The Long Way Out

Chapter One: Grounded

The prop lay on a padded bench in the corner of the hangar like something dead.

Thea Ahlgren stood over it with a coffee going cold in her hand and did the arithmetic she had already done eleven times that morning. Eight days for the overhaul if the shop in Calgary shipped the hub back on schedule. Twelve if they didn't. Either way, her de Havilland Beaver sat on its floats at the dock on Schwatka Lake with a bare nose and a tarp over the engine, and every day it sat there was two thousand dollars she wasn't earning.

"You could stare at it harder," Marla said from the office door. "Sometimes that helps."

"I've heard that."

"There's a survey crew wants to go to Tagish Wednesday."

"Then somebody with a working airplane should take them."

Marla Ostergaard ran Sundog Aviation out of two hangars, a portable trailer, and an unshakable belief that the season would be better next year. She was sixty-one and had flown floats for thirty of those years before her knees quit. She looked at Thea the way she looked at weather coming over the Coast Range — with interest, and no illusions.

"September's a graveyard anyway," Marla said. "The Germans have all gone home. Go fishing."

"I don't fish."

"Right. I keep forgetting."

Thea drank the cold coffee and didn't say what they both knew, which was that in eleven years of flying out of Whitehorse she had never once put a rod in a boat, never once camped for pleasure, and had turned down three charters into the Liard drainage without giving a reason. Marla had stopped asking after the second one.

The hangar smelled of avgas and hot dust. Outside, the light had that thin, tilted quality that arrived in the Yukon in early September and meant the summer was finished pretending. The birch along the airport road had gone yellow in a single week. Frost two nights running.

Her phone buzzed against her hip.

She almost didn't look. It buzzed the way a text buzzes, and nobody texted her but Marla and the fuel supplier and a pilot named Ferg who kept sending pictures of grayling.

The number was long and strange, the way satellite numbers are. The message was fifteen words.

Dad hurt bad. Cant move him. Fever. Please come. Raven Fork. Its Jolene.

Thea read it four times.

The first read did nothing at all. The second put a cold hand flat against her sternum. On the third she noticed she had set the coffee down on the wing jack without meaning to, and on the fourth the hangar seemed to have gotten very quiet, as though someone had thrown a blanket over the whole building.

Raven Fork.

She had not spoken those two words aloud in eleven years. She had driven past the turnoff to the Liard road exactly once, on a ferry job to Fort Nelson, and had gripped the yoke so hard her knuckles ached for an hour afterward.

Dad.

She had a photograph of Gunnar Ahlgren in a shoebox under her bed, taken on a dock in Prince Rupert when she was seven. In it he was laughing with his head back, a fish in one hand, sun on the water behind him, and he looked like the safest man in the world. That photograph was a lie of a very specific kind: it was completely true, and it had nothing to do with anything that came after.

And — Jolene.

She did not know a Jolene.

Thea walked out of the hangar into the wind, phone in hand, and typed with her thumbs.

Who is this?

Nothing came back for nine minutes. She stood in the gravel lot the entire time, coatless, while the wind combed the yellow birch. Then:

Jolene Creagh. Im his daughter. Yours too I guess. Half.

Thea sat down on the bumper of Marla's truck.

There was a way the world could reorganize itself in a second, she knew that; she'd had it happen when she was fourteen and a doctor in Prince Rupert said the word metastatic in the hallway outside her mother's room, thinking the door was shut. It felt like the floor going soft. It felt like this.

She typed: How old are you.

19.

Thea did the math and the math was ugly. Nineteen years ago she had been ten. Her mother had been alive. They had lived in a green house with a woodstove and a dog named Boots, and her father had been away at sea for weeks at a time on a seiner called the Elin B., and had come home smelling of diesel and salt with candy in his coat pockets.

Something moved in her chest that she recognized as rage, and she put it away, because there was a man with a fever in it too.

How bad is he.

The reply took four minutes.

Fell off the cache roof. Hip is wrong. Cant stand cant crawl. Started shaking last night. He says its nothing. Its not nothing. Cant fly out, weather. Please.

Thea called the number. It rang with the strange hollow delay of a satellite link and then a girl's voice came through, chopped up, sounding much younger than nineteen.

"— hello? Hello —"

"It's Thea."

A pause the size of a canyon. "Okay."

"Where exactly are you?"

"Cabin. Where you'd — where he built it. Second bench above the Fork, quarter mile up from the confluence."

So it was still standing. Thea had half expected the bush to have swallowed it.

"Have you called anyone else?"

"I hiked to a line shack for this phone. It only has —" static ate a word — "minutes on it. I called the Crossing. They said helicopter can't come, there's a system coming off the Gulf, ceiling's on the deck for a week maybe. They said get him to the Crossing and there's road."

"Forty miles of river."

"I know what it is," Jolene said, and there was steel in it, and something else underneath, thin and frightened. "I can't move him alone. I've tried. I got him twenty feet and he screamed so bad I thought he'd die of it."

Thea closed her eyes. Wind moved the birch. Somewhere on the field a Cessna ran up its engine.

"What antibiotics does he have?"

"Half a bottle of amoxi from a dog."

"From a dog."

"Vet gave it to us for Roscoe two years back. He's been taking them."

"Okay," Thea said. "Okay. Jolene. Listen to me. I need you to keep water in him. Not tea. Water with a little salt and a little sugar, as much as he'll swallow, all day and all night. Cool cloths on his neck and his wrists when the fever climbs. Don't let him roll onto that hip. Put something between his knees. Can you do that?"

"Yes."

"How many days since he fell?"

A silence with a shape to it.

"Three," Jolene said. "Four now."

"Four days." Thea pressed her thumb hard into the ridge of scar tissue along the side of her left hand, an old habit, an old map. "I'm coming. I don't have a plane. I'll come by river. It's going to take me the better part of two days to get to you."

"Two days." The girl's voice cracked exactly once and then went flat again. "Okay."

"Save your minutes. If you have to reach me, text."

"Thea." First time she'd used the name. She said it like a word she'd read a lot but never spoken. "He doesn't know I called you."

"I figured."

"He said —" static — "said you'd never come."

Thea looked at the yellow birch and the Cessna taxiing and the whole clean, ordinary, hard-won world she had built out of nothing at eighteen years old with two ruined hands.

"I'm coming," she said.

She found Marla in the office and said, "I need your truck for a week."

Marla looked up from a fuel invoice. Took in Thea's face. Reached into the desk drawer and put the keys on the desk without a single question, which was one of about four reasons Thea loved her.

"Where?"

"Fortier Crossing."

Marla's eyebrows went up a quarter inch. She knew the geography. She knew what was up that river, in the general way that everyone in the territory knew something about everybody.

"Your dad?"

"My dad."

"Tank's near full. There's a jack in the box and a spare that's honestly more of a suggestion." Marla stood. "Thea. You want company?"

"No."

"Didn't think so." Marla came around the desk and did something she had never done in six years, which was put a hand on Thea's shoulder. "Diesel. Not gas. And phone me from the Crossing before you go upriver, so somebody in the world knows."

Thea packed in twenty minutes, in her apartment above a laundromat on Fourth. She had a talent for packing; it was the one useful thing three winters on the Raven Fork had given her, other than everything else. Wool. Fleece. Two pairs of gloves. Her good rain shell and the cheap one over it. Headlamp, spare batteries, fire kit in a film canister. Her first-aid roll, and then, from the shoebox under the bed, the amber bottle of doxycycline she'd been prescribed for a tick bite in Ontario and never finished, and the eight tablets of cephalexin left from a bad cut two winters ago. Not enough. Not close. She put them in anyway.

She stopped at the pharmacy on Main and stood at the counter and lied, calmly and thoroughly, about a hunting camp in Alaska, and walked out with ibuprofen, acetaminophen, a bottle of iodine, ten meters of gauze, and a splint kit. The pharmacist wouldn't sell her antibiotics without a script and Thea did not blame her.

At 1:40 in the afternoon she pulled out of Whitehorse in Marla's diesel with the Alaska Highway running out ahead of her, four hundred and thirty kilometres of it before the turnoff, and the sky in the south had a low grey shoulder to it, a long bruise lying along the mountains, the leading edge of the thing coming up out of the Gulf of Alaska.

Eleven years, she thought. Eleven years and one text message.

She drove.