Resurrection Bay (2 page)

I made dinner that night since Dad was off on an emergency run, flying geologists down from Anchorage.

“If I climb up on the roof, d’ya think I might be able to see the glacier from here?” Sammy asked me.

“No, but if you climb up on the roof, you’ll fall off and break your neck, and I’ll get to have your room.”

He threw a pea from his dinner plate at me but said nothing more about it. I’m not sure whether he was more worried about breaking his neck or me getting his room.

It was strange how the next day things went on as usual—at least at first. We had school that day, and although everyone talked about the glacier, we all went about our business, from class to class. It was surreal, as if the glacier’s approach was some alternate reality.

When I got home, though, reality hit. Dad had spent the day flying a team of experts over the glacier, so he knew more about this “phenomenon” than anyone else in town . . . and he was packing up all our belongings in his pickup truck.

You have to understand, this was more than just an evacuation for us, because to Dad, his home was very much his castle. See, after Mom died, Dad fixed up the house. He patched the roof, and painted the porch, and put up a white picket fence around the yard so that our house was the envy of Seward. It looked like the model of hometown America—but
with one problem. Our household was one member short. Still, Dad kept up the house, the yard, and that perfect picket fence religiously, like they were the only things keeping us together. But the truth was,
he
was the only thing keeping us together.

So you can imagine that seeing him packing up things in that prepanic kind of way made me feel like the world was coming apart all over again.

“There’s not much room,” he told Sammy and me. “Just take the things you really care about.”

He tried to comfort us by telling us that Seward wouldn’t be hit for two more days, but debris was already being shaken loose from the mountains and landing on the road to Anchorage. If that road got taken out, the only ways out of Seward would be by sea and sky—and there simply weren’t enough boats or helicopters to rescue everyone. After the initial numbness, people were beginning to leave town any way they could.

We couldn’t go yet, though; Dad needed to fly the geologists around, so that night he took our overpacked pickup, and we all went to stay with Rav and his dad, since they lived on higher ground that was out of the glacier’s path. Our fathers were good friends because they had found a common misery: dead wives. My mom died giving birth to Sammy. She was Tlingit, and one of her brothers had said it was punishment for marrying my dad, who’s not. Because of that, Dad won’t
have anything to do with that side of the family anymore. Rav lost his mom just a couple of years ago. She was an ecologically conscious woman, always trying to save nature—but nature didn’t save her. She wrapped her Prius around a tree one rainy night.

“When I can drive,” Rav had once told me, “I’m gonna get a car with a huge Hemi engine and guzzle gas like there’s no tomorrow, because nature deserves to suffer.”

Rav’s got issues.

Late that evening, while Sammy slept and Dad drank away his sorrows with Mr. Carnegie, Rav and I sat on his porch. Even from this far away you could feel the glacier churning up the earth and hear the fracturing of ice and the ominous falling of trees.

“Do you think you’ll leave Seward for good?” Rav asked me. “It would suck if you left for good.”

I was going to tell him that there’d be no Seward to come back to—that it was the end of life as we knew it. But instead I said, “We’ll have to see how bad it is.”

A breeze blew across the porch. Cold air out, warm air in. The glacier’s breath. I shivered, and as I wrapped my arms around myself, I must have caught the clasp on my charm bracelet, because it fell and slipped between the wooden porch slats, disappearing into the darkness below.

“I’ll go get a flashlight,” said Rav. When he came back, we went under the porch, squeezing into the low, muddy crawl
space draped with the abandoned webs of spiders long dead and a few old, cranky spiders that should have been dead but for some reason weren’t and were now really, really big.

But I wasn’t going to think about that. The charm bracelet had been a gift from my mom, so I’d deal with the spiders. Rav had a vested interest, too, since he had bought me a few of the newer charms.

However, once we had made our way to the right spot under the porch, the bracelet was gone.

“Maybe it’s still stuck in the slats,” I said.

We looked up; it wasn’t there.

That’s when I felt something brush across my arm. Something cold. I gasped and dropped the flashlight, and it went out.

“Don’t worry,” said Rav, “I’ll get fresh batteries.”

“It’s probably the bulb!” I called after him, but he was already gone.

I was alone now in the dark . . . but I had the eerie sense that I wasn’t alone at all. There was some light coming down between the slits from the porch—not enough really to see by, but enough to catch faint glimpses of things. For a second, I thought I heard breathing, and then something moved just a few feet away from me. Something big!

I panicked. I knew there were all kinds of wild animals in this area. Wolves and wild dogs. An angry raccoon could rip your eye out. A frightened bear cub could tear you to shreds.

I scurried away, painfully slamming my head against a crossbeam on the way. In my panic, I had lost my sense of direction and came up against the house instead of the yard. I turned again but banged up against a post—and now I could feel a presence very, very close to me.

Terrified of the dark and of the nature of this thing I couldn’t see, I desperately tapped my flashlight once, twice; and then on the third time, I must have hit it just right, because it came on—

—shining right into the face of the creature.

I yelped and leaped back against the wall of the house but held tight onto that flashlight, afraid to drop it again. Afraid of being left alone in the darkness with the thing.

Then I realized this wasn’t a thing at all. It was a person. A woman. Her clothes were tattered, her hair was matted, and her skin was so pale, it was almost white. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was her eyes. They were a deep, deep blue. A shade of blue that somehow seemed even darker than black.

And she was wearing my charm bracelet.

I was so shocked, so freaked out, all I could say was, “That’s mine. . . .”

She slowly turned her head to look at her wrist, then took off the bracelet, dropping it in front of me.

“Wakeful,” she said.

“What?”

“Awake. Can’t sleep. Wakeful.” She tilted her head oddly, and her neck let out a sound like crackers crunching in your hand. “Don’t I know you?” she asked.

I shook my head, even though I knew I had seen her somewhere before. I was sure of it.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I
do
know you!”

Then one of those god-awful, enormous, should-be-dead-by-now spiders came webbing down from the crossbeam up above, landing right on her cheek . . .

. . . and the moment it touched her face, the spider frosted up and froze solid. It fell to the ground with a clink, like an eight-legged piece of glass.

I screamed and bolted as fast as I could, dropping the flashlight along the way. I stumbled in the darkness until finally I came out from underneath the porch. I raced up the porch steps, just as my dad, Mr. Carnegie, and Rav burst out of the house, having heard my scream.

“What is it, honey? What’s wrong?”

“You see an animal or something?” asked Rav.

I couldn’t catch my breath. “No, not an animal.” I let them help me inside. My head was spinning.

“I saw . . . I saw . . .”

I sat down—no—I collapsed in a kitchen chair.

“Anika, you’re bleeding!” My father grabbed a towel and touched it to my bloody forehead.

“What did you see, Anika?” Rav asked.

I grabbed the newspaper from the table and pointed to the picture on the front page. The newlydead couple. The smiling woman in the picture.
“Her!”
I told them. “I saw
her.”

Stunned silence. No one knew what to say. Then a neighbor came bounding in.

“Did you hear? Did you hear?” he shouted, completely oblivious to what was going on around him. “The glacier’s changed direction!”

“Glaciers don’t change direction,” said Rav’s father.

“This one did. It’s not heading toward the center of town anymore. It’s just gonna catch the edge. Now they’re saying it’s just gonna take out Dunbar Street and everything west of it.”

“That’s . . . great,” said Rav’s dad, still a little bit rattled by what I had just told them. “There’s nothing west of Dunbar Street but old warehouses.”

I shook my head.

“You’re wrong,” I told Mr. Carnegie. “There’s something else west of Dunbar Street.”

“What?” asked Rav.

I swallowed, feeling that chill of the glacier slide down my throat, making my stomach seize into a knot. “The cemetery.”

On Thursday, at about two thirty in the morning, Exit Glacier, having plowed through the forest before it, gouged its way through the fence of Seward Memorial Cemetery. It
took down headstone after headstone. It tore apart what few marble mausoleums stood there. They fell like houses of cards. The wall of ice churned up the hallowed ground, and then when the entire cemetery was under the massive sheet of ice . . . the glacier stopped.

Just as quickly and mysteriously as it had begun, the forward surge ended. Most people agreed that it was some kind of miracle. I wasn’t so sure.

In the morning, Rav and I ditched school. I think half our school ditched so they could join the crowds standing in front of what used to be the town graveyard, getting only as close as police would allow. Mostly, our friends and neighbors were hoping for a moment of TV fame; with all the reporters there, chances were good that some of them would be interviewed.

Rav and I didn’t crowd the barricade like the others because we were there for a different reason. Instead, we climbed to the top of an abandoned work shed, where we could have a better view of the whole face of the glacier, and we waited.

Rav was not happy about being here, but he wasn’t leaving, either.

“What you’re thinking is crazy,” Rav said.

“I know.”

“I should just walk away from you,” Rav said.

“Then why don’t you?”

“I guess I must be crazy, too.”

I smiled at him, and that seemed to make him a little bit
ill. He looked away. “You said you banged your head, right?”

“I didn’t bang it that hard.”

“It was hard enough to make you bleed,” he pointed out. “You were in pain and probably confused. How can you be sure of what you saw that night?”

“Because I am.”

We watched as the geologists took measurements and the reporters reported. Not a single piece of ice had fallen from the glacier’s face since we’d arrived.

“I really don’t want to spend a whole day watching a glacier not move,” said Rav.

“I know what I saw the other night—it
was
that dead woman,” I insisted. “And maybe it’s not as impossible as you think. The Tlingit traditionally believe that everything is interconnected. The earth and the sky, the ice and us.”

“You’re only half Tlingit,” he pointed out.

“Right, so the other half is annoyingly skeptical and needs undeniable proof.
That’s
why we’re here.”

“What do you expect to see? Dead people strolling out of the ice like zombies, looking for brains to eat?”

I turned back to the glacier. “No, not zombies. Not exactly . . .”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know. There’s not a word for what they are.”

“And anyway,” said Rav, “most of the people in that cemetery have been dead since, like, forever. There won’t be any
thing left to come back.”

“Permafrost,” I told him.

“What?”

“There’s permafrost six feet down. It’s frozen all year round, which means that a lot of people will be perfectly preserved.”

Rav got that ill look about him again, maybe even worse than before. He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again when nothing came out.

We watched for a few more minutes in silence, then Rav asked me, “So, is your mom buried here?”

I shook my head. “No,” I told him. “Her family took her to a Tlingit burial site.”

“Oh.” He was quiet for a good ten seconds before he said, “Mine is.”

Nothing out of the ordinary happened at the glacier that day, or the next, so things began to settle back to normal. Many of the geologists and all the reporters left—the glacier was now old news. It sat there more still than ever, its leading edge hunched on the cemetery.

It’s funny how the rational world has a way of pummeling things that don’t make sense into a neat little pile that it can push under a rug and dismiss. That whole business with the woman under the porch, for instance. See, the next day some homeless woman was found shoplifting in town. She was one of the summer people who didn’t leave, because she appar
ently had nowhere to go. Even though this woman had blond hair and the woman I saw didn’t, it put enough doubt into my mind. Maybe that’s who I saw. After all, it was just in the dim light of a dying flashlight, and as Rav was so happy to point out, I
had
bumped my head. My thoughts might have been addled. That made more sense than anything else, and with things getting back to normal, I’d rather believe I was temporarily nuts than the alternative.

But there were things going on in the town in those few days after the glacier had made its move. Had I been more observant, I might have noticed. I might have put two and two together.

Like the way our English teacher, Mrs. Mason, suddenly seemed to have no interest in teaching at all. And when the bell rang, she left class even faster than us kids.

Like the way that our mailman stopped delivering mail. He just stopped showing up. Word was that he didn’t call in sick or anything—he just locked himself in his house and wouldn’t come out.