Dana Stabenow: A Grave Denied

That was the last big job Len had done for her. She’d been able to tend to other chores as they cropped up on her own, until Johnny Morgan had appeared on her doorstep and indicated his intention to embrace permanent Park rathood. Her one-room cabin with its sleeping loft was roomy enough for one person. With Johnny, it was getting a little crowded. They’d made it through the winter amicably, more or less, and now it was spring with summer hard on spring’s heels. They’d be spending most of their time out of doors, but autumn would come, when they would be driven back inside, first by rain and then by snow and then by the bitter cold of the long Arctic winter night.

And the Park was rife with stories of lifelong friends, entire families, and couples married and unmarried splitting the blanket over the effects of that long night on the psyche. Kate wasn’t about to let that happen to her and Johnny.

Initially, the plan was to have added a room on to her cabin. The winter together had changed her mind. Or, truthfully, Johnny’s. “Why not my own cabin?”

She didn’t have a lot of experience raising kids, so she said unwisely, “Because I said so.”

“That’s not good enough,” he told her, and, impressed by the lack of temper in the statement, she shut up and listened. They had been sitting across the table from one another, Kate sprawled back with her hand wrapped around a mug of cocoa, Johnny sitting up straight, torso precisely perpendicular to the edge. Kate was beginning to recognize Johnny’s body language. This posture meant business.

“You’re kind of solitary,” he said. “You like living alone or you wouldn’t be here on your dad’s homestead in the middle of twenty million acres of national park, with the nearest village twenty-five miles down an unpaved, unmaintained road.” He wasn’t being confrontational or accusatory, exactly. It was more like he’d adopted the impartial air of the scholar. A sociologist, perhaps, come to the Park to examine non-mainstream socioeconomic systems, about which he would then write his thesis, which would then earn him a doctorate, followed by a publishing contract, followed by a visiting chair at UC Berkeley, a college in a state which celebrated alternative lifestyles.

Johnny had continued to tick off items on his list, and Kate had reined in her imagination. “Even Dad only visited, or you visited him in Anchorage, you never lived together. Right?”

“Right so far,” she said obediently.

“I want to stay here with you. I’m not going back to Anchorage to live with her, and I’m sure as hell not going back to Arizona to live with my grandmother. I don’t want to be anywhere else but here, so if I’m smart I’m going to annoy you as little as possible.”

She couldn’t help laughing a little. “You don’t annoy me, Johnny.”

He grinned. “Thanks, Kate. That’s so sweet of you,” and then had to duck when she’d thrown a spatula at him. “To tell you the truth, Kate, I’m feeling a little cramped myself.”

Amused, she said, “Oh, you are, are you?”

“Yes. It’s why I couldn’t stand Arizona, too many people. Which is why I think I need a cabin of my own.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“It doesn’t have to be as big as this one,” he said quickly. “No loft. Just room enough for a chair, a woodstove, a sink, and a bed. Maybe a desk where I can study. Look,” he said, and pulled out a notebook. “Like this.”

He’d drawn a floor plan that bore a strong resemblance to the cabins at Camp Teddy, and showed signs of having been influenced by Ruthe Bauman, the camp’s owner. Kate had to admit they had done a good job of it.

He took that as an opening. “It’d be a lot easier, a lot less labor-intensive to build a new, separate cabin than to add on to this one,” he said.

“It’ll cost more in materials,” she said, more to test him than to contradict him.

“Not really,” he said. “Look, I found a book on construction in the school library,” and he hauled it out. “You add on, you gotta mess with stuff like the foundation, and then there’s the roof.” He slapped the book shut. “And think about having to live in the mess while the construction’s going on. If we build me my own cabin, we can just live here until it’s done, like we are now. I figure we could get it done this summer, and I could move in in the fall, when school starts.”

He made a good argument. Still. “Johnny, I don’t like this idea of a fourteen-year-old boy living by himself.”

“I’ll only be thirty feet away. I measured it last night, come on, take a look,” and he dragged her into the yard. He’d been busy with strings and pegs, laying out a neat square on the other side of the outhouse, and had taken advantage of the mud to draw in the floor plan.

He watched her as she paced it out. She looked up to see the determined expression on his face, the sun slanting across it, making his blue eyes narrow, highlighting the untidy thatch of thick dark hair falling over his forehead, the stubborn chin. The strong resemblance to his father didn’t hurt anymore.

Well. Not as much.

Snow was melting inside the tops of her tennis shoes. “Let’s go back inside.”

They sat down at the kitchen table over new cups of cocoa. “I don’t know,” she said. “Kids are supposed to live with their parents.”

“Not this kid,” Johnny said.

“Yeah, yeah,” she said, “let’s not go there, okay?”

“I’m not living with her, I don’t care what she does or says.”

“I know, I know, calm down.” Her was Jane Morgan, Jack’s ex-wife, Johnny’s mother and Kate’s sworn enemy. Jane had placed Johnny with his grandmother in Arizona when his father had died, and he had liked it so much that he had hitchhiked all the way back to Alaska the previous fall. Kate, who had worked as a public investigator specializing in sex crimes for five and a half of the longest years of her life, knew exactly and precisely every awful thing that could have happened to a young boy on that journey. She still couldn’t think of it without a chill running down her spine. He’d shown up in August with Jane hot on his heels. Somehow Jane had learned the location of Kate’s homestead, so Kate had tucked Johnny away with Ethan Int-Hout, but Ethan’s wife had returned with their two daughters and had returned Johnny to Kate with more haste than grace, citing a wholly imaginary lack of space. Johnny would have had hurt feelings had not the antipathy been wholly mutual.

Kate, deciding that running from Jane was not the answer, had settled him in on her homestead and prepared for a probably legal and undoubtedly expensive siege. Unskilled at saving money, nevertheless she had made an obscene salary the previous year working security for an election campaign. She was prepared to spend it all if necessary to get and keep custody of Johnny. “Look out for Johnny for me, okay?” his father, her lover, had asked her the day he had died in her arms. It never occurred to her to do anything else.

In this, she had the tacit approval of the law in the Park, in the person of state trooper Jim Chopin, who was currently involved in a building project of his own. Yes, the troopers were opening a post in Niniltna, staffed by the aforesaid Chopper Jim, an event that in Kate’s eyes drastically shortened the twenty-five miles of road between the village and the homestead. It seemed to have a distinct effect on the regularity of her heartbeat and respiration, too, so she tried not to dwell on it.

“Okay,” she had said. “We’ll build you your own cabin.”

Johnny had been prepared for everything but capitulation. “What?”

She grinned. “But,” she said, and she leveled a forefinger for emphasis, “you eat here, you hang mostly here, and I’m consulted if and when there are any overnight guests.”