There wasn’t much to see. The day was bright and hazy, one of those winter days that fools you into thinking it’s warm until you’re out in it, but on the black-and-white screen, the crew moved through an electric blizzard, private as the ultrasound I’d seen when Perley was just a cluster of cells. Marie moved the excavator back and forth, flattening the mounds of rubble and mud, moving bales. Lawrence and Jay handled shovels, levered rocks out of the way, laid filter bags, spread straw. On the screen, the three of them didn’t look Indian. Marie didn’t look like a woman. But what did that mean, that they all looked like white guys? Like Rudy or Shane? Did Rudy and Shane look alike? What did I look like? No mirrors in the camper, not even one in the motel. Helen sometimes talked about white people, or whiteness, as she called it. Like most of the stuff she’d learned at college, it didn’t seem to add up to much besides her sucking air out of the room and saying in a complicated way what everyone already knew, that the ones in power weren’t giving it up anytime soon. Helen was as pasty as I was, but she talked about whiteness like she wasn’t part of it, like she was just watching the rest of us assholes from the sidelines. But how did I talk about it? I guess I didn’t. I guess I didn’t think of myself as white unless I was around people who weren’t. I guess coming up north had made me into a woman again. At home I thought of myself only as some fierce raptor parent, a vessel of lessons and principle, a weight on the ground that worked and whittled with my head down. On the screen in front of me, humanity was a disorganized jumble, and if I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to keep an accurate eye on it, I figured that for twenty-five bucks an hour, I could figure it out. I was getting what I wanted, a chance to prove my family belonged to me and that I belonged to them. The loneliness was as insulating as a layer of snow.