“He worked for a couple of years, saving his money, and he was all set to go to school in Seattle when he fell in love.”

Her mother.

“I have never seen any two people more in love in my life,” Moses said, sounding almost judicial in tone. “They were crazy for each other, dancing the night away at the bars, necking in his truck out at the end of River Road, holding hands so they couldn’t hardly get through a door when they needed to.” He shook his head, and in the softest voice she’d ever heard him use, said, “No. That’s not how I mean it to sound. That’s not how it was. They were in love, girl. Head-over-heels, fly-me-to-the-moon, I-only-wanna-be-with-you love. You understand?”

Her throat tight, she managed to say, “Yes.”

“Thought you might.”

She waited as long as she could. “What happened?”

He shrugged. “What usually happens when two people fall in love? They got married.”

“Was she pregnant?”

“What? No. They didn’t have to get married; they wanted to. He told her all his plans, and she was all for it, so they were careful not to let anything happen to get in the way. They needed a place to live, though, so he used up his savings to buy them a little house, and he went back to work deckhanding, saving up enough to get the both of them Outside and him to school. She was miserable with him out on the water most of the time, but she handled it. Got herself a job down to the cannery on the slimer. Then she got herself an idea, and the next time he was in town and they had come up for air-”

His dry tone made her smile involuntarily.

“-she tells him. They could apply for a loan. They’d just opened up a local branch of an Anchorage bank, and he was a local boy with a good reputation. No reason somebody wouldn’t lend him money. So they did.”

You really are a master of the dramatic pause, you miserable old son of a bitch, she thought, not a respectful way even to think of one’s elder and teacher. She was determined this time not to ask, but she didn’t last thirty seconds. “What happened? Did the bank turn them down?”

“No.” He shook his head and laughed, not a nice laugh. “No, the bank didn’t turn them down. It would have been better if they had.”

“Uncle! What happened?”

“The bank manager told them she would have to sign the loan because she was the responsible member of the marriage.”

She stared at him, again trying to make out his face in the dark. “Why?”

“She was white.”

“What?”

“She was white, Caucasian, Polish-German-Scotch-Irish-English. A round-eye. A gussuk. Daughter to the BIA teacher couple in Icky. Think they were from Indiana, or some such.”

Wy closed her eyes and bowed her head. “And he was native.”

“Yupik as you and me. More. Myself, I think that was the beginning of the end. Oh, they went out to Seattle, and he came back with his certificate, and he got on the big boats. I imagine most of the big boats had mostly white crews and they weren’t easy on him. He started drinking, and they started fighting. In the middle of all this, she gets pregnant.”

“With me.”

“With you. He ran off, Wy. Maybe he was just following the sterling example set by his own father. Maybe he just couldn’t watch the world be mean to a child of his. I don’t know. One day he was there; the next he was gone.”

“What did my mother do?”

“She had you and farmed you out to your father’s sister. Not the best thing she could have done, in the circumstances.”

Wy remembered what little she could of her first years on earth, and bile rose up in her throat. No. Not the best thing.

“And then she left.”

“Do you know where she is?”

He hunched a shoulder.

“What about my father? Do you know where he is?”

“Your father’s dead, Wy.”

She drew in a sharp breath.

“He quit drinking and eventually moved up to master on the Alaska ferry system. He divorced your mom and remarried. He had three kids by his second wife.”

“I have half brothers and sisters?”

“Yeah.”

“Where are they?”

“Outside somewhere. I don’t know exactly where.”

“Would someone in Icky know?”

“Probably. Whether they’ll tell you…” He shrugged.

The red buoy at the mouth of the river winked on and off, on and off. Red right returning. On the very edge of the horizon she thought she could see the lights of a boat, too far away to see if it was coming up the river or passing it by. A meteor streaked across the sky. She took a long, shaky breath. “Thanks for telling me, uncle.”

He grunted.

“Why now?” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me all this when I first moved back to Newenham? You must have known from the beginning who I was, and who my father was. You knew I wanted to know. Why didn’t you tell me?”

Another long silence, during which she got the impression, unusual in the extreme, that Moses was picking out the right words to use. “I hoped I wouldn’t have to,” he said finally.

She stared at him, trying to decipher his expression in the dark. “ ‘Wouldn’t have to’? I don’t understand.”

“Remember last month, when you launched that two-bit kite into a gale-force wind to come after that boy of yours?”

Now she was angry. “Don’t try to change the subject, old man.” And then she added, “And sixty-eight Kilo isn’t a kite.”

“I’m not changing the subject,” he said, his voice flat. “Do you remember?”

“Of course I remember. I nearly wrecked the plane, which would have taken out half my equipment inventory.” And Liam had been with her.

“What made you do it, girl?” He sounded only curious, but she knew him well enough to know that, for Moses, curiosity alone was never a reason to do anything. “Gale-force winds, abrupt temperature changes, snow changing to sleet changing to hail changing to rain. It wasn’t VFR; hell, it wasn’t even good enough to be IFR. It was a National Weather Service wet dream. So what made you do it?”

“I…” She tried to think. “Jim and Jo had figured out that somebody was leaving bodies in a line leading to Old Man Creek. I knew Tim was there. I knew you and Bill and Amelia were there. I didn’t think about it much, I just-”

He was inexorable. “Why did you come, Wy?”

“I guess… I couldn’t not come, Moses.”

There was a brief silence before he sighed and shifted, the rough nap of the army blanket catching at the shoulder of her parka. When he spoke again, his voice, a deep, raspy husk to begin with, sounded like gravel being ground together. “Something tell you to?”

Wy stiffened. “I beg your pardon?”

“Did something tell you to come to Old Man? Call it instinct, intuition, a gut feeling.”

“A voice?” she said.

He was surprised into a snort of laughter. “Yeah. A voice.”

She was almost amused. “I don’t do voices, Moses. That’s your line of work.”

He was silent for a while. “It’s hereditary.”

“What is?”

“Hearing the voices. It’s passed down, generation to generation.”

She felt a pricking at the back of her neck. A flash caught her eye, and she looked up to see another meteor, a second, a third. It seemed to be a long time before she could form her next question, and when it came it was a weak “So?”

“So sometimes it skips a generation or two, according to the stories. Sometimes they just take a while to make themselves heard.”

“Moses-”

“I was the man who ran out on your father, Wy.”

“What?”

“I’m your grandfather. Me, Moses Alakuyak. You, born Wyanet Kukaktlik, to Eleanor Murphy and Doug Kukaktlik, adopted by Mary Anne and Joseph Chouinard. You are my granddaughter. Mine by blood and bone, if not by my presence in your life, up till three years ago.”

The meteors were raining down on them now; every time one painted a streak across the horizon, a second burned into existence before the first’s tail had faded. She said the only thing she could think of saying. “My father’s name was Kukaktlik?”