Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [86]
12
POSSESSION
DEAD RECKONING: n. The process of determining the position of a vessel at any instant by applying to the last well-determined position the run that has since been made.
The small house perched at the edge of the bay was just what I needed. It was a few miles out of town, distanced from passing cars by a field of spruce stumps and elderberry shrubs. I didn’t know the neighbors.
The house belonged to an older woman I knew through a class I’d taken at the college. She had left town to spend the winter in Arizona, where she was seeking treatment for debilitating arthritis. I had tracked her down by phone and mumbled into the receiver something about “going through a hard time.” “Can I stay in your place for a little while?” I asked. There was a pause. “Okay,” she said. “Just pay the heating bill.”
I got keys from a neighbor and brought a carload of boxes and bags to the house. I swept a small upstairs room clean of dead flies and spread out my things. As I unpacked my books, I remembered the way I had looked at these same books sandwiched together with John’s on our shelves. His library of reference books—on natural history, home building, geography—were the kinds of resources one needed, I had thought, to live in and understand the world. At the time, my volumes seemed only to prove something lacking in me, my inability to store and use important information. But wedged together on this small, empty shelf, the books formed an odd assemblage that traced my history—novels that had taken me into worlds I wanted to keep within arm’s reach, books that had been gifts over the years from people I loved, an assortment of poetry volumes I turned to from time to time.
Because of her arthritis, the woman who owned the place had been confined to the downstairs. Friends had wheeled a hospital bed into the middle of the living room. And as she was a widow and had no one around to remind her, she left messages to herself on yellow sticky notes posted around the house: “Think of 10 good things that happened today.” “Smile.” “Don’t strain your wrist—hold phone loosely.”
That winter was a cold one. A blue-white skin of ice formed on the surface of the bay in a small inlet protected by the Spit. The kitchen windows looked out onto the bay, and the shape-shifting ice was mesmerizing. The tide floated sheets of ice close to shore and then dropped them onto the frozen mudflats. The ice rolled and pulsed above the water and split and heaved as the bay changed shape. The ice could look blue, or white, or gray; it could seem solid or liquid, like great planes or millions of shards. The sea was a welcome distraction.
At night, however, when the windows turned to mirrors, they threw reflections at me. I saw how my small breasts had started drooping and how my cotton underwear sagged. I saw how winter dulled the blond streaks that summer had laid in my hair and I recognized the angles I’d never liked in my face. It was impossible to look away.
Almost daily, I walked out the back door down the snow-covered trail that crisscrossed the slope down to the beach. Along the edges of the trail, dry branches of wild roses punctured the snow and offered shriveled, rust-colored hips. On the beach, I pushed my rubber boots through dry salt slush at the edge of the water. On these cold days, the receding tide glazed over the cobble beach in ice. As I walked along the beach, I tried to see everything I thought John would see on a walk like this: the raft of scoters out on the open water, the direction of the wind and what that might mean for tomorrow’s weather, the ferry that arrived only on Tuesdays. Without John’s keen eyes, however, I felt I never could see enough. Doubts perched in the periphery of my vision and squawked at me. I called friends, family, past boyfriends. I felt as though my motor