Snowbound

SEVENTY-SIX

It had been a little over two months since they’d landed in Anchorage, weeks that had taken years to pass. For five of them, Rachael had undergone treatment and counseling at the psychiatric hospital in Denver. But these last few weeks, leading up to Christmas Eve, they’d been together, seeing if the pieces still fit in that quaint farmhouse in Mancos, Colorado. Devlin wasn’t sick, and Rachael was eight and a half months pregnant. They’d hired a midwife out of Farmington, New Mexico, to attend the home birth, expecting to have a little one in the first or second week of the new year. Will was coming to terms with the fact that the child in that enormous belly of Rachael’s didn’t possess a single chromosome of his DNA.

He remembered Devlin’s birth, sixteen years ago, could still recall the lightning that had struck when she’d come screaming into the world, still teared up thinking about it—that fierce, inexorable love that had altered everything he thought he knew about priorities. What kept him up lately, these long December nights, was the fear that he wouldn’t feel those things when this baby came, wondered how you faked a thing like that, how you raised something you didn’t feel belonged to you.

He prayed to God every night that the lightning would strike again.

It had been a cool, dry Christmas Eve, and much to the Innises’ delight, little snow had fallen so far this season in the Mancos Valley. You could see patches of it gleaming under the sun or the moon on the rim of Mesa Verde, and the La Platas were buried above ten thousand feet. But the pasture out back stood bare; the river slacked off to a trickle. No snow lingered under the spruce trees that enclosed the farmhouse. There wasn’t even a fading patch to be found in the north-facing shadows—Devlin had gone looking that afternoon.

She was thriving, out of school for Christmas vacation and spending all her time with her mother—hoisting Rachael out of chairs, cooking for her, cleaning, helping to prepare the nursery in what had been an empty bedroom when she and her father were on their own.

It was only at night when she thought of Alaska, in bed, buried under covers, listening to the wind blow through the firs. A few nights ago, a pack of coyotes had moved through the pasture. Their yaps woke her at 3:00 A.M.—evil, mocking laughter—and she sat up in bed, thought for half a second she was back in the Wolverine Hills, saw that huge white wolf with raging pink eyes standing at the foot of her bed.

She’d thrown back the covers and walked into the kitchen, poured herself a glass of water, and sat down at the table, listening to them howl until her hands quit trembling.

One of Rachael’s therapists in Denver had said something that applied to them all. If you let fear take hold, if you let it own you, your life ceases to be your own. She’d even given them a motto, a creed—concise, profane, and unforgettable. Devlin had glanced at the refrigerator clipboard where Will had scribbled it in black Magic Marker, thrice underscored.

Fuck the fear.