The Choice
The light wakes me.
It's not the grey light of the storm. It's hard and blue and clean, and it cuts across the bed in a rectangle, and for a second I don't know where I am.
Then I remember everything at once, the way you remember an accident: the plane, the snow, the blood, the parking lot, the way Dean's hand found mine in the dark of the shed.
The storm is gone.
I turn my head. Dean is asleep beside me.
Actually asleep. Not listening to the lodge with one ear, not counting minutes.
His face is slack and younger without the calculation in it, and his right arm is bandaged to the elbow, and his shoulder is wrapped under Ruth's flannel, and he's breathing slow and even like a man with nowhere to be.
I watch him for a while. The scar through his eyebrow. The stubble. The way his hand lies open on the pillow between us, palm up, like he fell asleep reaching for something.
The claw marks on the door catch the light.
Three pale grooves through the paint, deep enough to show wood.
I look at them, and I think about the size of the paw prints that led into the trees, and I think about the fact that I'm still here, in this room, with this man, and the world outside is blue and ordinary and safe.
Dean's eyes open.
He doesn't startle. He just looks at me, and I watch him remember where he is, and something in his face settles.
"Morning," I say.
"Morning." His voice is rough. He looks at the window. "Storm's done."
"Plows have been through since four. Ruth told me."
"Ruth told you."
"She brought coffee." I nod at the pot on the table. "She also said, and I quote, 'That man of yours has a hole in him. You keep pressure on it and stay out of my way.'"
Something moves in his face. Not quite a smile. "That sounds like her."
"She's going to repaint the door. She stood there with a paint can and called the scratches vandalism and asked what kind of animal does that." I pause. "I told her a big one."
Dean looks at me for a long moment. Then he sits up slowly, careful with his shoulder, and tests the arm, flexing the fingers, watching the bandage. The gash on his forearm is pink at the edges. The shoulder wound has closed to a pale line.
"Silver takes a while," he says.
"It's been one night."
"Exactly."
I unwrap his arm and redo the bandage the way I did it in the shed, slower this time, without the dark and the fear. He lets me. He watches my hands the way he watches the moon, like they're something he's still learning to trust, and when I finish he flexes his fingers and looks at me.
"Thank you," he says.
"Don't mention it."
"I mean it."
"I know." I get up and pour coffee, and his fingers brush mine when he takes the cup, and neither of us says anything, and it's the easiest silence I've ever been in.
"Everyone's downstairs," I say. "Omar has a new line item on his spreadsheet."
"What line item?"
"Existential distress."
He makes a sound that might be a laugh. I take it as a win.
"Existential distress," he repeats, like he's tasting it.
"It covers the part where he thought he was going to die in a blizzard. I'm considering filing my own claim. Emotional damages. I watched a man turn into a wolf."
"That's not billable."
"It should be. I'm putting together a spreadsheet of my own."
The common room is full of people who are leaving.
That's the difference. Yesterday they were a captive audience, stuck and resentful, performing boredom.
Today they're packed and fed, coats on, bags by the door, checking watches like the plane might leave without them.
The storm is over and so is the emergency, and nobody wants to be the last one out of Montana.
Ruth stands at the counter like a general at the end of a battle. She's made eggs again, and toast, and a pot of coffee she refills without being asked. She doesn't say much. She watches the passengers eat like she's counting them off a manifest of her own.
Omar is at the end of the table with his phone out.
"Seventeen million," he announces. "That's the number.
I've itemized. Ticket, hotel, per diem, missed event, emotional damages, and a new category I'm calling existential distress, which covers the part where I thought I was going to die in a blizzard.
" He looks up. "I'm putting the eggs in too.
Ruth's eggs are the only good thing that came out of this trip, and I'm billing the airline for them. "
"Eggs are complimentary," Denise says.
"Then I'm billing them for the discovery of the eggs. That's consulting."
The couple by the window laughs. The retired teacher folds a map she'll never use. Tom Alvarez sits apart with his coffee, and when he catches my eye he raises the cup, and I go over.
"The component," he says quietly. "The NTSB pulled it this morning. The contractor in Spokane is cooperating. He gave them everything."
"And Grant?"
"They're holding him on the assault, and the federal people are circling on the sabotage. He's not going anywhere." Tom looks at me. "The story's holding. A man with a grudge against a passenger. Followed him across three states. Knife in a parking lot. Nobody's asking about anything else."
Nobody's asking about anything else. I think about the claw marks on the door, and the paw prints, and the way Dean's shoulder closed overnight.
I think about how the world is full of people who would rather not know.
By the time the sun came up, the plows and a hundred boots had erased the tracks.
The world doesn't keep evidence of what it can't explain.
"Good," I say.
"Good." Tom stands. "Keller give his statement?"
"Last night, before they took Grant."
"Then he's done." He picks up his bag. "You two take care of yourselves. If you're ever in Chicago, the first round's on me."
"We'll hold you to it."
He gives me a look, the kind that says he knows there's a piece of this he hasn't been told, and he's decided not to ask. Then he heads for the door, and I watch him go, and I'm grateful for him in a way I don't have words for.
Denise finds me by the wood stove.
She's got her coat on and her bag over her shoulder, and she looks at me the way she looked at me at the vending machine, like she's reading something off my face.
"You've got circles," she says. "Both of you."
"We've had a weekend."
"That man of yours." She nods toward the window, where Dean is out in the lot with Ruth.
"He's got a wound that should have taken a week to close.
It's pink at the edges this morning. I do this for a living, so I'm going to say this once and then never again.
" She looks at me. "I don't know what kind of man he is.
But I know he looks at you like you're the only person in the room, and I know you looked at him like that first, before he earned it.
" She pauses. "You take care of each other. That's all I'm saying."
I don't know what to say to that. Denise doesn't need me to. She pulls me into a hug that smells like coffee and cold air, and she holds on a second longer than I expect, and when she lets go her eyes are bright and she's already turning away.
"Don't be a stranger, Megan."
"I won't."
"You will," she says, and she's smiling, and she's gone.
The bus to Red Creek is warm and nearly empty.
The passengers spread out like they're claiming territory, and Dean and I take a seat in the back, and he puts his good arm on the armrest and I lean against him, and neither of us talks.
The world outside is white and blue and endless.
The road is a black line through it. The sky is the color it only gets after a storm, scrubbed clean and aching with light.
At the airport, the vending machine is still there.
It hums at me from the corner, the same yellowed front, and I stop in front of it and give it a long look.
"It owes me three dollars," I say.
"It owes you more than that." Denise materializes beside me with a coffee from the machine that ate my money, which is a personal betrayal. "It's got standards. It only steals from people who look like they can take it."
"I look like I can take it?"
"You've got the face for it."
She winks and heads for the gate, and I watch her go, and I think about how you can meet someone in the middle of a disaster and know them for a day and feel like you've known them for years.
Or like you've survived a plane and a murder attempt together, which is the express lane. I'm not sure I'll ever have a normal friendship again. I think I'm okay with that.
The gate is a rectangle of chairs and a window full of snow-light. The replacement aircraft sits on the tarmac, small and ordinary. The passengers scatter around with their coats off and their phones out, the way people are when the end of a trip is in sight.
Omar walks past and stops. "You two." He points at Dean, then at me. "The stabbed guy and the fire alarm lady. I'm putting you in the report. Heroes of Flight 237." He pauses. "The airline still owes me seventeen million, but you two are the only part of this weekend I'm not billing."
"Thanks, Omar," I say.
"Don't thank me. It's a spreadsheet. It's what I do."
"I'll put in a good word with the airline."
"Don't you dare. I want them to suffer." He points at me, then at Dean. "You two are the exception. Everyone else can burn."
He goes. Dean and I sit apart from the others, two seats by the window. He's quiet, the way he was quiet on the first flight, and I've learned enough about him by now to know the difference between quiet and quiet. This is the second kind. The kind that means he's counting something.
"Dean."
He looks at me.
"When we land," he says, "you can walk away."
The words land and sit there. I look at him. He's not looking at me. He's looking at the plane on the tarmac, and his voice is careful, the voice he uses when he's saying something he practiced.