away to show the walls.
‘The only other hotel’s in Faro, and that’s—’
‘Not us. You. What was it about Ross River that made you stay?’
‘The land is good. As good as any place in the Territory. And the town is—’ He stops to remember what he was about to say, and realizes there’s nothing there. ‘The town is nowhere,’ he goes on finally. ‘I suppose it’s somewhere for the people born here. And for the Kaska it means all sorts of things, good and bad and other stuff I don’t have a clue about. But for me, it’s the best nowhere I was able to find.’
‘I knew that’s what you’d be looking for.’
‘And that’s how you found me.’
Alex shrugs.
‘I tried the easy ways first,’ she says. ‘But there was no phone number under your name anywhere. I even tried looking up your mom, but she’s totally off-line, too.’
‘She got rid of her phone when she realized the only person she has to call anymore is me. And we’ve already made our own arrangements on that count.’
‘So what did that leave me with? Fifty thousand miles. I would come to a road that ran off whatever road I was on and I’d follow it to the end. When I couldn’t go any farther on the last one I could find—that’s where I knew you would be.’
‘Nowhere.’
‘Nowhere’s nowhere,’ she says. ‘Not when you’re in it.’
Miles doesn’t agree—he’s living proof that she’s wrong—but he doesn’t contradict her.
‘How long did you plan to keep it up?’
‘This was it,’ Alex says, clapping her hands together once, hard. An everybody-out-of-the-pool sound. ‘August first. Ten days from now. Four seasons rolling from Eugene to Pink Mountain to Spokane and I’m finally ready to quit. Then you’re right there. A bogeyman on a bar stool.’
‘It must have cost a hell of a lot. And your parents can’t be giving—’
‘To look for you?’
Alex releases a nasty laugh and sits on the end of the bed. The mattress screeches in protest. When she settles, however, her body is unnaturally still, as though something had switched off inside of her.
‘A tent, a cooler full of hot dogs and bananas,’ she goes on, sliding her hands down the front of her jeans. ‘The rest is pretty cheap, really. Buy a used pickup at the beginning of the summer and resell it on Labour Day. The rest of the time it’s driving and stopping. Showing a picture of you to everybody I meet, like a cop in a TV show. Excuse me, ma’am, have you seen this man? And they would look, and make a sad, oh-poor-dear face and shake their heads. I’d tell them to look again and imagine half his face scarred. Because it’s weird, you know, but I never took a picture of you after you came back from the fire. Have you ever noticed that people only take pictures when they’re happy? Anyway. Anyway. I’d show the old photo of you for a second time and tell them to add in a scar. Sometimes they wanted to help so much that they’d lie and say yes, they thought they saw somebody like that around last week. At the back of the pool hall, asking for spare change outside the liquor store—one of those places where you’d expect to come across the sort of person you wouldn’t want to take a good look at. But I became an expert at detecting the sound of wishful thinking, and move on. Drive and stop and out comes the picture. Excuse me, sir. Drive and stop. When it got to the end of August, we’d turn around. That was it. That’s the whole itinerary for four years running. Our annual adventure. The only summer holidays Rachel has ever known.’
Alex stops now, a little breathless, and feels a blush heat her cheeks at how long she’s spoken. It’s been a while since she’s talked to anyone aside from Rachel, and Alex knows that Miles can hear it as clearly as she can.
‘I thought of changing my name,’ Miles says, turning to face the window again. ‘But I figured I didn’t have to. For the natives, names are sacred. For the rest of us, we just feel better off not knowing.’
‘So it was easy.’
‘There was a time you couldn’t get away from things as easy as I did. You were born someplace and you died there. If anybody asked who you were, you knew what to say. Your family name. Your church. Your trade. Nobody talked about finding or reinventing themselves. You were only who you were.’
His face has drifted so close to the window that his nose has grazed its warm surface, leaving a print behind. He pulls back an inch. Behind him, Alex waits for him to complete his thought, and only now does he realize he had one.
‘It’s different now, though,’ he says, and watches the patch of steam his words make against the glass. ‘People move around. Try whole new lives on for size.’
‘I guess that’s freedom.’
‘Oh yeah. Free as birds.’
‘Is she there?’ Alex asks after a time.
‘I can see her,’ he says, and realizes he’s been half watching Rachel for as long as he’s been standing there.
Miles forces his eyes to focus. He looks out across the tall grass of the Welcome Inn’s back lot to the yards of mobile homes beyond it. In one of them, a bunch of Kaska kids play on a trampoline. Rachel is there, her strawberry dress lifting wide and sucking back against her legs with every jump. Miles is amazed how quickly they all have gone from introductions to holding hands, screaming in made-up terror. Without instruction they have worked out a pattern where only one pair of feet connect with the elastic tarp at a time, sending them into the air and the pink rubber bubbling up after until the next bare toes push it earthward again.
As Miles watches them he places three of his fingertips against his scar and draws them down. He does it so delicately that, to Alex, it appears that he is searching for something in the marks, reading his face like Braille.
‘Do you have somebody here?’ she asks, and her voice pulls his hand away from the burn.
‘You mean like a girlfriend?’
‘You can choose the term you’d like.’
‘No, I don’t have somebody.’
‘I’m a little surprised.’
‘You shouldn’t be. I’m not looking. And even if I was, there’s nobody here to look for.’
‘There’s that girl in the bar last night.’
Alex isn’t smiling, but her voice is. Viciously amused. Miles has forgotten it. The tone of accusation, mocking and inescapable.
‘What girl?’
‘The pretty one. The only one. The one who gave me the once-over and then burned her eyes right through your forehead when you walked out.’
‘Margot,’ he says. ‘She already lives with an asshole, she doesn’t need two.’
‘From what I saw of her, I’m sure she thinks that’s too damn bad.’
