by Nicole Baart
“And when exactly was the last time you saw Etsell Greene?”
Sam rolled her eyes and light glinted off the dark irises like mica. Her hand leapt out and she yanked a notebook out of the officer’s hand.
“Hey!” he shouted.
She narrowed her eyes at him. “It says right here that the last time I saw him was on Saturday, when he dropped me off. Would you like me to underline it?”
The officer snatched his notebook away from her.
“Sam, honey, you have to understand, we’ve been looking for Etsell—and you—for a very long time.” Blair patted Sam’s arm with a tender hand.
Dani thought it was strange that Blair would call that wildcat honey, but Sam seemed to gentle beneath his touch.
“Look,” she said, attempting patience, “I’m sorry that Etsell Greene is missing, but I don’t know anything about it. He wasn’t with me, I swear it. We parted ways at the airport over two weeks ago.”
Miraculously, Danica believed her. And apparently, so did everyone else.
“You’d better call the Midnight Sun,” one of the officers suggested. “They’ve been worried sick about you.”
“More like they’ve been losing money over me. Who else can lead the hunting tours?”
“You’re the best,” Blair assured her with a wink.
The room exhaled, a collective murmur of relief at the prodigal daughter returned. But something buzzed at the back of Danica’s mind, an insistent whir that grew in intensity until blood pounded in her ears and surged florid behind her eyes. Sam’s appearance was a simple solution that cast Ell’s disappearance in an entirely new light. Dani’s role had flickered like a broken compass, swinging from hopeful wife to scorned spouse to lost lover in a matter of days. And now where was she? Standing in a hotel room that smelled faintly of smoke and the memory of cheap banquet food with a woman who was more concerned about taking a shower than the fact that she had been the object of so much speculation and fear that psychology books could have been written about her. Or rather, about the response she was able to elicit simply by going on an unannounced hike.
The prodigal daughter had returned relatively unscathed. But what about the prodigal son?
Dani fought down an urge to scream, to throw herself at the calm, collected men who were so willing and able to simply walk away from Etsell’s disappearance without a backward glance. They had tried, she knew that, and yet, didn’t they realize that Ell was her husband? Her best friend? Her life? No amount of searching could be enough. No amount of subtle remorse could return to her what had been lost.
Sam had been unofficially released and Blair was offering to drive her to the airport when something inside Dani snapped. “You can’t go!” she all but shouted, lunging for Sam as if she was going to scoop her up and take her hostage. But Dani got hold of herself and stopped short of touching the strange woman. “Please,” she begged. “I would like a minute alone with you.”
The relief that had saturated the room at the eventual acceptance of Sam’s return faded as quickly as it had come.
“I think that would be a good idea,” Blair said, taking charge after a brief, shocked pause. He steered the two officers out of the room with a fatherly hand. Hazel gave Dani a long look, but she eventually left, too, closing the door behind her with a definitive click.
Only when they were gone did Dani turn to the woman she had vilified a dozen different ways. Sam was so real standing there, her hair mussed and stringy, thrust behind her ears where it was long enough to tuck, and sticking up everywhere else in half-curled bunches like damp weeds. Her shirt was stained, her boots caked in mud and ornamented with broken tufts of purple grasses that were as exotic to Dani as moon rocks. Sam seemed bright to Dani. Bright and tangible, almost shockingly real.
The inescapable truth of Sam’s nearness—of her presence and Etsell’s absence—was like the fine slice of a knife, a cut that separated him from her with one irrevocable slash. And yet Dani couldn’t stop herself from pressing them together, from trying to make the pieces fit so that Ell could go on existing. Even if his existence was relegated to a nebulous somewhere. Somehow. With someone else.
Sam was studying her with a wary, guarded eye, and Dani considered that she didn’t have much time. The waif of wild woman before her would run before too long.
There was silence for a few seconds, nothing more than the disharmonious shuffle of their uneven breathing. Then Dani gathered herself and said, “What do you know about my husband’s disappearance?”
Sam’s gaze turned steely. “How should I know where Ell is?”
The sound of his name on the strange woman’s tongue sent something small and black-winged fluttering in Dani’s chest. “I know you flew with him almost every time he went up.”
“So?”
“So you had to have talked. You’d know if he had a favorite route, somewhere he liked to fly or a vista he enjoyed. . . .”
“I went over this with Blair and the police.”
“You haven’t gone over it with me.”
Sam crossed her arms against her chest. She looked fierce standing there, fierce and foreign, and Dani had to reevaluate her first impression. Sam was an Amazon, a petite Joan of Arc, a spark like a fresh-struck match. And she seemed poised to fly—one breath and she’d blow out of Dani’s life forever.
Dani changed her tactic. “Please.” She took one tentative step forward, battling a desire to grab hold of Sam by the arms and not let go until she extinguished every last question that burned her tongue. “Please, it might not seem like much to you, but if there is anything—however small—that you remember, that might help . . .” She trailed off helplessly.
Sam bit her bottom lip, leaving a line of even marks that looked as if her skin had been carefully stitched. Then she exhaled heavily and said, “Nothing. I’m sorry, there’s absolutely nothing I can tell you. Ell loved to fly up here and it wasn’t at all uncommon for him to go for a joyride.”
“You think it was a joyride?” Dani narrowed her eyes, scrutinizing the other woman for even the slightest hint that she had accompanied Etsell on any one of those rides, for clues that she was anything more than a coworker.
Sam shrugged. “Who knows? Listen, I know this probably sounds cold to you, but this is Alaska. Do you know how many people went missing in 2007 alone? Two thousand, eight hundred thirty-three. I know, because that’s the year I started working at the Midnight Sun. We had just lost a group of hikers. They were found three days later, dehydrated and hysterical, but just as often, people aren’t found.”
“But Etsell is my people.”
Something flickered through Sam’s eyes, the silver flash of a fish in shallow water, but before Dani could discern the emotion it passed.
“I’m sorry,” Sam said again.
Those futile words were quenching. All at once, Dani felt cavernous, hollow and empty, as if everything inside her had been scooped out and she had no more strength to stand. I’m sorry. What else was there to say? “Do you know what I thought?” she said almost to herself. “When I heard that you were missing, too, I thought that you were together.”
“Together,” Sam echoed quietly. The weight of the word was not lost on either of them, but she did not bother to deny the unspoken allegation.
“Who was he?” Dani asked suddenly. “I mean, here. Who was Etsell here? Did you know that there was . . . me?”
Sam tilted her head like a curious bird, but she seemed to take Dani’s question seriously. She thought for a long moment, then a trace of a smile whispered across her lips and she said, “Of course I knew about you.”
Something went out of the room, a tension, a taut line of strain that had been wrenching ever tighter between them. There was an inaudible snap in the air, a moment of clarity, and then Sam turned on her heel and left. No good-bye, no good luck.
It wasn’t until Dani watched Sam walk away that she realized they had both spoken about Etsell in the past tense. The finality
of it buckled her legs.
Hazel found her like that: in the middle of the conference room, cross-legged on the floor, staring blankly at the wall.
“You okay?” Hazel whispered, sinking to her knees beside Dani. “Did that little witch say something? Did she—”
“I want to go,” Dani cut in. “Right now. I want to go home.”
Danica
The world shifted while I was in Alaska. It was the soft thud of a bolt falling home, a fresh picture of something familiar that had gone grainy and haloed around the edges, almost ethereal. Nothing had changed, and yet everything was different. Ghosts inhabited my halls, memories of a life with Ell that were frozen in time until they could be buried forever or resurrected from the bay of ice and water where I was secretly sure my husband sank.
When I arrived home after midnight in the middle of a warm June night, I tiptoed through the rooms barefoot, hoping to catch a glimpse of the quiet phantoms that suffused the air with a scent like ether. Sweet and volatile. Ready to explode. But there was nothing to see, no words inscribed on humid windowpanes in whispers that would echo across whatever divide my husband had crossed. No moments of transcendence, no thin places where his spirit crossed mine in an act of divine comfort. Nothing.
It was a hollow feeling. Brittle, delicate, with edges as fine and deadly as blades. I cut myself on them as I turned on the lights in every room, and finally perched on a corner of our carefully made bed, bleeding, waiting. But there was nothing to wait for.
Five weeks had passed since Etsell had last curled up beside me beneath the sheets I sat upon. Just over a month, a small, defined span of time on a calendar of days that would continue to fade into oblivion with each orbit of the distant moon. It was less than a sliver outside my window, the moon, a whisper of nothing more than the faintest reminder that the hours would continue to slip by. Without him.
I remembered the first time we stepped foot in this house, the real estate agent’s hesitancy even to show us the white Craftsman with a sinking porch on the very edge of town.
People think that the South has soul, but I know that the North does too. It’s different, maybe. Cooler, more restrained. But Blackhawk is a rare gem of town, a family heirloom that sparkles still beneath well over a century of history that has accumulated like so much dust over our collective memory. There are the cobbled bricks of Main Street, a tiny graveyard with hand-carved headstones from the eighteen hundreds, and the oak that stands proud beside the library; it would take six grown men holding hands to encircle the prodigious girth of it. Most visibly there are old homes, houses with character and stories to tell.
Etsell and I fell in love with our home even before we were married. Blackhawk spills out from the center like an ornamental fan and slowly loses momentum as it spins toward the edges of town. The streets are frayed at the outskirts, with dandelions poking through cracks in the concrete and a scatter of forgotten houses that are one small step up from the trailer park where I grew up. But Ell and I weren’t aiming high.
We used to walk the streets of Blackhawk when I couldn’t stand another moment in the trailer and his dad was passed out on the living room couch. The weather didn’t matter. If it was cold we wound thick scarves around our necks and stuffed our fingers into fat mittens. And when the sun scorched and the humidity topped the charts at over ninety percent, we followed back roads to the river.
The Big Sioux was a shallow, muddy river, but it was wet, and that was enough to entice us to pick our way over a fallen log and let our feet dangle in the slow drag of the water. It wasn’t far from town, maybe a quarter mile on gravel past the spot where Thirteenth Street disintegrated into dust. And it was on that corner—the final mark of civilization between Blackhawk and the innocuous bramble of a thin prairie forest—that our dream house stood.
It was a single-story, post–World War I tribute to the unbalanced prosperity and hope of a country emerging from a cloud of disillusionment. There was a cautious optimism about it, the low double arch of the gabled roof and the generous porch spread out in welcome seemed cheerful somehow. But according to the deed, the house had enjoyed only two short years of contentment until the stock market crashed and the Great Depression caught Blackhawk in a strangling grip. You could almost see the effects on the sweet little house.
“It looks sad,” I said the first time we walked past. And the twin gables did indeed look like a pair of hooded eyes.
“It could be a great home.” Etsell stopped with his fists on his hips and studied the whitewashed structure before him. “It’s got a great porch.”
“Squirrels’ve probably built nests all over it.” I giggled. “I don’t think anyone has lived there for years.”
“We’ll fix it up,” Ell said, a grin in his voice. He came behind me and draped his arms around my shoulders, pressing his cheek to mine so that we saw the house from a matched perspective. “What color should we paint it?”
“Yellow. The color of winter wheat and linen.”
And that’s exactly what we did.
It didn’t feel like home without him. The wind hissed through the eaves in warning and every familiar sigh of settling wood seemed strange. I didn’t know this place. I didn’t know how to exist in it alone.
But after a few minutes of feeling sorry for myself, I put both hands on the bedspread beside me and took one last self-pitying breath. It was a long inhalation, a gulp of air that nearly ended in a sob, but I broke it off by clearing my throat. Then I pushed myself up, straightened my shirt with a deft tug, and went to work.
Etsell and I had closets across the room from each other, tiny square compartments with narrow doors and glass handles that hung a little loose. His was propped open, always, because there was a full-length mirror on the back. But it hurt to look at his clothes, to walk past and catch the faintest whiff of the crisp cotton scent of his dress shirts as it mingled with the musk of his skin. There was a lone tie dangling from the edge of the mirror—his only tie—and a pair of jeans that I had allowed to rest in a crumpled heap on the floor. I should have thrown them in the wash, but my dismissal of his abandoned laundry had been a gauntlet, a petty way to remind him when he got home that I hadn’t just been waiting on pins and needles for his eventual return. Now the faded pair of pants seemed an indictment.
I bent to pick up the jeans and shook them out with one hard flick of my wrists. Then I folded them carefully, smoothing the fabric flat, and placed them on top of neat pile of pants on a low shelf. I straightened everything, separating the hangers that held his shirts and tidying a stack of sweaters he never wore. When the closet was in order, I backed out—careful not to catch a glimpse of my pale face in the mirror—and shut the door.
The room seemed strange with Etsell’s closet shut. The door was a white portal, a place that held secrets and memories and wishes that I felt I would never again dare to voice. But one small thing had been done, and it pricked with the double-edged sting of guilt and relief. There was much more that I needed to do.
In the living room, random stacks of Etsell’s magazines loitered, poised for his return and the brief moment when they would be thumbed through and just as quickly discarded. Sometimes Ell pored over Aviation Week and Plane & Pilot, but Golf Digest only took up valuable space in the already overcrowded room. Either way, the glossy covers were visual land mines. I shuffled them together and dug an empty cardboard box out of the recycling bin in the garage. It was probably foolish to keep them, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw his subscriptions away either. I stuffed the box on a shelf in the entryway and shut the door a little harder than necessary.
Remnants of him lingered everywhere, details that had made our house a home and that now caused me so much pain I felt breathless from the ache of it. The bathroom was the worst. His towel beside mine, stiff from the dryer and unused because I had done a load of whites before I left for Alaska. I wished I hadn’t. I wished I could press the white terry to my face and take him in. His shampoo was
gone from the shower, and his toothbrush from the drawer. The only thing that held a trace of him was a thin disk of hard soap, a graying cake that he kept beside the sink for washing his hands and face before bed each night. I hadn’t touched it in the weeks that he was gone because I hadn’t really even noticed it was there. It was a part of the landscape, a fixture in our narrow bathroom.
But I saw it as I stood between the bathtub and the corner sink, and the feeling it evoked in me was visceral.
It was the only thing of Etsell’s that I threw away. And in the moment before I clicked off the light in the bathroom, I saw that it landed right on top of the used pregnancy test in the garbage can.
8
Sacrifice
Danica slept on the couch because she couldn’t bear to crawl into bed alone. She had slept alone before, but it felt permanent now, like wet concrete slowly setting, and she was afraid that if she conceded defeat on this one small front, her life would slowly harden along severe and lonely lines.
It was the perfect time of year for sleeping with the windows open, and she slid the double-hung panes as high as they would go to let in the night breeze. The air teased her, breathing soft kisses against the edges of the lightweight curtains before suddenly exhaling hard enough to make the wind chimes that hung just outside the front door play a string of chords presto e forte. Her first night home was made from the stuff of fever dreams and dark fantasy. Dani didn’t really sleep, she rested—with one half-dreaming ear open for the sound of a car in her driveway or footfalls on the steps of her porch.
But no one came until the sun was already bathing the corner where she slept in buttery morning light. The second she opened her eyes, the windy night was less than a memory, and Dani rolled off the couch feeling weighted and strange. She rubbed her face hard, then swept the afghan around her bare shoulders and stepped out into the day clad only in a pair of Etsell’s old boxer shorts and a tank top. She didn’t bother trying to hide a yawn when she realized it was Katrina who would be the first to welcome her home from Alaska.