by Nicole Baart
“Why Alaska?” I asked.
Etsell opened his mouth and closed it. Let a stunned breath escape from between his lips. “Because,” he murmured. He seemed confused, distracted, like he didn’t know how to explain the feel of the wind on his skin to a fish. I was the fish.
“Because it’s Alaska, Dani,” he finally managed. “Because it’s vast and gorgeous and savage.”
I cringed a little, but he was too enamored with his subject matter to notice.
“It’s where pioneers belong, and entrepreneurs. And thrill-seekers, wanderers, adventurers . . .”
And little boys, I thought. Grown-up little boys with broken hearts.
“We’ve got nothing tying us here,” Etsell whispered, unraveling his fingers from mine so that he could cup my face.
“My mother,” I reminded him. “Hazel. My sisters.”
“They’ll visit. We’ll take them salmon fishing.”
I could see him for just a moment, a man on the bank of one of the rivers I had read about online. The Kenai, the Yukon, the Koyukuk. The water was bottle-green and ice cold, and we were all lined up on either side of him like wings. Wings of women who would hold him up. Help him rise when he fell.
“Yes,” I whispered. But I wasn’t saying yes to Alaska, I was saying yes to him. I couldn’t cross my fingers as I stretched the meaning of my ambiguous answer, but I considered the long plait of my braided hair, the way my legs intersected at the ankle, the line of one wrist over the other.
I let him kiss me, and as his lips met mine I imagined the dross of every splintered vow anointing our heads like Arctic snow. They were white lies, inconsequential, nothing. But necessary all the same. It was part of the process of coming together, the way we dulled our sharp edges on each other, made promises we had no intent to keep.
We had done it before. Pretended we fit like the hollow of earth beneath a rock that had rested against the same dirt for centuries. Millennia. And when the raw truth of our differences felt harsh and uncompromising, we shifted positions, tried again. It wasn’t deceptive, not really. It was who we were.
2
Genesis
When the phone rang after midnight, Dani wasn’t asleep. For a moment her heart swelled with hope, but the tinny trill that shattered the silence of her troubled night was coming from the handset that rested on the kitchen counter, not her cell phone. Etsell would never call the landline.
Dani leaped off the couch all the same, and stumbled bleary-eyed and stiff into the kitchen. She yanked the phone off the base and pressed the talk button with a trembling finger. Five days. The thought flashed through her mind like a spark of something so white-hot it left the memory of a burn against her skin. She felt singed knowing that her husband had been missing for five entire days. They were the points of a star, the fingers on her hand, a number that seemed to signify an end, a completion.
“Hello?” she said before the headset was even against her cheek.
There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Hello? Mrs. Greene?”
“Yes, this is Mrs. Greene.” Dani fell against the counter as if someone had shoved her. Very deliberately, she placed the palm of her free hand against the smooth edge of the laminate before her and anchored her fingers to the cool, steadying surface.
“Good evening, Mrs. Greene,” the gentleman continued in a voice too accustomed to disaster and loss to betray any hint of what he had called to say. “My name is Blair Knopf. I’m with the Civil Air Patrol in Seward, Alaska. I believe you spoke with my colleague Tim Mason yesterday?”
“Yes, sir.” Dani exhaled.
“I’m calling this evening to apprise you of our current situation. I’m not calling too late, am I?”
Dani glanced at the clock on the stove, where 12:17 blinked back at her in an eerie, gleaming blue that made her think of moonlight shattering on ice caps and fathomless glacier lakes. “Not too late at all,” she muttered, remembering that it was three hours earlier in Seward. Still light as day. No glowing alien pools of darkened frost and snow.
“Good.” Blair seemed to waver for a second, to gather himself before spilling the information that Dani could hardly force herself to listen to.
This is it, she thought, digging her fingernails into a counter that wouldn’t give.
“Are you alone, Mrs. Greene? Do you have someone with you?”
Dani ignored the quiet hum of the refrigerator and the crisp, uneven slap of her own heart against her chest. She was absolutely alone. But she didn’t want to tell him that. He might try to track down a nonexistent pastor to pass along the news or even call the local police station. A gentleman down the street had been informed of his son’s fatal car accident that way—a blue cruiser with flashing lights pulled up to the house. Later he confessed that the Grim Reaper had been forever altered in his imagination. Death didn’t wear black robes, he wore a starched uniform with a gun and holster.
“I’m not alone,” Dani lied.
“I’m glad to hear that,” Blair said slowly. “Ma’am, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but as of this evening we are calling off the official search for your husband’s plane.”
The little gasp that thudded in Dani’s throat was born of shock, not horror. “I thought you were calling to tell me he was dead,” she whispered.
Blair swallowed audibly on the other end of the line. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Greene. Truly, I am.” It sounded as if he didn’t perceive much difference between an abandoned search and an accounted-for corpse.
“But you didn’t tell me that he’s dead,” Dani cried, her desperation finally clawing its way through the numbness that had shrouded her since she first learned of Etsell’s disappearance. “He’s not dead. I mean, you don’t know that. It hasn’t even been a week.”
“Five days, ma’am. We’ve followed every protocol. We’ve had flights in the air almost nonstop. Civilians, volunteers, CAP . . .”
“How can you call off the search?” She wanted to weep, to scream and hurl insults at the seemingly unruffled stranger who called from a world away, but the reservoir of her tears was dry.
“I’m so sorry,” Blair said again, “but we’ve done what we can. Your husband didn’t file a flight plan, and we don’t even know where to begin. It’s like searching for a needle in a haystack.”
“What do you mean he didn’t file a flight plan?”
“It’s advised. Highly suggested,” Blair explained patiently. “But pilots aren’t required to file a flight plan in Alaska. The Seward airport is just one of six hundred airports and another couple thousand airstrips up here. If Tim hadn’t seen your husband before takeoff, we wouldn’t have even known he was gone.”
Dani’s forehead bloomed with a bright burst of pain. She closed her eyes against the Technicolor light of a sudden, bone-deep headache, and forced herself to speak calmly. “You must be mistaken, Mr. Knopf. Etsell wasn’t leaving from Seward. He was landing in Seward. He called me before he left the hunting lodge where he’s been working for the last three weeks. He was flying a load of cargo back, spending the night in Seward, and then he was supposed to come home.”
“He made the drop,” Blair told her. “Safe and sound. We believe Etsell went missing after that.”
For a few seconds, Dani couldn’t speak around the lump in her throat. “Excuse me?” she finally choked.
“I thought you knew.” Blair sounded confused. “He took off out of Seward. About two hours after he landed, as far as we can tell.”
“Why? Where was he going?”
“That’s what we’d like to know.”
Dani was still leaning against the counter when she heard the unmistakable click of her front door opening. Blackhawk was a small town surrounded by a prairie of Midwestern nowhere, such a well-kept secret that it was hidden on the map between the curling line of the Big Sioux River and the shaded border of a sprawling state park. It was a forgotten place, and it didn’t cross Dani’s mind to be concerned that someone was sn
eaking into her home in the middle of the night. It was probably her mom. Or her sister. Katrina often crashed on the sagging couch in the living room when she didn’t feel like going home.
“You up?” a smoky voice whispered from the foyer.
Dani answered without thinking. “In the kitchen, Mom.” Once the words were out of her mouth, a part of her wished she could snatch them from the air and swallow them whole. She could pretend that she was hidden in the depths of her small Craftsman home, surrendered to the sleep of the drugged. One of the first things Dani’s mom had brought over after the news of Etsell’s disappearance broke was a half-empty bottle of prescription sleeping pills. Though Dani hadn’t availed herself of the narcotics, they would have made the perfect excuse.
But it was too late. There was the sound of shuffling feet—her mother struggling through the shag carpet in her predictable four-inch heels—then Charlene Vis burst through the old-fashioned salon door that separated the kitchen from the rest of the house. She came in on a breeze of cigarette smoke and cheap perfume, something floral and overpowering that she bought half-price at a flea market two summers ago. She blinked a few times, looking for all the world like a startled bird, a waif of little more than brittle bone and tanning-bed brown skin. But it wasn’t the recent skin cancer scare and her mother’s continued frequent trips to Tan World that set Dani off. It was her hair.
“Throw those damn clearance boxes away and let me color you!” Dani hissed at the sight of Char’s teased coif. Her mother’s thinning strands were perched on the top of her head like a windblown nest, and though the gray roots were covered, the amber brilliance of her newly dyed locks leaned far more toward crossing guard orange than brunette.
“You know I like to go with the mood of the day,” Char quipped. She gave her T-shirt a slight, attention-seeking tug. It was a subconscious gesture, a small act of self-arrangement that was as natural to Char as blinking.
Dani turned her eyes from the sight of her mother’s freckled cleavage where it was framed in the deep V-neck of a revealing top. “It looks terrible.”
Char ignored the biting comment and stitched up the distance between them with a few quick, staccato steps. Giving her daughter a smacking kiss on the cheek she asked, “Why aren’t you in bed?”
“Because I was expecting midnight company.”
“Don’t be cheeky.” Char clucked her tongue. “I gave you sleeping pills. You should be sleeping.”
“I don’t want to.”
“You’re being ridiculous. You’ll need your energy to nurse Ell back to health when they find him in that godforsaken wasteland. You should have never let him go up there in the first place. He’s probably fallen off a cliff or something. You’ll have an amputee for a husband.” Char’s gaze raked over the bare counter, the empty table. “Got anything to eat?”
Dani sighed. “Check the fridge.”
“I thought people were supposed to bring you meals.”
“I thought waitresses were supposed to get free food at the end of their shifts.”
“Half-price,” Char humphed. “And if I have to eat another onion ring this week I swear I’ll drop dead.” She rummaged through the nearly empty fridge and came up with a carton of Boston cream pie yogurt. “Toss me a spoon, will you?”
Dani stifled a groan, but it was too late to tell her mother to leave. Instead of arguing, she stalled for just a moment and read the names and numbers she had copied onto the piece of paper in her hand one last time. Then she painstakingly folded it in half and half again and slid it into the back pocket of her jeans. The soft crinkle of the paper was a consolation of sorts. Some small corner of her soul could draw a shaky breath at the simple assurance that it was there.
Wrenching open the cutlery drawer with more force than necessary, Dani extracted a spoon for her mom and considered throwing it across the kitchen just as she had asked. But the older woman was already sitting cross-legged in a hard-back chair, peeling the foil off the yogurt container with her teeth so that she could preserve the plastic nails she had glued on. She looked to Dani like a little girl instead of a fifty-something woman.
“Here,” she said as she handed her mother the utensil and plopped into the chair across from her.
Char scooped out a spoonful with an eager half smile on her face. She closed her eyes for just a second, apparently savoring the texture, the taste, before she made a sound of disgust in the back of her throat and fixed Dani with an accusatory stare. “You don’t have anything else?”
“Asparagus.”
Char pulled a face. “Asparagus? Where in the world did you get asparagus?”
“From Benjamin.”
“Your neighbor? That preacher from the country church?”
“That’s the one.”
“He’s weird.”
Dani lifted one shoulder noncommittally and watched as her mother shoveled another bite of the offending yogurt.
“I want to hear all about the search,” Char mumbled with a full mouth. “I came here to be a listening ear. A shoulder to cry on. But I need sustenance first.” She swallowed. “What do you have to drink?”
“There’s a little bit of Crown in the cupboard above the fridge.”
“The good stuff,” Char hummed. “Coke?”
“Diet Pepsi.”
Char grimaced. “It’ll have to do.”
While her mother mixed herself a strong drink, Dani put her cheek on the cool surface of the table and let her eyes drift closed. The headache that had blossomed as she spoke with Blair from Civil Air Patrol was now a dull wash of angry color that invaded her peripheral vision. She felt sick to her stomach, hot, dizzy. And though she wanted nothing more than to curl up into a ball and die, there was something settling about having Char around. She wasn’t a comfort, not exactly, but Dani was grateful for the chatter even if it grated. For the silent thrum of another heartbeat in the house, mingling with the crooked cadence of her own.
Dani startled when Char finally reclaimed her chair and slammed a glass of dark liquid on the table. “Oops.” Char hit her seat heavily and licked up the little pool of whiskey like a cat. “Damn heels. My feet are killing me.”
“Wear comfortable heels when you work,” Dani intoned, but the words were devoid of meaning, rote. She had suggested the same thing to her mother dozens of times. Hundreds. Her advice always fell on deaf ears. As did her not-so-subtle admonitions to lay off the drinking and stop bringing strange men home from the bar. Etsell had assured Dani once that her mother was not an alcoholic—he knew the signs from experience and in his humble opinion Char just enjoyed a slight, permanent buzz. But not even Etsell, Char’s only son by birth or marriage and a virtual god in her estimation, dared to comment on her penchant for one-night stands.
“I know, I know,” Char moaned, leaning beneath the table to undo the ankle straps of her rhinestoned heels. “You’re so sensible, Danica. Sometimes I think you’re the mother and I’m the daughter. I should listen to you more often, shouldn’t I?”
Dani didn’t respond, but she pushed herself up on her forearms and took a few gulps of her mother’s drink. It burned going down, but she didn’t do it for the taste or even for the soporific effect of the hard liquor. She did it to take a bit off the top. It was obvious this wasn’t her mother’s first drink of the night.
“Good girl,” Char said as if her daughter was eight and had just taken her cough medicine without complaint. “That feels better, doesn’t it?”
Dani cleared her throat. Didn’t bother to nod.
“So,” Char began after taking her own generous swig. “Update me. When’s our boy coming home?”
It was a cruel thing to say, even if Char didn’t mean to give her words bite. For a moment Dani tried to picture her husband living off survival-ration bars and freeze-dried camping food pouches. He could dip water from some glacier-fed stream and use his magnesium fire starter to ensure that he would always be warm. Or at least that he wouldn’t die of hypothermia. May
be he was alive somewhere. Maybe he was sending up flares, anxious for rescue, dreaming of her, the same way she couldn’t close her eyes without seeing him.
But try as she might, Dani couldn’t get the picture to focus. She couldn’t see the label on the silver packet of food. He could be eating turkey Tetrazzini or Mexican-style chicken. For all she knew, he could be eating dust. And her imagination refused to fill in the details of the reality she hoped he still existed in—the black-and-white world she tried to conjure faded to a hundred thousand shades of gray at the edges, a blank space to remind her that no matter how hard she wished for it, her daydreams were likely little more than fairy tales.
“I don’t know,” Dani whispered. She didn’t even realize that she had given her mother an answer of sorts. Her comment was an admission to herself. A declaration of failure on a hundred different fronts. There were so many things that she didn’t know.
“But you’ve heard something,” Char pressed, her voice almost scolding. “They were going to give you daily updates.”
“I spoke with someone from the Civil Air Patrol about a half hour ago,” Dani said.
“Who? I thought the army took care of this sort of thing. The air force?” Char worried her bottom lip, leaving a smudged line of cherry-colored lipstick on her bleached teeth. “The cops,” she finally declared. “They’re in charge of disappearances and such.”
“Not in Alaska. At least, not in this case. Not when planes go missing or . . .” Dani shook her head and caught handfuls of her hair in her fingers as if she intended to pull them out by the roots. “Look,” she huffed with more force than she intended. “We’ve been through this all before. Besides, it doesn’t matter anymore. They’re calling off the search.”
Char’s response was almost comical. Her mouth was empty for once and she let it drop open, a crooked gash that tore across her face and accentuated the lines that she tried to hide with antiaging makeup and drugstore night creams. “What?”
“What do you mean what?”
