The Unsinkable Greta James(54)

“I told her I’d make sure you were okay. I promised.”

Bear is getting closer now, and Greta can see that he’s holding a small chunk of ice in one hand. She turns back to Conrad, feeling oddly panicky.

“I am okay,” she says in a way that makes her sound precisely the opposite. “We just have different definitions of that.”

His mouth tightens at the corners, but he doesn’t say anything.

When Bear is close enough, he calls out to them: “Couldn’t let you miss all the fun.” He waves the piece of ice in the air. “You have to taste it. There’s nothing like glacier ice.”

Greta shakes her head, still too full of emotion to manage a smile. Conrad, too, looks at him, stone-faced. “No thanks,” he says, but it’s not enough to dissuade Bear, who lopes the final few yards with all the eagerness of a puppy.

“Trust me on this,” he says, pushing the ice into Conrad’s hands.

For a second, nobody moves. They all three stand there in the middle of all that wilderness, their cheeks pink and their boots sunk deep into the sand, staring at the piece of blue-gray ice like it’s some sort of oracle.

And then, to Greta’s surprise, Conrad gives it a single lick.

“See?” Bear says with a grin. “Now you’ll always remember this as the day you tried glacier ice.”

There’s a flash of something on Conrad’s face. “I doubt it.”

But Bear is insistent. “Sure you will. What could possibly top that?”

“My anniversary.”

For a few seconds, this doesn’t quite land; it skirts the edges of Greta’s crowded brain, the word moving through her head like music: anniversary, anniversary, anniversary.

And then, all at once, her heart falls.

It was today. Of course it was today.

This whole trip was meant to be a celebration. But today was the actual day. Forty years since they walked down the aisle in a small wooden church in Ohio; forty years since they said their vows and, laughing, smashed cake into each other’s faces.

Forty years, and they were supposed to be spending this day together.

Forty years, and Greta completely forgot.

She turns to her dad, mouth open, feeling suddenly undone. But before she can say anything, Bear gives him such a hard thump on the back that Conrad pitches forward a step.

“Happy anniversary, man,” Bear says. “How many years?”

Conrad’s eyes meet Greta’s, and then he says, in a voice like gravel, “Forty.”

What he doesn’t say, what she can practically feel him not saying is: At least it would’ve been.

“Wow,” Bear says, shaking his head in wonder. In his hand, the piece of ice has started to melt, one slow drip at a time. “Forty years. What’s your secret?”

Again, Conrad looks at Greta.

“We always kept our promises,” he says.





Chapter Twenty-One


When Bear heads over to round up the others, Greta starts to follow. But Conrad hangs back. She turns to face him, not sure what to say. All the heat between them has dissolved; what’s left is something heavier, something slower to burn.

Her face is numb from the wind, her hands so cold they feel hot. An image of her uncomfortable bed in her windowless room on the ship flashes in her mind, but the thought of getting from here to there—hike to canoe to bus to boat—feels insurmountable, like she might as well be on the moon right now.

Conrad pats at his pocket again, then reaches inside and pulls out a small plastic bag, cradling it carefully in his palm. To her alarm, he looks like he might cry.

Still, it takes Greta a second to realize what he’s holding.

When she does, she walks back over to him, staring down at the contents of the bag, which don’t look all that different from the grayish sand they’re standing on.

Her mouth falls open.

“It’s not all of them,” he says quietly. “The rest are still at home. But it seemed only right to bring some here.”

Greta’s heart is racing beneath all her layers. She glances toward the rest of the group, then at the plastic bag, at this piece of her mom that he’s carried here from Ohio, that he’s held in his pocket all day. It knocks the wind out of her, seeing it there like that.

“I thought you might want to help,” he says, and she nods, though she’s not entirely sure. Her brain is moving slowly; so are her feet, which feel unaccountably heavy as she starts to move back toward the glacier, head bent against the wind.

Conrad surveys the area. “What do you think?”

There’s the ice in front of them, towering and slick, and below that a series of puddles between patches of sand. Greta is shivering now, though she can’t tell if it’s from the cold or something else. He’s right: this is what she would’ve wanted. But it’s still hard to imagine leaving any part of her here in this windswept place.

It’s hard to imagine leaving any of her at all.

“Maybe over there,” Greta says, pointing to a small shelf in the ice, just about eye level, because it looks sturdy and even and somewhat protected from the elements.

Conrad nods solemnly. “Do you want to go first?”

She accepts the bag from him, feeling the small and precise weight of it, then picks her way over to the ice, her wellies sinking into the puddles. She’s not sure whether she should pour straight from the bag or put some into her hand first. In the end, she’s afraid the wind will blow it away, so she reaches inside and scoops a little into her palm, then tips it gently onto the ice. Some of it drifts off anyway, scattering into the air like snow, there and then gone. But she feels surprisingly lighter as she watches it go, and when she turns to her dad, she can see that he’s crying too.