“Are you afraid?” Bear asked gently.
“Like hell I am,” Cassie said. Ridiculous to be nervous about meeting her own mother. This should be the best day of her life.
But her feet wouldn’t move. All she had to do was walk to the door and open it, and there she’d be—her mother. “You could come in with me,” Cassie said.
Snow drifted across the doorstep in silence.
“I know you do not want that,” Bear said finally.
She nodded. She didn’t know what had made her say it.
“Raise the station flag and I will come for you,” Bear said.
No more thinking, she told herself. It was time to do this. Shouldering her pack, Cassie marched briskly across the lit snow. Closer, she heard the generator humming—a comfortingly familiar sound, like the welcoming whine of a family dog—and she slowed to a stop in front of the door.
Behind her, she heard Bear rumble, “I love you.”
Suddenly, going inside seemed easier than staying outside. Without looking at Bear, she pushed the door open. The smell of unwashed bodies hit her in a wave, and she reeled backward from the sourness. Steeling herself, she stepped into the entryway and closed the door behind her. Breathing shallowly through her face mask, she opened the second door.
And she was home.
Cassie stood in the second doorway and blinked, her eyes adjusting to the barrage of color: orange life vests, red parkas, bright blue packs, green and purple climbing ropes. Slowly, as the colors resolved into familiar shapes, she started to relax. Heaps of gear, stacks of files, rats’ nests of clothes on top of and around the desks and file cabinets… She knew this mess. Cassie stripped off her outer gear. She could hear voices in Owen’s workshop. She left her pack and gear on her desk and crossed to the half-open door.
The scene was very familiar: Max and Owen stood at the workbench. They were muttering over a chunk of engine. Leaning against the door frame, Cassie watched them. Max and Owen. Her two pseudo-uncles. She used to play in here while they muttered over some hunk of metal, exactly as they were doing now. She felt a grin tugging on her lips. “Nice toaster,” she said lightly.
Owen dropped the clamp.
“You should be more careful with that equipment,” she teased. “Treat it like a baby.”
Max whipped off his goggles, reverse raccoon mask underneath. “Cassie? Lassie!” He leaped over a sawhorse and scooped her up into a bear hug. Max! She’d missed him! She hugged him back fiercely. “Look at you, Cassie-lassie!”
Owen was frowning at her. “Cassie?” he said.
“It’s me. In the flesh. Good to see you.” She meant it. It was very good to see them, surprisingly good. She’d focused so much on her parents that she hadn’t thought about what it would be like to see the rest of her family. “Good to be home.” She threw open her arms and inhaled the smell of home: stale winter. She coughed.
“Cassie… we didn’t know if you were alive or dead, lassie,” Max said.
“Your mother always believed you lived,” Owen said.
Your mother. Cassie felt her heart stop for an instant. Bear had done it. Her mother was here. Alive and here. Cassie hadn’t realized that up until this moment, there had still been doubt, lurking. But hearing it from prosaic Owen’s lips, here in the unmagical, ordinary station… When her heartbeat resumed, it felt loud, like a timpani under her skin, and her voice sounded far away to her ears. “Where is she?”
Max grinned broadly. “Come on, Cassie-lassie.” He draped his arm around her shoulder and shepherded her out the door. “I want to see the expression on their faces when they see you.”
Cassie let herself be led. She didn’t feel her feet touching the floor. She barely saw where she was walking. Their faces, plural, when they see you. Max propelled her through the research lab to the kitchen. He released her as they entered.
There was only one person in the kitchen.
Her father was sitting at the table with his head bent over his notebook. A pot simmered on the stove behind him. For a long moment, she stared at him, feeling her insides tumble, unable to sort out what she was thinking or feeling.
After months with Bear, her six-foot-five father looked small and fragile. Gray streaked his hair, and his neck sagged beneath his mountain-man beard. She had forgotten his gray. She stared at him, trying to match this man to her memories. How had she ever found him intimidating? She wanted to cross to him and push his hair out of his eyes. He looked so… human.
Max cleared his throat, and Dad glanced up from his papers.
“Hi, Dad,” she said.
He looked stunned, as if she had dropped from the sky into the kitchen. Recovering, he shot out of his chair. The chair clattered backward to the floor behind him. In two large steps, he was in front of her. He crushed her in a hug. “Oh, my little girl,” he said.
He hadn’t called her that in years. Cassie swallowed a lump in her throat. “Where’s Mom?” The word tasted strange in her mouth.
His face split into an enormous smile. Still holding her shoulders, he called, “Gail! Gail, she’s home!” He squeezed her shoulders. “Gail!”
Cassie heard footsteps from the hall behind her. Her mother’s footsteps, running. Cassie’s back muscles tensed. The footsteps stopped at the doorway, and her father released her. But Cassie couldn’t turn around. Her feet felt glued to the linoleum. She had dreamed of this too often for too long. What are you afraid of? she challenged herself. Turn around.
No, I don’t want to.
Tough, she told herself. Turn the hell around.
Slowly, she turned—counter, cabinets, wall, Max, Owen… “Gail,” Dad said to the woman in the doorway, “this is Cassandra. Cassie, this is your mother.”
Green eyes. For a long moment, Cassie had no other coherent thought. She stared at her mother’s eyes and felt as if her brain were spinning like a coronal aurora. Cassie did have her mother’s eyes.
But the resemblance ended there, at the eyes. Gail was short compared to Cassie, maybe five-foot-five. She had black hair, not red. Instead of sharp cheekbones, she had soft baby-doll cheeks. Decked out in a red blouse and jeans, she looked nothing like Cassie, except the eyes.
“Mother,” Cassie said, testing it.
Her mother swallowed and fluttered her hands as if she weren’t sure what to do with them, as if she were surprised that she had hands. “You can call me Gail, if it makes you more comfortable,” she said, her voice quivering.
Her mother was a stranger named Gail. “Gail,” Cassie said. She had not pictured using her mother’s first name. Cassie attempted a smile. “Very punny. North Wind’s daughter. Gale.”
Her mother sparkled at her with a smile out of a Crest commercial. “It’s short for Abigail.” Inanely, Cassie wondered where her mother had found lipstick up here. It was as red as Red Delicious apples, and as inappropriate as cotton jeans in fifty-below. “Oh,” Cassie said, continuing to stare. Her mother seemed smaller than she’d been in her daydreams.
The smile faded, and Gail twisted her hands. “Could I… Would it be all right if I hugged you?”
“Maybe,” Cassie said. Was it? “Yes.”
Gail took a step toward her and awkwardly held out her arms. Cassie took a matching step forward. Her mother smelled like pine trees, like wild air. Her arms felt bony around Cassie’s back. Cassie placed her hands on her mother’s shoulder blades. She was hugging a stranger. This close, Cassie could feel the gulf of every year, of every minute.
Her mother said in a soft voice, “My baby. My little girl.”
And something inside Cassie broke. She felt it give, like a sagging spruce under the weight of a winter’s ice. All of a sudden, Cassie’s cheeks were wet. Water filled her eyes, and she couldn’t see. She buried her face in the sharp shoulder of her pine-scented mother. Her mother’s arms started to shake. “My baby, my baby.” Gail’s voice cracked. She was crying too.