by Kim Baldwin
Her radio crackled to life. “BTT to A2024B Piper. Bryson, you copy?” The voice, a raspy baritone, belonged to Mike “Skeeter” Sweeney, a fellow bush pilot who worked part-time manning the minuscule FAA station at the village airstrip.
“A2024B Piper,” she replied, relaying the identification tag emblazoned in large black text on the side of the Cub. “’Sup, Skeeter? Kinda busy here.”
“Grizz asked me to give you a shout. Really squirrelly here. Ceiling’s down below two hundred feet, sustained winds thirty and better, and it’s startin’ to ice up like a sonofabitch.”
A glance at her GPS told Bryson she still had eight miles between her and the airstrip. It didn’t sound like much, but it was an eternity in conditions like this, so she kept checking the terrain below for suitable places to land. “Should be okay. Dicey, but seen worse.”
“Roger that. I’ve got the strip lights up full, and I’ll watch you on radar until you get in. Bettles out.”
She spotted another narrow canyon ahead, so she gripped the controls and risked a quick glance in the mirror at her passenger. “’Nother roller coaster coming up. Barf bag’s under your seat.” She hoped the warning would prevent any further splatters on her windows. Visibility was tough enough already, without another dose of half-digested powdered eggs and Spam.
As the man fumbled for her stash of bags, she added, “If you keep from messing up my plane again, I’ll give you a discount on future flights.” It was an easy promise, because the greenish tinge on his face made it clear this was the last time he’d set foot in any kind of bush plane.
Just as she expected, the downdraft in the narrow canyon was fierce, but she’d gained as much altitude as possible before it hit them, so when the bottom dropped out again she was able to keep the Cub from plunging into the river below. More worrisome now were the cliffs on either side of her wingtips. The wind buffeted the plane from side to side with alarming unpredictability, twice putting them within arm’s reach of the rocky façades.
She ignored the mumbled recitation of the Lord’s Prayer from her passenger but took a few deep breaths herself when a subtle change in the whirr of the propeller told her the blades were accumulating a coat of ice.
It was bare-knuckle flying from then on, a steady battle against the wind and sleet, and those last few miles tested every bit of her considerable experience in the air. By the time she lined up for her approach to Bettles, the ceiling was only thirty feet, so she was grateful for her GPS and intimate knowledge of every mile of terrain in the surrounding area.
She cranked the skis back and peered anxiously through the haze of sleet for the airstrip, holding her breath. Skeeter had supplemented the dual strip of landing lights with four blazing fires in fifty-five-gallon drums, two on each end of the runway, and it was these she saw first.
As she made a mental note to buy him a beer, she descended the final few feet and made a perfect three-point landing. Her passenger exhaled loudly in relief, and she glanced in the mirror in time to see him making the sign of the cross.
“Thank you for flying with Thrillride Airlines,” she said cheekily as the Cub rolled to a stop at the edge of the runway. “You can pick up your complimentary beverage at the Den, since our stewardess was too preoccupied to serve you during your flight.” If the eclectic group of individuals who did what she did had anything in common, it had to be their readiness to daily stare death in the face with a sense of humor.
Still clutching his barf bag, the photographer staggered from the plane and headed directly to the roadhouse without a word, oblivious to his gear or the weather. Bryson chuckled. Grizz would get a few dollars from him tonight, at least the cost of several glasses of good Scotch.
Chapter Two
October 21, morning
Atlanta, Georgia
“Karla? I know you’re there. Come on, already, please pick up. I’m way past worry and halfway to panic.”
During the brief silence, Karla pictured her best friend Stella pacing around the nurses’ station with her cell phone. She was restless, the kind who rarely lit in one spot for more than five minutes, and Karla had given her good reason to be concerned. This call was the latest in a string of messages left since the funeral, none of which Karla had returned.
“Hon, I know you’re hurting and don’t want to see anyone right now. But this just isn’t good. I’m coming by after work, and you’d damn well better open the door this time. At least let me take you out for a bite to eat or something. Love you.”
Karla had no intention of allowing Stella in, for even in her fog of grief and confusion, she knew her friend would be shocked by the state of both her appearance and her apartment. She didn’t have any energy to fend off well-meaning efforts to alleviate her downward spiral.
She’d lost so much weight that her pajamas hung loosely on her five-foot, four-inch frame, and dark circles under her eyes from too many sleepless nights marred her otherwise delicate features. Her collar-length, light brown hair was a shade darker than usual and plastered to her head, and at odd moments even she could detect the stench of her unwashed body.
Her two-bedroom apartment hadn’t fared the turmoil any better. Dirty mugs, most half full of cold, stagnant coffee, littered the living room, some on tables and some on the floor. Here and there were a few plates of crusted foodstuffs, uneaten and unrecognizable. The heavy curtains, drawn tight, blocked the sun so well she barely registered day from night. Only the pale glow of a single floor lamp saved the room from cave-like darkness.
Scattered around where she sat cross-legged on the carpet beneath the lamp were a half-dozen photo albums and several boxes, large and small, their contents in such disarray it looked as though she’d been burglarized.
The boxes that held memories of her four years with Abby had consumed the first days of her current despair. It had been a month since her partner left, but the wound of Abby’s betrayal was as open and raw as it had been the day she’d announced she was leaving Karla to follow her heart, having fallen in love with a coworker at her law firm.
Karla was still having a hard time wrapping her mind around the abrupt, unexpected ending of their calm domesticity. One day they were sitting down to dinner together as usual, chatting about what movie to go see, and the next, Abby was packing her bags. Since then she’d asked herself over and over if Abby’s apparent happiness and devotion had been an illusion. Those boxes, full of ticket stubs and vacation souvenirs, small stuffed animals and other mementos, held no answers, no clues to how she could have been so wrong about their life together.
And then, two weeks ago, her mother died in her sleep, an apparent heart attack. Somehow, Karla had made it through the funeral, a walking zombie, feeling more alone and abandoned than ever before. She hadn’t left her apartment since, or spoken to any of her well-meaning friends and coworkers. She’d opened her door just once, the day before, only because her visitor from the nursing home was there to drop off her mother’s belongings. Fortunately her leave of absence from her job as an ER nurse at Grady Memorial Hospital was open-ended, because she couldn’t fathom when she might have the strength to rejoin the living.
Karla hadn’t summoned the courage to examine the contents of the delivery until now, but she finally pushed aside the boxes of her life with Abby for a new round of grieving. She didn’t think she could cry any more, but the tears rarely stopped as she considered each item she withdrew from the cache of her mother’s things.
The first box contained jewelry and the few scarves and clothes her mother had obsessively insisted on wearing after Alzheimer’s claimed her once-impeccable fashion sense. In the end, she’d become so agitated if Karla tried to launder her favorite lavender blouse that Karla had searched the city’s shopping malls without success for a duplicate.
The blouse was faded and nearly threadbare in places, but because her mother had worn little else in the months before her death, it was hard to picture her without it. Karla felt guilty for not burying her in
it, opting instead for the new cream-colored dress she’d bought for her mother’s fifty-seventh birthday. She clutched the blouse and held it to her face, inhaling deeply, seeking the familiar scent of patchouli, but the garment had obviously been washed. She felt as though she’d been robbed.
Sorting through the contents of the jewelry box consumed half the night. Her mother had saved the pearl necklace for special occasions: her college graduation, birthday dinners, weddings, holidays. All happy occasions that evoked fond memories. But her mother had worn the delicate tigereye necklace that matched her eyes so often it seemed almost a part of her, right up to the end. Karla stroked her thumb over the cool stone for more than an hour, lost in the past, sobbing until her sides ached. Then she tucked the necklace into her pocket, unable to let go of it.
After the jewelry she reminisced through a box containing a collection of bunny figurines and other keepsakes. The lopsided clay vase she’d made for Mother’s Day in the fourth grade. Her old report cards and class photos. A lock of her baby hair. Several items she’d never seen before: another lock of hair, curly and red, which matched no one in the family. A colorful ashtray that looked to be a child’s art project, when neither of her parents had ever smoked. Why had her mother saved these mementos?
Finally, about dawn, she began to sort through the final box, this one full of photos and documents: a copy of the will, insurance papers, bank-account statements, marriage and birth certificates, and her mother’s long-expired passport. And beneath it all, she discovered a sealed envelope addressed in her mother’s handwriting.
For Karla. In the event of my death.
Her mother had been unable to recognize words for at least two years, and it had been four or five since she’d been able to write legibly, so the missive clearly predated that. It had been so long since her mother had been able to communicate rationally—she hadn’t even recognized her in the final months—that Karla felt as though God had gifted her with one final, bittersweet reunion. The three sheets of heavy bond paper transported her back to a time when her mother had still been the vibrant and intelligent woman of her youth.
My darling Karla,
I am watching you scurry about the kitchen as I write this, putting the final touches on the cake you are making for my forty-fourth birthday, pausing now and then over your lopsided creation to smile at me and apologize for your lack of culinary skills. But all I can think is that I am so proud of the woman you have become, so thoughtful and kind to all you meet. Your unwavering moral compass and commitment to helping those in need. And most of all, I admire your ability to rise to every challenge you have faced in life with optimism and determination.
You will need all of those qualities in the future. The inevitability of my decline seems certain, and if we are blessed to have many more years with each other, I have no doubt that you will make the right decisions for me when the time comes and ensure I have the best quality of life possible. I know it will be hard on you, my darling. I’m so sorry for that.
Take comfort in our many wonderful years together and view my passing as a blessing, for I will likely have long abandoned my body and already be looking out for you from Heaven, happily reunited at last with your father.
I know it will be much tougher on you than on me in the years to come. I pray as you read this that you are able to remember me as I am now. And most of all, I hope you will seek to understand what I have to tell you and forgive me for not telling you until now.
You have a sister.
Karla stared at the words until they seemed to separate themselves from the others on the stationery, creating white space around them that wasn’t really there, blurring the other words and becoming bolder, almost three-dimensional.
You have a sister.
How had her parents kept this from her? All her life she’d thought she was an only child, the progeny of two people who preached honor and truth and the importance of family. As a child, she’d wanted a sibling playmate so much she’d created an imaginary one, a little sister she called Emily. Her parents had patiently indulged her fantasy, tucking Emily in beside her at night and setting an extra place at the table for her at mealtimes, never hinting that a real Emily existed somewhere.
The sudden knowledge of their duplicity made her question everything she thought she knew of them and left her feeling more alone and adrift than ever.
She read the words a dozen times, then began to sob again, great wails of anguish that shattered the silence and seemed to echo off the walls. She couldn’t read the rest for a long while.
Five years before I met and married your father, I became pregnant. I was only sixteen, still a child myself and naïve about such things, but I fancied myself in love with a boy at school named James O’Hara.
After talking with Jim’s parents, mine sent me immediately to a home for unwed mothers to have the child and convinced me that it was best for both me and for the baby to give it up for adoption as soon as it was born. It was what girls did then, especially those from Catholic families. I knew from my brief glimpse of her that I’d had a daughter, born healthy and with curly red hair, like her father. Then the nuns took her away.
I regretted that decision many times and wondered what happened to my baby, but as the years passed, I came to accept that my parents’ decision had been the right one.
When I met your father, I struggled for a long time over whether to tell him about the baby I’d had. I wanted to, but I worried that he would think less of me for what I did, and my parents urged me to keep my “youthful indiscretion,” as they called it, a secret. Once I’d made the decision to do so, there seemed to be no going back. How could I tell him after a year of marriage? Or five? Or ten? Besides, I had no way of knowing what had happened to the baby, so I could think of no good reason to confess to your father what I’d done.
It was not until he was gone, and my mother deathly ill with cancer, that she told me she had known all along who raised my baby and where she was. She and my father gave my daughter to a couple they knew, Richard and Joan Van Rooy. The Van Rooys were unable to have children of their own, but desperately wanted one.
Unknown to my father, my mother asked only two things of this couple in return: that they move to another state but keep in touch over the years. They agreed and sent my mother photographs of the child growing up, pictures of her birthday parties and prom dates, vacations. She threw them away as soon as she received them, afraid that either my father or I would discover the evidence.
When she knew she was dying, she finally told me the truth.
Your sister’s name is Maggie. She grew up in Alaska and married a man named Lars Rasmussen. They are living in an apartment in Fairbanks. As far as my mother knew, Maggie’s adoptive parents never told her the truth about her parentage, so she, too, does not know that she has a sister.
I hope you can find her, so you can finally have the sister you always wanted. If you do, please tell Maggie I thought of her often and wished I’d had the chance to tell her I’m sorry, and that I love her.
All my love to you, my darling. Be strong.
Mom
So many secrets. So many lies.
Maggie Rasmussen. If she’d been born when her mother was sixteen, that meant she was forty or thereabouts, some four years older than Karla.
She wasn’t alone. She still had family. Despite the lifelong deception, she felt as though someone had just thrown a life preserver into her churning sea of despair. What was this secret sister like? Would she welcome this news? And was she even still in Fairbanks? The letter was written thirteen years ago. Maggie Rasmussen could be anywhere by now.
Karla stood, still clutching the letter, and went to fire up her computer. You could track down almost anyone on the Internet these days. Couldn’t you?
*
October 21, evening
Bettles, Alaska
Despite the early winter snowstorm raging through interior Alaska, twenty-six of the twenty-seven res
idents of Bettles were happily enjoying dinner, drinks, and an evening’s entertainment in the Den, provided by four of their own: Grizz on bass, his wife Ellie on piano, Bryson on drums, and Lars Rasmussen on alto sax.
The place was a typical Alaskan roadhouse, one large room with dark oak paneling and a wood floor dotted with peanut shucks. A stuffed grizzly bear greeted customers at the door, and the walls were decorated with mounted moose heads and caribou antlers, neon beer signs and dogsled paraphernalia. A bar ran along one side, booths ringed the walls, and a scattering of tables with mismatched chairs filled the rest.
The Bettles Band, as they called themselves, sat on a small raised platform in the back corner. Their performances were usually impromptu, dictated mostly by the weather and the number of tourists in town. If the sky was clear and clients ample, Bryson was usually flying and Lars was guiding some fisherman or hunter to their quarry. But oftentimes when a whiteout or fog stranded the two of them in town, the call went out that the party was on. And tonight was jazz night, always a popular favorite.
Bryson and Lars were the only far-flung homesteaders present. It was too early in the season for snowmobiles or dogsleds, and the weather was too poor for boats, so those hardy souls who lived off in the bush somewhere were unable to make it in. But a handful of Athabascan Indians from the nearby native village of Evansville were here, along with a half-dozen Japanese tourists who’d come to the Arctic Circle hoping for a glimpse of the aurora borealis, or northern lights. The only other outsider in town, Bryson’s photographer client, had spent a long while at the bar before he stumbled upstairs to his room hours earlier.
The band finished a rousing rendition of “All Of Me” to wild applause before pausing for a break. Bryson was stowing her drumsticks when Geneva De Luca, a waitress at the Den, appeared at her elbow.
