What You Can Endure

In my deep swimming dreams, my mother tells me I can't come home. Not for the things I have done, but for the things I haven't. There's a story she tells about my grandfather, Fox, leaving her at a hunting stand miles away from the homestead, alone, in the dark, when she was eight. No lantern or light in late September. "Colleen, you're the oldest," he says. "Find your way." She has a rifle. Behind every tree, another tree, another shadow, or a bear. The woods so thick. No stars to follow.

"If anyone tells you to cut your hair," she says, "it means they destroy beautiful things." Her father cut her hair. For years. Hacked above the shoulders with the bluntness of practicality. His jagged cuts marked his return from Korea, from working on the slope in Prudhoe Bay. She never wore her hair short when she had a choice. She let it grow down her back, black and straight or in a braid.

She makes me feel the top point of her skull where there is a dent the size of a poker chip. "You have it too. Your brother doesn't. I have this mark and you have this mark and we were once whales." When I dream about my mother, there are whales.

She says she didn't love me when I was born, it took time. She needed to know I would live, survive, prove to her I was strong enough. I was four years old before she knew. She had fallen asleep on the couch after putting me down for a nap. I crawled out of the bed and found her only tube of red lipstick and painted my naked body, a toddling flame, and rolled across her white rabbit fur rug, over and over again, rolled across the walls, her bed sheets. "A little warrior," she says. "A goddamn mess of a comet."

"God is more of a whale than a man," she says. Here, the blood washes up on the shore and melts the ice. My bare feet are tinged with red. The cold snow. The blood warm and pooling from the whale's belly. They have stripped the skin and a layer of fat with chain saws. A whale out of the ocean is a mountain, a horizon, a different bend of sky.

"Did you wash your hair?" she says. "It's as slick as cod-liver oil." Which is the worst thing. A spoonful she had to choke down either before or after a dinner of rabbit stew or moose chili. Once, she found a bottle of her father's cod-liver capsules hidden in a cabinet. Fox's secret stash for himself. "He didn't want to down a spoonful of the godawful-tasting stuff. But he made us kids do it."

"I washed my hair," I say.

"I don't believe you," she says. But she braids it anyway. Her braids are never straight or neat—they are frayed and wild and I don't dare undo them.

We are crossing Chinitna Bay on a fishing boat. My cousins and I huddle in the cabin and wait for the coast guard to pass. We have too many people on the boat. Then there is shouting, "Come up, come up." A whale. We scramble to the deck. A humpback shoots out of the water, twisting in the air, white fins raised to the sky, and back down slamming into the water. My uncles are hollering and spilling their beer on the crowd of us. Another whale breaches, leaps up from under the boat, belly an arm's length from the rail. We all shrink back, me holding on to the hood of my mother's jacket. But she has a hand out, reaching and then brushing the white belly of the falling whale, the splash soaking her. My uncles net the floating bottles they threw overboard in their celebration. "Touch your eye," she tells me. "That's what it feels like."

There is a story about how I was almost never to be. My mother...