The Nameless Luna novel · Chapter 30 of 32

Chapter 30: Breakup

Warrick sat straight up in bed.

"What was that?"

Another crack came down the valley, longer.

"The river," I said.

I was already pulling on my jeans.

By the time we got down to the bank, half the pack was there in boots and long underwear, with flashlights.

The cook had a thermos. Of course she did.

Nobody said anything.

The ice was still white across the whole river, but it was groaning, deep down.

Then, in the middle, a black line opened.

It ran upstream as fast as a man could walk.

The whole sheet shuddered and lifted.

Slabs as big as the Otter broke loose and tipped up on edge, and ground against each other, and started to move.

The kids screamed with joy.

My father stood a little apart from everyone, with his hands in his pockets, and watched it the way he used to watch weather.

Annalise had her headset around her neck from habit. She didn't need it anymore. She wore it anyway.

The river went out all night.

By three in the morning the sky was already gray in the north, and the ice was going past us in a white roar, carrying whole spruce trees.

Warrick stood beside me on the bank.

He didn't say anything.

He'd said he would ask again. He was waiting for me to tell him the ice had gone out.

I watched a slab the size of a house roll over and show its dirty belly.

"Well?" I said.

"Is it out?"

"It's going."

"Going isn't out."

"You're the one who wants to marry me. Ask."

He looked down at me.

Everybody on that bank heard me say it.

The cook put the cap back on her thermos very slowly.

Warrick took his hands out of his pockets.

They weren't shaking this time.

"Teal," he said. "Will you marry me?"

The river roared past, louder than anything.

"Yes," I said.

I said it again, louder, so the far bank could hear.

"Yes."

Gussie screamed.

The kids screamed because she did.

The trapper took off his hat and threw it in the river, and then looked very surprised, and watched it go.

Warrick picked me up off the gravel and held me so tight my boots hung a foot off the ground.

Over his shoulder I saw my father.

He wasn't clapping. He wasn't smiling.

He just took his hands out of his pockets and nodded at me, once, the way he'd nod at a landing he couldn't fault.

Annalise was crying.

On purpose, this time.

Coldfoot Air started flying the second week of May.

That was Gussie's name for it, and nobody could think of a better one.

We pulled the Otter's wheels back into her floats and put her on the lake the day the ice let go of the beach.

Gussie and I painted COLDFOOT AIR across the front of the hangar in red letters taller than me.

Mine were straighter. Hers were bigger.

The schedule went back up on the whiteboard.

Mail Mondays. Freight Wednesdays, with my father. Fuel Fridays. The clinic run. The lodge at Bettles. The road crew. Two new lodges on the Koyukuk. A fishing outfit from Fairbanks that had heard about the medevac.

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