It might seem impossible that someone like me could ever drive again. I know Ruth thought it was. Something I don’t have to remember because I simply know her well enough to guess the worried slant of her eyes, the thin line of her lips. I’m sure my driving worries her, but for me it’s the most normal thing I do. To keep from getting lost or confused, I stick to dependable routes, like the one from Whittier to Anchorage and back again, which I had traveled often before. But just in case, I play the audio file for each trip so that I don’t forget and accidentally end up in Seward.

The signal turns green, and I accelerate into the tunnel, letting the rocky mouth swallow me whole. Overhead lights blink past in a familiar rhythm. The walls are rough with blasted rock hewn into a narrow but tall interior. I was a teenager when the tunnel opened up to cars. Before then the only way we could get into or out of Whittier was by train, plane, or boat. Dad always said the tunnel came too late for Mom. But I know that nothing would have made her stay.

My hands grip the wheel until the flesh over my knuckles whitens. I don’t remember much after my headache overwhelmed me, but I can recall Dad’s truck sailing through this narrow tube, the red swaths of light that painted the walls and his face, worry lines deeply embedded into his forehead. It’s okay, you’re going to be okay, Claire bear, it’s all going to be okay.

Ahead is a small semicircle of light that brightens and grows with each rotation of my tires. And just like that, the tunnel spits me out and I emerge on the other side of the mountain. Muddled light sifts through bottom-heavy clouds, clinging to the tops of mountains and brushing over gray water. I don’t look in the rearview mirror at the yawning black hole behind me, don’t want to think any more about the tunnel that stole my memory and squirreled it away into its dark, damp, and unreachable recesses.

When the road opens into Whittier, a heaviness lifts from my chest and my breathing flows unhindered. The entire town encompasses something like twelve square miles. A small U-shaped plot of land bounded on one side by the deep waters of the Passage Canal. Begich Towers sits toward the backside of town, a blocky, yellow monolith that is at odds with the wild Alaskan landscape surrounding it.

I breathe out a smile. I don’t care what it looks like. It’s my home.