Nothing Gold Can Stay

TWENTY

Portage Creek, September 6

The strain of holding the plane more or less level was beginning to tell in her arms and legs. The pedals pushed hard against the soles of her feet, the yoke pulled steadily against the grip of her hands, and she was constantly on the alert, constantly adjusting her limbs to meet the demands the weather was putting on the exterior surfaces of the aircraft.

She risked a look at Liam. He was staring straight ahead with a grim expression. His blue eyes were narrowed, as if in concentration, as if by concentrating on the control panel he could by sheer effort of will make the plane fly straight and true. His knuckles were white where his hands were knotted on the edge of his seat.

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.

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.”

“Do what you have to,” he said. “Never mind me, just get us down.”

She risked a look at him and saw that his face was white but determined. He looked like he thought he might die, but that there was nothing he could do about it.

“We’re fine,” she said.

“I know.” Nothing he could do but trust her.

They were coming off the end of the runway now, gaining altitude but not enough to lose the airstrip. They went into another left turn and the wind slammed into them again. This time they were more ready for it, braced. Wy felt like she was riding a bucking bronco, only higher.

“You ever go sailing?” Liam shouted.

“What?”

“Sailing, like on a sailboat.”

“No,” she said, working the yoke and the rudder in subtle movements, trying for the best altitude to produce the most forward motion and the least turbulence. The horizon, a mass of dark green intersecting with a mass of dirty white, tilted up.

Liam kept shouting. “When the wind’s blowing, the sailboat heels over, to the right or to the left, depending on the tack the boat is taking into the wind. Why doesn’t the boat go all the way over and swamp, you ask?”

She was bringing the Cessna around to a southwesterly heading before the storm blew them to Anchorage, but she shouted back, “Why?”

“There’s a part of the hull that sticks down like a sword out of the center of the keel. It’s filled with lead. Ballast.”

“Oh. Right. Good.” Their airspeed kept fluctuating, and she had no idea what their true ground speed was. Her biceps were beginning to tremble from the strain of hauling so long and so steadily on the yoke.

“I never think there’s enough ballast,” he shouted.

“What?”

“I never think there’s enough ballast on a sailboat. I always think it’s going to go all the way over. It never does.”

They were lined up with the runway again, although they kept sliding north and Wy kept having to correct. She came in full power again because she didn’t dare do anything else. This time the gear touched down, not just once but three times, hard enough every time so that it felt like the struts were going to come up through the wings.

Trees flashed past, the gravel strip screamed beneath them, the Cessna keeping on the straight and narrow only when it was crossing it.

“Wy?” Liam said.

The end of the runway was fast approaching.

“Wy?” Liam said.

So was the Nushagak River.

“Wy!”

She waited until the last possible moment to cut power. When she did, they had maybe a hundred feet of runway left. She pushed in the throttle and kicked right rudder simultaneously. The Cessna pulled hard right. A gust of wind came screaming down the runway and hit the tail. It raised up, enough to pull the plane up off its right wheel. The left wingtip dipped toward the ground. They were still rolling.

“Wy?”

The gust seemed never-ending, pushing, pushing, pushing. The left wing of the plane dipped lower and lower, and they were still rolling, right toward a stand of three large cottonwoods. She cut power completely. The prop stopped straight up and down.

“Wy?”

Momentum kept them moving. Ground loop, she thought, goddamn it a goddamn groundloop, we’ll be okay but what about my goddamn plane goddamn it. “We’ll be okay Liam we’ll be okay we’llbeokaywe’llbeokay oh shit!”

The Cessna paused, poised on nose and left gear, the left wing barely a foot from the ground. It seemed that everything was holding its breath. Wy, Liam, the Cessna, even the wind.

The wind died. Just like that. Stopped in mid-roar, for that precious second the Cessna needed to recover. The tail settled down, the right gear fell back on the runway with a thump, and the left wing came up.

They were still rolling. Wy hit left rudder hard, swerving to avoid the cottonwoods, only to run into a stand of alders. Smaller trees, but still trees. The Cessna hit them hard enough to bury its nose up to the leading edge of the wings. They bounced back once from the impact, and stopped.

They sat there for a moment in silence. The wind as suddenly started up again, a long, angry howl.

“You’re a good pilot, Wy,” Liam said finally, in a conversational tone.

“The best,” she said in a very faint voice.

“I wonder if my heart is ever going to get back to normal sinus rhythm,” he said, still in that same conversational tone.

“I wonder if mine’s going to start beating again anytime soon.”

They sat for another moment, trying to grasp the fact that they were still alive, and trying to remember what it was they were supposed to do next.

Tim. That’s why they were here. Tim. There was a crazed killer on the loose who might hurt Tim. Moses. Bill. Amelia.

Wy stirred. “We’d better get going, see if we can find a boat.” She unstrapped her seat belt with hands that did not seem to belong to her. The door was hard to open against the alder branches crowded up against it, but once the wind caught an edge she had to hang on so it wouldn’t be yanked out of her grasp. On the other side of the plane Liam was having the same problem. A branch caught at his uniform, ripping a hole in his sleeve, and he cursed.

Wy tugged a backpack from the cargo compartment and pulled it on. Liam did the same with his. They were both wearing heavy boots and jackets. She forced the smaller door shut and turned to leave.

“What about the plane?” Liam said.

“Leave it,” she shouted back. “Those alders are probably better than a tie-down in this wind. Come on.”

He paused, looking up.

“What?” she shouted.

“Did you hear it?”

“Hear what?”

He stared over her shoulder. “Nothing.” Any sensible bird out in this wouldn’t waste time croaking out hellos, he’d be keeping his beak shut and his head down.

They staggered down the strip, bent double into the wind. It wasn’t very cold, Wy thought dimly, and noticed that the four inches of snow that had fallen overnight had almost completely melted away. “Chinook?” she yelled.

“It feels like it,” he yelled back. “Did the forecast call for it?”

“No.”

“Figures.”

The runway ended in a small berm overgrown with more alders and salmonberry and raspberry bushes. The red and yellow fruits seemed almost incongruous on such a day, hanging in fat succulent clumps from stalks bowed beneath their weight. Bears, Wy thought suddenly. “Bears,” she said out loud.

“Shit! Where?”

“Berries,” she said, pointing. It was hard to get words out, the wind snatched her breath away.

“Oh. Yeah. Right. Where’s the dock?”

“Over the berm.”

They found the path and struggled down it. It terminated in a dock, a rectangular pier surfaced with one-by-twelve wooden planks. There was no boat.

“Shit!”

“Well, great,” Liam said, more tired than annoyed. “What do we do now?”

“There has to be a boat, there has to be. It’s September, there’s nobody left on this part of the river except Moses.” She turned and let the wind blow her ashore.

“Where are you going? Wy, wait, wait for me!” He lumbered after her, to find her wading through the brush along the river. “What are you doing?”

“I’m looking for a boat,” she said. There was a crash of brush ten feet to her right, a hasty scramble of feet and big body, a panicked breaking of branches; Wy didn’t even look around. Liam never did see what creature’s hiding place they disturbed. “There has to be one, Liam, a lot of people with fish camps leave their boats here over the winter. They pull them up on the bank and-” She stopped, so suddenly that he ran into her.

He looked over her shoulder, and there was an old wooden skiff, about twelve feet long, he estimated, lying hull up on a trampled patch of ground.

Wy was already bending down and hooking her hands beneath the gunnel. He moved forward to stand next to her. “Ready? One, two, heave!”

The boat was heavy and went over reluctantly, but Wy was determined and over it went, landing with a thump and rocking a little on its rounded hull before coming to a rest. She went to the bow and found the bowline threaded through a crossbar nailed inside the prow. “Come on,” she said, and started hauling.

He picked up the pair of oars that had been lying on the ground beneath the boat and tossed them in. He pushed from the stern, going knee deep into mud. Great, there went his uniform pants. It wasn’t twenty feet to the edge of the river and the boat slid easily into the water.

The surface of the river was choppy, and the current was strong. They began drifting downstream immediately. Oarlocks dangled from twine and Liam slipped them into their respective holes. The oars went in. “Do you know how to row?”

“No,” Wy said, the wind ripping the words out of her mouth almost before they were said. “It can’t be that hard, though.” She sat down on the thwart and grabbed both oars, pushing forward. The blades dipped in the water, skimmed the surface, splashed a lot of water around and didn’t provide any thrust. She looked up, surprised.

For the first time in days Liam felt like smiling. “Here,” he said. “Let me try.”

“No,” she said. “I’ll get it, I just need to-”

“Wy. Get up.”

Something in his voice made her comply. He remained standing, face forward, and the oars dipped, rose, dipped, rose. The chop hit the bow with regular taps as they moved smoothly forward.

“You’ve done this before,” she said.

“I like boats,” he said.

“Better than planes.”

“A whole hell of a lot better than planes.”

“I’m going to teach Tim how to fly,” she said.

“Are you? Good.”

Wavelets slapped at the hull. Liam felt a coldness around his feet and looked down to see that they were taking on water. Not a lot, and not very fast, but there was some in the bottom of the boat that hadn’t been there when they shoved off from the airstrip. “Wy?”

“Oh great.” She found a bailing can cut from a Clorox bottle wedged beneath the bow thwart and started scooping up water and emptying it over the side. A log thudded into the skiff and they both held their breath, waiting for a hole to open up and the leak to become a gush. It didn’t happen. Cold sweat trickled into Liam’s eyes and he wiped his forehead against his arm. The wind took the opportunity to gust hard against the port side and push the stern halfway around, so that the bow was headed toward the south shore of the river. Liam battled it back, shoulder and arm muscles straining as he pushed hard on the port oar, the starboard oar horizontal and motionless above the surface, water dripping from the blade. “How far is the fish camp from the airstrip, again?” he said when they were straightened out and headed downstream once more. He was proud that his voice remained level.

“About four miles,” she said. “Why don’t I teach you, too? Make it a family affair? If you understand it, if you can control it, it won’t frighten you as much.”

“Do you have any idea how fast this river runs?”

She sighed. “No. Why?”

He rested the oars to check his watch. “We went into the water twenty minutes ago. I’m trying to figure when we’ll make the fish camp.”

“It’s the first dock on the north shore of the river after Portage Creek.”

The wind roared overhead and snatched the words from her mouth so that he could barely hear them. “So we hug the right bank and hope we bump into it.”

“Yeah.”

Hopeless, he thought, and as if to underline the thought, there was a gust of wind so hard it spun the skiff around like a top. Wy was thrown against the side and lost her grip on the bailer, which went over the side. “Are you okay?” Liam said when they stopped spinning.

“Yeah,” she said, straightening. “I lost the bailer.”

“I saw.” He looked around, eyes tearing from the wind. They seemed to be in the center of the river, no bank, no trees to guide them. “Which way is downstream?”

She looked left, right. “I don’t know.”

It was so dark and the surface was so choppy that it was impossible to tell which way the current was going, and the wind was blowing so hard that it negated the current anyway.

Then there was a brief, tantalizing lull in the wind and he heard a sound, a creaking branch, or maybe the k-kk-kkrak of a raven.

What the hell. He rowed toward it. Trees, shaken roughly in a giant’s hand, loomed up out of the darkness. He put the starboard side parallel to them and began to row again.

Liam bent his head and rowed into the wind and the darkness. Push, lift, swing forward, dip, push. Push, push hard, push the water under them, behind them, away, away, along the wide Nushagak. Didn’t quite have the ring of the Missouri, he thought dimly. Push, lift, swing, dip, push. His shoulders were aching, his arms numb. If only he could row with his legs, his tai chi-conditioned legs. His thighs were like iron, his calves like steel. From the waist down he’d never been in such good shape.

A high chair bolted to the thwart. Like a dentist’s chair, only not as heavy. Stirrups on the oar handles. Sit in the chair, put your feet in the stirrups and push, lift, swing, dip, push. If he got out of this alive, he’d patent the son of a bitch.

“Liam?” Wy’s voice came to him from far away. “Liam?”

He realized she was standing stock-still, her head cocked as if she were listening. The oars came up and he paused, trying to hear what she did. “What? What is it?”

“Nothing,” she said, and he could hear the tired smile in her voice. “Nothing at all.”

It took him a minute to comprehend what she meant. Sometime, somehow the wind had died down completely. Stopped, as if someone had thrown a switch. The surface of the river had smoothed out, hardly any chop left.

“What happened?” he said, dazed.

“It stopped,” she said, sounding as punchy as he felt. “It stopped.”

One minute later, as if in compensation, they floated into a gloomy soup of fog. It parted grudgingly before them and closed in again greedily behind them as they passed through it, and Liam had the sensation of being swallowed alive. He knew a sudden sympathy for Jonah. Water sloshed at his feet.

Moisture condensed on their faces and hands in tiny droplets. They couldn’t see ten feet in any direction. Liam kept them as close to the bank as he dared. The riverbank undulated in curving S’s, flirting with sandbanks, opening suddenly into the mouths of creeks-the wrong creek, time after time. They heard the sound of an occasional fish jump, the lost cry of a goose, the rustle of brush as something moved through a thicket. No croaking of ravens, though.

“I feel like Charon,” Liam said, his voice hushed.

Her laugh was forced. “Where is Cerberus?”

“That was him before. The wind. Sounded like a three-headed dog howling to me.”

This time her laugh wasn’t quite as forced. “Now that you mention it…”

He could barely see her through the mists that curled between them, a ghostly outline in the bow. To keep her talking, he said, maybe at random, maybe not, “Do you remember your mother?”

“Not much.”

“Was your father around?”

“No.” There was a brief silence. “I don’t remember him at all.”

“Lucky,” he said, thinking of his own father.

Her voice came gently out of the night and the fog. “He’s not that bad, Liam.”

“Yeah, well, whatever.” She didn’t know what he knew about his father and what Colonel Charles Campbell would do, had done, for promotion. She didn’t know why he had made her fly him out to that archaeological dig south of Newenham and west of Chinook Air Force Base when his father had left this summer. Wy had met Charles twice. She didn’t know him the way he did.

“You named your son for him,” her disembodied voice reminded him.

“That was Jenny’s idea.”

“You could have changed her mind.”

“Yeah.” He rowed. “Yeah, I suppose I could have. And the fact that I didn’t says something.”

“He’s your father.”

“Yeah. He is that. Did you ever know who yours was?”

A raven croaked suddenly from overhead and Liam started violently, jerking the oars free of the water. Water splashed, catching both him and Wy. The stern of the skiff started to drift. The dock loomed up suddenly out of the fog, materializing into a dark rectangular shape off the starboard bow.

They both saw it at the same time. “There!”

He pulled for shore with short, powerful strokes, and a moment later they were alongside. Liam shipped the oars while Wy fastened the bowline off to a cleat on the dock. She trotted up the dock, Liam right behind her, and they threaded their way up the path that followed the creek. Moments later they emerged into the clearing and there was the cabin. She paused just long enough to grin at him. “I told you we could make it.”

He kissed her. He hadn’t meant to, but he did it anyway. “I’ll never doubt you again.” He added, following her to the door, “I’ll never fly into a storm with you again, either.”

“I swear I hear voices,” they heard someone say, and the door of the cabin opened as they walked up the steps.

Bill stood there, astonished. “What the hell are you two doing here? And how the hell did you get here?”