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“Yeah, yeah.” He smirks, leaning in to steal a quick kiss, obviously in a rush to get off the ground.
I grab hold of his neck before he has a chance to pull away and hold him there, prolonging the feel of his lips against mine.
He’s frowning curiously when I release him. “Am I gonna get this kind of goodbye every time I fly off somewhere?”
“Yes,” I say with more seriousness than I intended. “Don’t ever leave without saying goodbye to me. Please.”
He studies my face a long moment. “I’m not gonna crash, Calla. I promise.” His voice is soft, lulling.
“You can’t promise that.” Though I desperately want to believe him.
He leans in to kiss me again, this time more deeply. “Fine. But I will always find my way back to you,” he whispers against my lips. “Love you. See you in a few hours.”
“I love you, too.” My heart sings as I watch him head toward the plane, a buoyancy to his step that I’ve come to recognize as Jonah when he’s about to get in the sky—cheerful, energized, but also at ease, as if slipping into something comfortable. Today, he seems more charged than usual. Probably because he hasn’t flown since the day we arrived almost two weeks ago. The longest he’s ever gone without being in the air since he moved to Alaska, he noted last night, as we lay naked and out of breath, in postcoital bliss.
Suddenly, he spins to face me, walking backward. “By the way, what is that stuff in the fridge? In the jars?”
“Chia pudding. I made it for breakfast. Like it?”
“No.” He screws up his face. “Not even a little bit.”
I shrug. “It’s healthy for you.”
He waves off my words, turning his back to me. “You should go for a run!” he hollers over his shoulder. “You must have cabin fever by now!”
“Yeah! Log cabin fever, thanks to you!” A run isn’t a bad idea, though.
He climbs back into the plane. Moments later, the engine purrs loud and then Veronica is taking off.
I huddle in my parka with my Canon pointed, capturing stills of Jonah’s first official flight from our airstrip. Veronica’s wings tip and wobble left and right as she climbs into the sky, until the plane is nothing more than a speck and I’m all alone, surrounded by snow and trees and an eerily calm silence.
The snow machine’s engine chugs and coughs a few times in protest before finally coming to life. I coast back to our empty home, the panoramic view of the mountain range against the crisp, blue sky following me the entire way.
* * *
I slow my pace to a walk, my hot breath producing a billow of misty cloud as it merges with the icy air. My body is suitably warm from the three layers I dressed in, but my lungs burn from the cold.
Six kilometers.
That’s the distance I had to run—past chained driveways and smokeless cabins—to spot signs of another living being.
I pause to suck back a small gulp of my water from my insulated bottle while reading the tacky array of corrugated signs ahead. They’re nailed to a half-dead spruce tree on the right of the driveway leading into Trapper’s Crossing Resort, and they promise everything: fully equipped two- and four-person cabins and spacious camping spots for rent, excellent fishing and dogsled rides, free Wi-Fi, a hot breakfast, and small-engine repair.
Phil boasted about the fishing in the network of rivers nearby. I imagine that’s a seasonal thing. Right now, the rustic little cabins with red-tin roofs sit idly among the thinned-out trees, their curtains drawn, the snow-covered ground around them free of tracks.
Utterly lifeless.
The main building stretches off to the left—a simple, long and narrow log cabin capped with a red-tin roof to match the rest of the property’s structures. A string of old, multicolored Christmas lights like the ones I dug up in my father’s shed dangles across the front, from one end to the other. Above a solid forest-green door is a colorful decal of a fish and a sign that reads Ale House. In the window is a blinking neon Open sign. One lonely pickup truck sits in the lot, its burgundy color coated with dirt.
The sign for small-engine repair, which points with an arrow to a metal garage off to the other side of the main building, is what sparks my interest and spurs me toward the Ale House’s green door. This might be a good place to service our snow machines, before we find ourselves stranded.
I stomp my shoes—specialty winter runners my mom gave me for Christmas—on the thinned doormat that reads Dogs Welcome, Humans Tolerated, and push inside.
Warmth and the smell of freshly brewed coffee envelop me as I allow my eyes to adjust to the darkness. The only light in the room is a pot light shining over the bar where a burly man in a camo baseball cap and a heavy gray sweater is hunched over a spread newspaper, staring at me.
“Hi,” I say through a slightly ragged voice, still catching my breath. I’m out of shape, having only run a dozen times since leaving Toronto last December.
The man’s appraising gaze skitters over me, all the way down to my shoes, as an AM radio broadcaster’s voice chatters in the background, filling the otherwise empty, quiet room with news of this weekend’s weather forecast. “You need somethin’?” Unlike Roy, this guy sounds like he might be from here, his voice carrying that folksy lilt. Like Roy, though, he isn’t showing any hint of friendliness.
