by Bill Rancic
“We need to stay here to look after them. We can help them plan and organize, get ready for when the rescue planes come.”
“Phil can do it.”
“You’re not thinking clearly. What happens if the weather clears up and the rescue planes find the crash site? We would be caught away from the wreck. They’d never find us. Not to mention it will be hard going. Very hard going. Walking in snowshoes isn’t like taking a stroll in the city.”
Bob narrowed his eyes at Daniel and said, “You telling me you think I’m too old and out of shape to go with you?”
Daniel looked at Bob’s well-fed physique, but he only said, “I wouldn’t dream of saying so.”
“Hmph. You know me well enough to know I’m doing this whether you want me to or not. Now, show me how to make a pair of these things.”
Daniel shook his head. There was no reasoning with the man. He could make all the snowshoes he wanted, but one trip up to the top of the ridge huffing and puffing the whole way would show him how wrong he was. If he even made it to the top. Daniel said, “Have it your way. I can’t stop you.”
Bob turned to the boy. “You think you could find more branches for me? You found all the best ones last time.”
The boy beamed and ran back to the woodpile, but Daniel said, “I don’t know what we’re going to use for laces. The kid scrounged everything he could find, even off the bodies outside.”
“There’s no more string?”
“You know where to find some, I’m all ears. Planes don’t carry much except basic necessities.”
Bob thought a minute, then leaned over to ask Kecia if there had been any duct tape aboard. She gave him a small smile. “Yes,” she said. “We keep it on board in case we ever need to secure an unruly passenger.”
Bob looked surprised. “And have you?”
She was still grinning. “Once or twice, maybe.”
“Do you know where it is?”
“I’ll give it a look,” she said, and disappeared toward the first-class galley.
“What else are we going to need for this little expedition?” Bob asked.
Daniel sighed, thinking. “Extra clothes, as many as we can put on. There’s no food left.”
“I stashed some. Some bags of pretzels, some water, a couple of sandwiches I brought back from the tail.”
Daniel was silent. Bob had hidden away food that could have been feeding the passengers, thinking only of himself as usual. It didn’t matter. Bob was Bob no matter where he went. He was always thinking of himself first. “Fine,” Daniel said.
“What else?”
“A map of the area would be nice.”
“Can’t help you there.”
“Didn’t think you could, but since I was wishing . . .” He thought a minute. “A couple of empty water bottles instead. Um. Snow goggles.”
“You think they have any on board?” Bob asked.
“We can make some. A strip of dark cloth will do the trick. We can tie it around our eyes and cut slits in it to see through. If the sun comes out, it’s going to get awfully bright out there. Our eyes won’t last half a day.”
“How would you know that?”
“Ever gone for a walk in the snow? It doesn’t take a genius to figure out.”
“Okay, Grizzly Adams. Anything else?”
“A compass, though I doubt we have much chance of finding one.”
“There’s a compass on my watch.”
He held up his heavy titanium military watch for Daniel to see, showing off the compass dial on the face. Daniel had often noticed the watch and wondered why his boss had spent ten grand on such a thing. He couldn’t really have known there would be a time when such a thing would be helpful, even necessary.
Daniel shook his head at the senior VP and said, “All right. We have a compass.”
“So what’s the plan, then?”
“If we’re lucky, the snow will have stopped in the morning and we won’t need a plan.”
“If we were lucky, we wouldn’t have crashed in the first place. Now, seriously, which way should we go?”
“Don’t think we’re going farther than up that hill,” Daniel said, “because that’s it. We go to the top to see if we can spot any man-made landmarks. Roads, bridges, that kind of thing. If not, then we come back down.”
“And if we do see any landmarks?”
“We try to use my phone to signal. If that doesn’t work, we build a fire. The bigger the better.”
“With all this wet crap?”
“We bring some dry kindling to get it going. Anyway, the wet stuff smokes more.”
Bob nodded along to all of this. Daniel could see him thinking it over, could see his jaw working the problem like a mule chomping at the bit. He wasn’t going to give up on the idea of walking out of here to find help; once he seized upon an idea, he’d never let it go. But he only said, “Good as any plan we’re likely to come up with.”
Bob sat in his spot on the floor nearest the first-class cabin, pulling one of the thin airline blankets around himself and settling down to wait for the boy to return with branches to make himself a pair of snowshoes. In the dim light, Bob’s white hair looked like a crown, like something out of an old legend or fairy tale. There’s no way, his face said, that a man like me is going to die out here. “Bet you never thought you’d be managing a disaster from the inside, did you?” he said to Daniel, who shook his head. The old man was enjoying this. He wasn’t thinking about the hardships they were going to face away from the plane, he was only thinking about being a hero. And Daniel had let himself be goaded into it, once again: letting Bob bully him into taking a risk he knew was foolish.
“You’re right, Bob,” said Daniel. “I never did see myself like this.”
If the old man thought he would goad Daniel into walking all the way into Whitehorse, though, he was sadly mistaken. Daniel was going to the top of the hill, and that was that. He wasn’t going to abandon Kerry here in the wilderness. He wasn’t going to let her go.
—
That night Daniel lay curled around Kerry in the dark, willing not only his body heat but his health, his strength, into the frail form beside him. Her and the baby both.
He was tired but not tired enough to keep his mind off the tasks he still had to do, the decisions he still had to make, hoping beyond hope that when he woke in the morning the sun would be shining and the question of whether to stay or to go would have been taken out of his hands.
When he wasn’t worrying over the trip to come, he was reliving the entire plane ride, starting first at the airport in Anchorage, when he’d watched the news and been relieved the flight was being allowed to leave. When the flight attendant came on the intercom and said they would begin boarding, he should have turned to Kerry and suggested they get a hotel for a couple of nights, wait out the storm. He should have known then. But she’d been so glad to be on her way home, where they’d start planning for their wedding just a couple of weeks away, and he had to admit he’d been relieved, too. He’d wanted to go home. They all had.
Then he was blaming himself for taking the aisle seat and leaving Kerry the bulkhead. If he’d taken the window seat, it was possible Kerry wouldn’t have received such a vicious blow to the head. Daniel hated the window seat, said looking out the window made him feel ill, and Kerry had always given the aisle to him, no matter where they were flying, or for how long. Just that once, couldn’t he have been more generous?
Two days they’d been out here, hurt and freezing, with no sign of rescue. He kept one ear tuned to the sky, but there was nothing but the soft silence of falling snow outside, the occasional snore of his fellow passengers, the butterfly flicker of Kerry’s pulse against his cheek. She’s only asleep, he told himself. It isn’t a coma. Beverly said so.
Tomorrow, if everything stayed the same, he was
going to have to make a difficult decision. You need to sleep, too, and all this worrying isn’t helping. But he didn’t. He lay beside her, half-awake, half-dreaming.
Sometime in the night, Kerry’s whole body went rigid, her legs trembling as if she were in pain. Daniel sat up immediately. Something was terribly wrong: Kerry was stiff, her hands clenched, but no matter how he shook her she wouldn’t wake.
“Beverly!” he called.
Half the passengers sat up and rubbed their eyes, wondering what was wrong. Beverly leaned over Kerry with one of the still-working flashlights, shining it into her eyes and away again, in and away.
“What is it?” Daniel asked. “What’s happening?”
The nurse said, “Her pupils are not fixed and dilated, which is a hopeful sign, but . . .”
“But what?”
“She seized for a moment there. The shaking legs—that’s a bad sign.”
“Help her. Please help her. I’ll get you anything you need.”
“She needs fluids; she’s dehydrated.”
“Can’t we get her to drink something?”
“She’d choke. She should be hooked up to an IV.”
“There might be an IV in the emergency kit.”
“Sure, but it’s a block of ice. I already checked.”
“Then what?” he begged, his patience wearing thin. “What can I do? Tell me anything and I’ll do it. What would you do if she came into the emergency room?”
“If she came into my ER unconscious and seizing, I’d intubate her and sedate her.”
“That sounds bad.”
“It is bad. All of this is very bad.” The tiny woman was shaking her head, and Daniel could see tears in her eyes: tears of helplessness, of rage, of resignation. This was where they were now: not alive or dead but somewhere in between.
Daniel knelt near the bulkhead and pressed his forehead against the cold plastic, feeling his own knees tremble, feeling the breath in his lungs threatening to choke him. The decision he’d been dreading the past two days was on him now.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
He looked up at the gray sky, the low clouds, the first changes in the light that preceded dawn. All night he’d hoped and prayed for the snow to stop, for the sun to rise, for the survivors to be rescued. He’d wanted the decision taken out of his hands, the decision of whether to go or to stay.
“The only thing I can do,” he said. “I’m going to try to get us all some help.”
15
“We’re almost to Edmonton,” I say. “Twenty miles. We should probably stop there for the night.”
For the last hour, Jackson’s been quiet in the back of the car, listening. This part of the story is another thing we’ve never really explained in detail—just how hurt Kerry was in the accident, how badly her life was threatened. I go quiet for a while, listening to the sound of the road under the tires, the swish-swish of the wipers clearing the windshield of a light, sleety snow. There are more buildings here, the towns closer together, signs for hotels and restaurants springing up along the highway. It seems a good time for a breather, to let our son take in everything we’ve told him so far, absorb it.
“Where do we want to stop?” Kerry asks, reading the signs one by one. “Look, this one has a pool, honey. What do you think?”
But Jackson isn’t thinking about pools or even dinner, which is how I know the story is really getting to him: he’s not the kind of kid who ignores his stomach. He says, “Is that why you sometimes have nightmares, Mom? Because you were hurt in the accident?”
Next to me I feel my wife stiffen. She says, “Sometimes. I don’t remember this part really well. Your dad knows more about it than I do and a lot of this story was told to us by other people who were there, after it was all over. I was pretty sick. It was scary, for a while. We didn’t know how it was going to turn out.”
“I didn’t know you could have died. I mean, I’ve heard you talking about the time you hurt your head, but I didn’t know it was so bad.”
“In some ways I was really lucky. Other people were hurt worse than I was.” She touches the black journal in her lap. I know very well what’s in there, what it says. Jackson will, too, soon. And what will happen then? Will it change him? I wonder. Will it change all of us, the life we’ve built?
He’s quiet again for another minute. The radio is playing some oldies, David Bowie singing “Modern Love.” “It must have been scary for you, too, Dad,” he says.
“It was,” I say. “We were all scared. But I suppose if we were never scared, we’d never need to be brave, would we?”
In the rearview mirror, I see him working his jaw, see him come to a decision. He says, “Yeah. That makes sense.”
In the car the three of us go quiet. “Okay,” I say, coming up on a hotel that looks clean, just off the highway. “Let’s stop here. Should we get pancakes?”
“Sounds good to me,” Jackson says. The moment’s over. Tomorrow we’ll have more to tell him, but for now it’s time to rest.
16
When the sun rose, the snow was still falling, the sky was still low and gray, and after another long and nearly sleepless night, Phil opened his eyes to the sight of Daniel, grim-faced, shaking him awake.
“Hey,” he said, looking around. “Can I talk to you about something? I need your help.”
“Can’t it wait?” Phil rolled over and felt a throb at the tender spot in his belly, felt the numbness at the tips of his fingers and his nose. He felt sluggish, unable to think clearly. He was aware of pain, and that something was wrong with him, but he couldn’t remember just at that moment what it was or how it had happened. His head was still full of half-remembered dreams: endless ice, endless cold, and something lost in the whiteness that he was looking for but could not find.
Daniel shook him again. “It can’t, I’m sorry.”
Phil sat up a little too quickly, the reality of their situation coming back to him all at once. “What happened? Is Kerry all right?”
Daniel was looking away, not at Phil but at the place where Kerry lay on the floor nearby, covered with the winter coats of the dead or missing passengers. There was a stillness about her that morning that Phil didn’t like one bit. He had to resist the urge to hurry over to her and shake her awake, beg her to open her eyes.
Daniel shook his head like he was answering a question no one had asked. He said, “I need you to take care of Kerry for me for a little while. Keep her warm, keep her safe. Beverly has more than she can handle already. You’ll look after her, won’t you?”
It was starting to dawn on Phil just what Daniel was saying. “You’re leaving?”
“I have to.”
“She needs you. I won’t do her any good.” Phil felt his anger rising. What did Daniel mean by deserting her when she was so ill? What could be so important?
“If there were anyone else to go, I’d gladly let them.”
“Anyone else could go. It doesn’t have to be you.”
“I know a little bit about surviving outdoors.”
“A little bit? Why, because you have a house by Lake Superior? That doesn’t make you qualified to lead an Arctic expedition.” Phil couldn’t think of anything more stupid and reckless. Hadn’t Daniel told Bob, just the day before, that leaving would be suicide?
“I know that!” he said. Then: “I’ve spent time in the woods. Not in this kind of cold, it’s true, but . . .” He looked grim. “I can’t ask anyone else to go instead of me. I’m not hurt, not sick. Believe me, I’ve thought of all the excuses.”
Phil frowned but only said, “So what are you going to do?”
“I’m going up that hill, to start with.” He nodded at the heavily wooded rise to the west of the crash site, pristine under a blanket of new snow. At the top the trees thinned, showing a dark rocky outcropping that was higher than
any of the others. It would make a good vantage point. “That was the direction we were heading in when we crashed. If we’re lucky, if we’re close enough, I might be able to spot a town or a road from that rise. Power lines. Anything that looks man-made would do.”
“And if you don’t?”
“If I don’t, and the rescue planes haven’t come by then, then I’m going to keep going.”
Phil couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Kecia said we might have been as much as three hundred miles away from Whitehorse when we went down. You going to walk the whole way?”
“I’m hoping it won’t come to that. I’m hoping I’ll be able to spot a road or a town. Something.”
“And if not?”
“If not, we’ll keep going until we do.”
“Wait a minute. Who’s ‘we’?”
Daniel’s mouth pressed into a grim line. “Bob’s coming with.”
“‘Bob’s coming’?” Phil gave a laugh of derision. “That’s just great. Bob’s in no kind of shape to be running up hills. He’ll only slow you down. Leave him here, put him in charge of watching over Kerry and the others.”
“I tried, but you know how he is. Wouldn’t hear of it.”
Phil got to his feet. “This is a stupid idea.”
“I agree.”
“I’m sure they’ll find us today. They’ll find us, and you and Bob won’t be here. We won’t even know where to look for you.”
“You’re probably right. They probably will come today.” Daniel shook his head slowly, like a man on death row who’d lost his last appeal. Phil was struck at how exhausted he looked: eyes sunken, three days of stubble on his cheeks, his mouth drawn with marionette lines of worry. He looked too worn out to make it to the top of the first hill, much less all the way to Whitehorse. “If they come today, fantastic. Bob and I will see them from the top of that ridge, and we can hurry back.” He looked over at Kerry again. “But if they don’t, if the ELT is broken, if the storm doesn’t let up soon, if they can’t find us . . .”