Could it be him?
A man Adam’s size, with long black hair, down on hands and knees, was isolated on a tiny rock island in the middle of the frozen lake. I took another step toward him, and this time the ice cracked in the shape of a spiderweb. I took a step backward.
“Adam?” My voice came out tenuous like the ice, cracking in the cold.
Somehow in that great stillness, he heard me, and he looked over. It was too far away to see his eyes. He didn’t have a shirt on. His pants were torn and frayed and sliced so that they hung around his legs like rags. He seemed to be looking for the source of the voice, then turned his face upward, toward the nothing sky, and gave a maniacal laugh.
“You fooled me again!” he screamed, and in his voice I could hear every torment known to man. “Well done! Yes! Well done!” He slammed his hands against the ice and his shoulders shook. I thought he must be weeping. I wanted to shout for him again, but I didn’t want to cause the same reaction. He was obviously hurting himself.
But I couldn’t help it.
It was him.
“Adam!” I shouted, looking frantically around for another way across the ice. I took a few steps back, slid to my right ten or fifteen yards, and walked forward again tenderly, leading with my toes. The ice was turning to fire under my feet. But when I had walked the same distance forward, the ice groaned and split.
“No,” I groaned. “Adam!”
Immediately I wished I hadn’t called for him again—my voice seemed to be making him crazy with agony. He struck his forehead on the ground in front of him. He screamed. He grated his fingers along the rock.
I felt it before I saw it, a blur of movement to my left, coming out of the trees. Lucia ran across the ice, and as she did, a word erupted from her. It seemed to have the force of all the gathered words she had held in.
“Daddy!”
I caught my breath. I stopped blinking. The world spun.
Lucia, running toward Adam, was shouting “Daddy!” over and over again.
My throat swelled and I knew it was true. Maybe I had known the first time I saw her, recognized something in her eyes or the way she looked at me or how she pushed her hair away in some familiar gesture of Adam’s.
“Lucia!” I shouted, trying to warn her. “The ice!”
But she didn’t stop. She only glanced at me and sprang from side to side, here and there. In some places I could tell the ice had split under her while in others it remained flat and firm. She didn’t run straight but seemed to follow some pattern. Maybe she could see where the ice was thicker. Maybe a shallow place ran from where she had emerged out to the small island where Adam knelt. Or maybe she was simply lucky.
I watched the knapsack sway and bounce on her back, the precious knapsack holding the last of our water. And the key.
She arrived at Adam’s rock, clambered up, and sat quietly beside him. He did not look up. I wondered if he could see her. Maybe he thought she was simply another in a long line of hallucinations. She studied him, her head tilting to the side, then she reached out a hand and, with the gentlest touch of her index finger, lifted his chin so that his eyes rose to hers. They were like a precious statue, the father on his knees, the daughter lifting his face so that he could see her.
Even from where I was, I could see him begin to tremble, first in the weakness of his arms, and after that his hips, and eventually his whole body. Lucia lifted her other hand and held his face, her tenderness propping him up. She leaned forward and kissed his forehead.
The ice under my feet cracked further, and I shifted back and away from Adam’s rock, alarmed at the distance growing between us. I stared down at the ice to see if things were stabilizing, but hairline fractures were still forming, so I took a few more steps back. When I looked back up, Lucia was taking off the knapsack and placing it on the rock. She took out the water and funneled some into Adam’s mouth. I worried about how much she was giving him and if we’d have enough to get us back out.
Adam drank, sat back on his haunches, and stared at her as if she was a vision come to life. He said a few words I couldn’t hear, and she leaned forward and hugged him, even in his wretchedness, his filth. This time his shoulders trembled, but in sobs. He kept leaning his head back and looking at her in amazement, then embracing her again.
The water under me churned, which was strange because I hadn’t moved. I looked out over the black expanse of ice, and it all seemed to vibrate as if in an earthquake. The ice trembled. Some distance off, at the edge of what I could see, a large piece of ice broke from the rest and stood up on end. The whole earth seemed to groan.
“Lucia!” I shouted. “The ice!”
We must have realized it at the same time: this was not a lake we were on but a river, one so massive I couldn’t see the far bank. The water beneath us was moving, and the ice was beginning to break up. The sound of it was like the splitting of the mountain. I became more and more frantic as the seconds passed, as the river moaned, as the ice fractured.
“Hurry!” I screamed, my voice as broken as the river, and yet still they remained on the rock. I could tell she was pleading with him, and he was shaking his head, his long black hair swaying in pendulum movements. She wept, she pleaded, she hugged him, and still he remained, sitting back on his heels, refusing to move.
She pointed across the ice. He looked at me. Our gazes locked, there at the bottom of the abyss, with the world collapsing around us. I wanted to shout to him to get moving. I wanted to raise my hands and gesture wildly for him to hurry, the ice was breaking, this was his chance. I wanted to get on my knees and plead. But all I did was stand there, my shoulders slumped.
I had caused this. He was here because of me, because I had forced him to fly that day, because I was more concerned with my own reputation and possessions than anything else. I wondered if he had somehow discovered that it was my fault, that the accident never would have happened without my insistence that he get out of bed that morning and fly the plane.
He stood. Lucia was tiny next to him, but strong. He leaned on her and they climbed gingerly down the shallow side of the rock and began making their way across the ice. She ran ahead, I guess because their weight together would have been too much, and beckoned to him. As they grew closer, I could hear her voice encouraging him, pleading with him to keep coming, telling him he could do it. He followed her, barely able to walk, sometimes falling to his knees. At one point his legs went through the ice, and he sprawled forward, spreading out his weight, inching himself forward.
It started snowing again. Lucia arrived to me before he did, and we backed up, hoping to find thicker ice or shallower water farther back toward the trees. Still he kept coming. Now he could walk, his bare feet white on the ice. I was shaking with cold but also warm from the exertion, the stress, the emotion.
There he was, standing in front of me. Could it be true? I waited for him to evaporate, a mirage. I had waited so long for this moment.
He wouldn’t look directly at me. His eyes flitted here and there, nervous and unstable, and I understood why Lucia had reached out and taken his chin in her hands, directing his uncontrolled glances. But I waited, and eventually our eyes met.
“Adam,” I said, my voice shattered, miniscule, lost.
“Dan,” he said.
For a moment I thought I was truly looking at myself, another version of me, one that had never made it out of this place but had withered away here at the bottom for endless years, endless decades, tortured by all the wrong I had done. It should have been me. All along, it should have been me.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and his gaze sharpened, but he said nothing. “I’m sorry,” I said again, and I put my hands on his shoulders as if I was going to shake him. He seemed so lost.
“The knapsack,” Lucia whispered, her voice barely registering in the midst of the river’s chaos and my overflowing emotions.
“What?”
She didn’t answer. She sprinted back onto the ice that cont
inued to break up, clashing against itself, upending in sharp angles and shards.
“Lucia!” I shouted.
Adam, too weak to continue in the midst of everything, fell to his knees and broke through the ice. The ice around my own feet followed, and I plunged through. For a moment we clawed at each other, trying desperately to rise. The water was dark underneath the ice, and in a panic I lost my sense of up and down. But it was shallow there where we stood close to the trees, and my hands soon found the muddy bottom. I pushed off, up, and burst through the surface.
My brother had already pulled himself to safety and crawled the rest of the way to the trees. He sat there, his back against a trunk that resembled a forlorn mother with branches reaching down like arms. The trees’ shadows were darker then, like bottomless ditches. I pulled myself aching and frozen from the water. How long could we survive, wet as we were, hungry as we were, cold as we were? I gathered myself on all fours and the ice creaked. I didn’t think I had the strength for another submersion.
I crawled along a line where I thought I would be safe, looking toward Adam’s rock for Lucia, wishing she would show herself. I choked back tears at the thought of losing her there, in that lowest of places. Just when I gave up, she appeared, coming up out of the icy water, gripping the rock, pulling herself up. She lifted the knapsack and started to put it over her shoulder but stopped. She stared at it. She peered through the darkness and spotted me.
Freed from its icy bonds, the river flowed faster than before, and the flat spaces of ice had become bobbing, miniature glaciers sliding away. Lucia seemed to gather her courage. She jumped from one floating ice island to the next. She vanished into the water, then pulled herself up again, crawling onto a slowly spinning slab. She was swept toward me briefly, jostled by other moving pieces of ice. She prepared herself to make another running leap, had second thoughts. Her face was sad. Her lips were a straight line. All around us was the sound of ice colliding, cracking, creaking.
She threw the knapsack hard in my direction, her arm a slingshot, and I crawled toward the spot where it landed, on ice in shallow water. I grabbed it, and a wave of relief washed over me so that I almost felt warm again. I looked at her, a smile on my face. She gave me a thumbs-up. Throwing the knapsack had knocked her to her knees, and she paused there for a moment on all fours. She tried to smile, but I could tell she was afraid.
Then the ice she was on tipped up at one end. She slid toward the other edge, bracing herself, clawing for something to hold on to.
“Lucia!”
She went under, and I lost sight of her.
23 How Far We Have Fallen
I DON’T KNOW how long I waited in that spot, holding my breath. The water was a mess of ice collapsing in on itself, mounding up in some areas, spreading out in others. It was like a flat field full of debris left behind after a village is leveled in war. I gasped for breath. I held the knapsack in one hand. I wanted to scream.
But the cold, the cold was breaking my bones. I turned and crawled, and my body creaked with the weariness of it. Once I was closer to what I thought was solid ground, I stood gingerly and walked toward where Adam still sat against a tree. They were haunting, those trees. Their roots, where they showed through the black ice, seemed to pulse like veins. I knew it was some trick of the light, perhaps the shimmering of the ice, but it still repulsed me.
I stopped beside Adam and sat down. The snow had been coming and going ever since Lucia and I had arrived in that place, but in that moment, it was so light that I thought it had stopped. Except every so often a lone flake would fall, lost. The sky was only low, gray clouds, like a hovering fog. I thought about the rim of the abyss beside the river Acheron and the immeasurable distance between us and that place. I wondered how far we had fallen.
Adam mumbled something that sounded like a question. I looked at him again, trying to find the brother I remembered hidden there among the gaunt flesh, the long hair, the broken skin. His knees bled from kneeling on the rock for who knows how long. He flinched every few seconds as if being prodded.
“What?” I asked him quietly. I wanted to hug him. I wanted to hold him. After so much time with Lucia and her silence, the sound of another human being’s voice, even indecipherable, was like balm. But there was something between us, something I couldn’t identify. There was a kind of strangeness there, and years, and misunderstandings that might be too far gone to clear up.
“The girl,” he muttered, his voice still hoarse. Saliva pooled in the corners of his mouth. He was crazed. Would the hike out help him heal, or had he left whatever shred of sanity that remained on that rock in the middle of the frozen river?
“Where is she?”
I took in the shifting ice. When I didn’t see her, a sob came out of me, a wave of grief, but I cleared my throat to hide it. I knew in that moment I could never tell him about her, or he wouldn’t leave. I was the only one who knew she was his daughter. Had been his daughter. There was no reason to tell him now.
“What girl?” I whispered.
“The girl,” he said, his voice stronger, his eyes searching mine. “The girl who came over to me.”
I shook my head slowly. “I don’t know, Adam.” I paused, swallowed. “I didn’t see anyone.”
He stared hard into the deep blackness of the ice beneath us. There was another blistering crack from the river, a moaning creak, and Adam shivered convulsively. The ice was on the move. I wondered what had set it off.
“I’ve seen a lot here,” he said. “I’ve imagined a lot.”
I nodded.
“Are you sure?”
“I didn’t see a girl,” I insisted. “I saw you look up at me across the ice, drag your way through the river. That’s all I saw.”
He clenched his jaw. Shook his head. “I could’ve sworn . . .”
“We should go.” I stood up, moving gingerly away from the tree on the ice, but my caution was unnecessary. The water there remained solidly frozen.
“No use,” he said.
What?
“No use,” he said again. “There’s no way out. The gate is locked.”
“Have you been to the gate?” I asked.
He nodded. “Once. Long after everyone left. Long after she left. I managed to crawl all the way there. When I found the locked gate, I gave up hope. So I crawled back out to the rock.”
“She?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You said, ‘Long after everyone left. Long after she left.’ Who’s ‘she’?”
He shuddered. “The one in charge. The one who ran this whole place, every circle of it, every tree, every corner.”
“It was a she?” A sense of dread slunk through me. “Did she have a name?” I asked in a hushed voice.
He nodded again.
I raised my eyebrows in a question. What was her name?
“Kathy,” he whispered.
Kathy. I had left everyone with her, and they didn’t even know who she was. A thought dropped into my mind—what if I was here because of her? I was, wasn’t I? Hadn’t she been the one to convince me to come back in, to get my brother? But he couldn’t have gotten out without me, could he?
What if she was now convincing the others to come in and retrieve me? What if she walked east and found others to convince?
She would fill this place again.
“We should go,” I said. I was filled with fresh urgency to get him out, get us out, and find the others.
“Who are you?” he asked with none of the urgency I was looking for.
“Me?” I asked. “I’m Dan.” I decided to leave it at that. For now.
“Dan,” he whispered, and he was lost again, searching through hidden realms in his mind, perhaps searching for me. He emerged moments later. “The gate.” He sighed.
I reached into the knapsack, searched the bottom corners of the cloth, and pulled out the key. I held it up in front of him, and he looked at it in awe, as if it was the strangest of all the stra
nge things he had seen, the least believable.
He reached up, not to take it but to touch it. “Is it real?”
“Yes,” I said, again seeing the movement of Lucia’s arm as she threw the knapsack. I saw her clinging to the ice, sliding toward the edge. I saw her going under.
Adam tried to stand, and when he couldn’t do it on his own, I reached down and took hold of his arm. He felt like a bundle of twigs. We both continued to shiver, so I put my arm around him and we tried to live off each other’s warmth. I didn’t know how we would walk, how we would leave this place. I thought of the bog we had to get through, the ledge we’d have to maneuver. The river. Maybe Karon and Sarah could help us. If we made it that far.
The ledge. I had left Miho by the ledge, assuming she wasn’t a figment of my imagination. And now we had to get past her too, make sure she didn’t exact some sort of revenge on Adam. I had never heard her story, but I could guess. The crash had affected her in some way. She hated my brother. She was waiting for him like all the others.
“Do you see people a lot down here? Imaginary people?” I asked.
He nodded as we walked stiffly through the trees and over all those strange shadows. The ice felt solid under our feet, but I was still expecting it to break at any point. The water that was on me felt like it was freezing, turning me into a block.
“Do you think I’m real?” I asked.
“No,” he said, and as we shuffled along, this was the closest he’d come to giving me a smile.
“Fair enough.”
We found the entrance to the narrow canyon and left the trees and frozen river behind. And Lucia. We left Lucia behind. The guilt was crushing me, even though I knew there was nothing I could have done. I could not have walked across the ice. I could not have jumped in and pulled her out. I could not wait here long enough—she was gone. Not telling Adam about her felt like both a gift and a terrible betrayal. I told myself I would tell him someday. Far in the future. Far from here, when everything else was better.
The gate was still there, open, just as I had left it. Adam seemed so intrigued by it that I slowed and let him lead the way. He stopped directly in front of its opening, walked from side to side, and caressed its cold metal. He examined the lock, the doors.
These Nameless Things Page 19
