by Nicole Baart
“Oh”—I waved my hand dismissively—“he won’t be gone that long.” Spinning her chair with my foot, I reached for a clean cape from the drawer in the chic vanity.
“Not too tight,” Hazel warned me.
I fastened the Velcro the same way I always did, but she tugged on it anyway.
“All I’m saying is you never can predict these things,” Hazel muttered when I tipped her back and began to slowly rinse her hair in the sink.
“Mm-hmm.” I squirted out a generous amount of shampoo and used my strong fingers to my advantage. Maybe if I kept scrubbing, she’d be too preoccupied to bother me with her unwelcome musings.
But Hazel wouldn’t be deterred. “I mean, he has a ticket back and all, but he’s always wanted to be a pilot in Alaska.”
My hands stiffened. “Are you suggesting that Etsell would stay? He has a life here,” I snapped. “A wife.”
“I know, I know,” Hazel assured me.
For the next half hour we hardly said another word to each other. And yet there was something taut and unspoken between us. It was the same thing I felt when Etsell kissed me good-bye. Apparently, she felt it too.
Something about his absence felt permanent.
4
Far Away
The air at thirty thousand feet was clearer somehow, backlit and brilliant as if the entire sky was on display in some heavenly gallery. Danica could admit that it was gorgeous, an impossible work of art that shimmered like a pearl beneath the splash of hot sun a thousand light-years away. But any benevolence she felt toward the thin place between the mountain range of cumulus and the dark edge of space that threatened above was the direct result of antianxiety medication, strong meds that made her feel bleary and muddled, foggy around the edges, as if she was trapped in a warm glass bottle. Her panic was a damp smog around her, but it was capped in, held tight so that she could feel the pressure of it against her skin, waiting to explode.
“How you holding up?” Hazel asked, showing the smallest hint of concern for the very first time since they left Minneapolis hours before.
Danica blinked and ripped her gaze from the window, realizing that she was holding the requisite airline magazine with white knuckles. The pages were creased and torn. “Fine,” she said, but it was obvious that she was anything but fine.
“Breathe, girl. You’re going to hyperventilate.”
Hadn’t Etsell said the same thing to her once? Had he told her to breathe, just breathe? As if it were that easy.
“You have a greater chance of dying in a car crash than—”
“I know,” Dani interrupted. “I know. I’m not afraid of dying.”
“What then?”
But Dani couldn’t put words to it. Couldn’t describe why the sky was so wholly other, so unnatural and foreign. She tried to tease the heart of her dread from beneath the fog of medication, but it was like clutching at mist. No matter how hard she focused, she came up empty-handed, clammy-palmed, with only the faintest memory of some distant panic clinging to the hollows between her fingers. Giving up, Dani shook her head and forced herself to open the crumpled magazine. There was a two-page spread of a beach in Bali, the sort of place that seemed a universe away, it was so inaccessible to her.
“Half an hour,” Hazel said, patting Dani’s knee awkwardly. “Can you feel that we’re going down?”
“Good Lord,” Dani whispered, because as soon as Hazel mentioned it, she could feel that they were descending. There was an empty place beneath her stomach, a black hole where the pull of the earth felt like an inescapable gravity dragging her down.
“Can’t you take another pill?”
Dani shook her head and reached for the plastic cup of cheap airline wine that she had emptied an hour ago. She took Hazel’s water instead and drank it in one long gulp, filling her mouth with big cubes of ice and crunching them frantically.
Hazel looked at her in bewilderment for a moment, then she abandoned all pretense of concern and laughed. “How in the world did Etsell ever end up with you?”
“I resent that,” Danica muttered around a mouthful of chipped ice.
“I could ask it the other way if you prefer: How did you ever end up with Etsell?”
“That’s no better. No matter how you say it it sounds like we don’t belong together. Like our marriage is some sort of a mistake.”
Hazel tipped her head as if seriously considering the implications of Dani’s words.
“You think my marriage is a mistake?” Dani hissed before Hazel could speak her mind.
“I never said that. You and Ell are just a bit of an enigma.”
Dani leaned back in her seat with a sigh and pressed her fingers to the corners of her eyes. She wanted to tell Hazel that it was none of her business, that she would do well to keep her unwanted opinions to herself, but snapping at the older woman seemed like a self-destructive thing to do. Instead, Dani bit her tongue and hoped that Hazel would go back to reading the crime novel she held open on her lap.
But Hazel dog-eared the corner of a page in her book and closed it with a snap. Turning away from Dani, she laid her forehead against the tiny airplane window and stared down at the peaks of mountains that were just beginning to poke above the clouds. The Aleutians? Dani wondered, glancing past Hazel to take in the craggy, unscalable summits. As she watched, the clouds beneath them parted and they were granted a sweeping, undisrupted view of the wild earth below. It was breathtaking and beautiful and terrible.
Dani’s stomach lurched, and one word bubbled up from somewhere so deep inside it took a bit of her with it. She moaned, “No.”
With her face still turned toward the window, Hazel reached blindly for Dani’s hand and held it fast.
“He’s out there,” Dani said, her voice high and fast. “He’s out there somewhere, isn’t he? How are we going to find him?”
Hazel didn’t answer.
“I’d like to see a moose,” Hazel said when Danica emerged from the terminal restroom. Landing had been a stomach-churning, soul-stirring affair, and as soon as Dani’s feet touched the solid ground of the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport, her body had rebelled. Vomiting in a public restroom was not her idea of a good time, and capping it off with one of Hazel’s ill-timed and insensitive comments didn’t do much to improve her already foul mood.
“Go to a zoo.” She meant it to sound like a joke, but there was an edge to her voice. Dani forced a placating smile and tightened the shoulder strap of her backpack with a shaking hand. When Hazel ignored her, she raised her eyes to take in the view before her.
Though she hated flying no less after spending five straight hours in the air, she had to admit that the Anchorage airport was one of the most amazing buildings she had ever been in. Instead of a wall, one entire side of the long terminal was made of glass. It framed the mountains surrounding the city in a picture so clear and pixel-perfect it could have been a computer-generated image. Dani fought an urge to touch the vast window to make sure that it was real.
The view was undeniably breathtaking, but it filled her with a sense of disquiet, a feeling of dread that made everything seem somehow sinister. It was nearly midnight, but the sun was still low on the horizon and it painted the sky pink and orange, wetting the tips of the mountains with a rust-colored wash that was surreal in its splendor. She knew that she was being dramatic, that the panoramic vista before her was the sort of scene that inspired painters and poets, prophets and kings. But the jagged edge against the horizon put Danica in mind of a serrated knife. She was exhausted, and nursing a headache. In the long shadows of the mountains, her quest seemed huge and impossible. Foolish.
Doomed.
“I’ll bet you ten bucks that we see a moose,” Hazel said. Apparently she was unaffected by the scene before them. Or worse, impervious to the task at hand.
But Danica knew that wasn’t true. Hazel was trying to distract her. “Ten bucks,” she sighed, shaking on it. “Time frame?”
“Ton
ight. I bet we’ll see a moose tonight.”
“Make it twenty.”
“You’ve got yourself a deal.”
Dani was convinced that Hazel’s longing to catch a glimpse of the wildlife would be a wish unfulfilled, but before they had managed to leave airport property, they nearly hit one of the gentle behemoths as it grazed beside the road. The moose lifted its head and stared at them for a moment before he seemed to blink in boredom and returned to the grass at his feet.
Hazel chuckled a little and took one hand off the steering wheel to offer it, palm up, before Dani. The younger woman dug two tens out of her wallet. She didn’t mind parting with the money. She figured she owed Hazel a much greater debt than twenty dollars. And paying Etsell’s would-be mom in cold, hard cash was easier than attempting to return her generosity with the sort of relationship that she couldn’t quite piece together no matter how hard she tried.
Their final destination was Seward, a town on the cusp of Resurrection Bay that could easily have been reached by one last half-hour flight. But Dani had put her foot down. She simply couldn’t stand the thought of another airplane. Hazel hadn’t put up much resistance—except to insist that she would be the primary driver—and they ended up booking a hotel partway between Anchorage and Seward, splitting the three-hour trip into two shorter legs.
“Shouldn’t we call Blair?” Dani asked when they were on the outskirts of the city. Seward Highway unfolded before them, a long stretch of road that suddenly took a sharp curve and revealed the Cook Inlet in one generous rush.
“Not anymore,” Hazel said. “I told him we’d call when we landed if it wasn’t too late. But I don’t want to wake him now. We’ll call in the morning.”
Dani glanced at the dashboard clock and realized that it was after one in the morning. It didn’t feel that late, and yet her stomach clenched with the faint nausea of exhaustion. “It’s unnatural,” she complained. “The sun shouldn’t shine in the middle of the night.”
“I kind of like it.” Hazel tapped her brakes and pointed out the passenger window to the steely water beyond. “That’s the Turnagain Arm,” she narrated. “And that stretch of beach beyond the stones? It’s the beginning of the mudflats.”
“I had no idea you were so well versed in Alaskan geography,” Dani said, easing Hazel’s arm out of the way with her fingertips.
“I researched. Google Earth. Travel Alaska. There’s more on the Internet than pornography, you know.”
If Hazel was trying to get a rise out of her, Dani was too travel-weary to take the bait.
“Buck up, princess.” Hazel grinned wide enough to reveal the silver fillings in her teeth, but it looked more like a grimace to Dani. “Imagine we’re on a road trip. You’ve never been this far from home before.”
“That’s exactly the problem.”
Some small part of Danica wished that she had the kind of camaraderie with Hazel that fostered intimacy, or even casual conversation. Everything would be eased a little if only she had someone to share it with. But Hazel irritated Dani. She tried, they both tried in their fumbling, well-intentioned ways, but it seemed impossible for them to hit the mark. They always missed each other.
Hazel stopped attempting to draw Dani out of her miserable silence as they made their way from Anchorage to Girdwood, and the car slowly filled with an awkward tenor of apprehension. It was a one-note chord, the hum of something soft but insistent that settled into the places where they didn’t dare to speak. Dani could have screamed from the ache of it, from the continuous refrain of exhaustion and hopelessness that clutched at her chest with phantom fingers.
But she held herself together, for what choice did she have? Her husband was out there somewhere, and the man who would try to help her find him. And while her desperation felt infinite in breadth as it pressed against the doors of the tiny rental car, Dani did her best to rein it in, to ignore the haunting early-morning sunset and the way the mountains concealed mysteries she could not begin to fathom.
They were different, the Alaskan mountains. Different from anything she had seen or experienced, in no way comparable to the Black Hills of South Dakota, where she had taken a late honeymoon with Etsell so many years before.
With a small jolt of surprise, Dani realized that she could remember exactly how she felt when she caught her first glimpse of the hills after driving for hours through nothing but endless prairie flatland. They had gotten married before Christmas, but postponed their honeymoon until the weather was more clement. It was a brilliant day in early June when they left Blackhawk, and the sun had traveled with them from their little home through Mitchell and Chamberlain and past a dozen Wall Drug signs. And though it was nearing suppertime, daylight was still overhead when the blue-green line of limestone peaks and ponderosa pine forests blurred the horizon like a mirage.
Dani didn’t mean to be so sentimental—she knew it would make her new husband snicker—but she couldn’t help it when her breath caught in her throat. “It’s beautiful,” she whispered.
Etsell was supposed to disagree, to laugh at least and tell her that they could have seen sights much more grand than the miniature mountains of the prairie. But he smiled instead, and raised their woven fingers to kiss the bones at her wrist. “So beautiful,” he agreed. “And sacred. Did you know that the Sioux and the Cheyenne considered the Black Hills the spiritual center of the world? Holy ground.”
Religion was like quicksand as far as Etsell was concerned, seductive, deceptive, slow to drag you down. But there wasn’t an ounce of sarcasm in his voice when he spoke of the consecrated earth before them. It made Danica feel filled somehow, as if her groom had gifted her with something sweet and heavy and warm. The richness of his words seeped into every dark crevice and made her think, not for the first time, He is everything. And she added to that belief, We are everything. We are holy.
Dani remembered turning from the mountains then and focusing on the tangle of their hands, the individual peaks and valleys of knuckles and bone. These are my hands, she marveled. And his. They seemed profound to her.
The mountains that towered over her on the road to Girdwood held none of the sanctification, none of the quiet awe of the pine-covered limestone of the rugged Black Hills. In fact, Danica’s memory of the Hills was stripped of its rough-hewn splendor and relegated to something out of a children’s fantasy, a black-and-white Lone Ranger Western with gentle Indians and a kindhearted cowboy who embodied every good but misguided intention. It was as if in the shadow of the Chugach Mountains she realized for the first time that the Black Hills weren’t really mountains at all.
There was no kindness here. Nothing gentle. The wild land around her seemed ripped from the earth in an act of violence that left everything defensive and torn. Danica raised heavy-lidded eyes to the hulking giants that hemmed her in on every side, and suppressed a shudder. Monsters lurked here. Wolves and demons and beasts that were meant to devour and destroy. The rocks were so sheer, the trees so dense that it seemed terrain fit only for claws.
She cupped her hands in her lap and stared at the intersection of lines across her palms. The twin trails that ran parallel to her wrist, the arc that separated her thumb. When she balled her fists, the crests were there. The secret range that she had made with Etsell still existed in part, though her hands were older, her skin dry and cracked from water and chemicals. She tried not to think about it, but there was a question in the lonely lines of her fingers. In spite of her best efforts, she wondered if Etsell’s calluses would ever again fit against her palm.
When Hazel’s cell phone rang, it seemed otherworldly, detached. Dani watched as Hazel patted herself in an effort to locate the source of the sound, and when she finally produced it from the hip pocket of her Columbia shell, she tossed it at Dani.
“You answer it. I’m driving.”
Without looking at the number Danica flipped open the scratched Motorola. “Hazel’s phone,” she said.
“Hazel?”
�
�No, it’s Danica Greene. Hazel is . . .”
The older woman waved her hand dismissively and kept her gaze on the road before her.
“She’s indisposed at the moment. Can I take a message?”
“Hi, Mrs. Greene, it’s Blair Knopf calling. Can I assume you’ve made it safely to Anchorage?”
“Actually, we’re halfway to Girdwood. I’m sorry we didn’t call. We figured you would be sleeping.”
“I was.”
Danica wasn’t sure what to say, so she said nothing at all. Neither did Blair, and the silence between them stretched so long that she wondered if they had been disconnected. “Mr. Knopf?”
“I’m still here,” he said. “Call me Blair.”
“Is there something I can do for you?”
The line trembled with a moment of static, but Dani thought she heard Blair sigh all the same.
“Something has come up,” he began. “I just got a call that we have another missing person.”
Dani’s throat tightened. “Does that mean you can’t help us?”
“No,” Blair said, “nothing like that. It’s just . . . I have a question for you.”
“Of course.”
“Do you know someone by the name of Sam Linden?”
“I’ve never heard of him.”
“Not him,” Blair clarified, “her. Her real name is Samantha, but she goes by Sam. That name doesn’t ring a bell?”
Dani was tired. Tired and confused, and her strange conversation with Blair was only making matters worse. She laid her forehead in her hand and closed her eyes. “No, I’ve never heard of a Sam, or a Samantha, Linden. Should I have? What does this have to do with Etsell?”
Another silence. Another weighted pause. “We have reason to believe that she may be with him.”
“What do you mean?”
“We think they disappeared together.”
Danica
I always knew that other women found Etsell handsome, but I didn’t realize just how irresistible he was until one morning when Katrina woke up on our couch. It was a snowy Sunday in January, and Kat had snuggled under the tattered afghan even longer than normal. She might have been hungover—it was hard to tell with my sister because she could hold her liquor so well—but I prodded her off the couch anyway and dragged her to the bathroom, where I gave her my terry-cloth robe and a fresh towel from our linen closet.