Then I watched as my father stuffed our Sheltie, Pixie, into a tiny blue and white clown suit, and set off a frenzy by trying to affix a foam red nose on the dog’s snout (“She can’t breathe, Bill!” Mom had screamed.) Now it was finally my turn.

     “I would like to be a punk rocker girl,” I said. “I want to look exactly like the girls who hang out at the punk McDonalds in Uptown.” Dad snorted.

     “C’mon Billie, try to be original. There’ll be about a hundred and twenty punk rocker girls hitting the pavement tonight. Remember, what have I always said the goal is?” I shrugged.

     “I don’t remember.”

     “Yes, you do,” he said.

     “To be memorable,” I said.

     “Memorable and required,” my father said. “Be necessary to people, to someone. So, let’s try this again. What do you want to be this year?”

     “I don’t know.”

     “Well, I’ve been thinking about this a lot, Billie. And I think that I have the perfect idea.”

     “Okay,” I said.

     “Alright, just sit tight then, and don’t ask any questions until the end.” My father looked at Pixie, who was sitting by the fireplace, clawing at the clown suit.

     “Pixie!” he shouted. The dog leapt to its feet and tip-tapped across the hardwood floor towards him. My father unzipped the clown suit halfway and ran his hand over the dog’s fluffy brown hair. “Hey Roberta!” he shouted. “Bring me the dog’s brush.”

     Twenty minutes after I’d sat down, after a thin coating of rubber cement slathered over my cheeks, and after my father had stuck tufts of Pixie’s hair onto the rubber cement, my father began furiously kneading a rubber nose he’d picked up at the drug store. My mother appeared in the doorway of the dining room, her arms crossed. I squinted at the rubber nose.

     “What’s that, Dad?” I asked. He shook his head three times—short, snappish movements that were meant to convey his great frustration with the question.

     “Wolf’s nose,” he snarled, then looked at me. “For a werewolf. Keep remembering what it is you’re going to become. Halloween is about disguise, not fantasy, Billie. And if it requires a goddamn rubber wolf’s nose, then you grit your teeth and wear it.” For some reason, that moment—that angry “wolf’s nose”—had become code for my father’s bad behavior, his anti-hero tendencies, and my mother and I traded it back and forth like a password. It seemed to have been the only moment when our respective perceptions of Bill Gosling had overlapped. I forgot he was perfect for a moment, and for that same moment, my mother remembered why she never thought he had been. That tiny spot of shading, the infinitesimal no-man’s-land in the Goslings’ geography of perception, was too small to name, but it contained a city.

     he next morning, I padded into the living room of our cabin to find my mother with her nose inches away from the plate glass window looking onto the lake. A bull moose was staring back at her.

     “Brmmph!” my mother snorted.

     “Mom?”

     “Hold on.” She took two steps to the left, and crunched a Nicorette pack under her right foot. “Damn these fucking things! Brrmph!” The moose’s nostrils flared and he raised his head. “I can get him to sneeze,” my mother said, her back to me. “He’s about to do it. Brrmph!”

     Suddenly the moose turned his head to look at something out of sight, near the woods. He stared at it for a moment, then bolted to the frozen lake and disappeared behind a curve in the shore. My mother turned away from the window and walked over to the coffeemaker. “Coffee?” she asked sadly.

     “You guys see that bull moose outside?” my father shouted as he stamped the snow off his boots in the foyer. “I got an incredible photo. Profile shot. Regal fella’.”

     “Yeah, we saw him,” I said.

     “Where’s the dog?” my mother asked.

     “Checking out the scene near the birdfeeder.”

     “Did she poop?”

     “She peed.”

     “But did she poop?”

     “Maybe. I don’t know,” my father said.

     “Well, how far did you take her?”

     “Up to the sliding hill and then across to the dog pen, but not too close. It was a good half-mile.”

     “Did she poop?”

     “I didn’t see her do it, Roberta,” my father said, “but she might’ve gone behind a bush or something when I wasn’t looking, when she’d run up ahead,” he said. My mother handed him a cup of coffee and slumped into a chair near the fireplace.

     “She holds it,” my mother said absently.

     “Why?” I asked.

     “Because she saves it all up for her walks.”

     “What if you don’t have time for a walk?”

     “Constipation,” my father said. “And sometimes even when she gets a walk. If it’s not the kind of walk she wants—right duration, right scenery—she won’t shit. It’s really catch-as-catch-can for your mother and me ever since you girls left.”

     “Why since we left?”

     “She’s the only child now,” my father said. “She knows she can afford to toe the line.”

     “May hasn’t called,” my mother said.

     “She will,” my father said.

     We all looked at the tiny fake Christmas tree my mother had brought from home and stuck in a corner of the little living room. It was strung with colored lights that blinked. There were a couple presents beneath it.

     “Anybody see my gum?” my father asked.

     “In the console of the car?” I offered.

     “Nope. Roberta?”

     “Why would I know where that nasty stuff is?”

     “I’m using it to get off the cigars,” he said to me. “When was the last time you saw me with a cigar in my mouth?”

     “You always have that gum in your mouth now,” my mother said. “Isn’t room for a cigar.” My mother walked back to the kitchen, poured her coffee into the sink, and set the empty mug upside down on the counter.

     “You gonna bother to wash that or anything?” my father asked.

     “Wake me back up if May calls,” she said, and went back to bed.

     My father and I sat across the kitchen table from one another, sipping our coffee. Dad looked tired. Beneath his red plaid hunting cap, his forehead was deeply lined by thought wrinkles, as neat and evenly spaced as pleats. When he wasn’t smiling, the crow’s feet around both of his eyes pulled the corners of his eyelids down so that he looked sad and pensive. After two days of not shaving in preparation for the aesthetic demands of the north woods, tiny shoots of gray and white hair had appeared above his upper lip and in the crease below his bottom lip.

     “It’s just that May and her are birds of a feather,” my father said. The dog scratched at the door and my father got up to let her in. She bounded across the living room floor, shuddering and shaking the snow out of her coat and nosed up to me, expecting praise.

     “Get,” I said half-heartedly. Pinky sat down next to me. My father grunted as he sat back in his chair. He picked up his coffee mug, tipped it about forty-five degrees, and peered at the dregs. He sighed.

     “You know we’re two peas and all that, Billie, but your mother was always a little afraid of you. I think it says something that your mother is afraid of you. Means you’ve got two brain cells to rub together. She was always scared of smarts. And I guess all I’m saying is that there’s no need get blue over the show your mother is putting on about May not being here for Christmas. Your presence is appreciated. Just brings a different kind of comfort.”

     “Yeah, the kind that’s uncomfortable,” I said. But my father was replaying his speech in his head, and didn’t seem to hear me. I tried to smile at him, but I thought—I hoped—he knew his skills at bullshitting had been supplanted by my ability to recognize bullshit when I heard it.

     I shut the bathroom door and dialed my home voice mail in New York. When I was out of town, I did it twice a day—9 A.M. and 9 P.M. But ever since I’d lost my friend, I’d been dialing it seven or eight times a day on my father’s cell phone. I sat on the edge of the bathtub and listened.

     “Fucking cunt.”

     I replayed it, listening to the robot woman’s clipped and perfect voice, the round vowels, the hard consonants, and the emphases just slightly off.

     Voice. Call. Received…today—at—four-twenty-three a.m.

     Pause. An angry sigh. The sound of a door slamming or a cabinet being closed with a too much force, or a hand coming down hard on the linoleum of an imperfectly purple and white tiled kitchen counter where open tins of cat food were hidden beneath overturned coffee mugs, a kitchen counter I’d scrubbed with Tilex on a Saturday morning while he watched.

     “Fucking cunt.” Click.

     To replay message, press 1.

     “Billie? You in there?”

     “Yeah?”

     “We’re going to do a circuit of the snowshoe trail. Meet us out on the deck, I’ve got your snowshoes.” I heard my father walk away, then walk back to the door.

     “Billie?”

     “Yeah?”

     “Have you seen my gum?”

     “Wasn’t it in the pocket of your coat?” My father walked away from the bathroom door quickly. My mother had thrown my father’s stash in the trashcan in the bathroom. She hadn’t just thrown the boxes in the bin; she’d popped each gray square out, poured water over them, then covered them with tissue paper blotted with her lipstick, to give the illusion of menstrual blood.

     I hung up the phone and stared at the towel hanging on the rack in front of me. Someone had stitched a small Alaskan Husky into the bottom right-hand corner. Its long pink tongue was exaggerated, unfolding from that place between his lower canines to the snow bank at his feet, and his eyes bulged from the sockets. In the upper left hand corner was a female moose who had just emerged from the shower; her little bath towel had slipped off her shoulder and she looked at the Husky coyly.

     I looked at the phone in my hand. I imagined what I would say to him if he were to pick up, answering in that soft, innocent, boyish voice he affected when he answered phones—hoping he sounded young, hoping he sounded cute. That was how he’d gotten half his sales when he was telemarketing in his twenties. I thought of all the little calamities that had befallen him since he had abandoned me. The unfortunate haircut. The bad chemical peel—his seventh—that had left him temporarily red and which had deepened his permanent humiliation. The failures at work. I never wondered who it was ringing my buzzer at four in the morning once every two weeks, but I was never brave enough to answer and have that final conversation. With it left unresolved, I could have that conversation in my head ten times a day for the rest of my life and never abandon hope.

     The snowshoes were highly engineered affairs, the kind of sleek instruments that snowshoes were not meant to be. My father had picked up three pairs of the most ergonomically advanced snowshoes on the market—an investment, he said, in our health and our happiness—and my mother and I studied them on the deck of the cabin.

     “I thought snowshoes were made of wood and catgut,” I said.

     “I thought I’d be sitting in front of the fire with a beer and a pack of Trivia Pursuit cards in my hand,” my mother said. She spat in the snow, and I watched as it landed, turning into a tiny reddish lump.

     “What’s that?” I asked.

     “I just flossed,” she said. “Gingivitis.”

     “Might want to get that checked out,” I said.

      “Yeah, whatever.” The front door rattled open and Pinky and my father came out, both of them inspecting my mother and me.

     “You’re gonna get hot,” he said to my mother.

     “I’m cold now.”

     “Yeah but once you start up that hill, that heart gets racing, you’re gonna get hot. I’d take off about three of those sweaters.”

     “I’m fine, Bill.”

     “Dad, don’t you think we ought to take it easy on account of Mom’s heart anyway?”

     “Heart only gets better when you work it. It’ll slip to a few beats a month if you don’t work it out.” He picked up a pair of spectacular purple and fuchsia metal snowshoes and handed them to me. “These are the second best snowshoes made. From the Catalyst series—adjustable toe yoke, titanium toe crampons, all that. Try ‘em on for size.”

     “Please tell me you rented these, Dad.”

     “Roberta—these are yours.”

     “I told you to try calling me Delly. I prefer it.”

     “God damn it, Roberta, I am not calling you Delly. A woman your age doesn’t just acquire a nickname. Especially a bullshit one that means nothing. It’s not a logical derivative of Roberta. Not logical. Now strap those shoes on. Billie, help your mother.” Pinky nosed around the snow bank next to the porch and began digging at the tiny cavern created by my mother’s bloody spit wad. I grabbed her collar and pulled her back.

     “Quit,” I said. Pinky looked up at me dejectedly and sat down, casting glances at the snow bank. Dad removed his snowshoes from a nylon sack he’d been keeping under the bed he and Mom were sharing in the cabin.

     “Now, Billie, feast your eyes on the best snowshoes made on earth. You can cross the Antarctic continent on these babies. And guys do.” The shoes looked like a piece of modern art you might see at MOMA, an unclassified geometric vision of hell or heaven. “This is the Piranha 20321 model. Bladder molded carbon fiber frame—say that three times fast.” He strapped them on his feet. “And Hypalon decking.”

     We had gone about a quarter mile past the main lodge before Mom stopped trying. My father was at the top of Husky Hill with Pinky, and he turned to check on our progress. I could see his face fall.

     “What’s she doing?” he called down to me.

     “Stopping,” I called back.

     “I’m bored,” my mother said.

     “She’s bored,” I shouted to my father. He took his sunglasses off and cleaned them with the tail of his flannel, which was sticking out below his North Face jacket.

     “Why do I have to do something I don’t want to do?” my mother asked me. “Be somewhere I don’t want to be?”

     “Wolf’s nose,” I said. My father started snowshoeing towards us. My mother waved him back.

     “Stay! Go do your circuit, don’t bother about me, Bill! Please!”

     “What’s wrong with you, Roberta?” my father asked when he got close enough. “You tired?”

     “I just don’t find this fun, Bill.”

     “Roberta.”

     “May could be calling right now,” she said.

     “I’ve got my cell phone,” he said, and patted himself down. “Or, I did.”

     “See, that’s what I’m saying, Bill. I really don’t want to miss the holiday call because we’re too busy snowshoeing up some hill that the sled dogs use for shit creek.” My father appealed to me.

     “Billie?” I couldn’t seem to find my voice.

     “She’s not having fun, either,” my mother said. “Don’t force her to do something she doesn’t want to do.” My mother’s face brightened and her cheeks reddened not with shame but with vigor. She took a clumsy step towards my father with her left snowshoe. “You’ve been doing that her whole life, Bill. You forced the girls to make you into a hero and then you hold on to it for too long, trying to impress them with trivia and long sermons on obscure subjects.” I’d never heard my mother speak full sentences like this, filled with words I’d never heard her use. “You think you’re a hero, but only one of your daughters is even polite enough to keep up the charade. It’s embarrassing. Don’t you see that?” My father’s thin lips almost disappeared as he pulled them into a tight frown.

     “I guess I do now, Roberta,” he said. He turned around, thrust his poles into the snow and propelled himself into a snow-shoed run back up Husky Hill.

     After dinner, my mother watched as I opened small presents she’d stuffed into a Christmas stocking with my name stitched down the side. Two eye shadows. A can of shaving cream. A manicure kit. Tic-Tacs. A tube of mascara. My father hadn’t returned from his circuit around the lodge grounds, but Pinky had trotted back alone. I gave my mother her Christmas present, an oversized locket with a fairy embossed on the front. It hung from a chain of tiny interlocking hearts. I told her she could put someone’s picture in the locket, that there was space for two. She smiled and said thank you, and then she opened May’s present. It was in a thin, oblong box, the kind ties come in.

     “Maybe it’s a neckerchief,” I said, hoping for a smile. But my mother was intensely focused on removing the wrapping paper—hummingbirds with Santa caps on—without tearing it so she could use it next Christmas. As she lifted the top off and removed the thin white gauze that covered the gift, I heard her suck in her breath. She put a hand over her mouth.

     “Jesus,” I said. “What is it?” I picked the box off the ground and saw that May had sent my mother a plane ticket to San Francisco. She’d written a note on the back of a grocery store receipt that said: “I miss you, Mom.” I closed the box and set it on the arm of the sofa. I patted my mother’s knee.

     “See, Mom” I said. “You are missed.”

     I walked along the frozen creek that ran a few a yards past the dog camp. My father was still gone and my mother had locked herself in the bedroom with a glass of wine, my father’s cell phone, Pinky, and Pinky’s grooming brush, and called May. After waiting for her in the living room with the VCR, and Rosalind Russell, on pause for an hour, I decided to take a walk.

     Outside, the constellations were as clear as a good map, and I could see faces and figures in the sky. Once, walking on the piers in Chelsea with the man back in New York, I had seen a few pinpricks of starlight on a clear, cold night.

     “Those are planes and satellites, Billie,” he’d said then. “You make machines into stars. Anything can be beautiful at a distance. That’s why I make it a point never to get too close.” I knew he had been right, that up close nothing was perfect, nothing was lovely, and he’d lost his head and let me get close and I’d ruined the illusion. Up close I was imperfect and I was ugly, and I could never be forgiven for my imperfection and my proximity.

     I imagined the only way to ruin the hope was to make the city we had to share an icy, frozen place like Gunflint, covered in snow, hardened into a shell, clean, and the kind of place where you could disappear. If I saw him on the street, that thin, miserable figure in the gray jacket with the fur-trimmed hood never pulled over that perfect head, (those long, deliberate strides, the gait of an escapee), I would remember it wasn’t really him, but only one of a million strangers. Because, I knew, no one was more of a stranger than someone who used to love you, whom you used to love.

     I began to turn back to see if my father had returned, but a cool, low wail from what felt like feet away stopped me. I waited, frozen. A cooler, lower wail came from just past Husky Hill. It was joined by the voices of more wolves, and lasted for a full minute. The first howl sounded again, and I saw, beneath the flood-lamp outside the volunteer fire station, my father, his hands cupped to his mouth, his snowshoes still strapped to his feet. He dropped his head, as if in prayer, and waited for an answer from beyond the snowshoeing trail. I wanted to laugh, to say “wolf’s nose”—to ruin the moment, to extinguish it, and him, because he was necessary to someone and I wasn’t anymore. But the wolves sounded so close, so I kept still and watched the dark space before us. I wished I could disappear into that black I was staring into, yet remain just alive enough to listen.