The marine forecast for Area 6 had been less than encouraging. A storm warning, south winds at fifty knots, seas at twenty-two feet, rain. The low was a hundred miles north of Dutch Harbor and moving up the Alaska Peninsula. Oh joy.
Oh fog. Oh fucking fog. She was flying blind but for the digital readout mounted to the control panel. She watched it more than she looked through the windshield because the view through the windshield never changed, fog and more goddamn fucking fog. The little green numbers ticked off steadily, one at a time, reassuring her that she was on course and nearing the location she had punched in, that she was maintaining her altitude, that her ground speed was a hundred and five. She believed the readout. She believed it implicitly. Her faith was committed, fervent, and necessary. She might even buy stock in Geo Star. If they got out of this alive. Which of course they would, because she believed.
The minutes inched by a second at a time, with more minutes stretching ahead.
“I’m sorry,” she said suddenly.
It took him a minute to respond, she suspected because he was too terrified to open his mouth, afraid that the physical act of speech might somehow affect the motion of the aircraft and send them plummeting down. “What for?”
“For not telling you sooner.”
He did look at her then. “Jesus, Wy. That’s not why I’m pissed.”
A strong gust blew the tail around to the left. Wy corrected the attitude of the plane automatically. “Then why are you?”
“Because you didn’t trust me enough to understand.”
“It wasn’t that.” She risked looking away from the GPA for a moment to meet his eyes. “Liam, think about it. We haven’t known each other that long, we’ve been together even less than that. I-”
“I know all I need to know,” he said.
“Evidently not.”
A gust of wind shook the craft. Liam set his teeth and stared out into the whirling white maelstrom. “So you’ve been married before. So what?”
“If that’s how you feel, why the attitude?” she demanded.
“It was Gary, wasn’t it? Jo’s brother? The guy I met on the river last month?”
“Yes.”
He thought of the good-looking man, of his proprietary air around Wy that had so irritated Liam. “The divorce wasn’t his idea, was it?”
“No.”
“He’d still be married to you if he could be.”
Her capable hands adjusted the throttle, fine-tuned the prop pitch. The Cessna seemed to respond, their passage through the vortex smooth out an infinitesimal amount. “I don’t know. Probably.” She risked another glance. “But. You will notice that he is not. Things end. We move on.”
“You’re starting to sound like Moses,” he muttered.
“I was pregnant,” she told him suddenly.
“What?” He stared at her. “What did you say?”
He is thinking about something other than a fiery plane crash now, she thought with a flash of grim amusement. “I was pregnant, that’s the only reason Gary and I got married. I liked him, I loved Jo’s whole family, but I had plans for what I wanted to do with my life, and they sure as hell didn’t include marriage and children, not then. But I got pregnant, and I made the mistake of telling my parents, and they insisted on marriage. So did his. Pretty traditional people, both sets of parents.”
“What happened?”
The plane hit an updraft and they were borne irresistibly upward, a hundred feet in a snap of the fingers, magic. She coaxed the plane back to fifty feet, then wiped her palms on her jeans, one at a time, and tried to put her hands back on the yoke with something less than the grip of a dead man. Liam, she noticed, was looking at her instead of monitoring the altimeter. She wasn’t sure he’d even noticed the updraft.
“I lost the baby,” she said. “In the beginning of the sixth month.” She took a deep breath, held it, and then let it out, one slow molecule at a time. “They let it rot inside me. Just rot away, into nothingness, nonbeing. My belly got smaller and smaller. And then it was gone.”
His eyes were stricken. He tried to say something, failed, had to start over. “God, I’m sorry, Wy.”
“The marriage, such as it was, didn’t last much longer. Gary didn’t fight me on it.”
“But he’s always there, waiting,” Liam guessed, and smiled humorlessly when he saw the acknowledgment in her eyes. “Smart, good-looking guy like that. Why didn’t you stay with him?”
“Because I was more in love with his family than I was with him, and after the baby died I realized that. It was a girl.”
“What?”
“The baby. It was a girl. They told me after one of the tests.”
He was instantly overwhelmed by the vision of a tiny Wy, all dark blond hair and big gray eyes and dimples. “Goddamn it,” he said. “Goddamn it, Wy.”
Her voice was strained. “Afterward the doctor talked to me. He said something went wrong.”
“What?”
She shook her head. “He used a lot of medical terminology, but what he said was, I couldn’t have any more children.” She turned to meet his eyes. “Not ever, Liam. No babies out of this belly. Not ever.”
They stared at each other.
The GPS beeped, loud enough to be heard over the wind buffeting the plane, and they both jumped. Wy looked down and saw the coordinates of the Portage Creek airstrip flashing on the digital readout. She peered through the windshield. Nothing but fog. She checked the altimeter. Fifty feet, sixty feet, fifty-five feet, she couldn’t maintain a steady fifty in this wind.
The GPS stopped beeping. They’d overshot the strip. Climb and bank or just bank? Fifty feet in the air in winds gusting to forty was not the place to indulge in turns, however gentle, and however flat the terrain. She increased power and pulled back on the yoke. The wind slammed into the side of the plane and the tail crabbed around, but they climbed to a hundred feet. “Hold on,” she said, unnecessarily because Liam would have been holding on with his teeth if he could have, and put the plane into a full-power left turn.
The rudder fought her for every degree of turn. The wind howled its delight, slapped the underside of the right wing with all its force, the right wing came up and for a moment Wy thought the Cessna was going into a snap roll. She increased power, kept her stranglehold on the yoke and her feet firm on the rudder pedals, and prayed that the rudder wouldn’t rip off. The wind had them by the scruff of the neck and they were being shaken and tossed and jostled and jarred and jolted all over the place, their seat belts and a minimal amount of centrifugal force the only things keeping them in their seats.
They hit another updraft, a small one but strong enough to jerk the plane up five feet. Liam’s head banged against the window with the sudden movement. “Jesus Christ, Wy! This is gonna tear her apart!”
“Don’t worry! She’ll hold together!” You heard me, baby, she thought. Hold together.
The Cessna came around, slowly, screaming in every seam and rivet, but she came around. This time Wy didn’t screw around, she took it down to the deck, twenty feet off the ground, flying every foot of the way, hopping the tops of trees, fighting her way around torn wisps of fog, straining her eyes in search of eighteen hundred feet of gravel strip, thirty feet wide with spruce and birch and alder and cottonwoods crowding the sides and one end ending in the Nushagak River.
It appeared suddenly out of the mist, so like an apparition and so much what she wanted to see that for a moment she doubted it.
“There!” Liam yelled.
“I see it,” she said, and went in for a full-power approach.
The first time the wind blew so hard and so steadily down the airstrip that the Cessna had too much lift to land.
“I can’t get her down at full power,” she shouted to Liam. “We have to go around.”