Northern Lights by Nora Roberts
"Meg—" Nate began.
"Peach, when's the last time the chief took a day off?"
"Three weeks, a little more, by my recollection."
"Head-clearing time, chief." Meg grabbed his jacket off the hook herself. "We've got a clear day for it."
He took one of the two-ways. "An hour."
She smiled. "We'll start with that."
When he spotted her plane at the dock, he stopped dead. "You didn't say this head-clearing time involved flying."
"It's the best method. Guaranteed."
"Couldn't we just take a drive, have sex in the backseat of the car? I find that's a really good method."
"Trust me." She kept his hand firmly in hers and used her other to brush the cut under his eye. "How's that feeling?"
"Now that you mention it, I probably shouldn't fly with a wound like this."
She cupped his face, leaned in and kissed him, long, slow and deep. "Come with me, Nate. I have something I want to share with you."
"Well, when you put it that way."
He got in the plane, strapped in. "You know, I've never taken off from the water. Not when the water was . . . wet. There's still some ice. It wouldn't be good to run into the ice, right?"
"A man who faces down an armed mental patient shouldn't be so jittery about flying." She kissed her fingers, tapped them on Buddy Holly's lips and began to glide over the water.
"Sort of like water skiing, but not," Nate managed, then held his breath as she gained speed, kept holding it as the plane lifted off the water.
"I thought you were working today," he said when he decided it was safe to breathe again.
"I passed it to Jerk. He'll be dropping off supplies later. We've got parade stuff coming in, including a whole case of bug dope."
"You and Jerk run drugs for insects."
She slid her eyes in his direction. "Insect repellant, cutie. You survived your first Alaska winter. Now we'll see how you fare in the summer. With mosquitoes as big as B-52S. You won't want to walk three feet out of the house without your bug dope."
"Roger on the bug dope, but I'm not eating Eskimo ice cream. Jesse says it's made from whipped seals."
"Oil," she said on a laugh. "Seal oil or moose tallow. And it's not bad if you mix in some berries and sugar."
"I'll take your word because I'm not eating moose tallow. I don't even know what the hell it is."
She smiled again because his shoulders had relaxed, and he was actually looking down. "Pretty from here, isn't it, with the river, the ice, and the town all lined up behind it?"
"It looks quiet and simple."
"But it's not. It's not really either of those. The bush looks quiet, too, from the air. Peaceful and serene.
A harsh kind of beauty. But it's not serene. Nature will kill you without a minute's thought, and in nastier ways than a crazy guy with a gun. It doesn't make her any less beautiful. I couldn't live anywhere else. I couldn't be anywhere else."
She soared over river and lake, and he could see the progress of breakup, the steady march of spring. Patches of green spread as the sun worked on the snow. A waterfall rushed down a cliff side with the sparkle of ice gleaming out of deep shadows.
Below them, a small herd of moose lumbered across a field. Above, the sky curved like a wild, blue ribbon.
"Jacob was here that February." Meg glanced at him. "I wanted to get that out of the way—maybe off both our minds. He came to see me a lot when my father was gone. I don't know if my father asked him to, or if it was just Jacob's way. There might've been a couple days here and there I didn't see him. But not as much as a week at a stretch, not a long enough time for him to have climbed with my father. I wanted you to know that, for certain, in case you needed to ask him to help you."
"It was a long time ago."
"Yeah, and I was a kid. But I remember that. Once I thought back on it, I remembered. I saw more of him than I did of Charlene in those first few weeks after my father left. He took me ice fishing and hunting, and when we had a storm come in, I stayed at his place for a couple of days. I'm telling you that you can trust him, that's all."
"All right."
"Now, look to starboard."
He glanced right and watched them fly off the edge of the world, over a channel of blue water that seemed entirely too close for comfort. Before he could object, he saw an enormous chunk of that blue-white world crack off and tumble into the water.
"My God."
"This is an active tidewater glacier. And what you're watching is called calving," she said as other boulders of ice broke and fell. "I guess because in the cycle, it's more a kind of birth than death."
"It's beautiful." He was all but plastered against the windscreen now. "It's amazing. Jesus, some of them are the size of a house." He let out a laugh as another shot off into the air and barely registered the shimmy of the plane in a pocket of turbulence.
"People pay me good money to fly them over here to see this, then spend most of their time with their eyes glued to the lens of a video camera. Seems like a waste to me. If they want to see this on a movie, they should rent one."
It wasn't just the show, Nate thought, the spectacle of it. It was that cycle—violent, inevitable, somehow mythic. The sights—jagged boulders of blue ice heaving themselves into the air. The sounds of it, creaks, the thunder and the cannon shots. The gushing up of the water on impact, the rising of the white into a shimmering island that streamed along on the churning fjord.
"I have to stay here."
She guided the plane up, circling so he could watch from another angle. "Here, in the air?"
"No." He turned his head, grinned at her in a way she rarely saw. Easy and relaxed and happy.
"Here. I can't be anyplace else either. It's good to know that."
"Here's something else that might be good to know. I'm in love with you."
She laughed as the plane shuddered through rough air; then she punched it through, and bulleted up the channel while ice fell around them.
Twenty-Seven
Charlene had always loved what passed for spring in Alaska. She loved the way the days kept stretching out, longer and longer until there was nothing but light.
In her office she stood at the window, her work neglected on her desk, and stared out at the street.
Busy. People walking, driving, going, coming. Townspeople and tourists, country dwellers in for supplies or company. Fourteen of her twenty rooms were booked, and she'd be at capacity for three days the following week. After that, the strong, almost endless light would draw people in like flies to honey.
She'd work like a dog through most of April, into May and straight through until freeze-up.
She liked to work, to have her place crowded with people, the noise and the mess they made. The money they spent.
She'd built something here, hadn't she? She'd found what she wanted—or most of what she wanted. She looked out to the river. Boats were on it now, slipping their way through the melting islands of ice.
She looked beyond the river, beyond to the mountains. White and blue, with green beginning to spread slowly, very slowly at their feet. White at their peaks, forever white in that frozen, foreign world.
She'd never climbed. She never would.
The mountains had never called to her. But other things had. Pat had. She'd felt that call blow through her, a thousand trumpets, when he'd roared into her life. Not yet seventeen, she remembered, and still a virgin. Stuck, hadn't she been stuck, in those flat Iowa fields just waiting for someone to pluck her out?
The original midwestern farm girl, she thought now, desperate for any escape. Then he'd come, churning up all that dull air on his motorcycle, looking so dangerous and exotic and . . . different.
Oh, he'd called to her, Charlene remembered, and she'd answered that call. Sneaking out of the house on those chilly spring nights to run to him, to roll naked with him on the soft green grass, free and careless as a puppy. And so desperately in love. That burni
When he'd gone, she'd gone with him, walking out on home, family, friends, speeding away from the world she knew, and into another—on the back of a Harley.
To be seventeen, she thought, and that daring again.
They'd lived. How they'd lived. Going wherever they wanted, doing whatever they liked. Through farmland and desert, through city and tiny town.
And all the roads they'd wandered had led here.
Things had changed. When had they changed? she wondered. When she realized she was pregnant? They'd been so thrilled, so stupidly thrilled about the baby. But things had changed when they'd come here with that seed planted inside her. When she'd told him she'd wanted to stay.
Sure, Charley, no problem. We can stick around awhile.
A while had become a year, then two, then a decade, and God, God, she'd been the one to change. To push and prod at that wonderful, reckless boy, to nag and hound him to be a man, to be what he'd run from. Responsible, settled. Ordinary.
He'd stayed, more for Meg, she knew, more for the daughter who was the image of him than for the woman who'd given him that child. He'd stayed, but he'd never settled.
She'd resented him for that. Resented Meg. How could she do otherwise? She wasn't built to do otherwise. She'd been the one to work, hadn't she? To make sure there was food on the table and a roof over their heads.
And she knew, when he'd gone off, to pick up jobs, to take a break, to climb his damn mountains, that he'd gone to whores.
Men wanted her. She could make any man want her. And the only one she really wanted had gone to whores.
What were his mountains but other whores? Cold, white whores that had seduced him away from her? Until he'd stayed inside one and left her alone.
But she'd survived, hadn't she? She'd done better than survive. She'd found what she wanted here.
Most of what she wanted.
She had money now. She had her place. She had men, young, hard bodies in the night.
So why was she so unhappy?
She didn't like to think long thoughts, to look inside herself and worry about what she'd find there. She liked to live. To move, to keep in motion. You didn't have to think when you were dancing.
She turned, vaguely irritated by the knock on her door. "Come on in."
She smoothed her face out, and the sultry smile was automatic when she saw John. "Well, hi there, good-looking. School out? It's that late already?" She patted her hair as she looked at her desk. "And here I've been daydreaming, wasting the day away. I'm going to have to get out there and see what Big Mike's whipping up for tonight's special."
"I need to talk to you, Charlene."
"Sure, honey. I've always got time for you. I'll make us some tea, and we'll get all cozy."
"No, don't."
"Baby, you look all frowny and serious." She crossed to him and skimmed a finger down each of his cheeks. "Of course you know I love when you're serious. It's so sexy."
"Don't," he said again and took her hands.
"Is something wrong?" Her fingers tightened on his like wires. "Oh God, is someone—something else—dead around here? I don't think I can take it. I don't think I can stand it."
"No. It's nothing like that." He let go of her hands, eased back a step. "I wanted to tell you, I'll be leaving at the end of the semester."
"You're taking a vacation? You're going to be taking a trip just when Lunacy's at its best?"
"I'm not taking a vacation. I'm leaving."
"What're you talking about? Leave? For good? That's just nonsense, John." The flirty smile faded, and something hot and sharp stabbed in her belly. "Where would you go? What would you do?"
"There are a lot of places I haven't seen, a lot of things I haven't done. I'll see them. I'll do them."
She felt her heart sink as she looked up into his dependable face. The ones who matter, her mind whispered, leave you. "John, you live here. You work here."
"I'll live and I'll work somewhere else."
"You can't just. . . why? Why are you doing this?"
"I should've done it years ago, but you get into the drift. Float your life away. Nate came to see me at school last week. Some of the things he said made me think, made me look back over . . . too many years."
She wanted to find her anger, the sort that pushed her to shout, to break things. The sort that swept her clean. But there was only dull worry. "What does Nate have to do with this?"
"He's the change. Or the rock in the stream that caused the change. You drift, Charlene, like water in a stream, and maybe you don't notice as much as you should what's going by."
He touched her hair, then dropped his hand again. "Then a stone drops into the stream, and it disrupts.
It changes things. Maybe a little, maybe a lot. But nothing's quite the same again."
"I never know what you're talking about when you go on like that." She pouted as she turned around and kicked at her desk, and the gesture made him smile. "Water and rocks and streams. What does that have to do with you coming in here like this and telling me you're leaving. You're going away. Don't you even care how I feel?"
"Entirely too much for my own good. I loved you the first minute I saw you. You knew it."
"But not anymore."
"Yes, then, now, all the years between. I loved you when you were with another man. And when he was gone, I thought, Now, she'll come to me. And you did. To my bed, at least. You let me have your body, but you married someone else. Even knowing I loved you, you married someone else."
"I had to do what was right for me. I had to be practical." She did throw something now—a little crystal swan. But its destruction gave her no satisfaction. "I had a right to look out for my future."
"I would've been good to you, and for you. I'd have been good to Meg. But you chose differently. You chose this." He spread his hands to indicate The Lodge. "You earned it. You worked hard. You built it up. And while Karl was alive, you still came to me. And I let you. To me and to others."
"Karl wasn't after sex, or hardly. He wanted a partner, someone to take care of him and this place.
I kept my end," she said passionately. "We had an understanding."
"You took care of him and this place. And when he died, you kept taking care. I've lost track of the times I've asked you to marry me, Charlene, the number of times you've said no. The number of times I've watched you go off with someone else or slide into my bed when there wasn't someone else. I'm done with it."
"I don't want to get married, so you're just going to take off?"
"You slept with that man the other night. Part of the hunting group. The tall one with dark hair."
She jerked up her chin. "So what?"