The Boy from Reactor 4

CHAPTER 75





NADIA AND ADAM forged onward for two hours until they were stranded on the ice. The wind whipped their faces. They made fists constantly to keep the blood flowing in their hands. Nadia felt as though her nose were frozen. Adam said his feet ached. He knew he had blisters.

As the fog broke up and the clouds rolled over the strait, the cliffs of Little Diomede flashed in and out of sight a quarter mile to the right. Seabirds screamed as they swooped to the water from their bluff-side perches. Excluding the birds, this side of the island was completely deserted.

Ten minutes after they stopped moving, a skiff circled to them from the far side.

“You made it,” a man said in perfect English. He wore a hooded parka made of animal skin and resembled the Chukchi. “My name is Sam. Get in quick. The Border Patrol rarely comes out this way and the fog is thick this morning, but we heard helicopter noise coming from Imaqliq.”

“Your cousin said to say hello,” Nadia said after they got in the boat.

“Which cousin?”

“The grumpy one who’s mad the US didn’t buy Chukotka, too.”

“I have twenty-six cousins on Imaqliq and in Chukotka. You’ve just described every one of them.”

He rowed to a rocky beach. After Adam helped him hide his skiff behind a giant boulder, he guided them along a rocky path for half a mile to a cluster of huts on the other side of the island. Nadia focused on each step. Her breath was labored and her legs were expiring, but she refused to fall behind.

Sam took them into his home, a three-room shack wedged into the bottom of a cliff. He introduced them to his wife and two toddlers. By American standards, it was a small, humble home, but Adam thought it was paradise. He marveled at the quantity of food in the refrigerator and the wide-screen TV.

“Welcome to my home,” Sam said. “I’ll go out and melt some snow for you to drink.”

“You don’t have running water?” Nadia said.

“No. We store water from a spring in a tank for the winter. By March we run out and have to melt snow instead. There’s some water in the basin in the washroom, and the honey bucket is around the corner if you need it.”

“Honey bucket?” Nadia said.

“Only the washateria and the clinic have septic systems. My wife will prepare some food for you. You must be exhausted. After that, you can get some rest.”

“Thank you so much, Sam,” Nadia said. “This is very generous of you. When will we go on to the mainland?”

He frowned. “The mainland? You mean the Lower Forty-Eight?”

Nadia figured out his reference. “No, no. I mean Alaska proper.”

“Oh. Right. Day after tomorrow. On Monday.”

Nadia frowned. “You mean tomorrow. Today is Sunday.”

“No. Today is Saturday. When you crossed the international date line, the clock went back twenty-one hours. It’s one p.m. on Saturday. That’s why they call them ‘Tomorrow’s Island’ and ‘Yesterday’s Island.’”

After Sam left, Adam tugged on Nadia’s sleeve and asked her to translate. Nadia repeated what Sam had said.

“You’re on Yesterday’s Island,” she said. “You get to live the day again. As of today, you get to start over.”

Nadia and Adam had developed blisters around their eyes from the wind on the strait. Adam had also earned some hard black blisters on the soles of his feet because his boots were so worn. Sam’s wife treated them with an antibiotic ointment.

They ate, recuperated, and stayed indoors so as not to attract attention for two days. On Monday, a large helicopter delivered the mail. While his wife feigned illness and distracted the officer of the Border Patrol, Sam escorted Nadia and Adam into the back of the helicopter. The pilot, a longtime friend, took off.

They flew south to the Nome Airport, where they met an old bush pilot with a Cessna. He flew Nadia and Adam back north to Kotzebue, a small town with a population of three thousand. It looked more like an industrial park that had been plunked down on a massive gravel pit at the tip of a peninsula on the edge of the Arctic Circle.

A middle-aged man met them in an old Jeep at the Kotzebue Airport. While the Chukchi and Sam had the same bone structure and skin color as Adam, this man looked like an artist’s impression of the boy himself in thirty years. The one exception was the huge smile on his face that was evident from the moment Nadia and Adam stepped off the plane.

He hugged each of them as though he’d known them since birth.

“Hello, Adam,” he said in English. “My name is Robert. Robert Seelick. I am your mother’s brother. I am your uncle.”