WHERE ARE YOU? HOW ARE YOU?

In July, after frantic maneuvers to get her passport, ticket and some last minute sketchy accommodations, she was gone. Our only connection with her now is through cryptic e-mails like, “I’m in the southern desert, temperatures in the 120’s, working in the kitchen. The cook hates me.” These messages illuminating my computer screen are like her blood pulsing through my veins. In the instant that I receive them, I know where she is, how she is. When the computer is turned off, she’s gone again. Now I have to leave Julia and my e-mail connection to her, because my mother has become quite frail in the last couple of years and I’m called to her, drawn like a small child frightened by a mother’s illness. I feel an urgency, also, to get closer to my sisters. We’ve grown distant, not due to the miles that separate us, but because our life styles and experiences have made us strangers.

I read all of Julia’s e-mails one more time before I leave for the airport and I fixate on the first e-mail. “Working in a kitchen eight and nine hours a day, helping to prepare meals for 200 to 500 people.” I remember when she was a teenager how many times she had to be asked to do the dishes before she finally got around to it.

She writes, “I’m not getting tanned, I’m getting stronger from lifting crates of vegetables,” and I wonder if she is complaining or boasting–or both. She had wanted to get away from New York, do something different. She’s old enough now to do anything that she wants, a college graduate living on her own. “Where are you Julia? How are you?” I call out into the Internet as I send an e-mail before leaving on my journy.

And I remember the agony of when I had not heard from her for almost a week after she arrived in Israel. I was miserable, having no choice but to let go and wait. “Don’t worry,” my husband says now. “She’ll be fine.” And he promises to ‘save as new’ all her e-mails while I’m away.

Flying west as dawn begins to break gives the illusion that the sunrise goes on for hours. Julia is never far from my thoughts and I remember an e-mail telling us, “I rise early every morning now, just to watch the sun come up,” and I wonder if we are watching the same daybreak.

Halfway into my flight, during the second refreshment service and while I’m still basking in the constant morning sun coming through the window on my side of the airplane, the captain announces that we are flying over the result of this summer’s forest fires. I had seen on the news that the fires burned thousands, maybe millions of acres of trees. I watch the smoke creep along the deep valleys of the mountain ranges like a thick fog, and for the remainder of the flight I watch the wilderness of South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and Washington burning as though on a toy display of the planet earth. I marvel at how insignificant the damage seems from so far away. My sister, Toddi, meets me at the airport. Five years have gone by since we last saw each other, though I would recognize her anywhere, even, I realize, if her back was turned to me. She has gotten older though, and I suppose that I have, too.

Too many years have passed between our visits and we both feel the distance time creates as we drive to her new home, talking awkwardly, dancing around in our conversation as strangers do when seeking common ground for a relationship. When we approach the house she recently bought, a house she waited years to own, I’m first struck by the lovely garden in her front yard. Roses are everywhere, and hollyhocks reach halfway up the side of the house with stocks full of purple flowers.

“It’s beautiful,” I tell her. She smiles and says, “I love my garden.”

The house itself smells of fresh cut roses and delicate bouquets of lavender. That would be how I would describe Toddi if I had to tell you what my sister smelled like. Her kitchen is no surprise to me, either. It’s a quarter of the entire house. Her husband, who greets us, laughs, a familiar laugh, one I remember hearing when they were dating, and he says, “No mystery why we bought this house, is there?” We walk out into the back yard, and she tells me about her roses, the Crimson Beauty, the Heavenly Sunset, the Luscious Apricot, her Satin Dreams. Watching her gesture with hands I used to hold as we walked to school, I’m pulled away from being a mother and wife, and drawn back into my childhood. I remember how Toddi and I floated our umbrellas, twirling the handles to make them spin around and around as we sent them off across a mud puddle.

I call my husband on the second night. “Did Julia send an e-mail?” I ask. We’d received nothing. The last e-mail had said she was traveling with several women–two or three from France, one from Korea–and a man, an Israeli lifeguard, who was planning on attending film school later in the year. “Where are you, Julia? How are you?” I whisper in the dark as I crawl into bed and kick the covers loose from the tight military regulation tuck. I remember that Toddi always was better at making beds than I was.

The four days with Toddi go faster than I thought they would, but if I stay longer we will move toward territory into which neither of us is ready to venture. We are sisters, after all, and some issues we may never fully resolve. But leaving each other is lightened by her accidentally forgetting her handbag on her husband’s workbench back in the garage, so she has to borrow money from me to pay for her parking. Then I cannot find my drivers license–buried somewhere at the bottom of my carry on–to show the airline clerk that I really am who my ticket says I am. Toddi and I laugh, we laugh so hard we have to dab at our eyes to catch the tears before they fall too far.

Once on the airplane headed to Alaska, in the back of my mind, in a place where I can read words like a ticker tape, I see one of Julia’s e-mails in caps, the way she sent it, “I JUST WANTED TO SAY I LOVE YOU.” The engine revs up and we’re pulled into the sky. The woman sitting next to me hands her husband a stick of chewing gum. It’s a gentle, common act that touches me.

The flight into Anchorage is one miracle after another, glimpese of ice floes and high, snow-crusted mountains that demonstrate the concept of ruggedness. I watch the frozen land passing under the airplane, knowing Julia, at that moment, is in a desert suffering 120 degree temperatures. One of her e-mails told of sleeping on the roof of a youth hostel and how she could not believe how hot it was at night, how she felt “rootless for the first time, and kind of liking it.”

I have one more plane to take before I reach the town where my mother and two youngest sisters live, 250 miles west and south of Anchorage. I think I, too, am like my daughter, traveling, but, unlike her in her enjoyment of rootlessness, I am seeking the source of my roots by visiting my mother, maybe for the final time.

Mom meets me at the airport. She looks smaller and so much more bent over than when I saw her last year. Arthritis and osteoporosis are chewing at her bones, eating away her life. We hug and I think, as I have always, that she could be easily broken. She is like a fragile, cracked porcelain cup. Her body even makes slight crunching sounds when she is wrapped too closely in my arms. But refraining from holding her tightly when I first see her on my visits is hard. When I look at her I realize I feel it too, some days, old creeping closer to my bones.

In the evening when my sisters get off work, they come bounding into mom’s small apartment. We hug and kiss, and jump around each other like puppies. They are much younger than I am, and were preadolescents when I left home. Now, miraculously, we have become the same age and are all the same size, tall, large-boned women. They were perfect little sisters and I regret that we have let five and ten years go by between our visits. I have been forwarding Julia’s e-mails to them, keeping them up with her travels. “Where is Julia? How is she?” they ask eagerly once we settle down to talk, and I tell them, savoring Julia’s adventures as though they were memories of my own.

My visits with Mom are usually spent as her companion. Because of her health she gets out very seldom. She’ll go grocery shopping and maybe stop off for a few minutes at a local fabric store to pick up material for a quilt she’s making to pass her time. I sew while she sits on her recliner and we talk or watch her daytime programs. Last year during my visit, she helped me make a baby quilt for a friend.

This year, Patty, my youngest sister, made a weekend reservation for us three siblings to stay in Saldovnia, a small fishing village across the bay from Homer. We lounge around on the deck of the B and B that sits on stilts overhanging a river. We catnap in the brilliant evening sun and watch eagles fly over the trees, while otters playfully flap about in the water below us.

We walk, and talk, reminiscing about each other. I feel as if we are putting together a puzzle, with each of us remembering different pieces of the past. Pieces are missing from the puzzle, too, hurtful times where our father would have been. Cruel and always angry, he made us forget big chunks of who we were. Those are the pieces we do not want to put into the picture. We fit only the happy times into our mural of our childhood. My sisters tell me how I took care of them while mom cleaned and washed and cooked and canned and farmed and tried to knit the scraps of her life together with dirt-poor remnants. They tell me how I clomped around in rain boots and danced to cheer them up on the dreary Northwest housebound days. I made puppets for them, baskets of woven paper strips, and brought books from the library for my sisters to read. They tell me I taught them to love to read in a home where our father mistrusted any written word except the Bible, and sometimes berated even the Bible for its lies.

Because we live so far apart, my sisters have only seen Julia a few times, once at Dad’s funeral when she was a two-year-old busy streak of fluff that got into everything, and then much later when she was a quiet, self-conscious adolescent. “Tell us about Julia,” they ask. “She’s so lucky to be traveling. She’s not afraid of the world, is she?”

I tell them she is strong-willed, that no way could anyone keep her down. I tell them about her voice. “She’s got a megaphone in her throat,” I tell them, “and if anything went wrong, she’d call out so loud we’d hear her across the sea.”

When we return to Mom’s apartment, she says she had not been well while we were away. But today she’s feeling a little bit better. We huddle around her and give her the cinnamon roll we purchased in the only coffee shop in Saldovnia. She takes it and says she’ll eat it later. The pastry is too dry, though, when she gets around to it and she throws it away.

“She’s working on a banana plantation in the upper regions of Israel,” my husband says. That impresses everyone when I get off the telephone and tell them. They all agree that Julia will have great stories when she returns home.

Traveling turns time upside down. What is usually short is long, and what is typically long passes by in a flash. I rarely am hungry here and because of the constant daylight in the Alaskan summer, I never know when to get tired. When I look at the calendar, I realize that I am scheduled to leave the next day. The puzzle has not been completed, but then it probably never will be.

The visit has been too short for everyone, and Mom cries at the airport. Her tears dry quickly, and I wonder, are there fewer tears in the elderly? Mom looks like a small child standing next to my sisters. She appears to have gotten smaller since I first arrived. “I’ll come back soon, Mom. I promise.” My flight homeward moves me from the unreality of constant daylight to the unexpected normality of total darkness as we move east and into the night. I order a drink from the refreshment cart and settle back. An hour later, the captain announces that the northern lights are playing in the sky on the left side of the plane.

A huge hazy ribbon undulates all along the horizon, and I cannot stop watching for the slightest change, as wisps of light float up like smoke, break off and disappear. For miles and miles the lights play outside the airplane windows, following us, flirting with us. Then I close my eyes and see a faint imprint of my sisters and Mom as they were when they watched me board the airplane and I wonder how far away from me my own children’s travels are destined to take them.