Through eyes blurred with tears, Estelle could almost see the bodies still in the cockpit.
Then one of them moved.
Estelle froze, heart in her throat.
A high voice fluted, “Aunt Estelle? Up here!” A slender hand reached out the cockpit window.
Estelle muttered, “I’m going to murder that girl.”
Now that Estelle was closer, she could see a rope that stretched from a boulder toward the plane. Clever girl. She’d had the sense to give herself a safety rope so she wouldn’t slide down the glacier again. It didn’t reach all the way to the plane, but she’d obviously made it over the last few yards to the plane somehow.
“What the hell are you doing?” Estelle called.
“Charging the phone.”
Damn fool girl. What was the dire need to recharge the satphone? Estelle would have told her not to risk it. Alaska Eagle Med already had their GPS location, no need to keep calling them. “Serafina Marie Dupris, you come back right this minute!”
The passenger door opened, and Sera’s face peered out. “It’s all right. Just a little more and the phone will be charged enough.”
“Sera, please. I don’t want to leave Annie alone so long.”
“Ten minutes. Just give me ten more minutes.”
Estelle sat on the ground, undecided whether Sera should be sternly lectured for going off without telling anyone or congratulated for her initiative. Being Sera’s substitute mother was going to turn Estelle’s hair gray—if they both lived that long.
“Sera?”
“Hold on to your hair. It’s only been five minutes.”
The five minutes seemed to last an hour. Finally, Sera stepped down out of the plane. Clinging from handhold to handhold, she worked her way to the plane’s tail.
Her clothes were odd: socks for gloves and a sweater tied around each knee. The reason became clear when, as she reached the tail rudder, she dropped to hands and knees.
Sera crawled slowly over the ice. Each time she crept forward, she paused to brush gravel out of her path, but still the jagged ice must have been murder on palms and kneecaps.
When she was close enough to grasp the end of the rope—the tie-downs they’d used to string together Annie’s “sled”—Sera carefully rose to her feet. With a shuffling gait, she half walked, half skated across the slick blue ice under the meltwater brook.
Estelle held her breath—and her end of the rope. Oh, Sera. She’d “secured” the end of the rope by catching it under a boulder—but if Sera had fallen, it would never have held her weight.
When Sera reached the rocky moraine, Estelle pulled her up the bank and grabbed her, hugging her tight. “That was a brave, brave, stupid thing to do. If you had asked me . . .”
“You would have told me not to,” Sera finished, handing Estelle the satphone. “I know. But this was something I had to do, for me.”
She turned and, using her cellphone, snapped a photo of the broken Cessna.
Estelle’s jaw dropped. “Pictures? You risked your life so you could take selfies?” Taking a risk to charge the satphone was one thing—the satphone was their only line of communication to civilization. But Sera’s sparkly purple cellphone? Without a cell tower, it was utterly useless—except for indulging the narcissistic teen obsession with chronicling every event in pictures.
Sera crossed her arms, lip pouted out. “Will you listen?”
“You are the most . . .” Pigheaded? Ungrateful? Stupid? Words Estelle had heard from her parents all through her adolescence. Words that had hurt and done nothing to make her into the passive, obedient child her parents seemed to want her to be.
Estelle took a breath and began again. “I was terrified. I didn’t know where you were and I was afraid . . . afraid I’d lost you, too.” Her eyes teared up. “I can’t. I can’t lose you, too.”
This time it was Sera who enveloped Estelle in an embrace as the sobs Estelle couldn’t stop came tumbling out.
“It’s all right,” Sera said. “You won’t lose me. Not yet, anyway.”
Estelle held off demanding an explanation until she and Sera had rejoined Annie.
According to the newly revived satphone, it was four o’clock Saturday afternoon, two days after they’d left Rainbow. The satphone’s small amount of power—Sera had apparently charged the purple cellphone first—was enough for Estelle to call Central and demand to know when help was coming.
“Soon,” she told Annie and Sera, deeply unsatisfied. “That’s all they could tell me. Some state trooper is on his way and should be here within a day.”
“What kind of a rescue is that?” Sera asked. “It’s been two days. Is he coming by rowboat or something?”
Estelle shook her head. “And now, young lady, please explain why you thought it was so vital to charge your cellphone when there’s no cell tower within a hundred miles of here.”
Sera caught her lower lip under her teeth. “I’m sorry I worried you. I didn’t think I’d be gone so long, but it took longer than I thought it would to cross the ice.”
“But why?”
“Because of Mom.” Sera turned away for a moment, blinking. “You saw the note she left. ‘Sorry.’ No explanation, nothing to help me understand. I can’t do that. I won’t do that. Maybe we’re all going to die out here. But if we do, I want to leave behind something meaningful. So as long as I can, I’m going to take pictures and tell our story. That way, even if the worst happens, there will be something left. And you’re both part of the story, so you should tell your part, too. I don’t know how long the charge will last on my phone, so think about what you want to say, and when you’re ready, I’ll record you.”
What could she say to that? Estelle had no words, only emotion. Awe that this barely grown girl should have such maturity. Shame
