“Hey,” he said, giving her a casual look. “Anna is an occasional closet smoker. She needs a smoke.”
“Well, I have them only by the pack.”
“Okay.” Sam bought a pack of Marlboros, removed one, and gave the remainder to Betty.
“Keep ’em behind the counter for customers.”
“No way. They smell up the place. I can’t believe she smokes.”
“Toss ’em, then. She only wants one. Doesn’t need the temptation of a whole pack.”
Sam shrugged his shoulders as if it were a mystery, then went around the corner to the men’s room. Inside he lit up, took two huge drags, snubbed it out, and tossed it.
Sam walked back to a wooden bench overlooking the bowl-shaped harbor where they would wait for the seaplane. Large conifer trees, lustrous and green, covered the upper slopes around the bay. The water was calm; the hillsides near the water were very rocky and produced gnarled trees in interesting shapes and arrangements; the ground was ornamented with salal, grasses, and fern, the rocks with lichen. Broken clouds let the sun stream through, bringing out the blue of the sky and sea. Something about the place was more than the sum of its parts, creating a mood unique in its intrigue.
“It’s beautiful here.” Anna had found him.
“Yes.”
“Why do I smell cigarettes?”
“Maybe the shirt.”
“Sam, could we talk seriously a minute?”
“I’m always serious. It’s just that I occasionally feel compelled to be irreverent.”
“Tell me about your mom and dad.”
“Just like that?”
“Come on, Sam, you’ve given me nothing else, and you know you can trust me.”
“Well, the only thing I knew about my mom when I was growing up was what my dad told me.”
“Which was?”
“Drunken slut.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s all of it.”
“Did you ever see her or talk to anyone who knew her?”
“Not when I was growing up. I knew only my grandparents on my dad’s side and never my mom’s. My grandparents just refused to mention her or comment in any way. It wasn’t until a few months after my dad died that I discovered my mother. I was eighteen and in college. At first I told myself I wanted to meet her or find her grave. Listening to my dad, I guess I had it in my head that she probably died of alcohol or drugs. I traced my dad’s life back to when he was nineteen, found people who knew him then, people he’d lost all contact with. They told me about a beautiful girl, Native American, that he dated. I discovered the schools she might have gone to and started looking. Finally, I got a name, pictures, positive ID, and found her. I think I just didn’t want to doubt my dad when he was alive so I hadn’t pushed it.”
“I want to be sensitive here. But there is this sort of looming question-”
“Why didn’t my mother find me? Why did she let me go?”
“Well, yes.”
“She was going to school, he was working. They actually met because my mother was renting a room in my grandparents’ basement. They lived not far from the school campus. All of my mother’s family at that time was pretty much centered in the reservation. Neither my mother nor my father wanted me on the reservation, so his parents took care of me during the day and my mom took care of me at night. My mom and dad were never married and my mom just kept on living with my grandparents and going to school. My dad lived on a military base. Not long after I was born my parents quit talking. Then, when I was a year and a half old, my mom went on a travel class overseas for a month.
“When she returned, my father and grandparents told her I had died the day she left. Crib death, they said. Showed her an urn with my ashes. She totally believed it, and it really broke her down. She went back to the reservation, then on to the city and problems with drugs and alcohol, then back to the reservation and a dry-out facility. Then she spent time with her father and really changed. She went back to school, graduated. She is a psychologist and a spiritual leader in the tribe. When I found her and she saw me, she suspected who I was during my fumbling introduction. I mentioned my father and she started weeping.”
“She must have felt horribly betrayed.”
“It was hard for her to get over the hate.”
“I can imagine. Your dad raised you?”
“I lived mostly with his parents until I was ten; then he took me full-time.”
“And when you learned the truth you felt betrayed?”
“Horribly. But you deal with it.”
“Did you and your dad get along?”
“My dad taught me three things-self-reliance, self-control, and survival. He was special forces military.” Sam just smiled.
“Oh, I get it. It might give you away.”
“My dad did that until age thirty-seven, when he faked an accident so he could die so he wouldn’t have to retire and become an ambulance driver or something like that. He’d had knee troubles and his brand of special forces didn’t go much past forty anyway.”
“He killed himself?”
“Not what they called it, but that’s what he did.”
“I’m sorry.”
“When I was growing up, he put me through a tougher version of what he went through. We went on trips into the Alaskan wilderness, British Columbia, practically naked, and lived like animals. We climbed around on Mount Denali, scaled ice cliffs. He loved to tell me about all the schools he went to. There were at least nine. Combat diving, paratrooper, underwater egress, survival, special ops medicine. He knew I was more suited to academic school, using my mind. I think he was trying to sweat it out of me.”
“You never wanted to follow in his footsteps?”
“I never for a second considered the military.”
“You just don’t seem like a math nerd.”
“Well, Dad made sure I was big and strong and athletic. I got out a lot and-”
The drone of the seaplane provided a convenient escape from what was quickly becoming an embarrassing topic.
“Sam?”
“Yeah.”
“Did your father abuse you?”
“He didn’t hit me except with boxing gloves on. But he did things with a young kid that shouldn’t be done.”
“Like?”
“Like it’s time to go.”
“Sam…”
“I loved him. I respected him. But at the same time I pretty much lost him even before he died.”
“What do you mean?”
“In the winter I studied and played with my computer, primitive as it was in those days. I got totally enthralled with math and then computers and from about twelve on it was all I thought about. Any fun I had on the wilderness forays in the summer was blunted because it kept me from playing with computers. I was great with logic and math but not much else in school. I’m dyslexic and couldn’t read a book to save me. The math skills got me pretty far, though. The high schools didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to other subjects as far as I could tell. So I went off to the university young.”
“What university?”
“A good one. Doesn’t matter. Graduated at twenty and after that got some graduate degrees. Was out at twenty-four.”
