by Bill Rancic
Daniel stopped what he was doing and fixed Phil with a long, level gaze, long enough that Phil could see the things he was fighting with contending in his expression: fear for Kerry, for all of them; anger at the situation in which they found themselves; exhaustion; the desire to keep busy, to be useful.
Finally his shoulders slumped, and he said, “That’s how it’s feeling right now. That it’s my job to keep everyone alive.”
“It’s not, though. Your job doesn’t have you looking after Kerry. It doesn’t have you working without food or water or electricity in the middle of the wilderness.”
He leaned forward to put his head on his knees. “I can’t help feeling like it’s all up to me. If even the flight attendants don’t know enough not to give people snow to drink . . . I mean, how are we going to keep everyone alive long enough to be rescued?”
Phil didn’t say anything for fear he’d betray himself. He was in love with Daniel’s fiancée, and that fact had long kept him from making friends with this man, had made Phil dislike and resent everything about him, but the truth was that he admired Daniel, admired the way he didn’t sit around feeling sorry for himself, he did things, took charge. No wonder Kerry loved him, had chosen him. Daniel was the kind of person other people looked up to, the kind of person other people followed. Just then Phil wanted, for once in his life, to be that kind of man himself.
Phil pressed a hand against the sore spot near his bladder as if he could contain his pain. He said, “I don’t blame you for being worried. I’m worried, too. But don’t take it out on them.”
Daniel gave Phil a look that changed from anger to surprise to something that looked like grudging respect, all within the space of a few seconds. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry. I was out of line.”
“I’m not really the one you should be apologizing to.”
Daniel nodded, then approached the flight attendant and knelt down. He was sorry, he said—he didn’t mean to scare her, but he did need to ask that no one eat snow in place of water. It would make them too cold, as cold on the inside as they were on the outside, and right now they needed to be warm, to horde their warmth like misers with gold. Amber had nodded grudgingly and asked, “Okay, then. What do we do?”
Daniel grinned, his expression reversing back to its usual cheerfulness. “I’ll teach you the trick of it. You melt the water in your armpit.”
She wrinkled her nose. “That’s disgusting,” she said.
“Not really. Watch.”
Daniel knelt and scooped up the snow in Amber’s tray into an empty plastic bottle, showing her how to tuck it into her coat, inside her armpit, to melt the snow into drinkable water. After a few minutes went by, the flight attendant pulled out the plastic bottle to reveal several swigs of drinkable water inside. “See?” Daniel said, watching her open up the bottle and take a drink. “Voilà! Water for everyone.”
“Won’t it take a long time to make everyone enough to drink it this way?” Amber asked.
“It may interfere with our big plans to sit around freezing to death, sure, but I think we can manage,” Daniel said, but the flight attendant gave him a tentative smile, the tension finally broken. Phil was gratified to see that Daniel’s defensiveness and sarcasm were completely gone now, replaced by his usual easygoing manner. He’d be all right for a little while longer. Until tomorrow, anyway.
When the passengers had all been given plastic water bottles for their own drinking water, Daniel came back and sat down beside Phil. “So,” he said.
“So.”
“You were right, I was acting like it was a job site and I was in charge.”
“Only natural. That’s what you do all the time—you clean up disasters.”
Daniel looked up at Phil, his face going gray as the light faded. “And you’re a human-resources director. You manage people.”
“I try.”
“I’m sorry about before,” Daniel said, his expression full of something new that Phil had never seen before—respect, maybe. “I was out of line.”
“It’s fine. You’re worried about Kerry. Anyone could see that.”
He’d almost said scared but knew that would be going too far. They were not really friends, after all.
“But anyone wasn’t paying attention,” Daniel said. “You were.”
“I’ve seen it before.” Phil looked carefully down at his hands. He didn’t want Daniel to know just how closely he’d been paying attention. “Plenty of times.”
Now Daniel was the one paying attention. “Plenty of times, but one time in particular.” He narrowed his eyes at Phil. “One time when it was you, in my situation.”
Phil said nothing. Saying it out loud had always been difficult for him.
“Who was it?” Daniel asked quietly. “Girlfriend? Wife?”
“Wife,” he said.
“What happened?”
“Ovarian cancer.”
“Sounds bad.”
“It was.” To Phil’s relief, the other man didn’t cluck or make sympathetic noises or give him any hollow words of condolence. He sat for a while listening, watching the passengers huddling down for the night, curling around each other, while Phil told him about how fast everything had happened: the diagnosis, the treatments that didn’t work, the way the disease had robbed Emily of everything by the end, even her humor, even her beautiful mind. Every once in a while Daniel rubbed his hands on his jeans, both men’s thoughts on the sick woman in the corner. If she died . . . But Phil wouldn’t think about it. Not yet.
“That wasn’t the worst of it, though.”
“No?”
The sound of Daniel’s voice startled him. He’d almost forgotten the other man was there. It was like being in a confessional, he thought, like telling all his sins to a priest. Daniel never interrupted, didn’t judge or cringe or turn away as Phil told all his darkest, most appalling secrets.
“I ran away. Near the end. She’d been so vicious to me all day, telling me I was killing her, that I wanted her dead. She slapped me and kicked me. I mean, I knew it was the medicine making her act that way. The hospice nurses had warned me she’d have mood swings, that I wouldn’t even recognize her sometimes, but I never thought she would hate me so much.” He was still, the noises of the wind outside and the soft snoring of people the only sounds besides his voice. “One night I just had enough. I’d worked a ten-hour day and then went straight home to let the nurse go, but nothing I did was right. The look in Emily’s eyes—it was like she wasn’t even the same person. I got up and walked out of the house and left my dying wife alone in our living room. I was gone for three hours.”
This piece of information, possibly the most painful thing Phil had ever said out loud, still didn’t seem to faze Daniel. He only asked, “Where did you go?”
“I hardly remember. I went to the lake for a little while. Parked my car and just sat there, watching the moon come up over the water. I couldn’t believe this was my life. Then after a little while, I turned the car around.”
Daniel was sitting and listening, nothing more. “Then what happened?”
“Then nothing. I came home.”
Daniel said, “But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there? Something you’ve been blaming yourself for all this time.”
“I—”
How much could he trust Daniel, really? How much could he live with the man knowing, with anyone knowing what he’d done? What he’d nearly allowed to happen?
They were probably going to die out here anyway. What did it matter if he confessed his most grievous sins?
He said, “I didn’t even know how long I was gone until I got back and found the home-health nurse there, and the fire department. Emily was passed out on the kitchen floor. She’d been trying to make herself soup and accidentally left a kitchen towel on the stove. It caught on fire.”
&n
bsp; “Jesus.”
He screwed his eyes shut and rushed onward. “If a neighbor hadn’t seen the smoke coming out of the house and called the fire department, Emily would have burned the house down. She would have burned to death there in the house, because I left my dying, delirious, hallucinating wife alone for more than three hours.
“She was right where I’d left her, but she was crying and calling for me. When I went to her, she said, ‘I thought you weren’t coming back.’ I mean, who does that? How could I have abandoned her?”
“You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Didn’t I?”
“You didn’t. But I understand why you’d blame yourself.”
It was nearly full dark, but Daniel didn’t say anything more. Phil looked around the fuselage, at the passengers huddling together once more against the cold. Maybe it was the fact that they weren’t looking at each other that was making it possible, for the first time, for Phil to talk about Emily with someone. Or maybe it was because he knew Daniel couldn’t see his face. Or maybe it was simply that Daniel was the first person he’d known who didn’t pity him, who knew exactly what it was Phil had suffered all those days by Emily’s bedside. He’d seen it in the man’s face, hovering over Kerry: the look of utter and complete helplessness in the face of someone else’s suffering.
Phil stood and went to move back to his own piece of floor, but he couldn’t let the moment go: Daniel was still there, still listening. “If I could do it all again, I’d never let go, not for a second. Those three hours were a gift, and I threw them away.”
He lay back down in the dark and curled around himself, his memories making sleep impossible. If only he could go back and do it all over, he thought. How different things would be then.
14
That afternoon, the boy Zach and his mother had brought Daniel a number of green branches and enough shoelaces to reach from one end of the cabin to the other. Daniel had praised the boy’s ingenuity in coming up with a good substitute for string. “Shoelaces!” he’d said. “What a clever idea. I would never have thought of that on my own.” And the boy had beamed.
Now, unable to sleep, Daniel asked Kecia for one of the working flashlights, and he and Zach sat down to make snowshoes while Zach’s mother—Alice, her name was—watched nearby, wrapped in several coats and smiling a little at her son’s boyish enthusiasm. It must be hard for her, being out here with him on her own, Daniel thought, and then he wondered about the boy’s father, if he was at home waiting by the phone for word of his wife and son. He pictured the man—a solitary figure in khakis and a sweater, his damp-combed hair done in a neat part—arriving in Whitehorse with the rest of the families, pale and nervous, drinking bad hospitality-suite coffee and chatting halfheartedly with the other mothers and fathers and sons and daughters, tense and unhappy, waiting for news, dreading it, halfway convinced that the worst had already happened and hoping wholeheartedly it had not. He thought about all the mothers and fathers on board the plane, the living ones and the dead, and their families waiting for word of them, anything but waiting around, not knowing. It was not only Kerry who needed saving.
Daniel put his head down, talking to the boy quietly over their work, afraid to disturb the others, though it was only near six o’clock, long before bedtime, and inside the plane no one was really asleep. But it felt wrong to raise their voices inside the cabin somehow, like disturbing people praying in church. So Daniel and Zach sat with their heads together and whispered to each other—instructions from Daniel, questions from Zach—while they worked on the task of making snowshoes out of shoelaces and branches.
At one point Zach stopped and looked at Daniel. “Have you done this before?” he asked.
“Made snowshoes? No.”
“Then how do you know it will work?” the boy asked.
Daniel thought a minute about how he should answer that. “Well, I don’t exactly know,” he said. “I think it will work. I’ve worn snowshoes before. Not ones like these—metal ones, bought at the store—but these aren’t so different from the ones that people have been making for thousands of years in these parts of the world.”
“Really?” the kid asked. “Thousands of years?”
“Yep. The native people learned how to do it. Mostly you want to distribute your weight outward so you don’t sink straight down in the snow. With some good strong shoelaces and branches, we should be able to make a decent pair of snowshoes.”
“What are you going to do with them?”
“Well,” Daniel said, weighing his words carefully, “I might be able to gather more firewood, or look for more food. Maybe I could make it to the top of the hill and see a town or a road, something like that. The snowshoes will make it easier for me to walk now that the snow is so deep.”
Zach was getting excited now. “You’re going to help the rescuers find us?”
“Zach,” his mother warned. The kid’s face fell.
Daniel said, “I can’t go far. Here we have a place to sleep that’s warm and dry, and we have each other to help if we need it. If I left, I’d have to go by myself. It would be very dangerous.”
“What about our phones? My mom has a phone. Isn’t there a way we can call?”
“The phones don’t work if there are no signal towers nearby, and out here there are no towers, because there are no towns and no people. Besides, we haven’t been able to charge our phones in two days. The phone batteries are all dead.”
The boy looked over at the place where Kerry lay unconscious, her head cradled for the moment in Beverly’s lap. The nurse was stroking her hair and touching the spot near her temple where she’d hit it in the crash. “The red-haired lady. She’s your girlfriend?”
“That’s right.”
“Doesn’t she need a doctor?”
“Yes, she needs a doctor. She’s very sick.”
The boy was quiet, holding the ends of the branch together to make the frame of the snowshoe while Daniel tied it tight with the shoelaces. “I hope they find us in time,” the boy said.
“Me, too,” said Daniel.
He tied the ends of the snowshoe together and then began weaving the shoelaces across the frame, diagonally at first and then in and out, but as it turned out he didn’t tie it tightly enough, and as soon as he pressed down in the center of it with his hand, the shoelaces gave, pulling the frame apart with them, so that Zach ended up holding the long green stick and a lap full of multicolored shoelaces.
“Well,” Daniel said, “that wasn’t the right way to go about it. Let’s try again.”
On his second attempt Daniel wrapped the branch with a shoelace first and used the wrapping to anchor the diagonal lines in place. He anchored two short branches in the center of the snowshoe for cross-pieces and wrapped them with laces as well, tying everything so firmly that even when he pressed down in the center of it, it barely gave. Better. It might actually hold his weight. The only question was for how long?
The second snowshoe was even more difficult than the first one. The branch he’d chosen was too dry, too brittle to bend, and snapped in half when he went to close the loop. He had to send Zach’s mother to the woodpile with a flashlight for another branch. Luckily, the one she brought back this time was green, long as Daniel’s leg, and with a little manipulating, Daniel was able to get a second snowshoe ready to go.
He was brushing pine needles off his lap when Bob came over. “What are you doing?”
“Making snowshoes.”
“Bullshit.”
“Watch the language around the kid,” Daniel said, but Bob didn’t apologize.
“About time we took matters into our own hands. This mean we’re going to take off in the morning?” he said.
“No. It means we’re making snowshoes, and that’s all.”
“We should walk out of here. Get some help.”
Daniel didn’
t think Bob knew the slightest thing about what he was saying. Walk into the Yukon wilderness in December in homemade snowshoes, with no fire and no equipment? The guy was insane. “We need to stay with the wreck.”
“Listen, you think Kerry’s going to last much longer? You said yourself she’s barely conscious. We have no food, no water. God only knows how long this storm is going to last. You and me, Daniel, we have the chance to do something here, really do something.”
Like get ourselves killed? Daniel thought. “I’m not going any farther than the top of that next hill, the one to the west. If I don’t see anything, I’m coming straight back down to wait. That’s all,” Daniel said, but he knew better than to disabuse his boss of an idea once he got it into his head. The old man was right about Kerry, even if he was wrong about the two of them being able to do anything to help. Still, Daniel was genuinely surprised when Bob asked, “You got enough for a second pair of those?”
“Not really.” There were maybe three or four shoelaces left, hardly enough for a full pair of snowshoes.
“I’ll have to see if I can find something else to work with, then.”
“What for?” Daniel asked, already dreading the answer.
“I’m coming with you.”
Daniel shook his head. “Bob, no, don’t even think about it. We need to stay near the shelter. Going out into this weather without the proper equipment is insane.”
“We can’t sit around and wait. Some of these people are seriously hurt. You said yourself that the ELT was probably damaged. If we can find a road or a house and let people know where we’re at, why wouldn’t we do it?”
Daniel didn’t want to say what he was really thinking: that Bob was in no kind of shape for the trek to come, nor did he have the slightest idea of how quickly exposure to the elements could shut down a human body. Daniel didn’t want to be saddled with him out in the wilderness, just the two of them, miles from help or even the limited comfort of the plane’s fuselage. If he got sick, if he collapsed . . .
“I can’t sit around here all day waiting,” Bob said. “It’s driving me nuts. All these people with nothing to do.”