Resurrection Bay Read Free Page A

head was spinning.
    “I saw . . . I saw . . .”
    I sat down—no—I collapsed in a kitchen chair.
    “Anika, you’re bleeding!” My father grabbed a towel and touched it to my bloody forehead.
    “What did you see, Anika?” Rav asked.
    I grabbed the newspaper from the table and pointed to the picture on the front page. The newlydead couple. The smiling woman in the picture. “Her!” I told them. “I saw her.”
    Stunned silence. No one knew what to say. Then a neighbor came bounding in.
    “Did you hear? Did you hear?” he shouted, completely oblivious to what was going on around him. “The glacier’s changed direction!”
    “Glaciers don’t change direction,” said Rav’s father.
    “This one did. It’s not heading toward the center of town anymore. It’s just gonna catch the edge. Now they’re saying it’s just gonna take out Dunbar Street and everything west of it.”
    “That’s . . . great,” said Rav’s dad, still a little bit rattled by what I had just told them. “There’s nothing west of Dunbar Street but old warehouses.”
    I shook my head.
    “You’re wrong,” I told Mr. Carnegie. “There’s something else west of Dunbar Street.”
    “What?” asked Rav.
    I swallowed, feeling that chill of the glacier slide down my throat, making my stomach seize into a knot. “The cemetery.”
    On Thursday, at about two thirty in the morning, Exit Glacier, having plowed through the forest before it, gouged its way through the fence of Seward Memorial Cemetery. Ittook down headstone after headstone. It tore apart what few marble mausoleums stood there. They fell like houses of cards. The wall of ice churned up the hallowed ground, and then when the entire cemetery was under the massive sheet of ice . . . the glacier stopped.
    Just as quickly and mysteriously as it had begun, the forward surge ended. Most people agreed that it was some kind of miracle. I wasn’t so sure.
    In the morning, Rav and I ditched school. I think half our school ditched so they could join the crowds standing in front of what used to be the town graveyard, getting only as close as police would allow. Mostly, our friends and neighbors were hoping for a moment of TV fame; with all the reporters there, chances were good that some of them would be interviewed.
    Rav and I didn’t crowd the barricade like the others because we were there for a different reason. Instead, we climbed to the top of an abandoned work shed, where we could have a better view of the whole face of the glacier, and we waited.
    Rav was not happy about being here, but he wasn’t leaving, either.
    “What you’re thinking is crazy,” Rav said.
    “I know.”
    “I should just walk away from you,” Rav said.
    “Then why don’t you?”
    “I guess I must be crazy, too.”
    I smiled at him, and that seemed to make him a little bitill. He looked away. “You said you banged your head, right?”
    “I didn’t bang it that hard.”
    “It was hard enough to make you bleed,” he pointed out. “You were in pain and probably confused. How can you be sure of what you saw that night?”
    “Because I am.”
    We watched as the geologists took measurements and the reporters reported. Not a single piece of ice had fallen from the glacier’s face since we’d arrived.
    “I really don’t want to spend a whole day watching a glacier not move,” said Rav.
    “I know what I saw the other night—it was that dead woman,” I insisted. “And maybe it’s not as impossible as you think. The Tlingit traditionally believe that everything is interconnected. The earth and the sky, the ice and us.”
    “You’re only half Tlingit,” he pointed out.
    “Right, so the other half is annoyingly skeptical and needs undeniable proof. That’s why we’re here.”
    “What do you expect to see? Dead people strolling out of the ice like zombies, looking for brains to eat?”
    I turned back to the glacier. “No, not zombies. Not exactly . . .”
    “Then what?”
    “I