I gaze out the window at our family: a little knot on a fringe of tundra, waving in the wind. When she sees me, Mom opens her mouth and hollers. I can’t hear her voice, but I can read my name on the shape of her lips, my real name.
Th
e name I’m leaving behind.
“How come we don’t get to go BIA schools?” Bunna asks.
“Guess we’re special,” I say, and the kid sprawled out on the seat across the aisle grins big.
“You going to Sacred Heart?” he asks.
Bunna fl ops his head up and down.
“Hey. Put her there,” the kid says, extending his hand.
“Me, too.”
And right then and there you know he owns Bunna.
“You ever been to Sacred Heart before?” Bunna asks.
“Sure,” the kid says. “Sure have.” Like he’s been everywhere and back again.
“So what’s it like?”
“Well, it’s not like home, all right, but you get used to it.
8
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M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y / L u k e Know what I mean?”
We nod our heads, even Isaac, like we really do know.
Th
en I turn to watch out the window as the plane noses up into the sky. All the families get smaller and smaller, slipping away from us like peas off a plate.
“How far is it to Sacred Heart School?” Bunna asks.
“’Bout as far as the moon,” the kid says.
Bunna looks out the window quick, his eyes big.
“I jokes,” the kid says.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
He leans over onto his elbow, like a cowboy in front of a campfi re.
“Amiq,” he says. He says it slow and sure, like he’s daring the world to get it right.
Th
en the plane levels out and sweeps across the tundra, rising slowly up toward the sliver of moon that still hangs in the morning sky.
For a fraction of a second it feels like the earth below us has split wide open and swallowed up everything I ever knew.
Like the earth itself is fl ipping over and falling away like it did a long time ago. Like there’s a big scar down there on the tundra, a jagged place where the edges will never ever line up smooth again.
Not ever.
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Looking for a Tree
SEPTEMBER 6, 1960
CHICKIE
—
I was fi ve years old before I fi gured out I wasn’t really Eskimo. It’s weird it took me so long since I have hair as blond as snow, freckles like crazy, and a dad named Swede.
I mean, who ever heard of an Eskimo with freckles, for Heaven’s sake? But I never thought about this when I was a little girl in Kotzebue, Alaska, because Swede didn’t have any use for mirrors, so our house never had one. Th ey say
I look like my momma, but I wouldn’t know about that, either. Swede never had pictures. Now here I am at Sacred Heart School in a room with four beds, one huge mirror, and a picture of Mother Mary, big as life.
Th
e one thing Swede told me about Sacred Heart was that I’d see a lot of trees here, and he was right about that—Sacred Heart School is in a valley that’s full to the brim with trees.
In the late afternoon sun, the ones outside my window shake their yellow leaves and wave their papery white trunks like dancers. Farther off in the distance are great big ones, dark as 10
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L O O K I N G F O R A T R E E / C h i c k i e priests, poking holes in the sky with their prickly tops. Th is
is all brand new to me because in Kotzebue, Alaska, there are no trees—not real ones anyhow.
Swede says the fi st time he ever saw my momma, that’s where she was—high up in a tree. She was so far up, he didn’t even see her at fi rst, didn’t even think to look up until he took his suspenders off to make a slingshot, and a couple of birds started laughing at him. Th
at’s what it sounded like, anyhow,
because at the exact same moment my mother started laughing, two jays started screeching. When Swede fi nally looked up, there was my momma, sitting up in that tree like a big blond bird, laughing.
So all I ever wanted to do, just once, was to see what it would feel like to sit up in a tall tree, looking down, because my momma died before she could teach me about trees. I fi gure if you look hard enough in a place like this, you’ll fi nd a tree tall enough to reach the clouds—tall enough to reach Heaven, maybe, which is where my momma is, though Swede never says it. Aaka Mae—she’s the one who helped raise me after Momma died—she says Heaven’s a place way up in the sky where everyone is always happy and no one is ever sick and they eat pie every single day. Only you have to die to get there, which I, personally, have questions about. Someday I’ll get answers, too, because I’m stubborn. When stubborn people have questions, they don’t give up until they get answers. Stubborn people can probably fi gure out how to climb trees without anybody’s help just fi ne, too.
At least that’s what I fi gure, sneaking out the back door of 11
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M Y
