Almost Thirty

It was the moonlight that caused the problem. Or maybe it was the way the sky opened over the forgotten parts of Alaska after forty days of thirty-five degrees and raining. The temperature fell for a week straight and the river outside of town froze solid. Or solid enough.

Chad, my boyfriend of two years, smashed his foot into a borrowed ice skate as we sat side by side on the cold smooth rocks of the river, the mountains an eerie blue gray rising steep and sharp all around us. His wide shoulders were hunched over his foot, his long legs bent to get close. His breath puffed into small clouds as he yanked on the lace and broke it. "Goddamn it." His mood taking that sharp turn into dark and hostile.

I didn't look over. I'd taken to not looking over.

The ice glowed a brilliant blue in the moonlight, as did the glaciers draping the tops of the mountains. The now-constant sour twist of nerves in my stomach loosened the slightest amount.

In the distance, our friend Doug skated backwards, coaxing his sometimes girlfriend Ally along. She stutter-stepped in borrowed skates, but Doug and I had our own. I watched him cross one foot over the other, side step with a kind of grace I'd never noticed in town. Doug had expressed interest covertly and not so covertly that winter, but I'd gotten good at denying everything, emotions included. So here we all were, miles outside of town, almost midnight, almost thirty.

I had moved to Alaska alone years earlier, committed to wildlife biology field work, which was providing mind-blowing adventures and an ulcer because I couldn't afford anything, ever, on what it paid. I loved small-town Alaska and had dug my heels in, trying to stay. I scrambled for extra work to cover my rent, I ate what I could catch, but I couldn't make it work very well. One blown head gasket, one broken leg, and it would all come crashing down. There was no savings to dip into, there was no one to call to ask for a loan.

When the town shipwright bought me a beer, made me laugh, wanted to move in together a few months later, it eased everything. I could stay. This life I wanted so bad could happen, was happening, until I realized I was apologizing for driving wrong, for holding the flashlight wrong, for thinking wrong.

It was a fierceness and crystal-clear independence that brought me to Alaska in the first place. But all that chipped away under the intense desire to hold onto the life I wanted: the partner who also wanted to build an Alaskan life out of boats and fishing and rain, the cabin off the grid, the job I loved. To leave him was to leave all of it. I was trapped in a way I'd never been before, in a way I'd never imagined myself capable of. And so I continued apologizing for asking him to stop yelling, for glancing over when Doug walked into a room.

I laced up my cold skates, suddenly wanting only the freedom of the ice. I scooted across the rocks to the edge of the wide, frozen river, scooted out a little further, and stood up. There is a point of balance on skates, elusive, but always there. My body adjusted, found it, and settled in. I pushed off, my skates gliding through the imperfections in the ice, my legs absorbing the bump and rattle of the way it froze.

"Wait," Chad said.

I did. I always did.

He imitated my scooting and then scrabbled to get to his feet. His body, so capable in the crafting of beautiful wooden boats out of ugly pieces, was useless in skates. The cut of Doug's skate far behind me, the bite of cold against my exposed ear, the heavy footsteps of something upstream along the treeline, Chad's unexpected vulnerability, what I knew I was capable of—I'm not sure what it was...