Cold (35 page)

Harold whispered, “What’s he
doing?”

“He doesn’t want to slow down or stop,” Liesl said.
 
“Afraid he won’t be able to get up the hill.”

They were halfway across the bridge and the green truck was closing fast on the bottom of the single lane.
 
Harold accelerated a bit more, pushing the speedometer just over thirty-five.
 
The green truck blared its horn and it kept coming.

Liesl saw the next few seconds like a dance or perhaps a figure skating routine, a carefully choreographed duet.
 
At the bottom of the bridge Harold steered slightly to the right and his wheels climbed the base of the plowed bank.
 
The pickup tilted to the left and they made it that way, coming off the bridge at an angle, just as the green truck, horn still blaring, passed them.
 
A man was driving, bearded, wearing a hat with the earflaps down.
 
It was a commercial truck—there was gold lettering on the side, but it went by too fast for Liesl to read.
 
Harold could read it; she didn’t know how, but she was sure he had registered the name of the company written on the truck.
 
There was a look in his eyes, a look he got when he’d been wronged and he had determined a course of action in response.
 
She knew from that look that as soon as they got home he was going to call information, get the number of the company and call to register a complaint about one of their drivers.

Once past the bridge the pickup came down off the snowbank.
 
The cleared road widened and Harold steered right down the middle, but they were going too fast to make the next bend.
 
And the grade was getting steeper, so they were picking up speed.
 
Harold had his foot off the accelerator, but it wasn’t enough.

He whispered,
“Grab her.”

As they went into the bend the tail of the pickup swung to the right and for a long moment they were sliding sideways down the road.
 
Gretchen was leaning hard into Liesl now, looking out her window.
 
Then the rear of the truck seemed to suddenly gather weight and they went into a full spin—four, maybe five times, they went around, seeming to pick up momentum.
 
Trees and road and bridge and sky raced across the windshield, until the pickup slammed broadside into the right snowbank.
 
The impact caused the truck to roll over, right up the six-foot embankment, and then it fell.
 
There was a moment during the freefall that Liesl remembered as being quiet, almost pleasurable.
 
Yet she distinctly recalled the sound of the engine, now racing.
 
She was remarkably calm, and she was aware of a desire to preserve the moment.
 
Out the windshield she saw distant snow-covered trees above the gray sky.
 
She saw snowflakes rising up.
 
Until they landed, and the roof and broken glass came in on them.

Liesl remembered nothing after that.

But now, staring at the accident report on her desk, she remembered the other thing about Del Maki, the thing that wasn’t common knowledge in Yellow Dog Township.
 
Something she had known all these years, but it had remained hidden in her confused recollection of everything that had followed the accident.
 
But now she knew what had happened.

After the truck landed, she was unconscious.

Harold died immediately of a broken neck.

Gretchen was still alive, though her lungs were severely damaged.
 
It had been explained to Liesl—she wasn’t sure when or by whom, though she suspected it was while she was still in the hospital and heavily sedated—that the first to arrive at the scene was a schoolteacher in a car with a cellular phone, who called the constable’s office.
 
The deputy constable arrived and, before the ambulance came, he worked hard to try and keep Gretchen alive.
 
When they got her in the ambulance there was still a pulse, but she died before they reached the hospital.

Liesl switched off the lamp, went through the living room to the bedroom.
 
She lay down on the bed, still with the blanket wrapped around her shoulders, and listened to the north-northeast wind cause the house to sway, creak and moan.

•

Opening his eyes, Del looked into Noel’s pretty face, which was only inches from his, and his first thought was that she wanted to kiss him.
 

He closed his eyes but was aware of her hands touching his head.
 
Of a tightness around the top of his skull, which he took to be some kind of a scarf or bandage.
 
Of pain that was centered above his right ear and descended down his neck and into his shoulder.

“How do you feel?”

He opened his eyes again.
 
She was leaning back now and beyond her he could see the roof beams—he was lying on the couch and his right side was hot from the fireplace.
 
Raising his right arm he touched the side of his skull, and pulled his fingers away quickly—pain shot through his head.

“Ouch,” Noel whispered as she leaned closer.

He realized she had a smell that he missed.
 
It was the smell of smoke and bark and chicken soup, but beneath all that there was something he couldn’t identify.
 
It had been a long time since he’d been this close to a woman, to a young woman.

There were voices—Warren and Norman—coming from the kitchen.
 
They were speaking quietly and the silences were punctuated by the creaking of the floorboards.
 
Behind that there was the sound of the wind outside.
 
Del touched the swelling above his ear again and assured himself that there was some kind of a scarf tied about his head.
 
He remembered Norman swinging his arm, the gun in his hand.
 
He couldn’t remember what had caused it.

“Is he going to
die?”

It was a child’s voice above and behind him.
 
He raised his eyes—causing pain to sink deep into his eye sockets—and looked at the upside-down head of a blond girl of about three.

“I think he’s going to make it,” Noel said.

“What’s your name?” Del asked the girl.

She looked nervously at her mother.
 
“Lorraine.”

“How do you do, Lorraine?”

 
“How do you
do?”
 
The girl placed one hand over her mouth as she laughed.

 
Noel smiled as she picked up a large plastic mixing bowl that was sitting on the coffee table.
 
It contained a soggy, bloodstained towel.
 
“Lorraine, take this into the kitchen and ask—“ she hesitated—“ask for more ice.”

The girl took the bowl and held it against her chest but didn’t leave immediately.
 
She wore a brown and white wool sweater with reindeer; it was too big on her and the sleeves had been rolled up several times so that only her tiny pale fingers were visible.
 
After staring down at Del for a long moment, she seemed to have come to some conclusion and walked toward the kitchen.

•

Warren put the bottle of vodka on the table and watched Lorraine enter the kitchen, holding the bowl against her sweater, as though she were bearing a ceremonial offering in a sacred ritual.
 
“We need more ice.”
 
She spoke to neither of them really and she kept her attention on the contents of the bowl.

“Ice?” Warren said.
 
“Who needs ice?”
 
He raised the bottle to his mouth and before drinking said, “You see me using ice?
 
Isn’t it cold enough already?”
 
He smiled at the girl but she wouldn’t take her eyes off the bowl.

Norman stared at Warren a moment before getting up from the table.
 
He was not drinking.
 
Warren suspected his brother’s look was meant to be sympathetic, but at this point he didn’t give a shit.
 
Somehow since the gun had gone off twenty minutes ago, Warren wasn’t worried about any of it any more.
 
It was their problem, not his.
 
He was more concerned about what to do when this bottle of Popov was empty.

“I’ll get you more ice,” Norman said.
 
He reached into the bowl, took out the towel and carried it to the sink, where he rung it out.

“Thank you,” said Lorraine.
 
She kept her gaze on the pink water in the bottom of the bowl, which she still held tight to her chest.

Warren leaned toward the child and put his finger in her ear.
 
She started to pull her head away, glaring at him, but he took her small chin in his thumb and forefinger.
 
She didn’t move and she stared up at him uncertainly.
 
Slowly he worked his thumb up her chin until he touched her warm, moist lips.
 
Her eyes grew large and frightened as he began to insert his thumbnail into her small mouth.
 
Just as he felt her small teeth against the tip of his thumb, she stepped back out of his reach and some of the pink water sloshed over the rim of the bowl, splattering on Warren’s boots.

“Son of a bitch,” he whispered, looking down at his feet.

Norman opened the refrigerator and took out a plastic tray of ice cubes.
  
“After this we’re out of ice,” he said.
 
The girl watched as he twisted the tray and emptied the cubes into the bowl.
 
“If you need more, you’ll have to go outside and see if you can find any.”

He put the towel in the bowl of ice and she left the kitchen.

“Kid has no sense of humor,” Warren said.
 
“None.”

“Right.”
 
Norman sat at the table again.
 
“Takes after my side of the family.”

•

Noel took the bowl from Lorraine.
 
“Thank you, Sweetheart.
 
Now I want you to get yourself back into bed.”
 
The child looked at her, pleading.
 
“It’s all right now.
 
There’ll be no more loud noises to wake you.”

“But
Mommy—”

“Lorraine.”

The child glanced down at Del a moment.
 
“Is
he
going to go back to sleep too?”

“Eventually,” Del said.

“Now you go ahead,” Noel said in her flat, no nonsense voice.
 
“I’ll be in soon to check on you.”
 
She fixed Lorraine with a stare, until the child turned and walked into the bedroom where she had been sleeping.
 
“Leave the door opened a little,” Noel said.

Lorraine shut the door.

“I knew that was coming.”
 
Noel reached into the bowl and rung out the cold towel.
 
She folded it into quarters and laid it on the right side of Del’s skull.

“What now?” he asked.

“They’re in there planning that, I guess.”

“You came here with Norman—willingly.”

“Seems silly, doesn’t it?”

“Not necessarily,” he said.
 
“In some ways it’s enviable.”

“I can’t explain it,” she said.
 
“Everything else seems to have been a mistake, why not this?
 
But I wanted this.
 
The other things, I’m not so sure I knew what I wanted.”

 
“Few of us do.”
 
Raising his hand he took hold of the cold towel.
 
He closed his eyes.

She let their fingers touch a moment before she took her hand away.
 
His face was still in the firelight.
 
He wasn’t exactly handsome but she found his face interesting.
 
There was something unadorned and blunt about his eyebrows and nose.
 
His lips were thin and flat.
 
His eyelids revealed an unexpected delicacy in the way his lashes lay against his cheeks.
 
She guessed he was at least forty-five, but not fifty.
 
Working nights at the motel she had become quite good at guessing the age of older people.
 
He wasn’t an AARP member yet.
 
Something about the lashes suggested what he must have looked like as a boy.

•

“What are you going to do now?” Warren asked.

Norman didn’t answer.
 
He paid attention to his brother’s hands as they clutched the bottle of vodka.

“You don’t have a fucking clue—you
never
have,” Warren said, raising the bottle to his mouth.
 
“And now with this shit you’ve gotten this far, but it’s only going to get screwed up in the end.”

In some fundamental way Warren wasn’t any different than before all this had begun, before Norman had gone to prison, before Warren had gone into the Navy.
 
Warren was the same as when they were kids.
 
He only looked older.