Into the Estuary

Chapter 1: The Freezer

The ashes sat between a bag of frozen peas and a container of chicken stock that had been there since before Eamon died. Joss Coleson opened the freezer every morning for ice, and every morning she looked at the black plastic box wedged against the back wall, and every morning she closed the door without touching it.

Eighteen months. That was how long her brother had been reduced to seven pounds ofiteiteite calcium phosphate in a temporary container that the funeral director had assured her was "perfectly adequate for interim storage." Interim. As if she were just waiting for the right afternoon, the right mood, the right alignment of planets to do the thing she couldn't do.

The apartment was quiet at four in the afternoon because it was always quiet. Joss worked nights at Mountain View Hospice, twelve-hour shifts from seven to seven, and she slept—or tried to sleep—through the pale Missoula daylight with blackout curtains that turned her bedroom into a cave. She'd arranged her life so that she rarely saw the sun, rarely saw other people outside of work, and rarely had to explain to anyone why a thirty-four-year-old woman with no pets, no partner, and no apparent hobbies lived like someone in witness protection.

She poured coffee. She checked her phone. She had one text from Janelle—"Swapped you onto Bay 3 tonight, Mrs. Kendall is asking for you"—and one missed call from a number she didn't recognize, area code 406, which was all of Montana, so that narrowed it down to roughly a million people.

She called it back because she was a nurse and nurses called people back.

"Ms. Coleson? This is David Petrie, I'm an attorney in Helena. I'm calling about your father, Hollis Coleson."

Joss set her coffee down. She hadn't spoken to her father in four years. The last time had been at Eamon's funeral, where Hollis had stood at the back of the chapel in a corduroy jacket that didn't fit him anymore, looking like a man who'd wandered into the wrong building. They hadn't spoken then, either. He'd left before the reception. She'd watched him cross the parking lot from the window, his shoulders hunched against a rain that wasn't falling.

"Ms. Coleson?"

"I'm here."

"I regret to inform you that your father passed away three days ago. A stroke. He was found in his home by a neighbor."

Three days. He'd been dead for three days and she hadn't felt anything shift in the world, no tremor, no dimming of light. Which was, she supposed, exactly right. Hollis Coleson had been a man who took up very little space, even when he was alive.

"I'm sorry for your loss," David Petrie said, and Joss could hear the practiced rhythm of it, the way he'd said it hundreds of times. She used the same rhythm at work. "Your father left a will. It's straightforward, mostly. The house and its contents go to you as his sole surviving heir. But there's one provision that's... somewhat unusual."

"Unusual how?"

"He requests—and I should say, Ms. Coleson, that this is a request, not a legally binding directive, though it's written as one—he requests that your brother Eamon's ashes be carried the full length of the Wolfhead River to the Pacific Ocean. He specifies that they should be scattered at the river mouth, where the estuary meets the sea."

Joss picked up her coffee again. Put it down again. "The Wolfhead."

"Yes, ma'am. Three hundred and eighty miles, headwaters to coast. He was quite specific."

The Wolfhead River. She and Eamon had planned to paddle it the summer he died. It was supposed to be their trip, their adventure, the thing they'd been talking about since they were teenagers dragging a secondhand canoe down to the Clark Fork. Eamon had built a cedar-strip canoe for it, spent two years in his garage steaming ribs and fitting planks, and then he'd drowned in a rapid on the Blackfoot River three months before they were supposed to launch.

Not on the Wolfhead. On a training run. A stupid, ordinary class III rapid that he'd run a dozen times, except that day the water was higher than he thought, and his spray skirt didn't release, and by the time someone pulled him out, he was gone.

"Ms. Coleson? Are you still there?"

"I'm here. Is there anything else?"

"There are some papers. Personal effects. I can mail them or you can pick them up."

"Mail them."

She hung up. She stood in her kitchen for a long time, looking at the freezer.

Three hundred and eighty miles.

---

That night at work, she moved through the ward with the particular efficiency that her patients' families often mistook for coldness. Joss had learned years ago that warmth in hospice work was not about smiling or touching or speaking softly. It was about precision. It was about knowing when Mrs. Kendall needed her morphine adjusted by a quarter milligram, when Mr. Torelli's breathing meant fluid and when it meant anxiety, when a family member sitting in the hallway at two a.m. needed coffee or silence or permission to go home.

Janelle caught her at the nurses' station at three in the morning. Janelle was fifty-two, had been a hospice nurse for twenty years, and had the uncanny ability to detect emotional disturbance in her coworkers the way some people could smell rain coming.

"You look like someone hit you with a truck," Janelle said.

"My father died."

Janelle set down her chart. "Oh, honey."

"We weren't close."

"That doesn't make it easier. Sometimes it makes it harder."

Joss didn't want to talk about it. She wanted to check Mr. Torelli's oxygen levels and restock the supply closet and do the things that made sense, the things with clear inputs and measurable outcomes. Grief was not a thing with clear inputs. She'd learned that from Eamon.

"I might need to take some leave," she said.

"How much?"

"I don't know yet. A few weeks. Maybe more."

Janelle studied her. "For the funeral?"

"There won't be a funeral. For something else."

She didn't explain. Janelle, to her credit, didn't push.

---

The papers arrived four days later in a manila envelope with David Petrie's return address. Joss opened it at her kitchen table with the same careful detachment she used when opening a patient's chart for the first time.

Inside: the deed to Hollis's house, which she'd never visited because he'd moved to Helena after the divorce when she was nineteen. Insurance papers. A bank statement showing a savings account with $11,400 in it. And, folded into quarters at the bottom of the envelope, a hand-drawn map on graph paper.

She knew the handwriting before she unfolded it. Eamon's. His precise, architectural lettering, the product of two years of drafting classes at the community college. The Wolfhead River, sketched in blue ink, every rapid named, every campsite marked with a small triangle, every portage noted with a dotted line. He'd drawn it from memory and satellite images, cross-referencing with guidebooks, building the map the way he built everything: meticulously, obsessively, with love.

But there was a second handwriting on the map. In the margins, in pencil, someone had added notes. Water levels. Put-in directions. The name of a outfitter in a town called Tamarack. And at the bottom, in a shaky hand she recognized as her father's: "E says the Devil's Gullet is class V at high water. Portage trail on river left. Don't let Joss attempt it."

Don't let Joss attempt it.

She read it again. E says. Hollis had talked to Eamon about this trip. Hollis, who hadn't spoken to either of his children for years after the divorce, who'd missed birthdays and graduations and holidays with the passive consistency of a man who simply forgot he had a family—Hollis had talked to Eamon about the Wolfhead.

She called David Petrie.

"The map in the papers," she said. "Do you know when my father got it?"

"I don't, I'm afraid. Is it important?"

"Were they in contact? My father and my brother?"

"I only handled Mr. Coleson's estate planning. But I do know he mentioned a son during our meetings. He spoke of him with... considerable affection."

Considerable affection. Joss put the phone down and stared at the map until the blue lines blurred.

Eamon had reconciled with Hollis. Sometime in those last months—the months when Joss and Eamon had been planning the Wolfhead trip together, eating takeout on her apartment floor, arguing about gear weight and river flows—Eamon had also been rebuilding a relationship with the father who'd abandoned them. And he hadn't told her.

She wasn't sure which hurt more: that Eamon had kept it secret, or that Hollis had waited until he was dead to let her know.

The anger arrived slowly, the way a river rises. Not a flash flood but a steady, relentless accumulation, filling every low space in her chest until she could feel it pressing against her ribs.

She went to the freezer. She took out the black box. She set it on the table next to the map.

Three hundred and eighty miles.

"Fine," she said to the empty apartment. "Fine."