Far from Here

by Nicole Baart

  “I mean, what does it mean that they’re calling off the search? They’ve found him, or . . .”

  “Or nothing. It’s over. They’ve done all they can.”

  “But it’s Ell, Dani. You can’t just—”

  “I know.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.” Dani pulled her hands across her head and let her palms slide down her temples to the place where her cheekbones slanted in perfect symmetry. She covered her eyes because she couldn’t bring herself to face the decision she had already made. But there were phone numbers in her pocket. People to call, steps to take, plans to be made. She didn’t want to do it; she didn’t have a choice.

  “I’m going,” Dani whispered.

  “Excuse me? You’re going where?”

  “To Alaska.”

  Danica

  Etsell left for Anchorage the day after his twenty-seventh birthday. We had been married for over seven years, and together for almost ten—an entire decade of oneness that ensured I could not remember my life without him. There was no me, only us, and in the wake of the announcement that his enduring, childhood dream was about to get a long-awaited test run, I felt for the first time as if I was married to a complete stranger.

  After we said, “I do,” Etsell and I eased into the sort of comfortable, easy life that can only be classified as desultory. We didn’t make plans or try to plot out an exciting future; we simply existed. My husband continued flying, racking up more and more miles as he taught lessons, piloted local businessmen all around the Midwest, and even flew antique planes in small air shows where little boys asked for his autograph.

  I went to beauty school because nothing else seemed to make much sense. A college degree had always appealed to me, and I could have followed in my oldest sister Natalie’s footsteps and attended a moderately prestigious private school, but getting my BA was a whim, not a necessity. Besides, I worried that if I seemed too excited about the possibility of school, Etsell would jump on board and suggest I attend the University of Alaska.

  It was always there, hovering between us like an invisible saint, the unspoken dream that was as dear as religion to my husband. But I ignored it, and Ell either didn’t dare to bring it up or he was carefully biding his time.

  Biding his time, I realized when I saw him take a small suitcase out of our attic and place it carefully on the floor beside the dresser in our bedroom. He didn’t put anything in it for many days, nor did he deign to tell me why it was there. I didn’t ask, but a part of me knew long before he whispered the words as we lay beside each other like corpses one sleepless, loveless night. I didn’t say anything then, but I confronted him the next morning.

  “It’s three weeks,” Etsell muttered as he poured himself a cup of coffee from our ancient coffeemaker. It had a hairline crack at the very top of the thin glass carafe, and enough hard-water stains and mineral buildup to make brewing a pot of coffee a forty-five-minute affair. “I thought you were going to buy a new coffeemaker,” he complained, sloshing cream on the counter as he gave the contents of his mug a vigorous stir.

  “It’s on the list,” I told him absently. My head was too thick with thoughts of Alaska to worry about our aging kitchen appliance. I vaguely remembered that it had been a wedding gift from Hazel. A cheap one at that. I pressed my fingers to my forehead to clear it. “But I don’t want to talk about our coffeepot right now. I want to talk about you leaving.”

  “Leaving? You make it sound like I’m walking out on you. Don’t be so dramatic, Dani. It’s unbecoming.”

  “Excuse me,” I huffed, stung by his casual dismissal. “But I’m not exactly thrilled that you think you can just waltz in here and tell me that you’re going away for three weeks. Isn’t this the sort of decision that we’re supposed to make together? What if I wanted to go with you?”

  Etsell snorted in what could have been loosely interpreted as a derisive laugh. “Like you’d sit in a plane for seven hours. We drove to the Black Hills for our honeymoon because you wouldn’t put one little toe on an airplane. We could have gone to Tahiti on my inheritance money. Tahiti, Danica. The Virgin Islands, a Mediterranean cruise, Paris . . .”

  “That’s not the point.” I gritted my teeth in an effort to control my tongue. “You should have asked me. Given me the chance to make my own decision at least.”

  “I thought you made all the decisions anyway.”

  He said it so quietly, I wasn’t entirely sure that I had heard him correctly. But the set of my husband’s carved jaw was defiant, his eyes smoldering. This was about much more than an opportunity to help a friend. It was about us. Whether he would admit it or not, I knew in that moment that he needed a break. A break from us. From me?

  Stunned, I whispered, “I’m sorry.”

  Etsell softened then, the sort of whole and immediate disarmament that happened at the bitter end of each of our fights. He threw down his weapons and surrendered. I could feel it in all the spaces between us, in the way every part of me that knew every part of him loosened just a bit. Relaxed.

  “Danica Reese,” he all but purred, abandoning his coffee on the counter so that he could slide his hands around my waist and pull me to him. “You’re jealous. You don’t have to be jealous.”

  “I’m not jealous,” I protested against his shoulder, even though I could hardly stand the thought of being left behind. “I just wish you would have told me sooner. That we could have made this sort of a big decision together.”

  “It’s not a big decision. And I really didn’t have a choice. Russ’s wife has just been diagnosed with breast cancer and he really needs someone to take over his flights for a couple of weeks. May is—”

  “One of the busiest tourist months in Alaska,” I finished. “I know. And Russ is the good friend of a good friend.”

  I didn’t mean to sound accusatory, but Etsell stiffened. “Russ is more than just a friend of a friend. We’ve met a couple times and I really respect him. I want to do this for him.”

  How noble, I thought, but instead of picking another fight I took a deep breath. “Refresh my memory,” I said. “You’ll just be making routine flights of passengers and cargo from Seward to . . . ?”

  “A blip on the map in the middle of the Aleutians. And I won’t just be landing in Seward. I’ll make flights to Anchorage, Kodiak, pretty much anywhere the lodge guests need their fish toted.”

  “The lodge is called?”

  “Midnight Sun.”

  “And I’ll be able to reach you?”

  “Whenever you want. They do have cell coverage in Alaska.”

  I pulled back from Etsell’s embrace and gave him a quizzical look. “I’m sure the state is populated by towers.”

  “Maybe you won’t be able to call me twenty-four/seven, but close enough.” He kissed my forehead with a decidedly paternal smack. “It’s not like I’m going to the moon.”

  “The last frontier,” I quipped.

  “No, space is the final frontier. Alaska is the last.”

  It wasn’t a very comforting thought. But what could I do? Etsell had passed off all his regular clients to less experienced pilots, booked a flight from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to Anchorage, and packed a carry-on bag with long-sleeved T-shirts and jeans. It was set, with or without my approval.

  To celebrate his birthday and recognize his impending departure, I bought a fifty-dollar bottle of wine, ordered a shipment of oysters on dry ice, and picked out an enticing set of black lingerie that left absolutely nothing to the imagination. If the ovulation predictor kit I had used could be trusted, the night Etsell and I celebrated his twenty-seven years of life could also be the night that we conceived our first child. By the time he came home from Alaska, I might have a surprise of my own. Apparently we were becoming adept at making decisions without each other.

  But it seemed our night together was doomed from the beginning.

  The oysters were a complete waste of money. I had arranged them on
a white plate, their shells curved in concentric circles and their flesh glistening and almost iridescent in the light of a dozen tapered candles I had arranged around our living room. The guaranteed-fresh seafood smelled briny and a little off, as if it had spent a few too many hours out of the cold ocean before someone thought to package the large shells. And the crushed ice I displayed them on didn’t do much to aid the overall appeal. The shards were melting quickly, juices from the oysters mingling in the tepid water to make a salty, grayish puddle.

  But Etsell tried one anyway. He came home from work to find me reclining amid a handful of artfully arranged pillows on the floor, the oysters and wine before me and the lingerie like a bow I had tied around my middle. I could have put a tag on the slight ribbon that hugged my waist: For you. He sank to his knees in the carpet and took one sip of the Napa Valley Chardonnay I had paired with my aphrodisiac offering. Then he slurped down one oyster. It was obvious he had a hard time swallowing.

  The feast was forgotten after that. He crawled on hands and knees across the floor to me, and caught my bottom lip between his teeth. I had anticipated the moment all day, but Etsell seemed detached.

  The night before my husband left for Alaska, we didn’t make love. We had sex.

  3

  All the Broken Pieces

  When Char fell asleep on the couch, just as the sun was beginning to rise over Blackhawk, Dani made herself a cup of green tea and went to sit in the garden. Though she hadn’t taken one of her mother’s pills, Dani felt drugged and drowsy, hemmed in by the kind of exhaustion that made her limbs heavy and her head light. She wanted to sleep, but the swelling crescent of a carmine sun as it ascended the hills that curved around the tiny town she called home ensured rest would be impossible. If vampires inhabited the night, Dani need never fear one. She was made for the day, and as long as the sun shone she could not bring herself to close her eyes.

  The garden was shrouded in a thin veil of May mist, a cool fog that swirled around Dani’s legs the moment she opened the screen door to step out into the morning. She hugged the hot mug in her hands and tucked her neck a bit deeper into the fleece that she had grabbed off a hook beside the door.

  It wasn’t cold, not really, but Dani stifled a shiver all the same. Spring was supposed to be gorgeous and green, lush with new grass and tulips that would open their cups to the sun as if waiting to be filled with warm, golden rays like nectar. But her back-door garden had gone untended for weeks—long before Etsell actually went missing and she had a reason to neglect the spindly flowers and herbs that tangled around the stone patio. The truth was, when her husband left for Alaska, Dani simply forgot about the raised planter boxes that lined the little haven. The basket of pansies on the wrought-iron table went unwatered, the clusters of hyacinth and tulips that lined the path to a bench beneath a willow tree spilled petals like narrow formations of wounded, fallen soldiers, and the few seeds that she had planted before Etsell left were snarled masses of yellow-leafed disorder.

  In years past, Dani had strung Christmas lights from the branches of the lilac bushes that flanked the outdoor living space, and decorated the low, crumbling stone wall with sturdy, tempered-glass hurricanes that she filled with white candles. But this year, none of those special touches brightened the usually lovely patio. Instead, the garden was downright depressing cloaked in early-morning fog. It seemed a testament to all she had lost.

  A little tremor scurried down Dani’s spine at the thought that somehow, in some impossible way, she had known. How else could she explain her uncharacteristic neglect of the garden she so loved? What else accounted for the fact that her Christmas lights and hurricanes, the delicate Chinese lanterns with their exquisitely patterned, snow-colored paper and the expensive torches she had ordered from a specialty magazine, had remained untouched in the back shed? Somewhere, deep down, her heart had acknowledged the fact that there was no reason to prepare, no purpose in waiting for Etsell to come home.

  All at once Dani’s legs felt weak, her bones brittle, about to fracture. She sat down hard on the stone wall and sloshed a few drips of steaming tea onto her jeans. The dark drops looked like blood to her, a smattering of life that anointed her legs with a meaningless pattern of accidental ruin. Her throat closed around the almost overwhelming desire to cry for the heartbreaking randomness of the sudden stains. Of things that could not be undone no matter how much she longed to reverse them.

  Dani didn’t know how long she sat that way, staring at the splattered denim and wishing that she could turn back the clock. But by the time she blinked and looked up, the sun had crested the trees and hung like one of her paper lanterns in a sky that would soon be perfectly, painfully blue. It was going to be a gorgeous day.

  “You’re up early this morning.”

  She wasn’t usually the sort to startle easily, but the world felt fragile to Dani, as if it were made of eggshells and on the verge of cracking, exposing edges, sharp corners that cut without intention. His voice in the solitude of her derelict garden made her jump and drop the mug that held every last sip of her untouched tea. It shattered into a hundred pieces on the flagstone pavers.

  “Oh!” Benjamin exclaimed from the farthest edge of his backyard. “Oh, I’m so sorry, Mrs. Greene. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “Dani,” she whispered, watching as he jogged the short distance between them and dropped to his knees at her feet. “Please don’t,” she said when she realized what he was doing. “It’s fine. I’ll take care of it.”

  But Benjamin was already picking up shards of pottery with his fingers and depositing them in the shallow blade of the spade he had been carrying. “It’s my fault,” he told her simply. “I clean up my own messes.”

  It was a strange thing to say, as if Benjamin had offered himself up for voluntary subjugation, but he smiled genially as he knelt before her. And though she knew she should bustle him out of the way and do it herself, Dani stayed rooted to the low wall. She inched her feet back slightly, determining to sweep the ceramic dust into the grooves between the stones later.

  “I really am sorry,” Benjamin said again. “It was a handsome mug.”

  “Handmade,” Dani admitted. “There are four in the set.”

  “Three.” He sounded sad. “We should bury the pieces. A thousand years from now our descendants could dig them up and wonder at our primitive civilization. Butterflies?” Benjamin held up a particularly large piece that was still attached to the curved handle of the broken mug. There was a swath of buttercream yellow fading into the jagged edge.

  Dani shook her head. “Nothing so elaborate. Abstract lines. Modern art. Meaningless.”

  “I doubt it was meaningless to the artist,” he mused.

  “I was the artist.”

  Benjamin’s eyes lifted to her face. He studied her for a moment and it was as if she could see the mental gymnastics he was performing to account for the source of her unexpected artistry. Dani was used to people being surprised by her creative streak. Most beauticians didn’t go through a brief but furious pottery phase or paint patterns on tabletops with their fingertips.

  “I just liked the colors,” she said. “The way they blended together. I did a few pieces years ago. I haven’t touched a wheel in years.”

  “Well, you have a knack, meaningful or not. It is—it was—beautiful.” Benjamin lifted the final piece and then used the palm of his hands to brush the smaller fragments to the edge of the patio. “Don’t cut your feet.”

  Dani looked down and realized for the first time that her feet were bare beneath the straight line of her stiff jeans. Her toes were numb, foreign to her. “I’ll be careful,” she assured him.

  Benjamin stood and carefully lifted the short-handled spade with one hand, making sure that the remnants of the mug remained in the low basin. He hovered for a second, leaning on his heels as if he was on the verge of saying good-bye and going back to whatever chore had brought him out to his garden on a quiet spring morning. But he didn�
�t leave.

  There was a long stretch of uncomfortable silence between them, then Benjamin apparently mustered the courage to ask, “Any news?”

  “They’re calling off the search.” Dani’s lips could hardly form the words. She stared at the ground as she said them, at the place where the mug had broken.

  Benjamin didn’t respond right away, and she felt him lean toward her as if he intended to place a sympathetic hand on her shoulder. Dani shrunk back a little and crossed her arms against her chest to discourage his pastorly touch, the well-practiced homily of advice and consolation that he was undoubtedly on the brink of spewing.

  But Benjamin didn’t touch her. He didn’t offer to pray with her or try to explain that it was God’s will. Instead, he pushed a hard breath through his lips, a soft sound of frustration and commiseration that ended with the question she least expected. “Are you going after him?”

  Dani’s eyes jerked to his face. “Do you think I should?”

  He tilted his head and gave her an indiscernible look. “Never do what you should do, Dani. Do what you have to do.”

  Dani knew she couldn’t go alone.

  Just the thought of navigating the unfamiliar chaos of a major airport, never mind gathering the courage to actually board a plane was enough to make her break out in a rash—or at least feel like she was going to. But her options were slim.

  Char was obviously not the right woman for the job. Taking her mother along on a trip of such magnitude was like inviting a toddler into a china store. Visions of airport bars and handsome Civil Air Patrol pilots made Dani shudder. Whether she realized it or not, Char broke things. Promises, guarantees, relationships. A misplaced attraction to one of the people who might be able to help could quickly ruin everything.

  As for Dani’s sisters, they were too immersed in their own lives to fly across the continent with the youngest member of the Vis family. As the baby of three girls and the final oops for her single mom, Dani had spent most of her childhood and young adulthood fending for herself. By the time she hit elementary school, she was the only person in the house who knew how to fry an egg, and if she didn’t do the laundry, her sisters were forced to go to school in clothes that bore the faint but unmistakable odor of spoiled milk. But Dani’s story was no Cinderella tale. Though she grew into the role of caretaker and surrogate mother when Char was too busy partying to pay much attention to her daughters, Dani was neither neglected nor abused by her makeshift family. Quite the opposite. She was appreciated and adored, and though she was forced to grow up fast, there was no lack of love among the quartet of women in the Vis home—even if it was somewhat backward and unconventional.