by Jeff Giles
Then, last month, the Wallaces had disappeared. Betty, the less senile of the pair, apparently got away from the intruder for a moment and rushed Bert into their truck. That was the police’s theory, based on the blood on the steering wheel. The truck was found smashed into a tree a hundred yards from the house. Its engine was still running. Its doors were flung open and there was no sign of the Wallaces, except for more blood. Imagining the confused look on Bert and Betty’s faces as someone scowled murderously down at them hurt Zoe’s heart so much she could hardly breathe.
The Wallaces’ house was left just the way it was, lonely as a museum, while their lawyers looked for the most recent version of their will. Zoe had promised herself that she’d never go near it again. It was too painful. The lake outside Bert and Betty’s house was frozen over with cloudy gray ice now. Even the forest seemed scary—dense and forbidding, like somewhere your evil stepmother takes you in a fairy tale.
Yet here she was on the edge of the trees, being pulled down toward the Wallaces’ place. Jonah knew better than to walk through the trees in a storm. If the dogs had gone into the forest, though, he’d have followed them. Spock and Uhura had lived with Zoe’s family for a month, but they used to belong to Bert and Betty. They might have plunged into the icy trees, thinking they were going home.
There was less than a mile of woods between the Bissells’ land and Bert and Betty’s house. Ordinarily, it was a 15-minute walk, and it was impossible to get lost because Betty had made hatchet marks in the trees for the kids to follow. Also, the woods were divided into three sections, so you could always tell if you’d gotten spun around somehow. The first section of forest had been harvested for timber a while back—Zoe’s mom preferred the term “raped and pillaged”—so the trees closest to the Bissells’ house were new growth. They were mostly flaky gray lodgepole pines. They were planted so close together that they seemed to be huddling for warmth.
The second section was Zoe’s favorite: giant larches and Douglas firs. They were Montana’s version of skyscrapers. They were only a hundred years old, but looked dinosaur-old, like they’d come with the planet.
The trees closest to the lake had burned in an unexplained fire before Zoe was born. They’d never fallen, though, so there was a quarter-mile’s worth of charred snags just standing there dead. It was a spooky place—and Jonah’s favorite part of the woods, of course. It was where he played all his soldier-of-the-apocalypse games.
Walking to Bert and Betty’s house meant following the path through new trees, then old trees, then dead ones. Zoe and Jonah had made the trip a thousand times. There was no such thing as getting lost—not for long. Not in decent weather or in daylight.
After Zoe had walked 20 feet or so into the young part of the forest, the world became quiet. There was just a low hum in the air, like somebody blowing across the top of a bottle. She felt sheltered and the tiniest bit warmer. She aimed the flashlight at the treetops and then at the surly sky above them, and she had a weird, dreamy impulse to plop down in the snow. She shook her head to erase the thought. The cold was already gumming up her brain. If she sat down, she’d never get up.
Zoe shone the flashlight in a wide arc along the ground, looking to pick up Jonah’s tracks again. The beam was weak, either because of the batteries or the cold, but eventually she found them. Jonah probably had a ten-minute head start on her and because he was wearing snowshoes he’d be covering ground faster. It was like a math problem: If Train A leaves the station at 4:30 p.m. traveling 90 miles an hour, and Train B leaves ten minutes later traveling 70 miles an hour … Zoe’s brain was too numb to solve it, but it seemed like she was screwed.
Jonah knew the path to the lake but he must have been following the dogs. Their paw prints were messy and wild. Maybe they were being playful. Maybe they were chasing grouse or wild turkeys, which sometimes rode out storms beneath the skirts of the trees. Maybe they were just flipping out because it was so cold.
Zoe could see Jonah’s snowshoe tracks chasing the dogs every which way. She couldn’t tell if he had been playing along happily or if he had been terrified and begging them to turn back. In her head, she repeated over and over: Just go home, Jonah. This is insane. Just leave the dogs. Just walk away. But she knew he wouldn’t abandon the dogs no matter how scary things got, which made her angry—and made her love him, too.
So she just kept slogging through the woods. Which sucked. Drag right foot out of snow, lift it up, stick it in again. Drag left foot out, repeat. And repeat and repeat and repeat. Zoe was losing track of time. It took forever to go even a couple hundred feet—and much longer when she had to hike herself up and over a fallen tree. Her legs and knees began to ache, then her shoulders and neck. And she became obsessed with the hole at the top of her hat where the tassel used to be. She imagined it yawning wider and wider, and could feel the wind’s bony fingers in her hair.
After Zoe had been in the woods for 20 minutes or so, her cheeks, which were partly exposed to the air, were scalding hot. She thought about taking her gloves off and somehow peeling the skin off her face—and then she realized that that was completely crazy. She and her brain had stopped playing on the same team. Which scared the hell out of her.
The ground started to level off and Zoe saw an enormous old fir tree up ahead. New trees, old trees, dead trees. She was almost a third of the way through the woods. She told herself to keep walking, not to stop for anything, until she could touch that first giant tree. That would make everything feel real again.
About ten feet from the fir, Zoe stumbled on something under the snow and belly flopped onto the ground. A bolt of pain tore through her head. She’d hit it against a rock or a stump, and could feel a bruise blooming on her forehead. She took off a glove and touched it. When she pulled her hand away, her fingers were dark with blood.
She decided it wasn’t that bad.
She forced herself up onto her knees, then her feet. And, using that first fir tree as her goalpost, she walked the next few yards. When she got to the tree, she leaned against it and felt a wave of relief because, no matter how heinous things are, you gotta love a Christmas tree.
Zoe was in the second part of the woods now, with maybe half a mile to go. The trees were massive—they roared up toward the sky—and set far enough apart that what daylight was left trickled down to her. Here, Jonah and the dogs’ tracks were clean and clear. They seemed to be sticking to the path now. She started off again, trying to think of nothing but the rhythm of her steps.
She imagined finding Jonah and marching him home. She imagined wrapping him in blankets till he laughed and shouted, “I! Am! Not! A! Burrito!”
Zoe had been outside for 30 or 40 minutes, and it had to be 25 below. She was shaking like she’d been hit by an electric current. By the time she’d made it halfway through the fir trees, every part of her ached and shivered like a tuning fork. And the storm seemed stronger now. The forest itself was breaking apart all around her. The wind stripped off branches and flung them in every direction. Whole trees had toppled over and lay blocking the path.
She stopped to rest against a tree. She had to. She swung the flashlight around, trying to figure out how far she was from the lake. But her hands were weak and she fumbled and dropped it in the snow.
The light went out.
She sank to her knees to search for the flashlight. It was getting dark so she had to root around in the snow. The shivering had gotten worse—at first it’d felt like she’d touched an electric fence, but now her nerves were so fully on fire that it felt like she was an electric fence—but she didn’t care. And she didn’t care about the bruise or the cut or whatever it was that was pulsing on her forehead. She didn’t care that there were thorns and branches hiding under the snow and that they were tearing at the skin beneath her gloves. She could barely feel anything anyway. After a few minutes on her knees—it could have been two, it could have been ten, she had no idea anymore—her hand found something in the snow. She let out a yelp
of happiness, or as much of one as she could manage, and she pulled it out. But it wasn’t the flashlight.
It was one of Jonah’s gloves.
The skull on the back glowed up at her, the empty eye sockets like tunnels.
She pictured Jonah stumbling through the woods, sobbing loudly. She pictured his hand frozen and raw and beating with pain. She pictured him pleading with the dogs to go home. (He must have started pleading by now.) His face came to her for a second. He had their father’s looks, which still made her wince: the messy brown hair, the eyes you assumed would be blue but were actually a cool, weird green. The only difference was that Jonah had slightly chubby cheeks. Thank god for baby fat, Zoe thought. Because, tonight, it might keep Jonah alive.
She found the flashlight, and—miraculously—there was some life left in it. She got to her feet and started out again.
A few feet from the first glove, she found the second one.
Ten feet later, she found Jonah’s coat.
It was a puffy black down jacket, patched with electrical tape—and he’d left it draped over the jagged stump of a tree.
Now Zoe imagined her brother dazed and wandering, his skin itchy and hot, like it was crawling all over him. She imagined him pulling off his clothes and dropping them in the snow.
Zoe was exhausted. And freaked out. And so unbelievably mad at those idiot dogs who didn’t know enough to stay close to the house—who didn’t realize that her beautiful brother would follow them and follow them and follow them through the snow. Until it killed him.
She had to erase that awful image of Jonah. She cast around for a happy thought. She remembered how Jonah used to hide in the exact same place every time they played hide-and-seek with their dad—the old meat freezer in the basement, which hadn’t been used in years. She remembered how they’d act like they had no idea where Jonah was, even though they could see his little fingers propping the lid open for air. And she pictured the ecstatic look on Jonah’s face when she and their dad pretended to give up and Jonah thrust the freezer open and revealed himself, like a magician at the end of a death-defying trick.
“It’s me!” he’d shout happily. “It’s me! It’s me! It’s me!”
For a few seconds that image of Jonah warmed her. Then it disappeared, like a star snuffed out forever.
Zoe made it to the edge of the fir trees—right up to where the forest died suddenly and gave way to fire-charred stumps and snags. She was carrying Jonah’s coat and gloves, hugging them against her chest in a bundle. Did she still think she could find Jonah, or was she just stumbling the last quarter mile to Bert and Betty’s house to collapse? She didn’t even know anymore. The cold had erased everything inside her. She was blank. She was a zombie, lurching forward because she didn’t know what else to do.
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 l
ight 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.
