She doesn’t ask if everything is okay. She already knows it’s not.
“Hannah broke her arm,” he says, his voice cracking. “It’s really bad.”
Greta swallows. “What happened?”
“She fell at the playground. They’re at the hospital now.” He glances around, his gaze unfocused as he takes in the odd collection of fish-related contraptions. “I don’t know what to do. She must be so scared.” He blinks a few times, his eyes glassy. “I can’t believe I’m not there right now. I can’t believe I’m not home.”
Greta isn’t sure what to say. Everything that occurs to her feels woefully inadequate: I’m sorry and That’s awful and I hope she’ll be okay.
She says it anyway: “I’m so sorry.”
But Ben is distracted now, looking at something on his phone, rubbing the back of his neck with his other hand. It’s a gesture she hasn’t seen before, maybe something he does when he’s upset or worried or both, and as she watches him, Greta is suddenly aware of how little they actually know each other. At the end of the day, they’re just two strangers who’ve spent less than a week together in a place that’s about as far from their real lives as it’s possible to get.
Her heart is thudding for reasons she can’t quite explain.
“I should go,” Ben says, snapping his head up.
Greta nods. “Right. Sure. I’ll go back with you.”
For a split second, he looks bewildered by her response. But then he shakes his head. “No,” he says. “I meant…home. I should go home. I should be there with her.”
She stares at him, feeling like she’s misread something important, like she’d accidentally gone straight to sympathy on some invisible continuum, when perhaps the situation warranted something more serious. “She’s going to be okay, right?” she asks, and a flicker of impatience passes over Ben’s face.
“I don’t know,” he says tersely. “That’s the whole point of going there.”
“Yeah, but a broken arm isn’t”—she fumbles for the right word—“serious serious. Right?”
“They heard the bone snap,” he says. “That’s…serious. She might need surgery. Anesthesia…that’s definitely serious.”
Greta looks around, still trying to recalibrate. “How would you even— I mean, we’re in the middle of nowhere and—”
“I don’t know yet,” he says. “I have to go figure it out.”
“We’ll be in Vancouver in less than forty-eight hours,” Greta says. “By the time you find another way back—”
“I can’t just sit here in the middle of Alaska and drink beers with you while my daughter is in the hospital.”
She reels back. “That’s not what I’m saying. I meant—”
“You wouldn’t understand,” he says as he starts for the door.
Outside, the sky is still a hard, clean blue. Greta follows him up the wooden boardwalk that leads back to their ship, which is docked on the other side of a small peninsula, hidden behind an outcropping of spruce trees.
“Wait a second,” she says, half-trotting to keep up as he walks straight through someone’s family photo, charging ahead, each footstep loud on the wooden planks.
“I can’t wait a second,” he says, spinning around. “You don’t get it because you’re not—”
He stops himself, but they both know what he was about to say.
You’re not a parent.
It’s only a fact. And not even an unpleasant one to Greta. At least most days. Still, something about the way he says it stings, and she has to work to compose her face to disguise this.
“I’m sorry,” Ben says. “But this is the part where you drop everything to be there.”
Greta stares at him, stricken. It takes a few beats for him to realize what he’s said. When he does, his face goes slack.
“I didn’t mean…” he begins, but he doesn’t seem sure where to go from there. “I wasn’t talking about what happened with…” He stops again and shakes his head, flustered now. “I’m sorry,” he says finally. “But I really have to go.”
“It’s fine,” Greta says, because what else is there to say at this point?
“I wish…” He falters, then tries again: “I wish it didn’t have to end this way.”
The word end lands with a thud between them, and Ben looks as if he’s trying to decide whether or not he should take it back.
“I really hope your daughter’s okay,” Greta says, and to her surprise, he reaches for her hand. There’s something automatic about it, the way they fit, and she thinks how strange it is that they woke up together this morning, and how empty it will feel without him tomorrow.
“Thank you,” he says, and then—just like that—he turns and walks off toward the ship.
Later, sitting on the cold sand, Greta does a search on her phone: there’s a flight from the nearby town of Hoonah straight to Juneau, and from there, a red-eye to New York. All afternoon, as the sun slides across the sky, and the tourists move in and out like the tide all around her, she tries to picture where he might be at that moment, imagines him sitting in a taxi, then waiting at an airport, then flying across the barren landscape, doing everything he can to get home.
Chapter Thirty
The last day at sea is cold and gray. The wind has fallen flat, making everything eerily still, and a low-hanging fog sits atop the water so that it almost feels like they’re sailing straight into a cloud. Looking out the rain-specked window from a reclining chair in the Crow’s Nest lounge, Greta thinks of ghost ships, of pirate ships, of all the ships that have come before, sailing these waters when they were still uncharted. She wonders if Jack London might’ve been on one of them, or if he made it up here some other way. She wishes she’d asked Ben.
Tomorrow, they’ll be back in Vancouver before dawn. But today, there’s only this: water and mountains and sky. Gray on gray on gray.
She has no idea how long she’s been there when her dad walks up, glass in hand, and sits down in the chair beside her. He’s wearing a fleece vest with the logo of the cruise ship on it, and his cheeks are a little ruddy.
“Let me guess,” he says. “You’re here for the Macarena.”
“What?” Greta asks wearily, and he nods over his shoulder, where a group of people have started to gather for a lesson on the small dance floor in front of the bar.