Snowbound

TWENTY-EIGHT

Will had just begun to dream, when his daughter’s voice broke through.

“He’s moving, Dad.”

“You are fucking kidding me.” Will rubbed his eyes, felt like he’d been asleep less than ten minutes, but the sun was above the horizon now, early rays glittering on the waters of the Yukon River. Pretty country up here, he thought, looking out at rolling foothills covered with fir trees.

According to the dashboard clock, he’d slept for almost two hours, though the brief reprieve had barely made a dent in his exhaustion. He turned the ignition, drove the Land Rover slowly through town, letting the truck put a few more miles of distance between them.

“You need to talk to me,” he said. “I’ll nod off, end up running us off the road.”

“I can drive.”

“Not yet.”

“What do you wanna talk about?”

“I don’t care. Just engage me. Take my mind off how tired I am.”

Devlin was quiet for a moment, staring out the tinted glass as they passed through downtown Whitehorse.

“Okay,” she said finally, “do you think Kalyn’s pretty?”

Will straightened in his seat. “Well,” he said, “I think that did the trick.”

“No, you have to answer my question.”

Whitehorse was fading away in the side mirrors, and they had the Alaska Highway all to themselves, a corridor of pavement through a forest of black spruce.

“Sure, she’s pretty.”

“You like her?”

“Excuse me?”

“In school, we have this rating system. You can like someone. You can like like them. Or you can like like like them.”

Will laughed. “So what was your rating with little Ben over the summer?”

“We’re not talking about me right now, Dad.”

“I don’t know, Devi. What do you think? That these last few days have been one big date? This is an incredibly stressful time, and I—”

“That doesn’t mean you can’t like her.”

He caught her eyes in the rearview mirror. “Look, I’m not saying this to judge or be mean, but Kalyn’s a damaged person, Dev. Nothing against her. I’m just saying I think she’s had a really hard time since her sister disappeared.”

“Harder than us with Mom?”

“Yeah. Why are you asking me all this? You want me to like her?”

“I guess it’d be all right. I mean, you haven’t dated anyone since Mom. Aren’t you, like, lonely?”

“You don’t like it, just the two of us?”

“No, I do, it’s just—Dad!”

Will’s eyes cut from the rearview mirror back to the windshield.

An enormous bull moose stood straddling the dotted white line of the Alaska Highway, thirty yards ahead.

Will slammed down on the brake pedal, lunging forward, something shooting through the space between the front seats, smashing into the dashboard.

“Devlin!”

The Land Rover skidded to a stop, the front bumper five feet from the moose, which just stood there staring dully at will through the windshield. He looked in the backseat, confirmed that Devlin was buckled in, safe but rattled, tears streaming down her face.

“No, honey, don’t cry. It’s okay. We’re all right.”

She shook her head, and Will’s stomach fell. He glanced down. Near the gearshift, in the front passenger seat, on both floorboards, and on his lap lay pieces of the computer, and the portion of the screen still attached to the shattered keyboard was black.

“Oh God,” he said.

“We can still find her, right?”

“Oh God.”

“Dad?”

He drove around the giant moose and floored the accelerator.

It was midday before Will finally spotted Jonathan’s truck, pulling away from the border station into the state of Alaska.

He and Devlin spent fifteen agonizing minutes talking with the American customs official, Will thinking the officer had probably sensed his impatience and decided to ask more questions than he otherwise would have. By the time they were on the road again and passing a sign welcoming them to the “Last Frontier State,” Will figured Jonathan had at least a twenty-mile head start.

He pushed the Land Rover to eighty-five, speeding along the Alaska Highway, passing RVs at the rate of one every couple of miles. In the nowhere town of Tok, Alaska, ninety-three miles west of the border, Will came to what he’d dreaded more than anything—a fork in the road. Stay straight on Alaska 1, head west to Fairbanks. Or make a left onto Alaska 2 and head south toward Anchorage.

“Which way, Dad?”

Will pulled onto the shoulder, shifted the car into park.

“Fairbanks is two hundred miles that way,” he said. “Kind of in the middle of the state. I don’t know much about it. Anchorage is in the south, on the coast.”

“How close do you think we are to the truck?”

“I don’t know.”

“Dad—”

“Just give me a minute here, Dev!”

After thirty seconds of the most excruciating deliberation he’d ever put himself through, he finally shifted into drive and stomped the gas.

“Anchorage?” Devlin asked as the Land Rover accelerated to ninety miles per hour.

“It’s a shipping city. Lots of ports. I have a feeling they’re putting Kalyn on a boat.”

“Are you sure?”

“No, baby girl. Nowhere close to sure.”