Whenever I'm With You

by Lydia Sharp

  “Don’t get your panties in a bunch, princess, I didn’t mean nothing inappropriate. Tell ’er, babe. Tell ’er how we used to fly together.”

  Vicki presses her lips together. I’m starting to realize just how much of a sacrifice she’s making for us—first the snowmobiles and having to spend the night in a shed, now taking us to the home of her less-than-pleasant ex because he’s the only person she knows with a plane. “Yeah,” she says, “I used to be his copilot, helped him run summer air tours over Denali, back when we used to be together. Emphasis on used to.”

  “All I’m asking for is a ride with you,” Jack says. “So it isn’t so lonely on the way back? I just want someone to talk to.”

  Sure he does. “Forget it, Vicki,” I say. “You don’t need to put up with him. I’d sooner walk.”

  “No, I’ll do it,” she says, then cuts Jack a glare. “But I’m doing it for them, not for you. So don’t get any ideas.”

  “Or what?” He practically laughs the words.

  “Or my boyfriend will beat the tar out of you,” she blurts.

  Jack’s grin doesn’t budge, but the humor leaves his face. “You got a boyfriend? Who?”

  “Yeah, he’s, um … He’s …” She tosses a glance at Hunter. Raises a finger toward him. “Right there,” she finishes, her tone ending high like a question rather than a statement.

  Oh, mierda. Like we need any more complications on this trip.

  Hunter’s face remains oddly neutral, except for the usual wrinkle in his brow. That could mean he’s upset. Or it could mean he didn’t even catch what she said. You never know with him. And a little white lie might be considered harmless to most people, but Vicki doesn’t know how adamantly Hunter doesn’t want to be in a relationship, likely even to the extent of not agreeing to a fake one.

  If it were me, I wouldn’t. Small lies lead to bigger lies lead to hurting people you love.

  “Really, babe?” Jack says, ignoring the fact that Hunter really could beat the tar—and probably a few organs—out of him if he had reason to. “You’re with Hulk?”

  That did it. I can almost hear the gears shifting behind Hunter’s eyes, his protective instincts kicking in like Kai’s did over me. He crosses the room to Vicki’s chair and stands behind it like a sentinel. “That’s none of your business. And how about you stop calling her babe.”

  Not a question, a command. He might as well have just said, “Back off. She’s mine.” Jack stares at the tops of his shoes and mutters something about getting the engine warmed up, then makes a hurried exit.

  Firelight dances in Vicki’s eyes, and a distinctly pink hue has blossomed on her freckled cheeks. She’s lucky Hunter is actually a big softy under that hard-to-read exterior.

  Try as he might to deny it, he does care what happens to her. Maybe that’s the real reason he put the brakes on his social life, and used his extra schoolwork and taking care of his family as an excuse. Kai found a way to get out, regularly. But Hunter … Hunter didn’t want to. Spending time with someone leads to getting to know them, and getting to know someone leads to caring about them, and caring about someone can lead to loving them, and loving someone allows them to love you in return—the exact thing he wants to avoid.

  “We left you two alone for five minutes this morning,” Kai says, grinning. “That was fast.”

  I smack his arm.

  But his brother ignores him. “Vicki, this doesn’t mean we’re—”

  “I know,” she says, and a tiny smile twitches the corners of her mouth. But whether she’s glad she’s in a fake relationship with Hunter or that doing so got Jack off her back—maybe both?—isn’t clear.

  While Jack is out preparing the plane, and Kai and Hunter are out making sure Jack doesn’t change his mind, Vicki and I are left with a moment of peace by the fire.

  “I can’t believe Hunter went along with that,” she says.

  “He’s a good guy. Kai is, too. It must be genetic.”

  She shakes her head as if confused. “What are y’all doing up by Fairbanks that’s so important, anyway? I thought you were trying to stop Kai. Now you’re going with him.”

  She’s helped us so much, she deserves to know everything. And with Kai and Hunter and Jack outside, this might be my only chance to explain it to her without interruption or someone telling me she doesn’t have to know. Keeping secrets never does anyone any good, though. I’ve learned that from my mother’s mishaps with the media. People find out the truth eventually. You might as well be the one to tell it to them and at least salvage your credibility.

  I relay as much as I know, in a way that I hope makes sense. Hunter and the whole Locklear family think their dad is dead. Kai thinks their dad is alive. One of them is right, and one of them is wrong. Both of them are emotionally screwed no matter what the outcome. She listens without a word, occasionally nodding. And in Vicki’s world, I’m not sure what her silence means. Maybe it’s this place making her pensive rather than chatty, just being here, remembering her past relationship with Jack, whatever it was. From what I’ve seen of him so far, it couldn’t have been that great of a time in her life.

  Blessing or lesson—not hard to guess what Jack was for Vicki. But at least she got away from him. Now she can find someone better. I just hope she doesn’t believe that “someone” could be Hunter. He’s a road to nowhere—but it’s not my place to tell her that. It’s his.

  The shrill ring of a telephone interrupts my thoughts.

  “There’s a phone here!” I shriek. “Why didn’t you tell me there’s a phone here?”

  Vicki yelps at my outburst, and then again as I jump out of my chair. “You don’t have to answer it.”

  Still in my socks, I pad across the wood floor like a dolphin using echolocation. It rings and I move. Pause. Ring. Move. Pause. Ring. Move. Until I’ve stepped into a tiny room housing a bed so large it leaves no space for any other furniture but a nightstand, and on that nightstand is a corded rotary phone, something I’ve seen only in old movies. It’s stopped ringing. No answering machine picks up. This is my chance to call Dad before crossing the great Alaska Interior and I’ve no clue how to use this dinosaur contraption.

  I hold the clunky receiver against my ear and try to remember how I saw actors dial a phone like this. Finger in the hole. Spin it … which way? It doesn’t move in the direction of the number order, which makes no sense at all, but even more infuriating is that spinning it the other way does nothing, either.

  There’s still a dial tone. What am I doing wrong?

  “Help!” I yell to Vicki.

  She’s a ferret racing into the room. “What what what— What happened? Are you okay?”

  “Do you know how to dial this? I need to call my dad.”

  Vicki rolls her eyes. “Is that all? Pig on a stick, Gabi, I thought you saw a rat.”

  “Are there really rats here?”

  “You’ve seen the yard?” She jacks a thumb toward the front of the house. “All kinds of critters take shelter in that mess. Might be a whole family of Sasquatch in there!”

  She has to be kidding. Please let her be kidding.

  “But Jack don’t mind,” she goes on. “He loves animals, rats and all. He’s a jerk-face otherwise, but he’d never even swat a fly. That gun he’s got? For human trespassers only.”

  “How comforting.”

  I give my dad’s work number to Vicki and she spins the numbers in—clockwise—hitting the metal stopper hard with each one. That was my mistake. I didn’t turn the wheel far enough. In the vintage films, people are always in a hurry or angry when they dial a phone. I thought they were just being overdramatic, spinning each number with the force of a punch. But it’s actually necessary. How did people use these for years and years on a daily basis without getting calluses? And what if you had long nails? Impossible.

  The post office picks up and I barely get out “Alex Flores, please” before I’m put on hold. Vicki gestures at herself and then at the doorway. Thank yo
u, I mouth to her, and she walks out. A few decades of Muzak pass.

  Then, “Hello?”

  “Papi, it’s me.” Finally. And he’s loud and clear—God bless landlines.

  “No personal calls!” someone shouts on his end. “Is that an emergency?”

  “Is this an emergency?” Dad asks.

  “No, but … I didn’t catch what you said when you called earlier. The connection was bad and you got cut off.”

  There’s some shuffling on the line and he says something that I can’t decipher, his voice low. Then, to me, “Your mother called me while I was on my way to work—first thing on a Monday morning—just to accuse me of being a bad parent. She said I’m letting you run wild.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “I don’t know, querida. Why does she do anything she does?”

  That’s the million-dollar question. Or, in her case, multimillion.

  He sighs, heavy breath rattling the phone. “She was talking so fast I couldn’t keep up. Something about an alert on the credit card she gave you. Odd charges or something. I told her to put a freeze on it if she was worried about theft. Do you still have your card?”

  “Yeah, I … still have it …” And I’m an idiot. That’s the first time I’ve ever used my card outside of Anchorage or for something other than an online purchase. No wonder Mom freaked. She isn’t worried about theft like Dad thinks—she knows I’m not where I’m supposed to be. And at a lodge, of all places? With charges for two lunches, a room payment, and an exorbitant fee for the snowmobiles likely marked “other” or “miscellaneous.” Fantastic. I can just imagine what she thinks I’m doing there.

  Stay out of trouble, Gabriella. Those were her last words to me at the airport before I unleashed my fury onto her. Not “good-bye.” Not “I love you” or “I’ll miss you.” Stay out of trouble, as if I was the one to blame for all of this. Like I was the one who forced us into exile.

  She’s the one who needs to stay out of trouble, not me. But she was so worried I might do something to draw attention to myself, that someone would recognize me and connect it back to her, that she didn’t even say good-bye. Good freaking riddance.

  “Then I don’t know what she was going on about,” Dad says. “And when I asked her to slow down and explain, she hung up on me. Can you believe that?”

  No, actually, I can’t. If she wanted to give Dad an earful, she’d make sure he got it. There were plenty of times I heard her screaming at him long after he’d slammed a door shut or driven off. She’d stand at the front door, yelling at a pair of taillights. Our neighbors loved us.

  Nothing Mom does anymore surprises me, though. Maybe hanging up on Dad is just part of who she is now, I don’t know. And I don’t care.

  “What are you still doing back here?” that same gruff voice snaps at him. He’s gone from a scolding wife to a scolding boss. Moving to Alaska got him nowhere.

  He smooth-talks his supervisor into giving him two more minutes using his charismatic lawyer voice, then says to me, “I got a call from your homeschool teacher a little bit ago, too. She said you didn’t sign into class this morning. Are you feeling okay?”

  Part of me wants him to piece it together that I’m gone, panic and worry, become unreasonable, do something. But when I think about it logically, it’s not that unusual that Dad hasn’t noticed my absence yet. He leaves for work before I’m out of bed, and more often than not, I’m out somewhere with Kai when he gets home. His sleeping pills have knocked him out by the time I come home again. I’m entirely self-sufficient in the hours between. This phone call is the most we’ve talked in weeks.

  “I had a headache.” It’s not a lie. I did have a headache after slamming it into a car window. That happened yesterday, but it did happen. “It’s better now.”

  “That’s good,” he says. “I have to go. I’ll see you at dinner.”

  “No, wait. I’m”—don’t lie—“going out with Kai. I’m not sure when we’ll be back.”

  “Okay. Have fun.”

  Fun. Right. We say our good-byes, but I can’t get myself to pull the phone away from my ear until I hear the dial tone again. He’s gone. And he doesn’t know I’m gone.

  Mom knows, but what can she do about it, so far away? Except call Dad again, after she’s cooled down. By then I’ll be somewhere in the mountains north of Fairbanks, where neither one of them will find me even if they tried.

  But I still want them to try. Just because they’ve given up on each other doesn’t mean they should give up on me.

  During the twenty-minute walk to the airstrip behind Jack’s house, we discuss the plan. Jack’s going to have to find a place for us to land as close to the coordinates of the Locklear cabin as possible—which might end up being not very close at all. Jack has never flown to that area before, but Vicki assures us it’s not a problem. Despite her not having much faith in him as a human being, she has complete faith in his piloting skills. Flying is his life, and has been since he was a kid.

  I wonder if that was part of the problem when they were together. A passion like that can consume your time and mental focus so much that it drives other things—and people—out. Like Mom and her acting career. It started small, with bit roles and commercials, things that didn’t interrupt our life too much. I remember going with her to some of the auditions because she couldn’t find a babysitter, although I was too young to remember much more than that it happened. The details are fuzzy. I do remember she always took me out for ice cream afterward. Then some big shot “discovered” her and put her in a leading role of a blockbuster film, and after that, everyone wanted a piece of her.

  And I still wanted her, too. But more and more of her went to other people instead, until there were only crumbs of her existence left for me. Passing her in the hall on my way to the kitchen. A text to say happy birthday while she was on location in Italy. So when she made room in her busy schedule to talk to me face to face, one on one, I knew it was bad news.

  “You’re going to live in Alaska for a while,” she’d said.

  It was more lecture than discussion. No asking me how I felt about it. No remorse, for anything.

  When we reach the plane, Kai helps me climb inside the tiny cabin. Hunter hunches over to keep his head from hitting the ceiling, even after he sits, and stares out the window on his side. Jack is up front in the pilot’s seat, which is only a few feet from where I’m sitting. I’ve been on plenty of planes before, but nothing this small. I could stand on the nose and spit on the tail. Although I’d rather spit on Jack.

  Vicki climbs into the copilot’s seat up front and gives me a cheesy grin coupled with two thumbs up. She and Jack start flipping switches and turning knobs, speaking to each other in aviation terms that might as well be gibberish to me. Hunter leans and reaches across me and helps Kai into the cabin, then Kai sits across from me, facing me, his back to the pilots. Our knees are touching. How is this safe? Hunter props one foot up onto the empty seat across from him and stretches the other leg toward the cockpit, the picture of calm. Once we’re all settled and buckled in, Kai pulls the cabin door down and it clicks shut.

  “This is a first for me,” Kai says.

  “Me, too.” I reach over and take his hand. “I’ve flown before, but not like this.”

  “I haven’t flown ever. Hunter has. But I prefer to stay on the ground.” His knee bounces and he tosses furtive glances out the window. We haven’t even started moving yet.

  “I’m sorry I messed up your big plan,” I say.

  “You didn’t mess anything up. This is good. It’s good to try new things.” He tries a smile, but it’s tenuous, and his voice trembles. But he’s trying. He’s not giving up or demanding we find another way or insisting I go home because I threw a wrench into his journey. This is Kai, eternally optimistic, even when he’s doing something that obviously scares the snot out of him. “Remember what Dad used to say, Hunter? About trying new things?”

  Hunter shrugs and keeps star
ing out the window.

  “Wherever you go,” Kai says, “let your heart lead your feet.”

  Nice sentiment, but: “What does that have to do with trying new things?”

  “Because if you really want to try something, and you have a really good reason for wanting it, your heart will make you do it no matter how much your brain tells you not to.”

  Hunter doesn’t respond, so I give Kai a smile and say, “I like that.”

  The engine roars to life and the propeller spins outside the front window. Kai squeezes my hand hard and grips the edge of his seat with his other, the rest of his body completely rigid. As we move forward, which is actually backward for Kai, slowly at first and then faster and faster, Hunter reaches across the cabin, pulls Kai’s death grip off his seat, and holds his hand.

  He doesn’t let go until long after we’ve shot into the air and Kai has visibly relaxed. I know it’ll only be a couple of hours, but it seems like we’ve been flying for days already. The drone of the engine has dulled my ears into thinking the constant buzz is normal. But when I try to talk, I can barely hear my own voice, let alone Kai’s. We tire of shouting at each other after a while and opt for staring out the window, like Hunter’s been doing on his side.

  It’s beautiful, with all those mountains, rivers, and trees, and what isn’t snow-covered is a lovely shade of muddy green. From above, it doesn’t seem real, like we’re just analyzing a painting in a museum. The earth is a living work of art. We even see a herd of something running across a plain. Kai says it’s caribou. But then we fly into a dense fog that blocks the view. I lean back in my seat. Neither Jack nor Vicki seems concerned about the lessened visibility. I assume their instrument panel is helping them “see.” Hunter starts snoring, leaning against his window, and Kai is nodding off. They must be exuding sleeping gas because suddenly I’m fuzzy and warm and can’t fight the urge to nap along with them.

  I give in and close my eyes. Everything feels right and at peace. We’re together again. Soon we’ll get to the cabin and hopefully find the truth, whatever it is.