Extreme

by Lark O'Neal

  Then we’re off, following a road along the bay and then into the great dark vastness. It unsettles me, the emptiness. “So lonely and empty,” I comment.

  “Nah, you just can’t see the inhabitants in the dark.”

  “There aren’t even any houses.”

  His phone buzzes, once, twice, three times. He swipes his thumb over the screen without looking at them. “Not people.” His face is lit by the dashboard lights, faintly green, and he smiles sideways at me. “Elves.”

  “Right. Elves.”

  “Careful. There are a lot of them.”

  From the backseat, Madeline pipes up, “It’s true. We went on this little tour and the woman just could not stop talking about elves in the lava fields, and elvish churches and dwarves causing accidents on the roads. Crazy.”

  “Seriously?”

  “A lot of people believe in them here,” Gabe says, looking in his rear view mirror.”

  “What are they like?”

  As if to underscore the mystical, a woman’s voice begins to sing a wispy, wistful sounding song in Icelandic. It shifts the energy in the cab and I find myself looking out into the darkness for little fires or tiny houses.

  “Do you believe?” I ask Gabe, half-kidding.

  He inclines his head. “In elves? I don’t know. When I was a kid I believed in ghosts and huaka’ipo, the Night Marchers.”

  “You’re a scientist!”

  “Science is just a process of discovery. Maybe we just don’t know how to measure that energy yet.” He looks at me, his eyes so very dark in the low light of the dashboard. “Once I thought I saw a ghost, for real.”

  It’s one of the secret things I never tell anyone that I swear a ghost lived in our house, and I saw her more than once. “Where?”

  “In a house museum on the island. A woman cooking, just cooking, that’s all, in traditional dress, her hair really long and shiny.” He shakes his head. “It sounds crazy, but I saw her like I see you, just standing there. But when I went over to see what she was cooking, she disappeared.”

  “That’s kind of creepy.”

  “I guess. It didn’t scare me.” The music shifts again, still quiet. “Do you believe?”

  “Our house has a ghost. A woman who died there in the late 1900’s, suicide. She’d disgraced herself. Very sad story, and she weeps sometimes, especially when the snow first begins to fall.”

  “Have you heard her?”

  I nod. “It used to make me cry when I was little, but no one else heard her. They thought I was having nightmares." I shake my head, absolutely sure to this day that those episodes were not dreams.

  “So you’re sensitive.”

  “I don’t know about that. I saw that ghost, but never any others. I kind of try not to see them—I mean, really. No.” Looking into the landscape, I add, “It seems especially sad to get stuck at a bad moment, right? Like you should be able to escape all that when you’re gone.”

  “I never thought of it like that.” He peers into the darkness, fingers long on the steering wheel. “Maybe I think ghosts are more like energy blocks, you know, an imprint, like a photograph.”

  “Not an actual ghost?”

  “Yeah, like why would that Hawaiian stay there, cooking?” He glances at me. “Maybe it was just a good day and it stuck in the ether somehow.”

  I shake my head, thinking of the ghost in my house. “Mmm. Maybe. Our ghost moved around. Like I saw her drifting through the halls, crying.”

  He raises his eyebrows. “That must have scared the shit out of you.”

  “Pretty much.” I shake my head. “And nobody believed me. They think I made it up—but I saw her a lot of times over a period of a few years.”

  He waits, quietly.

  “For awhile, I started looking up ways to free a ghost. Like exorcism or something. But then I started training and I forgot about her.” I half-grin. “Which kind of makes me feel guilty, now that I say it like that.” The subject starts to make the hair on my neck prickle. “When did Mount St. Helen’s erupt?”

  “Way to change the subject.” Gabe laughs softly. “1980. Washington. It’s in the same range as Mt. Rainer.”

  “There were earthquakes last night and this morning in Reykjavik.”

  “Right, which were probably related to all the activity in the fissures, but it might not have been. There are earthquakes here all the time, too.”

  “Ok. So how do you know when there’s a problem or not a problem. I mean, people live here, right, and there are live volcanos all around.”

  He glances toward me. “Be careful. I’ll geek on you with volcano stuff.”

  “Geek away.”

  “All right. At St. Helen’s, the mountain had a bulge, a big one. It was hanging around for awhile, long enough that they moved everybody out.”

  “And it just blew, like all of a sudden?”

  “It really blew. 14 miles into the air, and straight out over the lake and the surrounding forests.”

  I’m imagining a mountaintop exploding and it gives me a weird sense of apprehension. “So how do you know that won’t happen with these volcanoes?”

  “We get some warning. It’s not like it can’t blow—they do crazy things—but we’d have some idea that it might be happening. We just don’t know what will erupt, or for how long, or what kind of eruption it will be.”

  “Like the lava.”

  His phone buzzes again and the screen shows a long message. “Do you want me to read that to you?” I ask.

  “Nah, I’ll look at them when we get there. Nothing I can do while I’m driving.”

  “So—lava?”

  “Right. Mount St. Helens and Pompeii are the same kind of eruptions, one of the most violent kind. Huge blast, rapid flow that just wipes out everything in its path.”

  I glance out the window. “At least there’s nothing to be wiped out here.”

  “You’re really going to have to come back in the summer.”

  “I’ve been here in the summer,” Hunter says from the back seat. “It’s gorgeous.”

  “See?” Gabe says.

  “I have to say the dark is hard to take,” Madeline said. “I was ready to get out of here after a day, but Olivia—” she sighs.

  I turn so I can see her. “Olivia is your friend, right? The curly-hair and exotic looking eyes?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And who’s the other girl? The one who is hooking up with Tyler?”

  “Chelsea.”

  “Got it.” I nod. “Are you backpacking?”

  “Yep. Worked a bunch of crappy jobs to save up for it. Then I went to massage school to have a skill and she has restaurant background.”

  “That’s great,” Gabe says. “How long you been on the road?”

  “Four months. We are supposed to go to Australia next, but—”

  “Australia,” Hunter breathes. “That’s the place that calls me. Uluru. The red center.”

  Madeline snorts. “You’re such a hippie.”

  “Why do you want to go there, then?”

  “I don’t know. Australia. It’s just…a cool place, right? The Great Barrier Reef and all that.” She scoots forward to lean between me and Gabe. “Have you been there, either of you?”

  “Not me.” Gabe slides a glance toward me. “You’d be more in New Zealand, right? All those slopes.”

  “I prefer Chile for training, but I have a lot of friends from Australia. It’s a cool place.”

  “Training?” Hunter echoes. “What kind of training do you?”

  I take a breath, exchange a glance with Madeline. It never stays under wraps for long, and sometimes it doesn’t even matter, but sometimes it does. “Snowboarding. Olympics.”

  “No kidding?”

  Madeline says, “She is being really modest. She’s one of the top snowboarders in the world right now. Gold medal in slope style at Sochi, amiright?”

  Gabe’s head swings around. “No shit? Gold medal?”

  I inc
line my head. “I should probably do something more serious with my life.”

  To his credit, he laughs, and the sound is round and deep, as rich as his speaking voice. “Probably need to knuckle down.” Across the seat, he takes my hand and gives it a squeeze.

  “Oh, my god!” Madeline cries suddenly, pointing through the windshield. “Look!”

  On the horizon is a leaping red light, high against the sky, and creeping over the horizon is an enormous cloud, sparking with lightning. “That’s amazing!”

  “Just wait.”

  We’re all mesmerized as we approach, the red light growing more distinct as we get closer. A cluster of official vehicles are lined up in a row across the road, and Gabe rolls the window down. “Hey, Eberg. Taking a couple of visitors in.”

  The man, bundled in thick parka, peers into the car. “Okay.”

  “Are we supposed to be doing this?”

  “Stick with me, kid,” he says, steering around the narrowing road.

  “Cool,” Hunter says from the back.

  Gabe keeps driving until we are almost too close for my sense of comfort. Light from the finally rising sun is leaking across the fields of snow, painting the sides of the mountains pale purple, and ash is billowing into the sky, spreading in a distinct lean toward the east. “That’s why the planes are grounded, right?”

  “Yeah. It’s not as dramatic to look at as the Stromboli, but it causes a lot more trouble.”

  “Is that the Stromboli?” I ask, pointing to the orange liquid boiling on top of the mountain, molten and leaping. At the summit, red fire is crawling very slowly down the side of the mountain, turning the snow beneath into billowing steam.

  “Yep.”

  “Amazing.”

  “Let’s get out,” Gabe says. “Hats and gloves.”

  For a moment, I’m a little afraid, thinking of that exploding mountain that took out a whole town in Pompeii, and whole forests in Washington. “Didn’t you say this mountain was bulging? What if it blows in a bigger way?”

  “Fair question.” He looks over the wheel and cranes his neck to see the top of the mountain. “First of all, it was bulging, but the eruptions have relieved that pressure. And second, if it blows while we’re here, we won’t really know anything about it.”

  Again he gives me that cheerful smile. I realize he means we’ll all be dead.

  “Great. Well, then, let’s go.”

  In the distance, much closer than we are, is a cluster of vehicles, a tent with the glow of a light inside. Tiny silhouettes of presumably scientists are moving around.

  The four of us cluster in a little knot at the front of the Range Rover, partly for protection from the icy wind blowing over us. It slices between the layers of my clothes to find ways in, right by my jaw, into my ear, and I clap a hand over it. A low, rumbling sound rolls over us. “Is that sound the volcano?”

  “Yeah. Cool, right?” Gabe leans on the front of the Range Rover and I follow suit, finding the warmth against my back. Madeline has her phone out, taking pictures, but I’m awestruck.

  Until the rumbling seems to travel down the mountain, across the open space between us, and shakes the earth. “Is that a warning?” I ask in alarm.

  “It’s all part of the event,” he says. “Are you worried? You seem jumpier than I thought you’d be.”

  “Well, that’s because somebody was telling me stories about terrible eruptions on the way here.”

  “Aw, I’m sorry,” he raises his arm and pulls me closer to him, and I lean in gratefully, braced against his strong, lean form, my arms around his waist. The smell of him poofs out from his coat and I breathe it in. He adds, “I grew up with a volcano in my back yard.”

  “Live?” I look up, and from this angle, I can see the underside of his jaw, the black shadow of his whiskers along his chin, and the shape of his Adam’s apple. It’s thrilling and strange, and in some way, completely, exactly right. I find myself moving my hand on his coat.

  “Yeah, it has a slow lava flow almost all the time.”

  “Why did you come all the way to Iceland to study volcanoes when you have them in your own backyard?”

  He’s silent for a minute. “The story I tell is that my professor is the best in the world and the fellowship was a very good one, which is true.” I feel him take a breath. “But I wanted to leave Hawaii, leave my parents. I needed to.”

  The way he says it makes me understand there is more to the stuff with his parents than he let on at first. Mildly, I say, “Big climate change there.”

  “Tell me about it. Those first six months were a shock to the system.” He pulls me tighter against him. “Now I like it, the cold, the snow, the glaciers. It’s amazing.”

  In front of us, the mountain is putting on a show, sending sparks and blobs up into the air. Another rumble sounds, expands, blasts out, and I find myself wincing, narrowing my eyes like it would help if the thing exploded. Along the edge of the eastern horizon, the sun has emerged in aloof coldness, a ball the color of salmon obscured by shifting clouds. It’s harsh and beautiful.

  “Speaking of parents, you won a gold medal and your parents still want you to find something else to do?”

  “Don’t be too hard on them. You didn’t think it was—how did you put it?—a job for a smart person.”

  “That is true. Then I saw your muscles. And your scars.”

  I look up and he’s smiling down at me. “And that told you what, exactly?”

  “That you’re serious. That it means something, that you’ve been doing it a long time.”

  I’m watching his lips move as he speaks, and before I realize I’m going to do it, I reach a hand up and circle his neck so that I can pull his mouth down to mine.

  The connection is instant and electric, almost carrying a sound. His mouth is lush and wide and hot, and after the first little hesitation, he’s tugging me into him, bending himself and lifting me so that our bodies are pressed close—or at least our coats and thirty-nine layers of gear are close—and our tongues communicate in a language they invented, slipping, touching, circling, retreating.

  He pulls away first. “My professor is over there somewhere. He probably wouldn’t care, but—”

  “I understand.” I settle back down, my arms loose around his waist. “Should I let you go, too?”

  “Nah. We’re huddling together for warmth.” He rubs my arm. “I’m going to Google the hell out of you when I get home. Watch your Olympic runs.”

  “Okay.” But it makes me think of my fight with my mother. Her threat that she’s going to cut me off. I have some money from the wins, but not that much, and this is an expensive sport. They all are, but this one doesn’t pay much yet.

  In the car, his phone dings again.

  “You forgot to check your messages.”

  “It’s the professor. He’s giving me updates on the seismic activity and—”

  A series of dings sound, one after the other after the other. Gabe frowns. “I’d better check that.”

  “I’m going to sit in the car with you, get out of this wind.”

  We climb back into the comparatively warmer interior of the truck and he scrolls through his messages. “Well, well, well,” he says. “Looks like things could get very interesting.”

  Chapter NINE

  “What does that mean?” I ask.

  “Hold on.” He pops back outside. “Hey, I have to take you back, guys.” When they get in, he starts the truck, cranks up the heat, and turns around. “There’s substantial activity on a sister volcano. She’s acting up, too, and I have to get you guys back to the hotel and go to work.”

  “Do you want us to drop you with the others and you can get the truck later?” I ask. “I can drive.”

  He looks at me. “You’re okay on icy roads?”

  “Of course. You can just text me when you need me to come back or whatever.”

  For a minute, he taps on the steering wheel. “I can get a ride into town when we’re done.” He
studies my face with those inky eyes. “If you’re sure you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all.”

  “All right then.” He smiles. “Thanks.”

  He drives us all to the tent and vehicles closer to the eruption¸ and I get out to take the driver’s seat. “Sure you’re good with this?” he asks.

  “Absolutely.” I hop in the seat. “I drove my dad’s Jeep everywhere in Maine, and I have driven in the Rockies in the middle of winter many times. Remember, I’m a snowboarder. We live for snow.”

  “Gold medal rider,” he adds, grinning, and steps back so I can close the door. He salutes me. “I’ll text you.”

  “Get to work,” I say, grabbing the door. “Somebody has to save the world.”

  He laughs, lifts his hand a wave, and then he’s off, jogging in the icy cold toward his people, the little knot of scientists.

  I realize I’m feeling a little hollow, knowing he’s going to be working again—and maybe for quite awhile. Maybe this whatever it is won’t have a chance to develop into anything. As he lopes away under the unreal light, volcano and low sun creating a landscape from outer space, it makes me much sadder than it should.

  Instead, it should underline the very real challenges to this possible romance. How do you develop a relationship when you’re not even in the same country?

  I slam the door. “Buckle up, girls and boys.”

  * * *

  The return trip is uneventful and we’re back at the hotel in an hour. My limbs are restless with lack of exercise, and rather than go back to my room, I wave Madeline and Hunter off and tell them I’m going to get a walk. I’m worried enough about how little exercise I can do here, and my ankle is irritated by the decision a bit, but I’ve got to move or I turn into a monster.

  In town, the wind isn’t so sharp, and the way the light falls over the water and the snow and the cliffs across the bay is nothing less than spectacular, a wash of purples going gray with the ash cloud overhead, roiling and dark. Little sprinkles of ash fall every now and then, and I wonder if our lungs are all at risk.

  But as I walk away the restlessness, feeling it leak through my feet into the squeaky snow, I notice that there’s a holiday spirit in the air, as if the volcano has given people an excuse to let loose. Stranded tourists from all over the world make up the largest number of people along the waterfront, taking photos of each other posing against the sky, taking selfies, huddling together for warmth.