“Nice,” Emily said. “Did Pete help pick it out?” She said this casually, but Cassidy knew she was digging.
“Sort of.”
“So he is coming,” Emily said, her eyes lighting up.
Cassidy blushed. “Yes.”
Emily’s eyes flashed. “How’s his book coming along?”
“He finished the first draft. He’ll get edits back next month.”
“Have you read it?” she asked, nibbling on a pretzel.
“He reads parts aloud to me. But I haven’t read the whole thing.” She readjusted her coaster, not wanting to confess that listening to the near-death experiences in Pete’s book brought up the same feelings she’d faced after the avalanche. She again remembered the trip to Tofino and how Pete had stood by her even though she was falling apart. Telling him how his stories made her feel would break his heart—he loved sharing with her. And she loved him too much to hurt him like that. “I haven’t been able to do much except get ready for this,” she admitted instead. “I’m so glad it’s all over.”
“I can’t believe you’re going to Costa Rica so soon though. Don’t you get a break?”
Cassidy laughed. “No way. This is an amazing opportunity.” Her first post-doctorate project at University of Oregon would be studying Arenal, Costa Rica’s most seismically active volcano. It hadn’t erupted in almost a decade, but past eruptions had been violent and deadly. She was excited to apply her harmonic tremor work to help map the volcano’s plumbing system. Maybe she could help identify the movement of magma in such a way as to help predict the size and volume of the next eruption.
“But wouldn’t it be nice to, oh, I don’t know, go on a real vacation?”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Quinn and Pete return from outside. Quinn’s eyes found hers, and a grounded, peaceful energy moved between them. They had always been able to read each other. “Pete and I are going on a road trip tomorrow.”
“That’s not a vacation,” Emily said as Pete and Quinn joined them.
“What’s not a vacation?” Quinn said, standing close to Emily, who looked ready to purr.
“A road trip,” Emily replied.
Cassidy shared the details of the following day’s adventure—camping in the back of her truck so they could get a predawn start at a spring ski of St. Helens’ south face.
“See? Camping also doesn’t qualify as a vacation,” Emily said. “You two should get on a plane together. Go somewhere with palm trees.”
“Palm trees are overrated,” Cassidy said as Pete slid his arm around her shoulders. “Give me mountains any day.”
After a cold night in the back of her truck, they woke before dawn and brewed a quick thermos of coffee on the tailgate, then dressed and packed up their gear. They set off from the parking lot, ski poles tapping the soft dirt of the trail and their skis attached to their backpacks like A-frames. The morning passed quickly, and after an hour they were able to step into their skis. Taking turns leading, their skis sliding steadily along, the two made their way up the open terrain.
They had decided to ski the mountain together for two reasons: Cassidy wanted to put the avalanche behind her, and skiing Mt. St. Helens seemed like the best way to celebrate the completion of her research.
Finally, they stood on the crater’s rim. The morning air felt crisp, but the rising sun was quickly heating the land. Below them, in the center of St. Helens’ crater, a mound of ash and rock steamed, clouds of it carried off by the swirling wind.
“I guess this is goodbye,” Cassidy said, looking around. Even though the locations of her field stations lay buried under the snowpack, her mind played images of her many trips here. “Though, I guess I could be back. You never know.”
“You’ll be a professor by then,” Pete said. “You’ll be the one barking orders at your students.”
“Ken never barked orders,” she groaned. “I hope I’m as agile at his age,” she added.
Pete took a sip from his water bottle. His smooth cheeks glowed from the exertion of the climb and his eyes sparkled as they took in the view of Mt. Adams in the distance, with the river valleys and lakes far below them shining like mirrors in the sun.
They sat on their packs and shared a snack of cheddar cheese, peppery crackers, and homemade peanut butter cookies. Occasional whiffs of sulfur wafted past them from the crater. A mouse appeared to snatch their crumbs, then darted away the minute they noticed.
“So, I brought something,” Pete said, slipping a piece of paper from his pocket. “Mind if I read it?”
Cassidy took in his strange expression. “Sure,” she said, mildly confused. What on earth was so important he would want to read it during a ski trip? “Is it for a story?”
“You could say that.” His cheeks seemed to pale. He smoothed the creases of the paper on his thigh, and stood. Baffled, Cassidy waited for him to begin. He exhaled slowly, and read:
“Why do we have to listen to our hearts?” the boy asked, when they had made camp that day.
“Because, wherever your heart is, that is where you’ll find your treasure.”
“But my heart is agitated,” the boy said. “It has its dreams, it gets emotional, and it’s become passionate over a woman of the desert. It asks things of me, and it keeps me from sleeping many nights, when I am thinking about her.”
Pete’s gaze connected with Cassidy’s, and then returned to the paper.
“Well, that’s good. Your heart is alive. Keep listening to what it has to say.”
The boy continued to listen to his heart as they crossed the desert. But he became fearful. “My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer,” the
