The old man nodded. “My pleasure, Tica.”
In her previous life, Leni wouldn’t have believed this man had been a captain at Pan Am. But up here, lots of people had been one thing on the Outside and became another in Alaska. Large Marge used to be a big-city prosecutor and now took showers at the Laundromat and sold gum, and Natalie had gone from teaching economics at a university to captaining her own fishing boat. Alaska was full of unexpected people—like the woman who lived in a broken-down school bus at Anchor Point and read palms. Rumor had it that she used to be a cop in New York City. Now she walked around with a parrot on her shoulder. Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you. No one cared if you had an old car on your deck, let alone a rusted fridge. Any life that could be imagined could be lived up here.
Leni stepped up into the plane, ducking her head, bending in half. Once inside, she took a seat in the middle row and snapped her seat belt in place. Ms. Rhodes sat down beside her. Matthew lumbered past them, head down, not making eye contact.
“Tom says he’s not talking much,” Ms. Rhodes said to Leni, leaning close.
“I don’t know what he needs,” Leni said, turning back, watching Matthew take a seat and strap his seat belt tight.
“A friend,” Ms. Rhodes said, but it was a stupid answer. The kind of thing adults said. Obvious. But what was that friend supposed to say?
The pilot climbed aboard and strapped himself in and put on a headset, then started the engine. Leni heard Marthe and Agnes giggling in their seats behind her.
The float plane engine hummed, the metal all around her rattled. Waves slapped the floats.
The pilot was saying something about seat cushions and what to do in case of an unscheduled water landing.
“Wait. That means a crash. He’s talking about what to do if we crash,” she said, feeling the start of panic.
“We’ll be fine,” Ms. Rhodes said. “You can’t be Alaskan and be afraid of small planes. This is how we get around.”
Leni knew it was true. With so little of the state accessible by roads, boats and planes were important up here. In the winter, the vastness of Alaska was connected by frozen rivers and lakes. In the summer all of that fast-moving water separated and isolated them. Bush planes helped them get around. Still, she hadn’t been in an airplane before and it felt remarkably unsteady and unreliable. She clutched the armrests and held on. She tried to sweep fear out of her mind as the plane rambled past the breakwater, clattered hard, and began lifting into the sky. The plane swayed sickeningly, leveled out. Leni didn’t open her eyes. If she did, she knew she’d see things that scared her: bolts that could pop out, windows that could crack, mountains they could crash into. She thought about that plane that had crashed in the Andes a few years ago. The survivors had become cannibals.
Her fingers ached. That was how tightly she was holding on.
“Open your eyes,” Ms. Rhodes said. “Trust me.”
She opened her eyes, pushed the vibrating curls out of her face.
Through a circle of Plexiglas, the world was something she’d never seen before. Blue, black, white, purple. From this vantage point, the geographical history of Alaska came alive for her; she saw the violence of its birth—volcanoes like Mounts Redoubt and Augustine erupting; mountain peaks thrust up from the sea and then worn down by rocky blue glaciers; fjords sculpted by rivers of moving ice. She saw Homer, huddled on a strip of land between high sandstone bluffs, fields covered in snow, and the Spit pointing out into the bay. Glaciers had formed all of this landscape, cut through and crunched forward, hollowing out deep bays, leaving mountains on either side.
The colors were spectacular, saturating. Across the blue bay, the Kenai Mountains rose like something out of a fairy tale, white sawlike blades that pushed high, high into the blue sky. In places, the glaciers on their steep sides were the pale blue of robins’ eggs.
The mountains expanded, swallowed the horizon. Jagged, white peaks striated by black crevasses and turquoise glaciers. “Wow,” she said, pressing closer to the window. They flew close to mountain peaks.
And then they were descending, gliding low over an inlet. Snow blanketed everything, lay in glittering patches on the beach, turned to ice and slush by the water. The float plane swerved and banked, lifted up again, and flew over a thicket of white trees. She saw a huge bull moose walking toward the bay.
They were over an inlet and descending fast.