The Unsinkable Greta James(75)

She turns around, ready to make a joke to Ben—something about close quarters and sardines; she hasn’t quite gotten there yet—but she sees that he’s still standing near the door, the phone pressed to his ear. From this distance, it’s hard to read his face. The barnlike building is filled with noise and chatter, and between them, people crisscross the wooden floors, carrying bags from the gift shops or eating crab cakes out of paper boats. Still, she can tell by the hunch of his shoulders that something is wrong.

As she watches, he lowers the phone and looks around. When his eyes find hers, there’s something wild about them. He hurries over to where she’s still standing beside the canning machine.

She doesn’t ask if everything is okay. She already knows it’s not.

“Hannah broke her arm,” he says, his voice cracking. “It’s really bad.”

Greta swallows. “What happened?”

“She fell at the playground. They’re at the hospital now.” He glances around, his gaze unfocused as he takes in the odd collection of fish-related contraptions. “I don’t know what to do. She must be so scared.” He blinks a few times, his eyes glassy. “I can’t believe I’m not there right now. I can’t believe I’m not home.”

Greta isn’t sure what to say. Everything that occurs to her feels woefully inadequate: I’m sorry and That’s awful and I hope she’ll be okay.

She says it anyway: “I’m so sorry.”

But Ben is distracted now, looking at something on his phone, rubbing the back of his neck with his other hand. It’s a gesture she hasn’t seen before, maybe something he does when he’s upset or worried or both, and as she watches him, Greta is suddenly aware of how little they actually know each other. At the end of the day, they’re just two strangers who’ve spent less than a week together in a place that’s about as far from their real lives as it’s possible to get.

Her heart is thudding for reasons she can’t quite explain.

“I should go,” Ben says, snapping his head up.

Greta nods. “Right. Sure. I’ll go back with you.”

For a split second, he looks bewildered by her response. But then he shakes his head. “No,” he says. “I meant…home. I should go home. I should be there with her.”

She stares at him, feeling like she’s misread something important, like she’d accidentally gone straight to sympathy on some invisible continuum, when perhaps the situation warranted something more serious. “She’s going to be okay, right?” she asks, and a flicker of impatience passes over Ben’s face.

“I don’t know,” he says tersely. “That’s the whole point of going there.”

“Yeah, but a broken arm isn’t”—she fumbles for the right word—“serious serious. Right?”

“They heard the bone snap,” he says. “That’s…serious. She might need surgery. Anesthesia…that’s definitely serious.”

Greta looks around, still trying to recalibrate. “How would you even— I mean, we’re in the middle of nowhere and—”

“I don’t know yet,” he says. “I have to go figure it out.”

“We’ll be in Vancouver in less than forty-eight hours,” Greta says. “By the time you find another way back—”

“I can’t just sit here in the middle of Alaska and drink beers with you while my daughter is in the hospital.”

She reels back. “That’s not what I’m saying. I meant—”

“You wouldn’t understand,” he says as he starts for the door.

Outside, the sky is still a hard, clean blue. Greta follows him up the wooden boardwalk that leads back to their ship, which is docked on the other side of a small peninsula, hidden behind an outcropping of spruce trees.

“Wait a second,” she says, half-trotting to keep up as he walks straight through someone’s family photo, charging ahead, each footstep loud on the wooden planks.

“I can’t wait a second,” he says, spinning around. “You don’t get it because you’re not—”

He stops himself, but they both know what he was about to say.

You’re not a parent.

It’s only a fact. And not even an unpleasant one to Greta. At least most days. Still, something about the way he says it stings, and she has to work to compose her face to disguise this.

“I’m sorry,” Ben says. “But this is the part where you drop everything to be there.”

Greta stares at him, stricken. It takes a few beats for him to realize what he’s said. When he does, his face goes slack.

“I didn’t mean…” he begins, but he doesn’t seem sure where to go from there. “I wasn’t talking about what happened with…” He stops again and shakes his head, flustered now. “I’m sorry,” he says finally. “But I really have to go.”

“It’s fine,” Greta says, because what else is there to say at this point?

“I wish…” He falters, then tries again: “I wish it didn’t have to end this way.”

The word end lands with a thud between them, and Ben looks as if he’s trying to decide whether or not he should take it back.