Ripping off the Mask

Alaska is a small place with interlocking stories, interlocking sorrows. My family moved Outside when I was a child, but I came back to Alaska as a young adult and worked in broadcasting.

I anchored in Anchorage. I also produced a half-hour documentary and could pretty much fill the 22:30 (the time allotted the show after commercials), any way I pleased. It was high stress, low pay, toiling in a land where temperatures could shatter video tape as if it were glass.

When I first started working there, the nightly network news we saw in Alaska was actually the news from the night before. There was no satellite feed. We had our sister station in Seattle tape the network news and ship it by plane to us. The joke was, the world could end and we wouldn’t hear about it until the following night.

By the time I left news, just a few years later, the nightly news was seen across three time zones by satellite in places as remote as Barrow in the Arctic and down into the Aleutians.

There were stories everywhere, but some of them have stayed with me across the soft sweep of time, and one of them led to The Timer Game.

I can’t remember her name. But I remember her energy. She lived in a place called Seward, in a log house that sounds much nicer than it was. There was a wildness about it. Dark, tangled trees, a violent sweep of sky, the Kenai River churning not far from her door down a slippery mud path limed with sharp stones.

She was a single mom and had two kids, as I recall, a boy and a girl. Alaska attracts people who don’t like being discovered, people on the run, either toward something or away.

Most of the ones I met were running away from something and trying very hard to stay ahead of whatever dark thing was coming after them. It makes for strange alliances to hold the bad things at bay.

So. This woman. Alone. With two kids. Struggling. Isolated by place and circumstance. In a land were wheels get mired in muck during the rainy season and where bears forage for trash and clamber in the Kenai swiping at reds as the salmon dart upstream.

Where things die.

A loosely constructed family of drifters settled in a tent not from her house, and before long, the woman was sitting at their campfire, drinking beers and swapping tales, her children darting shyly in and out of the frame of light, casting long shadows in the spatting embers.

Within a week, the drifters appeared at her door, a raggedy group of about five, laughing too loudly, looking past her into the warmth of the house. She invited them in; it was the neighborly thing to do. The man who seemed to be the leader was big, broad shouldered, with curly strange hair and wild eyes and next to him always was a woman, thin and pale. She smacked her lips a lot.

They took a special interest in the kids, offering to take them fishing, camping, almost anything the man had said. He’d bared his teeth in a smile.

At this point, her mother’s radar should have been screaming, but it was a dim radar, underused, the light feeble. She was happy, so happy to be included. Relieved the kids had a chance to do something fun.

For a couple of weeks, everything was glad and good. The group would stop and visit, sometimes take the kids down to the river right in front of the house and catch a fish and everybody would sit around while she fixed it and they ate.

And then one day they were gone.

No explanation, no word. The grass under the tent had died and left a yellow patch and she could see the earth thorugh it. It was getting cold again, and the winter ahead looked long.

She’d been a little deflated; even the kids were dispppointed. She made plans for them to go to a friend’s house that night and on to school from there.

She watched them head down the path to the neighbor’s house, their backpacks bright stamps of color in the growing dusk. It was a distance away, out of sight, and she watched as they turned the corner and disappeared from view.

It was the last time she saw them.

There was no telephone at the neighbors’–cell phones were still years away–and when the kids didn’t show up, the neghbors assumed something had come up. This was Alaska; plans change.

Her telephone wasn’t working properly; she had a hearing problem and used equipment to amplify voices. The school had tried contacting her about the kids’ absence, but she couldn’t hear what they were saying. By the time she’d put the pieces together, the kids had been gone almost 24 hours.

When I interviewed her, just after Halloween, they’d been missing since September.

She had jumpy, exhausted energy. She told me she was going crazy. She was certain the travelers had taken them, but she and the state troopers had little to go on. She remembered that the plates on their van had been muddy, the numbers obscured. They’d used nicknames for each other.

I interviewed her in her livingroom as she sat hunched on a brown nubby sofa, her nostrils chapped from crying. She said that the hardest part was Halloween. Her voice caught. She had a wild look in her eyes, as if something huge and very terrible sat right behind her pupils, straining to get out.

She had this crazy notion that her kids were coming to the door, in disguise, and if only she could recognize them, she could save them, bring them home. She’d had to stop herself from ripping off the masks of the kids as they held their hands out, trick-or-treating.

I never knew what happened, and it’s haunted me all these years. When I became a parent, that story was the nightmare against which I measured everything else.

I can’t imagine–don’t want to imagine–the awfulness of losing a child, and yet as a writer, that’s exactly the country I go into every day. Stephen King said once that he wrote about the things he did because he had this theory: if he spoke the scary things out loud, they couldn’t possibly happen in real life to people he loved.

We write for different reasons, but Stephens’ is a good as any I’ve heard.

I wrote The Timer Game trying to understand. Why would somebody steal a child? What would a parent do to get her back? What would I have done?

Anything. Everything.

I had it play out against a timer, because it seemed particularly appropriate. The FBI says that if a kidnapped child isn”t found within the first three hours, the chances of finding that child alive drop exponentially. My main character, Grace, Descanso, working CSI in the San Diego Police crime lab, would have known that kind of statisic cold.

How would it unravel if she were forced to act alone? Without the backup of the FBI or the local police? Where would it end?

It ends with the mask ripped off, the secret revealed. And since it’s my world this time, it ends in goodness.

I’m a writer. My power is puny. I can’t restore lost children. But on a good day, when the words work, I can create on the page a world where that kind of ending is possible.