I love the end of the year, and thinking about the next. When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time alone, and even now, living in the city, I still carry with me the stillness of the mountains, and its solitude.

I was born in Alaska, as was my dad before me. My grandparents were immigrants who homesteaded an island. Dad was their only child. The story goes that Grandma kept a trunk packed for two years on the island, trying to get away, and finally made a run for it with my dad. In the middle of a choppy storm, she took a skiff off the island and made it to Juneau, where she stood huddling on the dock with her young son, waiting for the barge that would carry them away. The story goes blank there, a small hiccup in family lore, resuming again when Dad and Grandma and Grandpa are all safely back on the island, the trunk at last unpacked.

I’m drawn to that hiccup, the silence in the middle. I’ve filled it in a million different ways. Grandpa follows, through the worst of the storm, as waves slam over the lip of the tiny craft and he peers through the lashing rain at the lights of the barge, slowly pulling into the dock, a barge that would take away from him everything that’s ever been good in his life. He’s young and very handsome in this version and won’t take no for an answer, pouring out his love for Grandma in a torrent of German and fractured English. Grandma looks like somebody in the English Patient in this scenario – not the guy in the bandages, the beauty who takes care of him – and my dad is small and vulnerable and clutching them both by their legs, a kid holding them together.

Except, of course, Grandma was a real pistol – closer to the harridan Bette Midler played in Ruthless People – and Grandpa was probably secretly relieved to have had a minute of peace.

Except I know that’s not the truth, either. They were madly in love, my grandparents, and when they fought, the deal was, they’d each strike out in different directions on the island and by the time they returned, they weren’t mad anymore. They were cold and exhausted and worried about how to get food on the table, especially if it was still running around on the island somewhere and night was falling.

This is going to sound like a non sequitur, but hang in there. I was auditioning actors for the webisodes I put together for my novel, The Timer Game and had narrowed it down to four guys. Each had a chance to play a scene opposite Sarah Sido, whom we’d already cast. After each audition, Kai (the director) and I would ask the actors questions. Sarah could have, too, but she was cool and understood it was enough for each actor just to get through the scene, let alone have to string together any coherent sentence. Kai had already found out from Troy Zuercher that his family was from the Ukraine and that he’d been raised on a farm in, I think, South Dakota.

It was my turn for questions. I asked him what he’d learned on the farm that he’d taken out the door with him when he came to Hollywood, and without missing a beat he said, “I learned how to live with loneliness, and not be afraid of it.”

That’s it, isn’t it, for all of us. Learning not to fear the silence in the middle, learning how to fill in the gaps. Learning to be.

I’m still working on that. It’s slow going. I sketch in the missing parts, delicately cross stitching a thread of continuity, a glint of wonder, fretting over the part that doesn’t hang together, worrying the ends into thready clumps of missed opportunities and righteous anger. And then when I hold it up in front of me, sometimes, when I squint at it just right, I can see the light through it, and dimly, the image of my grandparents holding each other on a windy wharf, with a small boy caught in between.

Its imperfection knocks me out. And then I realize that’s all there is. Day by day. This small, horded treasure of raggedy bits. My story. All our stories.

Susan is author of The Timer Game, released this month by HarperPress.

She paused. She’s driving through Boulder traffic in the snow, trying to merge, so I give her a minute and wait for it. She adds, “And how the first time isn’t always that great.”

And I say, “Oh, wow, that will get dark very fast.”

And she says, and she’s riffing here, and I’m really appreciating her effort, “but, but, it’s the first…that…that leads to the second. And so on.”

Thanks. It’s practically written itself.

Actually, it has. I’m writing about sisters. I have three of them, all wildly funny, all beautiful. And unlike our brother, all still alive.

Well, that took a turn.

So maybe this is actually about my brother. Or maybe it’s just about how we all get through the worst of it the best way we can, by taking care of each other. My sisters are famous for that.

My brother died suddenly, in Alaska, in a glacier calving accident. He was thirty-six. Our Dad had already died the year before, and it was before Bruno became part of the family when he married Mom, so Mom was handling things the best she could, which is to say, she was going a little crazy.

All four of us sisters had come up to Alaska to help. We’d gotten through opening the door to his place. Boxing things up. Taking things to remember him by. We’d come through the memorial service, attended by so many people that there weren’t enough pews. Our brother was astonishing, singular, and even in death, people needed to talk through their stories about him, just to get a handle on what he’d been.

Everybody from the Mayor of Anchorage, Tony Knowles, to my broadcaster friend, Herb Shaindlin, had shown up. Our brother had mowed lawns–he had a modest gardening business–and one of his clients was Tony. Geno–that’s my brother–worked for an energy auditing company and flew into native villages to figure out how to shore up houses before winter. Often he stayed on his clients’ floors. They returned the honor by attending the service, standing in a silence as deep as the redwoods at the back of the church, and slipping away just as quietly at the end.

Geno had also guided disabled skiers, mostly women, down Mount Alyeska and they showed up. Two women actually had a heated shouting argument at the front of the church when they were eulogizing him, arguing about whom Geno had cared for the most. It had ended with them lunging at each other to find a good grappling spot before they both seemed to remember there were witnesses and in the same instant, pulled back.

He inspired that kind of wildly inappropriate behavior.

And of course there were complete strangers. A couple talked haltingly about how they had been part of a tour group in Fiji, and suddenly realized, there was an extra person in the group, on the bus, at dinner. Geno had just inserted himself into the tour.

The man had pursed his lips and frowned, looking skyward, remembering. My sisters and I were laughing. It was exactly the kind of stuff Gene had been famous for.

At first, they’d been appalled, the man continued. “But he kind of grew on us. And we ended up staying in touch, all these years. . .” His voice had trailed away.

We were in that country my sisters and I knew by heart. The place where things take a turn. We were almost able to call it back. One sister had insisted on having the Lord’s Prayer sung by everybody, and the pianist pitched it so high that nobody could get through it. We dissolved in hiccupy laughter, and then we dissolved in tears.

Afterward, we were completely exhausted and Mom was just revving up. Grief had made her unstoppable. After the wake, she insisted she was still going to make us dinner, just the family.

Understand, we had been eating non-stop. Casseroles, pies, salads, people had been bringing things to the door in a steady stream of mute offerings. Mom pushed the food out of the way and cleared a place on the counter.

“Party potatoes,” she announced. “I’m making this and you’re all going to eat it.”

My sisters and I stared. We watched as she peeled the potatoes, layered them, her movements brisk, brittle, every turn of the scraper a little wilder than the one before, as if some delicate mechanism had come unhinged and in a moment, she would come flying apart into a million tiny pieces. She kept going. Right about the time the potatoes would have gone into the oven, it finally caught up with her and she put her head down and took a shuddery breath.

“I just need to sleep,” she said. Her voice was small.

We asked her if she wanted us there for awhile until she did. She nodded. We sat in the quiet dark bedroom until she fell asleep, and then the four of us, in one voice, walked out the door.

It was a dazzling bright Anchorage day. Two teams of old guys were playing a game of baseball on the park strip, the runner pounding heavily down the baseline toward first as if his knees hurt.

We headed toward La Mex for margaritas. We raised a glass to the little kid we’d known and the man he’d become. And then we came home and ate party potatoes.

Susan is author of The Timer Game, released this month by HarperPress.

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.