From Out of the Blue

by Nadia Nichols

  “Whoa,” Mitch interrupted, setting down his beer bottle and closing his hands on her shoulders. “You are so off base here. You might be sick right now, but you’re going to get better. And you couldn’t be ugly if you worked full-time at it.” His voice unexpectedly lowered a notch and became husky with emotion. “You’re beautiful, Captain Katherine Carolyn Jones, with hair or without. I’d take you either way, and gladly.”

  Kate felt her heart speed up as she looked into his eyes. “Take me?” she echoed.

  She saw his flicker of uncertainty as she pressed for clarification.

  “Take you fishing,” he said, landing on his feet like a cat. “Wolf watching. Bear tracking. Camping. Touristing. Matter of fact, I thought we might go for a short hike tomorrow, up to Wickersham Dome…”

  “Sure,” she said, the laughter that had filled her only moments before draining away, leaving her hollow inside. “That sounds nice.” She pulled away from him and turned back to the salad she’d been making. “You’d better start cooking your gourmet meal. It’s getting late, and I’m sure Hayden’s hungry.”

  THEY ATE DINNER by lamplight while the rain drummed hard on the roof. At 11:00 p.m., Hayden’s eyelids were drooping, though he protested leaving the old-fashioned puzzle games he’d found on the bookshelf. The park service CEO must have kids or grandkids. Kate supervised Hayden’s nighttime washing up and tucked him into one of the four bedrooms that had two twin beds, and he was asleep before she could bend over and kiss his cheek. Thor sprawled on the floor beside him with a contented sigh and gazed up at Kate without remorse.

  “I’m not mad,” she told him wryly. “Don’t lose any sleep over it. In the end, the wig would’ve had to go.”

  Mitch had washed the dishes and tidied the kitchen in her absence, and then shut down the diesel generator in the shed out back, leaving them to the sound of the rain and the wind and the soft glow of gas lamps and firelight. He’d been eyeing her warily all night, as if she might suddenly snap and bite. She sat on the couch near the warmth of the fire and curled her legs beneath her, nursing her glass of wine and wearing her black jogging hat. He retrieved another beer and dropped onto the couch next to her, gazing into the fire for a few moments before shifting those keen eyes and zapping her wide-awake.

  “So tell me. If the wig was a farce, what does that make the hat?”

  She sat up, cradling her wineglass. “Warm,” she replied in self-defense. “It can get kind of drafty up top when you don’t have all that much hair.”

  “You didn’t eat much supper.”

  “Neither did you.”

  “There’s a phone here, in the kitchen.”

  “I saw it,” Kate said.

  “I’ll call the park supervisor in the morning and thank him for the use of his lodge.”

  “That would be the polite thing for us to do.”

  “I could call the governor, too, and thank him for putting together the donor drive.”

  Kate drew a short breath. “Yes, I suppose you could.”

  “Then there’s the chief of Umiak. He had some good points.”

  “He certainly did.”

  “You suppose your big boss would take a phone call from me?”

  Kate felt herself clench up. “Maybe.”

  “Think the world might sit up and take notice if we all got together for a powwow about saving people’s lives with a bone marrow drive?”

  Mitch held her gaze for a long moment before she tore her eyes away and looked back into the fire. Her heart was pounding painfully and it was hard to breathe. She hated to air her private affairs, and yet once again, Mitch was right. This wasn’t just about her. Children were dying. Children as precious to their families as Hayden was to her. If she could help them somehow, some way, wasn’t she obligated? And what of the adults diagnosed like she had been? What about Tuttu? Maybe her twin brother was still alive and someone might know where he was. What about all the families and friends who agonized over their loved ones’ fate and fought the battle alongside them, hoping for miracles that might or might not happen, hoping for bone marrow donors to step up to the plate and give the gift of life?

  Kate felt the prickle of tears. “Maybe.”

  Mitch finished his beer slowly and wondered what Kate was thinking about as she gazed into the flames. They sat side by side on the couch with no more than two feet separating them, but it felt like much more. He wanted to reach out and touch her because he sensed that touch was what she truly needed but he didn’t dare and he silently cursed his cowardice. What if she did die? What if he were to allow himself to fall in love with someone who had only a few months to live? A man would be a fool to open himself up to so much pain.

  The smartest thing he could do was to keep his distance.

  Two feet was just about right.

  Still, he wondered what she was thinking.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” he said.

  She stirred, shifted her eyes briefly to his, then gazed back into the flames. “I was thinking about this eighteen-year-old girl who was in the room next to mine at the hospital. Her name was Gail Anne and she wanted to be a concert pianist. She’d been in there for a long time. None of the treatments were working and no suitable bone marrow donor was found. She’d become so weak she was bedridden, but she was so sure they were going to let her go home this spring. She missed her dog and her friends and couldn’t wait to see them again. I used to visit with her a lot. She asked me what song cheered me up the most, and I had to think about it a while but I told her it was the theme song from Annie. When I was having a down day she’d play that song for me.”

  “She sounds like a nice girl,” Mitch said.

  “Gail loved Hayden. She’d let him sit on her bed and play on her keyboard with her. The day the doctors told her she’d probably be sterile from all the chemotherapy and wouldn’t be able to have children, she cried like her heart would break. She told me I was so lucky to have such a beautiful boy.

  “On the last Friday in April they moved her upstairs,” Kate continued, speaking softly. “All her things, the special music box that belonged to her grandmother, the stuffed dog that looked like her dog Scout, her electronic piano, her favorite photographs, all gone. The very next day one of the nurses who came in to check my IV looked like she’d been crying. When I asked her what was wrong she said that after they’d taken Gail upstairs and settled her into the intensive care unit, the doctors finally told her she wouldn’t be going home. So she told her mother she was tired, closed her eyes and died.”

  Shaken, Mitch pushed off the couch to put another log on the fire, then finished off his beer and carried the bottle into the kitchen. Only after returning to the living room did he dare look at her. He thought she’d be crying, but she was just staring into the flames with that same pensive expression. He sat back down with that safe two feet of distance separating them and tried to think of something to say, but couldn’t. He no longer had to wonder what she was thinking about, but mortality was a topic he avoided whenever possible.

  “I’m not afraid of dying anymore, Mitch,” she murmured.

  Time to change the subject. “Look, you’re going to beat this, and tomorrow we’re going to show Hayden Wickersham Dome and maybe see some more wolves, and we still have to find a grizzly—”

  “I used to be,” she continued, ignoring him, “but now that I know you’ll take care of Hayden, I’m not.”

  “You’re not going to die.”

  She looked at him with a faint smile. “We’re all going to die someday, and I don’t have a problem with that, but I don’t want to die in a hospital the way Gail Anne did.”

  Mitch could feel the fight-or-flight response kicking in, but he didn’t have a clue which way to go. “You won’t. You’re going to get that bone marrow transplant and get better.”

  “All she wanted was to go home. What’s so wrong with letting someone die at home if they’re going to die anyway? She wanted to see her friends and hug her d
og.” This time her voice broke and he saw the shine of tears before she looked away. “Even if a bone marrow donor is found, there’s a seventy percent chance that the transplant procedure won’t be successful, and if everything goes badly I’ll be so sick I won’t have the strength to get out of that bed and walk out of the hospital, and it scares me to death to think I might die that way.”

  Goddamn, he was in way over his head. There wasn’t anything he could say and he was too close to her now to ever be able to run away so he did the only thing he could do. He erased the safe, protective distance between them on the couch and put his arm around her. When she turned into him with a muffled sob, he put his other arm around her and held her tight and tried to remember that men weren’t supposed to shed tears.

  “I don’t usually cry,” she wept, her voice muffled against his flannel shirt.

  “I know.”

  “I keep thinking about how young she was, about all the dreams she had and all the things she was going to do and the two babies she wanted to have, a boy and girl, and how they told her she couldn’t. Why would they tell her that, when they knew she wasn’t getting out of there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And I keep thinking about her dog, waiting for her. Scout must wonder why she never came back home. They took her upstairs and she never went home.”

  “That’s not going to happen to you.” He rubbed her back as if she were a small child and felt her body shake with sobs.

  “What if they won’t let me leave?”

  “If you get so sick you can’t move and the doctors tell you that you can’t ever go home again, and you want out of there, I’ll take you out. I swear to God I will. I’ll lift you out of that bed and carry you out of that hospital and take you home.”

  “They wouldn’t let you.”

  “They couldn’t stop me if they tried,” Mitch assured her, realizing all at once that it was true. “All you have to do is call me. As long as I’m alive, you don’t have to worry about dying in a hospital room. I’ll come get you, anytime, anywhere. I promise you that.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  BY MORNING, THE RAIN had stopped but it was still gloomy and overcast at 6:00 a.m. Mitch was the only one awake. He made a pot of coffee in a French press he found in a kitchen cupboard and built another fire in the fireplace. Kate slept through it all, curled beneath the blanket on the couch. She hadn’t even moved when he got up. He walked outside with his mug and stood on the deck and guessed he was staring right at Denali but the entire mountain range was still invisible. Canyon Creek was frothy with white water after the rain, thundering over a series of steep falls below the cabin. A raven glided past on the canyon currents, wary and watchful, looking for its next meal. Mitch finished his first cup of coffee on the deck, and the second he drank while making phone calls, the first to Admiral Ransom Gates, whose secretary put him on hold for ten long minutes before the admiral himself came on the line, transmitting from some top-secret locale.

  Mitch introduced himself and came straight to the point. “I’m a friend of Captain Kate Jones’s and I need to ask a favor of you. We appreciate your offer to sponsor a bone marrow drive. The thing is, we could test every volunteer in the Navy and in Alaska—and it would be great to get those people on the bone marrow registry—but in my opinion Kate’s best chance of finding a donor would be to test people on the Crow reservation in Montana, and the towns around it and near where she grew up. Does the Navy ever send their medical staff that far inland?”

  The admiral didn’t pause more than a second. “I think it could be arranged. I’ll make some calls. Do you have a number where you can be reached?”

  Mitch gave it to him. “There’s one other thing, sir. The sooner this donor drive happens, the better, and the speed that they work at in the lab getting the results could make the difference between life and death for Kate.”

  “I understand. I’ll let you know when we can schedule it.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Take good care of her. She’s the best of the best.”

  “Yes, sir, I know.”

  And that was just the first call.

  IT WAS HAYDEN who finally woke Kate by crawling onto the couch beside her and burrowing under the blanket. She’d been having the strangest dreams. Good dreams. So good she didn’t want to wake up, but when she did and discovered Hayden nestling into her arms she kissed the top of his head and forgave him his trespass.

  “I guess I’m the sleepyhead this morning,” she murmured.

  “Wake up, Mumma, we have to look for grizzly bears.”

  She tightened her arms around him. “Grizzly bears. Is that what we’re looking for?”

  “And wolves.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Don’t sleep, Mumma. Open your eyes. Mitch said it might rain again.”

  “It’s good to sleep late on a rainy morning.”

  “But we have to find the bears and wolves before it rains.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Mitch said so.”

  “Well, Mumma says sleep is good.”

  “But Mitch said we might see bears and wolves and witches’ domes.”

  “Oh, he did, did he?”

  “Wake all the way up, Mumma.”

  “I can’t. Are you sure it isn’t already raining?”

  She heard Thor’s paws and a man’s tread on the porch steps, and then Mitch was in the room and there was no hiding from the morning, nor did she particularly want to hide when she opened her eyes and saw him standing there. “What time is it?”

  “Ten o’clock,” he said.

  Kate was shocked. She never slept past six. Never.

  “And it just started to rain again,” Mitch added.

  She propped herself up on her elbows and looked out the big glass windows fronting the canyon. Sure enough, raindrops were streaking the glass. “Good. We can sleep in all day long and listen to it on the roof.”

  “But I want to find a bear.” Hayden slid off the couch, clearly not buying into Kate’s sedentary plan. “Mitch said we could.”

  “Then you’d better get dressed,” Kate advised. “You can’t go bear hunting in the rain wearing pajamas.”

  Hayden stampeded for his bedroom with Thor at his heels while Mitch brought her a cup of coffee from the kitchen. Kate took it with a murmured thanks and sat up, swinging her legs over the edge of the couch.

  “The weather’s supposed to clear tomorrow,” Mitch said, dropping down beside her. “We can hide out here today. I’ve been going through the cookbooks in the kitchen and I’ve found a recipe I’m going to try.”

  She cast him a questioning glance. “What?”

  “Barbecued bear ribs.” His expression was deadpan, but she was catching on.

  She crinkled her nose. “Is hunting allowed in the park?”

  “Not in the wilderness section, where most of the tourists go, but it is here. Don’t worry—not this time of year. Most of the shooting is done in fall and winter.”

  It felt so natural to lean into him, and his arm draped around her as if it belonged there. “I suppose they use this lodge as a deluxe hunting camp.”

  “I suppose.” Mitch pried off his boots and lifted his feet to the coffee table. “I’ve flown a lot of hunters into this little town. Probably some of them stayed here as guests, same as us. Anyhow, the cookbooks seem to be all game-oriented, and all we brought along to eat was factory-farmed beef and chicken.”

  “It’s my turn to cook. You pick out a recipe you like and I’ll follow it. The beef and chicken will become wild game. They have no choice.”

  “I made some phone calls while you were sleeping. I got in touch with Dan Wills, the park supervisor. Nice guy. Said he was glad we moved into the lodge before the rain started. It looks like we’re on for a meeting with the governor. He thinks for maximum impact it should be held at the Anchorage hospital because there are three leukemia patients being treated there in between their trips to the same h
ospital you were in. I told him I’d run it by you, but that you’re here on vacation and the last place you want to be is in a hospital.”

  Kate was quiet for a few moments, thinking this over. “None of us wants to be sick and hospitalized, but sometimes we don’t have a choice.”

  “He has the Blood Bank of Alaska on board for the drive, and the Red Cross, as well. He’s working on getting the test kits to the villages of Umiak and Kotzebue and all the other major villages along with a team who can take the blood and fly it back for immediate testing. I volunteered for that. He’s going to contact the chief of Umiak personally, and the friend of Tuttu’s. I gave him the contact numbers.”

  “When is this meeting scheduled?”

  “Monday. That gives us two whole days, and if he comes here, it could be even longer.”

  “The governor’s right. The meeting should take place at the hospital, right in the patients’ rooms. If this is a push to make people aware, they need to see how it really is in a cancer ward, and the press should go to Seattle and interview the patients and their families at the cancer research center. They’re the real heroes.”

  “I don’t doubt that, but you’re my personal hero and Hayden’s, too, and besides, I’d just as soon keep you in Alaska as long as possible.”

  Kate felt her heart lose its rhythm for a moment. She thought about the strange, vivid dreams she’d had the night before, then raised her hand to her head. The warm ski hat was gone and her head was bare. She leaned forward and looked between the couch and the coffee table. The hat was lying on the floor, right where she’d flung it in her dream. She looked back at Mitch. “Did you say those very same words to me last night?”

  “We said a lot of things to each other last night.”

  Caught off balance, Kate set her cup of coffee down and composed her racing thoughts, or tried to. Some of her strange dreams had been somewhat sexual in nature. Very sexual, in fact, and Mitch had stayed with her on the couch, all night long. She’d woken several times, each time reassured by his strong, solid presence. She remembered that. But as to the dreams, had they really and truly been just dreams?