There’s nothing she can say to this. Because he’s right.
She hadn’t thought about it like that, of course. In the moment, she wasn’t really thinking about anything. She’d just arrived in Berlin, and the festival was a few days away. She and Luke had plans to go to some museums and wander the city and drink a whole lot of beer. The call from her dad felt vague and faraway: her mom was having headaches and he was worried. It was rare for him to phone her; that alone should’ve been warning enough. But there was also a hitch in his voice, something subtle and hard to define.
“She hasn’t mentioned anything to me,” Greta had said. She was in the lobby of the Berlinische Galerie, and it was noisy with voices and footsteps. “Has she gone to the doctor?”
“Not yet, but we have an appointment on Friday,” he said. “Asher is coming. Maybe you should be there too.”
Luke had gotten the tickets and was standing near the entrance, waving them in her direction. When she glanced over, he mouthed, What? She shook her head and turned around again.
“Dad,” she said, putting a finger to her other ear as a group of German schoolchildren shuffled past. “I’m in Berlin. I’m playing a festival this weekend.”
“Oh,” he said. “Right. I forgot.”
“How worried are you? I mean, if you think I should cancel…” She was regretting the words even as they came out of her mouth. On Saturday afternoon, she’d be headlining in front of forty thousand people. It wasn’t that she couldn’t cancel. It would be costly, and it would take a lot of explaining, but she could do it if she had to. If it was important.
She just didn’t want to.
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Conrad said briskly. “She’d probably kill me if she knew I was even calling you.”
“Listen,” Greta said, “I’m supposed to fly back to New York on Monday, but I can switch my ticket to come straight to Columbus instead.”
“It’s okay,” he said, but his voice was tight. “We’ll be okay.”
“Well, if anything changes,” she says, “I can be there. I will be there. I promise.”
“I know.”
Greta felt a tug of uncertainty. “You’ll let me know how the appointment goes?”
“Of course,” he said. “Good luck with the festival.”
“Thanks,” she started to say, then realized he’d already hung up.
Now he’s looking at her with a slightly bewildered expression, like he’s not exactly sure how they’ve waded into this. They haven’t actually talked about it before, not outright, and suddenly here it is, dropped onto the sand between them like something heavy and lifeless.
“Dad,” she begins, her mind racing, but she doesn’t actually know what to say. There are no apologies big enough. She’s thought about that conversation constantly over the last few months; it’s a small blinking light in her chest that never seems to dim. But she’s only now realizing how much her dad has been an afterthought. There’s the guilt that her mom needed her and she wasn’t there, the heaviest thing of all, and then just behind that, a razor-sharp grief that she didn’t get a chance to say goodbye. But for the first time, Greta can see that she’s been feeling sorry for her mom, and sorry for herself, and at the end of all that, there simply hasn’t been anything left over for her dad.
Conrad’s shoulders are hunched, and his face looks windburned. “It doesn’t matter now,” he says, though of course it does. It matters more than anything. That moment, that phone call, that missed opportunity: all of it is as elemental to their lives as this glacier is to the beach, huge and imposing and receding so slowly, so gradually, that you might be forgiven for assuming it would be here forever.
“Dad,” Greta says again, and this time he looks disappointed when she can’t seem to locate a follow-up sentence. But she feels entirely empty.
In the distance, Bear is walking their way. He’s beaming at them, his smile so at odds with the moment it’s almost humorous. Almost.
Conrad turns to follow her gaze, then lets out a heavy sigh.
“It all went so fast,” he says, watching the younger man cross the beach. Greta isn’t exactly sure what he’s talking about, but when he turns back to her, his eyes—the same color as hers—look very tired. “I’m not going to be around forever either.”
“Dad,” she says for a third time, feeling hopelessly ill-equipped for whatever this conversation is. “You have to stop—”
“I told her I’d make sure you were okay. I promised.”
Bear is getting closer now, and Greta can see that he’s holding a small chunk of ice in one hand. She turns back to Conrad, feeling oddly panicky.
“I am okay,” she says in a way that makes her sound precisely the opposite. “We just have different definitions of that.”
His mouth tightens at the corners, but he doesn’t say anything.
When Bear is close enough, he calls out to them: “Couldn’t let you miss all the fun.” He waves the piece of ice in the air. “You have to taste it. There’s nothing like glacier ice.”
Greta shakes her head, still too full of emotion to manage a smile. Conrad, too, looks at him, stone-faced. “No thanks,” he says, but it’s not enough to dissuade Bear, who lopes the final few yards with all the eagerness of a puppy.
“Trust me on this,” he says, pushing the ice into Conrad’s hands.
For a second, nobody moves. They all three stand there in the middle of all that wilderness, their cheeks pink and their boots sunk deep into the sand, staring at the piece of blue-gray ice like it’s some sort of oracle.
And then, to Greta’s surprise, Conrad gives it a single lick.
“See?” Bear says with a grin. “Now you’ll always remember this as the day you tried glacier ice.”
There’s a flash of something on Conrad’s face. “I doubt it.”
But Bear is insistent. “Sure you will. What could possibly top that?”
“My anniversary.”
For a few seconds, this doesn’t quite land; it skirts the edges of Greta’s crowded brain, the word moving through her head like music: anniversary, anniversary, anniversary.
And then, all at once, her heart falls.
It was today. Of course it was today.
This whole trip was meant to be a celebration. But today was the actual day. Forty years since they walked down the aisle in a small wooden church in Ohio; forty years since they said their vows and, laughing, smashed cake into each other’s faces.