by Nicole Baart
“It’s my life, Natalie. My life.”
Her eyes went big and round, and she stepped toward me as if she was about to take me by the shoulders and shake. “You’re kidding me. You are absolutely kidding me. You’re going to stay, aren’t you?”
“College is your dream,” I said, trying not to be cowed by her shock.
“I thought it was yours too.”
My shoulders inched toward my ears in an act of self-protection. “I thought so. Once. But I don’t know anymore. Maybe I just want to stay in Blackhawk. Mom and Kat need me. . . .”
“I think they’re capable of making their own wraps,” Natalie growled between clenched teeth.
“It’s more than that.”
“You’re going to marry that guy.”
“Etsell Greene.”
“What kind of a name is Etsell, anyway?”
“It’s his mother’s maiden name,” I all but whispered.
Natalie leveled me with a look that was so filled with disappointment, I could almost feel myself shrink beneath her gaze. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” she muttered. Then she spun on her heel and slammed out the door of our double-wide, leaving the screen to slap feebly against the crooked frame.
Etsell proposed a week later and we set the date for Christmas, just a few weeks after my nineteenth birthday.
I was a little girl when I married Etsell, a baby, really. What did I know at nineteen? I may have believed that I had it all figured out, but lying on top of my bed at the Holiday Inn Express of Seward I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I had been so naive it was almost tragic.
“You need a man in your life,” Ell had told me at the beginning of one of our very first dates. Char had invited him into our little trailer when he came to pick me up for a football game, and he took one sweeping glance at our run-down home and came to a decision. I could feel it in the way he pulled himself up beside me, straightening his back, lifting his chin as if he had discerned a problem and just happened to have the solution tucked in his back pocket. As the words crossed his lips, I knew he considered himself the man for the job. “A little testosterone would go a long way in this place.”
“I think we’re doing just fine,” I told him.
“Whatever. You need a guy. Someone to fix the screen in the kitchen window with more than just duct tape.”
“You mean a dad? We’re a little lacking in the father department, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“I’ll be your daddy.” Etsell laughed, leaning over to nibble the high arch of my ear, which I had just pierced with a single diamond stud.
I yanked away from him. “That’s disgusting.”
“The kiss?”
“The implication. I’m doing just fine, thank you very much. We’re doing just fine.”
“Who takes care of the money?” Etsell demanded.
“I do.”
“What would happen if Char’s car broke down?”
“We’d take it to the shop.”
“Do you lock your doors at night? Wait, ignore that question. Anyone could kick down one of your walls if they wanted to get in. I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll—”
“You’re a chauvinist,” I said, incredulous. “You act like this really fantastic, understanding guy, but underneath it all you’re a pig.”
“Oink.” Etsell grinned.
“You think the Vis girls are doomed without a man in our lives.”
“Oink-oink.”
I wanted to be offended, but he was making me laugh. He slipped his hands around my waist and I pushed him away halfheartedly, muttering under my breath, “You and your porcine sensibilities can take a hike, Etsell Greene. I don’t need you.”
But I did.
For all my bravado, I stayed with Ell. He reached out his hand and I took it, tentatively at first, without really even grasping what I was doing. But he was seductive that way, capable of pulling me in so slowly that I didn’t even realize I had entered his orbit until there was simply no way out. My life circled his with the inevitable magnitude of personal gravity. The only thing that made my utter dependence on Etsell tolerable was the fact that he appeared to be equally as addicted to me.
“You’re all I know,” he told me once, and I knew exactly what he meant.
It didn’t occur to me until nearly ten years and four thousand miles later that maybe I wasn’t all he wanted to know. Curling onto my side, I blinked dry eyes and looked out the window at the postcard-perfect view. Etsell had come here, without me. He had picked at a loose corner of our life and unraveled a strand for himself, a thread that he wove into something that I didn’t understand and wasn’t a part of. As I lay with my head in the pillow of my bent arm, I considered the possibility that my husband was a stranger.
How well did we know each other, really? I could predict that Char would continue wearing suicidal shoes and sleep with losers she met at the bar even if they looked for all the world like they had every communicable disease known to man. And Natalie would never come home again, never condescend to bless us with her significant presence, her self-perceived otherworldly wisdom. Kat would keep on being Kat, smart in ways that Natalie would never accept, but downright brain-dead when it came to making wise and lasting choices for her life. I thought I knew them, but I had never stopped to wonder why Char was the way she was. Why Natalie ran across the country and Kat ran into seedy corners. I thought I knew my husband, but here he was, a runaway too. And I had no idea why he had run.
Never mind the mysterious Samantha Linden. Even without the threat of her presence looming at the fringes of my darkest fears, I had to admit that Etsell was lost long before he ever took off from the landing strip in Seward.
He wasn’t the only one.
7
Prodigal
A week in Seward disappeared like a hot stone falling through cold water. The passage was quick and almost violent, sending up ripples that bubbled and fizzed in frantic ascent, only to dissipate like so much steam. Dani clutched at experiences and people and leads that turned out to be nothing more than a red backpack abandoned on the slope of a solitary mountain, a rock that reflected water like light, a whisper of activity swirling into nothing more than the echo of forgotten ghosts. The searchers had left nothing to chance. Every avalanche, hole in the ice, sun glint, and unexplained shadow had been explored.
But there was nothing. They were chasing an impossibility.
Even Blair and Hazel looked defeated by the end of the fourth day. They had logged more hours in Blair’s plane than Dani ever thought possible, and although there was a desperate, hopeless slant in their eyes, she encouraged them through two more days of searching. When Hazel mentioned something about the cost of fuel, the thought skittered through Danica’s mind that Etsell had a sizable life insurance policy. She could afford a few more days of gas. But as the words life insurance impressed themselves on the place in her heart where Etsell’s disappearance was still a fresh wound, she felt branded by something poker-hot.
“I can’t afford more fuel,” she said as if saying it would somehow make it real. As if she could pretend her way back to a normal life—one where her husband’s life insurance policy wasn’t likely to be cashed anytime soon.
Hazel nodded once, her chin falling to her chest and staying there until she heaved a sigh that seemed to come from the very marrow of her bones. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.”
And that was that. The Civil Air Patrol had searched. The Rescue Coordination Center had recorded nearly six hundred hours of flying time, covering an area larger than the state of Iowa. The search for Etsell, and presumably Sam, had left little to chance. And it was officially and unofficially over.
Blair dropped Hazel off at the hotel by late afternoon on their final day of searching. There was something almost ceremonial in the acknowledgment that his plane would not go up for Etsell again, and Hazel had called ahead to tell Dani it was over. Dani threw on her coat and waited for her husband’
s surrogate mother in the lobby, but when the older woman slouched out of Blair’s car and made her way hunch-shouldered through the glass doors, she barely gave Dani a second glance.
“I’m going to my room,” she announced.
“Supper?” Dani blurted out. She didn’t want Hazel to leave, even though she wasn’t remotely hungry.
“Maybe. I’ll call you later.”
Dani felt as if there was more to say. Like she should press Hazel for details, information from their final day of flight that might spark some latent glimmer of hope. Surely there were clues that Blair and Hazel had misread. A reason to try one more day. But even as she longed to find something worth clinging to, Dani knew deep down that she was too tired to try. So was Hazel. So was Blair. The fine art of continuing to clutch at hope had proved to be an exhausting endeavor. Dani let Hazel disappear into the stairwell without another word.
There was a defeated pallor in the air, a gray mist that had followed Hazel and now hung sad and discarded about the room. It was raining outside, but Dani couldn’t handle the damp inside so she turned up the hood of her coat and made her way to the back door. There were clouds over the bay, dark and thin like bits of pulled cotton that had been put to some secret, dirty use. Dani eyed them warily, but the rain was needle-fine and assaulted her cheeks with such tenacity she eventually lowered her head and watched the slow progress of her feet along the slick boardwalk.
Seward seemed abandoned in the dim shadows of the waning afternoon. It was as if everyone had made a collective decision to shutter themselves in where it was warm and light and dry. Even the shops and tour companies that Dani passed seemed unusually empty. The odd clerk sat lonely behind a high counter, nursing a half-empty bottle of organic juice and staring into the unnatural twilight that Dani inhabited.
When she ran out of boardwalk, Dani turned away from the water and paced backstreets until she was so cold that her fingers were numb. As the rain drove at her with a new intensity, she looked up and wondered exactly where she was. Too far from the hotel to seek refuge in her room, she decided.
The golden-flecked light from a dozen stores and restaurants beckoned her to take shelter, but Dani wasn’t interested until she spotted a long, empty bar in a seedy-looking pub. Warm air breathed over her as she stepped inside, a sigh against her skin that left her fingertips tingling. She pushed back her hood and tried to shake the dampness from her jacket, but it was insistently wet and determined to stick to her sweater. Instead, she unzipped it and peeled off her cold outer layer, hooking it unceremoniously over a wrought-iron coatrack that stood near the door.
There was a couple in one corner of the pub; each was holding a tall glass of beer the color of liquid amber and they were talking in hushed tones. The only other person in the place was the bartender, a middle-aged Native man with a heavy brow. He didn’t look up as Dani entered, and he didn’t pay her any attention as she took a stool at the bar. She had been hoping for a quiet understanding, for a drink to magically appear in front of her from a sage, tight-lipped barkeep who could appreciate how much she needed it. But the man before her was going to offer no such small comfort.
“Something warm,” Dani said, tapping the counter with her palms as if she were patting it into place. “It’s freezing out there.”
The barman didn’t look up, but he went for a pot of coffee that had just finished brewing.
“Something stronger.”
He didn’t pause in his pour, but he left a good inch of space in the glass mug and unscrewed the cap on a bottle of Jameson Irish whiskey. “Cream?”
“No.”
The steam coming off the drink was so fragrant, Dani had to repress a desire to lick it. It was bitter and sweet, sharp and smooth like a momentary oblivion, a place where she could forget. She took a long swallow, relishing the way it burned her tongue and left a scorching path all the way through her chest.
The Irish coffee was gone before Dani realized she had drank it down to the very last drop. It hummed in the tips of her fingers and radiated warmth all the way down to her feet. Everything felt soft and slightly blurred, and she raised her head to ask for another, but before she could voice her request, the bartender placed a fresh drink in front of her. “You look cold,” he said as if to offer an explanation.
“I am,” Dani admitted. “Cold and miserable. I’d like to swear a blue streak.”
For the first time since she entered the pub, the bartender looked her in the eye. A faint smile lifted the corner of his mouth, and Dani saw the silver line of a scar kiss his lip like a bolt of lightning. “You can do that here,” he said. “Use every word in the book. I won’t tell a soul.”
“Thanks. But it’s not my style.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“I could throw something.”
He glanced at the neat rows of glasses hanging behind him. “Might not be such a good idea.”
“It would make a terrific mess. Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it yourself.”
“All the time. But I’d like to keep my job.” He measured coffee grinds into the filter of a second coffeepot and filled the carafe with cold water from a blue-handled hose. “You’re not from around here.” It was a statement, not a question, and open-ended enough that Dani could ignore it if she wanted to.
She didn’t. “I’m from Iowa.”
“Long ways from home.”
“Not by choice.”
He gave her a hard, unreadable look. It sent something cool and slippery straight through her.
“My husband is missing,” Dani said. She wasn’t sure why she wanted to tell him this, but all at once the truth was rising inside of her, a high tide swallowing everything in its wake. “He took off from Seward Airport and . . .”
“Disappeared,” the bartender finished. “Funny name, right? Elson? Elton?”
“Etsell.”
“Sorry about that.”
Dani didn’t know if he was sorry about Etsell’s disappearance or his name. “I’ve never . . .” She fumbled. “I don’t know what to do with it. I should feel something, you know? Something deep inside of me should just know that he’s alive. That we need to keep looking.”
“Or that you need to stop.”
He said it dispassionately and Dani found herself searching his face for understanding, for answers. There were none to be found. “I don’t feel anything,” she admitted.
The bartender picked up a rag that was draped over a little prep sink and turned it over in his hands. There was nothing to wipe, no surface in the pub that hadn’t been fastidiously cleaned, and he held it for a moment in his fist before folding it in a perfect square and laying it on the counter. Dani blinked and looked around, noticing that her first impression had been dead wrong. She hadn’t stumbled into a seedy bar at all. It was snug and tidy, a study in crisp right angles and warm light that pooled on dark tables and made the liquor bottles shimmer as if they contained crushed gems. For just a moment Dani felt as if something had settled over her shoulders, a hand-knit blanket that fell on her softly and made her want to close her eyes.
“I really am sorry,” the bartender finally said.
Me too, Dani thought. For so many things.
“Blame the Alaskan Triangle,” he said. “The Kushtaka. God. Fate.”
Dani’s list of culprits wasn’t nearly so lofty—Russ to a certain extent, maybe Sam, definitely herself and Ell—but when he took out two small glasses and extracted a small, diamond-cut bottle from somewhere beneath the counter, gratefulness shot through her. “Thank you,” she whispered. Not because he was pouring, but because he understood.
At the moment Dani’s fingers brushed the smooth glass, her cell phone rang in her pocket. It was an unexpected sound in the close stillness of the pub, and she nearly startled right off her seat. Hazel’s name and phone number blinked at her on the screen and she flipped the phone open with her thumb.
“Hi, Hazel.”
“They found her.”
<
br /> Dani’s heart stumbled. “What?” She gulped a breath and tried again. “Who? Who did they find?”
There was a low hiss on the other end of the line, then Hazel said, “Samantha Linden.”
Sam defied every preconceived notion that Dani had carefully constructed around her—one furious tap of her hiking boot–clad foot and she crushed the imaginary facade to rubble.
Dani had pictured her tall and fierce, the sort of woman who was all stunning angles and sharp edges. Eyes like fire, Amazonian cheekbones, skin flushed from inside with something wild and maybe just a little dangerous. The kind of woman men either worshipped or secretly feared.
But the real Samantha Linden was a pixie. She stood an entire head shorter than Danica, and probably weighed less than a hundred pounds soaking wet. But that didn’t mean she didn’t cut an impressive silhouette. Sam exuded a sort of richness, a sumptuous quality that went beyond her trim curves and the exquisite obsidian gleam of her almond-shaped eyes. Her hair was a cropped frame around her face, and her lips were so full, Danica wondered if they were injected. But they were real; they had to be. Nothing about Sam suggested artifice. She didn’t wear a stitch of makeup, her clothes were old and torn in places, and she obviously hadn’t showered in a week. Maybe more.
Dani couldn’t stop staring at her, even though the diminutive woman kept throwing her razor-sharp looks.
“This is ridiculous,” Sam finally said, throwing up her hands. They were all clustered in a small conference room at the Holiday Inn—Blair, Hazel, Dani, Sam, and a pair of uniformed policemen—and after an hour of questioning, the formerly missing woman seemed beyond anxious to leave. “I’ve told you a hundred times. I visited a friend for a couple of days and then I went hiking. I would have been back in time except that I slipped down a ravine in the dark and twisted my frickin’ ankle.”
The officers had wanted to see her injured ankle, and even Dani was impressed that Sam had made it out of the bush with her leg swollen like a loaf of bread spilling over its pan. It wasn’t broken, or at least, Sam told them it wasn’t, but the explosion of purple and green and black behind the loose laces of her boot was enough to make Dani cringe.