Dana Stabenow - Nothing Gold Can Stay

She’d taken the Cessna. Heavier plane, more power. Faster, too, although that didn’t seem to matter much. The wind was gusting thirty to thirty-five knots out of the southeast, and the Cessna was being continually buffeted from the right, which meant she continually had to correct for drift.

She glanced down at the GPS, and thanked whatever the gods might be for it. The digital readout recorded their progress. She’d logged in the latitude and longitude of their destination, and it would tell her exactly and precisely when they had arrived, a good thing since they sure as hell weren’t going to see it very far ahead.

So it wasn’t like they were forced into dead reckoning, although the weather on the outside of the cabin made it feel like it. Torn wisps of fog kept the ceiling at a hundred feet. She was maintaining an altitude of fifty feet and even then she wasn’t always sure which way was up. The snow on the ground merged with the clouds and the fog to form a sphere of white all around them. She didn’t look up from the instrument panel. She was afraid to, afraid she would lose all sense of where the earth was, and fly straight into it.

She couldn’t do that. Tim was at fish camp. So was Moses. So were Bill and Amelia, for that matter.

She was following the river in hopes that she would spot the fish camp dock. If she could just locate the cabin, she could buzz it, open the window, yell a warning. Tim, be careful, she thought. Watch your back. Look out for yourself.

They’d only found each other two years ago. Two years filled with joy and laughter, rage and tears. Two years of getting used to sharing her home with an adolescent boy, the equivalent of one gigantic nerve ending rubbing up against the world. She was doing a good job, she was sure she was, but she’d only had him two years. He had just turned thirteen, and she wanted him for another five, she wanted to care for him until it was time for him to go out into the world. She wanted to give him a chance, the same chance her adoptive parents had given her when they rescued her from her birth parents. What was the point of returning to Newenham to live if she couldn’t help out her own?

And she loved him. Tim, oh Tim, please, please be all right. Please let whoever this crazy killer is miss the fish camp. Please let him be lost and stumbling around a hundred miles from here, or on his way to Acapulco. Please let this goddamn fog lift.

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.