Into the White

Chapter 1: The Postcard

The postcard arrived on a Tuesday in late June, tucked between a credit card offer and a flyer for gutter cleaning. Annie Weymouth almost threw it away. The front showed a gas station somewhere in British Columbia—one of those roadside places with a single pump and a hand-painted sign advertising smoked salmon. The kind of place that existed to remind you how far you were from everything.

She flipped it over. Wyatt's handwriting, cramped and slanting left the way it always had, like the words were trying to escape the page.

"Going into the Brooks Range. Going to live the way people were supposed to."

No salutation. No signature. Just those two sentences and a smudge of what might have been motor oil in the corner.

Annie stood in the doorway of her duplex in Minneapolis, the screen door pressing against her hip, and read the card twice. Then she carried it inside and dropped it on the kitchen counter next to the fruit bowl where two bananas were going soft. Her husband, Greg, was in the living room watching a Twins game with the volume low.

"Anything good?" he called.

"Wyatt sent a postcard."

A pause. The announcer's voice murmured about a double play.

"What's it say?"

"He's going to Alaska. The Brooks Range."

Greg appeared in the kitchen doorway, a can of beer in his hand, his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. He was thirty-one, four years older than Annie, with the kind of face that settled into concern the way other faces settled into neutrality. "The Brooks Range. That's—that's above the Arctic Circle, isn't it?"

"Most of it, yeah."

"By himself?"

"The card doesn't mention anyone else."

Greg picked it up, studied it, turned it over to look at the gas station. "Going to live the way people were supposed to," he read aloud. "What does that even mean?"

Annie took the card back and opened the junk drawer, the one that held rubber bands, dead batteries, takeout menus from restaurants that had closed. She dropped the postcard inside and slid the drawer shut.

"It means Wyatt is being Wyatt."

---

She hadn't spoken to her brother in thirteen months. Not since the night their mother called from a hotel room in Scottsdale, her voice flattened by a cocktail of Ativan and white wine, and told Annie that their father had been maintaining a second family in Tucson for the better part of a decade. A woman named Gina. Two kids—a boy and a girl, ages seven and four.

Annie had taken the news the way she took most bad news: she went quiet, asked practical questions, and then spent three hours cleaning her kitchen until the grout between the tiles was white again. She called a therapist the next morning. She started going twice a week.

Wyatt had taken it differently.

He'd driven from his apartment in Boulder to their father's office in Denver, walked past the receptionist, and thrown a paperweight through the window behind the desk. Not at their father—through the window. The glass had rained down onto the parking lot three stories below. Security escorted him out. Their father, Richard Dempsey, did not press charges. He did, however, change the locks on the family cabin in Estes Park and cancel Wyatt's supplementary credit card.

After that, Wyatt went dark. He dropped out of his final semester at CU, forfeiting the degree he'd spent five years crawling toward. He stopped returning Annie's calls. When she drove to Boulder to check on him, his roommate said he'd moved out two weeks earlier and left no forwarding address.

Annie told herself it was a phase. Wyatt had always been the volatile one, the kid who climbed too high and swam too far and once hitchhiked from Colorado to the Pacific coast on a dare when he was seventeen. Their mother called it recklessness. Their father, when he still bothered to weigh in, called it a lack of discipline. Annie, who loved her brother with the particular ferocity of someone who'd spent her childhood pulling him back from ledges, called it what it was: Wyatt burning.

He'd always burned. The question was how much fuel he had left.

---

Summer passed. Minneapolis sweated through July and August, the air thick enough to chew. Annie worked her job at a nonprofit that helped resettle refugee families, filing paperwork and making phone calls and occasionally driving a bewildered Somali grandmother to a medical appointment in a part of town that might as well have been Mars. She was good at the work. She liked the clarity of it—here is a problem, here is a form, here is a phone number that might help.

Greg sold medical devices. He traveled three weeks out of four, which meant Annie spent most of her evenings alone in the duplex with a book or a podcast or the particular silence that settles over a house when only one person is breathing in it. She didn't mind. She'd grown up in a loud house—her parents' arguments had been operatic, full of slammed doors and theatrical exits—and she'd learned early that quiet was a luxury, not a punishment.

She thought about Wyatt sometimes. Not constantly, but in the way you think about a stone you've thrown into deep water—wondering where it landed, how far it sank, whether the ripples ever reached the other side.

She thought about calling him. She still had his old number, though she doubted it worked anymore. She thought about hiring someone to find him—a private investigator, maybe, someone who could track credit card charges and cell phone pings. But that felt like something their father would do, and Annie had spent her adult life building a wall between herself and anything that reminded her of Richard Dempsey's particular brand of control.

So she waited.

September came. The leaves turned. Greg brought home a puppy—a beagle mix with ears too big for its head—and Annie named it Hector and took it for walks along the river, where the cottonwoods were going gold and the air smelled like wood smoke and something sweet she could never identify.

October.

November.

The phone rang on a Thursday, the second week of November, at 6:47 in the morning. Annie was in the shower. She almost let it go to voicemail. Something made her reach for the towel.

"Ms. Weymouth? This is Sergeant Dale Pitkin with the Alaska State Troopers, A Detachment, Fairbanks."

Annie sat down on the edge of the bathtub, water running down her back, and listened.

Wyatt's van—a 1998 Ford Econoline he'd apparently bought for cash in Whitehorse—had been found at a remote airstrip called Dovetail Lake, roughly sixty miles north of the small settlement of Coldfoot on the Dalton Highway. A hunter had spotted it. The van's battery was dead. The doors were unlocked. Inside: a sleeping bag, a camp stove, a box of paperback books, and a hand-drawn map of the Brooks Range with a route marked in red ink. No food. No water. No Wyatt.

The trooper's voice was measured, professional, and not unkind. He told Annie that search and rescue had conducted an aerial survey of the surrounding area but found no sign of her brother. The weather had turned early this year—snow was already deep at elevation, and temperatures were running twenty to thirty below at night. He told her that the circumstances were consistent with a voluntary wilderness entry. He told her that in cases like this, outcomes were sometimes—

"Don't," Annie said.

"Ma'am?"

"Don't finish that sentence. I'll be on the next flight."

She hung up. She sat there for a long time, water cooling on her skin, listening to Hector scratch at the bathroom door.

Then she stood up and started packing.