Forty years, and they were supposed to be spending this day together.
Forty years, and Greta completely forgot.
She turns to her dad, mouth open, feeling suddenly undone. But before she can say anything, Bear gives him such a hard thump on the back that Conrad pitches forward a step.
“Happy anniversary, man,” Bear says. “How many years?”
Conrad’s eyes meet Greta’s, and then he says, in a voice like gravel, “Forty.”
What he doesn’t say, what she can practically feel him not saying is: At least it would’ve been.
“Wow,” Bear says, shaking his head in wonder. In his hand, the piece of ice has started to melt, one slow drip at a time. “Forty years. What’s your secret?”
Again, Conrad looks at Greta.
“We always kept our promises,” he says.
Chapter Twenty-One
When Bear heads over to round up the others, Greta starts to follow. But Conrad hangs back. She turns to face him, not sure what to say. All the heat between them has dissolved; what’s left is something heavier, something slower to burn.
Her face is numb from the wind, her hands so cold they feel hot. An image of her uncomfortable bed in her windowless room on the ship flashes in her mind, but the thought of getting from here to there—hike to canoe to bus to boat—feels insurmountable, like she might as well be on the moon right now.
Conrad pats at his pocket again, then reaches inside and pulls out a small plastic bag, cradling it carefully in his palm. To her alarm, he looks like he might cry.
Still, it takes Greta a second to realize what he’s holding.
When she does, she walks back over to him, staring down at the contents of the bag, which don’t look all that different from the grayish sand they’re standing on.
Her mouth falls open.
“It’s not all of them,” he says quietly. “The rest are still at home. But it seemed only right to bring some here.”
Greta’s heart is racing beneath all her layers. She glances toward the rest of the group, then at the plastic bag, at this piece of her mom that he’s carried here from Ohio, that he’s held in his pocket all day. It knocks the wind out of her, seeing it there like that.
“I thought you might want to help,” he says, and she nods, though she’s not entirely sure. Her brain is moving slowly; so are her feet, which feel unaccountably heavy as she starts to move back toward the glacier, head bent against the wind.
Conrad surveys the area. “What do you think?”
There’s the ice in front of them, towering and slick, and below that a series of puddles between patches of sand. Greta is shivering now, though she can’t tell if it’s from the cold or something else. He’s right: this is what she would’ve wanted. But it’s still hard to imagine leaving any part of her here in this windswept place.
It’s hard to imagine leaving any of her at all.
“Maybe over there,” Greta says, pointing to a small shelf in the ice, just about eye level, because it looks sturdy and even and somewhat protected from the elements.
Conrad nods solemnly. “Do you want to go first?”
She accepts the bag from him, feeling the small and precise weight of it, then picks her way over to the ice, her wellies sinking into the puddles. She’s not sure whether she should pour straight from the bag or put some into her hand first. In the end, she’s afraid the wind will blow it away, so she reaches inside and scoops a little into her palm, then tips it gently onto the ice. Some of it drifts off anyway, scattering into the air like snow, there and then gone. But she feels surprisingly lighter as she watches it go, and when she turns to her dad, she can see that he’s crying too.
When it’s his turn, he stands there for a long time, his head bowed as if in prayer. Behind him, Greta quietly says a prayer of her own: “I love you, I love you, I love you.”
This, too, is carried off by the wind.
Afterward, Conrad tucks the empty bag into his pocket and wipes a sleeve roughly across his face. Down by the canoes, Bear is shouting for them, his voice faint. But they take their time anyway. About halfway there, Greta is seized by a sudden impulse. She loops an arm through her dad’s, and he stiffens for a moment, then relaxes. So they walk the rest of the way like that.
They’ve barely left the banks of the river, the glacier already starting to recede, when Greta feels a drag on the canoe. She turns to see Bear with his oar braced in the water, his eyes on a line of spruce trees. “Shh,” he says, though none of them are speaking. He half-stands, the canoe tilting beneath him, and the rest of them lift their dripping paddles, trying to follow his gaze. One of the men passes over a pair of binoculars, and Bear lets out a soft laugh as he looks through them.
“Holy shit,” he says. “I heard there was a Steller’s sea eagle spotted in Juneau last month. He must’ve made his way up here.”
“A what?” says the woman with the compass.
Bear hands the binoculars to her. “A Steller’s sea eagle. They’re incredibly rare. Especially around here. This one is a vagrant.”
“A vagrant?” the husband asks. “What does that mean?”
The binoculars reach Conrad, and Greta watches as he lifts them to his eyes, scanning the trees. She can tell when he’s spotted the bird by the way his whole body goes still.
“Just that it’s way off course,” Bear explains. “They’re usually only found in Asia.”
“Wow,” says one of the other men. “So what’s it doing all the way over here?”
Conrad hands Greta the binoculars, which are heavier than they look. When she peers through them, the world skids madly before righting itself. She searches the feathery tops of the trees until she sees a pop of orange: the great curved beak of the bird, which looks enormous in a way that has nothing to do with magnification. It’s huge and black with white-tipped wings, and it sits placidly in the branches, its beady eyes alert, its head moving mechanically back and forth.
“Well, that’s just it,” Bear is saying. “We don’t know. But legend has it that these birds are messengers from the land of the dead, returning to visit their loved ones.”
Greta lowers the binoculars and turns to Conrad, her heart beating fast. He’s looking at her in disbelief, his face suddenly pale. For a moment, the canoe spins slowly in the water, everything so quiet it almost feels loud. And then Bear begins to laugh.
“No, I’m just messing with you,” he says with a grin. “It probably got lost. Or blown off course in a storm.”
All the tension floods back out of Greta. She wants to laugh along with the others, but she can’t. When she looks back at her dad, he gives her a slightly embarrassed smile, and it makes her feel less alone, imagining that he believed it too, even though they both know better, even though they both understand that it’s far easier to get lost than to reach across such impossible distances.