The burden of it would fall on Jonathan. The questions would come fast and angry: What were you doing out there? Why were you at the lake? Why was there a raft when you were supposed to be hunting? He pictured helicopters and detectives, state police rescue divers searching the lake for a body and perhaps finding a box with the bones of a boy. He would have to build a castle of lies – one after the other. No explanation would satisfy their curiosity.
Jonathan found himself in the same position as the night they killed Thomas Terrywile. The music changes, but the song remains the same. He desperately wanted Conner to emerge from the lake alive – more than anything right now he wanted that. He wanted Michael to snap out of it and help craft a plan. Only time would determine how this worked out, but he had little patience at this point. Jonathan checked the backpacks. They were down to a couple of sandwiches and some jerky. He found a bottle of whiskey stored in Michael’s pack. He unscrewed the top and took a long drink and then another. It burned and warmed and numbed and let him move on for just a moment, like it had for all those years since the boy died.
He waited for his vision of the world to soften and for his mind to rest. He took the bottle to Michael, put it down beside him and went to look for firewood. Jonathan cleared a space in the snow, dug down past the leaves until he reached dirt, where worms wriggled in the exposed air. He gathered rocks from the shore to form a ring. He found kindling and some large fallen wood that had dried. He took the lighter fluid from Conner’s backpack. The kindling burned bright and orange for a moment and then began to die. He bent down and blew the flames, watched the small sticks redden and then piled on larger branches until a steady fire consumed the falling snowflakes and sent gray smoke up through the trees. Michael stirred in his sleeping bag.
Jonathan walked back to the lake, coiled the rope from the raft and threw it on the rocks. He took out his knife and stabbed the raft. Each side burst like a gunshot, exhaled and died. He folded the heavy, wet rubber, wrapped a heavy stone in it and threw it as far as he could back into the lake. He took the rope and strung it between two trees near the fire and hung Michael’s clothes on the line. Jonathan cleared a patch of flat land and set to staking down the corners of the tent. He leaned his rifle against a tree nearby. At times, he would look up from his work and gaze out through the timber and over the endless lake. The sky deepened and swirled and grew colder still. A wind came down from the mountains, and the trees began to dance, their high branches knocked together so all around was the echo of dead wood.
The fire crackled and threw light and shadow, and suddenly it was as if the whole forest were alive and moving – the shadows ran and jumped like children, the trees groaned like old doorways, ripples from the lake sloshed upon the shore and streamed rivulets through the rocks.
Jonathan sat on the ground and fed the fire. The fire made his wet clothes steam, and the mist rose into the night; it singed and burned his knees, threw smoke into his eyes and lungs. He sat with his rifle at his side and waited and listened to all that moved.
Michael finally emerged from his cocoon and sat naked by the fire, the nylon sleeping bag draped over his shoulders. He stared into the flames.
“I still feel cold,” he said. He spoke as if he were the last man on Earth, muttering into a dying darkness. Jonathan fed another piece of deadfall into the fire. “I touched him down there,” Michael said. “I felt his hand for a second and then he was gone. I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t see anything. The water was all black and freezing. I could only feel the cold and then his hand. I tried to grab it, and then it was like he was yanked down deeper. My lungs…they hurt. I couldn’t do it. And then I came up. I don’t even know why I came up. I didn’t want to. It was like my body made me do it. When it really mattered I just came back up.”
Jonathan stared at him. “You would have died down there, too. You’re lucky you’re not dead now.”
“No,” he said. “That’s not why.”
“Why then?”
“It was cold and dark,” he said. “I couldn’t make myself go deeper.”
Jonathan watched Michael from across the fire. His face seemed to move and shift in shadow.
“Conner is down there,” Michael said, and then he took a long pull from the whiskey.
“Probably shouldn’t drink too much out here,” Jonathan said.
“I don’t care,” Michael said. He stood and pulled his clothes from the line and put them on. He took the
