Breaking the Ice (16 page)

“Love some. With milk or cream if you have it.” She looked out the window, but it was still pitch-black. She couldn’t tell whether the snow had stopped. “I can’t believe how late the sun rises here.”

“Dawn’s not for another hour.” Lars poured two cups and brought one over to her. “In a couple of months, it’ll be dark until noon, and sunset’s only a couple hours later. Those are our hardest months. Not a lot to do and too cold to be outside much. Real easy to get cabin fever.”

“You’ll have a lot to keep you occupied this winter with a new baby.” Karla glanced over at the bed to reassure herself Maggie was still sleeping. “Did Maggie say anything about me last night after I went up to bed?”

He grinned. “Yeah. She said she liked you right off, and that she shouldn’t have given me such a hard time about letting you come. Getting rid of her leg cramp was a nice way to break the ice.”

“I hope she still likes me when she finds out we’re sisters.”

Lars laid a hand on her shoulder. “I don’t think you have to worry. But just to make sure you have as much going for you as possible, I’d say wait until after breakfast. She wakes up like a starving bear coming out of hibernation.”

“What can I do to help? I really want to pitch in while I’m here.”

“If you know your way around a kitchen, you’re hired, ’cause I can barely boil an egg. How’re you at making pancakes?”

*

“If Lars had told me you could cook like this, I’d have begged him to bring you.” Maggie sighed with contentment as she pushed her plate away, no trace remaining of the large stack of pancakes and reindeer sausage Karla had whipped up. “How long can you stay?”

Karla laughed. “I’m no Rachael Ray, but I’m glad you liked it.”

“Who’s Rachael Ray?” Lars and Maggie asked in chorus.

No television, idiot.
“Not important.”

“I’ll take care of the cleanup, if you two want to adjourn to the comfy chairs and get acquainted,” Lars said, smiling encouragingly at Karla.

“Sounds like a great idea to me.” Maggie braced her hands on the table and pushed herself up. “And it’s not looking like a good day for you to be out sightseeing, anyway.”

Karla followed her gaze to the front window. The sun had come up but the sky was overcast, and it was snowing heavily. There seemed little chance she would be seeing Bryson soon, and she couldn’t help feeling disappointed. “How long do you think it will last?”

“No telling.” Maggie shuffled slowly toward her overstuffed chair, rubbing her stomach. “An hour, a day, a week. Weather forecasts here are virtually useless.”

Karla went to the window to try to gauge how much snow had fallen. At least four or five inches, she guessed. She saw no trace of their tracks from the night before, and the branches of the spruce trees around the cabin were bending under the weight of the accumulation. With the surrounding mountains providing a majestic backdrop, the scene was serenely beautiful, a Christmas card come to life.

Though the weather might keep her from spending time with Bryson, even if Maggie wanted her to leave, travel was impossible. Nature was allowing her time to convince her sister to accept what she’d come to tell her.

As she turned from the window and walked slowly toward Maggie, she was startled by how calm she felt. In the blink of an eye, her trepidation had melted away. Her palms were dry, her head was clear. She felt no trace of the trembling that had seized her every time she’d imagined this moment.

She sat on the edge of the couch facing Maggie, but looked behind her at Lars. He was keeping himself busy at the sink, watching them both. He met her eyes and gave a little nod and smile of encouragement.

Maggie half turned to look at him, then back to Karla. “What’s going on?”

“I haven’t been entirely honest with you,” Karla said in a soft voice. She placed a hand on Maggie’s knee. “And Lars agreed to keep my secret until I could tell you myself. I waited until this morning because I know you’ll have lots of questions, and I didn’t want you to lose sleep over it.”

Fear came into Maggie’s eyes. “Is this about the baby? Is something wrong?”

Lars hurriedly reassured her. “No, no. Nothing’s wrong with the baby.” He wiped his hands on a towel and came to stand behind Maggie, placing his hands on her shoulders. “Tell her, Karla.”

She took a deep breath and let it out. Simple was best. “Maggie, I’m your sister.” She sat back and let the news sink in.

Shock. Bewilderment. Maggie’s face registered both in quick succession. “What are you talking about? Is this a joke?” She craned her head to look up at Lars. “This isn’t funny, Lars. I don’t know what you two are up to, but you know damn well I don’t have much of a sense of humor right now.”

He stooped until they were eye to eye. He wasn’t smiling. “It’s not a joke, Mags. Karla is your sister. If you just give her a chance to explain—”

“I don’t have a sister,” Maggie insisted, glaring at him. “You
know
that.”

“You were adopted, Maggie.” Karla kept her voice as soft as Lars’s had been, the same tone she used when giving a patient news they wouldn’t want to hear. Maggie’s head whipped around and she started to open her mouth in protest, but Karla cut her off. “The Van Rooys adopted you when you were a baby. Our mother had to give you up. She was very young, just sixteen, and in those days—”

“Stop!” Maggie was red in the face. “Just stop. I don’t know where you got this information, but it’s not true. I wasn’t adopted, and I don’t have any brothers or sisters. I had a great relationship with my parents. We were very close, and they wouldn’t have deceived me about something like that. Not something that important.”

“Believe me, I know how hard all of this to absorb,” Karla said. “Especially the idea that your parents lied to you. My mother—
our
mother—lied to me, too, and I would never have thought her capable of it. I didn’t find out about you until a week or so ago.”

“What’s a lie is any claim by
your
mother that I’m not who I
know
I am.” Maggie turned to look at Lars. “Get the satellite phone. Let’s call her right now. We’ll settle this, find out what her motive is.”

“We can’t do that, Mags.” Lars started to stroke her arm, but she jerked away from his touch.

“Get the damn phone!” Maggie was shouting. “I won’t listen to any more of this bullshit. I’ll get her to tell me the truth.”

“Maggie, she died three weeks ago.” The image of her mother in the coffin rose again in Karla’s mind, and tears sprang to her eyes. When they overflowed, she wiped them away absentmindedly.

Maggie went quiet, her rapid, loud breathing the only sound in the room. She slumped back in her chair and all the fight went out of her. Her eyes were fixed on Karla’s. When she finally spoke, she sounded in pain. “I’m sorry for your loss. But I still don’t believe this. How are you so sure it’s true?”

“My mother left behind a letter explaining everything. It was pretty convincing on its own, but I was certain it was true as soon as I saw you last night. She kept a lock of your hair. It matches. And you have so many of her features. Nose. The shape of your face. That one-sided dimple when you smile. And the color of your eyes. It’s the same as hers. As our grandmother’s. The same as mine.”

Maggie leaned forward, as best as she was able, to compare them for herself, and Karla shifted toward her, until they were only a foot or two apart. Maggie looked intently into her eyes for what seemed like an eternity. Then she leaned back again, her face expressionless. “Exactly what did this letter say?”

Karla had expected this question, so she’d made a photocopy of her mother’s note before she left Atlanta. She didn’t want anything to happen to the original so she’d put it in her safety-deposit box. And when Lars and she’d decided to withhold the news of her mother’s Alzheimer’s, she’d tucked away the first of the three pages and torn the second in half. She pulled the remaining portion from her back pocket, unfolded it, and handed it to Maggie, who began to read.

Karla had read the note so often, she’d committed it to memory.

I hope you will seek to understand what I have to tell you, and forgive me for not telling you until now.

You have a sister.

Five years before I met and married your father, I became pregnant. I was only sixteen, still a child myself and naïve about such things, but I fancied myself in love with a boy at school named James O’Hara.

After talking with Jim’s parents, mine sent me immediately to a home for unwed mothers to have the child and convinced me that it was best for both me and for the baby to give it up for adoption as soon as it was born. It was what girls did then, especially those from Catholic families. I knew from my brief glimpse of her that I’d had a daughter, born healthy and with curly red hair, like her father. Then the nuns took her away.

Maggie began to cry silent tears halfway through the letter and her hand began to shake. She was completely absorbed in the words, her face registering confusion and incredulity. Karla soon stopped mentally reciting the letter and lost herself in empathy for Maggie.

Neither Karla nor Lars spoke, but Lars, still stooping beside Maggie’s chair, put his arm around her shoulders. It took her so long to finish that Karla was certain she’d read it through at least twice.

Finally she looked up at Karla. “My God. It’s true.”

“Yes, Maggie.” She held her breath, studying her sister’s face. Maggie looked away, staring off into space, her gaze unfocused. Clearly, she was stunned by what she’d heard and read, and Karla certainly empathized with that reaction. The memory of how she’d felt when she opened the letter was still fresh. What now, she
wondered. Did Maggie want her in her family?
She couldn’t speak the words. It would probably take time for Maggie to come to terms with everything. “Look, why don’t I take a walk and give you two some time alone. I realize you have a lot to think about.”

Maggie didn’t reply or react. Lars put his mouth to her ear and whispered something, but she acted as though he wasn’t there.

Karla climbed up to the loft and dug the photo album out of her bag. Then she put on a set of long underwear and redressed, adding a new woolen sweater to her ensemble that she’d forgotten to take the price tag off of. By the time she descended the ladder, Maggie was back in bed and Lars was seated beside her, speaking in low tones.

She gingerly approached them. Maggie still wouldn’t look at her, so she offered the album to Lars. “Pictures of our mother.”

He took it with a half smile, but his eyes were dark with worry. He set the album down on the bed and turned his attention back to Maggie.

Karla retreated, donned her coat, hat, and boots, and stepped outside, feeling oddly more relaxed than she’d been in ages. Her part was over. The rest was up to Maggie.

She inhaled the crisp, clean air and stepped off the porch into ankle-deep snow. Thick flakes were still showering down and the sky was gunmetal gray. It was eerily quiet, with no hint of movement in the sky or forest around her.

The Rasmussens had an outbuilding like Bryson’s, though much larger, nearly half the size of their cabin. The roof on one side extended several feet beyond the building to cover an enormous pile of stacked firewood. And like Bryson, Lars and Maggie also had an outhouse and a small log structure built high off the ground on four long posts, with a narrow ladder leading up to it. A large round thermometer nailed to one of the posts told her it was a couple of degrees below freezing.

The ground had been cleared in a wide circle around the homestead, and the snow cover was nearly pristine, unmarked except for a single set of fresh tracks that ran along one side of the outbuilding and down the trail to the river. She walked over to examine them. Up close, they looked like cat tracks. Smudge, the gray tabby she’d had growing up, often left muddy prints on the kitchen floor and she’d had to clean them up. But these seemed quite a bit bigger than the ones she remembered, at least five inches long by five inches wide.

She followed the paw prints down the trail to the water, where she stood transfixed. Wild Lake was oblong, nearly a mile across and more than six miles long, framed by majestic peaks in all directions. It was snowing so hard the mountains were partially obscured, as though seen through a veil of lace. She detected no sign of any other human habitation.

The tracks led to the water’s edge, as if whatever had made them had taken a drink and lingered a moment before heading off to the right, along the shoreline. It seemed as good a way as any to go off exploring a bit. At least she couldn’t lose her way. The memory of the wolves howling only hours before made her hesitate briefly, but she felt relatively safe in the daylight. And it was so quiet she was sure she’d be able to hear anything moving toward her from a good distance away.

Though the trail from the cabin had been easy walking, once she got off it the going was more difficult. The snow cover hid an uneven terrain dotted with large rocks and spongy mounds of grassy tundra that hadn’t completely frozen, so she had to walk gingerly to avoid twisting an ankle. Every couple dozen steps, she paused to look around because the view was so breathtaking. She’d gone about a half mile when she saw her first sign of movement—a bald eagle, startled from its nest in a high tree near the shoreline ahead. It spread its massive wings and soared gracefully over her, giving her a clear view of its startling white head and tail feathers. She was beginning to understand why Bryson loved Alaska so much, and Lars, and Maggie, too. Why hadn’t she remembered to bring her camera?