It wasn’t until around 4:00 AM that Grammy quieted. I sat on the couch, Frick snoring in little bursts in the rocking chair, and I listened as Mom scolded Grammy. And all Grammy would say was that what Robbie did was worse, stealing and tricking, and that she would do it all over again. It was all sickness, the whole thing, something that couldn’t be cured, but—and maybe it was because I was tired—I felt that I had done something terrible, like I had been the one doing the violent hunting, and I wanted to get up and right it all, but I didn’t know how. Maybe that was how Great-Uncle Robbie had felt, like he had no choices, that no right way existed to fix anything at all. In the moments before my eyes shut, hearing Frick snore and the clock tick toward 4:00 AM, I felt like I knew Robbie, felt like I had memories of him where he took me fishing or hunting, and when I couldn’t take the fish off the hook or when I couldn’t kill the white rabbit, he told me that that was fine, and he unhooked the fish—its jaw popping, gills throbbing—and plopped it into the river, or he took the rifle from my hands, and after all that we walked away through mud or snow until I stopped walking but he kept on going and going and going out there in quiet strides through a dark-pined forest until he was gone.

Safe Harbor

SAFE HARBOR

I’m sitting at the weathered picnic table under the gazebo in back of the crisis stabilization unit, and it smells like rain. My mother’s walking to get two cups of coffee. I don’t watch her. I’m too busy watching the short and skinny exterminator walk along the grass against the building’s foundation. He’s dressed in a white coverall, and he’s checking the black boxes filled with poison. Rodent bait boxes. I don’t think he looks at me, but he knows I’m here. He has to see me. I wonder if he thinks I belong here.

The crisis stabilization unit is thirty minutes away from the reservation. To get to the unit, I pass McDonald’s and a thrift store before I take the highway for most of the drive. Exit ramp. Red light. Always a red light. I have to turn left, so I always have to wait. Then I turn. Drive straight. School zone, drive slow. I cross a black-and-blue-tagged bridge before cutting through a brick city. One-way roads. Then some trees. More trees. The unit is coming up. Right turn. The unit is down a bumpy and cracked side road, away from the busy part of town. Against the woods, sharp pine trees clutter and lean into each other, and cardinals and finches flutter and jet from tree to tree.