Chapter Twenty-Two
NASH
I've never been a nervous man. I've faced down charging grizzlies with a steady pulse, landed a snowmobile on a moving ice floe during a spring breakup when the black water was churning like a blender, and navigated whiteout blizzards with nothing but a magnetic compass and a gut feeling that told me left was death and right was safety.
But standing on the wooden pier at Port Promise waiting for the mail plane on a clear Tuesday evening? That, apparently, will be my breaking point.
For now, I'm pacing in the generator shed at Misty Meadows, a twelve-by-twelve box of corrugated metal and diesel fumes that usually serves as my sanctuary. It's a place of logic, a place where inputs equal outputs and if something is broken, you can fix it with a wrench and some swearing.
Today, it feels like a cage.
The sat radio crackles on the workbench. I know who it is before I pick up.
"Grumpy, come in. I know you're pacing." Finn's voice, thin and pleased through the static. "Hank called his manifest in to May an hour ago. The whole island knows who's on the evening run. Over."
"I am not pacing, Finn. Over."
"Bet you a case of beer you're polishing the torque wrench right now. You only polish that thing when you're wound tight enough to strip threads."
"I am not—" I look down. My hand is on the torque wrench. I put it down like it burned me. "That's called maintenance. It's what prevents mechanical failure. You should try it sometime instead of just kicking things until they work."
"I prefer percussive maintenance. It's more cathartic. Also, you're deflecting."
"I am not deflecting."
"You are. You're deflecting hard." I hear the static shift as Finn adjusts the handset, and when he speaks again, his voice has dropped to the register he saves for the truth. "She's coming back, Nash."
"She said she was coming back," I correct him, wiping a spot of imaginary grease from the workbench. "She'll get off that plane. I know that. I'm not worried about the plane."
"Then what are you worried about?"
"Six months from now," I say, the dark thought that's been circling for the last hour finally finding voice. "A year from now. When the honeymoon wears off and the winters get longer and Fairbanks feels like a real city again. That's when I lose her."
Finn sighs, and even at ten miles I can hear him shake his head. "You really have the Hollister Curse bad, don't you?"
The Hollister Curse. It's the family joke that isn't a joke. When the Hollister men fall, we fall hard, and usually for women we can't keep, or worse, women we lose.
I look at the torque wrench, thinking about Dad.
He didn't lose Mom to a plane ticket. He lost her to a disease he couldn't fight.
He was gone for months after, walking off his grief, and when he came back, the house was quieter in every room she used to be in. He's still there. He's just slower now.
"I'm not Dad," I say. "And Aris isn't dying."
"No," Finn says gently. "But you're terrified she's going to disappear anyway. That the happy ending isn't something we get to keep."
I don't answer.
"Nash." Finn's voice sharpens. "Stop cleaning clean tools. I know you're doing it. Get on your machine, get to the harbor, and go stand on the dock like a normal lovesick idiot before you strip a thread on something you actually need."
"I hate you."
"I know. It's my charm." I can hear him grin—that widening silence that always means a trap is coming. "Also, tell me you haven't shaved twice today."
I touch my jaw instinctively. It's smooth. I shaved this morning. And then again twenty minutes ago because I found a spot I missed.
"Shut up, Finn."
"Oh no. Oh no. You did. I called it. Kane owes me twenty bucks." Finn's laugh cracks through the radio. "Mags is going to lose her mind when I tell her."
"If you tell Mags anything, I will loosen the lug nuts on your snow machine."
"Empty threats from a man in love. Crystal Creek out."
The radio clicks dark.
I stand in the shed for another ten seconds, staring at the generator. It's humming perfectly. Voltage is steady. Spark plugs clean. Filters new.
I've fixed the machine. I've controlled the variables I can control.
Now I just have to see if the one variable I can't control—the woman with the stubborn streak and the PhD—is actually going to show up.
I take a deep breath, inhaling diesel and pine, and head for the snowmobile.
The ride to Port Promise takes forty minutes. It should take forty-five. The clouds are pink on their bellies by the time I pull the machine up onto the dock ramp at the town harbor. The sun is dropping fast behind the range, throwing long purple shadows across the ice.
The dock is quiet. A few boats iced in for the season, canvas taut, mooring lines fuzzed with frost. Somebody's smoker breathes cedar down at the far end. My boots crunch on the frost.
Then I hear it.
The low, throaty drone of a radial engine.
It's faint at first, a vibration in the air that you feel in your teeth before you hear it with your ears. It grows. It echoes off the mountains. It disrupts the silence.
I scan the sky to the south, squinting against the fading light.
There.
A speck against the jagged silhouette. It grows larger, resolving into the battered yellow and blue shape of Hank's De Havilland Beaver.
It's an ugly, reliable beast of a plane, and right now it's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
My heart does a slow, heavy roll.
The plane banks and drops toward the harbor ice—Hank's signature approach, designed to minimize flight time and maximize passenger nausea. The skis touch down with a spray of dry powder, a white cloud erupting around the landing gear.
The machine settles, taxiing toward the dock, the engine popping and growling as Hank feathers the throttle.
I walk down to the end of the pier. My hands are sweating inside my gloves.
The engine cuts. The propeller spins down, turning from a blur into individual blades, and then halts with a metallic clank.
The passenger door flies open before the plane has even fully stopped moving.
Aris appears.
She isn't waiting for assistance. She steps out onto the ski, balancing easily on the slick metal surface that would send a rookie sprawling.
She's wearing the same city trench she left in, still losing its argument with Alaska. But underneath it, I can see the collar of a flannel shirt.
She looks at the dock. She spots me.
Then her grin breaks loose—crooked, relieved, half terrified—and I know I'll be remembering it for the rest of my life.
"Nash!" she yells.
She jumps from the ski to the dock, clearing the gap with a leap that would make a mountain goat proud. She lands, catches herself on the frost, and runs.
She runs straight at me.
I catch her. I don't have a choice. She hits me with the force of a small avalanche, wrapping her arms around my neck and burying her face in the crook of my shoulder.
"You're here," she whispers against my coat.
"Where else would I be?" I say, wrapping my arms around her waist and lifting her off her feet. I hold her tight, needing to feel that she's real, that she's solid, that she isn't a ghost I conjured out of loneliness.
She smells like expensive shampoo and airfield coffee and Aris.
"I tried," she says, pulling back to look at me. Her eyes are shining. "I tried to stay. I checked into the hotel. I ordered a salad. It was terrible, Nash. It all tasted like water."
"Tragic," I say, smoothing a stray hair back from her face.
"It was. And the walls were beige. Everything was beige. And I—" She stops, expression going serious. "I don't fit there anymore."
"No?"
"No. I fit here." She rests her forehead against mine. "With the cold. And the snow. And the stubborn, grumpy guide who thinks he knows everything."
"I do know everything," I whisper.
"You knew I'd come back?"
"I hoped," I admit. "I hoped really hard. I even cleared out the spare room."
She goes very still. "The spare room."
"For your data drives. Your monitors. I moved the boxes."
"Nash." Her voice breaks a little. "I'm going to cry, and it's going to freeze."
"Then don't."
She steps back and hauls her bag up from where she dropped it on the dock. Something inside shifts with a heavy clunk.
"What's in there?" I ask.
"Three pounds of premium beef jerky, a bag of coffee that doesn't taste like dirt, and a bottle of whiskey I had to walk past three times before I committed."
"That's an acceptable tribute."
"May's is open," I say, glancing up the boardwalk toward Main. "You've never eaten there. And you look starving."
"I am starving. May would love me for that alone."
"Then May's."
I sling her bag over my shoulder and take her free hand.
We walk up the pier ramp and onto the boardwalk, the wood creaking under our boots.
The small town does what small towns do.
The light over the Hollister General Store is warm gold, and the bell above the door rings as someone steps out with an armful of brown paper.
The big window of the harbormaster's office is full of charts and a cat asleep on top of a barometer.
Lights burn behind half the windows on Main.
The other half are dark. Smoke writes a slow column out of every chimney.
"It's smaller than I expected," Aris says quietly. "And bigger."
"How does that work?"
"Smaller because I can see the whole of it. Bigger because I know everyone who lives behind every one of those windows is going to have an opinion about me by Sunday."
"They already do."
"Oh, great."
May's sits at the elbow of Main where the boardwalk turns toward the boat slips, the windows steamed white, the neon OPEN sign buzzing against the salt-sprayed glass.
May Sweeney sees us through the glass and her face does the entire arc of surprise to delight to suspicious narrowing in about two seconds.
"You," May says, pulling the door open before we've reached it. The bell jangles like it's trying to alert the entire valley. "Inside. Both of you. I'm feeding you whether you want it or not."