come to the hospital for the birth, but afterward Mama stayed behind while Lily and I were put in a moldy brown car with cigarette burns on the seats. I didn’t think a brand-new baby should breathe in all the smells in that car, but Lily just lay there like the lump she was, and I held my scarf over my nose all the way to Gran’s house in Birch Park.
“Your mama needs more time,” Gran said, and she told me what was in the letter. My father’s plane had crashed in the Canadian Arctic, right next door to Alaska. Gran said the men were on their way home from the meeting when the plane went down. Something about the way Gran talked told me she did not think Daddy was “a brave man, with big ideas for Alaska,” which was what the letter had said. When Gran read it, she snorted, then wiped her nose with a tissue.
Afterward she said, “You can cry if you want, but it won’t bring him back.”
—
Birch Park smelled like an old person’s house, something I’d never noticed when we only visited, which hadn’t been very often. There were no flowers in whiskey bottles, no fresh deer carcasses curing from the rafters. The only meat in the refrigerator was pale and pink, sitting limp on a foam tray and wrapped in plastic. The blood was completely drained out of it, which made me homesick and suspicious.
The very next day there was a headline on the front page of the newspaper in thick, four-inch letters that said “We’re In” and Alaska became the forty-ninth state in the United States. Gran clipped it out and told me I should save it forever so I would always remember this day, as if she didn’t understand that this was a bad thing. I didn’t want to remember anything except the way it used to be, before all this statehood nonsense.
When Mama did not show up that day, or the one after that or the one after that, I figured statehood must have done something to her, too. Maybe she didn’t have the right passport or she had the wrong shoes? Or maybe she had gone to Canada, where she would be swallowed up in the same vast emptiness that had swallowed up Daddy.
I waited and waited for Mama, worried that Lily would never know how the world was really supposed to be. But the years ticked by until just before my tenth birthday, when the water started to rise and I knew this must be it—the river was fighting back. It flooded its banks and rose higher and higher, grabbing everything in sight with its big, wet tongue. Daddy had been right when he’d said the rivers could never be tamed.
Rusty metal oil drums, blue plastic coolers, and whole cans of peaches and fruit cocktail from people’s pantries bobbed down Second Avenue. Someone’s red frilly slip got hung up in Mr. Peterson’s climbing peas and made Lily laugh out loud until Gran shushed her. Gran’s face was as red as an overripe raspberry. Even in a flood, underwear was no joking matter.
Lily was now five and out of her mind with excitement about riding in the skiff that snatched us off the doorstep as the water kept rising. I just prayed that it would never stop, that the river would somehow take us back to our old life.
But the skiffs dropped us off at the high school just a mile beyond our doorstep, where the ground was higher and still dry. Lily acted like we were on a whirlwind vacation, laughing and playing with her friend Bunny.
A girl named Selma held my hand when we had to get shots, and I acted like I was only clutching her hand to make her feel better, but really I’m terrified of needles. She was my age, but so much braver than me. Selma was the only good thing to come out of the flood.
After a few days we went home to the wet, moldy house in Birch Park. There was no furniture, just donated goods that had been trucked up from Anchorage. Under our used sneakers the carpet squelched and burped muddy water for weeks. Gran worked as a volunteer to get the new state government to replace what everyone had lost in the flood. Some of the neighbors reported a lot of missing items. Dora Peters’s mom said she’d lost a washer and dryer, a kitchen table, and some