She doesn’t know if he’s talking about this night. Or this moment. Or something altogether bigger. But either way, she understands.
Either way, she wants to make it count too.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Sometime in the night, Greta must’ve agreed to go on some sort of excursion with Ben this morning. She has absolutely no memory of this, but nevertheless she wakes to find him standing over the bed in a green hooded sweatshirt that says SAVE THE WHALES, looking entirely too enthusiastic for seven a.m.
“Hey.” He nudges her shoulder. “We’ve got fifteen minutes.”
She yawns. “What’s happening now?”
“Whale watching,” he says, beaming, but then his smile slips. “You didn’t forget, did you?”
“Can you forget something you don’t remember knowing in the first place?”
He sits on the edge of the bed and leans over her, smelling of mint toothpaste. “Trust me, we’re going to have a whale of a time,” he says. Then—even as she rolls her eyes at him—he kisses her on the nose.
Looking out the window, she can see that the ship has docked flush up against a huge wooden pier, beyond which there’s nothing but forest, everything green and thick and wooded. A seagull flies low past the veranda, and they can hear laughter from the people next door.
“Where are we again?” Greta asks, rolling onto her stomach. Her head is pounding, her mouth full of cotton. “And how much did we drink last night?”
“Icy Strait Point,” Ben says as he stands and walks over to the dresser. “And a lot.”
When he turns around again, he’s holding a small worn paperback. He hands it over carefully, almost reverently, and she sees that it’s an old copy of The Call of the Wild, the spine cracked, the pages foxed and yellow.
“I thought you said you had a spare.”
He shrugs. “I have plenty of others.”
“Yeah, but this one…” She looks up at him. “It must be worth something.”
“Only to me,” he says with a smile. “It was my first ever copy.”
She stares down at the cover, a faded illustration of two dogs locked in battle. A classic story of the frozen North, it says.
“Ben, I can’t take this.”
“It’s just a loan,” he insists. “But that copy—it’s magic. It changed my whole life.”
“It’s too important,” she says, trying to hand it back to him.
But he only smiles. “I trust you with important things.”
A few minutes later, she has it tucked under her arm as she sneaks out into the hallway in a pair of Ben’s sweatpants and an oversized Dave Matthews Band hoodie. She pauses to check her phone. Six new messages from Howie. Her heart sinks a little further with each one.
If you want to go along with this, I need a quote ASAP.
I’m happy to write it for you.
Something vague, maybe?
Or we can shut the whole thing down.
Let me know what you want to do.
Like, now.
She turns the phone off again and hurries down the hall. To her relief, the only people she passes—a group with matching family reunion shirts—are too busy arguing to notice her. It isn’t until she reaches the elevators that her luck runs out. Of all people, her dad is there, waiting with a newspaper tucked under his arm. Greta briefly considers darting away, but it’s too late. He glances over, raising his eyebrows at her disheveled appearance: wild hair, bare feet, heels dangling from one hand.
“I’m going whale watching,” she announces, because her brain is still too fuzzy to come up with anything better.
“In that?” he asks with an entirely straight face.
She steps up beside him, and they both turn to the elevator doors, hands clasped behind their backs in the exact same way. Above them, something soft and classical plays from the speaker, and Greta lifts her eyes to the ceiling, trying to come up with something else to say.
“I’m sorry I forgot your anniversary,” she tells him eventually, and he looks over at her in surprise. “It’s weird. Sometimes all I can do is think about her. And sometimes it hurts too much.”
His voice, when he speaks, is like sandpaper. “Me too.”
The elevator dings, the doors sliding open in front of them. It’s empty, but neither of them moves to get on. After a moment, the doors shut again.
Somehow, they’re still standing there. Together.
“She kept a picture of Glacier Bay taped to the fridge,” he says without looking at her. “Every morning, when she went to get the milk for our tea, she’d smile and say, ‘That looks just like heaven.’ ” He turns his watery green eyes to Greta. “I have no idea how to do this without her.”
Before she can say anything, the doors open again, and this time, a family in swim gear is waiting on the other side, two moms with three kids, the toddler in the midst of a tantrum, red-faced and furious. All five of them shift to the side in a cloud of tears and sunscreen, leaving room for two more. But Conrad is still watching Greta, and Greta is still watching Conrad.
She’s about to let this one go too—not yet ready for the conversation to be over—when he looks between her and the elevator, his face flickering with indecision. Finally he gives his head a shake, and then, just like that, he turns and walks off down the hall without saying a word.
“Totally understandable,” says one of the moms with a grin. The other one catches the door before it closes, so Greta steps on.
When she arrives at the meeting spot outside on the pier, Ben is already there. He’s wearing jeans and sneakers and a puffy vest over his hoodie, and his eyes are shielded by the brim of a navy Columbia cap. There’s a moment before he sees her where she stands there watching him, and it’s a little dizzying, honestly, to feel her rib cage expand like that, to feel every inch of her heart inside it.
“What?” he asks, as she walks over and fits herself under his arm.
“Nothing,” she says.
The whale watching boat is bigger than the one she took yesterday, and she and Ben file aboard behind people with serious binoculars and even more serious cameras. Most of them huddle inside; the morning is chilly, and it’ll be a while before they’re far enough out to see any whales. But Greta and Ben head straight for the top deck anyway, their eyes already stinging from the wind.
They stand near the rail as the boat peels away from the dock, watching the cruise ship recede, their gloved hands wrapped around the metal railing. As they get farther out from the shore, they can see the whole of Icy Strait Point, a small collection of red wooden buildings on stilts and a rocky beach, all tucked beneath the cascading evergreens.