The bridge was only fifty feet away. We could get there. Then when it was about five feet away, I eased off of the gas, and I squinted to see the best possible entry.
Instead of completely choking up the entrance like Ramsey warned, there was a small hill just big enough, I thought, for the sled to fit through. But the darkness within was about as inviting as the mouth of a giant beast. It was a place that undoubtedly devoured light, which was something we didn’t have much of in the first place.
I kept on the gas, yet part of me longed to stop and turn around, go back the way we came. I knew if we went in the tunnel, there was a large chance we weren’t ever leaving it.
Still, it was a risk I had to take. For Mia, for her daughter.
I hit the brakes as I eased the sled down the hard-packed decline. Within the tunnel was a dusting of snow, light powder the wind had blown in. It stretched as far as halfway, fifty or so feet, then grew thinner and thinner before the asphalt took its place. I wasn’t sure if I could ride a snowmobile on bare road, but at this point, I didn’t care. Even if it killed me, I was getting Mia into the City.
The darkness pressed against the windows like a living thing. I gunned the engine, hearing the left ski scrape across the asphalt. Sparks flew from that side. The dark swallowed them up like it swallowed the headlights, and their brightness stretched all of about three feet, useless.
Ahead, the roof had caved in under the weight of the snow. Large sheets of corrugated steel hung low, blocking our path. I didn’t bother slowing, and I shot through the gap on the left of the fallen piece. The snowmobile raked against the side.
Goodbye, mirror. Goodbye, paint job.
We somehow fit through, and although my eyes hadn’t adjusted to this new darkness, I thought I saw a crescent moon of gray another fifty feet away at what must’ve been the end of the tunnel.
But in the foreground, my eye caught something else.
Not something…
Someone.
The broken headlights hardly illuminated the stooped figure standing in the middle of the road. But I knew that posture. I knew it from the dozens of old pictures seared into my memory. My father kept them in the attic, in the same box he kept the notebooks full of short stories and poems.
All I had to do was close my eyes and a mental photo album of my parents opened.
Here they were on their wedding day, happy, smiling, young. Here they were kissing at the top of a Ferris wheel at the county fair. Here they were standing with their arms around each other at a Bon Jovi concert. Here they were sitting up in a hospital bed with a newborn baby boy cradled against my father’s chest. Here they were crowded around a birthday cake with a single candle sticking out of it, the baby boy between them now a little boy of one year.
My mother and father.
My mother’s shoulders were hunched together and over and her neck was slightly craned in each of these photographs. Dad said when the cameras were around, she’d get so shy, she collapsed in on herself.
The figure in the road stood with that same posture. It had on a blue sundress like the one my mother wore at my first birthday party, and it also wore my mother’s face.
Yet, it was not my mother.
Only…my brain, in all its excitement and fear, failed to realize this.
My mother smiled with both her mouth and her eyes. Eyes that looked just like mine.
In that moment, she was as real as the snow.
I braked and cut the wheel, narrowly missing her. The back of the sled fishtailed as I fought for control again and found none. The next thing I knew, the pile of snow at the end of the tunnel was rushing to meet us.
I drove right into it.
And the whiteness consumed everything.
6
The Tunnel
It took crashing into the bank of snow to make me realize the figure standing in the road behind us wasn’t my mother. Call me stupid, or an idiot, or a dumbass—such names are probably justified—but put yourself in my shoes for a second.
You see, I was the boy who grew up without a mom. When I awoke from a nightmare, I couldn’t seek solace in the comfort of maternal arms. There was no soft-skinned, long-haired woman to hold me and tell me everything was all right. I would stay in bed, my brow damp with sweat, my heart beating madly, and stare at the dark ceiling until sunrise. If I had woken my father and told him of the evil monsters that stalked my dreams, he would’ve told me to man up and go back to bed. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my father. He was a great man, a hard worker, and always funny and sweet at the right moments, but he was largely a no-nonsense type of guy. Like his father before him, he believed a boy became a man pretty much right out of the womb.
I had no one to give macaroni pictures of houses and trees to. I had no one to make cards for, to cook breakfast and pick flowers for on Mother’s Day—a Sunday I didn’t look forward to, but rather dreaded because it was a reminder of what I didn’t have.
I spent countless hours of my childhood upstairs in that cramped attic where my father kept my mother’s belongings. The insulation lay bare along the walls. Cobwebs hung from the rafters, waving in the stale air. Sometimes a spider would amble past, crawling over the notebooks, pictures, and papers splayed out on the hardwood. Sometimes those spiders would be big and fat and hairy—terrifying to a boy of seven or eight—yet I braved them as I
