The Cloud Atlas

“No,” I said. “She's Yup'ik.” Glances were exchanged; I must have gotten the pronunciation close. “Well, Yup'ik and Russian.”

“Lily!” one of the other guys said with a shout and smile. Suddenly they were all talking. “How's our Lily?” “How's that girl?” “She still tall and pretty as anything?” Then one guy gushed, “Wasn't there a kid? How's he doin'?” and the other two frowned and fell silent.

No one said anything for a moment, and if you'd asked me, in that very instant, if I'd ever be able to speak again, I'm not sure if I'd have said yes. I'd been asked to believe a lot of things over the course of the war-that bombs could float through the air for thousands of miles, that teenagers could be given guns after a few weeks of training and be called soldiers, that the frozen-solid emptiness of Alaska was of strategic importance-but now I was being asked to believe that Lily had once been pregnant, had had a child.

The Yup'ik man who'd first questioned me looked up. “You're going to want to see Auntie Bella,” he said. “She's going to want to know about Lily, what she's doing and all.” He gave me directions, and when he finished speaking, it was clear I was to leave, immediately, without asking another thing.

BELLA: THAT NAME PROMISED someone huge, and round, and, I assumed, Yup'ik. But Bella was as thin and worn and white as the wooden posts that held up the porch outside her small boardinghouse.

Before I could say anything, she told me she had no vacancies, but when I told her I had news of Lily, she reluctantly let me in. Bella asked a lot of questions, mostly about Lily's health. Whenever I tried to ask a question, she interrupted with another one, asking questions about me when she'd run out of ones about Lily.

A noise outside distracted her and I jumped in. “One of the men I met, he said something about a kid-Lily has a child? Here?”

Bella gave me a hard look. “If she didn't tell you, don't imagine she wanted you to know,” Bella said, and we sat in silence for a bit.

Finally, Bella spoke up. “Wasn't no kid” she said. We sat a while longer. “I'm thinking about telling you a story,” she said. “But if I do, it's only because I want you to feel bad for having asked.”

“I already do,” I said. She snorted, and then got up and left the room. When she returned, she had a single, steaming mug of something, which she put on the table. After a moment, she picked it up and took a sip.

“I'm down to the one decent mug these days,” she said. “So I don't mind if I do.” Another sip. “Now, from all that you said, you sound like you're a friend.”

“I am,” I said.

“Boyfriend?” she asked, and I was so taken aback, I said nothing.

“Didn't think so,” she said, and shifted in her chair. “Well, you'll still feel bad,” she said. “But you'll probably also want to help her. And that's reason enough, I suppose.” She put the mug back down. “Feel free,” she said, nodding to it. But once she started talking, I couldn't move, and lost myself to the story.

LILY HAD RETURNED from her summer trip alone. People took some notice, but not much; few had seen her leave on her trip weeks back with Saburo, and in the meantime, the person who probably knew the most about Saburo, Sam, had been taken off to California, interned at Tule Lake.

And as the months passed, few people even noticed Lily had returned from her summer pregnant. Winter clothing concealed her secret from most everyone, except Bella, of course, who'd given Lily a room in the back.

Bella said you'd never seen a woman so happy who had so little reason to be. Here Lily was, alone, and with child. Sam, the man who'd taken care of her for so long in Bethel, had been hauled away and imprisoned. Saburo, the man she'd loved, had vanished-Lily wouldn't say where or how, but Bella assumed Saburo was attempting to return to Japan.

“Lily says he's dead,” I blurted out.

“Dead,” Bella said. “Not sure how she would know, but-then, I'm not sure how she knows half of what she does. Or how she could be so fool stupid, too.” Bella counted off the degrees of foolishness on her fingers: no money, no family, no husband.

“But she had you,” I said, and Bella nodded, puckered her lips.

“What we needed, in the end, was a doctor,” Bella said. Bethel shared its doctor with several towns up and down the Kuskokwim. One evening, Lily told Bella that dinner hadn't gone down well; a few hours later, Bella said, it was clear it wasn't dinner but the baby who was making problems.

“Now here we were, seven months in, I'd say, though she never knew when exactly she got in the family way, of course. Or wouldn't tell.” Bella exhaled. “And no doctor-he's two villages up, and bad weather's keeping him there. But this baby-this baby is coming. I got some of the other aunties in town over here double-quick, but all of us just knew wasn't going to be nothing we could do once that child come out.”

Bella sent word over to the airfield, to see if their doctor was around. He was, the report came back, but he couldn't work on civilians. “Couldn't work on Eskimos is what they meant,” said Bella. “Couldn't then, couldn't now. Couldn't or wouldn't? Well, you tell me, soldier boy, why we got problems with the soldiers in this town, drunk or sober?”

Lily read the panic in the eyes all around her, and grew panicked herself. She knew as well as they did that the baby was coming. She sent them all away and then called them all back in; she screamed for Saburo, she screamed for her mother. And then, twelve hours after dinner, two months too early, she delivered. A baby boy. Perfect in every way, but one: he was dead.

“Not a mark on that child,” Bella said. “Just the biggest head of black, black hair you've ever seen.” It looked like Bella was crying, but I couldn't be sure; the light was dim and nothing else had changed in her face or voice. “Tiny. Tiny, tiny thing. And here's where we disagree, the other women and me. I think-I know-that little boy took a breath, a single breath”-she gave a little gasp-“and that was all. Lily said so, too.” She reached for her mug and saw there was nothing in it. “No matter. Nothing any of us could do but sit there and cry with her a spell.”

But the hardest part came later, Bella said. Lily wouldn't give the baby up. The ladies let Lily have the day with the child, but when they came for him that night, she wouldn't move. “Saburo has to see him,” Lily said, though she wouldn't answer any questions about where Saburo was or how he would know what had happened.

“She wasn't making a whole lot of sense,” Bella said. “Said we needed to send for help-and I'm thinking, ‘A doctor? It's too late for a doctor’-and she's saying no, someone much better, much smarter than that.” Bella stopped. “Well. If this Saburo had been so smart, I don't think she would have found herself in this predicament in the first place. Course, I didn't tell her that.”

Bella looked in her mug once more. “Imagine they're expecting you back about now,” she said, but she didn't make a move herself.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Baby died,” Bella said. “Was dead. Told you that.”

“But who did you-”

“Aw,” Bella said, “this part of the story ain't worth the telling. What you might call a medicine man, a shaman: that's what she wanted. Hell of a bad idea, turns out. Oh, we got this man-young man- down visiting from Lower Kalskag. He comes in-drunk as a fart- I'm ready to turn him out. But Lily, she was beyond hollering by then, just screeching, and the fact is, none of the other aunties wanted to be in there. I didn't want to be in there. I don't think this shaman much did, either. But we left, he went in, and-” Bella thought about this for a moment, and then drew herself up before going on. “The next morning, it's just Lily lying there, wrecked, like something'd exploded. And she won't talk, but she don't have to. No baby. No shaman. No father. She's in there all alone.”