It was Bryn’s summer to be in Alaska. Would she come, as she had every five years? Memories of their last night together still clung to his heart, like mud in a dog’s fur. He sighed. He knew he needed to put that almost-romance to bed before he’d find the confirmation he sought for his relationship with Sara.
Bryn hadn’t given him any hope in the following years. There hadn’t been a single communication from her. And her intent, even during that visit, had been clear: She wanted nothing from Eli Pierce other than a means of transportation. He was an old family friend, an old flame, nothing more. It was getting his heart to shut away the desire for more that was the trick. Maybe he’d ask his mom and dad when they got back from their summer road trip if they’d heard anything from the Baileys, but that wouldn’t be until August.
He pulled the new Ford into the gravel driveway. Five vehicles belonging to clients in the bush were parked there and an old car with Anchorage identification. He put the truck in park and climbed out. A woman stood on the bank above the water, staring out at Fish Lake and the Talkeetna Mountains in the distance. One of the first sightseers to arrive for the summer? Probably wanted a ride around McKinley—
She turned then, at the sound of his truck door slamming shut.
And Eli felt as if he had been punched in the gut.
Bryn Bailey.
ALSO BY LISA TAWN BERGREN
ROMANCE NOVELS
THE FULL CIRCLE SERIES
Refuge
Torchlight
Pathways
Treasure
Chosen
Firestorm
CONTEMPORARY FICTION
The Bridge
HISTORICAL FICTION
THE NORTHERN LIGHTS SERIES
The Captain’s Bride
Deep Harbor
Midnight Sun
NOVELLAS
“Tarnished Silver” in Porch Swings & Picket Fences
CHILDREN’S
God Gave Us You
God Gave Us Two (fall 2001)
PATHWAYS
PUBLISHED BY WATERBROOK PRESS
2375 Telstar Drive, Suite 160
Colorado Springs, Colorado 80920
A division of Random House, Inc.
Scriptures taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.
The characters and events in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental.
Copyright © 2001 by Lisa Tawn Bergren
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
WATERBROOK and its deer design logo are registered trademarks of WaterBrook Press, a division of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bergren, Lisa Tawn.
Pathways / Lisa Tawn Bergren.—1st WaterBrook ed.
p. cm. — (The full circle series ; 3)
eISBN: 978-0-307-82220-8
1. Survival after airplane accidents, shipwrecks, etc.—Fiction. 2. Wilderness survival—Fiction. 3. Bush pilots—Fiction. 4. Physicians—Fiction. 5. Alaska—Fiction. I. Tide.
PS3552.E71938 P38 2001
813′.54—dc21
2001023379
v3.1
To Cheryl, one of my oldest friends, rediscovered,
sister in the God who saves.
Thank you for praying me through this last year! I love you!
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part 1 Trailhead, 1991
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Part 2 Higher Road, 1996
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Part 3 Homeward Bound, 2001
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Acknowledgments
Excerpt from Treasure
The place God calls you is the place where your deep gladness
and the world’s deep hunger meet.
FREDERICK BUECHNER
Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened,
and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you and learn from me,
for I am gentle and humble in heart,
and you will find rest for your souls.
For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
MATTHEW 11:28–30
Part 1
Trailhead, 1991
CHAPTER ONE
Come on, Bryn. Come out in the canoe with me. You haven’t been out of this cabin for two days. And it’s summer. You can study later.”
“No thanks, Dad,” she said, turning her back to him and trying to concentrate on her anatomy textbook. The longer she could bury herself in her studies, the faster this trip would be over.
She heard her father, Peter Bailey, walk to the front window. “Come on, honey,” he said, a slight begging tone to his voice. “The rain’s let up. We haven’t even been over to the Pierces’ to say hello.”
Thoughts of Eli Pierce flashed through her mind. People thought that Californians were snobbish. Eli wouldn’t give her the time if he had the last watch on earth. They’d played together when she was at Summit Lake with her dad the year she was ten, but when she’d arrived over her fifteenth summer, the guy had avoided her like a bad case of barnacles on a barge. Sure he was handsome, but Bryn had better things to do than get snubbed by a small-town jerk. “I’m just fine where I am,” Bryn said.
“Suit yourself,” he said. She could hear the shrug of defeat in his voice.
She wondered what her dad saw in this place. It took hours to fly to Anchorage from Southern California, and a couple more to drive to Talkeetna. Then they had to take still another hour to get the floatplane loaded with their gear and fly in to Summit Lake. Bryn heard the door shut behind her father.
All day to get here. She turned over and looked at the two-room log cabin, built by her father twenty years before. Her eyes floated over the hand-hewn logs and white, crumbling chinking. She lay in the bedroom in back, which held a bunk bed on either side. The front room was reserved for a tiny kitchenette and sitting area. It was dark, with no electricity, and it smelled musty, like an old basement blanket at her Grampa Bruce’s in Boston. Bryn had to read by the light of a kerosene lamp when it rained during the day. No wonder her dad hadn’t been able to get Bryn’s mother, Nell, to come all these years.
She closed her eyes as the hollow, scraping sound of her father dragging the canoe off the rocks and into the water reached her ears. She wished she were home working a summer internship at the hospital, heading to the beach, catching a movie with friends—anywhere but here. In two years she would be twenty-two, a graduate from college with a degree in premed. And she would finally tell her father that their days at Summit Lake together were to be no more. She would, after all, be an adult, no longer compelled to please her dad, despite her own desires. He’d have to accept that.
A pang of loss pierced her heart and she frowned, then sighed. Probably guilt pangs. The guy just wanted some quality time with his daughter. She could at least make the most of this trip with him. Appease him, share
with him, make the proverbial memory together. Dutiful daughters did such things all the time.
Bryn tossed aside her textbook and shoved her feet into shoes, hurrying to catch him before he was too far out. Bumping her head on the top bunk, she grimaced. “Dad, wait!” she called, hoping he would hear her from outside. She rubbed the top of her head and rushed out to the front room, then out to the lakeside where her father was already nearly fifty feet out. “Dad, wait! I changed my mind!”
Her father turned and flashed her a white-toothed grin. He was dark and handsome—Bryn’s roommate, Ashley, referred to him as “the sexiest man alive,” which always made Bryn’s skin crawl. No matter how others saw him, he was still just Dad to Bryn.
“Oh good, Bryn Bear,” he responded, using her childhood nickname. “I was already missing you.” The warmth and welcome in his eyes made her glad for her decision. It seemed his eyes were too often full of sorrow and longing these days, although she couldn’t think of a reason for such emotions.
Bryn turned and ducked her head in the cabin door, grabbing her parka from the hook inside. Summers in Alaska were notorious for turning suddenly cold, so she always kept the warm coat at hand. She walked back to the shoreline, pulling her long hair out and into a quick knot. Her hair was the same color as her father’s—Indian black, Peter called it—and they shared the same dark olive skin. Her nose was his too, straight and too long. But her eyes were her mother’s—wide and a bit tipped up in the corners. Smoky brown, a boyfriend once told her. “Just like the rest of you,” he had whispered. “Smoky.”
He was long gone. She had seen to that. Keeping a straight-A average at the University of California at Irvine was no small deal, and he had been in the way, always wanting to party and go out rather than study. But she wanted to graduate and go on to Harvard, at the top of her class all the way. It took discipline and concentration to accomplish that. And vision. No man was going to get in the way.
The canoe crunched to shore again. “Push us off, Bryn Bear.”
“Okay,” she said, wrinkling her nose a bit when her boots got wet and the cold lake water seeped through her socks and to her toes. While they glided backward, Bryn balanced on the bow, then carefully climbed in.
“There’s a jacket and paddle beneath the seat,” Peter said from behind her.
“Thought I was goin’ on a ride,” she tossed back.
“If you ride, you paddle,” her dad responded. “Can’t make an Alaskan out of you if you sit up there like a Newport Beach priss.”
She pulled out the life jacket, pausing to flick off a rather large spider, then put it on and reached for the paddle. Just then a bald eagle swooped low, his long wings spread wide, almost touching the surface as his thick talons clutched a trout from the waters across the lake. “Wow!” Bryn said.
“Isn’t it something here?” Peter replied. “I never get tired of seeing things like that. If only your mother would share it with me …” His voice trailed away, as if the admission were too painful to tell his daughter.
“You always wanted to live here, didn’t you, Dad?”
“Summers anyway. Your mother wouldn’t hear of it. Wouldn’t even come and see it.” There was a shiver of anger in his tone, frustration, as well as pain.
“It is a bit … isolated,” Bryn said, wondering why she felt compelled to defend her mother. She considered her father’s words as she dug her paddle into the water. She had to admit that it felt good to be out on the lake, out from the dank little cabin.
“The solitude is part of what I love,” Peter said, finally breaking the silence. “The first day Jed brought me here, I knew it would be a part of my life forever.”
Bryn looked about them at the small, shallow lake, edged here and there by thick, swampy areas full of reeds, with thick-treed snow-covered mountains that shot up on all three sides. A river fed into Summit from the mountain streams to the south. “This place is wild,” she said, shivering. “Mom would not like it.”
He was quiet for a moment, paddling. “I know. There’s something about being here—it’s so … primary, basic. Not your mother’s style at all. Reminds a person of who he is and who he wants to be.” He dug in his paddle again, and Bryn remained silent, waiting for him to go on. “Jedidiah said to me once, ‘The bush teaches a man about what he wants and what he needs, and the difference between them.’ Every time I come here, I remember. And I leave rededicated to discovering it in Newport, too.”
Bryn’s mind flew from this thin-aired, low-maintenance hide away to their rather ostentatious home in Newport. Her mother had made a career out of volunteering with the Junior League and decorating their home with only the finest furnishings and accessories. “How did you and Mom ever get together?” She looked over her shoulder to see his rueful smile.
“We were more alike once. In college, I thought …” His words drained away like the water off of his paddle. “At some point, your mother changed. I changed.” He halted, as if trying not to say too much.
“She’s been pretty mean lately,” Bryn said, digging her paddle into the water again. “Are you two okay? I mean, your marriage and everything?”
He was silent for a long moment. “Sure, Bryn. We’re fine.”
Bryn licked her lips and kept paddling, searching the approaching shore for the Pierces’ cabin. The sounds of sharp axes cutting through soft wood carried across the lake, as they had since morning, and she caught sight of Eli and his father as they stood around an old, dying tree. Built the same year as the Baileys’, the Pierces’ cabin had been completed first, then Jedidiah and Peter had moved on to finish the Bailey abode. All in one summer. “We were young then,” her father would say wistfully. But there was something in his eyes, in the way he held his shoulders slightly back, as if still proud of the accomplishment, that made her ask him to tell the story again and again.
Peter Bailey had met up with Jedidiah Pierce, born and raised in Alaska, in the summer of ’62, backpacking through Europe. In Germany, the pair had stayed at a youth hostel overnight and went out the next day to try the locals’ fabled Gewürztraminer. Frequently wineries set up tents along the road, and the duo stopped at the first one they saw. It was only much later that they learned they had crashed a wedding party, and the father of the bride had them tossed out.
From then on, the men were like blood brothers, and Jed, having spotted the pristine site on a hike years before, brought his new friend to Summit Lake the following summer. Both purchased several acres from Ben White, who owned much of the land surrounding the water. Ben was an older man who had been living alone on Summit since 1953, when he was discharged from the army. His home was at the northern tip of the lake. No one else owned land on the lake or lived in the small mountain valley.
“There she is,” Peter said from behind Bryn. “I’m always amazed that I can’t see their place from the water until I’m nearly on top of it.”
Deep in the shadows, the cabin did blend wonderfully with the trees, hidden behind a copse of alder and white spruce.
Jedidiah stood up with his son, ax in hand, panting. They had been working on felling an old-growth, rotten spruce that threatened their roof in the next winter storm. He wiped the sweat from his upper lip and took a step closer, grinning. “I knew that must be Peter Bailey who flew in,” he said. “And he’s got Bryn with him. Man, what a beauty!”
Eli met his father’s knowing eyes.
“She was always like catnip and you the tomcat,” Jed said in gentle warning. “Watch yourself.”
“I don’t think she’s interested, Dad. The girl couldn’t even manage to say hello last time I saw her.”
“She was a kid then. Now you’re adults. And that makes your dance a little more dangerous.”
“What’re you talking about?” Eli asked crossly.
“Can’t you see it? Trust a father’s intuition then. Just watch your step, Son. Listen to the Spirit’s lead,” he said, looking upward into the sunlight filtering through the dense
alder and spruce boughs. He slammed his ax into the tree trunk and left Eli’s side to greet his old friend.
After a moment, Eli began to follow. As he walked down the path, he tried to get a covert look at Bryn. When he saw her grin up at his father on the bank, it made him pause and almost trip. The girl, who had been a fox at fifteen, had grown into a classic Greek goddess, with long, lithe limbs and dark, swinging hair—an uncommon grace in every movement. And when she smiled, sweet heaven, it made his heart hurt and sail back to the year he was sixteen. The year she wouldn’t even speak to him. Too good for him, he had supposed. Their childhood friendship plainly dissolved.
Forcing himself to leave the cover of the trees, he approached his father, keeping his eyes on Peter Bailey, not risking a fall on his face in front of Bryn. Eli shook Peter’s hand firmly, noticed the look of admiration in the man’s eyes, his glance down to his daughter. And then Eli had to. Had to turn and look at her, greet her. Like an adult, just when he felt a keening teen shyness he hadn’t encountered in years.
Eli reached up for his grandfather’s airman’s cap and pulled it off his head, slipping it under one armpit. He forced himself to smile and look into her eyes—the color of a beaver’s tail in water. “Hi, Bryn,” he managed.
“Eli,” she said with another smile and a short nod. “Your dad roped you into a trip to Summit too, huh?”
“Every summer,” he said, wondering at her words. Roped? This place was heaven on earth. The kind magazine crews scouted for catalog shoots. Thoreau would have died a happy man after he’d seen a place like this. He glanced out at the honey glaze on the water, the deep forest green of the mountains, the snow at the peaks that was almost lavender. “What’s it been, four, five years?”
“Five years,” she said, confirming what he already knew. “Dad can only make it two years between visits here. Every five years is right on track for me. I mean, it’s pretty … rustic.”
Pathways (9780307822208) Page 1
