The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [25]
He hung up the phone and went back to his game. John shrugged, leaned his pack against the wall, and started for the coffee pot. He stopped at the small table that held the pot, cups, creamer, and sugar packs.
“Did we send any coffee filters?”
“I don’t remember,” Anna said. “Coffee is your ball of wax.”
“Crap. I don’t remember either. You think they sell coffee filters out there?”
“You could use an old sock.”
He poured himself a cup, took a sip, and grimaced.
“Tastes like his sock,” he whispered, thumbing toward the kid behind the desk.
And so they sat all day, drinking coffee, listening to the kid play video games and tell callers to check back in another hour to see if the planes were flying. The two of them knew they weren’t going anywhere.
The wind splattered the rain in sheets against the finger-marked window that looked out to the soaked black tarmac. A fleet of planes, mostly Cessnas, spanned a quarter mile of asphalt-covered tundra.
“I’m kind of scared to fly in one of those,” she said.
“I don’t think you’ll be flying in one today.”
“Why aren’t you ever afraid of dying?” she asked.
“Who said I’m not?”
“Well, those little planes look spooky. I wish there was another way to get out there.”
“We could find someone to take us in a boat.”
“No, thanks. Not in this weather. Where are we going to sleep tonight? Here?” she asked.
“At this point, I don’t really care. I just want to get there already.”
He took what must have been his hundredth sip of coffee. She reached over and took his hand.
“Can you believe we’re doing this?”
“Waiting for our first Alaskan storm to go away?” he asked.
“No, this. This move. It’s crazy, isn’t it? Are we crazy?” she asked, running her hand through her hair and pausing to look for split ends.
Anna always second-guessed herself. Sometimes it annoyed the hell out of him, but on this day, as he stared out past the planes, past the runways, and out to where the impossibly flat tundra just blurred into a wall of wind and rain, he tried to think of something reassuring. He took another sip of coffee, and bit at the plastic foam. “Yeah,” he said, “pretty crazy.”
“You think so? I mean—are we making a mistake? Should we have taken normal jobs?”
“Only crazy people want normal jobs,” he said. “We wanted something different in our lives anyway, right? Get away from the mortgage, two point five kids and a flat-screen, right? Figure out if a quarter of me belongs here. I’m getting hungry. You?”
“Don’t change the subject,” she said. She traced a finger around a small greasy handprint on the window. “I’m excited,” she whispered, “but I’m also scared. I mean, what if the kids hate me? What if they can’t understand me, or I can’t understand them? What kind of teaching materials am I going to have? Christ—there are a million questions slamming around my skull.”
“I’m wondering if we can order up some of that Chinese food, like the kid there did.”
“Don’t be a jerk. Everything can’t just always be so simple for you. So cut and dried. Food. Sex. You must wonder what it’s going to be like.”
“Sure I wonder,” he said. “But I can imagine and wonder and worry all I want and it’s not going to do me any good, us any good. What’s that saying about wishing in one hand and shitting in the other?” He paused and smiled. “Did you say sex?”
She punched him in the shoulder. “Tell me one thing you wonder about—then you can ask the kid about ordering some food. We might as well enjoy dining out while we can, but I’m sure it’s going to cost a small fortune.”
“Well, I wonder about friends,” he said. “Will people like us? Will they want to hang out with us? And I guess I wonder if anyone will take me hunting.”
“I should have known it would come down to hunting. Why do you wonder if we’ll have friends? Why wouldn’t we make friends?”
“Would you quit worrying? You’re going to be fine. You’ll be the life of the village. We’ll have to do what that one old bag said and make a signal that lets people know when it’s okay to visit because we’ll be so popular.