The dangers of Alaska aren’t limited to storms, starvation, and grizzly bears. Sometimes the most dangerous thing is the person you love.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Peggy Townsend’s The Beautiful and the Wild, which is out November 7th!
It’s summer in Alaska and the light surrounding the shipping-container-turned-storage shed where Liv Russo is being held prisoner is fuzzy and gray. Around her is thick forest and jagged mountains. In front of her, across a clearing, is a low-slung cabin with a single window that spills a wash of yellow light onto bare ground. Illuminated in that light is the father of her child, a man she once loved. A man who is now her jailor. Liv vows to do anything to escape.
Carrying her own secrets and a fierce need to protect her young son, Liv must navigate a new world where extreme weather, starvation, and dangerous wildlife are not the only threats she faces. With winter’s arrival imminent, she knows she must reckon with her past and the choices that brought her to the unforgiving Alaskan landscape if she is ever going to make it out alive.
A story of survival in the wilds of Alaska, The Beautiful and the Wild explores the question of whether we can ever truly know the person we love—or ourselves.
1.
The silence was so thick I felt like I was drowning.
It filled my ears and throat with a watery quiet that made it hard to breathe. I leaned my forehead against the cold steel door that imprisoned me, and willed myself to draw in small gulps of air until finally the feeling of suffocation began to lift. It was only then that I turned to look at my surroundings.
I was locked inside a rusted shipping container, its walls pockmarked with tiny holes that let in slivers of light. A mildewed mattress on a low frame sat in one corner, with a ragged upholstered chair and a steamer trunk next to it. There was a shelf with an old-fashioned lantern on it, a small woodstove that vented through the back wall of the space, and a cluster of fifty-five-gallon drums in the corner near where I stood. It looked as if someone had once lived here but had abandoned it the way people did in ghost towns, leaving everything behind as disaster and illness struck. I shivered and pulled my jacket tighter around me.
Gray light filtered through a high rectangular window and I pushed myself away from the door to look.
Outside, the sky was pewter with dark clouds that scudded in the wind. Dense stands of spruce pressed around the container. In the distance, a muscular line of serrated mountains poked the sky. Everything here in Alaska seemed oversized and unrestrained. Even the summer daylight had no boundaries. I didn’t have my phone or a watch but I guessed it was after midnight.
In front of me was a clearing that had been hacked out of the wilderness. A small greenhouse, a couple of graying outbuildings and a scattering of broken equipment edged the compound. A good-sized vegetable garden had been planted in the center of the opening, although the plants looked tired and anemic. On the far side of the garden was a sagging, low-roofed cabin with a set of weathered antlers nailed above the door.
Yellow light spilled through the front window of the hut, illuminating a male figure bent over a table as if performing some intricate work. He wore a plaid flannel shirt and his golden hair was long.
He was my husband, the father of my child. A man everyone said was dead, and yet here he was, very much alive.
He was also the one holding me prisoner.
I couldn’t help but wonder how everything had gone so wrong.
2. THEN
I met my husband, Mark, nine years ago when I was still struggling to find my way. I was living in Sacramento with three roommates and waitressing at a cheap diner where the mediocre food was matched only by the sullenness of its customers. I sometimes wondered if the meals were what made people grumpy or whether the sourness of the customers caused the cook to do only a halfhearted job because he knew he would never please anybody. Either way, I felt like I needed to blow off a little steam and decided to go to this country-and-western bar called the Holdup with another waitress from work. Mark was the first person I saw when I walked in.
I was wearing a short denim dress and a pair of cowboy boots I’d borrowed from my housemate Maggie, and he was sitting at the bar in faded Wranglers and a white T-shirt. He had shaggy golden hair and boyish blue eyes; when he smiled, a dimple appeared in his left cheek. I tried not to stare but I couldn’t help myself. I was like a moth with a beautiful yellow flame in front of it.
When Mark caught me looking, he came over with a bottle of Coors and sat at my table. My friend got up and went to the dance floor. My whole body vibrated with his nearness.
First, he asked me questions about myself and then told me he was a freelance filmmaker who’d studied at UCLA and just finished a documentary about a Marine amputee who’d run the length of Africa as a penance, basically, for being alive when the rest of his squad was dead. He told me about watching a sunset in Morocco, hiding from bandits in Uganda, and surfing at J-Bay in South Africa. He seemed confident and adventurous. One of those people who went off to climb mountains or motorcycle across Siberia just because the unknown was out there waiting to be experienced. He was so different from me and yet, from that moment on, he was the only thing I wanted.
I could say it was the beer I drank followed by three whiskeys on the rocks but I would be lying. We closed down the bar with talk and I went home with him, where we made frantic and then slow love on a mattress on his bedroom floor. I would have gone with him sober. I never left after that night.
When his Africa documentary won the grand jury prize at a prestigious New York film festival four months later, the combination of excitement and optimism caused him to propose marriage and we drove up to South Lake Tahoe, where we tied the knot in a wedding chapel off the main drag. The truth was, as we lay in our hotel bed that night-the new Mr. and Mrs. Russo, as the officiant had loudly announced-I felt like, even though I didn’t deserve it, I’d won some kind of prize too.
After that, we rubbed shoulders with celebrities at Sundance and spent a weekend at a fancy house in Tahoe with some hedge fund guy who introduced Mark to a couple of big-time producers. We went to elaborate parties in San Francisco and LA and spent all day in bed just because we could.
Life seemed shiny and bright then, especially after the two producers Mark had met hired him to replace the cinematographer on their most recent film, a guy who’d had an unfortunate accident involving a BMW, a power pole and a bottle of Don Julio tequila. Mark was flown to Utah in a private jet. Three weeks in, everything fell apart.
First, the producers told Mark that they had to make cuts to the budget and then that they wanted to take the film in a different direction: more commercial, more explosions, and with a love story. Mark told them they would ruin the film and made the mistake of sending an email to a fellow shooter telling him what a clown show the production had become and how the married director had been having sex with an eighteen-year-old girl on set. The story somehow made its way into the trades, including the detail that almost everyone on set called the two producers the Brothers Dim. Mark was fired and told he would never work in Hollywood again. He took a Greyhound bus back to Sacramento.
The next day, I found him passed out on the couch, an empty bottle of vodka on the carpet next to him. It was three in the afternoon. I helped him into bed and went to work, thinking he would sleep it off. He didn’t. For the next five days, he huddled under the blankets, refusing to speak, refusing to eat, refusing suggestions to get up and take a shower. His stillness felt scary and dangerous, like a hand grenade had been deposited in our bedroom.
On day six, just as I was getting ready to call Mark’s brother to ask if this had happened before and what I should do, Mark stumbled out of the bedroom. His hair was wild and his smell zoolike, and he went into the kitchen and fried himself three eggs.
“Don’t,” he said, and held up a hand when I started to ask how he was.
He spent the next two weeks on the phone. No one would take his calls.
After that, he got a job at one of those big-box hardware stores and started a portrait business on the side. Then, one day, he burst into our apartment and said a guy he knew from film school worked as a fire lookout in Washington State and needed someone to fill in for him while he went off to take care of his ailing father.
“Think of it, Liv. We’ll be on top of the world and no one will bother us. We’ll be part of nature, free from the money-grubbers, the phonies, the idiots. Just us.”
It scared me a little but he folded me into his arms and said: “Trust me, you’ll never feel more alive than when you don’t know what’s coming next.”
And he was right.
By the time fire season was over, I was weightless from the freedom of being unchained from rude customers, routines and responsibilities, and so we kept traveling. We crisscrossed the West, sleeping under the stars, drinking beer in dimly lit bars and getting temporary jobs when we were low on money. Once, we worked clearing out hoarder houses for a rehab outfit in Los Angeles. Another time, we spent three weeks in a commune outside of Portland, Oregon, where we canned vegetables, milked goats and fixed fences.
Then I got pregnant and Mark shifted from the restless wanderer to the superhero of fathers. He’d come into a little money after his mother died-his cardiac surgeon father had passed three years before-and he made a down payment on a house on the outskirts of Sacramento. It was beige stucco, 1,120 square feet, and had been built in 1939 when the Depression was still fresh on everyone’s minds. There was a tiny front porch, two small bedrooms, noisy plumbing and a galley kitchen that looked out onto a sprawling elm tree in the backyard. And yet it was ours.
He carried me over the threshold with my seven-months-pregnant belly. Later, we laughed about how he had grunted with effort when he hefted me up.
When Xander was born, Mark dove into fatherhood as if he had been destined to do just that. He changed diapers, read child-development books and paced the floor for hours when Xander had colic. When Xander began missing some of his milestones, Mark was the one who insisted we take our boy to Stanford.
I remember sitting under a buzzing fluorescent light in the tiny exam room and listening as the doctor spoke about genes being deleted from a certain chromosome that would make our son’s health as fragile as an old man’s and leave him with developmental delays. He said, however, that surgery could repair part of what was wrong with our son’s heart and that if we did a lot of occupational and physical therapy, we could get him fairly close to “normal.”
He smiled when he said it, as if we should have thanked him for such wonderful news.
Instead, Mark’s eyes lasered in on the doctor. “Who the hell wants normal?” he said. “Normal is just a prescription for unhappiness. You should know. Look at you.” The doctor reared back on his wheeled stool. “My kid is perfect,” Mark said, “an old soul who was placed here for a reason, and he’s going to change the world.”
It turned out both he and the doctor were right.
Xander was an old soul, a beautiful boy who changed our lives. But he also needed surgery to enlarge his narrowed aorta and therapy to help him learn to walk. Our hearts filled while our bank account drained.
I started cleaning houses because of the flexibility the work offered and Mark took on different jobs: shelf stocking, house painting, hardware clerking. We tried to keep alive some vestiges of our former life with overnight camping trips to the mountains and watching old movies on the couch with a bottle of wine between us. Eventually, however, our lives dissolved into routine and I couldn’t help but think we were traveling the same stretch of road day after day, never getting anywhere except the state of exhaustion.
We worked and ate and fell into bed, sometimes without even a good night kiss. We still had sex but it tended to be more hurried and less intense than in the old days. A few times, I faked an orgasm but most of the time I didn’t have to. Mark was always careful to make sure we were both satisfied.
Still, I was never quite sure what Mark saw in me. I wasn’t thin or tall or beautiful like the women in LA, who all appeared to have stepped out of the pages of a magazine. I was shorter and more compact but my hair was thick and the color of roasted coffee beans and my cheekbones were high and sculpted. Mark always said my looks reminded him of a warrior princess.
“How could I look at another woman when I have you?” he would say.
Despite that, there was a part of me that suspected he wanted more than me and our little house, our low-paying jobs and our suburban lives, so when he got a job at a custom-motorcycle shop delivering bikes to customers all over the West and discovered a subject for a new documentary, I was thrilled.
But maybe our quiet life was what I should have wanted. Maybe that should have been enough.
3. NOW
I awoke on the bare mattress under a striped wool blanket I’d found in the steamer chest. My eyes were full of grit and my mouth dry as dust. It took me a few seconds to remember where I was, and when I did, panic fluttered inside me.
I sat up and told myself to calm down, that Mark couldn’t keep me locked up forever, although I could no longer be sure of that fact. Not since so many things I thought I knew about him had turned out to be wrong.
I pushed myself out of bed, my back muscles protesting against the lumpy mattress on which I’d slept. The plywood floor was rough under my bare feet. I went to the window, which was set high enough so that my chin just came to its bottom sill. I wiped away the desiccated corpses of a half dozen flies and tapped the barrier with my finger. Plexiglass. No way to escape there.
Outside, the sky had turned cornflower blue and a hard breeze sent cloud shadows racing across the garden. The dirt was dark with moisture. It must have rained during the few hours I’d slept.
I thought of my drive here: the pouring rain through Seattle, the graveled highway with its frost heaves and the dark forest pressing in on either side, the fast food Xander and I had eaten so I could surreptitiously charge my phone because my twelve-year-old Subaru was too ancient to have a charging port. Somewhere in the Yukon, however, the fast-food places disappeared and I had to be even more creative. Once, I tried to charge my phone at an outlet I found behind a gas station/mini-mart and was chased off by the attendant, who threatened to have me arrested for theft of electricity. Pretty soon, though, finding outlets didn’t matter. Cell service became so spotty it was basically nonexistent. It made me feel cut off from the world but free in a way too.
Excerpted from The Beautiful and the Wild by Peggy Townsend Copyright © 2023 by Peggy Townsend. Excerpted by permission of Berkley. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
