Pathways (9780307822208) (14 page)

He turned away from the window. “We’re just not meant to be, Mom. I’ve given up on it. Don’t go gettin’ my nose back to the scent.”

Bryn couldn’t sleep. It was her last night here, and she had bedded down in front of the fire on top of the bearskin rug, waiting to get sleepy as the flames danced before her in hues of crimson and sapphire and aspen yellow. But sleep wouldn’t come. She supposed it was Eli being right across the lake but failing to come and see her. Or memories of Ben’s sweet good-bye hug, the most tender grand-fatherly embrace she’d had since Grampa Bruce had hugged her at the airport.

Ben had made her feel whole and loved and worthy. And he had opened her eyes to God’s unfailing love for her, even though she still longed for some tangible evidence, some proof she could cling to in the days ahead. But she realized it didn’t matter. Faith was about not always having proof. Besides, the peace in her heart spoke pretty loudly. Yes, it had been a good summer for her in many ways, regardless of what had or hadn’t transpired between her and Eli.

The bright third-quarter moon rose, sending rays of silver light through the front window, calling her. She glanced at her watch, turning to see its face in the light of the fading fire. Two o’clock. She looked back to the window, sighed, and rose, pulling on a wool sweater, jeans, and parka over the long underwear she had recently taken to wearing to bed. Outside, the lake was completely still, the mountains’ reflection brilliant in the water. It was irresistible.

Bryn pulled up her hood and turned the canoe over, shoving it into the water. One last good-bye to the lake her father had once loved, the lake that had now captured her heart. She paddled outward, toward Eli’s—no, to the center, she corrected herself—so she could get a 360-degree view. The reflection of the moon on the Alaska Range’s white peaks illuminated them all around her. She was halfway out when she heard a soft whisper.

“Doc?” came Eli’s quiet voice. “That you?”

She pulled her head back, jumping slightly in her surprise. Then she laughed to herself. “Yeah, it’s me, Eli.”

He paddled toward her and, when he glided alongside, reached out to grab the edge of her canoe. “Couldn’t sleep either?”

“No. Too much on my mind. And it was too pretty outside.”

“Yeah. Know what you mean.”

They sat there together in silence, drifting a little, staring all
about. In the distance—up north toward Denali—a faint green light streaked across the sky, then another and another, like a giant artist making his first strokes on a naked canvas. “Eli—”

“Yeah, I see it, Doc.”

As they stared in awe, the neon-green streaks connected and then grew in a sinuous, undulating wave, coming south, rolling onward like a wave across the sea. “Oh, Eli,” Bryn gasped. She had seen the aurora over the years, but nothing as brilliant as this.

The lights continued to dance, rolling with a faint stroke of white across the bed of green like wind in wheat. And then, at the bottom, the streaks turned a faint red. Minutes later, that red grew more vibrant, and the light changed direction, cascading downward in what Bryn could only describe as the gossamer wings of angels. Even more breathtaking was the bright scarlet hue those wings took; the closer they came to Summit, the deeper they became. “Oh, Eli,” Bryn repeated.

Tears coursed down her cheeks, and a joy bubbled from deep inside her—a joy she had never known before. Surely this was like the kiss of God. A gift. A miraculous gift. She could not take her eyes from it. She felt embraced, surrounded, blessed from above. This was the tangible she had craved, and God in his goodness had given it to her. Undeserving as she was.

“My father would say they’re sixty miles away, the product of a solar wind stream,” she mused. She could feel Eli’s gaze upon her but could not draw her own eyes away from the arcs and bands and rays and filmy draperies that surrounded them.

“What would you say, Doc?”

“I’d say this is the breath of heaven,” she said, weeping all the more.

Eli looked upward again. “Ben calls it an angel walk, when they come down like that. That we’re seeing them descend, the multitudes from heaven.”

Bryn nodded. She had been given a vision from heaven, had seen the hand of God. “That’s right,” she whispered. “I can see why he’d say that.”

She looked up again and cried even harder as the lights continued in their dance, celebrating over her. Bryn grinned through her tears.
Thank you, Father. Fill me. Make me your own. Teach me! Show me!

Eli seemed to sense her need for quiet and remained still in his own canoe, staring upward too. At long last he reached out and brushed his fingers over her cheek. “You all right, Doc?”

“Better than ever.”

“This been a good summer for you?”

“The best, Eli, the best. You were right, you know.” She looked at his handsome face, outlined by moonlight.

“About what?”

“About God being here, showing himself to me, talking to me.” Bryn looked skyward again, and wiped her cheeks, but the tears kept coming. “Eli, he’s here.
Right here
. With us.”

Eli paused, obviously surprised by her revelation. “Always has been, Doc. Waiting.”

B
ryn couldn’t believe she was back in Alaska, regardless of the fact that it was her year to be here. If she hadn’t come, something would be missing, something integrally wrong in her life. At least she wasn’t heading back to Talkeetna or Summit Lake this year. She was going to steer clear of Eli Pierce. He had occupied enough of her dreams—day and night—for the last decade. Besides, he was probably married with two kids. No, this year she had a new goal.

A full-fledged doctor now, as newly minted as a 2001 quarter, Bryn had elected to come to Alaska with Housecalls, a relief organization that would fly her to remote bush families or communities to tend to their medical needs. It was how she would spend the summer; then she would return to the Lower 48 and look for that perfect job that every new physician dreams of. But serving Alaska’s people for a summer was a way of giving back, returning a part of the gift she’d been given five years ago in 1996. The summer she’d first known she was a chosen child of God.

She turned her thoughts to her hospital buddies—friendships forged over the last five years. When she had gone home to Boston after her summer on Summit, it was as if something inside had burst loose, and she felt free for the first time to join in and meld with others. That summer had changed her life in many ways. She shook her head in awe. “Thank you, Lord,” she murmured, looking skyward from an Anchorage taxi.

She was glad her Grampa Bruce’s mind had been clear enough to know she had embraced Jesus. It was the happiest she’d ever seen him, the day she’d shared her news. He’d suffered several small strokes in the intervening years, rendering him incapable of caring for himself. It broke her heart every time she saw him, made her yearn for heaven for him. Where he would be whole again, fully functioning, his eyes as keen and bright as they once were. When he would be reunited with his beloved wife, gone now these last fifteen years.

In short order the cab pulled up outside a dilapidated building that looked like an old warehouse, half refurbished. A hand-painted sign outside read
HOUSECALLS
, and a light shone through a window. Bryn paid the cab driver and got out. “Wait until I make sure someone’s here,” she said. Obediently the cabby waited, the engine roughly idling.

When the knob turned, she waved at the driver and he gave her a dismissive flip of one hand and drove away. Bryn turned back to the small front room and closed the door behind her. When no one appeared, she called out, “Hello? Anyone here?”

“Coming!” a male voice called from the back. He emerged through a hallway and smiled as he turned the corner, a tall man, as dark as Bryn, with handsome features. About her age, too.

“Hi, I’m Dr. Bryn Bailey,” she said, reaching out her hand.

“Ah, Bryn Bailey,” he said, taking her hand in his and covering it with his other in a warm gesture of greeting. “I’m so glad to meet you, Doctor.”

Even after her years as an intern and resident, Bryn was still getting used to the title. “And you are …?”

“Oh!” he said, his eyes smiling at her. “I’m Doc Carmine Kostas, in charge of this most impressive operation,” he said, waving about
at his humble surroundings.
Greek and a sense of humor
, she mused.
It just might be a romantic summer after all
. “Come on back,” he invited, already on the move. “We’ll sit in my office.”

She followed him down the hallway, past a couple of people who were talking on the phone in cubicles, past a conference room lined with maps and a whiteboard on an easel.

“We run a pretty lean operation,” Carmine said. “Thus the lack of a receptionist. We want to make sure we get as much of our donated dollar as we can out to the people who need it. So we set up each volunteer doctor in his own location, with his own phone or radio and supplies. We’re”—he waved his arm to indicate the office—“simply the conduit of information. Once your area’s people find out you’re around—and believe me, word gets out fast—they’ll come to you direct. At that point, you only contact us on a weekly basis to ask for needed supplies and to report on the week’s activity.”

“How many doctors do you have this year?”

Carmine sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers in front of him. “We have fifteen this summer. Five year-round.” He glanced back at an extensive map of Alaska, with sections divided by different colors. From what she had studied, she guessed it was divided up by native tribes.

“So, Doc Kostas,” she said gamely, “where are you sending me?” She had thought about being stationed someplace very isolated, prepared herself for it. Maybe up on the Arctic Coast, in Barrow, serving the Eskimo population, or out on the Alaska Peninsula, with the Aleuts. Or maybe—

“Talkeetna,” he said, smiling as if he were Santa Claus bestowing a gift.

“Excuse me?”

“Talkeetna. We have a new outpost there. There’s a clinic that’s growing in case you have an emergency, a small hospital in Willow—”

“Ex-excuse me?”

Carmine’s face fell, his eyes betraying disappointment at her reaction. “What? Have you been there? It’s incredible! It’s one of the best locations in the field—”

“I can’t go to Talkeetna,” Bryn said, shaking her head. “Doc Kostas, please. Send me someplace else.”

“You’re crazy, girl! I’m telling you, there’s not a better place to be in Alaska come summer—”

“I can’t! I can’t go there.”

The director leaned back in his chair, clearly puzzled. “Want to tell me why?”

Bryn sighed. “Not particularly. Let’s just say I have some history in Talkeetna that I’d like to remain a fond memory, not a trip back in time.”

Carmine studied her, looked upward, then to the map. After a long moment, he turned back to her. “No, it won’t work. The two other areas I could assign you to already have better doctors in the field”—he raised his hands up as if to guard himself—“not a comment on your medical skills. They know the native languages.” He gazed back at the map. “Shannon is near Wainwright; she speaks Inupiaq, and Eric is going to an outpost east of Bethel and speaks Yupik. The rest of my doctors are established with their populations, having at least been to their regions in previous summers. No, the only place that makes sense is Talkeetna, Bryn.”

“Why there? You said yourself that there’s a clinic in Talkeetna
and a hospital in Willow. I thought Housecalls was all about serving—”

“Serving people in the bush,” he said, nodding. “With the popularity of Denali on the rise, more and more people are moving to the bush country near the park and visiting bush families that take in overnight boarders. We get some state funding—”

“I’m sorry,” Bryn mumbled. “I can’t go there. There must be someone else who could.”

“Are you saying you’re not going to join us if we send you there?”

Bryn’s mind went back to Boston, to the three hospitals that had expressed interest in her, that she had put on hold in her desire to serve Alaska’s people. “I don’t know.”

“What happened in Talkeetna that was so bad?” Carmine asked gently. “Want to talk about it?”

“No,” Bryn said, shaking her head and sighing. “I don’t want to talk about it. Nothing happened—nothing bad, that is.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

Bryn studied his dark eyes and mulled over her dilemma. “Guess there isn’t one,” she sighed. “I suppose I’m just meant to be there every five years.”

“Every five years?”

“Never mind. Where will I stay?”

Dr. Kostas rose to pull a file from his cabinet and then sat back down. “Looks like we’ve secured a great little cabin on the Talkeetna River, right outside of town. Not a half-mile from the airstrip and two, three miles from the anchorage of our floatplane contractor.”

For the first time, Bryn dared to think of that angle. “And … who will be flying me to see patients in the bush?”

Dr. Kostas looked through several pages in the file folder. “Here we are. Leon Wilmot and Eli … What was his name? I just met him last fall. I swear I’m losin’ it.” He laughed at his lack of memory and scanned the remaining copy. “Nice guy. Eli—”

“Eli Pierce.”

Carmine’s dark eyes met hers with surprise. “You know him?”

Bryn laughed softly, shaking her head. “Ever hear, Dr. Kostas, that God has a funny sense of humor?”

“Yes,” Carmine responded with a tentative smile.

“Well, he does. I’m living proof.”