I Am Still Alive Read online

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2018

  Copyright © 2018 by Kathleen Marshall

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE

  EBOOK ISBN 9780425290996

  Version_1

  To the gang on the mountain.

  contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  SUMMERBefore

  After

  Before

  After

  Before

  After

  Before

  After

  Before

  After

  Before

  After

  Before

  After

  Before

  After

  Before

  After

  After

  Before

  Before

  FALL

  WINTER

  SPRING

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  I’M ALONE. I don’t have much food. The temperature is dropping.

  No one is coming for me.

  It will be winter soon, and there are so many ways to die out here. If the cold doesn’t get me, the hunger will. If the hunger doesn’t get me, the cold will. Or some wild animal. Or those men will come back . . .

  But I’m not dead yet, and someone should know. Someone should know what happened. So I’m writing it down, as best I can. In pieces, because that’s the way it is in my head, all tangled up.

  There are two beginnings to this story. One of them is on a tarmac in Alaska. The other’s standing on a lakeshore with the rain falling on me like mist, the cabin’s timbers smoldering, sullen and red. I’ll tell you both stories, what happened before my father died and what happened after. And when I’m done or when I’m too weak to write anymore, I’ll leave this notebook where the cabin was. If someone comes looking for us, for me, maybe they’ll find it.

  So if you’re reading this, I’m probably dead. But for a while, I survived.

  My name is Jess Cooper, and I am still alive.

  SUMMER

  Before

  IT TOOK TWO flights to get up to the town where Dad lived in Alaska—where I thought he lived. I spent the second flight studying a picture of him. Mom had gotten rid of the photos of them together but held on to one of him alone, just for me, and I clutched it in my hand. I was worried I might not recognize him. Or he might not recognize me. We could walk right past each other and not know it.

  In the photo, he stood in the woods in a blue rain shell. Mist hung in the air, his breath making a thicker cloud in front of his bristly lips. He had a beard that needed trimming and bright eyes, crinkled up at the edges like he’d laughed right before the picture was taken. By the time I stepped onto the tarmac and scanned the thin crowd of people waiting, I had memorized every detail of his face.

  He wasn’t there. I imagined adding gray to his beard, taking his beard away, making it longer. Scrubbing out the laugh lines and adding the sort of wrinkles you get from frowning, because I figured he couldn’t be that happy if he’d left his wife and kid. No matter what I did to the picture in my mind, it didn’t match anyone there, and soon everyone waiting for the plane had been claimed by one of my fellow passengers.

  The only person left was a huge man wearing a puffy yellow jacket who stared straight at me, squinting, but didn’t move or wave or anything. His bushy red-brown hair poked out from under a baseball cap that might have once been yellow but had faded to gray brown everywhere except the brim.

  I hitched my bag over my shoulder. Dad must have sent someone to pick me up, that was all. I walked over, my right foot dragging slightly. I still couldn’t lift it properly, and the ball of my foot scraped along the ground. The man watched my slow progress without budging.

  “Hi,” I said when I got close. It sounded like a bird chirping, high-pitched and spastic. “I’m Jess. Did my dad send you?”

  “Jess?” the guy said. He scratched his beard. “I’m supposed to be meeting Sequoia. Could be I’m in the wrong place, though.” He looked behind me as if another girl could be lurking there.

  “No, that’s me,” I said. “Jess is my middle name. I never go by Sequoia.”

  “Oh, great.” He grinned. He looked a lot less intimidating when he smiled, but he still could’ve closed a hand around my entire head. “Carl’s waiting.”

  He’d turned around and started walking before I really remembered that was my father’s name. Carl Green. Not Cooper; Mom hadn’t changed her name.

  “So he sent you?” I asked the man’s back as I struggled to keep up. I had to take three steps to one of his, and that meant instead of taking slow, careful steps with my bad foot, I had to fling myself forward in a lurching limp. Which I wasn’t supposed to do. Will, my physical therapist, had been really clear about that. Slow and steady and I’d walk almost normally someday.

  “Uh-huh,” the man said. I was puffing by the time we reached the fence that divided the tiny tarmac from the parking lot, and he stopped. He looked around at me and blinked rapidly. “Sorry. I can take the bag, if you want.”

  I shook my head, slinging the duffel around to my front and folding my arms over it. “It’s fine,” I said, jaw set.

  He rubbed the back of his neck with his palm. “Forgot you were handicapped. Is that the right word? Handicapped? Or is it something else? I think it’s something else. I think handicapped is wrong. Sorry.”

  “It’s fine,” I said again. I didn’t want to have this conversation. I was grateful when he nodded. But when he set off again he walked slowly, peeking at me out of the corner of his eye, and I could keep up pretty well. I focused on lifting my foot all the way off the ground. If I let it drag, I’d trip eventually, and a fall was the worst thing I could do to my healing muscles and tendons and bones.

  I hadn’t realized before the car crash how much a body could break, and I hadn’t realized until the months afterward how imperfectly it got put back together. Parts of me would always be broken.

  “I’m Griff,” the man said abruptly as we walked, and all I could think to do was nod.

  * * *

  • • •

  THIS IS WHAT you need to know about Griff:

  He’s probably the nicest guy I’ve ever met, even though he’s a bit odd. He looks like a mountain man but claims it’s camouflage: mountain men won’t eat you if they think you’re one of them, he says. He tells a lot of jokes like that, but he has a totally deadpan delivery, so you can never tell if it’s a joke or one of the strange things he believes. If you laugh at the wrong thing, he’ll give you this sad look. He loves the color yellow. Jesus is his personal savior. And if anyone’s coming for me, it’s him.

  But if he is coming, it’s not for months. And maybe not at all.

  These days I think about him a lot. He’s on a list that cycles through my mind all day. Mom, Scott, Will, Dad, Griff. Lily. Not George so much, because George is an asshole. Michelle, Ronnie, and then I’m out of people I really knew, and I start picturing faces from all over the place. The guy who served me ice cream the day before the accident. The woman at the gas station with three blond kids who stood at the nose of her minivan and put a hand to her forehead like she didn’t know if she was going to get back in it. The pilot who’d flown the first leg up to Alaska, who’d known my mom, who’d invited me up into the cockpit but hadn’t said anything, and I hadn’t said anything, and we just sat there being quiet and sad until I had to go take my seat.

  I thought it would be food that I fantasized about, but so far it’s people.

  BACK THEN I was more than a little scared of Griff. Which was only smart—strange guy telling me to get in his car? Yeah, that seems safe. Only I didn’t see another option. I had a phone number for my dad, but I’d already tried it during my layover and gotten a recording telling me it was disconnected.

  I probably should have gone back to Seattle then. Explained to the social worker that something was wrong, and I couldn’t go live with my dad after all. And yet I didn’t. I didn’t turn back when the call didn’t go through, and I didn’t turn back when Griff was waiting for me.

  Griff’s car was an old station wagon, probably older than he was. The back of it was full of takeout bags and soda bottles, a sleeping bag, three banker’s boxes, a full set of suitcases, and two pairs of shoes. The front seat was full of receipts, which Griff scraped off onto the floor when he got in. I wedged my bag between my feet, making the receipts rustle, and shut t
he door.

  “You didn’t bring much,” Griff said.

  “I don’t need much,” I said. The lawyer who’d taken care of selling the house and the furniture had rented a storage place for the rest, for whenever I wanted it. My memories would be tucked away safe, he’d said.

  It felt like he was giving me permission not to remember. I didn’t want to think about my life before, because I loved it too much. Loved Mom too much. I could lock everything up and forget about it until it all healed over, however long that took. As long as it would take to teach my body to walk properly again, I thought. When I could take a step without thinking about how to lift my foot, maybe I’d go back to Seattle and remember.

  Griff didn’t make much conversation after that. We drove a long time in silence, until I realized we were heading the wrong way.

  “I thought my dad lived in town,” I said.

  “Got a house in town,” Griff said. “But he doesn’t live there. You’ll see.”

  “Shouldn’t I know where I’m going?” I asked.

  “Wouldn’t mean anything to you,” he said. “I’m taking you to your dad, and that’s what counts.”

  “Right.” I looked out the window. The town had petered out. Now there were a few gray-sided houses that looked embarrassed to be interrupting the wilderness. The road was pocked and cracked, and my hand drifted to my leg. The skin on my right leg looked just like that, with red swapped for gray.

  It had taken them hours to pick all the glass out of my skin. I had more scars on my shoulder, and on my neck and face. The scars on my face were deep and red, like claw marks. They made people stare.

  I liked them. People who stared at my face, I could stare back at. People who stared at my limp, I couldn’t do anything about.

  Eventually Griff started singing. He was so off-key and he mumbled so much that I couldn’t tell what he was singing, but he bobbed his head and tapped the wheel in time to something. He jammed a button and the heater came on, rattling and coughing, and the wheels scraped and bumped on the uneven road and something clattered and bounced in the backseat. And then we came around a bend and there was a bear in the road.

  Griff pumped the brakes casually, slowing up without stopping, and the bear took off for the woods. We just kept sliding along the road.

  “Look at him skeeedaddle,” Griff said, pulling out that syllable with a twangy accent, and I laughed. He gave me a grin and laughed with me, and then both of us were laughing with the gray-blue sky sliding over our heads and the forest growing thick and deep and wild around us. It was the first time I’d laughed since the accident, since Mom died, and it felt like coughing up burrs. It felt good, too, though I only realized that after.

  “Skeeedaddle,” he said again, and as we started on the next few hundred miles we were friends.

  After

  I CAN’T QUITE comprehend what happened here. I know it but don’t feel it, feel it but don’t understand what I feel. Maybe writing it down like this will help. It doesn’t feel like a story, the same way that before does. It feels like it’s still happening. That even now I’m waking on the shore, smoke and fog mingling together until I can’t tell one from the other.

  It’s morning, though the sunlight is weak and thin through the thick gray mass of clouds, which hang so low they shroud the jagged tops of the trees. The forest has never looked so much like teeth. It’s never seemed to stretch so far.

  I’ve slept all night curled on the shore while the cabin burned. The fire is out, but the timbers still smolder, shedding smoke and steam. I sit up and hunch against the rain. It’s getting harder, pelting against my shoulders and hissing on the lake behind me. The noise is like static, and it drowns out any other sound—a kind of crowded silence that leaves no room for thought. Every living thing with any sense is hunkered down, sheltered among the dark, endless trees. Waiting out the rain. Waiting out the cold. Still I can’t move, can’t think at all.

  My mind refuses to retrace my footsteps, to go further into the past than the night, the fire. I know only that I am alone, that I am hungry, that my tongue is like sandpaper in my mouth.

  I tip my face up, closing my eyes. The rain spatters my cheeks, my eyelids. You’re alive, I tell myself. I won’t, can’t, think about what happened, but I know that being alive is a miracle in itself. Stay that way.

  But how?

  My thoughts move reluctantly. There are too many places they can’t go, like pockets of burning embers too hot to approach. Thinking about Dad burns worse than all the rest, but I force myself to seize on to the thought of him, hold it in my mind until I feel as if my skin will blister and crack from the pain of it.

  Dad would know what to do. Somewhere in my smoke-shrouded, too-painful memories, he must have showed me what to do.

  He told me cold will kill you quickest—so build a shelter. Thirst will kill you in a day or two—find water. Hunger won’t kill you for a long time, but it’ll make you weak—so find food. Fire is supposed to be last. Fire is warmth and food and clean water, but it’s hard and time-consuming, and people die because they spend all their time making the fire and no time finding water or building a shelter.

  So shelter first. But the cabin’s gone. Everything’s gone. I have nothing, I—

  No. Stop. I don’t have nothing. I have the rain. The rain, which kept the fire from spreading to the trees, which I can gather and drink without boiling (no way to boil the lake water, not yet, not without fire).

  I have what I’m wearing: good boots, warm clothes, a rain shell.

  I have everything I grabbed from the cabin before the fire. Not much—my duffel and backpack, the hatchet, a can of peaches, a can of salmon.

  I have the rifle and the bow with all its arrows, and a box of ammunition.

  And I have Bo. He’s down by the lake, pacing, sniffing. Looking up sometimes like he’s waiting and watching. Waiting for Dad? I’m not sure. But I’m not alone, not completely. Bo is here.

  No one is coming for me. For us. If I’m going to live, I have to move.

  Easier said than done. My body is still a map of pain, from the soles of my feet to my pounding head. But better than sitting here with nothing but the flame-scorched past, waiting to die.

  One thing at a time.

  I grab for my duffel and rummage in it until I find what I’m looking for: a pill bottle. I rattle it. Five pills. Painkillers, the powerful kind, left over from my prescription. I haven’t taken them in weeks, but I shake one out now and swallow it dry. Just one, even though I long for two, for the complete blanketing numbness that even when it doesn’t muffle the pain makes me not care about the pain.

  But there are only four left, and I have to stay sharp, so I cap the bottle and tuck it safely back in the bag.

  One thing at a time, and the next thing is to feed myself. I twist the lid off the jar of salmon and pop a greasy piece in my mouth. Bo must smell it, because seconds later he comes loping up to me, his pink tongue hanging between his teeth and his breath fogging the air. He halts two feet away and licks his chops. Waiting for permission.

  “Nuh-uh,” I say. “I need this.” The salmon and peaches won’t last long. A few days if I stretch them. Less if I split them with a hundred-pound dog.

  Bo whines and ducks his head. And then I remember the jerky treats. I grabbed them this morning when we were heading out, and they’re still crammed in my pocket. I dig in my pocket, get a handful, and toss them to Bo. He snatches one out of the air, then snuffles around the ground collecting the rest.

  I don’t know what kind of dog Bo is. Neither does Dad. Neither did Dad. He’s mostly black, flecked through with gray, lighter around his muzzle. He looks like he’s got some husky in him, some malamute, and almost definitely some wolf. He’s got that wildness to him. Dad said that you can’t tame a wolf-dog, just make an ally of him. Bo’s never been on a leash in his life.

  I chew slowly. Even though I’m starving, I feel queasy, an odd churning in my stomach. It takes me a minute to recognize it. I had the same feeling after the accident, when they told me Mom was dead. For two, three days, things swung between horrible, clawing grief that hurt more than my injuries and a pinched numbness. That pinching was awful, but it meant I didn’t think about Mom. Her death didn’t feel real to me, not for a long time.