Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

She’d suggested a few weeks away from each other and he’d nodded, agreeing, praising her wisdom, and then two weeks later he’d died. He’d collapsed on the beach. At Normandy. He’d gone to lay flowers at the grave of his great-uncle, then, apparently after that he’d gone jogging, and suffered a venous thromboembolism. The funeral, back in Ohio, was a mess of ex-girlfriends and sisters — the man had a life full of women, and they had all loved him, so why hadn’t Josie tried harder?

The check from the political pizza makers arrived. They wanted eighty-two dollars. With a tip she would be paying a hundred dollars for a pizza, two cookies and three glasses of wine. This was Alaska. It looked like a cold Kentucky but its prices were Tokyo, 1988.

Josie paid and walked down the steps, out the door, and felt so free, out in the open, and happy that the women of pizza hadn’t seen her, drunken afternoon mother. Then she felt the afternoon’s new chill, and looked at her children, and realized they didn’t have coats on. Where were their coats? Josie turned around to find one of the women of pizza, standing at the door, holding their coats and long-sleeved shirts, smiling like she could have Josie imprisoned.

Josie took the coats, hustled Paul and then Ana into them, and they wandered down the street. Three shops down was a kiosk full of hand-woven hats and sweaters and Josie was sure she’d never seen such beautiful things.

“Were these made here?” Josie asked the woman, grey-haired and with bright opal eyes. The woman was grinning with joy barely contained, as if to be in Homer, selling handicrafts, was more than she deserved.

“No,” the woman said. “Bolivia, mostly.” She purred the liv portion of the nation’s name, implying this was the only place or way to do it, to live, and it seemed to Josie the only way to say the word.

Josie fondled the sweaters and hats, thinking she must purchase these Bolivian goods in Alaska, and if she didn’t, she would have missed an opportunity to fully seize this moment.

“You let me know if you have any questions,” the woman said, and sat on a nearby stool, raising her face to the sun with a beatific smile.

Josie found a scarf, wrapped it around Paul’s neck and stood back to admire him. He looked five years older, so she took it off.

“Mom, how do you know Sam again?” Paul asked.

This was unusual for him. Normally she didn’t have to tell him anything twice; his memory was airtight for unusual information about the adults in his life. Before she could explain, this time more memorably, he asked, “Have I met her?”

He had met her. Or Sam had met him, held him as a baby. Josie told Paul this, and made up something about how he had really bonded with her, that she was sort of a godmother to him.

“So she’s my godmother?” he asked.

Josie looked quickly to the opal-eyed woman, expecting judgment, but her ecstatic expression hadn’t changed.

The truth was that Josie hadn’t given Paul godparents yet. When he was born, she held off, wanting to wait till his personality had formed, to better match him to the right people. It had seemed radically enlightened at the time, but since then she’d plainly neglected the task. Now, this notion of Sam seemed inevitable.

“Sure,” Josie said.

Anyone would be better than Ana’s godparents, friends of Carl’s, who received the honor like a bad wedding gift quickly shelved. Ana hadn’t seen anything from them — never a card, nothing.

Sam, well, it could go either way. She would not likely be a smothering sort of godmother, but perhaps she could be the distantly inspiring sort? She could ask Sam about it when they saw her. No one ever said no to being a godmother, so it was as good as done.

“Sam’s the best,” she added. “Did I tell you she had a crossbow?” Sam wasn’t the best, and she was only guessing about the crossbow, but Josie was overcome with a sudden longing to see Sam, and to strengthen their ties over this godmother notion. She did love Sam in a complicated way, and hadn’t seen her in five years, and they’d walked the same strange path, and above it all and most important for Josie this day, Sam was an adult. Besides Stan and magic-show Charlie, Josie hadn’t said more than please and thank you to anyone over eight years old since they’d been in Alaska.

“She’s your stepsister?” Paul asked.

This was true in a general sense. Telling the whole truth of their sisterhood wasn’t possible, not to an eight-year-old. Though she’d tried, Josie hadn’t arrived at a simple enough storyline to explain Sam to her children.

“Right,” Josie said. “Pretty much.”

Now the grey-haired woman opened her eyes. Josie caught her looking at Paul, as if assessing if he had the strength to live through all this — cloudy step-aunt and godmother, tipsy mother. Josie bought sweaters and hats for Paul and Ana, showing the woman her competence and love by spending $210 on bright Bolivian clothing that her children would wear only reluctantly.

—

Josie did some math and realized she had spent all of the money she’d brought, $310 in an hour, while in a state of being most would consider intoxicated. Across the street she could see the Chateau beckoning, warm and still.

“Who wants to watch Tomás y Jerry ?” she asked.

They went back to the RV, the kids settled into the breakfast nook and she started the movie. Josie crawled upstairs, fully clothed, lay down on the sunny mattress. Before she fell asleep, she heard Paul say to Ana, “Are you going to get your coloring book? I don’t know how long you can play with a carrot.” Were they watching the movie or not? How did it matter? She drifted off, and woke up an hour later, sweating heavily. She looked down to find Paul and Ana asleep, with their headphones on, hair matted.

She closed her eyes again, feeling the heat of the afternoon, thinking that what she had done, taking the kids up here, notifying no one, especially not Carl, might be considered criminal. Was it illegal? Insane? Carl would use that word. For Carl, good things were insane. Bad things were insane. Josie was insane. “You grew up next to a nuthouse!” he would say, as if that meant something. As if the entire town where Josie had been raised would have been deranged by osmosis. As if Josie growing up near the Rosemont Veterans’ Administration Hospital, formerly the Soldiers’ Home, better known as Candyland, would explain whatever he hoped it would explain. He thought her childhood, her proximity to the scandal, her emancipation from her parents at seventeen, gave him some kind of leverage. He was from sturdier stock, went the implied logic, so he was entitled to drift — was allowed to do nothing. This was nonsense, of course. His father was part of a beef conglomerate that deforested some large swath of Costa Rica to make room for cows and grass, cows that would eventually be chopped into American steaks. That’s why he grew up in some luxurious expat school in San Jose — Costa Rica’s, not California’s — and why he’d grown up with servants, and why he had no idea how to work, what work meant. And because he’d never seen any connection between work and the ability to pay mortgages and the like, he felt at will to judge Josie’s every quirk. And because Josie had been born to two nurses — an occupation Carl associated with the servant class he’d exploited as a child — and because both of them were implicated in the Candyland scandal, any variance in her behavior, any flaw or weakness, could be exploited, tied to this VA tragedy.

When she and Carl were together, they’d decided not to tell the kids anything about Candyland, but now, as she lay in the Chateau, soaked in sweat, breathing the stale air inches from the ceiling, she knew she would have to be on guard around Sam. Sam, she knew, had told her twins about it all, Sunny and her own emancipation, and would be determined to bring it up in front of Paul and Ana.