Winter Study (14 page)

She
and Robin checked the camp area. As far as they could tell, the little
meadow was devoid of hidden evils. Had it possessed a snake pit or
hellmouth, Anna would have voted for stopping there anyway. Much as she
would have loved feeling superior, she could identify with Katherine
all too well. She doubted she had the where-withal to take up the
fifty-three pounds again.

They headed back to spark enough life in Bob and Katherine to get camp set up.

“Stop that,” Robin said as they crunched south shoulder to shoulder.

“Stop what?” Not only was Anna not doing anything, she was too tired to think of doing anything.

“Stop touching your nose. You’ve been touching your nose all day. It’s not frozen.”

Sheepishly Anna put her hand back into her mitten.

“You’re
obsessing, aren’t you?” Robin asked. The question wasn’t judgmental.
She asked it like a physician familiar with the symptoms of poison ivy
might ask: “You itch, don’t you?”

“I guess,” Anna admitted. “I keep thinking it might be frostbitten.”

“Mine’s
here,” Robin said and tapped her mittened fingertips against her high
cheekbones. “I can see them turning dead white out of the corners of my
eyes and I picture myself with two holes in my face. Leave your nose
alone. You touch it all the time like you’ve been doing and you’ll
irritate the skin to where it’ll peel. Then you’ll really think your
nose is falling off.”

Anna nodded and stifled the urge to check her nose one more time before she went on the wagon.

Because
it was lighter to pack in and their body heat would be consolidated,
the four of them were sharing a single dome tent. While Bob and Robin
went about pitching it — a task that in moderate weather would have
been the work of fifteen minutes but was roughly doubled by the clumsy
mandate of winter — Anna settled Katherine on a sleeping pad, for the
little insulation from the ground it afforded, and set about boiling
water. In a pinch, snow could be melted to drink, but the process
wasn’t as easy as one might expect. On a freezing day, if snow were
packed into a cooking pot and the stove turned up, the pot would burn
before enough snow melted to even out the temperatures. Small portions
had to be heated slowly till slush formed before the gas could be
cranked up. Eating snow was a taboo of which even Anna, with her
penchant for avoiding the cold at every opportunity, was cognizant. To
convert snow to water robbed the body of so many calories that the heat
transfer could lead to hypothermia.

Anna
used the water she’d carried inside her parka next to her body. When it
was hot enough to pass muster, she stirred in cocoa, twice as much as
she would normally use. Backpacking in winter burned three times a
person’s baseline calorie requirements. To stay warm, a woman Anna’s
size needed nearly five thousand calories a day.

“Drink this,” she said and handed a plastic insulated mug to Katherine. Metalware was useless when the cold got serious.

Katherine shook her head wearily. “No thank you. I just want to sit for a minute.”

“You need to drink it,” Anna told her. “It’ll make you feel less tired.”

Katherine took the cup between her mittened hands, and Anna was put in mind of a seal trying to clap with its flippers.

“Hold it tighter than you think you should,” she cautioned.

Katherine began to sip.

Anna slipped off her mitten, stopped her hand halfway to her nose, then put the mitten back on.

The
tent was up. Robin handed out hot drinks and candy and granola bars
while Anna started another pot of water for their dinner of
freeze-dried pasta, peas and chicken. Robin unwrapped a block of
cheddar, cut it into four pieces and said: “Hors d’oeuvres.”

They
ate in silence as the light dimmed to nothing. The snow, mean and
sparse all day, showed no sign of changing, and Anna was glad. On the
Great Lakes, changes in the weather were usually heralded by high
winds. The balmy sixteen degrees they’d enjoyed in the heat of the day
was going with the light. Had there been wind, what scant warmth the
food generated would have been quickly stripped away.

When it was too dark to see the cups in their hands, they put on headlamps and blinked at one another.

“The
lights of Marfa,” Anna said. Maybe the others knew of the Texas town,
famous for its mysterious UFOs. Maybe they didn’t. Nobody had enough
energy to say either way and she hadn’t the energy to volunteer an
explanation.

Dishes
were scraped and wiped. Washing was out of the question, but since no
self-respecting bacteria could survive in such cold the health risks
were minimal.

When they’d finished, Robin announced “Jumping jacks!” and Anna feared for the young woman’s sanity.

The jumping jacks were to warm them before they crawled into their sleeping bags; calories and layers alone would not suffice.

“Pee,”
Robin suggested after they’d run around the tent and jumped like mad
things for several minutes. “Your body has to work harder keeping extra
fluid warm.”

They separated in four directions and bared various parts of their anatomies to Jack Frost’s kiss.

“No mosquitoes,” Anna told herself, trying for a scrap of good cheer.

Then it was bedtime. It wasn’t yet seven p.m.

Retiring
was a miserable process. Food for the following day’s lunch was
retrieved from packs; full water bottles were dragged into the tent. To
keep these precious items from freezing — or to thaw them out for the
next day’s use — meant they would spend the night in sleeping bags with
the campers. The bags’ stuff sacks were turned inside out and boots put
in and stowed between the knees to keep from freezing overnight. Parkas
and what outer garments wouldn’t fit into the bags were piled on top.
Thus cocooned, neck scarf and balaclava still on, Anna switched off her
headlamp.

“Good
night,” she said to the black nest filled with her fellow larvae. Even
to her own ears, her voice sounded so gloomy that she laughed.

“It’ll be okay,” Robin whispered. “You’ll sleep.”

Anna said nothing, but she took comfort.

“Leave your nose alone,” Robin said.

The biotech was freakishly intuitive. Anna pulled her hand back under the covers.

“Don’t
breathe in your sleeping bags.” Robin’s voice filled the cramped space
though she spoke quietly. “It’ll make them damp and you’ll freeze to
death.”

Anna quit breathing warm air into her bag.

“Will it happen soon?” she asked hopefully.

8

As
challenging as it was to play the Pollyanna glad game with dirty boots
and a hunk of half-eaten cheddar snugged between her thighs, Anna was
glad for the physical demands of the past day. She was so thoroughly
tired that she knew Robin was right; she would sleep. Eventually.

Darkness
inside the tent was absolute, thick, pressing down on skin and mind the
way it did underground: Carlsbad Caverns, Lechuguilla. Anna remembered
that crushing blindness, air so hard with earth and ink that it choked
her.

Claustrophobia
tightened her skin and squeezed on her lungs. People, flesh, crowded in
on her: breathing and rebreathing the air, snuffling, wriggling,
adjusting; a filthy monstrous womb and the four of them stillborn.

“Enough!” Anna hissed.

An
elbow pressed into her side. Robin. Her feet were jostled. Bob. Bob
Menechinn took up the lion’s share of the space. This was almost
balanced out by Katherine, who had squished herself into the corner
between tent wall and floor until Robin made her move farther in, where
it was marginally warmer.

Cold,
as palpable and suffocating as the crowding night, negated the odors
attendant on such a pile of humanity, but nothing could negate the
ectoplasm — or whatever the stuff was called when people were not yet
dead. The lives of the others fluttered and battered in the enclosure
as if they were captive birds flying against the bars of a too-small
cage.

On
the best of nights, tents were not necessarily Anna’s friend. She’d
woken more than once to claw her way through the opening flap, past the
rain fly, to see the sky and breathe new air. This was not the best of
nights. Forcing her mind away from crazy places, she readjusted the
bagged boots between her knees. Had they been left outside the tent, or
even outside the bag, the boots would freeze, Robin said. There would
be no getting them warm in the morning.

Who knew boots could freeze? Anna could have gone to her grave without knowing that.

Time
passed. The parts of Anna touching the ground cloth numbed. She curled
up as best she could with half of North Face’s inventory jammed in the
sleeping bag with her. The spectral birds began to settle. One by one,
pairs of wings ceased to scrabble on her consciousness. The others
slept. She tucked her hands into her armpits and tried to focus on a
single point of white-hot light in her mind. Shirley MacLaine had done
it with some guru or other and gotten so hot, she felt like she was
burning up. It didn’t do much for Anna. After a time, she drifted into
a chilled coma full of aching dreams.

A
nightmare wind gusted in her ear: “Anna! Anna, wake up!” The second
hiss brought her out of her icy dreams. Her eyes opened to total
blindness, her arms were pinioned to her sides and she couldn’t feel
her legs. She began to panic.

“Listen!”

Robin;
it was Robin. Panic subsided. The biotech had hold of her shoulder. She
was pressed so close Anna felt her breath on her cheek. It was warm.
Anna remembered warm. “What—”

“Shh. Listen,” came into her ear on a balmy breeze.

Anna listened.

Beyond
the tent walls, the preternatural stillness of a night, frozen into a
timeless instant, creaked in her ears. With a mittened paw, she shoved
her hat up the better to hear. Silence, thick as an ice floe, pressed
against her eardrums.

“There it is again.”

Now
Anna heard it. Into this concrete quiet came the pad of a soft-footed
animal, an animal heavy enough that the snow squeaked under its weight.
Faint and ethereal, the sound moved around the tent, then stopped.
Anna’s ears rang with the emptiness and she tried to sit up, but Robin
was on Anna’s left arm and the detritus of Anna’s life was tangled
around her body.