by Lydia Sharp
I consent with a nod. It’s more than Kai would have agreed to, allowing me to cover half, let alone cover all of it up front. Wherever Kai got his view on earning money and taking handouts, Hunter either wasn’t there with him or simply doesn’t agree. My bet’s on the latter. So many other things about them have already proven to be different, sometimes so different they are complete opposites. I have to keep reminding myself they had the same parents and grew up in the same house.
We abandon our plates, then head to the front counter near the bar. Vicki meets us at the register. She’s been running all the tables by herself, and they’ve become fuller and busier in the last twenty minutes, and now she’s ringing us out, too. I scribble a larger-than-required tip onto my receipt. Not just because I feel for her plight—being dragged out here by her parents, with likely no say in the situation, only to have them split—but because she relies on tips for a means to live, to help her mom, like she said. So I’m giving her something she can actually rely on.
I do feel sympathetic toward her, though. I didn’t have a say in moving to Alaska, either, but at least I’m not stuck here forever, held hostage by other people’s generous or not-so-generous natures and their ability or inability to calculate a percentage. I double-check my math and hand her the receipt, then turn away just as her eyes expectedly widen in disbelief. She doesn’t argue it, though, or claim I unknowingly wrote the wrong number. She just says, “Thank you, Gabi,” and for a moment I’m the one a bit shocked. Maybe everything about me really does scream money like Hunter said.
I’m two steps farther from the counter and closer to the door when I realize he isn’t moving. He’s staring at the wall. It’s covered with a bunch of old Polaroid photographs, each of them labeled in Sharpie with a date. Some of them also include a quote left by the person in the photo, ranging from silly to inspirational to sarcastic. The ones he’s looking at are several years old, but the backgrounds on all of them are the same. They were all taken here, in this restaurant.
“Are you and Kai up there?” I say.
“Yeah.” He points to one in the middle, surrounded by so many others with similar coloring, shading, and slightly blurred faces that I would have never picked it out. But there they are, the Locklear twins and their dad standing between them, with the same facial features as they have now but childlike. Pudgier cheeks. Innocent smiles. Softer eyes. All three of them hold their hands above their foreheads, fingers curled like antlers. They’re happy, and once again I’m struck with remorse for assuming they had a deadbeat dad.
“That was another life.” Hunter shakes his head, then flips up the hood of his coat. “Let’s go find him.”
I pull my own hood up, and something on the wall of pictures catches my eye, near the bottom, where the more recent photos have been posted. At first I thought the date was wrong, because who still uses a Polaroid these days, when everyone has a camera on their phone? But there are several from this year, and one of them is another person with their hands above their forehead—the only other person on this wall like that. My brain recognizes that it can’t be a coincidence before I’ve even understood why I leaned in to get a closer look.
And my brain is right. It’s Kai. I’d know those eyes anywhere. Below his face, along with a date, Kai’s hurried scrawl reads:
“Hunter, wait!” I tear the Polaroid off the wall, and the pushpin that was securing it goes flying over my shoulder. Hunter turns away from the exit. I wave the photo in his face, and the usual furrow in his brow deepens to a trench. “Kai was here. Just yesterday.”
Hunter grabs the photo and whirls on Vicki. “Did you see this guy yesterday? He’s my brother. Did you talk to him?”
Vicki nods, and her eyes shift between us a few times. “He didn’t stay long, but yeah. I took that picture last night. And no, you can’t have it.” She fishes a new pushpin out of a drawer beneath the counter and then snatches the photo out of Hunter’s hand.
“Last night—” My hand flies to my chest. “Then he can’t be too far from here. Can he?” I look to Hunter for an answer, but his eyes are glued on Vicki.
“What else did he say?” Hunter presses. “Tell me everything you remember. We’re trying to find him.”
Vicki stammers for a moment. Her cheery charm has fled, and with good reason. Hunter has gone into full interrogation mode. Instead of answering right away, though, Vicki attaches the photo back to the wall.
“This is really important,” Hunter says, his voice so low the words almost sound like a growl instead of a sentence. For someone as levelheaded as he is, the boy can snap in a heartbeat. All it takes is the right trigger, and apparently his twin brother is it. “Kai’s headed to the wild outside Fairbanks,” he says to Vicki. “You know, where you said people die. If we don’t stop him, Kai might die, too. He left home a few days ago, so he might not even know there’s a bad storm this close, and if he’s not prepared for it, then he’ll definitely die.”
Every time he says the word die, Vicki pinches her sweetheart lips, like she’s holding back from an instinctual rain of indignation in response to his veiled accusation. “I didn’t know he was in danger. He didn’t say what he was doing. We get a lot of people coming and going through here, all ages, all types. He wasn’t no different.” She pauses in thought. “Except that he seemed really happy,” she adds. “Almost too happy. Excitable. Too much energy for someone who was traveling all day. He just stopped by to use the facilities. He didn’t eat or drink. Said he’d been here before and liked it, so it wasn’t nothing personal, he just didn’t have time to spare. Then when he saw the pictures, he asked if I’d take his. I’m not supposed to do that if a customer doesn’t buy anything, but he was nice. I liked him.”
“I like him, too,” I say. “He’s my boyfriend.”
“Aren’t you with this guy?” Vicki jacks a thumb at Hunter.
“Not with him, with him—”
“Vicki!” the bartender shouts. “You’ve got other customers!”
Hunter’s shoulders drop on a sigh, and his next words sound more like his usual self. “I know you have to go, but is there anything else he did or said that you think might help us find him quickly? We’re trying to get to him before the storm does.”
“He didn’t say where he was going, but he did say he’d been walking all day. It was just before the dinner rush when he stopped in, but he didn’t seem too tired. I offered him a room and he said ‘I’m gonna keep going until the sun stops me.’ My older brother, Johnny, is like that. He gets so excitable sometimes, disappears for weeks, and we don’t know where he’s been until he comes back. He always comes back, though, so we stopped fussing over it, and then he sleeps and sleeps for days. Mama thinks he has a chemical imbalance, like bipolar, but Johnny refuses to go to a doctor, says he doesn’t want people messing with his brain.” She cocks her head. “Is Kai bipolar? Is he off on a manic adventure? He was in and outta here like the wind, Mama would say.”
“He just likes the outdoors.” My outer calm remains intact, even though my heart is kickboxing my ribs. What if Kai does have some kind of imbalance? I haven’t known him long enough to see him cycle through ups and downs. What if these past three months have just been a high for him? All that energy that drew me to him—what if it’s about to peak before he dives? What if he believes he’s Superman, invincible, and jumps off the edge of a cliff? Or challenges a bear to a duel? Or—
“Vicki!” someone yells from the kitchen. “Orders’re up! Before they get cold, will ya?”
“Thanks for your help,” Hunter says. He doesn’t seem fazed by Vicki’s impromptu psych evaluation of Kai, but he’s so hard for me to read sometimes, that’s no comfort.
“Sure, um …” She reaches into the half apron tied at her waist, pulls out a business card, and hands it to Hunter. “That’s our number. I’m here every day of the week if, you know, if you need help with anything, or … to just let me know you found him?” Her top teeth catch her bottom lip, and she
starts to edge away, toward the kitchen. “Nice meeting y’all. Be safe out there. Oh, and don’t forget to like our Facebook page!”
Outside, a short, stout woman is hunched over, shoveling a walkway from the door to the parking lot. The snow has already accumulated an inch or so. Not enough to keep us from driving, Hunter says, but more than I’ve ever seen on the road or on a sidewalk or anywhere. From inside it looked beautiful, but now tendrils of worry creep around my middle, clinging to my ribs like sticky vines. We step around the woman shoveling, and she says, “Come again soon!” in a tone so cheerily similar to Vicki’s that it could be her mom.
As I climb into the Outback, Hunter starts the engine. “Do you have GPS on your phone?” he says.
“Yeah.” I turn up the heat to full blast. “Why?”
“I want to see if I can find a quicker route to get us close to the next shelter. It’s more than twenty miles from here. Kai couldn’t have gotten that far from here just since last night, assuming he’s being smart and not traveling in the dark. If we take a shortcut, maybe we can get there first, stop him in his tracks instead of chasing him. He’s already gone too far.”
Fifteen minutes later, the drive has already become monotonous. Snow builds quickly on the road, slowing us down. I keep my focus outside, through my side window, hoping to catch a glimpse of someone hiking across the open plains or through the random sections of trees. But so far, no one.
I lean back and sigh, the thickening white blanket around us suddenly too bright and painful to look at anymore. Vicki’s question pounds against my skull. Is Kai bipolar?
Of course I’ve heard of bipolar, enough to know it includes both highs and lows, but I wouldn’t know what kind of everyday signs to look for, especially in someone I only just met. My dad has depression, my mother has a diva complex, and one of my exes was a pathological liar. That’s the extent of my hands-on knowledge of mental illness.
“You okay?” Hunter says. “How’s your head?”
“It isn’t my head I’m worried about.”
He grunts softly through his nose. “This is why you’re good for him, you know? You’re not like other girls he’s dated.” He eases off the gas pedal as we go around a curve in the road. “You’re perceptive, Gabi, and you’re direct. He needs someone like that. He needs you.”
“Even though I’m the one who let him slip away?” I counter. “How perceptive am I really, if I didn’t figure out that his good-bye meant good-bye? That this necklace wasn’t just a gift but a symbol of his absence?”
“I said you’re perceptive, not psychic. Not a mind reader. Don’t blame yourself for his lack of explanation.”
Easier said than done. “Well, you know him better than anyone, I won’t argue with that. So tell me—do you think he has … something? Like Vicki said about her brother?”
“I’m not studying psychiatry, so this isn’t based on anything except the fact that I’ve lived with him since before we were born—but no. I don’t think he has a chemical imbalance. Not like that, anyway. Is he mentally imbalanced lately, though? Yes.”
I suck in a breath, and Hunter rushes to explain.
“He and Dad were really close, closer than any of us, except Dad and Mom. And when Dad died … the way it happened … we never got to see him—I mean his body—so the whole thing was hard to believe. We were told what happened and that there was no chance he survived, and we understood it, the reasons were logical, but it took a while for all of us to accept that he was never coming home, so it didn’t strike me as odd that Kai didn’t cry at the funeral. Other people were crying and he was comforting them. Helping Mom became our top priority, and it didn’t really hit us until long after condolences stopped coming. It hit me, anyway. Then I was so overwhelmed by my own grief that I didn’t realize Kai still hadn’t changed his behavior six months after the fact. It was an especially harsh winter, but it wasn’t until spring that Kai started … reacting to Dad’s absence. Like, I don’t know, maybe he thought Dad hadn’t come back because the bad weather prevented him, and when the weather turned, he realized the truth. He sank into a depression, but I thought he was finally dealing with it, so I let him be.
“But then he got so low it worried me all over again. He kept taking care of everyone, every day, but he stopped taking care of himself. He wouldn’t shower or change his clothes for days. He stopped going out with his friends. He almost didn’t pass junior year.”
My chest constricts and the back of my eyes sting, picturing Kai in that state …
Snowflakes come down harder, and the already gray sky has darkened. Hunter flicks on his headlights and turns the windshield wipers up a notch. “I tried talking to Mom about it,” he continues, “but she said Kai just needed more time to process. That everyone grieves in their own way and on their own schedule. It wasn’t long after that when you moved in next door, and …”
I swallow hard, silently willing him to finish. The five on the far right of the car’s digital clock flips to six before my patience runs out. “Was that a good thing?” My voice has the strength of a mouse.
Hunter lets out a breathy laugh. “It was a very good thing. He became himself again. Kai’s crazy about you—but he isn’t crazy.”
I want to believe that’s true.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Hunter says, “but your moving here was a relief to me. With you keeping him occupied and happy again, Kai was one less person I had to worry about. What happened to Dad really messed him up. They were close,” he repeats.
I’d thought we were close, too. “Then why didn’t he ever tell me about him?”
“I don’t know.” Hunter’s jaw tightens. “Are you sure you want to find out?”
“Yes.” The truth can’t be any worse than the frustration of wondering.
Know that I’m thinking of you, Kai said when he gave me the rock necklace, and how I feel whenever I’m with you.
I’m thinking of him, too, but all the good I felt when we were together, all the warmth in our connection, is chilled with uncertainty now.
A yawn stretches my mouth, throat, lips, and lungs so wide I let out a squeak. Exhaustion and a full belly are working hard to shut me down. The snow is practically impossible to see through, but Hunter doesn’t show any indication he thinks we should stop driving.
“You can sleep now, if you need to,” he says. “You’re out of the woods.”
Out of the woods … As I lose the fight to stay awake, I see an image in my head of Kai in the woods, snowdrifts building around his stiff, frozen corpse.
Hunter shakes me awake what feels like only seconds later, but the clock tells me I just lost over an hour of my life to dreamless sleep. “We have a problem,” he says.
“What?” I bolt upright and rub my eyes. There’s nothing but white. Everywhere. Despite the chilling view around us, the inside of the car is musky and warm. I cling to that comfort like a child would its mother. “Where are we?”
“That’s the problem,” Hunter says. “I think I missed a turn somewhere. I have to stay focused on driving, though. Can you check the GPS? Your phone is dark. I think it went into sleep mode with you.” He huffs a laugh, but it sounds forced, like he’s trying to keep me from worrying, and there’s a tense underlying edge to his voice.
I pick up my phone and swipe the unlock pattern across the screen. Nothing happens. I try holding in the power button. Still nothing.
Which means the battery’s dead.
Which means no GPS.
Which means, if Hunter doesn’t know where we are, then I definitely don’t know where we are, and we’re officially lost.
“So where are we?” he says.
“Somewhere in outer space.” I hold up my phone, its solid black face toward him. “The battery died.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“It wasn’t fully charged before we left, but I thought it had enough juice to get through a day, so I didn’t bring t
he charger. I don’t use the GPS that much, though.” More like never, because that would mean I’m going somewhere I’ve never been, without someone to accompany me, and that would require more adventurous spirit than I possess. “It uses up more battery life.”
We pass some dilapidated barbed-wire fencing that encloses a snowy pasture with tracks crisscrossing over it. A small herd of cattle mill about inside, literally the only living things in sight besides trees. We have officially entered The Middle of Nowhere, Alaska.
In a last-ditch effort to salvage control of the situation, I scramble toward the backseat and find the map of Alaska that Hunter showed me last night. But it doesn’t tell me which mountain that is ahead of us or which mountain that is behind us, or where that … scary dirt road leads to … Not going there.
“We need a more detailed road map,” I say. “This one only shows the major cities and major highways. Of which there are, like, maybe two in the whole state?”
“Okay.” He sucks in a deep breath and lets it out slowly. Steadily. “I’ll just keep driving until we pass a house or a lodge or something, and we can ask for directions.” He flashes a smile at me, but it’s shaky. “We’ll be fine. Everything will be fine.”
Nothing about this is fine, including my lack of patience for it. Hunter’s outward calm is unfortunately not contagious. I let loose a string of expletives, some of them English and some of them Spanish. The acidic tone of my voice sounds like Mom, which makes me want to cuss even more. For most of my life I wanted to be just like her, and now I’m afraid that I’m becoming just like her.
Eventually we do find a lodge, but we also find we’ve made zero progress.
Hunter unbuckles his seat belt. “Are you kidding me?”