Four Live Rounds

“Do you think I am?”

“No way to know. I understand that’s not the piece of comfort pie you want to hear, but it’s the truth, I’m sorry to say.”

“What would you do?”

“If I was in your boots?”

“Yeah.”

Messing cracked his thick linebacker’s neck. “I’m gonna tell you something that’s gonna be both horrifying and freeing. There ain’t nothing you can do, short of move your family to some overpopulated Third World shithole and disappear. If the Alphas decide to come calling, you won’t stop them. Not with a shotgun under the bed. Not with different names. They’re just plain the nastiest motherfuckers anyone’s ever heard of. So live your life, Mr. Innis. Don’t look over your shoulder or buy a home security system or anything of the sort. Just pray you were a blip on their radar that has long since disappeared.”

SEVENTY-SIX

It had been a little over two months since they’d landed in Anchorage, weeks that had taken years to pass. For five of them, Rachael had undergone treatment and counseling at the psychiatric hospital in Denver. But these last few weeks, leading up to Christmas Eve, they’d been together, seeing if the pieces still fit in that quaint farmhouse in Mancos, Colorado. Devlin wasn’t sick, and Rachael was eight and a half months pregnant. They’d hired a midwife out of Farmington, New Mexico, to attend the home birth, expecting to have a little one in the first or second week of the new year. Will was coming to terms with the fact that the child in that enormous belly of Rachael’s didn’t possess a single chromosome of his DNA.

He remembered Devlin’s birth, sixteen years ago, could still recall the lightning that had struck when she’d come screaming into the world, still teared up thinking about it—that fierce, inexorable love that had altered everything he thought he knew about priorities. What kept him up lately, these long December nights, was the fear that he wouldn’t feel those things when this baby came, wondered how you faked a thing like that, how you raised something you didn’t feel belonged to you.

He prayed to God every night that the lightning would strike again.

It had been a cool, dry Christmas Eve, and much to the Innises’ delight, little snow had fallen so far this season in the Mancos Valley. You could see patches of it gleaming under the sun or the moon on the rim of Mesa Verde, and the La Platas were buried above ten thousand feet. But the pasture out back stood bare; the river slacked off to a trickle. No snow lingered under the spruce trees that enclosed the farmhouse. There wasn’t even a fading patch to be found in the north-facing shadows—Devlin had gone looking that afternoon.

She was thriving, out of school for Christmas vacation and spending all her time with her mother—hoisting Rachael out of chairs, cooking for her, cleaning, helping to prepare the nursery in what had been an empty bedroom when she and her father were on their own.

It was only at night when she thought of Alaska, in bed, buried under covers, listening to the wind blow through the firs. A few nights ago, a pack of coyotes had moved through the pasture. Their yaps woke her at 3:00 A.M.—evil, mocking laughter—and she sat up in bed, thought for half a second she was back in the Wolverine Hills, saw that huge white wolf with raging pink eyes standing at the foot of her bed.

She’d thrown back the covers and walked into the kitchen, poured herself a glass of water, and sat down at the table, listening to them howl until her hands quit trembling.

One of Rachael’s therapists in Denver had said something that applied to them all. If you let fear take hold, if you let it own you, your life ceases to be your own. She’d even given them a motto, a creed—concise, profane, and unforgettable. Devlin had glanced at the refrigerator clipboard where Will had scribbled it in black Magic Marker, thrice underscored.

Fuck the fear.

SEVENTY-SEVEN

Devlin is already rubbing her eyes. It’s nine o’clock, late for a six-year-old. She stands on her tiptoes and hangs the last ornament on the tree—a clear glass cactus. Her parents are sitting on the couch, sipping hot toddies—Arizona-style: fresh-squeezed orange juice, hot water, Grand Marnier, honey, dash of cayenne.

It’s a warm December night. Devlin climbs onto the sofa between Rachael and Will.

“Everybody up for It’s a Wonderful Life?” he asks.

“I’ll probably fall asleep before Harry falls through the ice, but sure,” Rachael says. Will walks over to the television set, finds the video in Devlin’s movie cabinet, pops it into the VCR. He brings the remote back with him. “Will, I’m cold,” Rachael says. “Would you get my sweatshirt?”

“I’m not sure how I feel about touching that hideous thing.”

She grins. “Back off my alma mater.” Will had gone to law school at Carolina while Rachael was finishing her undergrad work at Duke. The schools were only seven miles apart as the crow flies, but a more malicious rivalry you could not find in all of collegiate America. The sweatshirt was a badly faded navy blue, the letters—D-U-K-E—having long since peeled away, leaving only a less faded palimpsest of the word.

Will retrieves it from the sweater chest in their bedroom, brings it back into the den.

“Thanks, honey.” He sits down with his family, presses PLAY. His dark-haired girls snuggle up on either side of him, and whether it’s the holiday or this movie that always makes him cry, Will is briefly overcome, keenly aware of what he has. There is only the small white lights of the Christmas tree, the glow of the FBI warning on the television screen. And for a moment, before the movie begins, the house is so quiet, they can hear the wind blowing out on the desert.

SEVENTY-EIGHT

Acade later, in a different state, in what felt to each of them like a different life, the Innises were decorating another tree—a blue spruce Will had chopped down in a small grove by the river two days ago. Rachael lay stretched out on the couch in the living room, watching her husband and daughter hang unfamiliar ornaments and makeshift tube-sock stockings from the mantel. A fire was petering out in the small stone hearth. The farmhouse smelled of wood smoke, hot cocoa, the sap from their Christmas tree.

“You remember those hot toddies we used to make?” Rachael said.

Will smiled. “God, those were good.”

“What’s a toddy?” Devlin asked.

“It’s a hot alcoholic drink. We used to make ours with orange juice,

Grand Marnier. . . . I forget what else we put in them.”