sound too crazy. I think I thought if we talked about it, then it might not work. Anyway, I promised that I would tell her sometime. And it was our anniversary coming up. We had agreed that I would tell her. I'd done this little meditation quite a bit by then and it was as close to magic as I'll ever come. I know it sounds dumb.''
'No, no. God no. It doesn't sound dumb at all. But you didn't tell her?'
'I never had a chance. Our anniversary was the day she died. And on that day I knew I should go and pick up Nate. I knew it. It was my turn. And if I had…'
'And you've been thinking about that.'
''I lie in bed at night and try to get back that picture of me and her together in the glass-topped casket. Just me and her. But ever since the day she died, I can't. I can only think I should have gone to get Nate. And she would be alive.'
'I'm sure she knew even if she didn't understand. She knew that you were pushing the others out of your heart and leaving room only for her.'
'I can't get her back even in my head.' His voice didn't crack until the last word. Then he wept the most profound sobs she had ever witnessed. 'I can't get her back.'
Overwhelmed by his sorrow, she forgot who he was, who she was, the many expectations that imprisoned them both. She wrapped her arms around his head and held him.
Back at the house they each took a sofa in the family room. After Maria had changed into her now-official nightwear for these sleep-overs, she returned to find him trying to put sheets on the couch.
'A sleeping bag worked fine,' she said.
'Well, that was when we had a tent,' he joked, looking at the lumpy sheets.
'Here, I'll help you fold them back up and we can get the sleeping bags.'
As they were folding, she looked at him and smiled.
'My face must look horrible.'
''Just a little bruised. Probably doesn't look nearly as bad as it feels.'
'Forget calling the scientists. I want to go to L.A. tomorrow. We can take Nate. He can stay at my parents' with my mother while we're at the university. We should get out of here and take stock.'
'Your mother?' He looked shocked.
'You have gotten the idea that my parents are dead. I called her from here the other night. My mother and I are best friends.'
'What about the log cabin, and the dishwater that froze before it hit the ground, and the cross-country skiing, and all of that?'
'It's true. I lived in a cabin in the far north.'
'Where were your parents?'
'Where they've always been. I went to Alaska after college. I got out of high school two years early and got my undergraduate degree in three years.'
''Well, what are your parents like? What's your dad do?''
'You're trying to place my family on the old socioeconomic ladder, huh?'
'You a little touchy about it?'
''Actually, I am. What I tell you about myself stays strictly between you and me. Got it?'' She stepped toward him with the sheet and found her finger pointing at his nose.
'I got it,' he said.
'My dad's a wealthy businessman. So now you know.'
Dan started chuckling. 'Well, I'll be damned. And you had a falling-out?'
''It all started one day when we were watching a football game. We did that a lot, my daddy and me. I was just about to graduate from Stanford. He was taking an unusually long time pouring his drink. I remember he was wearing a golf shirt with a little polo emblem on it that I got him when I was shopping near school. Funny what you remember. Anyway, he turns around, looks at me, and says, 'I have the law school picked out.'
'I said, 'I hope it's Yale because I think I'll get accepted.'
' 'It's Boalt Hall. I don't want you all the way on the East Coast. If we're spending my money,' he said. Well, you know about my temper. And he had been a little overbearing in recent times and there was this edge between us. It felt like a situation that could explode. I looked at him and said, 'Did you say, 'spending my money'?' And there were a few more words about money and control and I got up and walked out and packed my backpack. Skipped the graduation ceremony. And flew to Alaska. On my way out the door, I heard my mother talking to my father. It was the only time in my life I have ever heard her use a four-letter word.'
'What did she say?'
'She said, 'This time, dear, I think you really fucked up.' I had friends in Alaska, a married couple, in Fairbanks.'
Fairbanks was twenty degrees below zero on the November night that Maria arrived. Fortunately, she had the presence of mind to shop in Anchorage and get outfitted with insulated boots, gloves, a parka, and heavy sweaters. Even with all the trappings, the cold still cut through her, made her bones ache, and pretty much pushed her indoors every moment she could get near heat. Standing only moments in the still night air, she took a cab to 2640 Lambert. It was a nice house, Sam Nehi was the manager of a wholesale petroleum outfit, the head of the local office, and Margi, his wife, was a homemaker. They welcomed Maria with open arms.
Quickly she found a cabin and a job tending huskies for a man named Cotter, whose hobby was racing dog sleds. Her cabin was near the dogs, their yelping, their smell, their food, and their droppings. It was 22'xl4', all one room, no running water, a good woodstove, kerosene lanterns, an outhouse if you could stand it, a bucket if you couldn't.
There was a sturdy pine table, four chairs, a small sofa, and a brass bed, with a mediocre mattress. Oddly, she found it satisfactory.
Within two weeks she had enrolled in a correspondence law school. In the mornings she tended the dogs, exercised them, groomed them, doctored them, and fed them. Afternoons and evenings she studied.
Cotter was a good man, ran his own feed store, and was greatly amused at the sprightly, well-educated young woman who came out of nowhere to tend and eventually race his dogs. She could mush the dogs as well as any woman around and was better than most of the men.
Cotter had two homes, one in town where he spent most nights, and one near Maria's cabin at Cotter Hollow. The reason for the town house was that it was not easy to get to Cotter Hollow and once you got there you found nothing but Cotter's compound. In winter, access was by snowmobile and cross-country ski. Unless she was hauling supplies, Maria preferred the skis. It was twenty minutes of hard work to get to the parking lot and the four-wheel- drive Cherokee she ultimately acquired out of her meager wages and some money that her mother required her to accept. Her father wasn't allowed to require anything.
On all the holidays that Maria could get away for, she went home to visit. Barely speaking to her father, she maintained a rigorous chilly formality that thawed by fractions of a degree with each visit. Her mother was dismayed but stayed out of it.
Just after Maria passed the California bar exam, days before she was due to leave Alaska for the offices of Patty McCafferty, something happened. During the almost three years that Maria lived at Cotter Hollow, she had come to know the Prestons. They lived in a beautiful and grand log house situated adjacent to the trailhead to Cotter Hollow, where Maria parked her car in one of Cotter's three garages. Maria, who had a natural affinity for kids, got to know Amy Preston on short winter visits over hot chocolate.
Amy's father was a trapper who never ran a line or stretched a pelt. Her mother called herself Sarah Preston (although her native name was different and mostly unpronounceable) and was a successful weaver who made custom blankets that were really art.
Maria arrived several times a week at the Preston home on her skis. In front of Cotter's nearby garage, she would remove her skis, load them onto her Jeep Cherokee and — with a heater efficient enough to raise the temperature slightly above freezing on a cold day — drive to Fairbanks with something less than a certain conviction that she would make it.
Passing the Preston house day after day on her way to town, Maria became familiar with the place: when the lights came on in the morning and went off in the evening, that Thursday was garbage day, that Mr. Preston heated
