She stares at him, lost for words. “Thanks, Dad,” she manages, blinking a few times, though she doesn’t feel particularly fearless right now. In fact, it’s the opposite. She’s been too afraid to revisit “Astronomy” because it would mean revisiting not just the hope she’d been holding on to when she wrote the song but the grief that’s now a necessary part of it too. Finishing it would mean saying goodbye. And she hasn’t felt ready for that. So instead she’s been hiding. But it’s time to take her own kind of risk.
“You know how you could really thank me?” her dad is saying. “You could write me a new song. Maybe call it ‘Oceanography.’ ”
Greta laughs, unsure what to make of this. “Why?”
“Because your mother’s was called ‘Astronomy,’ ” he explains, looking pleased with himself, “and oceanography is sort of the opposite of that. It’s as far as you can get from the stars. But it’s still interesting in its own way.”
She doesn’t know if he came up with this on the fly or whether he’s been thinking about it for a while now. She’s not sure it matters.
“To opposites,” she says, clinking her glass against his, and even as he tips his head back to drink, she can see that he’s smiling too.
Later, as she makes her way back to her tiny box of a room for the last time, Greta realizes she hasn’t thought about Ben in hours. And maybe that’s okay. They had a week, and now that week is over. Sometimes that’s all you get. Maybe it was enough.
But when she unlocks the door, the first thing she sees is the book, right where she’d left it, in the middle of the bed. She sits down and picks it up, turning it over in her hands. Her brain is still hazy from the cocktails, her body still buzzing from the show. But when she opens it to the first page, she finds herself yielding to the words anyway, and by the time she closes it again, hours later, she can hear the attendants starting to collect the luggage in the hall, as beyond the walls of her room, the ship glides into the Port of Vancouver.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Greta is on the observation deck, elbows on the railing, watching the city grow closer, when a text comes in from Ben.
She’s okay, it says. No surgery.
That’s all it says. But she’s relieved to know.
I’m so glad, she writes back, and then she waits, watching the screen for a few seconds, hoping more of the little bubbles will appear. But they don’t.
The air is chilly, and though it’s only the beginning of June, it smells of fall, like leaves and wood smoke and damp. Greta stays there for another minute, soaking it all in, then slips the phone back into her pocket, picks up her guitar case, and heads inside.
Everyone else is at the buffet, having one last meal before they’re set to disembark. Greta’s flight is the earliest, which means she’ll be getting off soon, with the first group. So she grabs an apple before walking over to say goodbye.
Conrad stands up when he sees her. “You off?”
She nods and hands over a bag from the gift shop. He reaches inside uncertainly, then pulls out a puzzle.
“A new beginning,” she tells him as he studies the box, a thousand pieces of blue-and-white glacier.
“Wow,” Davis says, peering over his shoulder. “That looks like a complete and total nightmare.”
“It does,” Conrad agrees; then he looks up at Greta, his eyes damp. “Thank you.”
Greta smiles. “Thank you for a great week,” she says, and to her surprise, he begins to laugh. She does too, then tries again: “An unexpected week?”
“That works,” he says, giving her a hug, but the truth is so much more complicated than that. This was a strange week. A sad week. A hard week.
It was a week that could’ve easily sunk them.
But somehow, it didn’t. Somehow, they’re still here. Still trying.
She says goodbye to the others too, high-fiving Davis and promising Mary she’ll come visit over Christmas. She laughs when Todd suggests that she join them for their next trip, and promises a beaming Eleanor that there’ll be a couple of backstage passes waiting at her show in Cincinnati this fall.
They all wish her luck for tomorrow, and when Mary folds her into one last hug and whispers, “Your mom would be so proud of you,” Greta has to blink back tears, even though she’s said it a dozen times this week.
When her group number is called, she slings her guitar over her shoulder, says goodbye one more time, and then winds her way through the maze of the ship. There’s baggage everywhere, and people too, a flurry of preparations. Strange to think that this will start all over again this afternoon, that an entirely new set of passengers will step on board. At the ramp, she turns in her key and then walks off the ship, glancing back only once at the breathtaking size of it, her unlikely home for the past seven days.
Afterward, there’s a wait in the line for customs, then another one to get her suitcase, and then she hops onto one of the many buses going to the airport. As soon as she sits down, she gets a text from Asher. It’s a blurry picture of Greta and Conrad at the piano bar last night that Mary must have sent him. Underneath it, he’s written: I have so many questions. But the first is…am I still the favorite??
She laughs, then types: Don’t worry. I’m pretty sure your spot is still safe.
Phew, he writes back. I was starting to think I need to have another kid.
As the bus pulls out, she presses her forehead to the window, watching the city of Vancouver whip by, a blur of gray, and she thinks how odd it is to start the day at sea and end it in New York City, to go from calm waters and endless sky to brownstones and bodegas. And tomorrow, a music festival.
On the plane, she pulls out her notebook to work on her set list, which she still hasn’t sent to Howie for approval. At the top, she writes “Prologue” and stares at it for a long time. Then she flips back a few pages to a different song she wrote on a different plane traveling through a different sort of night. She closes her eyes, and what swims to the surface is an image of the glacier the other day, all those ashes floating off, black pinpricks against a stark white sky, like the opposite of stars.
Her heart gives a great lurch, and she lets herself feel it.
But only for a moment.
Then she begins to write.
She finishes just in time to nudge open her window shade and see the tip of Manhattan appear, the clusters of silvery buildings bounded by two rivers, one of her favorite views in the world. Even the first time she ever came here, nervous and hopeful, it had somehow felt like home. It’s the kind of place you can fall in love with even before clapping eyes on it. Now she feels her heart swell at the familiar sight, and as the plane veers away from the city and toward the airport, she takes a few long breaths.