Lava Falls Read online

  He looked up at me again, eyes narrowed with suspicion. “But you told me you’re waiting for her to come find you.”

  “There were circumstances I haven’t told you about. She agreed that it was unworkable. I didn’t run out on her. She wanted to keep her view of the sky.”

  “Maybe you need to go find her.”

  He stood and strode toward the bathroom.

  “No!” I cried.

  Jurek turned and changed course. He paced back toward me, scrutinizing my few possessions as he had the first time he’d come to the cabin, as if looking for a clue to life. Then he sat again, apparently finding nothing worthwhile. He looked lost.

  Maybe Lindsay did want to be found. Maybe even Dong Mei hoped Jurek would bust down the bathroom door. But he never even noticed that it was atypically shut. He slunk out of the cabin a couple of minutes later, leaving the coffee cup on the floor by the rocker.

  At dinner that night, I told the boys to tell their mother that they couldn’t stay any longer. Seth translated and then gave me her response. “She clean and cook.”

  “No,” I said firmly. “You all have to leave tomorrow. I’m sorry.”

  A rapid-fire discussion took place in Chinese, and then Roger spoke up in as manly a voice as the nine-year-old could muster. “We make money. We make very big money and give you.”

  I shook my head, which they misinterpreted, or maybe just blatantly ignored, because all three smiled.

  “No!” I shouted. “No money. No work. No staying here in my cabin. You must be gone tomorrow.”

  But of course they didn’t leave the next day. When I returned from work, all three sat at my small table. Before them was a small amount of cash. They were counting the dollars and stacking the coins. Seth proudly explained that the boys had gone to town and found a couple of odd jobs.

  “But Jurek will see you,” I blurted.

  “We here safe,” Roger explained to me.

  In direct retort, the door flew open, and Jurek entered, carrying an axe. He raised it over his head and roared, not at them, but at me, “You dirty lying bitch.”

  I think he meant to kill me. I saw the axe blade come my way. The same one that chopped wood would now split open my head. Dong Mei screamed at the boys, and they fled to the bathroom. She threw herself at Jurek, lifted her thin arms, and took hold of the axe handle.

  “Go,” she said to him. It was the first English I heard her speak.

  He wrenched the axe away and stepped around her, coming for me once again. There was nowhere for me to go, so I waited for the first hack. But Dong Mei leapt onto his back, wrapped her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist. She shouted in English, “YOU! NOW! STOP!”

  His entire body softened, as if he experienced her interception as an embrace. The axe slowly lowered. She slid off his back and took it from his hand. Then she used it to gesture toward the door, again saying, “Go!”

  “Why did you leave?” he asked her. “I love you.”

  “No love,” she said, and he looked flattened. “You go. No love.”

  He cast me one last crushing look and did leave. Dong Mei put the axe on the kitchen table and called her boys out of the bathroom. She hugged them both and then told me, through Seth, “We danger you.”

  She stuffed their tin pot and plastic mugs in her canvas duffel. The boys zipped up the parkas that Jurek had bought them. And the family left, not ten minutes after Jurek had. I knew I should stop them. Where were they going to go? I heard the crunching of their footsteps as they walked away from my cabin.

  I didn’t see any of them—Dong Mei, Roger, Seth, or Jurek—for a whole week. Then one day after work, as I was walking to the grocery store in town, I saw the two boys entering unit three of the motel. A couple of days later, I heard that Dong Mei was housekeeping for the owner in exchange for the room. The boys had begun school and were also offering themselves for every possible kind of job—running errands, washing cars, shoveling snow, even selling cups of hot coffee they made by running an extension cord from their motel room to a hot plate set up on a card table on the sidewalk in front of the motel, until the motel owner shut that operation down. I didn’t know when they had time to do their schoolwork, but their English improved rapidly. I was relieved I didn’t have to worry about them anymore. Clearly they could take care of themselves.

  As for Jurek, he’d stopped talking to me. He wouldn’t even meet eyes or say hi if we passed on the sidewalk, and he never came into the Java Luv Café anymore. I did hear a lot of gossip about him. People said that while the boys’ coffee business was up and running, Jurek bought more cups than anyone. They said that he had the boys wash his truck weekly and that he invented errands for them to run.

  But when I started noticing that he had the two little boys working on the construction site next door, actually hammering nails and hoisting two-by-fours, that they worked ten-hour days on the weekends, many of those hours in the arctic dark, building the cabin their mother was no longer interested in living in, I got angry.

  I counseled myself to not butt in—the axe incident was still fresh in my memory—but when Dong Mei came in the café one day to use the computer, I couldn’t help commenting. “Dong Mei,” I said. “Don’t let Jurek use your sons.”

  “Use?” she said quizzically. “What you mean, use?”

  Of course by now she knew the common meaning of the word, so I explained my meaning. “In this country there are child labor laws. He’s making Roger and Seth work far too many hours. He’s using them for labor he’d have to pay adults much, much more for. It’s called exploitation.”

  I misinterpreted the shocked look on her face. I thought she was experiencing that feeling of being slapped when you learn someone has taken advantage of you.

  She spoke emphatically. “He pay much. Too much. He try twenty buck an hour.” She laughed now, her crooked teeth making a merry mockery of me. “I tell him, minimum wage only. Boys learn skill. Very, very good.”

  I know she saw the confusion on my face, because she hurriedly closed her lips around the crazy teeth, and reached out a hand. It hovered for a moment in the space between us, and then alighted on my forearm, a very gentle touch. Now she, too, was looking at me with pity. Apparently, I didn’t have a clue about love or work. She said quietly, “Jurek sweet man. He wait.” She withdrew her hand and rubbed it with her other in a sensual gesture of anticipation. “Very sweet.”

  In late March, there was a knock on my door in the evening. It had been weeks since anyone had knocked. “Hello?” I called out. “Who’s there?”

  “Me.” The door opened, and Jurek walked straight to the rocker and sat, as if he’d never threatened me with an axe. I made coffee.

  “She said she doesn’t want a money arrangement. She wants to pay me back for the plane tickets. That could takes years.”

  “I heard she got a job cooking at the diner.”

  “Yeah. But only minimum wage, plus two meals a day for all three of them. And she cleans the motel for their room. I pay the boys as much as she’ll let me for hanging out at the construction site. She’s saving all their wages. But still.”

  “Then what? After she pays you back for the plane tickets?”

  He shrugged. “She said no promises. She wants a real house with bedrooms. She’s angry I had the boys sleeping in the tent.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “Boys like to camp.”

  “Not if they don’t have a comfortable home to return to.”

  “She says she doesn’t want any more children.”

  “I guess that would be her prerogative.”

  “She won’t even see me. Not even to go to a movie or out to dinner.”

  Jurek looked miserable, consumed. I probably should have told him about Dong Mei calling him sweet. Instead, I said, “It was stupid to send all your money and expect them to love you in exchange.”

  I thought he’d bat the word love aside. But he said, “I didn’t expect any
thing. That’s what seemed so perfect about the arrangement. I met her on the computer, so I thought she’d be like a computer. Somehow I knew the boys would have personalities that I would like or dislike, but I thought of her as a blank.” He breathed and swallowed and blinked. “She’s not a blank. She’s . . . she’s fierce. And beautiful. And maddening.”

  “You love her.”

  “Per your definition. All her faults. And still.”

  His admission blasted something open inside me. I smiled as goofily as if I were the one in love.

  “The world is in a deeper 3-D,” he said. “Colors everywhere are more intense. It’s like I never heard birds sing before. All that. She’s my beautiful awakening.”

  That night I skied to the Grief Tree and looked hard at the open spaces between the dark branches. It was a new moon and the sky was black, opaque. Then, as I watched, a smudge of chartreuse warmed the blackness. It spread and brightened to bottle green, began dancing. A rosy luster twirled through the green, eddied and sunk into itself. Bars of purple light pulsed across the sky. Her hand inside me, lit.

  By April, Dong Mei had paid Jurek back for only one of the plane tickets, but she agreed to have tea with him anyway, on the condition that the date take place in the Java Luv Café during my shift. The boys each had muffins with butter, and Jurek had a latte with a double shot of espresso. They all conversed in English, although the boys had to translate lots of words for their mother, and she endearingly pronounced his name, “Jerk.” Sometimes Jurek tried to pantomime the meaning of a word, and twice I saw Dong Mei laugh at his antics.

  Soon they were dating regularly, and my presence was no longer necessary. She still refused to move back in with him until she’d paid back all of the money for the plane tickets. As she explained to me one day on the street, “I no want business marriage. Also, I want house for boys.”

  Jurek worked night and day on the house. He never visited me in my cabin or at the café, but occasionally I strolled over to check on his progress. The stone chimney went in, the walls went up, and the windows were installed. He’d started much earlier than was advisable, and had to keep the entire project covered with plastic sheeting, which made the work worse than awkward. But finally he put on the roof.

  That’s when Jurek came over to tell me he was taking the family to Palm Springs, where he and Dong Mei would get remarried. This time with flowers and a cake, he said. He’d booked them into a hotel with three swimming pools and a Jacuzzi. The grounds were planted with hibiscus and palms. His happiness was as palpable as his desperation had been the day they disappeared.

  “One other thing,” he said, still standing on my porch.

  I gestured into the cabin, toward the rocker.

  He shook his head. He didn’t have time. My native loneliness settled over me as I waited to hear his one other thing.

  I could see him considering his words. Jurek had never been one to speak unless he had something to say, but I’d never seen him visibly thinking. Finally, “I emailed her.”

  “Who?”

  He only nodded.

  Words cannot describe the incredulity I felt.

  “I told her that she’d have the most enormous view of the sky possible up here. Black and starry in winter. I didn’t tell her about the northern lights. Sounds like they might scare her. But I said that in the summer she could study the clouds and blue twenty-four-seven, if she wanted.”

  Jurek was crazy. Why hadn’t I admitted that earlier? I breathed relief at the realization that he couldn’t possibly have contacted Lindsay, and leaned back against the doorjamb, crossed my arms, waited for him to finish this nonsense.

  He saw that I didn’t believe him. He said, “There are search engines, you know, where you can find anyone. Handful of keystrokes.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  He was. He really was.

  “I told her your exact whereabouts. And that you’re pining. I gave details to make sure she believed me.”

  “You have no right.”

  He shrugged. “To the contrary. I had to. I know I told you there’s no such thing. But.” He swallowed, blinked, looked away. “Dong Mei and Seth and Roger. They walked right in.” He tapped his breastbone.

  He turned and stepped off my porch.

  The days were full of light now, and the ice on the river had mostly melted. There was enough patchy snow on the banks to make my way to the Grief Tree, and sometimes I did. I had to decide soon whether I would find another place to live up here or return to the lower forty-eight. With the insulating snow rapidly melting, I began to feel ridiculous again, holing myself up in the north as if I were some kind of hibernating mammal. The bright light of the returned northern sun exposed me. A slight and vulnerable human being, after all.

  One night, while my neighbors were still on their honeymoon in Palm Springs, there was a knock on my door. It was dark, and the aurora was making a late spring appearance. I stared at the door, and then over my shoulder at the kitchen window where the colors swirled against the sky.

  And so, why not, I opened the door.

  Wolf

  I wasn’t exactly happy with Jim wanting to change his name to Anatoly, but I tried to roll with it. Change is good in a relationship, right? That was the whole reason we went to Yellowstone in the first place, to zest up our marriage, have a little fun, do something new.

  I didn’t think we needed an overhaul, though. Nor did I think the change needed to bleed outside our marriage. But after the first trip to the park, he started asking our neighbors to call him Anatoly. It was embarrassing.

  “Been reading our Dostoevsky, have we?” said our next door neighbor Clarence, pleased with himself for thinking he’d dredged up a literary reference. The other next door neighbor, Walter, narrowed his eyes, assessed, and then shrugged, neither agreeing nor disagreeing, pretty much just dismissing. I imagined both of them telling their wives, Cathy and Shawna, and having a good laugh on our behalf. Little did I know back then that I needn’t have worried about the neighbors, that we’d soon be selling the house.

  Still, in the beginning, I tried to find the humor myself. My complaints for the thirty-plus years we’d been together clustered around sameness, a hazy boredom that occasionally drifted through our otherwise happy marriage. So a new name? Why not? It didn’t occur to me that it might signify an entire identity change.

  Anatoly means east or sunrise. Fitting, I suppose. But how did he know that? Had he been researching wild names before we even visited the park and met the wolf watchers? I heard him tell them his name was Anatoly that very first morning. He removed his mitten and thrust out his hand, and the reluctant recipient of his greeting ignored the hand but nodded when Jim said, “Anatoly.” Barely awake, I decided I’d misheard, that Jim had probably only made some obscure joke the other man didn’t get. I got back in the car and unscrewed the thermos lid, poured myself some coffee.

  The ranger had told us that the wolves were most active at dawn and dusk, and that the best way to view them was to look for the cluster of people beside the road with viewing scopes. It was the dead of January, but sure enough that morning as we drove out the northern park road and entered the Lamar Valley, we found seven people in one of the pullouts, standing with alert expectation in front of fat cylinders on long legs.

  Clouds obscured the stars. The sky was black and the snow a deep lavender. We parked our Ford Fiesta next to the fleet of SUVs, and that’s when Jim introduced himself as Anatoly. Forgive me for repeating that moment; it’s the part of this life shift I can’t explain. The name must have come to him in the way dreams lay out whole stories we don’t even know exist in our unconscious. A wild name, Anatoly, parked in the recesses of Jim’s psyche, perhaps for years, waiting for the right mix of circumstances to surface. Or maybe the sight of that black sky and lavender snow, the promise of those long-legged scopes, birthed the name right then and there.

  For a few minutes I watched my husband from the car. He asked ques
tions and received brief answers from some of the wolf watchers. Others ignored him. A couple pointedly never even looked at him. I saw him tamp down his eagerness, realize that there was a culture here, that he best observe rather than blunder.

  This was my first moment of capitulation, although I certainly didn’t recognize it as such at the time. Viewing my husband through the windshield, as if it were a lens that allowed me to see him objectively, I saw a man in longing. For what, I couldn’t have said, but my annoyance at his enthusiasm for a predawn adventure dissolved. He was thrilled to be there, lured by the mystery of wolves, hoping to experience something new. I couldn’t fault him on that. Whatever malaise had settled over our life together, Jim himself had always had a childlike curiosity that I loved. I opened the door and stepped back into the bitter cold air.

  The ridge to the east darkened and the sky directly above it lightened. The mustard yellow burgeoned into a tangerine orange, and then came the first rays of the sun, sheer daggers of light.

  A wolf howled.

  The wolf watchers aligned themselves with their scopes and began scanning. Jim opened his mouth to ask a question, and I put my mitten against his lips and shook my head. He nodded his thanks, knew that I was right about silence now. The wolf howled again.

  Jim looked over his shoulder, as if the animal were about to pounce on him, and then did a quick 360 degree search. I thought he was startled, maybe frightened, but then I realized that the look on his face was deep calm, intense concentration. That howling wolf spoke to his heart more directly than the cries of our babies had.

  That night, while Jim was in the shower, I called Barbara from our room at the Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel and told her, “Your father has fallen in love with a female alpha wolf.”

  “Meaning?” I could hear the background clanking of dinner pots.

  “There’s this culture of people who go into the park every single day, and they stay all day, looking for the wolf packs.”