Lava Falls Read online

  The boys each held fistfuls of their mother’s cotton jacket. The black sky poured in the cabin door. There were a couple of feet of snow on the ground, and the temperature was in the teens. The newcomers were dressed lightly and all three were shivering.

  Jurek reached out an arm, laid it across my middle, and pushed me to the side. Then he ushered in his new family. He led Dong Mei to the rocking chair and nudged her into it. The boys ran to her side.

  Jurek said, “I figure they can sleep here a night or two, until I’m ready for them.”

  I shook my head.

  “I’ll get a sleeping bag. You have extra blankets? They’re used to hardship. They’ll be fine on the floor. This may be the fanciest place they’ve ever slept. It’s warm!” He was giddy with excitement, his skinny limbs twitching like a marionette’s.

  “You have to get them a room in the motel,” I said.

  Jurek scowled. “I won’t put my family in a motel. That place is a flea palace.” He stared hard at Dong Mei, and then turned back to me. “Besides, you’re lonely.”

  “No,” I said.

  And with that, Jurek left, leaving the cabin door swinging on its hinges. I walked slowly over and took a long look at the sky—the beginning of the aurora borealis flared purple across the velvety black—and said Lindsay’s name once, as if I knew it would be a long while before I had time to even think of her again.

  I shut the door and turned to my houseguests. Dong Mei sat with her head ducked and her hands folded in her lap. She refused to look at me, though the boys gaped.

  “Does anyone speak English?” When I got no answer, I foolishly asked the question louder. I heard myself nearly chanting, “English? English?” until I counseled myself to calm down.

  As it happened, I didn’t have extra blankets or pillows. I’d come to Alaska with nothing but what I’d need myself. I had intended solitude. So I opened the drawers of my dresser and pulled out any warm clothes I could find—fleece pullovers, a down vest, and a couple of wool sweaters. I handed these out. Then I tossed my own pillow off the bed and yanked away the down comforter. I laid the sheets out on the wooden floorboards, positioned and fluffed the pillow, and gestured to the family. They looked very frightened as they scurried onto the sheet. I handed Dong Mei the comforter and she pulled it over herself and her children. They fanned out their legs so that all three heads could fit on the one pillow. They must have been exhausted, or maybe scared to death, because they lay motionless.

  When, a couple of minutes later, Jurek burst back in the door, Dong Mei cried out in fright. He smiled at the sight of them in the makeshift bed, a papa bird inspecting his nesting family, and didn’t even look at me as he handed over a sleeping bag. He said he’d see us in the morning.

  I put the sleeping bag on my mattress and crawled in. It smelled like dirty man and I wanted to gag. I hardly slept that first night.

  The next day, Jurek collected a load of bedding in town and brought it by the cabin. I told him again that his crew could not stay with me. He said only until he got a place for them to live. For the next three days, Jurek worked at leveling a small plot in the clearing on his land. I watched in disbelief. Did he think he could build a cabin during the winter? Did he think Dong Mei, Roger, and Seth could stay with me while he did? Every time I tried to ask, he brushed me off, refused to talk. His focus was extraordinary.

  Meanwhile, I couldn’t stop Dong Mei from working. I’d come home from my shift at the café and find her on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floor with Ajax, which bleached the wood, made the place smell like a swimming pool, and left a powdery residue which she kept pointing at proudly, as if proof of her labor and the floor’s sanitation. Or she’d cook, once making a soup with ferns she’d dug up from under the snow, a can of tuna, peanut butter, and hot pepper flakes. She and her sons ate the soup with slurpy relish and she looked hurt that I would not eat the bowl she placed in front of me when I sat at the table with my own quesadilla. I begged her to stop trying to be useful, but she didn’t understand a word I said. I tried shouting the word, “No!” as I pointed at the ruined floorboards or the pot of soup, and I hated how it sounded, like I was trying to communicate with a dog. I also tried the subliminal approach, hoping she’d catch my meaning even if she didn’t know the actual words, when I quietly explained, “You don’t have to work, Dong Mei. Just make yourself and your sons comfortable.”

  She and the boys spoke only in whispers, to each other, the entire time they stayed in my cabin.

  Meanwhile, her sons had dismantled the perfectly neat woodpile and restacked it with military precision. They shoveled the snow away from the perimeter of my cabin, making an ugly, ten-foot-wide band of bare frozen ground. They found their way into town the third day and returned with some ingredients from which Dong Mei made a stew that, I admit, smelled delicious. I still refused to eat any, though, on principal. For one, with me, she didn’t have to work for her keep. For another, I didn’t want her thinking she could in any way pay for her stay. I know, the two thoughts conflicted, but both were true. I wasn’t Jurek. I wasn’t buying a companion or even a domestic worker. Nothing she could do would make the arrangement okay with me.

  Jurek visited each night but only briefly, grinning hard at his recent purchases and barely acknowledging my existence. Then, on the fifth day, he pulled a small Airstream onto the clearing on his lot, and came to fetch them.

  I was relieved to see them go, and yet, in the vacuum, my loneliness rushed back in. Jurek never thanked me and never came to my cabin for late-night talks anymore. Nor did he stop by the Java Luv Café to check his email. I sometimes saw his pickup truck in town, his blond head and their three black ones all squeezed into the heated cabin. Once there was an armchair in the bed of the truck. Another time a barbeque grill. After that, the smell of roasting meat sometimes drifted all the way to my porch. Her Chinese words, staccato to my ears, also began drifting my way as she became comfortable enough to speak up, claim her new home, communicate freely with her sons. The little boys’ voices rang out through the white birch branches as they threw snowballs and played chase.

  I did, once, take a pan of brownies over to the Airstream. The rounded pod looked homey from the outside, the windows yellow squares of light, the snow silently sliding off the silver siding. Jurek shouted for me to come on in. He sat at the tiny Formica table, holding a mug of coffee, and the two boys sat across from him, quietly drawing on paper with crayons. Dong Mei sat on the bed, turning the pages of a magazine.

  There was something slightly different in her demeanor that night. Later I’d call it a defiance, but then I only thought she’d become more present in her body. I was glad to see she wasn’t scrubbing the stove or mending his shirts. She watched me talking to Jurek from under those handsome eyebrows, but if I glanced her way, she quickly looked back down at the magazine.

  Jurek, for his part, was delighted. He said the boys were exceptionally smart for their ages, and that they loved sleeping in the tent. I asked him how he knew that. Jurek said that this life, full-time camping, was a boy’s dream come true. They would start school right after the holidays. In the spring, he would begin building a house—not a cabin, he said, a house. When he got the money, he was going to get braces for Dong Mei’s teeth.

  If Jurek was disappointed that she wasn’t as pretty as her picture, he didn’t show it. The closed-mouth smile in her photograph covered a set of very crooked teeth. She was a good ten years older than when the picture had been taken, but then that still made her at least fifteen years younger than Jurek.

  His mouth gummy with a chocolate smile, he said, “Maybe they have ladies for, you know, ladies.” I shook my head, uncomprehending. “I highly recommend the arrangement. Everything is contractual, on paper.” He leaned forward and bore down on me with his gaze. “No endless discussion and no emotional garbage.”

  Not only did I now get his meaning—he thought I should find my own mail-order bride—I felt nailed by his edict
. My emotional life was about as purple as the aurora borealis, or had been anyway, until I traded it in for northern austerity. Maybe I was on the same path as Jurek, after all. I got up and returned to my cabin.

  I resumed my nightly skis to the Grief Tree. My views of the sky were grand and unobstructed, the northern lights now making nightly statements, as if to affirm my overwrought ideas about love. Bars of lime green pulsed overhead, followed by giant whirling eddies of purple. That’s what it had felt like to have her inside me, my core touched and lit.

  I don’t blame Lindsay for being unable to bear the intensity. Who can? Having my loneliness relieved by her had been strenuous, like a too-long hike at high altitude. It was shockingly beautiful, but I couldn’t really live there. Could I?

  Jurek was absolutely right. You should endure life alone or find a partner in the true sense of the word, a companion in sex and work. As the solstice came and went, the broad sweeping strokes of my skis on the snow-crusted ice righted me. The bracing cold soothed. The asceticism of my cabin began, again, to feel just right.

  Then, one night when I returned from my ski, I found Jurek inside.

  “They’re gone,” he said, his desperation palpable.

  “What do you mean, gone?”

  “I went to get supplies in town late this afternoon. When I got back, they weren’t in the Airstream. I figured they’d gone for a walk, or to pick stuff. She’s always digging up plants and stuff. But they didn’t come back. I’ve been all over town. I’ve been all over the woods.” His voice clawed at the air. He bit back something much more fierce than tears when he said, “I hoped they’d be here, in your cabin.”

  I was suddenly furious. She took his money. She entered into an agreement. How dare she break Jurek’s heart. His loss swept into the atmospheric high of my own, and I was a storm of righteousness.

  I jumped into the truck with Jurek and we began combing the roads leading away from town. He drove slowly, and I looked for shadows in the trees. I scanned the snow for tracks. We returned to town, and I banged on the door of unit six in the motel, where the owner lived. When the man said he hadn’t seen them, Jurek grabbed the front of his T-shirt and threatened violence if he was lying. I pulled Jurek off the man and we got back in the truck. It was two in the morning by then, but I convinced him we had to drive to the Fairbanks airport. When we arrived, hours later, we walked bleary eyed by the ticket counters, checking the customers in line, looking for Dong Mei, Roger, and Seth. It was there that I began to be ashamed of my behavior. I was hunting a woman and her children, who had, by all appearances, chosen to leave a man.

  Later that morning, when Jurek dropped me off at my cabin, our eyes met briefly before I got out of the dark truck. Sometime during the night he must have made some emotional adjustment, because now he seemed to look at me with pity, as if I were the one who had been betrayed. He quietly said, “There’s no such thing.”

  I slept for most of that day. I didn’t even call in to the Java Luv Café. When I woke up, I rolled onto my back and looked at the wooden ceiling. I had no idea what losses Dong Mei had endured over the course of her life. Nor did I know what living with Jurek had been like. At the very least, he’d wildly misrepresented himself and his circumstances. I had no right to judge her.

  I got up and made myself a good dinner. Then I skied to my Grief Tree. I was hoping for the aurora borealis—now I wanted to be reminded of Lindsay, of the possibility of love—but there was just the black, black sky with a sparkle of stars. After stopping and paying homage to the tree, I decided to ski farther down the frozen river.

  Not much beyond, maybe a couple hundred yards, their tracks came down the bank and headed upstream. It was obviously them, three sets of tracks, those of one adult and two children. I stopped, listened, and looked around. They’d been gone over twenty-four hours. They could be in danger. I pictured the three runaways somewhere in advance of me, laying down tracks, fleeing.

  I didn’t know what to do. If I let them go, they might die out here. If I found them, would I return them to Jurek? Take them to the airport? I didn’t have the money to buy them plane tickets, and I’m sure they didn’t either. Slowly at first, I skied after the tracks, heading straight up the river. Then my worry grew and accelerated my speed, until I was sprint-skiing, gasping for breath, desperate to overtake them.

  They had built a small fire on the western bank. The boys crouched next to it, knees jutting, hands turned out like cowboys. Dong Mei paced on the perimeter of firelight, tossing small twigs into the flames. She stood taller as I approached, held her ground. There was something harsh about her now, as if she were guarding against a low-grade anger.

  I stopped and looked. We were like four wild animals caught in an uncertain encounter. Something told me to not disturb them. I had nothing to offer. And yet, I snapped out of my skis and climbed the snowy bank. Dong Mei bent and poured something from a tin pot sitting in the coals into a plastic mug. She held this out to me, and I tasted the steaming liquid. It was an odd, rooty tea that I hoped wasn’t poisonous. The earthy flavor made me think of sex.

  I didn’t know what to do next. The fire, the tea, her posture, these things led me to believe that maybe she knew exactly what she was doing. Anyway, their lives weren’t my jurisdiction. Still, I couldn’t help having an opinion. Two opinions, actually. A big part of me wanted to shout, “Run, girl!” A smaller but more reasonable part knew they had little chance in an Alaskan winter—despite the ability to make hot tea and fire—without shelter. They were lucky to have made it through one night. And apparently, Dong Mei knew it. When I gestured for them to follow me, she spoke briefly to her sons, and they kicked snow onto the fire. The family followed me.

  Walking rather than skiing, it took us well over an hour to get back to my cabin, and the boys were stumbling with exhaustion. I fed them crackers with peanut butter and hot soup from cans, and gave them my bed. Dong Mei allowed Roger and Seth to take it, but refused herself, curling up on the floor, at a distance from the now roaring wood stove, which she pointed at, meaning for me to sleep close to the fire. I gave her Jurek’s stinky sleeping bag.

  In the morning, I awoke to find Dong Mei filling the kitchen sink and stuffing the down bag into the hot sudsy water. She squished and sloshed the feathers and nylon with vigorous arm motions, doing her best, I supposed, to eradicate the noxious smell. When I returned from work that evening, it had been wrung out and hung from a rafter, drying. A dinner of pasta with tomato sauce and hamburger meat was waiting for me, and it was delicious. The four of us ate at the table like a family.

  I said, “Dong Mei, we have to figure out what to do about you and the boys.”

  She spoke in brisk Chinese, looking right at me, as if I might have picked up the language in the few weeks she’d been here.

  I was shocked when the older boy, Roger, interpreted. “He make tent for us with bear. No safe.”

  Dong Mei spoke again.

  Roger said, “He want babies. No.”

  Wide eyed, Seth tried to join in, but Dong Mei shushed him each time he repeated his brother’s English. However, as it turned out, the younger boy had a better command of the language, and over the next couple of days, I usually turned to him when I wanted information.

  “Did he hit you or the boys?” I asked. It was a crude question, and I felt intrusive, especially when I had to mime the question because no one understood the words, but how else was I going to find out what I needed to know to make them safe?

  “No,” Roger and Seth told me in unison.

  “Did he feed you enough?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he scare you in any way?”

  The boys translated and all three looked at each other with what seemed like utter incomprehension. In the end, I surmised that Jurek scared them a great deal—who wouldn’t be scared by the squinty, hyper man?—but he hadn’t mistreated them. I supposed that this would make it more difficult to get help for them, but I did go online at the J
ava Luv Café and search for organizations that rescued mail-order brides who’d changed their minds.

  In the meantime, I tried to come to terms with the plain fact that I was hiding them. From Jurek. Who lived a mere hundred and fifty yards away. This truth was hard to square with the fact that not forty-eight hours earlier I’d been hunting for them with Jurek, and also that he was my friend.

  On the up side, this all distracted me from mucking about in my own pool of loss, at least until the third day when there was a knock on my door. It was faint, not the usual pounding, and I hardly heard it at first. My fantasy of Lindsay tracking me down was absurd. I knew that. But the quality of this knocking had a quiet resonance. Like something destined.

  This moment of foolishness on my part was quickly smashed by Dong Mei flinging herself across the room to slap a hand over Seth’s mouth and to gesture with her other for Roger to keep silent. She grabbed their wrists and dragged them to the bathroom, the only place in the cabin with a shutting door. I made my heavy way toward the knocking.

  The door swung open before I could get there. Jurek paced to the rocker and sat. I forced myself to not look at the closed bathroom door. I also counseled myself to not make him suspicious by hurrying him off.

  He glanced at the stove where there was in fact some coffee already made, not to mention too many cereal bowls in the sink. I lit a burner and heated up the coffee.

  As Jurek swallowed, his Adam’s apple slid up and down his throat like a knife. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and held the mug loosely in his hands.

  “How do you know you love her?” he asked.

  “Jurek,” I said. “You forgot. There’s no such thing.”

  His eyes were shining as he lifted his gaze to hold mine. “How?”

  So I pretended to think about it. Then I said, “Because I can tell you every single one of her faults and I don’t care.”

  “So why’d you leave?”

  Again I pretended to not readily know the answer. I couldn’t tell him that that kind of intimacy and joy are like too harsh a light, unbearable. So I said, “It’s better to turn away while it’s still pure.”