Northern Lights

them are the size of a house." He let out a laugh as another shot off into the air and barely registered the shimmy of the plane in a pocket of turbulence.
    "People pay me good money to fly them over here to see this, then spend most of their time with their eyes glued to the lens of a video camera. Seems like a waste to me. If they want to see this on a movie, they should rent one."
    It wasn't just the show, Nate thought, the spectacle of it. It was that cycle—violent, inevitable, somehow mythic. The sights—jagged boulders of blue ice heaving themselves into the air. The sounds of it, creaks, the thunder and the cannon shots. The gushing up of the water on impact, the rising of the white into a shimmering island that streamed along on the churning fjord.
    "I have to stay here."
    She guided the plane up, circling so he could watch from another angle. "Here, in the air?"
    "No." He turned his head, grinned at her in a way she rarely saw. Easy and relaxed and happy. "Here. I can't be anyplace else either. It's good to know that."
    "Here's something else that might be good to know. I'm in love with you."
    She laughed as the plane shuddered through rough air; then she punched it through, and bulleted up the channel while ice fell around them.

 
     
     
     
    TWENTY-SEVEN
     
     
     
     
     
     
    CHARLENE HAD ALWAYS LOVED what passed for spring in Alaska. She loved the way the days kept stretching out, longer and longer until there was nothing but light.
    In her office she stood at the window, her work neglected on her desk, and stared out at the street. Busy. People walking, driving, going, coming. Townspeople and tourists, country dwellers in for supplies or company. Fourteen of her twenty rooms were booked, and she'd be at capacity for three days the following week. After that, the strong, almost endless light would draw people in like flies to honey.
    She'd work like a dog through most of April, into May and straight through until freeze-up.
    She liked to work, to have her place crowded with people, the noise and the mess they made. The money they spent.
    She'd built something here, hadn't she? She'd found what she wanted—or most of what she wanted. She looked out to the river. Boats were on it now, slipping their way through the melting islands of ice.
    She looked beyond the river, beyond to the mountains. White and blue, with green beginning to spread slowly, very slowly at their feet. White at their peaks, forever white in that frozen, foreign world.
    She'd never climbed. She never would.
    The mountains had never called to her. But other things had. Pat had. She'd felt that call blow through her, a thousand trumpets, when he'd roared into her life. Not yet seventeen, she remembered, and still a virgin. Stuck, hadn't she been stuck, in those flat Iowa fields just waiting for someone to pluck her out?
    The original midwestern farm girl, she thought now, desperate for any escape. Then he'd come, churning up all that dull air on his motorcycle, looking so dangerous and exotic and . . . different.
    Oh, he'd called to her, Charlene remembered, and she'd answered that call. Sneaking out of the house on those chilly spring nights to run to him, to roll naked with him on the soft green grass, free and careless as a puppy. And so desperately in love. That burning, blistering love maybe you could only feel at seventeen.
    When he'd gone, she'd gone with him, walking out on home, family, friends, speeding away from the world she knew, and into another—on the back of a Harley.
    To be seventeen, she thought, and that daring again.
    They'd lived. How they'd lived. Going wherever they wanted, doing whatever they liked. Through farmland and desert, through city and tiny town.
    And all the roads they'd wandered had led here.
    Things had changed. When had they changed? she wondered. When she realized she was pregnant? They'd been so thrilled, so stupidly thrilled about the baby. But things had changed when they'd come here with that seed planted inside her. When she'd told him she'd wanted to stay.
    Sure, Charley, no problem. We can stick around awhile.
    A while had become a year, then two, then a decade, and God, God, she'd been the one to change. To push and prod at that wonderful, reck less boy, to nag and hound him to be a man, to be what he'd run from. Responsible, settled. Ordinary.
    He'd stayed, more for Meg, she knew, more for the daughter who was the image of him than for the woman who'd given him that child. He'd