Always, and now, he held her hand and they walked together.
They headed to the tree line.
“We can’t stay here,” said Aidan. “We need to keep moving. To Anchorage.”
“I know,” said Emily. “But we need fire first. And then…we’ll plan.”
“What will we tell Bob?” he asked.
“I have literally no idea.”
Quickly, before her hands seized up, she gathered some twigs and fallen branches. Gloves, she thought. Need to find some gloves.
Aidan put out his arms, a request, and she placed a few small branches in them. Not too many.
“That OK?” she asked.
He nodded. He was smart, but he was so small, so fragile. She followed, her heart contracting at the sight of his tiny figure, holding the branches—so big in his small arms.
They walked back to the plane. Past the wing that had broken off and was lying in the snow. Bob had clearly woken with the same idea as Emily: he was dragging a branch, covered in needles, to the fire. It wouldn’t burn easily; her dad would have sneered. But she supposed Bob was counting on the gasoline as an accelerant. Her dad would have sneered at that too, but she had to admit it was effective.
She wondered how old the pilot was. He had gray at his temples, but she wasn’t good at guessing the age of adults. Forty? Fifty? It was hard to tell. He didn’t seem older than her dad, but he didn’t seem younger, either. Different, though. Her dad was all ex-military square lines: shaved, boxlike. Everything in its compartment. Tools: he hung them on racks in the shed out back, neatly. Sometimes she thought the main reason he didn’t like his knee injury, apart from how he’d blown his military career along with his cruciate ligament, was that it offended his sense of neatness to have one leg that worked better than the other.
Bob, on the other hand, seemed more like a…The word that came to her mind was buccaneer. Blurred at the edges.
Before Emily left Minnesota, Jeremy had told her that Alaskan pilots were “cowboys of the cold”—Jeremy often said things like that, a little overblown. He was fascinated by the bush pilots: their exploits, their bravery, their stubbled chins and hard arms too, their eyes washed pale by vast skies. She had teased him about it.
Her mom didn’t like them so much. After their flight into Stafford Landing, a year before, she’d vowed that they’d never go on one of the little planes again. The pilot hadn’t been Bob, but his vibe had been similar: unkempt, a loose cannon. Her mom had said, “If I’m going to trust my life to someone, I want it to be someone who can press a uniform.”
Or, Emily thought, glancing at Bob in his jeans and puffy jacket, wear one.
Emily’s mom worked part-time and had spent a lot of time in the gym when they lived in Minnesota; even now she still went running every day. She loved motivational quotes and inspirational poetry and the idea of personal growth through hard work and dedication—she was big on the power of transformation.
When Emily had joined the cheerleading squad at her new school, her mom had been thrilled. Which made one of them. Her mom had never really understood dance—she made that clear. She didn’t understand what it was for. As if everything had to be for something, as if everything needed to be cheered and paraded. All those motivational magnets…and not a single work of art in the house, apart from a Jack Vettriano print that some aunt had given her as a housewarming gift. Jeremy had said, “Your mom is the kind of person who finds Instagram poetry inspiring.”
Cheerleading, she totally got: it was supporting the football team. It was squad goals or whatever. It was motivational, like her magnets.
Emily thought squad goals could go screw themselves.
Anyway. Alaska was, like, the last frontier of flying—on that Mom and Jeremy would agree, though they’d disagree on the romance of it. A place where a person could test themself. A place you could still get lost, if you wanted to—or did if you weren’t careful.
Emily thought about that, looking at Bob. He was the kind of person who might have wanted to get himself lost. Well: he was truly lost now. She winced at that thought.
“You ever crashed before?” she asked.
The pilot looked up. “Nope.”
“Ever been lost in the wilderness before?”
“Nope.”
She nodded. “That’s comforting.”
“They’ll come,” he said. He didn’t sound too convinced. Alaska was a big place. “They’ll see the smoke, don’t worry.”
She squinted up. The mountain was wreathed in fog. “Hmm,” she said.
But that was exactly what she was worrying about—that they might come. Some people wanted to be lost, and she was one of them.
“Is there anything to eat?” asked Aidan, standing at the entrance to the plane. He was wearing a blanket like a shawl. He got cold very easily.
There was a whoosh as Bob doused the fire with gasoline. Flames rose into the air, standing on their own, glowing pondweeds, undulating, and Emily felt a surge inside her. The wood crackled. She noticed that her hearing was getting better; it had been muffled since the crash, sounds made fuzzy and faraway. From the woods came creaking noises—the trees buckling under their coats of snow. She beckoned Aidan closer to the heat: she didn’t want him collapsing on her. That could raise a lot of questions.
“Here,” said Bob. He threw a package of bread to Aidan, who fumbled it and dropped it. He bent and picked it up.
“Might as well eat it now,” said the pilot.
Aidan ate a slice of bread; handed one to Emily. She smiled at him, and he smiled back, a real smile. He was learning to do that.
Despite herself, she edged a little closer to the fire and held out her hands to warm them, staring into the wild, fickle flames. Because she of all people knew that fire had two faces: the one that said home, and the one that burned things down.
She thought of that fire, part of the reason she was here on this mountainside. How her mom had stopped jogging, because people on the street would stare at her. How her dad came home early from school every day, because, he said, he couldn’t go into the staff room anymore.
She hadn’t meant it to happen. She didn’t like fire: though, when it had happened, she found she liked the way it took ordinary things—clothes, wood, a whole building—and made them flare, made them glow, made them beautiful; and then made them nothing but ashes. It had been…cathartic.
Anyway, she didn’t care what people thought of her. She hated them all. Small-town kids. With their friends, knowing only each other, knowing what they wanted. Or just wanting what they were given.