“Thanks. Think I will.” He took one step, then stopped abruptly and asked, “Where’s Annie?” For he’d suddenly noticed the absence of his middle child.
“Relax,” Jo said. “She’s at the Pilons. Mark and Sue insisted she stay the night with them rather than try to make it home in the storm. Go on now. That shower will do you good.”
Upstairs in the bathroom, he turned on the water, then stood at the sink, looking into the mirror. As the glass steamed over, his own image was obscured, and he saw again the lone figure of Fletcher Kane at the window of the big cabin, staring at the frozen lake, with nothing to hold to but the thinnest of hopes.
“You okay in there?” Jo called from beyond the door.
Cork realized he’d been standing a long time gripping the solid porcelain of the sink. “I’ll be out in a minute.”
After his shower, he came downstairs to the smell of fresh popcorn and found his family already gathered in front of the television. Stevie was in his pajamas.
Cork sat on the sofa with his son snuggled against him, spilling pieces of popcorn into his lap. He paid little attention to the video. He was seeing instead the empty white trails that had been in front of him all day, and he was thinking, was there somewhere he should have looked but hadn’t? He was surprised when the movie seemed to have ended so quickly.
“Time for bed,” Jo said to her son.
“I’ll take him up,” Cork offered.
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure. Come on, buddy. How about a piggyback ride?”
Stevie wrapped his arms and his legs tightly about his father and rode Cork’s back upstairs to bed. Cork tucked him in, sat down, and began to read from The Tales of King Arthur. Stevie lay staring up at the ceiling, his hands behind his head.
“Does it hurt to die?” he asked suddenly.
Cork lowered the book. At seven, Stevie had already withstood blows that some people lived their whole lives never having to face. Cork believed his son was strong deep down and he answered honestly.
“It does sometimes.”
“Annie says it’s like sleep. And then you wake up with the angels.”
“It might be like that. I don’t really know.”
“Angels are white, like snow.”
Stevie said it as if he knew it was the truth, and Cork, who knew the absolute truth of nothing, didn’t argue.
He read until Stevie’s eyes closed and his breathing was deep and regular, then he closed the book and listened to the wind push against the house as if seeking a way to enter. He pressed the covers tightly around his son, gave him a gentle kiss, and turned out the light.
Jo was already in bed. She had an open folder on her lap, a legal file. She wore a long, yellow sleep shirt that Jenny had given her for Christmas. Across the front in black letters was printed LAWYERS DO IT IN COURT. In Cork’s eyes, she was a beautiful woman, his wife, and he looked at her with appreciation, as if he’d almost lost her but now here she was, a gift.
Jo looked up from her reading. “Is Stevie asleep?”
Cork nodded.
“Rose called. She’s fine.”
“At least the lines are still up,” Cork said. “That’s something.”
“You look exhausted. Why don’t you call it a night?”
“Not sure I can sleep.”
“Do you want to talk?”
“I don’t know what there is to say.” He stood at the end of their bed. “Schanno’s calling in a cadaver dog. Not that it will do any good. Way too cold. He just wants to be certain in his own mind, and the Kanes’, that he’s tried everything. If Charlotte Kane’s out there, she’ll be frozen under that snow until the spring melt.” Cork hesitated, then said what was on his mind. “I wanted to ask Mal Thorne something today. I wanted to ask him why his God lets things like this happen.”
“His God?”
“His idea of God. Doesn’t he preach a loving God every Sunday?” Cork didn’t know for sure, because church was a place where he’d refused to set foot for the last three years.
Jo gave him a look that seemed full of compassion, not censure. “Do you really want to argue theology right now?”
She was right. It wasn’t God he was angry with.
“I’m going to walk a little,” he said.
“I’ll be here.”
He headed downstairs and found Jenny standing at the living room window. He glanced where she looked and he was startled by her dark reflection in the glass. For the briefest instant, he saw again the shape of the wraith that had appeared to him on the ice of Fisheye Lake, a form that was both real and not real, that he’d sensed was Charlotte and yet was not Charlotte. Had they connected, two souls lost in a frigid hell?
“ ‘Rage against the dying of the light,’ ” Jenny said.
“What’s that?”
“It’s from a poem by Dylan Thomas.”
Jenny was an honors English student and an avid reader. She dreamed of being a great writer someday. She had a knack for remembering passages and seemed to have an appropriate literary reference for any occasion. Cork studied her reflected face, pale and serious in the window.
“Will you find her?” she asked.
He didn’t like the way she’d phrased her question, as if the responsibility for saving Charlotte Kane were his personally. He wanted to tell her that he’d done his best. That they all had. That it was no one’s fault.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Across the street, John O’Loughlin came out of his house and trudged to where his Caravan sat buried against the curb. He cleared the door on the driver’s side, stepped in, and started the engine. Then he got out and scraped his windows. Finally, he tried to ease the vehicle forward. The tires just spun. O’Loughlin got out again, pulled a shovel from the back of the van, and dug at the snow in front of the wheels. Cork couldn’t imagine what would take a man out into a storm like that. He considered bundling up and going over to give a hand, but he knew that even if O’Loughlin made it out of the drift in front of his house, he’d just get stuck somewhere else. In a couple of minutes, Cork’s neighbor gave up and went back inside.
“Do you know her well?” he asked.
Jenny shook her head. “I used to talk to her a little at church, but she hasn’t come for a long time.”
“How about school?”
“She’s a senior. We hang out in different crowds. She’s rich. Pretty. You know.”
“She’s always seemed very nice. Quiet. Smart, I hear. Very smart.” Though how smart was it to ride a snowmobile alone into the wilderness in the dead of night?
“Smart, yeah, but she’s been kind of out of control for a while,” Jenny said. “Partying a lot, running with Solemn Winter Moon.”
“Solemn,” Cork said. He knew the kid well. Ojibwe, good-looking, troubled. An enticing guide for a young woman who wanted a quick walk on the wild side.
“There’s something else,” Jenny began, then hesitated.
“What is it?” he said.
“It’s just that…” She bit her lip and weighed the wisdom of proceeding.
Cork waited.
“I had a class with her last term. Creative writing, one of my English electives. Mostly we wrote poetry. We read some of it aloud in class, but a lot of it we didn’t. We kept these poetry journals that we only shared with the teacher and a poetry partner. Charlotte was my poetry partner. I saw what she didn’t share with the class. What she read out loud was fine and all, but what she wrote in her journal was really different. Way better than anything else any of us wrote. But very dark.”
