. . Juneau, Sitka, Neely and Mexico.”
“See?” I asked from deep in my bag.
He rustled in his bag until he was up on one elbow. “But that was so I could fish on different boats.”
“Right. Something new each time.”
“Why don’t you just answer the question?”
“I did. There was nothing keeping me in any of those places. I rock climb. I climbed everything there was to climb and moved on.” And there was always something pulling me back here, I thought, but did not say.
“There’s no climbing in southeast Alaska, unless you head up on the glaciers. Gonna try your hand at ice climbing next?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Why do you ask so many questions?”
“If you’d quit being so mysterious, I wouldn’t have to.”
“Go to sleep,” I said.
“It’s not even dark.”
“I thought you’d spent lots of summers in Alaska, you should be used to it.”
“It’s always strange at first.”
He left me alone after that and eventually, fell asleep. I watched the sky, and listened to him breathe for a while before I climbed out of my bag and picked my way through the tundra, wondering how far away was far enough. In a relatively flat spot, I spread out my bag and climbed back in.
I started with as many verbs as I could remember in Spanish and then moved on to kitchen utensils. Tenedor, cuchara, cuchillo. Every night I worked to hold off sleep, that slippery place from which I woke fighting, most nights. A roommate came home once with Spanish tapes. What I thought would be something to fill in rainy days that couldn’t be spent climbing, turned into an obsession, a tool to use to pick away at the night.
I glanced across the distance between Kyle and me, trying to decide if I should move further away. I’d never woken up screaming, but didn’t trust that I wouldn’t. There was enough space between us that he wouldn’t notice the kicking to get free, unless he was up first. Plato, taza, sustantivo. The night darkened around me, my eyes ached from holding them open.
The nightmare had grown. Every night for the past two years, more details added, some subtracted, only to return weeks later. It was always cold and dark and tight. There was always the falling, the blood. Some nights the ice moved while I was in it, pressed against my skin so cold it burned. Other nights, I heard my voice, thin and full of fear, yelling her name over and over, the ice throwing it back at me, unanswered. Other nights, I was no longer sure which way was up or down. Whichever way I chose to move, it was darker than where I had been. Most nights, I heard the helicopter beating against air above the ice while I was in it, heard it leave as I froze, alone, one layer at a time.
The Spanish vocabulary words didn’t work that night on the tundra. Just as they didn’t work every night. I feel asleep despite the fight not to.
I woke to the soft light of an early dawn. My arms and legs were tucked snuggly in my bag, a thin layer of frost covered everything. I sat up and could see that Kyle was still sleeping. I sat there stunned. For the first time since that morning on the ice when I lowered myself into the belly of the glacier, I had not fallen in my dream, I had not been pinned into submission, I had not lost.
Kyle rolled over. “Morning,” he called over, and stretched. I stared at him until he smiled. I did not feel exhausted as I did every morning, I did not feel as though I’d been through a war.
“Did you sleepwalk?” he went on, “because if you did, it’s too bad you didn’t end up closer instead of farther away.”
I tried to make sense of it. I had never found anything that would give me a break from the nightmares. Kyle must’ve noticed the look on my face. A look of concern crossed his. “I’m just kidding. Probably shouldn’t say stuff like that when it’s just you and me in the middle of nowhere. Sorry. What do you have to eat? I’ve got plenty of oatmeal. You drink coffee?”
I nodded, still confused. He slid out of his bag, stepped into his boots and began rummaging around in the truck.
* * * *
Later that day, when the road wound down the backside of the mountains, then ended abruptly at the edge of the ocean in downtown Neely, I got out of the truck. “Thanks for the ride.”
“See you around,” he said. “Soon, I hope.”
I looked directly at him for the first time that day. I wanted to tell him I had not spent the night in terror, I wanted to ask him how that could be possible, I wanted to ask him if he had something to do with it. Instead, I turned away and he drove off down the street. I glanced up at the glaciers hanging between the peaks high overhead. Who was I to drag someone else down with me?
* * * *
Neely sat at the thumb of a long arm extended from Juneau in a narrow waterway carved by glaciers. A deep ripping that left sheer walls interrupted only by a few valleys. Snow covered mountains towered over town and on either side of the water. Steep streets ended at the sea’s edge and cross streets were packed tightly with a few restaurants, a coffee shop, a grocery store, and a hardware store. An old wooden dock reached out into the vast stone colored ocean. Fishing boats of all sizes were tied up; some shiny aluminum, others heavy steel, several wood, thick with paint.
From the road, I watched men in rubber raingear move up and down the dock, indistinguishable except for what they carried—tools, buckets, a sandwich for lunch.
That night, I walked to the edge of town to a state park and camped between hemlocks, each too thick to get my arms around. I grew up without the protection of trees. I studied the way branches wove together on this shoreline, felt I had finally found a place to rest. In the late evening light, I stretched out flat on my back and stared until I could see the exact overlap of needle, branch and sky.
The rain started later, sometime toward morning. A slow drizzle, a thick blanket against the walls of the tent. I nestled deep into my sleeping bag, feeling comfortably held under the branches and rain, thinking this is right, this is what I should be doing, this is close enough.
I actually welcomed sleep that night, gave in quickly to the rhythmic sound of the rain against the tent. The dream started with the helicopter, me buried in ice. I heard it leaving and then the roar of silence, the sound of blood rushing deep in my ears. I needed to yell, but couldn’t. I needed her to hear me, but couldn’t make my voice work. I struggled to free myself, but only slipped down farther into the narrowing throat of the glacier. My hands tore, my fingernails filled with ice as I tried to claw my way out.
I kicked and struggled and thrashed until I pulled the wet tent free of the stakes, until it covered my face and wrapped tight around my body. I woke up panicked, fighting the tent and the sleeping bag, unable to figure out where I was.
In those first few days, I kept my eyes on the ocean. It seemed to breathe. Two long breaths in and two slow breaths out each day; always pushing or pulling at the shore. The wind blew every afternoon and most mornings across glaciers before funneling into the fjord, bringing with it familiar smells and a new horrifying specificity to my dreams.
A week later, Kyle found me washing beer mugs behind the bar. I’d offered to close the bar every night I’d worked, anything to put off climbing into my sleeping bag. My mind was thick with the fog of very little sleep.
“Jack and Coke, please.” He had on a heavy wool jacket under orange rubber raingear. I watched his hand, thick with work, wrap around the glass I set in front of him. I decided then that thirty was a few years ahead of him, as it was for me.
“You sticking around?” He peeled off one of his two jackets.
“’Til I run into somebody driving south.” Maybe tomorrow, I thought. Coming back