by Bill Rancic
Instead, feeling a profound weariness settle into his bones, he crawled back inside the shelter and lay down with his back against Bob’s. The two men curled up against each other in the small space of the shelter, using their body heat and the small fire to chase off the cold. Don’t think I’ll forget this. Not for a second.
He still couldn’t sleep, his anger a towering thing, burning so brightly that he could hardly keep his eyes closed. He should turn back now, he thought—just go back to the crash site and wait with the others. By the time he made it back, the weather would surely have cleared up, and they could build a signal fire so big it wouldn’t be missed by rescue teams. That was the only sane thing to do. Get up and leave right now, Albrecht. Get up and let this old fool take responsibility for his actions himself, for once in his life.
So why couldn’t he do it? Why couldn’t he just stand up and leave Bob sleeping there, alone in the bush?
Because Bob wouldn’t last the night without him. He’d be leaving an old, sick man to certain death in the cold and snow. And Daniel couldn’t do that to another human being, no matter what the miserable sonofabitch had done to him.
He curled into himself, not really awake but not sleeping, either. There were noises around them, small scurryings that kept him wakeful.
As the hour grew later, Daniel felt the wind shift and change, the temperature drop once more. At one point he crept out of the shelter to look and saw that the night sky was clear, at once darker and brighter than he had ever seen. Clear! The storm had lifted at last.
Within that window, the black sky was completely lit by stars, more stars than Daniel had ever seen before, with the bright yellow-white cloud of the Milky Way at the center of the sky. His breath caught. It was beautiful. He hadn’t been expecting beauty, not out here.
The stars were all dead now, their light reaching him long after they were gone. Growing up in the northwest Indiana side of Chicago, surrounded by steel mills and factories, he’d never realized the sky was so full of stars. Even in the places he’d camped as a child—Wisconsin, Michigan—there had almost always been a town within a few minutes’ distance of the campsite. The light had never been able to reach him.
The night sky of the Yukon was something else indeed. It went on and on, sublime—almost like being in church. How many of his ancestors had stared at this sight? How many poems had it inspired, how many lovers, how many dreamers? Daniel felt a part of something greater than himself, a link in a chain of survival that reached back and back into the past, into the darkness.
He wished Kerry were here, so he could show her the stars.
He felt his eyes drooping, but he knew he couldn’t sleep away from the shelter; it would be the end of him. Only the shelter, the fire, the bit of human warmth that lay there would keep him alive until morning, so he crawled back inside, his back to Bob’s, and he dreamed he was back home in his own bed in Chicago, where it was warm, and Kerry was rolling over in the darkness to kiss him good night. Sleep well, sweetheart, she said to him, her mouth touching his eyes, his nose, his mouth, her breath sweet, turning to sugar, spilling over something warm and dark, spilling in countless grains as numberless as the stars. He tried to tell her about the stars, but she stopped him again with a kiss and said, Go to sleep, Daniel. I’ll wake you in the morning, I promise.
22
Kerry woke with the sound of snoring in her ears and the feel of Daniel’s arms around her. Her back—where Daniel lay with one arm pillowed under her head and the other resting lightly on her hip—was warm enough, but the rest of her was freezing, her hands and feet and face especially, and she turned and buried her face in Daniel’s chest to warm herself. She had the feeling that she had fallen asleep someplace she shouldn’t have, like she’d drunk too much at a party and had needed to spend the night on a friend’s couch, but she was glad Daniel was there, glad of his closeness. The smell of him was strange, smoky, as if he’d been standing by someone’s fireplace, and there were strange sounds around her, the breathing of many people at once. She stirred and came back to herself. Where was she? She had a sense of lost time but not how much. A few hours? A few days?
“Daniel?”
She opened her eyes to a pale blue-gray light and the sense she was in a crowded place with many people. She could smell and hear rather than see them—people covered with soot and pine sap, people breathing and whispering to one another, crowded close together on the floor. The space in which she found herself seemed to be the inside of an airplane, but all the seats were gone. Also, it was terribly cold, much more so than she’d realized at first, because the part of her that had been pressed against Daniel was so warm.
Was it Daniel, though? The man lying next to her was darker than Daniel, with short-cropped black hair and long, dark eyelashes against sallow cheeks, several days’ worth of stubble obscuring his jaw. Not Daniel, then—but who was he, why was she lying next to him? He didn’t look healthy; he gave the impression of someone who’d just gone through surgery, some kind of ordeal that had sapped his physical strength. She squinted, and the man’s features rearranged themselves into something she recognized. Someone.
“Phil?”
He sat up, still holding her around the waist with one hand. “Sorry,” he murmured, taking his hand away. He blinked several times and seemed to come back to himself. “You’re awake. Are you feeling all right?” His voice betrayed a combination of relief and concern both.
“Sort of.” She looked around her, trying to put together the things she remembered with the things she saw around her. She remembered being in Alaska, the airport in Anchorage. She remembered talking to Daniel about something important. The wedding, she thought it was—and something else, something that nagged at her but that she couldn’t remember. She remembered terror and falling, and walking around the bodies of the dead, trying not to look at them. “How long was I out?” she asked.
“Two days, give or take.”
Two days—no wonder she felt so strange. Light-headed. Thick-headed. “Where’s Daniel?”
Phil kept watching her with that same intense look, but he didn’t answer her question. “What’s the last thing you remember?” he asked.
“I don’t know. The airport in Anchorage I remember, and then I remember waking up on the ground. Daniel was here, and I remember talking to him.” She sifted through the images that came to her, unsure which were dreams and which were real. “Daniel left for a little bit, but then he came back. I’m sure of that. He came back with another passenger from the tail, didn’t he? I think I saw him sliding downhill toward us.”
The talking was helping, the sound of her own voice bringing her back to herself despite a strange mixture of terror and slowness, as if her body would not let her get the words out quickly enough. She felt drugged, almost, but with a core of pain nestled in the middle of her like a bullet in a wound. She only knew that Daniel was supposed to be here, and he wasn’t. She’d been so sure. The last thing she remembered, he had been right here.
Phil was looking over at someone else—a tiny dark-haired woman in the corner, who was sitting up and watching the whole exchange. She looked familiar, too, but Kerry couldn’t put a name with her face. Some kind of look passed between them.
“What’s going on?” Kerry asked.
Phil said, “Daniel left to go find help.”
“Why? Shouldn’t he have stayed here with the rest of us? Wouldn’t that be safer?”
Phil’s face pinched itself into a look Kerry knew well—the frown, the eyes hooded with discomfort. He didn’t want to be the one telling her this. “He was worried the rescue teams were having trouble finding us, because of the weather. He was sure the emergency transmitter was damaged in the crash, and then, things started to get bad . . .”
“What things?”
“You were hurt—” Phil started. Then he must have seen something in her face, because he
stopped, pulled back and started again. “A lot of the passengers are hurt. Not just you. I’m hurt, Kecia’s hurt, a lot of people. He thought he might be able to find a road or a cell-phone signal.”
A panicky, fluttery feeling clutched at her, clawed at her throat. “But there’s no shelter, no food. He’ll freeze to death!”
“He was scared. We all were. You wouldn’t wake up, and then Beverly said you might lose the baby . . .”
She stiffened. The baby—that was the thing she hadn’t remembered right away. Now it came flooding back to her, the missed period, telling Daniel. But the pregnancy was so unexpected, so new, she’d barely had time to think how she felt about it, much less decide how she wanted other people to feel about it. “How do you know about that?”
Phil blinked several times and looked away as if in apology for bringing it up. “Daniel told me. He thought I should know. He asked me to look after you until he got back.”
Rising panic again, her breath coming fast and heavy, her heart shattering her ribs. “That’s why he left, wasn’t it? He thought we were in danger. The—the baby and me.”
She could barely speak. Daniel was out there alone in the cold and the snow. He’d taken on a suicide rescue mission all because of her.
“It wasn’t just you. It’s been too long—no one’s found us. If the storm stops, he said he’d come right back. But someone had to go, and Daniel was the best chance we had. He knew that.”
She pulled herself up into a standing position. “If I wasn’t pregnant right now, he might not have gone at all, would he?”
Phil looked over at the woman in the corner again, quickly, then back at Kerry. The woman’s eyes were pleading with Phil, Don’t upset her, keep her calm, don’t get her riled up . . .
Kerry felt her emotions all snap into place. “Tell me the truth, Phil! I’m not a child! Daniel risked his life for me and the baby, didn’t he?”
Phil didn’t answer. The force of her anger was a power she couldn’t contend with; it would sweep her up, sweep her away. Suddenly the inside of the plane was stuffed with too many people, it was too close, too crowded, and Kerry needed to get out of there, get out, get out . . .
She staggered woozily to the back of the plane, pushed aside some suitcases and lurched outside into the snow. The sky was clear—the storm had broken during the night—and coming over the horizon was the clear yellow globe of the sun.
Dawn.
A few passengers were huddled around a small fire built in a bare spot next to the plane’s fuselage, protected from the wind. Kerry shouldered her way to the front until she felt the warmth and heat of the fire on her face, the most warmth she’d felt in days, probably. She couldn’t get rid of the picture of Daniel trudging through deep snow, only his eyes showing, head bowed against the wind. Because of her. Because of the baby. He always took responsibility for everyone else, he never thought of himself, and now if he died out there, if he didn’t come back, she’d never forgive herself, never.
If she’d been awake, she would have told him not to go. Begged him. No matter what Phil said, she knew he’d gone because of her. He would not have been able to sit still and wait for help when Kerry was hurt; it wasn’t in his nature. He was a man used to taking matters into his own hands, and he had a little experience in backcountry situations; he might have been able to convince himself that he could manage. But this wasn’t the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the middle of July, this was the Yukon in midwinter, one of the remotest spots on earth. The chances that he would find help were almost nothing, but the chance that he’d freeze to death out there, away from the shelter of the plane, was very great indeed. She might not have much experience in the woods on her own, but she knew that much, at least.
One of the other passengers was watching her from across the fire, a slender, dark-skinned woman around forty or forty-five who was wearing a coat so large it dragged on the ground. One arm was bandaged and splinted, and she held it in front of her like a wounded bird. She was the flight attendant Daniel had brought back from the tail section.
“You’re awake,” said the woman.
“Much good it’s doing me.”
The woman came around to stand next to her. “You look better. Bev and Phil were so worried about you.”
Kerry couldn’t think of the woman’s name, but it was obvious they’d spoken before. “And Daniel,” she said.
“That’s right, Daniel, the one who left to find help. He’s your fiancé, isn’t he? You two are getting married when you get back to Chicago.”
Kerry felt her eyes starting to blur with tears. “That was the plan.”
“Aww, honey,” said the woman, putting her arm around Kerry. “Don’t worry. Worrying only invites trouble. Imagine him finding a nice warm cabin with a phone. He might already be on his way back.”
Was she serious? Everything that could have gone wrong in this situation had gone wrong. Why should their luck change now? “I’ll try.”
“He said he spent a lot of time camping, hiking in the woods, that kind of thing. Surely he knows what he’s doing, right?”
Kerry smiled. “Camping” made it sound more rustic than it really was. They’d always had the best equipment whenever they’d gone out in the woods. Fleece jackets, waterproof tents, magnesium fire starters, enough food and water for a small army. But he had spent time in the woods, more than most. Maybe the flight attendant was right, and Daniel would come back to her, whole and safe and alive. It was possible, wasn’t it?
She leaned close to the fire and felt the orange heat on her face and wondered if anything had ever felt so good. Her hands and feet tingled, coming back to life, and she could see the way the other passengers leaned toward it—greedy, as though they would like to swallow it.
“Who built this fire?” she asked the flight attendant.
“Phil did it, the day before yesterday,” said the other woman. Kecia—that was her name. “You should have seen him. He was trying to warm up that IV bag for you—it was a block of ice before he made the fire. But he was determined. He and Amber and that kid, Zach, gathered all the wood and paper and found a lighter and everything. He was like a man on a mission, trying to warm up those IV bags.”
“Phil did it?” Phil Velez, her dour, pessimistic co-worker?
“And then when some of the other passengers tried to take over the fire,” Kecia said, lowering her voice in case anyone was listening, “he chased them off. Said he’d put the fire out and let everyone freeze to death if they couldn’t learn to take turns with it.”
Now, that she couldn’t picture at all. The Phil she knew was an avoider; he’d go twice around the globe if it meant he wouldn’t have to talk to Kerry, sit near her, deal with her at all. How could he possibly have worked up enough moxie to take on a bunch of starving, freezing, greedy passengers? “Unbelievable.”
“That’s what I said. Anyway, he got your IV warmed up and Bev hooked you up. It must have done you some good.”
Kerry didn’t know what to think. Phil had done all of that for her sake?
She couldn’t think straight. Daniel was gone, and Phil had stayed behind to take care of her. Clearly the world had changed while she was asleep. Up was down, black was white, and Kerry Egan was no longer certain she knew anything of the world, or the people in it.
—
When her twenty minutes were over—apparently the passengers had taken Phil’s fire rules very seriously—Kerry went back inside to sit against the bulkhead, pulling her coat around her to hold on to the warmth. It was strange to be there without Daniel. Her thoughts kept turning to him, to the vision she had of him falling to his knees in the snow, his eyebrows full of ice, ice in his mouth and his eyes. Why did you go? she kept imagining herself asking him. Why would you leave, when the thing I need most is to have you here?
Across from her she could see Phil sitting in his ow
n spot against the bulkhead, Beverly hovering over him. She was pulling up the tail of his coat and then his shirt, asking questions too soft to hear and then telling him he needed rest. “Stop running around after the fire and everyone else,” Bev admonished him. “You’re whiter than all this damn snow. Sit your ass down and stay there.”
From across the plane, Kerry said, “You’re still in a lot of pain?”
Phil looked up as if he hadn’t realized she was there. He pulled his shirt back down quickly, though Kerry had seen nothing more than an expanse of pale stomach marked by a purple bruise. “It’s been getting worse. I can feel it.”
“Is it bad?”
“Bad enough,” Beverly said, turning around to fix Phil with a steely glare. “And I know you’re peeing blood, so don’t bother trying to hide it anymore.” Then she stomped toward someone coughing near the rear of the plane.
“What’s her problem?” Kerry asked.
“She’s working without a net.” He followed Beverly’s movements, watching her thrash around the plane like a caged elephant. “She’s worried she won’t be able to keep us all alive until we’re found.”
This struck Kerry as more insightful than she would have given Phil credit for, and again she found herself shifting her perceptions of him, her long-held assumptions. He wasn’t anything like she’d thought—arrogant, proud. Instead here he was, caring for her, for all of them, as a real friend would.
Maybe Phil wasn’t the problem after all. Maybe she was the one who’d been too proud, and she’d never been able to see it.
“I want to thank you,” she said.
He looked up at her, the surprise on his face too evident, and she watched as he fought it back and settled his expression into something close to neutral once more. “For . . . ?”