by Roxie Noir
I’m relaxing, slowly, though I’m still suspicious of this new called just to talk thing. Doesn’t Wilder know that people don’t do that, at least not anymore? I mean, my mom will call her friends just to talk, but she’s in her fifties.
“Okay,” I say slowly, excruciatingly aware that I’m in a semi-public place where Kelly is half-listening and anyone else at the station could waltz in at any second.
“Do I have permission to proceed?” he teases. “If you’ve got musk oxen telenovela drama to go observe, I can call you back.”
I could tell him no. I could tell him never to call me again, tell him that I’m not interested in hearing about rich peoples’ skiing foibles or telling him about how hard Pierre freaks out every time someone leaves something in the fridge for more than three days.
And I shouldn’t be. I should have moved on ages ago, should have forgotten all about the boy with the bottomless eyes and the smile that makes me feel like the rest of the world’s evaporated.
But I didn’t, and now here I am.
“Don’t call me on this line,” I say, my heart squeezing in my chest. “It’s really for official station business, and there’s no cell reception up here, but we’ve got Wi-Fi and Skype.”
Chapter Forty-Two
Wilder
Beep boop beep, beep boooop beep.
No answer on the other end of the call.
She wouldn’t give me the wrong info, would she?
Just to get me to stop calling her?
I brush my hair out of my eyes. I need to get it cut, but after getting out of the military I’ve been pretty lazy about that. I never thought about my hair much before I went in, but ever since getting out, doing whatever I want with it is pure freedom.
Beep boop beep, beep boooop beep.
Come on.
She wouldn’t give me the wrong number to get me off her back. Hell, after some of the shit she said to me out in the woods, I can’t imagine her being anything less than perfectly candid and totally straight with me if she never wanted to hear my voice again.
Imogen would just tell me off if that were the case. God knows she’s done it enough times.
Beep boop beep, beep booo—
“Hey?” says a staticky voice on the other end of the line, though the picture doesn’t change.
“Civilization calling,” I say, grinning and leaning back into my leather couch.
“You don’t have to sound so smug about it,” she says, a smile in her voice.
Springs creak, and the Skype image breaks into static for a moment, then freezes again.
“I happen to really like canned green beans, dried ramen, and reconstituted meat products,” she says.
“The lasagna the other night wasn’t half bad,” I admit. “Better than half the food in the service, honestly.”
Imogen goes quiet for a split second too long, like I shouldn’t have brought up the other night.
“Ben — he’s one of the geologists up here — keeps joking that he’s gonna make jerky from some of the invasive species,” she says. “And then someone has to tell him that the problematic animals are mostly tiny crabs and microscopic bacteria.”
The image on the screen jerks, pixelates, flattens, but it doesn’t reveal anything beyond a moving, blocky shape that might be Imogen and might be a polar bear. It’s impossible to tell.
“Are the crabs any good?”
“I’m not sure it’s worth it to find out,” she says. “They’re a couple inches big, by the time you got through the shell to the meat there’d be almost nothing there, plus we’re situated on more of an estuary than on the seashore proper, so it’s kind of a hike to go even find the crabs…”
Imogen tells me about invasive species for a while. The picture never does come through, and after a bit, we switch to just voice. I’m disappointed — I like looking at her — but I’m aware that it’s a miracle we can talk at all.
She talks about the work she’s doing, about the other scientists. About how there’s already been a fight about someone leaving too much hair in the shower, and about how some uptight climatologist named Pierre has already been dubbed The Refrigerator Nazi after a mere four days at the research station.
“So one day you’re going to open the fridge looking for creamer and it’s just going to be him in there, all curled up and shouting about expiration dates?” I ask, enjoying the mental image.
Imogen laughs. It’s somewhere between a laugh and a giggle, a light, carefree sound that comes bubbling up out of her like she hasn’t got a care in the world.
It makes something deep in my chest pleasantly warm and fizzy-feeling, even as it twists, and I remember the last thing she said to me in person: I can’t do this again.
“Well, if I do find Pierre in the fridge, I’ll be more than well enough equipped to cure his hypothermia,” she says dryly. “It’s too bad we crashed on the way here and not the way back, because now I’d do a bang-up job of fixing you.”
“I thought you did an okay job,” I tell her. “I made it, didn’t I?”
I close my eyes despite myself, because I barely remember anything about falling into the lake — hypothermia does that, nearly shuts your brain down — but I remember her hands tearing my clothes off, her warm body behind mine as she held me tight.
“It took a whole day,” she says. “I think you almost didn’t come back. The right answer would have been to light the wood stove much earlier.”
I frown at the far wall of my apartment, where there’s a huge TV, speakers, and not too much else.
“I was asleep for a day?”
“Just about.”
“I never realized that. I thought it was a couple of hours. One minute I was freezing and you were in bed with me, the next I was awake and the fire was going,” I say.
Imogen sort of laughs, like she’s trying to play it off. I’m astonished that I lost a whole day without realizing it, but from this distance, I’m thinking of her — all alone in that cabin, in the middle of nowhere, not sure whether her only companion was going to live or die.
“Yeah, it was a while,” she says.
“Shit, Imogen,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“For falling into the lake?”
“For leaving you alone for a whole day.”
“If it helps, I mostly slept too,” she says, her voice suddenly sounding far away. “I got up to pee a couple of times, but I was afraid that if I left for any longer I’d come back to — you know.”
“Thank you, Squeaks,” I say softly.
We both pause, and I know we’re thinking of the exact same thing: my lips on hers, in front of the wood stove, warmth like I’ve never felt before in my life.
“Imogen, I mean,” I say, swallowing.
That was something I decided while drunk as hell on the way back from Yellowknife, miserable in a window seat on an airplane but glad to be drunk instead of sober since it kept me from thinking much about how far off the ground I was.
From now on, I call her Imogen. I stop reminding her of the asshole I was to her ten years ago, even if I still remember why I called her that. Even if after all this time, I still think about her sometimes when I rub one out.
She laughs again, softly.
“Call me Squeaks if you want,” she says. “I don’t mind anymore.”
“No?”
Her voice is like steam, curling through the phone, warm and soft.
“I got over it,” she says. “I think it was somewhere around the time you carried my pack a million miles for me and kept me from freezing to death that I decided you could call me whatever you wanted and I didn’t care.”
“Anything I want?”
“Well, not poopface or something.”
I burst out laughing, and after a moment, so does she.
“You really think poopface is my go-to?” I ask. “You think that, of all the ten thousand nicknames I could come up with for you, poopface would be one of them?”
“Shut up,
” she says, but I can hear her grin through the phone, and I grin back at my empty apartment.
I call her again two days later, via Skype first this time, and we talk for an hour about absolutely nothing. Pierre still hasn’t cracked — which is probably good, since as Imogen points out, a crazy person in a remote location is how three-quarters of horror movies start — and since it’s nearly June, it’s not like I’m doing any heli-skiing runs.
Which is fine. I’m not terribly enthusiastic about getting back in the air right now, anyway.
I end up telling Imogen that I got shitfaced in Yellowknife, on the way back, once I wasn’t going to have to fly anywhere any more. I don’t tell her how hard it was to get on that plane to the Tekkeit Research Station in the first place, and I don’t tell her that I threw up three times before I even took off, but I think she knows.
I tell her that I nearly got kicked off the plane before it left Yellowknife, but I don’t tell her about the revelation I had after my sixth whiskey in the airport bar, my head in my hands, blissful numbness finally coursing through my veins.
The revelation that, if she couldn’t do this again, the only option left was to do something else.
It sounds fucking simple and obvious, but it felt like the sun coming up after a cold night. Imogen and I were always fire and ice, love and hate and spikes and thorns. High and lows, hot and cold, and maybe she was right. Maybe that was fine when we were teenagers.
Maybe flying to her, showing up out of nowhere, and making a hell of an impression would have worked ten years ago, but any idiot can make a big romantic gesture once.
So I start calling her every other day. Sometimes every day. Sometimes every third day, if one of us is busy.
And we talk, the one thing we never did much of before.
And somehow, in the place of all that emotional wreckage, all the fire and ice, all the spikes and thorns, Imogen and I become friends.
“You can go on in,” Ginger says, smiling at me.
She’s new. She’s cute. This time last year I’d probably have chatted her up, gotten her number, taken her out behind my father’s back. I’d probably have kept it up until I got bored of her in a week or two.
Now I just smile at her, knock my fist against her wide mahogany desk, and walk on past.
“Thanks,” I say, and push the door to my father’s office open.
He’s behind his desk, wearing his usual blue suit. A man I faintly recognize but can’t quite place is sitting in one of the expensive-but-austere leather chairs, and both of them stand, all formal business.
I’ve got on a pair of jeans that aren’t my worst but that aren’t my best and a flannel plaid shirt rolled up to the elbows.
“Thank you for coming in,” my father says, and his tone is too stiff and formal by half.
“No problem,” I say, crossing my arms in front of myself as my spine straightens.
I’ve got a feeling that I know what this is about: a formal announcement that my younger brother Grayson will be the one taking over the reins at Flint Holdings, Inc., not me.
He went to the University of Chicago and majored in business; I joined the Navy, flew planes, and then came back here and didn’t make too much of myself. It’s not exactly a surprise that he should be taking over, not me.
Hell, I’d pick him, too.
“You remember Elijah Lininger,” my father says.
Suddenly the man’s face snaps into place: my dad’s lawyer, someone who’s been to dinner at our house more than once, though I clearly wasn’t paying too much attention.
“Good to see you again, Wilder,” he says as we shake hands.
“Likewise,” I lie.
Does he think I’m going to have a shitfit? Sue him?
Demand that I be given control of a massive company I’m barely interested in?
The two men glance at each other, then sit. My father gestures at the other chair in the room, but I shake my head, preferring to stand. Sitting too much makes me antsy.
“I’ll just get down to it,” my father says, lacing his fingers together on top of his dark wood desk. “It was recently discovered that one of the aircraft technicians in our private fleet had something of a cocaine problem.”
Wait. What?
I frown.
“It was also recently discovered that he had been… removing things from our aircraft here and there,” my father goes on. “Largely, he stole smaller electronic equipment that he thought might go unnoticed — handheld navigational units, radios, that sort of thing.”
I lick my lips, because they’ve gone dry. Now I know what he’s getting at.
“Like emergency transponders?” I ask, an edge to my voice.
I look over at the lawyer, but he’s intently reading the papers in his lap, refusing to return my gaze.
“We don’t have an exact list of the things that this individual has taken from aircraft,” my father says carefully.
He doesn’t have to admit to it, because I can read between the fucking lines.
“What else?” I ask, taking a step forward, my voice dipping dangerously. “Emergency beacons, what else, Dad?”
“I’m afraid it’s impossible to tell,” my father says, his eyes icy, his voice betraying nothing. “But I can tell you that he was caught when he tried to remove some copper wiring from a Cessna 172.”
My skin shivers cold, then hot. I can feel fire creeping up my cheeks, my hands clenching as I lean onto my father’s desk, sweat suddenly trickling down my back.
That’s the plane I was flying. Removing the right wires could sure fuck it up.
“Where’s he now?”
“Fired,” my father says. “Promptly, once his actions were discovered.”
“And?”
“And what?”
I pause, feeling the lawyer’s eyes on the back of my head. My father doesn’t flinch, doesn’t budge, because the man is half steel and half ice and always has been.
“Has he been charged with a crime?” I ask, keeping my voice soft. “Think he’ll be doing jail time for deliberately sabotaging a plane or for attempted manslaughter?”
Elijah, the lawyer, clears his throat. I look over my shoulder at him.
“Unfortunately, there’s no evidence for anything beyond the crimes he was caught during,” he says, his voice cool and calm. “Frankly, it’s more than enough to fire him and sue for the amount of the replacement items, but even that is a losing cause. Any money the man had has gone up his nose long ago, so it’s really pointless to sue.”
“You can’t press charges?” I ask, my voice a quiet snarl.
“I’m afraid it wouldn’t be worth our time,” the lawyer says.
For a moment, I’m not there. I’m on top of a mountain, just coming to, still strapped into the pilot’s seat of the tiny Cessna. The windshield is nearly covered with the snow I’ve just plowed into, and even as I’m trying to undo my restraints, I can’t quite get my hands to move the way I want them to.
I shake my head, and I’m back in my father’s office.
My father, who’s caught the man responsible for me nearly dying, and who isn’t interested in pressing charges. My father, who brought his lawyer with him to this meeting, presumably to make sure he didn’t say something that might make him liable to me, his son.
I stand up straight, taking my hands off his desk. I look from him to the lawyer and back: my father cool and calm, stony as always; the lawyer slightly shifty, nervous.
“All right,” I say.
I turn and walk out of his office, past Ginger, into the hall, out of the building and to my car and I drive back home, to my apartment that I don’t pay for because it’s in a complex owned by Flint Holdings.
But I don’t go in. I walk to the nearby ski slope, turn around, look down at Solaris nestled in the mountains.
And I start saying goodbye.
Chapter Forty-Three
Imogen
I pause for a moment, not sure I heard Wilder rig
ht. The line has been particularly patchy tonight — Travis keeps swearing that it has something to do with the twenty-two hours of daylight — so I take a moment, let my heart beat a little faster.
“Where?” I ask, hoping my voice doesn’t sound this nervous on the other end of the line.
“Boeing,” Wilder says, less staticky this time. “Third round of job interviews, baby. They want me in person this time.”
“Where is that?” I ask, even though I know perfectly well where Boeing’s headquarters are: the suburbs of Seattle, about thirty minutes away.
About thirty minutes away from me and the life I’m going back to in a month. My heart feels like it seizes and stutters in my chest, a thousand questions racing through my mind: why’s he doing this? Is it his dad or me?
How do I feel about it? Do I want him closer? He hasn’t said anything else about us.
There could be someone else. We could really be just friends now, he could have some girl and I’d never know because I’m here and he’s there…
Suddenly it’s all real. For the last eight weeks Wilder’s been a voice on my laptop, disconnected from the real world. I’m disconnected from the real world up here, but this brings it crashing back.
“Tukwila, Washington,” he says. “Though I’ve got the feeling you knew that, Squeaks.”
I laugh, awkwardly.
“There are other Boeing locations.”
“You knew which one I wanted, though.”
I swallow hard, even as a tight warm whirlwind thrums through my chest at his words.
“I had a feeling,” I murmur.
“A good feeling?”
I bite my lip, trying to keep myself from smiling even though he can’t see me. We gave up on the video part of Skype a long time ago, so for weeks now he’s just been a teasing, gravelly voice from my laptop.
“It was a feeling,” I demure, because I’m not even sure what the feeling was.
Part excitement, part disbelief, part mistrust at both of those things.
