Cold (17 page)

She nodded.
 
“I called my nearest neighbor and her daughter Darcy—I help with her home-schooling—she’s supposed to be tending to the stoves.
 
It’ll be good to get back to the house, my studio, my woods.”

“Good.”

He didn’t move for what seemed like a long time and it was making her nervous.
 
She was used to being the one who was still, but he had his own stillness, and it was both disconcerting and splendid—something about the trim of that jaw, the flatness of his lips.
 
For a moment she imagined his face as clay, how with her thumb she would make the sweet curve where the brow descended into the bridge of his nose.

She took a breath and said, “What?”
 
He turned and went over to the window.
 
She sat up slightly, feeling a twinge in her lower back.
 
Her room faced east and he was staring at the gray horizon above the blackness of Lake Superior.
 
There were at least a dozen shades of gray out there.
 
He seemed now preoccupied, as though he were alone in the room.
 
“What is it?” she asked.

“The walkaway.”

“Norman,” she said.
 
Del continued to face the lake.
 
“What about him?”

Every moment the sky seemed to be getting brighter, the grays shifting, and Del seemed content to witness this transformation from night to day.

She whispered, “He’s alive?”

“Apparently.”

“Then who was in the truck?
 
You said there were two bodies—or maybe I didn’t understand you.
 
This med they had me on, it makes you see choo-choo trains in the ceiling.”

“There were two bodies all right, but neither one was the walkaway.”

“His name is Norman Haas,” she said.
 
“How do you know this?”

“The lab work came back and I asked them to call me as soon as they were certain.
 
Your Norman wasn’t in the truck.”

“My Norman,” she said.

“A man from Menominee was reported missing by his wife, and according to the dental records he was in the truck with the driver.”

“Then Norman’s free.”

“In this guy’s car,” Del said.
 
“A van, actually, a brown Dodge van.
 
I don’t know how Norman managed it.
 
The truck that burned was headed west, but now that he’s in the van he could be in Wisconsin, Minnesota or maybe Canada by now.
 
Hard to say in this weather.
 
Not much is moving out there except the snowplows.”

Liesl sank down in her bed.
 
“What happens now?”

“State police put out the word, but they’re not moving much in this weather either.”

“They catch him and he resists, they’ll shoot him, right?”
 
Del turned from the window now.
 
“Can you tell if Norman
caused
the truck accident?”

“No, I don’t know that for certain.
 
Seemed like a typical jackknife in a blizzard.”

“He hasn’t
done
anything—except walk away from prison.
 
But they think he has.”

“And you’re in the hospital.”
 
She shook her head.
 
Del came over to the side of the bed now.
 
He still had his hands in his coat pockets.
 
His forehead was slightly pinched, creating a small bunch of flesh to rise up between his brows.
 
“What are you saying?”

“More than I had intended.”
 
She stretched her left arm out on the blanket and turned her palm up.
 
“I’m saying I fell.
 
It was an accident.”

“Right, and he left you for dead.”

“He tried to carry me out—at first, that’s what he tried to do.
 
But we fell in the snow.
 
Then he went for help, and I guess he just—”
 
Liesl had to avoid Del’s eyes now.
 
“I guess he just decided it wasn’t worth it.
 
I wasn’t worth the risk.
 
But I fell by accident; I’m not here because he tried to harm me.
 
It’s like the deer in winter.”

“What about the deer in winter.”

“We saw one while we were snowshoeing through the hills.
 
It was dying, starving and freezing to death.
 
You could tell—the others walked off when they saw us, but this one deer just stood there and watched us.
 
It couldn’t move.”
 
She raised her eyes now and for a moment she was surprised by something in his eyes.
 
They went beyond the necessary curiosity and skepticism of a small town constable; they were trying to comprehend.
 
She then did something that surprised her even more:
 
reaching into the front pocket of his overcoat, she took hold of his hand, which was pleasantly calloused and warm.
 
“The deer,” she said, “I shot it.
 
It wasn’t going to make it so I shot it.
 
Norman understood that.
 
It wasn’t something I caused.
 
It was just the circumstances of nature.
 
Or call it fate, if you want—but whatever, it dictated that there was no reason to let that deer suffer any longer.
 
I told him how it took me years to understand that about the deer I saw dying around my house in the woods.
 
I told him that when I was certain one wasn’t going to make it now I put them down with Harold’s carbine.”
  
She looked past Del now.
 
Out the window the sky had turned a bright oyster color, and the lake was its darkest blue, the color of ink.
 
“Circumstance, Del—he didn’t leave me to die in the snow, he just found that once he was out on that road, no longer wearing snowshoes, no longer accompanied by this woman who had a rifle, the circumstances had changed.
 
He did the logical thing:
 
he was free and he kept going in the blizzard.”

•

At dawn Noel stood at the bottom of her father’s driveway, which was about twenty yards long going up a slight grade.
 
A set of antlers hung above the front door of the house.
 
When she was small she had stood in the front yard, expecting them to move, for a buck to suddenly burst through the door.
 
In summer, when it turned very humid and buggy, the smell of Borax and the stench of tanned skins from his workshop, which was then in the basement, filled the summer nights.
 
Even from this distance, she could see that the antlers were now dried out, bone white.

She turned toward Norman, who sat behind the wheel of her Isuzu Trooper, but she could barely see him through the reflection off the windshield; then she started to walk up the driveway, which had already been plowed—if it wasn’t by the time her father was up in the morning, he would call Marchoud’s Garage and let them know about it.
 
Lately, upon returning from a night at the motel office, she had often imagined this particular walk—though never under these circumstances, never with Norman waiting in the Trooper.
 
She saw herself slipping quietly into her father’s house and taking Lorraine without his waking.
 
It was possible because he was a heavy sleeper, and frequently hung over.
 
If he woke, if he spoke to her, she knew she’d give away her real intention, not to simply take Lorraine back to her own apartment, but to flee.
 
He’d see it in her eyes; he’d hear it in her voice.
 
He was remarkable in that way.
 
This would only work if she left while he was asleep, if when he awoke he thought nothing of it—an ordinary morning where Noel had come in early and taken his granddaughter home.

But she had difficulty imagining what would happen after that, after she’d pull away from the driveway.
 
If she went north, there was nothing but Canada.
 
If she went south, it would be hours before she even got out of the Upper Peninsula.
 
She was certain that before she reached Menominee, which was over two hours away on the Wisconsin border, or the Mackinaw Bridge if she tried to cross the straits to the Lower Peninsula, her father would awaken, realize what she had done, and call the state police.
 
He would use the same voice with the police as he used with the plow driver at Marchoud’s Garage.
 
Never really angry; more like old friends, and he was embarrassed to have even bothered them—but beneath that there was something direct and explicit in his voice that caused people to do as he asked.
 
And that was his secret:
 
to get people to believe they were doing something because they wanted to—her mother and she both stayed because he led them to believe that that’s what they had chosen to do.

But no longer.
 
Noel realized that last summer:
 
she no longer wanted to stay in North Eicher, near Warren, near her father.
 
It was not a great revelation.
 
What surprised her, however, was that she understood that her mother went through it as well, years before she died:
 
that she too had finally realized that she was not staying with her husband because she wanted to, but because he had convinced her that she
thought
it was her own choice.

At the top of the driveway Noel went in the side door, which let her into the kitchen.
 
Once in the warmth of the house she moved slowly—just as she had imagined—not removing her boots, but walking on the beige carpet that her father tried to defend against snow and dirt.
 
It was one of the things he was adamant about, keeping the carpet clean, and more than once he’d lost his temper when Lorraine had stepped on the carpet with muddy boots.
 
Noel walked through the living room slowly, and then down the hallway, past her father’s bedroom door, which was open only a few inches.
 
She smelled the tobacco and bourbon.
 
She smelled the scent that she associated with her father’s laundry, when she washed his bed sheets and T-shirts.
 
Not entirely unpleasant smells, and she wondered if she might even miss them.
 
Her father was not an unclean man; it was more that he fully invested himself in everything he did.
 
He never had just a drink.
 
He never could stop smoking.
 
He bought good clothes and wore them until they broke through at an elbow or knee.
 
His T-shirts often had small holes up along the shoulders from years of wear and washing.
 
When she’d suggest that she throw them in the ragbag downstairs, he’d say first,
But they’re just getting good and comfortable.
 
And then he’d say,
Throw them out, if you want.

If you want.
 
Once he said that, you couldn’t do what you wanted.

The bedroom door at the end of the hall was open and Noel went in and picked up Lorraine from the crib.
 
Her weight was heavy, familiar.
 
The child didn’t wake, her blond eyelashes encrusted with sleep, yet something in her arms and legs suggested that she knew that her mother was back.
 
Noel carried her down the hall, but just as she approached her father’s door she heard the bed sheets rustle.
 
She stood perfectly still and listened.
 
The box springs groaned, but she didn’t hear his feet on the floor.
 
After a moment there was silence again and she walked by the door without daring to look into the room.

She went through the living room, somewhat disappointed to see that her boots had not left clear footprints of melted snow and mud on the carpet.
 
In the kitchen she put Lorraine’s snowsuit on and, though still asleep, the child’s limbs automatically responded so that she helped her mother dress her.
 
It wasn’t until Noel carried her out the kitchen door and into the smarting early morning cold that the weight of Lorraine’s head came up off her shoulder.
 
The girl’s body became more alert as they went down the driveway.
 
When she spoke her voice was small and sleepy.
 
“Mommy, we going home?”

Noel stopped walking halfway between the house and her Trooper.
 
She had never imagined this part, never thought that if she did leave North Eicher that it would be with someone.

No, occasionally, she had imagined that it might be with a man.
 
Sometimes when a man would come into the office at the motel to check in there’d be something about him that she would keep with her after he’d gone out into the night to his room.
 
Something about his face, his eyes, some kindness in his expression.
 
Or, during the summer when tourists passed through the Upper Peninsula, some man in shorts and a T-shirt who had firm arms, tanned legs, and she’d hold that image, so that in the middle of the night, when all the rooms had been let and the neon
No Vacancy
sign was lit, she’d lie on the cot in the near dark in the back office and put her hand down on herself, holding that image in her mind until it was all released.