I Regret Loving You for Five Years novel · Chapter 23 of 32

Chapter 23: Last Days on the Ice

The speaker hissed.

Boone's hand stayed on the back of my neck.

I pushed the button.

"Tell him yes," I said. "Once. After we land. Over."

"Once," the man in Tacoma repeated. "I'll tell him exactly that. Over."

"And tell him he doesn't get to cry. Over."

There was a dry crackle that might have been a laugh.

"My wife says she'd pay money to watch you tell him that yourself. Over and out."

***

The first plane of spring was due on October twenty-eighth.

That gave us nine days.

Nine days to undo a winter.

The carpenter came to the clinic with a crowbar and a shoebox.

"Woodshop," he said. "Third drawer from the left. You'd never have found it."

"You told me it was the second."

"I lied to you. In case they tortured you."

He opened the shoebox on my desk.

Inside, flat and dry, were forty-two pages of my own handwriting, printed the week the replacement doctor came.

The cook brought the second set in a box of frozen peas.

The pages were stiff with frost.

He put them on the radiator one at a time.

Boone went under the D8 on his back, one-handed, and came out with the third.

"Nobody's ever cleaned under there," he said, handing me the bag. "I checked. Still true."

I packed everything into one hard orange case from the science lab.

The black binder.

Three copies of it.

Amber's letter. The denial. The replacement doctor's order.

The epinephrine in its dated bag.

Thirty-one peeled stickers, each one taped to an index card beside the date it had been hiding.

Then I took the chain with my old ring on it out of the drawer.

I looked at it for a while.

I put it in my parka pocket, not the case.

The replacement doctor watched me lock the case from across the clinic.

"Can I carry it?" he asked. "On the plane. So it's not just you."

"You can carry it with me," I said.

***

On the last Thursday, the galley had a goodbye dinner.

Steak, and the last of the ice cream, and the cook crying into the gravy and pretending it was onions.

Halfway through, the power plant guy stood up and hit his glass with a fork.

"Shut up, all of you. The doc has to get her thing."

"What thing?"

Boone pushed a small paper bag across the table to me.

He wouldn't look at me.

His ears were red.

Inside was a round cloth patch, the kind the crews sew on their parkas every winter.

Somebody had embroidered it in the station's sewing room, slowly, by hand.

A yellow dozer with a stethoscope looped over its blade.

Around the edge, in white thread: POLE WINTER. 41 OUT, 41 HOME.

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