The Source of All Things (25 page)

By the following autumn, however, I needed a new place to live. So in September of 1994 I moved to Fairbanks, coldest spot on earth. I got a job training forty Alaskan husky puppies for a competitive dog musher named Jeff Conn. Jeff worked for the Department of Agriculture and spent $30,000 a year on seventy skinny huskies that never won a single race.

For the first time ever, I was in charge of something besides myself: four litters of pups named after things like Greek gods (Hera, Zeus, Athena, and Achilles), the space program (Sputnik, Armstrong, Buzz), and knives (Butter, Jack, Ulu). In the morning, we left the dog yard and ran a five-mile loop through the birch
trees. As autumn folded into winter the sun never rose above the horizon. I fed the pups, watered them, and hooked them to a sled. They ran hard and fast with their tongues flapping against their jowls. I yelled the commands I'd learned from professional mushers, who ran the Iditarod and the Yukon Quest. When I yelled “gee!” the dogs turned right, and when I yelled “haw!” they turned left. It always amazed me that a whole team of twelve-month-old puppies would respond to the sound of one voice.

As much as I loved the pups, though, I didn't like Jeff. He worked me to exhaustion in exchange for room and board and a small monthly stipend which I augmented briefly by working the night shift at a Fairbanks grocery store smearing frosting on doughnuts. Needless to say, sleep deprivation made my day job all the harder, but I kept at it because of the pups. I didn't realize it, but by training them I was also acting as their de facto executioner. Every week at Sunday dinner, Jeff would ask how they were performing on their daily runs out of the dog yard, and I'd report on their gait, their responsiveness, and their willingness to please. I had no idea of the sentencing I was giving them until the day, sometime around Christmas, when Jeff walked into the yard, rounded up all the “underachievers” and, after trying to sell them to other mushers, took them to the pound. Shortly thereafter, I started looking for another job.

One day after
I left Jeff's place, I was drinking beer at a bar called the Captain Bartlett when a different dog musher walked in. He wore a giant down parka, tattered Carhartt coveralls, and a pair of fur-trimmed, knee-high mukluks.

Colin James said he was from Scotland and that he'd been to base camp on Mount Everest. His next “little adventure” was to compete in the thousand mile Yukon Quest dog sled race, dubbed the “toughest race on earth.” To raise the money for such an undertaking, he guided British and Scottish tourists on dog-mushing trips north of Fairbanks. When I first met him, he seemed like a British version of Jack London. He was ruddy from the cold and missing his two front teeth, the result of a climbing accident. I liked his accent, his adventure résumé (which included sailing the North Sea in a boat he'd handcrafted, kayaking Europe's biggest rivers, and traveling through Afghanistan with his brother as a teenager during the Russian invasion). I also welcomed the fact that he could keep me warm, outside, in a sleeping bag, even when the temperature dropped to 20 below zero.

But before long, he began showing his true colors. And they weren't as pretty as the alpenglow I'd imagined shimmering on the Himalayas. Just two months after our first date, he became bellicose and possessive at a Fairbanks dance club called the Crazy Loon Saloon. A friend from the University of Alaska invited me out, and I asked Colin to come with us. When we got to the club, he said he wasn't into dancing. “I'll nurse a beer at the bar. But you go on without me,” he said. I kissed his cheek and walked onto the dance floor.

I guess I was having such a good time that I completely forgot about Colin. Because some time after we started dancing, my friend poked me and pointed. Colin was standing on the edge of the crowd, motioning me to him.

I smiled and waved him over. When he didn't come, I did my flirty move when I wiggled my butt and used my pointer finger to say, “Get over here, gorgeous.” But he just looked at me and shook his head. When the lights circling the dance floor moved over him again, I saw that he was coming toward me but was frowning. He weaved between the dancers and grabbed my bicep. I thought he was going to lean in and give me a big smooch, but he yanked me off the floor and into a corner.

I should have known that was my cue to leave. Not just the dance, but Colin. But at twenty-four, I still inhabited a long, dark tunnel. I repeated my cycle of love and despair, my most familiar emotional rhythm.

“You hurt me.” I said, reciting what was now beginning to feel like the theme song of my life.

“Good,” said Colin. “If that's what it took to get your attention.”

It took me a second to believe what I was hearing. I was three beers deep and feeling like a comedian, so I might have stuck my fingers in my ears as if to clean them. When Colin didn't laugh, I realized he was serious. I turned my back and started walking toward the dance floor.

This time Colin grabbed me again, pulling me out the door and all the way to the parking lot. I looked around to see if anyone was watching. A few kids were, but they were drunk and they turned their heads, clearly embarrassed for me. Colin kept tugging until we were sitting in my car, staring out the front windshield. He blinked his eyes and rubbed them, as if he were about to start crying.

“Colin?” I said, now wondering if I'd actually done something to hurt him. I could do that sometimes: get so caught up in the fun right in front of me that I'd forget to worry about the people I'd dragged along with me. Had I been flirting? Flaunting my body? I didn't try to defend myself—I couldn't understand why a thirty-two-year-old bar fighter would be so upset he was about to start crying.

“What's the matter?” I asked.

“Didn't you
see
me? I was standing at the edge of the crowd, waving at you for hours. I needed to get out of there, but you didn't even notice. You have no idea what you just did to me, do you?”

I tried to realize, but I didn't.

“Ireland,” he said. “You don't remember? The war? The bombs? I
told
you what they did to me.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I'm not remembering.”

“I can't believe it. I can't
fucking
believe it. You tell someone you love the most important thing about yourself and they can't remember?” Colin yelled. “That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.”

I scooted closer to the passenger window, stammering, “I'm sorry, Colin. But you've told me so many things. And they're all so amazing. How can I remember everything?”

“I don't care about the rest of what I told you. I'm talking about the war I fought in Northern Ireland. That club is exactly like the one I went to right after a bombing. Bodies everywhere. Bloody, dismembered teenagers with their trainers still on their feet.”

“Oh, Colin,” I said. “I really am sorry.”

It took a long time for Colin to calm himself enough to accept my apology. I stared past him, wishing that I could resume dancing. But when someone tells you how wounded he is—partially on account of your actions—a pair of shackles materializes out of the air and binds the two of you together. I knew I'd crossed a line. I also knew there was no retracting.

I took his hand, smiled, and pressed it against my cheek. I palmed the back of his neck, pulled him to me, and gave him a kiss.

“It's okay,” he finally said. “But can you promise me one thing?”

“Sure, yes. Whatever you need.”

“Just promise this is the last time we go dancing.”

That night, I waited until Colin was snoring before I snuck into the living room and called my parents. It must have been four in the morning. My dad answered first, saying, “Chris? Tracy? Who is it? What's the matter?” and then a few seconds later my mom got on the other line.

She was out of breath, even though I knew she'd just been sleeping. “
Tracy?
” she said. “Oh my God. Are you alright? What is it, honey? What
happened
?”

“Calm down, Mom,” I said. “Nothing happened.” But then I started crying.

“What?” said my mom. “Are you hurt? Are you
injured
?”

I tried to talk but a sob caught ahold of my words. Trying to be brave, I made myself keep talking.

“It's Colin,” I whispered. “He's freaking me out. I think he can be
violent
.”

“
Violent!
” said my mom. “What do you mean
Violent?
Did he hurt you? Who's Colin anyway? Is that the dog musher you've been seeing? Are you okay? Are you in the
hospital
?”

“
No Mom!
” I whispered back. It was one of those whispers that was also a shout. “Just shut up and let me finish. All I'm saying… is that tonight he did this weird thing when we were out dancing. He
grabbed
me. And I don't like to be grabbed by anybody.”

“Of course you don't, honey,” my mom's voice quaked. “And nobody should be grabbing you. What do you mean by grabbing anyway?”

“Jesus, Mom,” I said. “
Grabbing
. You know,
yanking
. He pulled me off the dance floor in front of everybody. It's like he wanted to show me that he
owned
me. I didn't like it, that's all.”

“Oh, God,” my mom said again, but I was waiting for my dad to chime in. Though I knew he was on the other line, he was being strangely silent. Before, when I'd had a spat with a boyfriend, he'd puffed his chest and made a point of telling me how easily he could “go down there and show that guy a thing or two.” But for some reason, he wasn't weighing in on this conversation.

“What do you think she should do, Don?” said my mom. “How can we help Tracy?”

I could almost hear my dad going over his checkbook log in his head, calculating how much spare cash he had and if it was enough to fly me home. He cleared his throat, which I'd noticed him doing a lot more often lately. Then he said, “Trace? What do you want us to do? This Colin character sounds like trouble. Do you have somewhere you can go to if he gets truly violent? You
know if you need us we're always here. If you think Colin is really going to hurt you, you know you can come home.”

“Home?” I said. “Dad, you know Las Vegas isn't my home. And I can't come home anyway. Colin just bought me a plane ticket. I'm going with him to Scotland.”

We flew to Edinburgh in June 1995, and I got a job at a water sports center called Loch Insh in a small town in the country's Highlands. Colin knew a couple who agreed to rent us an apartment. While I worked—waiting tables, helping Loch Insh's owner Sally Freshwater in her garden, and picking up the occasional early morning baking shift—Colin “sorted out his business.” He traveled to his home on the north coast, where he told his common-law wife that he'd met someone and we were starting a life together. She retaliated by saying she was keeping everything they owned, including his six-year-old daughter, Freya. When he returned to Aviemore, he was too despondent to find work or be patient and loving. A few days later, when I said I wanted us to go to a party with a new friend, he answered, “Your friends don't like me.”

“How do you know?” I asked. None of my new friends had ever expressed anything but curiosity and interest in Colin.

“They scrutinize me.”

“They don't scrutinize you. They don't even know you. How can they scrutinize you if they don't know you?”

“They look at my teeth. They think I'm ugly.”

“Colin. They don't think you're ugly. Besides, who cares what they think? I don't think you're ugly.”

“Well, I don't want to go. I want to go climbing. Come with me.”

“Come on,” I whined, “I don't feel like climbing this weekend. I want to go to the party. Why don't you call your friend Allen? You stay here and I'll go to the party. That way, we can each have fun and come back ready to see each other again after the weekend.”