On the other side of the meadow was the cave.
My heart hammered in my mouth as I turned around, wondering what I could possibly say to Zeke and Colin to explain that looming, dark maw. Zeke pulled himself through the trees and skidded to a stop next to me.
“Hey, sweet,” he said. “Hot springs!”
Of course. Now I noticed steam rising in the air like white ghosts against the darkness of the trees ringing the clearing. At least a dozen small, translucent blue pools, glimmered softly in the meadow. I heard the swish of skis on snow as Colin slid next to me.
“Huh,” Colin said, sniffing the air. “I’ve lost it.”
Zeke scratched his head. “Yeah, me too. You, Boss Lady?”
I stared past them at the mouth of the cave. The darkness inside the entrance seemed almost palpable, like a heavy oil slick, waiting to spill across the meadow.
“There,” I said. It came out a rough whisper; my voice had fled.
Colin and Zeke turned to the cave.
“Through those woods?” Colin asked. He raised his ski pole, jabbing it at the cave.
“You don’t see it?” I whispered.
Colin’s brow furrowed under his knit wool hat. “See what?”
I swallowed. “That cave,” I hissed. “That giant freaking cave!”
Just looking at the dark entrance made my skin crawl, but I was afraid to turn away. As if something might come out of that inky void the moment I turned my back.
“Cave?” Colin echoed. “I don’t see a cave.”
“All I see are more goddamn trees,” Zeke said.
A slow shiver ran the length of my spine. I’d wanted to send them away earlier, but I’d hesitated. Now I had no choice; that cave entrance must be for me alone.
“Then I guess you’re not coming with me any more,” I said, clearing my throat to hide the waver in my voice.
“Hey, I didn’t wanna give you the wrong impression,” Zeke said. “I mean, it’s more goddamn trees, but that’s not a problem. Hell, I love skiing through this creepy ass forest!”
“I know,” I said, smiling in spite of myself. “But I don’t think you can come any further. I think this next part is just for me.”
Colin shrugged. “Well, we can certainly try.”
“Sure. Of course you can,” I said.
I slid my backpack off my shoulders and let it rest against my skis, sighing with relief. For a second my entire body felt like it was floating. I clipped out of my skis and propped them against a tree, wedging my backpack between them. There wasn’t much snow on the ground between the opalescent, steaming pools, and I seriously doubted skis would be very useful against a dragon. Zeke and Colin watched me. Their eyes seemed wide in the fading light.
Squaring my shoulders, I turned to face the cave. It looked exactly like it had in my dream on Christmas Eve, when I saw Vali for the last time.
“No, it’s not quite right,” I muttered under my breath. I’d been standing slight closer to the entrance, and a little to the right.
I took a few steps to the right.
“That should be about right,” I whispered as I forced my eyes off the steam-dappled ground and back to the mouth of the cave.
The darkness in the mouth of the cave moved. It surged slightly, then lay still. As if it were breathing. As if it were waiting for me.
“Boss Lady?” Zeke’s voice sounded strange and far away.
I turned around, my heart hammering wildly against my chest. I’d left the meadow; I was already at the mouth of the cave. Zeke and Colin stood a good twenty yards away, beneath the trees, next to my skis and backpack. They seemed very far away, almost in another world.
My gut tightened, and my skin prickled with a long, slow shiver. From the corner of my eye, the darkness in the mouth of the cave shifted and undulated.
“Colin and Zeke,” I called, cupping my hands around my mouth to carry my voice. “Do not wait for me! You pack up, and you head home.”
Both of them shook their heads simultaneously. Insolent little shits, I thought.
“No,” Colin called. His voice echoed strangely in the clearing. “We’ll wait for you.”
Zeke pushed himself forward on his skis, and Colin followed. It seemed to take a very long time for them to cross the small meadow. Even when they stood almost next to me, Colin and Zeke still looked oddly distant and distorted. Like they were on one side of a mirror, and I was on the other.
“You, uh, need anything?” Zeke asked. He looked uncertain.
I had never, in four years, seen Zeke look uncertain about anything. The hesitant, caged expression on Zeke’s face terrified me even more than the shifting, churning darkness behind me, more than the spinning needle of the compass or the strange trees that didn’t fit the ecosystem or the low, acrid burnt smell in the air.
I shook my head. My hands trembled, and I tried to hide them behind my back. “I’m fine.”
“You want a ski pole?” Colin asked. It sounded like a joke, but his face was pale, and his lips were drawn tight.
“Bear spray?” Zeke offered.
I closed my eyes, remembering the enormous blue sword Vali had pulled from his back and swung in a wild, hissing arc before he entered the cave. I pictured myself swinging one of my thin, little white ski poles through the cold gloaming, and I couldn’t stop my laugh. Colin and Zeke looked even more concerned, and even further away, when I turned back.
“I don’t think it’s that kind of cave,” I said. “I’m going in. Please don’t wait for me.”
I turned from their pale faces and stepped into the darkness.
THERE WAS A SMALL, battery operated headlamp in my pocket. I fumbled in the darkness for a few seconds before I found the headlamp and pulled it over my forehead. For a brief second after I switched it on, the lamp flared, and I could almost make out my ski boots. Then it dimmed rapidly, until I couldn’t even see my hands. I pulled the headlamp off my head and examined it, seeing only a dim flicker of orange deep in the bulb. Then the darkness flowed over my hands, and that flicker was gone.
Damn. I stuffed the useless headlamp back in my pocket and started shuffling forward slowly, my arms raised so I didn’t crash into anything. The ground under my feet felt smooth and hard, almost like concrete, and it sloped gently downhill.
“Hello?” I whispered. My voice bounced and echoed in the darkness, amplifying until it seemed to be coming from everywhere.
Hello? Hello? Hello?
My skin crawled at the reverberating crash of my own voice. So much for subtlety.
I walked for a long time. Long enough to realized I was hungry and thirsty, in addition to cold and sore. Long enough to regret leaving my backpack with my skis. Slowly, I realized I could see the pale flash of my fingers in front of me. A few more steps, and I could see my white ski pants, and the dark, hard ground beneath me. A few more steps—
My breath caught in my throat. The hum of fluorescent lights and the beep and chirp of medical equipment rushed into the cold air of the cave. My nostrils filled with the harsh, sterile smell of bleach. The murmur of voices grew behind me. Three nurses wearing matching light blue scrubs emerged from the darkness and brushed past me, vanishing a few steps to my right.
“What the fuck?” I whispered.
I recognized those nurses; they worked in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Chicago’s Children’s Hospital. And they were working the day—
I blinked and turned slowly, expecting to see the darkness of the cave behind me. No. I faced a blank, white wall and a massive bulletin board covered with reports, forms, and schedules. And a huge, impassive, white clock. Ticking down the seconds.
“Time of death,” said a man’s voice.
I turned again.
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
I saw myself.
I wore a pale green hospital robe, and my disheveled, greasy hair hung lank down my back. My shoulders were hunched and my head was down as I sat in the hospital’s dark wooden rocking chair, ne
xt to the empty incubator. Barry Richardson crouched before me, his hand on my arm, his head tilted forward.
I was not crying.
That part I remembered; I did not cry. Not then. Not when Dr. Patterson announced the time of death in his soft, almost apologetic voice. And I had not cried that morning, just a few hours earlier, as he explained why they needed to remove the life support systems. As he’d said the words, “zero chance of survival.”
My stomach clenched violently, and my vision doubled. My breath came in great gulps, tearing at the sterile hospital air, and I fell to my knees.
“God, no,” I hissed, squeezing my eyes shut.
The machines of the hospital hissed and clicked and beeped. I opened my eyes and the blue and white pattern of the hospital’s linoleum floor swam into view.
“I am so sorry for your loss,” Dr. Patterson said in that same measured, level voice. I remembered wondering if he’d learned that in medical school, the perfect tone for condolences.
Barry’s voice caught in a ragged sob. I stared at him. Tears streamed down his face, leaving dark wet splotches on his white Oxford shirt. That part I didn’t remember. I had forgotten his tears.
I took a deep breath and forced myself to look at the hunched figure in the rocking chair. My younger self.
The Karen in the chair did not move. She did not acknowledge Dr. Patterson’s words. Meredith sat in her lap, locked in her trembling arms, her small, still body wrapped in the pink and blue stripes of the hospital blanket. I’d rocked her against my chest all morning as the machines keeping her alive were turned off, slowly, one by one. There were still needles in her tiny arms and bands around her ankles. But she was turning cold. I remembered that, how quickly her small body grew cold.
Karen Richardson was not crying. Not the woman sitting in the rocking chair, the woman who was still married to Barry, who had just become a mother and then suddenly, horribly, not become a mother.
But I was sobbing, sitting on the floor of the cave, watching myself. Watching my daughter.
Dr. Patterson reached for the Karen in the rocking chair, his arms crossing the space between his rolling office chair and her hunched shoulders.
“No,” I heard myself say, my voice choked and thick. “Don’t take her!”
Barry knelt beside me, pressing his forehead against mine. “Karen,” he said. “She’s gone.”
There was a low, animal sound, a sort of deep howl, from the woman in the rocking chair. And then a choked, wracked sobbing. The word no.
No. No. No.
They had to pull her from my arms as Barry held me back. And I hit him. My hand lashed out, following Meredith and slamming into my husband’s face so hard I knocked his glasses to the floor.
The round tortoiseshell frames skittered across the cold linoleum, coming to rest just in front of my dirt-stained knees, as a nurse finally pulled Meredith’s cold little body away from the screaming, hysterical woman in the rocking chair, the woman they would soon be sedating. I tried to turn away as the nurse walked past me, but I saw everything. I saw my once-husband’s very expensive glasses glinting on the floor. I saw Dr. Patterson whisper to the nurse, ordering a sedative.
And I saw my daughter’s perfect little face. Her dark lashes. Her scattering of downy hair.
My Meredith.
I collapsed on the floor of the cave, shaking, pulling my knees to my chest.
“Go away!” I heard myself growl.
My eyes squeezed shut as my cheek pressed against the cold dirt of the cave’s floor. I remembered this part, too.
“Karen, please,” Barry said. His voice trembled. He knelt in front of me, I remembered. He knelt in front of me, and he opened his arms. “Please.”
I heard the rocking chair scrape across the floor as the woman who had been me pulled away from her husband. “No,” she said. Her voice was almost a shriek. “Don’t touch me! Just go away!”
I opened my eyes enough to see Barry’s shoulders shudder as his head dropped to his chest. My heart ached with a sharp, empty throb. You could have found some comfort in each other, I realized. What an idiot you are, Karen McDonald.
What a great, fucking idiot.
The voices fell silent; the smell of disinfectant and baby powder was gradually replaced by the heavy burnt scent of the cave. The hospital room slowly faded, and I was alone in the vast, pressing darkness, curled on the cold floor of the cave. I crammed my fist in my mouth to silence my sobs.
EVENTUALLY, MY TEARS ran dry, and my stiff, cold legs began to ache. I pushed myself off the dirt, rubbing my palms across my eyes.
“What now?” I whispered to the darkness. My own voice bounced back to me.
Now? Now? Now?
I stood and tried to shake some warmth back into my body before I raised my hands and turned in a slow circle in the darkness. I felt nothing. The air in the cave was perfectly motionless. The back of my mouth tasted bitter, and I swallowed hard.
It was impossible to judge time in the cave. I moved forward one shuffling step at a time, inching along the smooth, downward-sloping floor, breathing deeply and trying not to think. Perhaps I’d been walking for five minutes. Or fifteen. Or fifty.
Slowly, the darkness enveloping me began to lift. Once again, I realized I could see my fingertips, ten pale dots floating in front of my eyes. My stomach clenched. I froze as my ears throbbed with the wild pounding of my heart. What the hell would I see this time?
But I knew.
I already knew.
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
The first thing I saw was the bottle of pills. The empty bottle of pills.
I should have thrown that bottle in the trash. That was one of my many regrets, in the first few days of my hospital stay. I should have thrown the bottle in the pink bathroom trash can, with the cotton balls and crumpled Kleenex, or buried it under the coffee grounds in the kitchen trash.
But I didn’t throw it away. I left it on the bathroom sink. I didn’t even replace the cap.
“Karen?” Barry’s voice rang through the house.
He shouldn’t be home right now. He should be teaching his class, his two hour long senior seminar on Chaucer. It was a Wednesday morning in late March, and Dr. Barry Richardson should be teaching his Chaucer class for at least another hour and a half.
“Karen?”
There was a desperate note to his voice. A touch of panic. I turned around, slowly, and saw that I had left the door open.
I should have closed the door to the backyard.
I didn’t.
Something crashed behind me, and I turned. Barry had dropped the briefcase carrying his brand new Macbook laptop, and it smashed against the floor. Of course. His computer screen was cracked when I got home from the hospital. He was always so careful with his things. I never knew how he had cracked the screen of his precious laptop.
“Karen!” he screamed.
I followed him, knowing what he was about to find.
I HADN’T WANTED TO die indoors.
Even though it was a cold, dreary day, the kind of gray spring day that makes the word “summer” sting like a cruel joke, I did not want to die indoors. So, I took the pills and I left the bottle on the counter. I opened the door to the backyard, and I left it open.
And I went outside to die.
There I was, my body slumped on the pale green grass under the crabapple tree, looking weirdly small in the overcast light. I hadn’t realized I’d fallen forward. My face was streaked with mud when Barry pulled me into his arms. My eyes were open; a thin stream of white foam leaked from the corner of my mouth.
Barry fumbled in his pocket, reaching for his phone. But he was talking already. Talking to me.
“Oh, my God, Karen, no,” he said, his voice low and hushed, like a prayer. “Karen, please don’t. Please.”
Barry wrapped his arm around me, and he rocked me like a child as he pulled his phone from his pocket. His hands shook as he swiped the screen.
“I need a
n ambulance,” he said. “Immediately. My wife—”
His voice broke, and he began sobbing. His face pressed against my hair and his chest heaved so violently it shook my motionless body.
The sting of tears filled my eyes again, and I brought my hand to my mouth. Watching my husband sob into my hair with his arms wrapped around me, I felt something cold and hard, something deep within my chest, begin to dislodge.
I had been angry at Barry Richardson for a very long time. Longer than we’d been divorced. Longer, even, than we’d been married. I had loved Barry, and I’d been angry at him, and the two had seemed inseparable.
But standing there, on the hard floor of Níðhöggr’s cave, in the thin, gray light of the Wednesday morning when I decided to kill myself, I felt the anger breaking up, dislodging. Floating away.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “Barry. I am so sorry.”
There was no reply. There was no sound at all, save his desperate sobs, and the thin echo of a woman’s voice coming from his cell phone.
“Hello? Sir? Can you tell me if she has a pulse?”
The ambulance arrived quickly. Two young men and one woman loaded me onto a stretcher with hurried efficiency. The woman turned to Barry, putting a hand on his arm as she led him back into the house. I followed, mute and unseen, my heart throbbing in my chest.
“I knew she was unhappy,” Barry said. His voice sounded strange and distant. “I just didn’t realize—I didn’t—”
“Sir, do you have any idea what she may have taken? Do you know how long it’s been?”
Barry shook his head. “We lost our baby. Our little girl. And she’s, she’s really been struggling...” He stumbled past me, through me, to the bathroom.
“Here,” Barry said. He held the empty bottle toward the woman like an offering. “This must be...”
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