by Roxie Noir
“Where are you going?” Wilder says.
I breathe hard, swaying against the side of the plane.
“I need to pee,” I tell him.
He heaves the door wider until it sticks open in some snow, then steps through it. Holds out one gloved hand.
I just look at it.
“It’s a hand,” he says, a hard edge in his voice.
“I know it’s a hand.”
“What happened to your ankle?”
I wobble, then steady myself against the metal side of the plane, still staring into Wilder’s eyes. They always made me feel like I was drowning, but now they make me feel like I’m being dragged underwater, held down until I can’t breathe.
“You crashed the plane,” I say, my voice sharp. “The fuck do you think happened?”
His jaw tightens, but he keeps holding his hand out.
“Is it broken?”
“I’m not a doctor.”
“All those fancy degrees and you don’t know if you broke a bone?”
My bladder is screaming.
“Just let me go pee,” I say, keeping my voice flat because I don’t want him to know that after all these years, he still gets to me like this.
“I’m trying to help.”
“I don’t need help, I need you to move so I can get off of this plane that you crashed and go pee.”
His eyes flash, but he moves, ducking his head and coming into the cabin, bracing himself against the ceiling as well. I pretend he’s not there as best as I can, focusing all my attention on the door I’m heading toward, the bright white of the outdoors beyond it.
I hop. It sucks, because my good leg also hurts and because the interior of the plane isn’t really high enough for this, but I’m sure as hell not crawling to the door in front of Wilder so I grit my teeth and bear it.
I’ve made slow, painful progress almost to the door when my knee buckles underneath me.
I scrabble at the doorframe but I’m not fast enough and my mittens are too slippery to grab the cold metal, and I’m about to go over when Wilder grabs me around my waist, catching me.
Don’t pee yourself.
I don’t pee myself. Wilder pushes me back onto my one good foot and I grab onto the doorframe for dear life, hopping forward once more and hauling myself out of the plane.
I don’t say anything. I don’t even look at him, because once we get rescued from wherever we are I’m not giving him any ammunition. I’m not letting Wilder go back to Solaris, with his rich friends and rich clients who hire him to helicopter them to the top of a mountain, and tell them about how when he miraculously survived a plane crash the girl he was with peed herself.
Wilder’s humiliated me enough for one lifetime.
The moment I’m out the plane’s back door, the wind whips through my hair, my ears and nose instantly frozen, my eyes watering. Somehow I didn’t think about how cold it would be out here.
My head still feels sloshy, dizzy, like it’s stuffed with cotton. I think Wilder’s right that I got a concussion, because it feels like I can barely string two thoughts together. Just the mental task of get through the snow and go pee is taking enormous effort, much more than it should. It should hardly take any.
The snow’s two feet deep. Hopping is hard, but I half-lean on the plane and half-scoot my foot through the snow until I’m closer to the tail, a spot slightly sheltered from the wind, and then I brace myself for the hard part, both physically and mentally.
Peeing outside in the cold is the worst. Every time I go on a research expedition I swear up and down that I’m going to buy one of those pee funnels that they sell to women so we get our business done without exposing our entire butts to the elements, and then every time I feel too ridiculous to actually make the purchase.
But right now, squatting on one leg, wind howling around me and air temperatures probably somewhere around zero degrees Fahrenheit, I’d give anything for one of those stupid things instead of freezing my vagina off out here.
Cold aside, it feels good, though. When I’m done I yank my pants back up as fast as humanly possible and lean against the tail of the airplane, finally able to think about something besides my bladder.
My brain still feels like it’s operating at half-speed, but at least that distraction is gone, and I can think about something besides whether I’m going to pee myself.
I inhale. I close my eyes. I exhale, willing myself to stop feeling like my head is stuffed with fluff, and I open my eyes.
And blink.
Shit.
I don’t know what I was expecting, but we’re in the middle of nowhere.
Chapter Nine
Wilder
I sit on one of Imogen’s cargo boxes, waiting for her to come back. And waiting.
And waiting.
Maybe she left, I tell myself. Could have decided to just walk away rather than be stuck here with you.
Hell, Wilder, she wouldn’t even make eye contact just now. You kept her from cracking her head open again and you didn’t even get acknowledged.
I flex my hands into fists, look down at them.
Then I stand, head to the plane door, and peek out.
Imogen’s just standing there. She’s wearing her huge coat, pants, mittens, and boots, but no hat or scarf and it can’t be more than ten degrees out here, her body tilted to one side as she leans back against the side of the plane, staring off into the distance like she’s lost.
Which, technically, she is.
We’re in the middle of nowhere, somewhere high up in the Canadian Rockies between Idaho and Yellowknife, much closer to Idaho than Yellowknife since we’re clearly still in the mountains, but that only leaves what, a few thousand square miles of wilderness?
It’s my fault. I was flying the plane.
“Squeaks,” I call out, leaning from the door.
She looks over at me, eyes contemptuous behind her thick glasses.
“Don’t call me that.”
“Come back in here.”
She looks forward again, at the view. I can’t blame her, because even on this mostly-cloudy day with the wind whipping up tiny snow devils all around us, it’s beautiful.
I managed to land on a gentle alpine slope, above the tree line, craggy rocks sticking out all around us. In two directions are rocky cliffs dropping off near-vertically; in the other direction is a rock outcropping that looks like it leads to another outcropping that leads to the top.
The only way down from here is a granite boulder scramble. I can’t even see most of it, but it looks sharp, cold, and maybe impossible. Not the ideal landing place but I didn’t have a lot of options at the time.
We’re at the top of a valley, rugged rocky peaks sticking up to the left and right, the tops of a few buried in the clouds. A couple hundred feet down the fir trees begin, green-black in the filtered light, stark against the pure white snow. I can’t really see deeply into the valley from this angle, but it’s safe to assume there’s water down there. That’s generally how these things work.
“You’ll freeze,” I call to Imogen.
She presses her lips together, blinks slowly.
“Is that so bad?”
“Supposed to be the worst way to die.”
“I thought that was burning to death.”
“You aiming to find out?”
“Hard to make a comparison, isn’t it?”
For no reason at all, I see a flash of the past: Imogen, moon-drenched, in the passenger seat of my car. Staring ahead just like this, impossible to read what she was thinking.
Only then I’d drive out to the middle of nowhere and kiss her in the middle of a field. I’d sneak us into a room in one of my family’s empty hotels and take her glasses off. Show her everything she was missing by studying too much.
I swallow the memories, a shiver working its way through my body as the wind slices through the space between my glove and my coat. I did some bad things when I was a teenaged asshole but sneaking around w
ith Imogen is one of my favorites to remember.
Even given how badly it ended.
Sighing, I tromp out into the snow. Imogen looks over at me, shoves her glasses up with the mittens I put on her while she was asleep. The clumsy movement gets snowflakes on the lenses.
“Come on,” I say, reaching out one hand.
She looks at me, wobbles on one foot.
“I don’t bite,” I tell her, swallowing not unless you ask me to. “What the fuck else can I possibly do to you besides crash this plane, break your ankle, and give you a concussion, Sque—”
Her eyes flash, and I grind my teeth shut against the nickname I know she hates.
“Imogen,” I finish.
She looks at me for a long, long time, like she’s trying to figure out something about me.
Then, all at once, she gives in. Imogen lowers her eyes and the steel goes out of her spine as she takes my hand in hers, so cold she’s shaking. I swallow hard, grit my teeth together, and put her arm around my neck.
Neither of us says anything as I help her back into the plane, most of her weight on me. It’s only thirty seconds, maybe forty-five at the most but it feels like forever.
It feels like I’ve gone back in time, back to things I shouldn’t be doing and a girl I shouldn’t be seeing, the girl who ended up bringing out the worst in me. No, that’s not true, because everything started with her bringing out the worst in me, too.
Maybe the worst is most of what I am.
I help her into the plane, and her arm leaves my neck. She holds onto the ceiling and doors as she hops in, heavily sits sideways on one of the Cessna’s rear seats. I heave the door shut behind us, and it’s suddenly quiet and still.
I open the plastic box with the emergency supplies and grab two bottles of water, hand one to Imogen. No sense in getting dehydrated. It’s an unpleasant way to die, not that any of them are fun.
“Where are we?” she asks at last.
I slump against the wall of the plane, slowly slide down it until I’m on the mess of the parachute that I pulled out last night. It was the first thing I found to lay Imogen on after she passed out again, sitting upright, and I was worried she’d hurt herself even worse.
It’s useless as a parachute now, but that was true as soon as I crashed this plane into a mountain.
“I don’t know,” I tell her.
She stares at me, like this information is taking a long time to process.
“Didn’t we have a flight path?”
“We did,” I confirm, a heavy, sinking feeling in my chest. “But I think we left it a while back.”
“A while?” she whispers.
I lean my head against the cold steel of the airplane’s side, trying to gather my thoughts. I’ve fucked this girl over worse than ever before, and without even meaning to. Sure, last time she moved out of town, but now she might die and it’s my fault.
“Something happened, and I don’t know what,” I admit, eyes still closed. “But about three hours after we took off from Solaris, my instruments stopped working. I think there was a short in the panel or something, on these tiny planes sometimes water can get into the dashboard and make everything go haywire, I don’t know.”
“It’s not even waterproof?” she says, her voice incredulous.
“They’re supposed to be,” I say, feeling helpless. “They get checked out by the mechanics before every flight we go on and nothing like this has ever happened before…”
I take a long glug of water and wish she’d stop looking at me because I hate the way she looks at me. I hated it even back then, when she looked at me like one of her pinned bugs under a microscope, like something disgusting she’d put on a slide.
“I don’t know,” I say. “There was some kind of catastrophic failure. I should have caught it sooner, turned back, radioed, maybe then we’d have still been within range of someone who could have heard us. But instead everything went FUBAR and we dropped out of the clouds before I knew what was happening, only a couple thousand feet up, and…”
It’s not the whole truth. I don’t even know the whole truth myself, but I do know that instrument panels in well-maintained aircraft don’t just stop working. My father’s owned this plane for years, and nothing in the Flint Resort fleet has ever just stopped working.
Yeah, the last guy who flew the skiing helicopter crashed it into the side of the mountain. That was a huge disaster and it took my parents years to recover from it, though I was still in the Navy then, so it didn’t affect me too much.
But the thing that they mostly kept out of the news was that the pilot of that helicopter was drinking. They found an empty flask in the wreckage, and none of the skiers, who all got dropped off before the crash, had any alcohol in their systems.
I’ve got a bad feeling that something is amiss. Not that this plane is sabotaged — I’m a rich kid, not an international spy — but something went amiss before this flight, something I don’t know anything about but got caught in the middle of.
“How long have you really been flying?” Imogen finally says.
Her voice has gone a little fuzzy, even though she’s drinking the water, her eyes getting heavy again, and despite myself I’m worried. She was out for a long time, and that means her concussion wasn’t minor.
“Long enough,” I tell her.
“That’s not a number.”
“You always did need those.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I take a long drink of water, because hell, I don’t know what it means. I only know that Imogen makes me feel small, stupid, and insignificant, and despite that, she’s still been haunting my dreams for ten years.
“It means that there are things in life that can’t be quantified, Squeaks. Sometimes measurements are useless, they’re not the be-all, end-all,” I say.
She pushes her glasses up, mittens still on her hands.
“You’re trying to tell me that the number of years you’ve been a pilot is somehow unquantifiable,” she says, sarcasm dripping from every word. “Because unless you and I have very different definitions of the word year and perhaps even the very concept of time, I’m pretty sure there’s a number that answers the question, ‘Wilder, how long have you been a pilot?’”
This is the worst part, when she’s right and she’s a haughty bitch about it.
“Since I was nineteen,” I finally answer her.
“Eight years?” she says coolly, looking out the window at the snow piled up outside. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
I close my eyes and don’t bother answering her.
Chapter Ten
Imogen
I hate this.
By this I don’t mean having a probably-broken ankle or being stranded in a tiny airplane way up in the Canadian Rockies. I don’t even mean being stuck with someone I sincerely hoped I’d never see again in my life.
I mean this fucking concussion.
I feel like an idiot, like my brain is running at one-third speed and can’t even do the simple calculations I’m asking of it. Like it’s a computer that keeps returning some sort of error I’ve never seen before, and I have no idea how to fix it.
I lean my head against the seat back of the chair I’m sitting in. I take my glasses off, fold them in my lap, because all of a sudden, I’m so tired again, even though it’s freezing cold and I should be panicking.
That’s the other thing. I should be, at the very least, really really worried about our predicament but I’m not. Those emotions feel like another area of my brain that I just can’t access right now. It feels like the only thing I can get to is the nearly overwhelming desire to take a nap.
It’s the concussion, I tell myself yet again. You’re not stupid, you’ve got a brain injury and the best way to heal that is by sleeping, all those myths aren’t true…
I wake up on the floor again, deeply nestled in the parachute. I’m not warm but I’m also not freezing, which is probably the best I can ask for.<
br />
I sit up, careful of my ankle, and recognize the familiar blur of my glasses, folded a foot in front of me so I grab them and put them on.
I think Wilder put them there. I think he put me here, lying on the parachute, and he folded my glasses and put them neatly in front of me because he knows I can’t see anything without them.
There’s always the vague possibility that I woke up mid-nap, hobbled over here, and did that all myself but I don’t have a history of somnambulism so that’s unlikely.
“You should eat something,” Wilder says from off to my left.
He’s chewing something himself, sitting on a large cargo box filled with clothes, some binoculars, a few books, and toiletries. In front of him, on another of my boxes, he’s got a map spread out and he’s leaned over, staring at it.
“I’m not hungry,” I say, because it’s true. If anything, I’m slightly nauseous, and even though I know that’s a side effect of the concussion and I haven’t eaten in nearly twenty-four hours, probably, I still don’t want food.
He turns and looks at me, blue eyes flat.
“I don’t care,” he says simply. “If we need to leave suddenly I’m not dragging you down that boulder scramble with a gimpy ankle and half-starved.”
He tosses me something, and I jerk my head out of the way, half-trying to catch it and failing completely. It falls to the floor behind me and I reach over to pick it up, because hand-eye coordination has never been my strongest suit.
Hell, my dad has been a ski instructor for probably forty years now and I can barely get down the beginner slope. At least I finally mastered the bunny slopes around age fifteen.
“Eat that,” he says. “And then I’m looking at your ankle.”
It’s some kind of meal-replacement bar, one of those really serious ones that crazy people have in their bunkers that looks, feels, and tastes pretty much like a brick. I don’t even argue with Wilder for once, just gnaw off a corner and start chewing, because deep down, I do know that he’s right.
