Ronan Drebber is just a teen from Homer, Alaska...
The snowmachine hit the ridgeline at full throttle and I let it go light.
That's the feeling. That half-second of suspension, skis off the snow, engine screaming at nothing, the whole machine weightless in a way machines have no business being. I'd been chasing that feeling for eight days. You learn things about yourself at seventeen that they don't put in brochures. One of them is this: you can not-think about anything if you go fast enough and don't stop. The brain has a governor on it. Physics overrides grief. Physics doesn't care who died.
I came down hard on the back side of the ridge and the machine bit and I was moving again.
The Caribou Hills trail system is sixty miles of groomed paths on old seismographic roads, northeast of Homer on the Kenai Peninsula, and at eleven o'clock on a February night it was mine and nobody else's. The Cabin Hoppers maintain the trails. Not at eleven PM in February. That was by design.
I always took the long way back. The long way is how you stay out there.
The view from the high ridge is the reason I started coming up here when I was twelve. Homer spread across the bluffs to the southwest, amber dock lights on the Spit strung out into Kachemak Bay like somebody dropped a lit match on the water and it didn't go out. The Kenai Mountains across the bay, enormous and white, filling the horizon the way they always have, indifferent to everything happening on this side of the water, as far back as anyone can remember, as far forward as anyone can see. On a clear night you could pick out the running lights of crabbers working the bay mouth. On a very clear night, the water itself gave back the sky.
Tonight the harbor was frozen, flat and silver, and the aurora was out.
I know what I said. I didn't look up.
Nobody who hasn't lived here understands the aurora. It doesn't make it into documentaries or postcards, the actual thing of it. The way it moves. The way it snaps. There's a violence to it, like the sky is tearing open along a seam and hasn't decided what's on the other side. Green in February, mostly. Vertical curtains that twist and fold back on themselves. Some nights it's close enough that you swear you can hear it, a high-frequency hiss just past where sound lives, though apparently that's not scientifically possible. Either the scientists have a gap in their data, or my ears know something my brain doesn't.
I was busy watching the trail.
What I know now: above my head the aurora was doing something it had never done before. The curtains were gathering at the top of the arc, pulling into a shape that had no business being in a sky. An eye. Open. Pupil and iris, lit cold green. Looking down at the ridge. Looking down at a specific boy on a specific machine on a specific groomed trail in the Caribou Hills northeast of Homer, Alaska, on the eighth night after his best friend died from a heroin overdose.
Eight days since I stood in the Morrow kitchen saying the wrong things, drove home, and sat in my truck in our driveway for an hour and twenty minutes because going inside meant it was real and he was never coming back.
I came down off the ridge and pointed the machine toward the Spit.
My father's boat shop was lit. It was always lit. That had started being ordinary a while back and become something I counted on instead. The amber glow in the single small window at the end of the shop, eleven PM, February, his truck the only vehicle in the lot.
The long way back had run out. It always does.
I pulled in.
