Northern Fires. JENNIFER LABRECQUE

Sven said, breaking the silence and pulling her back from her brief foray into the past, “how’d you wind up flying a bush plane in Alaska?”

      Surely he knew the story. It was a standard question that came with her profession and she’d been asked numerous times. She gave him the same abbreviated, sanitized version everyone else got.

      “I’ve always loved flying, being up in the air.”

      She was eight years old and once again Mama and Daddy were shouting and throwing things. Juliette darted out the back door when they were distracted. Outside was better than inside, but they could always still find her. She dashed across the field to old man Haddricks’s place and scrambled into the cockpit of his crop-duster plane. Her folks never thought to look for her there and she liked to pretend she was flying up in the sky. They couldn’t get to her up in the sky.

       “All right, little missy,” old man Haddricks said, nearly startling the pee out of her. “I been watching you sit in my plane going on near a month. I’m about to dust the Oglesby soybean fields.” He hooked his thumbs in the straps of his overalls. His gray, bristling eyebrows nearly met one another over his nose and he never smiled, but his eyes were kind. You could see meanness in a person and it wasn’t in him. “You wanna tag along?”

      She nodded mutely. Her heart nearly thumping out of her chest, she climbed over into the second seat and buckled in. The next thing she knew, they were off the ground. And for the first time in her life she actually felt safe. It was just like she’d dreamed it would be. No one could find her and no one could harm her when she was in the sky.

      She shrugged. “I became a flight attendant, fell in love with Alaska on a long layover and decided to get my pilot’s license.”

      Her life sounded so nice and neat and compartmentalized when in fact it had been one big mess and even that CliffsNotes version dredged it all up for her again. Marrying Boyd Feldman, her high school boyfriend, when she was seventeen just to get out of her parents’ house. Foolishly believing Boyd would stand between her and her parents. Realizing she’d jumped from the frying pan into the fire. Divorced by nineteen. Lucking into the flight attendant job. Falling into a second marriage where once again she thought he’d have her back, only to discover the only thing they had in common was burying their respective troubles in a bottle. A second divorce. Waking up in a hotel room one morning after a flight and an evening spent in the hotel bar, not remembering where she was or how she’d gotten there, knowing if she didn’t make some changes she’d surely ruin her life and die young. Alcoholism was suicide by installment plan.

      She’d climbed out of bed, bleary-eyed, hungover and generally mad at the world and gone online and found an AA meeting. She wasn’t sure what had been harder, showing up or admitting she was, in fact, the very thing she’d always despised about her parents. An alcoholic.

      With sobriety had come the acknowledgment that while being a flight attendant put her in the sky, what she really longed to do was fly a plane.

      She’d had a small nest egg set aside, but she’d still busted her butt waiting tables in an all-night diner in Anchorage. It had taken her twice as long to save up the money for flight school because her tips were easily half of what they would’ve been in a bar. But getting sober and staying sober had been as important as earning her wings.

      She certainly didn’t lay all that out on the table for Sven, who probably couldn’t handle it even if she wanted to tell him … and she didn’t. Instead, she simply smiled and said, “And the rest, as they say, is history.”

      A twig snapped underfoot, underscoring her story.

      Sven looked at her as if he could see through all she’d said to the pieces she’d left out, which was unexpected and caught her off guard. And there was something in his look that said he’d ask. “So, you’ve been flying how long?”

      She breathed a sigh of relief, but sooner or later he’d probe. She sensed his curiosity. Most of the time her wall of reserve kept people at bay, but with him …

      “Two years now.”

      Three years and forty-four days of sobriety, and she never, ever took it for granted. She looked up at the ribbons of orange and pink streaking the sky as the sun began its nightly journey toward the horizon. A sense of contentment wove through her.

      “I’m never as happy as when I’m up there.” The moment those words slipped past her lips she caught herself. Sven was easy to be around in a way she hadn’t experienced with anyone before.

      “What is it about being up there that you like so much?”

      Once again she lowered her guard as if lulled by the place and the man and the moment. “It’s freedom and open space and safety.”

      They climbed the last of a small rise where a stone outcropping formed a natural bench at the top. Without stopping to discuss it, they settled on the sun-warmed rock overlooking the vista of lake, mountain and sinking sun. Fireweed, her favorite Alaskan wildflower, filled a meadow on the far side of the lake. In the distance Dalton and Skye’s house sat in the clearing at the edge of the spruce forest. It was all singularly spectacular. She liked the solidness of the stone beneath her.

      The wind shifted and Sven’s scent wafted around her. He radiated energy, but it wasn’t the frenetic mix some people gave off. There was simply a heat and power to him that drew her.

      “Open space and safety,” he echoed her words. “That’s a different take.” Sven grinned and pushed his blond hair behind one ear. Juliette noticed a small hole in his earlobe, as if once upon a time he’d sported an earring. Somehow it seemed to fit. He struck her as free-spirited and a little unconventional with his long hair and outgoing personality. She was finding, however, that one-on-one he was quieter than she’d expected.

      “Lots of people would find being up in a small plane in a small cockpit in the air confining and somewhat dangerous,” he continued.