The Wild Truth (17 page)

I stood there, water still rushing through the hose in my hand, and watched as he walked away. “Um . . . Well, okay, then,” I murmured as I turned off the spigot and followed behind.

By the time I came through the front door, Fish had taken Max upstairs and was sitting on the couch in the living room, in silence, his head in his hands, eyes staring blankly at the beige carpeting. I had a guess as to what might be wrong. We had recently hired a couple more technicians to keep up with our demanding workload at the shop. Men enclosed in tight quarters are known to play jokes on one another, some more insensitive than others. I assumed from the injured confusion on Fish’s face that there had been some laughable claim that one of the guys had seen me around town with someone else. Fish was far from jealous, and I was far from unfaithful, so I had little interest in entertaining the discussion.

I walked into the kitchen and rinsed Max’s collars in the sink. When I walked around the corner, Fish hadn’t budged. I came around the couch to sit beside him and put my hand on his knee. “What’s
wrong
with you?” I asked with a laugh. “Have the guys been giving you a hard time?”

Fish looked up at me, his eyes red and desperate.

And then my world fell apart.

“It’s your brother,” he said slowly. “They found him. He’s dead.”

At that moment I became keenly aware of time and space and my place within all of it. And it was excruciating. My hand left Fish’s knee. My eyes blurred as the room collapsed into darkness, and a black vortex started spinning all around me—a sinister mass that somehow slammed me into myself until I became dizzy.

“No,” I corrected him, “Chris is not dead.”

Then I closed my eyes tightly, threw my hands to my sides, dug my fingers into the couch and began to scream uncontrollably. I could hear Max whimpering and scratching at the bedroom door. I could feel Fish trying to contain me within his strong, calm, kind arms as he searched for the right words to comfort me.

“No! Get away from me! Chris is not dead! He’s not dead!” I insisted and pushed him away. I wanted everything to stop. I wanted Fish to stop speaking, the earth to stop turning, my heart to stop beating—anything that forced me further into a life without Chris.

I crawled to one end of the couch and curled up in a fetal position. I shrieked at Fish to leave me alone as he tried to cry with me. He paced around the house for the next few hours as day passed into night and I continued in my hysterical state. Exhausted, I finally collapsed into his embrace, which I needed so badly.

I don’t know when I first learned more details—that Chris’s body had been found in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness. Fish may have told me then, but the chasm between what I heard and what I comprehended was wide and bottomless.

In a comatose state, I dragged myself up the staircase and took a warm shower. The simple tasks of cleaning myself up and packing a bag so Fish could drive me to be with my parents were agonizing. I was operating within a murky haze that dragged every action along in painful slow motion. I did not want to go anywhere or see anyone, but I felt a responsibility to be with my parents.

On our way out of town, I asked Fish to stop at our church. It was late but the main door was still open, and as I walked in alone, tears still streaming down my face, I came across the choir director locking up for the night.

“My dear, what is the matter?” he asked softly and put his hand on my shoulder.

“My brother died,” I said numbly, hearing my words and finding them absurd. “He was hiking in Alaska and they found him dead.”

“Oh dear God. I just read about that poor young man in the paper. That was
your
brother?” He looked at me with wonder. Later I learned that the
New York Times
had published a story, “Dying in the Wild, a Hiker Recorded the Terror,” a few days before. The paper hadn’t disclosed Chris’s identity because until earlier that day, when Sam was shown a photograph, the authorities had not confirmed who he was. On the choir director’s face, empathy that had once been theoretical became real and acute as he looked a suffering family member in the eye. It was a look I would see over and over again, for the rest of my life.

“Can I please just sit in the sanctuary for a little while?” I asked, looking down at the keys in his hand.

“Oh, of course, of course,” he obliged. “You take as much time as you need.”

I walked across the burgundy runner between the church pews, down the aisle that I had envisioned Chris walking me down on my wedding day, and fell to my knees in front of the altar. I thought about us as kids in the pews of Saint Matthew’s, trusting in a God that would protect us from harm.

“Why?” I cried out into the echo of the empty, cavernous room. “Why did you let him die?” I placed my head onto the steps below the cross and felt my tears soak into the floor beneath me. “Why?” I railed at my Father. “What am I supposed to do now? How do I do this? Why did you have to take him away from me?”

I didn’t know what I was looking for or what I hoped would happen. I thought about the glow that I used to swear I could see around Reverend Smith when I was little. I wanted to feel that around me. It was as if I was expecting the ceiling to open and that light to shine down and heal me, to explain everything, to give me understanding and acceptance. And peace.

I didn’t get any of that. I walked out of the church in as much pain and confusion as I had walked in.

I sobbed the entire four-hour drive to Windward Key. I did not want to return there. I did not want to see Walt and Billie.

We arrived in the early hours of a cool fall morning. The walk up the tall town house staircase was laborious as my feet became heavier with each step. But arriving in the middle of the night brought with it the welcome avoidance of an embrace with my parents. I battled with a cruel mix of emotions that teetered between sorrow and exasperating anger.

The next morning, I sat numbly on the couch as Sam explained things to Fish. Chris had covered his identity well, and it had taken the Alaska State Troopers nearly two weeks to find us.

The trail grew warm when an Alaskan named Jim Gallien saw an article in the
Anchorage Daily News
about a young hiker whose body had been found, and he recognized from the details and location that it must have been the same young man he’d given a ride to the previous spring. The Alaska troopers had developed a roll of film they’d found with the hiker, and Gallien had confirmed the young man in the self-portraits was one and the same. Chris had told Gallien he was from South Dakota, so the investigators had searched for his family there.

A South Dakota wheat farmer named Wayne Westerberg, who had been Chris’s good friend and employer, heard a radio report about the recovered hiker and feared it was Chris—or rather, Alex, as he had known him. He called the authorities and gave them the social security number Chris had written on a W-4 tax form. Through that social security number, the police learned Chris was from Virginia, and since Walt and Billie weren’t living in Annandale anymore, the McCandless number that came up in their directory was Sam’s. The authorities faxed Sam Chris’s self-portrait, and he recognized his brother immediately, though the young man in the picture looked different from the Chris he had last seen at Windward Key.

So, late in the afternoon of September 17, Sam had been faced with the terrible task of informing Walt and Billie that their son was dead. He had also called our shop, later admitting to relief that I hadn’t answered and regret that he had to pass on the awful assignment to Fish.

FISH HAD TO RETURN SOUTH
to the long list of cars awaiting his attention at the shop. I stayed in a stupor in the living room of the town house most of the day as events took place around me. Sam and his wife, Michele, took over with strength and grace. They put aside any differences they had ever encountered with Walt and Billie and did what needed to be done. Sam took calls from the police in Fairfax, Virginia, and the coroner’s office in Fairbanks, Alaska. Chris’s dental records were required to make a conclusive identification, and Sam saw to those arrangements as well. My mom had refused to look at the picture until the dental records confirmed beyond a doubt that it was her son.

She sat in the kitchen when the time came for Sam to bring the picture over to her. He laid it on the table. I watched her entire body tremble as she looked up to see if she recognized the image. Tears dripped from her nose and chin as she tried to fight the release, then an ungodly wail left her body. Sam put his arms around her and she crumpled from the chair onto his shoulder. My father stood by in his own unfamiliar element, trying to figure out how to control the uncontrollable, unsure of how to handle his own pain, much less hers. Their reliable standby of denial was not an option this time. I ran over to my mom and embraced her, finally taking in the common loss.

The phone rang constantly, and Michele drafted a family statement for the press.
Why in the world are people so interested in his story?
I wondered, and I wished there was no story to issue a statement about. Mom and Dad requested I get onto a plane with Sam the following day. We were to go to Alaska and retrieve Chris—his remains, his belongings, anything at all he’d left behind. I was surprised my parents were not going themselves, but I didn’t question the plan. I wanted to go. I wanted to fly across the country to discover that it was all a colossal mistake—or perhaps that Chris had succeeded in pulling off a brilliant scheme to finally separate himself once and for all from the oppression of our parents, just as he’d said he would. There would be a note for me explaining his ingenious plan and how to get in touch with him.

I DON
’
T REMEMBER MUCH
about the flight out of Washington, D.C., or the connecting flights that finally landed us in Alaska. I do remember thinking how enormous and distant a single state must be in order to justify having an entire airline named after it. Our first stop in Fairbanks was the coroner’s office. I had never dealt with the formalities of death before, and the experience at the bureau was less ceremonial than I had anticipated. As I sat across the desk from the coroner, I found her casual outdoor attire and the rustic environment of her workspace comforting.

She gave us the possessions that were recovered with Chris’s body, among them a .22 rifle, a pair of binoculars, a fishing rod, a Swiss Army knife, a book of plant lore in which Chris had recorded a terse journal, his Minolta camera, the pictures the state troopers had developed in order to help identify the body, five rolls of undeveloped film, and several well-read and tattered paperback books. There was no note waiting for me.

I was taken aback by the gun. I had never been that close to one before, and I didn’t realize that Chris had owned one. But the books and journal were so representative of the brother I loved, I felt the return of the smile that had been absent from my face for the past three days. Henry David Thoreau’s
Walden
and Boris Pasternak’s
Doctor Zhivago
were included alongside lighter reads like Michael Crichton’s
The Terminal Man
and even some Louis L’Amour.

Chris loved to read and could delve into highbrow philosophy or quick-read westerns with equal zeal. As a kid, he’d had a blue bookcase filled with his perfectly organized Hardy Boys mysteries, and he also loved to read Ray Bradbury. As I sat reading
Little House on the Prairie
or
Black Beauty,
he looked up from “A Sound of Thunder” to tell me about how the simple act of stepping on a butterfly could substantially alter the future of humanity. “Everything we do affects everything,” he explained seriously. Then he turned to reading something lighter, like
Old Yeller,
and tossed it to me to read when he was finished.

As the coroner explained things to us, I kept my head up and watched her lips move. Her sentences held little meaning, but certain words sliced through the air like a scalpel: “Starvation.” “Sixty-seven pounds.” “Decay.” “Autopsy.” “Cremation.” Her description of something called the Stampede Trail and an abandoned bus filled me with confusion. The coroner was polite and sensitive, yet this was clearly routine for her. My rattled mind wandered. I could not imagine having her job, but I supposed she took a certain satisfaction in helping families resolve things and take one more step toward closure. As the process continued, I focused on the nameplate on her desk:
FREJA LOVISWEAN.
I wondered how far someone with that name had traveled to wind up in the Alaska interior, and why. Sam was on point to verify statistics and sign the necessary papers to take custody of Chris’s things. I was responsible for collecting Chris’s ashes in Anchorage the next day.

Sam and I went to a hotel somewhere, went to dinner somewhere, talked about the plan for the next day. The restaurant was nice but not overly so. We sat at a table the shape of a half-moon, part of a series along the edge of the large dining room. The concave leather booth had a high back and welcomed me into a feeling of insignificance . . . I could just stay there and hide. I realized this trip was the first time I had ever been alone with Sam, who was twelve years older than me. He was kind and attentive. We didn’t talk about what Chris had done or why. We didn’t compare notes on our childhoods. We didn’t speculate about what had driven Chris to such extremes, nor did we theorize about any of his decisions. It was just time to eat, so we ate.

I had a very difficult time sleeping alone in my hotel room that night. I saw Chris’s ghost around every corner, behind every door. But these visions were not warm and peaceful. My traumatized brain invented images of Chris in a zombie-like state, decomposing, his guts exposed through his clothing, his flesh falling from his bones as he walked toward me, his outstretched arms reaching for me. I imagined his suffering. I felt terrible for the pain that he must have gone through, on so many levels. He loved life more than anyone I had ever known, and now his was over. The coroner had said it was likely he had died slowly. That meant he’d been aware of his impending death, and it was more than I could bear. Although there had been no note left for me, Chris had posted one at his camp, explaining that he was too weak to hike out, begging any hikers that might pass by to remain to save him when he returned from his search for food nearby. When the coroner had shown us the desperate message, I immediately thought of that day on the beach when we were kids, watching him shivering in the cold, being helpless to comfort him. I cried myself into a restless sleep.