Welcome to the Greenhouse (23 page)

“Are we going back to your place, then?”

“Not exactly.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s hard to explain,” he said, pulling the car over to the curb. “I’m very fond of you, Marion. You’re pretty and you’re fun to be around.”

“But…”

“You need to be here.”

Puzzled, Marion looked out the window.

They were parked at a vacant lot, a grouping of tents hugging the central space.

He touched her cheek, offered her a caring smile. “Just take a look around. Talk to the folks you find here.”

Marion saved her tears for later. “Rey…”

“Trust me,” he said.

“Will I see you again?”

“I think that’s very, very possible.”

She left him then, watching forlornly as he drove off, then walked over to the camp.

As she neared the perimeter, women, young and old, emerged from the tents, encircling her, embracing her without hesitation, accepting her without reservation, bringing her into their hearts.

Marion understood, now more than ever.

It was going to be a long summer.

“Rey, oh light of my world…,” they began reciting as one, and disappeared into the tents, where they waited for their turn to love.

Now that you understand more than your father and brother taught you, you watch the teenager on the middle of the bridge that connects the continents. She looks east, then west. She has never been more than a couple miles in either direction. She knows she never will.

Though told not to smoke, warned of its dangers, she lights a cigarette, cupping it in the hood of her parka to shield it from the Bering Sea wind, uncertain if she should enjoy the taste and wondering whom she should ask about that, now that her father and brother are gone.

It is noon. Dawn and dusk are united in midwinter in the Arctic, the sky ribbed pink and orange. Work to do. She flips the cigarette away half-finished, down into the sea below and, after watching for traffic that never comes, crosses the lanes to check for ice that is never there.

She slips a hand from a mitten, which now dangles from a clip attached to her parka sleeve, and with a pencil X’s boxes on the paper on her clipboard. Left box, right box. Makeshift work, you are both painfully aware, for the mentally challenged.

You are sure she has forgotten which box means what side of the bridge. Not that it matters. You have seen the stacks of papers she has submitted, all sitting in the station house, no one bothering to file them anymore.

She sets down the clipboard and with great effort climbs onto the bridge’s waist-high wall. Knees first, then rising slowly. After a moment, she lets the toes of her mukluks stick over the edge. The sea is cobalt blue and white-capped. A warm, delightful shiver seizes her. She has never done this before.

She looks back toward the village. People move like phantoms among buildings that, aproned with snow, hug the island’s mountain. The ancient shacks of dunnage and tin roofs now line the shore, the government houses that HUD sent having been disassembled and moved up near the school, because of the rising waters. No one sees her or, if they do, seems concerned.

She is seven months pregnant with her second child.

It’s her seventeenth birthday.

She will do what she wants.

I remember the day Daddy’s glow disappeared. I remember because I still attended high school. I cannot forget no matter how hard I try. It was seventy-two hours and six minutes after Daddy unboxed our telescope.

I found him in the sea. He was staring at the sky as if remembering the Woman from Ambler. Only his face showed above the water, the waves washing over him. I ran into the water. The current slammed me against him as I called “Daddy, Daddy!” and I tried to drag him ashore. But he was too full of whatever weight holds dead people down, and his glow was gone. There was only blackness. It was like the hole in the center of the spiral of stars the telescope showed me, the place where numbers go to die. Seabirds cried and cawed— calling his name, people said later. But I don’t believe that. The birds were startled, was all. Nothing called his name except me and the Woman from Ambler. She had come in his dreams from Anchorage to seduce him with sorrow, as he said she used to.

Daddy and I bought the telescope with our Permanent Fund. It is oil money we Alaskans get each year because everyone in the state is a Special Needs child. That’s what Daddy says. Gwimaq, my twin brother, wanted a new.22 with a Leupold scope. The telescope was a present from me and Daddy to Daddy and me. But then Gwimaq had money left over from the gun, so he helped too. I said not to, but he helped anyway.

Daddy opened the box one hundred and ninety-seven minutes— eleven thousand eight hundred and twenty seconds—after the Twin Otter brought it. We don’t get many planes here. Since the bridge closed, there are only some helicopters, plus barges four times a year and once in a while a government pickup truck.

I checked my watches the moment the plane touched down on the ice runway between Little Diomede Island, where our village is, and Big Diomede, two-point-four miles west. You can’t go there. Daddy said that when the bridge was open, big trucks traveling through would drop off things from America, to the east, where the sun rises, and also from Russia. But I hardly remember. I was very little the last time I saw one of the eighteen-wheelers.

I have three watches on each forearm, and I had them set to stopwatch. The instant the plane’s skis touched down it had been one million, six hundred and eighty-three thousand, three hundred and sixty-two minutes since Preston Robert walked away and I pulled my jeans back up that day beneath the monkey bars.

When Daddy set up the telescope in his classroom he said it was like bringing a family member home. It had come on what turned out to be the last plane on the last year that there was ice enough for a landing. I thought the telescope would be long and skinny, like on television, but it was fat as a stovepipe and you looked in from a little tube on the side. He turned off the lights, only his weak desk lamp showing, and adjusted some knobs.

Gwimaq said he wanted to see, and he shoved me aside because boys are like that, but Daddy said that he wanted me to go first because he had something special to show me. “It’s for you, Andromeda,” he said. “It’s the galaxy named after you.”

At first I said no because I was afraid of it, afraid I might break something. But Daddy insisted, and you can trust him. I put my eye on the rubber eyepiece and blinked several times, my hand over my other eye but Daddy said don’t do that and then I could see the stars. They were in a spiral. It is like when Daddy and I walk in the snow and carefully back out so people will think we’ve disappeared.

I think my eye became blurry because after a few moments, the stars began to move. It made me want to shiver, like when Preston Robert did that to me. The stars spiraled down into blackness, like numbers do that often come into my mind. “Some scientists call it a vampire galaxy,” Daddy said, “because it eats smaller ones. But now they say that our galaxy, the Milky Way, does that too.”

Maybe Daddy should not have said that, because then Gwimaq did shove me away. He wanted to see, Daddy frowning at him but as usual giving in. Gwimaq looked into the telescope and played with the knobs. Daddy and I sat at the desks. Outside, the aurora was ribbons of green and gold streaming in the darkness. The clock ticked on the wall. I thought about what the Woman from Ambler, the Woman Gone to Anchorage, as Daddy often called her, would tell me when I was little and still thought of her as my mother as she would tuck me into bed.

You are descended from Maniilaq, our greatest shaman. He lived two hundred years ago and predicted the coming of the whites. He said that boats would fly in the air or be propelled by fire. He also said that Ambler would become an enormous city, but I have seen his vision a thousand times, and it is not a city on the tundra, it is a city in the sky. So sleep, my precious, because a city of stars is watching over you.

Then the lights snapped on, and my cousin Preston Robert and his two friends came in. They were high school boys back then though they usually only came to school for lunch or open gym. Or they just walked into Daddy’s classroom when they felt like it, to link with their clients Outside, not even asking Daddy for permission.

They sat down at the computers that line one wall, watching Daddy as though daring him to stop them. Then they put on their headsets and leaned back, eyes closing, feet up on the desks. Gwimaq left the telescope and stood over them, arms folded.

But there was nothing he could do. The village council had ruled. The bowhead and the walrus are gone, the council members said; there is no more baleen to work or ivory to carve. Some people sat with their heads in their hands when they said that. The troubles Outside have dried up the bridge traffic, the council members said. And so the clients of people like Preston Robert and his friends were the only industry left to the village. Daddy was not allowed to kick them out of class. They were Untouchables, he said.

I have never emotion-linked, using the software that lets you send your emotions over the Internet. Daddy says not to because it’s dangerous and addictive. That’s why the government tries to shut down websites that allow it. It disgusted him—people here selling the feeling of being Ingalikmiut, the First People, to wannabes Outside. Besides, he said, it is animals that make Native peoples who they are, and except for the birds the animals are gone. So what is Preston Robert selling? Daddy would ask.

Preston Robert said that Daddy was jealous because he’s white and cannot sell what he doesn’t own. I would hug myself and shake my head whenever Preston Robert teased me about refusing to emotion-link. I think Gwimaq tried it a couple of times back then, but I can’t be sure. He knew I’d tell Daddy.

After the Untouchables checked their PayPals they went to work, signaling for Daddy once again to dim the lights, as though he were there to serve them. Gwimaq shook his head, but Daddy did as the boys wished. He didn’t want trouble. Gwimaq and I are half Native. Daddy’s just half crazy—for teaching here, he sometimes likes to say.

Soon the boys’ bodies were limp, their arms at their sides. Gwimaq nodded for us to leave, but Daddy kept watching the boys. Maybe getting angry, maybe not wanting to leave them alone in his classroom, I couldn’t be sure. Gwimaq was walking out the door when Mukta, the youngest, tipped over and lay shaking, his eyes rolled back in his head. Daddy sent Gwimaq running for the health aide and started first aid like he tried to show me sometimes.

Put his feet up. Cover him with a blanket. Put a stick in his mouth so he won’t swallow his tongue. But then Mukta stopped breathing and Daddy went pale and started to work on him, the glow around him flickering and sparking like the aurora. He pushed on Mukta’s chest and breathed into his mouth. By the time Gwimaq and the health aide arrived, Mutka was conscious. Daddy yanked the headphones off Preston Robert and threw them against the wall, Preston Robert blinking open his eyes and suddenly rising to thrust his chest against Daddy, hands fisted, glaring, his glow red and bubbling. Only when he saw that the health aide was there did Preston Robert leave.

Later that night, Daddy returned to school and put a padlock on his classroom door.

The next day he announced to our class that no one would use the computers except for schoolwork, and then only with his permission.

Two days later he was dead. He had slipped and fallen into the sea, smashing his skull against a rock. That’s what everyone said.

Despite understanding even more than what your father and brother taught you, it comes as a surprise when you realize that Andromeda, the girl on the bridge, does not intend to jump. You had supposed she would be serious about ending it all.

She is moving along the bridge’s ledge with a certainty akin to that of a gymnast on a balance beam, moving away from the village, the toes of her mukluks seeking where the next step should be. She appears to be dancing to a drumbeat—knees bent, mittens dangling, arms out and palms turned up, shoulders rising and falling with each step, face lifted to the sky, eyes open. With a shake of her head her hood falls back, revealing braids. As if in appreciation of the girl, the world suddenly is without wind. She moves beneath one of the mercury lights that have winked on at intervals along the bridge. They herald a path toward the far horizon, where the mainland is, a destination that she has never visited nor, until recently, wanted to.

Night is upon the sea, a red aurora spilling in a curtain of light so thick it appears viscous. Though science insists the northern lights are silent, there are groanings and screechings, the sound of a metal door being pushed shut.

“The mind,” her mother, the Woman from Ambler, once said as she sat on the girl’s bed and told her stories of the way life is supposed to be, “is not in the brain,” touching her temple and then the girl’s, the girl giggling. “The brain is merely a conduit, like a DVD player showing us signals that are created elsewhere.” She would then draw the life’s lesson on the big pad with its spiral binding along the top. The woman was artistic: baking, beading, sketching, scrimshaw. She drew a picture for the girl with an effortlessness that, the girl sensed, belied the pain that her mother kept bottled up. “The mind,” her mother continued to draw, “is in the aura, the halo of electromagnetism that surrounds all living things. It’s like the aurora for the earth, what for us northern peoples is the singing of the spiritual. That’s where the mind is, in the aura. A glow that, it’s said, some people can see.”

“You mean,” the girl sat up and cocked her head in disbelief, “other people can’t see it?”

I could not see the glow after Daddy died. We buried him on the North Side, a stranger beside people that, he said, he could not teach or reach no matter how much he loved his students.

Buried him aboveground, because as the Woman from Ambler often said, the earth in the North is too frozen to accept the body and too sullen to want the soul. After the others left, Gwimaq and I piled rocks around and upon the coffin. People used to do that to keep bears from devouring the dead, but the bears are gone now, so now the rocks are for decoration.

Gwimaq was holding a rock and looking down toward the village. Below us the bridge came out of light slitted at the east, the mainland twenty-five miles away. Then at our island it doglegged, as Gwimaq liked to say, and went northwest to Big Diomede, where we weren’t allowed. I felt we were at the bottom of forever, like rocks dropped into a deep, dark sea.

“Just you and me now,” I heard Gwimaq say. He set the rock atop the coffin and wandered down toward the village without another word.

And then the birds came.

They rose into the dawn from beneath the bridge, where they nested by the thousands. They came from off the cliffs where Gwimaq hunted them despite being a poor shot compared to the other boys. The birds were like a black aurora spiraling up from the earth. Not here to celebrate the soul, but to gorge themselves on the wealth of insects the warmer winters have brought.

I wanted to go with them. I wanted them to stop haunting me. When they reached the darkness they winked out like the numbers that spiral out of my math book and from out of my watches, numbers that flit in my aura like flies I cannot kill. Sometimes I have to sit with my head in my hands, whimpering, other kids peeking at me and then away, pretending I don’t exist. I am not retarded, only slow, I tell myself; I am not retarded, only slow. Because of the numbers.