Part 5
The man coming down the bank wore a ranger’s patch on his coat. He saw my hand move and shouted to someone above him, and an older man appeared with a blanket. They reached me together, keeping me low as they covered my wet clothes.
“We heard you on the radio,” the first man said. “Then we saw your truck. Where’s the animal?”
I tried to point toward the trees. He followed the marks in the snow, then looked back at me.
“A wolf?”
“Pregnant,” I managed.
He shut his eyes briefly, as if he needed a moment with that information. Then he spoke into the radio on his coat and asked for medical help.
I kept trying to tell them about the rig. The older man leaned close enough for me to hear him over the river.
“We’ll get it brought in. You can worry about your truck when you’re warm.”
They took me to a heated cabin in Alder Crossing, a small settlement serving the road crews off the Dalton. I remembered a dry shirt passing over my head and somebody saying to leave the mug alone because I wasn’t swallowing properly. After that, my memories came in pieces.
When they joined up again, I was in the camp’s small clinic. An oxygen tube lay beneath my nose, and a nurse was fastening a cuff around my arm. She had a pencil holding up part of her dark hair, although most of it had escaped.
“Daniel Mercer?”
I nodded. The movement made me cough, and she waited until I could breathe comfortably before asking another question.
“I’m Claire Sutton. Do you remember the river?”
“My little girl.”
“She’s with Ray and Beth. They’re waiting to speak to you.” She loosened the cuff. “Your dispatcher gave us their number. Paul knows you’re here too.”
I turned my head toward the window. The light looked wrong for the time I thought it was.
“You’ve been in and out for two days,” she said. “You were badly chilled, and you took water into your lungs. The doctor is treating you for pneumonia.”
The clinic served the construction camps as well as the settlement. A physician supervised my care, with a transfer plan if my breathing worsened. For the first few days, I saw more of the ceiling than anything outside; when my fever eased, walking to the bathroom left me needing to sit down.
Claire brought a phone to the bed. Ray answered first, and for once he didn’t begin with a practical question.
“You scared us.”
“I’m sorry.”
There was a pause, then Iris was there, asking why I sounded funny. I told her I had a bad cough and that people were helping me. When she asked if I was still coming home, I said yes and looked at Claire to make sure I had told the truth.
She stayed until the call was over. Then she moved the water where I could reach it without pulling at the tubing.
“One job at a time,” she said. “Right now yours is getting well enough to travel.”
I spent close to three weeks recovering in Alder Crossing, first in the clinic and then in a room nearby once I no longer needed a bed there. Claire checked on me between shifts. Some days she brought stew from a pot she had made for herself; on others she arrived with crackers because she hadn’t found time to shop.
She had little patience for my attempts to pretend I was stronger than I was. When I came back from an ambitious walk looking gray, she pointed at a chair and let me catch my breath before saying anything.
“How far?”
“Not far.”
She waited.
“Past the fuel shed.”
“Tomorrow, try less than that.”
I told her about Erin one afternoon while she sorted the mail she’d collected on her way over. I had meant to give a short explanation of who Iris lived with. Instead I told her about the nursery and the week Ray found me, leaving out the parts I still couldn’t put into words.
Claire set the mail down. She didn’t tell me what Erin would have wanted. When I stopped talking, she asked how old Iris had been when she first laughed.
Another day, after she was off duty, Claire told me she’d once expected to be married in Oregon. A doctor had said her chances of carrying a pregnancy were poor. Her fiancé had begun talking about the future as though she was no longer in it.
“He called it being realistic,” she said, turning her mug by its handle. “I let him call it that for a while.”
She had taken the northern nursing post after the engagement ended. She liked the work and the people, but she missed having someone to tell about the ordinary parts of her day.
I wanted to say something that would make what happened to her less cruel. What came out was, “I’d like to hear about those.”
She looked at me, then down at her mug. A little later she told me about a broken refrigerator at the clinic, and I listened.
After I was discharged, we took short walks. She matched my pace without mentioning it. Once, outside her door, I caught myself looking at her mouth and became so embarrassed I asked whether she needed more firewood.
“Eventually,” she said. She was smiling when I finally looked up.
My rig had been brought to the yard, and the return load was still waiting for its last leg to Fairbanks. I didn’t drive it until the clinician cleared me and Paul agreed the schedule could wait. Even then, I stopped more often than usual, keeping Claire’s number beside the one I called for Iris.
Back in Spokane, I went to Paul’s office before I went to collect my daughter. I thanked him, told him I was leaving long-haul work, and put the company keys on his desk.
He asked whether I was sure. I thought about the day marked on Iris’s calendar and the additional days she had spent waiting for news from a clinic.
“Yes,” I said.
Iris ran into me so hard that I had to lean against Ray’s porch rail. For the next several weeks I stayed close while we packed the apartment, talked with her grandparents, and made plans that included savings, work prospects, and school. Claire and Iris began talking on video, usually about whatever Iris was drawing.
Erin’s books went into a box with photographs and the little things I wanted our daughter to keep. I bought two one-way tickets through Fairbanks and let Iris choose a small suitcase. She put a stuffed moose inside, then took it out to hold.
At the airport she watched me check our bags. “Are you getting on my plane,” she asked, “or going away in the truck?”
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