The Edge of Everything(4)

The flashlight found something: a dark clump, barely higher than the snow.

Zoe should have been excited at the discovery, but she felt terror wash through her instead. Whatever it was up there in the snow, it wasn't moving.

She didn't want to get any closer. She didn't want to know what it was.

She didn't want it to be her brother.

It took months to walk the next 15 feet. And even when Zoe was only a few steps away-even when the flashlight was shining right at it, bathing it in a sickly yellow light-she couldn't figure out what it was. Her mind refused to take it in, refused to record it. 

She forced herself forward. She hovered over it. She peered down. It was a dark, tangled mass. It looked lifeless and still. Zoe held her breath and willed her eyes to focus.

It was the dogs.

Since they were both black Labs, you couldn't tell where Spock's fur ended and Uhura's began: they looked like a dark rug flung onto the snow. Zoe knelt down. They'd dug a shallow pit to shield themselves from the wind. She took off a glove and laid a hand on one, then the other.

They were breathing! Something that felt like birds' wings flapped around in her heart.

The dogs were groggy, halfway between sleep and something worse. It took them a minute to notice that she was rubbing their bellies. Eventually, they began shifting in their icy bed. Spock snorted and sent a puff of fog into the air. Uhura craned her head in Zoe's direction. She seemed to recognize her and to be grateful she was there. Zoe felt too wrung out to cry or she would have.

Spock and Uhura wriggled some more, trying to wake themselves up. And as their bodies untangled and parted, as they became two distinct animals again, she finally saw something she should have seen immediately, and what she saw made her hate herself for ever thinking they were idiot dogs. They were beautiful dogs! They were brave and glossy and gorgeous Montana dogs!

Because they were lying on something. On someone. They had dug a pit with their paws and pulled him into it-she could see where their teeth had torn his green hoodie-and then lain down on top of him. On top of Jonah. They had lain down on her brother to keep him warm.





two


Jonah was stiff as a mannequin.

Zoe wrapped him in his coat. She blew on his frozen fingers to heat them, though she could barely force any breath out of her body. And she took him up in her arms. She figured she'd have to go back for Spock and Uhura but they shook themselves off and waddled like ancient snow creatures out of the pit. Spock whined. He couldn't believe what he was being asked to do. Uhura snapped at him, as if to say, "Get over it!"

And then Zoe ran. Through the dead trees, toward Bert and Betty's. She draped Jonah over both arms and when her arms felt like they'd snap, she heaved him over one shoulder, and when it felt like that shoulder would break, she heaved him over the other. She was shaking too hard to aim the flashlight, so the beam bounced crazily in front of her. It was a miracle that she didn't smash into a tree and bust both their heads. She was like an animal running. Her heart was pounding, not just in her rib cage but in her ears-loud, like someone drumming on a bucket.

The joke was, she was probably going a tenth of a mile an hour, staggering through the snow like a drunken yeti. But she was getting there. She was covering ground. When she could finally see Bert and Betty's house through the trees, she totally lost it and cried. Even the dogs barked with something like happiness. Actually, Uhura sounded happy, and Spock sounded like he was yipping, "Are we there yet?"

Zoe laughed, and whispered to Jonah, "Oh my god, Spock is such a wuss." He was too out of it to reply, but she could feel his little-boy body breathing against her chest-a wheezy but unmistakable in and out, in and out-and that was answer enough.



Bert and Betty's house looked like a capital A. It stood about 200 feet back from the lake, on a couple of acres of land that had been spared by the fire way back when, even though the flames swirled around it. The skies were black and the blizzard had begun to die by the time Zoe got to the front steps with Jonah wriggling in her arms. The door was unlocked. That should have seemed strange-the police had sealed the place up and Zoe's mom checked on it every few days-but her brain couldn't absorb the information. It just kept pinging with the word shelter, shelter, shelter.



       
         
       
        

Zoe held the door open for Spock and Uhura, but they hesitated on the steps. They'd never been allowed in the house.

"Go," was all she had the energy to say.

They looked at each other, then scrambled inside.

The flashlight had died so she felt her way to the living room in the dark, and laid Jonah on a couch. She covered him with blankets, cushions, even an antique wedding quilt she pulled off the wall. He said one feverish word ("Me?") then fell into sleep like a stone thrown in a well.

Zoe reached for a lamp but the electricity had been shut off. The heat, too. And probably the water and phone. But she didn't care. She lit some candles around the room, which was all they needed.The house was so much warmer than the woods that the couch might as well have been a hammock on a beach. And they'd made it. They'd made it. Now that she had set Jonah down her arms were so light they floated.

There was a spiral rag rug on the floor. She picked it up, shook some dirt out of it, and wrapped it around her like a cape. It was scratchy and stiff, but she didn't care. There was a smell in the room that shouldn't have been there-cigarettes-but she told herself she didn't care about that either. She noticed a scuzzy-looking sleeping bag bunched up in front of the fireplace like dead skin a snake had sloughed off. It shouldn't have been there. And there was a collection of empty booze bottles, all different kinds, making a miniature skyline on the floor. They shouldn't have been there. She didn't care, didn't care, didn't care.

The dogs were freaking out, though: they sniffed and growled and poked into every corner.

Zoe shushed them.

"Nobody here but us chickens," she said.

It was some weird thing she'd heard her mother say.

Her mother.

Zoe dug into her pockets for her phone, but this deep in the woods she couldn't get a signal to make a call. It was just as well. She'd have to answer too many questions-and micro-questions and micro-micro-questions. She was too tired to explain anything, let alone everything.

Zoe knew that her mom could camp out on her friend Rufus's couch for the night, if she couldn't make it back up the mountain. Rufus was sweet, shy, and so slim that he looked like a stick that had somehow grown a beard and bought a Phish T-shirt. He was an artist. He specialized in chain-saw carvings of bears like the one he'd made for the Bissells' driveway. Depending on the season, he made them out of salvaged timber or ice. ("Carving ice is epic, man," he said. "It's a rad, rad journey.") In Zoe's opinion, Rufus was secretly in love with her mother. She hoped he'd blurt it out someday. Her mom acted strong for the benefit of the kids, but Zoe knew how much sadness she carried around since the kids' dad had died. It was always there, like background music. 

Zoe had to tell her mom she was okay. She groaned at the thought of expending any more energy-she was, after all, about to fall asleep sitting up, draped in a rug that looked like a giant Danish. But before she closed her eyes, Zoe rallied long enough to do two final things for the day. She checked on Jonah. He lay beside her snoring lightly like a soft little machine. His cheeks were hot, but he seemed basically fine.

Then she texted her mother a single word. She knew it wouldn't go through-she knew she'd have to keep hitting Try Again-but she did it anyway.

She texted: Safe.



At 7:30, Zoe fell asleep just long enough to have a single violent dream. She was in a white room with a bare wood floor. Animals were chained all around her. She didn't know what kind of animals they were-maybe they were imaginary creatures that her brain invented-but they were vicious and snarling, all teeth, claws, and saliva. And they were straining at their chains, trying furiously to rip them out of the wall. Zoe stood in the center of the room. They were inches away from her on all sides, howling and screeching. And then snow started falling into the room somehow. She lifted her face and let the flakes drift down on her. She felt relieved for a second. When she looked back down again, Jonah was suddenly beside her. He said he would fight the creatures and save her. She forbade him. She told him to stand still, to stand perfectly still. But the animals were wailing so loudly that he couldn't hear her and thought she was saying, "Yes, kill them, Jonah. Kill them all."

The last thing she could remember was Jonah saying, "Yeah, I'm definitely gonna," and stepping into all those wet, flashing teeth.

It took forever to swim up out of the dream. And the howling followed her, because Uhura was at the door making a crazy racket. She barked so loudly it was astonishing. The noise was like a physical presence in the room. Zoe couldn't think.

As for Spock, he was hiding under a rug-all you could see was a big quaking bubble.

Zoe went to the door, afraid to pet Uhura when she was so wired.

"What's going on, girlfriend?" she said softly. "Shhh. It's okay, it's okay."

She reached out to stroke the dog with her palm, but Uhura snapped at her-something she'd never done, not to anyone, ever-and began hurling herself at the door. She thumped against it three times, loud as a monster knocking.