A Late Hard Frost

by Stephanie Joyce Cole

  All the usual tricks hadn’t worked with him. The open book, the headphones in the ears and the monosyllabic answers to his questions hadn’t shut him down. No, he clearly was determined to have a meaningful conversation with her. And all she had wanted was to put her mind ahead, to what awaited her in Homer, to how she was going to handle all the questions about where she’d been and her sudden reappearance.

  Finally, she had lost patience and turned towards him, first swallowing a large gulp of the glass of wine that the flight attendant had served her. She took a deep breath and straightened her back, willing herself to look strong and confident. His eyes grew round and solemn as she told him how she had assumed a fake identity for three months in Homer, after a terrible bus accident had left her presumed dead. And how all went well enough until her husband realized she was still alive, found her and tried to kill her. Her eyes pricked with tears but she refused to let them come, forcing herself to talk in a careful even voice, as if she were talking to a small child. Now that Michael was awaiting trial, she’d managed to make some arrangements for their property and straightened out her life back in Florida, and she was on her way back to Homer, to engineer a new life there. When she finished her story, she stared coolly into his eyes and waited.

  She watched him swallow and open and close his mouth, and for a brief moment she was sorry she’d blurted the story that she knew would shut him down. Maybe he thought she had made it all up. But she felt a thread of pride too, that she hadn’t just surrendered her time to him. He offered up a weak and uncertain smile, stuttering out “oh my” and “so very sorry,” and in short order he buried his nose in a newspaper he pulled from his briefcase. Several minutes later, when he shook the paper and looked up, she was turned towards the window and pretending to doze and he left her alone.

  She still found it hard to stick up for herself. Maybe a few months ago she might have been more resigned to his persistent questions about why she was traveling to Alaska and what she was going to do there, as he tried to worm his way into a conversation. She would have made up a nice bland response, which probably would have led to him talking about himself for the remaining hours of the flight. But she was determined not to be a mouse anymore. She’d fought hard to put life with Michael behind her. Those years were a part of her fabric now, she knew, and she couldn’t roll back time. But she was learning to go forward in a different way.

  This morning, after no more than four restless hours of troubled sleep, she’d trudged out of the airport motel into the piercingly cold air to find a taxi. After the driver dropped her outside the commuter terminal, she muscled her duffle awkwardly across the floor to the check-in counter, pushing the fall of her long brown hair out of the way behind her ears, cursing under her breath. The months of physical inactivity in Florida had taken their toll, and her slight body had lost strength.

  She’d left phone messages for both Cassandra and Moira, so they must know she was coming back, though not exactly when. They would probably tell Nick. She had picked up the phone several times to call him, but each time she didn’t even get as far as dialing his number. Instead, she stared into space, seeing his face and remembering how she had felt so safe with him. Each time, the words she wanted to say to him wouldn’t settle into place. She couldn’t find the words that would make him understand that this time she had taken, these past months alone back in Florida where her story began, was the only way she could put herself back on a path to Alaska, to a new life, and to him. It seemed impossible to straddle both worlds at once. She had to sort out the tangled mess back in Florida first. Merry missed him every day, but she didn’t call him. Soon enough, she would face him.

  The brief flight from Anchorage to Homer had been frigid and noisy. The only other passenger in the cramped cabin huddled fast asleep inside his gigantic, stained, green parka, his wool-capped head turtled deep into his chest. His ragged snores occasionally harmonized with the roar of the engine. As they flew over Cook Inlet, winds buffeted the Beechcraft, banging it from side to side and dropping it into air pockets that sent Merry’s stomach up into her mouth. Her numb hands curled like frozen crabs around the top of the armrests. She tried to focus on the view outside: the flat pale sky, the steely blue-gray water flecked with whitecaps and dotted with chunks of floating ice, the sheer mountainsides encrusted with the mangled fur of stubby evergreens. The pilot was chatty, turning to shout out a conversation to her from the cockpit, barely making himself heard over the engine’s steady droning rumble. “Bit bumpy, but a good day to fly,” he yelled back into the passenger cabin, grinning. He looked like he could still be in high school. She forced her mouth into a weak smile and wished he would turn around and pay attention to the controls in front of him. Pressing her eyes shut, she forced away thoughts of the small plane that had crashed into the tour bus in Fairbanks, the fiery accident that had first propelled her here into a new life, months ago. She remembered Nick saying, “Turbulence doesn’t take down planes. It might feel bad, but they can fly through a lot more than you’d imagine.” Thinking about Nick only made the churning in her stomach worse.

  Merry had stumbled, stiff and cold, down the metal stairs from the plane to the tarmac. The Homer airport terminal was modest but blissfully warm. She watched through the window as the pilot helped to unload a backpack, three waxed supermarket boxes, a crate that looked alarmingly like a coffin, and finally her duffle onto a waiting cart. Her fellow passenger reached his arms skyward and stretched his back while shouting a hello across the room to an arriving gate attendant. As he warmed, the odor of old fish and tobacco wafted her way.

  No one had been there to greet her. Of course not, she hadn’t told anyone any details about her arrival. Still, she felt a stab of disappointment, a moment of rejection. She unzipped her puffy coat and unwound the fleece scarf from around her neck. Now that she’d recovered from the icy plane trip, the terminal was stifling. Sweat trickled from her neck down her back. That’s the way it is here, she remembered: Coats on, then coats off, then coats on again. Iced fingers and toes, so cold they ached and stiffened, then blasts of overheated air, laden with odors of bacon fat and heating oil, the stale reek of rooms closed too long against the winter elements without airing. Then, back outside, perspiration flashing into a freezing film. But in winter, even in the hot rooms, slivers of cold snuck through broken window seals and laid in wait to send shivers down spines. Back in Florida, she rarely gave much thought to the weather, but here it was always a constant lurking concern.

  She had called a taxi from the terminal, staring out at the town as the driver headed to Sweenie’s, where she had made a reservation for three nights. It had been a calculation: She didn’t have much money, but she didn’t want to assume that she could impose on anyone right when she arrived, since no one knew her exact plans. She was buying time, too, time to find the right words to explain why she had stayed away so long without even a telephone call. Three nights should give her a chance to find a foothold somewhere.

  The landscape outside the car was bleak and monochromatic: white, brown, gray. A thin layer of clouds had blown in, and the stiff wind that brought the clouds hissed and knocked hard crumbles of snow against the windows. The taxi drove along Front Street, almost deserted now, the art galleries and tourist shops awaiting the onset of summer and the inevitable tsunami of tourists to revive them. The few pedestrians hurried along the side of the road, their faces muffled in scarves. Homer, Alaska. This was going to be her home. As the taxi bumped down the road to Sweenie’s, she’d tried on the thought for size, once again. Once again, it seemed both impossible and the only possible answer.

  Now, in her musty hotel room, back in Homer where her new life had risen from the ashes of the old like the proverbial phoenix, she opened her eyes and stared up at the pocked ceiling above the lumpy bed. Well, she was really here. What next? The gallery was walking distance away. She could visit Moira. But no, that didn’t seem like the right thing to do first. Her eyelids drooped
and she dozed, exhausted and groggy in the dry, baking heat rising from the clanking wall heater.

  Cassandra, yes, she wanted to see Cassandra. She smiled, half asleep, recalling their first encounters after she’d arrived in Homer. Cassandra had been horrible to her, treating her as if she was not even worthy of notice. Yet as circumstances threw them together, they’d slowly come to recognize that they could lean on one another to salve the deep wounds they each had suffered. Merry’s memories of long afternoons with Cass in her studio, both of them focused on working the clay, not talking, just taking comfort in each other’s presence, had sustained her back in Florida as she trudged through the chaos of her world there. Merry sighed and opened her eyes. She wasn’t sure how it had come about, because the experiences that scarred them were so different, yet somewhere along the way their friendship had bloomed and with that blossoming, healing began for both of them.

  And she was going to see Nick. She grinned and rolled onto her stomach, burying her face in the wilted pillow, her pulse quickening, a warm deep flutter rippling through her body. Of course Nick. She pictured his face, the deep lines etched around his eyes and his wide smile. She could see him so clearly, and the memory of his calloused, strong hands running down her body made her shiver. She just couldn’t imagine what she was going to say to him. She guessed, “I’ve come back,” would be a start.

  ~ * ~

  Tremors like scuttling beetles tumbled in Merry’s stomach. When she’d walked down to the harbor to find Nick’s boat, her heart had hammered in her chest, her breath escaping in shallow excited gasps. But Nick wasn’t there. There was no reason why he should have been. He wasn’t expecting her. So she left a note on Dreamer’s decking by the cabin door, weighted down with a rock. Pushing away her disappointment, she’d returned to her room at the motel. Now she paced back and forth on the threadbare carpet, unable to contain her impatience.

  He could be anywhere, in town buying groceries, getting coffee at Scully’s or The Twins, on the road somewhere. She couldn’t just wait calmly at the motel for him. She needed to move. But she wasn’t ready to see Cassandra or Moira yet. She stopped for a moment, staring at the wall. Of course.

  She left a message for Nick at the front desk, with the skinny kid playing a loud video game on the office computer: “Walking to Rita’s cabin—please find me. Merry”

  It was about a mile to the little cabin. She dropped her head low and trudged steadily, lost in her thoughts. The wind lessened, and soon she pulled off her fleece cap and gloves and stuffed them into her pockets. Low, dense clouds brooded over the silent landscape, reducing it to a dull, flat palette of grays. At each turn in the road she paused, her mind returning to the other times she had been in this same place. Each tree, each rut in the roadway seemed familiar and foreign at the same time. Once she wandered within ten feet of a massive moose, standing motionless in a cluster of alders, so close she could hear its breath huffing into the still air. She backed away slowly, keeping her eyes on it as it swung its huge head in her direction, but it didn’t move. I’ve forgotten what it’s like to live here. I’ve forgotten what to watch out for.

  When she made the final turn down the dirt road, her throat closed. Rita’s cabin. Merry’s home for almost three months, while she hid from the world. Even that terrible last day here hadn’t robbed her of the warmth of her memories, as she had stumbled at first into a new life, and then slowly rediscovered herself, gradually gathering back together the pieces that Michael had torn away.

  The tiny log structure still seemed to be sinking into the surrounding meadow, but some changes were immediately apparent. A cherry red pickup truck was pulled up close to the front door. The three splintering steps up to the cabin were gone, and in their place new stairs of shiny wheat-colored boards gleamed, frosted with ice filigrees, leading to the covered porch in front of the door. More fresh boards had been used to repair parts of the porch, patterning a mosaic of splintery mud-brown and polished gold. The old and the new, together.

  Bright blue curtains dotted with white circles covered the kitchen window. Merry edged closer, slowly, then stood silently next to the pickup, her eyes fixed on the front door. Emotions whipped through her as remembered scenes surfaced and hung in front of her in the cold morning: Her arrival here last September, alone and confused, hardly knowing where she was, following a cranky, elderly stranger into a wreck of a cabin. The weeks and months that followed, as her soul slowly mended while she knitted a new life, a new identity, hour by hour, day by day. And the terrible last day here, when Michael found her here and tried to kill her.

  After a few minutes, she heard the front door creak. Rita. But of course it wasn’t Rita. Rita was dead. Instead, a slender young woman in a tie-die t-shirt and jeans, hoisting a baby on her hip, hovered in the half-open doorway. “Hello, can I help you?” Her voice was uncertain and high-pitched, not unfriendly, but not welcoming either. The baby chewed his fist, then pushed his face against the woman’s chest, into the tumbling mass of her long blonde hair.

  Merry’s consciousness slammed back into the present. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to alarm you. It’s just that...I used to live here.”

  The woman frowned at her. “Are you Merry? The one who stayed here with Rita?”

  Merry nodded.

  The young woman pushed the door fully open and shifted the baby to her other hip. “I’m Sabrina. My husband and I live here now. We rent from Moira.” She looked behind her into the cabin, and then back to Merry, biting her lip. “Would you like to come in? I’m afraid the place is a bit of a mess.”

  Merry shook her head. “No, I don’t want to disturb you. I just got back to town, and I came by to take a quick look. That’s all.”

  Sabrina hesitated for a moment, and then called back through the doorway. “Ren, take Willy, will you?” A bearded, dark-haired man glanced out the door, and then grabbed the squirming baby. Sabrina pulled a coat over her shoulders and stepped outside onto the porch.

  “You’re not disturbing us. You just startled me. We don’t get a lot of people wandering down our road.” Sabrina’s voice was tentative and small, like a little girl’s. She hugged the coat around her shoulders, hunching her shoulders forward, her face obscured by the cascade of streaky blonde hair. She looked down at the porch boards. “Moira…told us about you.”

  Merry’s gaze drifted past the cabin and over to the meadow. The light was rapidly fading. The blanket of crusty old snow turned the mounds of grass into shadowy white bubble wrap in the twilight. She turned back to Sabrina with a small twisted smile. “I guess I’m a local legend now.”

  Sabrina rubbed her toe against the top stair. “It bothered me, at first, that there had been so much violence here. I told Ren I wasn’t sure we should rent the place. Bad karma, you know. But Moira said that you and Rita were nice people and that you were both happy here.” Sabrina’s voice lilted high at the end of each sentence, as if she were asking a question or seeking approval. She shrugged. “We only moved in a couple of months ago, but I like it here. It’s peaceful.”

  Merry smiled at Sabrina. So very young, just a girl herself, and with a baby already. “We were happy, right until the end. And I think Rita would love that a young family lives here now.”

  Sabrina’s face opened with a smile and came alive. “It’s a good place for us with the baby. It doesn’t cost too much money, and we have a lot of privacy.” She picked her way down the shiny new steps. “Come see, we’ve put a seat out here so we’ll be able to sit outside by the meadow when summer comes.” She led the way down a narrow path, placing her feet mindfully on the thick coating of ice that had thawed and frozen into slippery treacherous lumps, along the side of the house to a rustic birch bench under a twisted wood arbor. “Ren’s very handy. We’ll be able to do more in the spring.”

  The bench was encrusted with a slick layer of ice, but Sabrina shook out a stiff blanket from under the eaves and draped it over the seat. Merry perched on the very edge, not int
ending to stay, but paralyzed by the memories washing over her.

  Sabrina’s voice was thin. “We don’t know the whole story, but we heard that you were attacked here?” Again, the upward lilt of the sentence, uncertainty or embarrassment, Merry couldn’t tell which. Maybe both.

  Merry sighed. “Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that.” She looked up at the dark spruce on the other side of the meadow, wondering if the eagles still had a nest nearby. “It’s a long story. There was a terrible accident...”

  She paused, unsure if she wanted to tell the story. She took a deep breath. “Well, I survived a terrible accident, and everyone thought I was dead.” Fragments of memories churned inside her head. “I…ran away.” She hesitated, wondering how she could possibly make Sabrina, or anyone, understand. “I…ran away from my husband. Our marriage…I couldn’t…”

  She shook her head, staring down at the grainy ice under her feet. She took another deep slow breath, lifting her head to look across the meadow. “I ended up here, living with Rita. But then my husband found me, and he wasn’t happy I was still alive. And so he tried to kill me.”

  Sabrina was still and silent next to her. Merry’s voice had choked on the last few words, and she cleared her throat. “Rita tried to protect me from Michael, but she wasn’t strong enough.”

  Now they were both silent. Merry shook her head, ever so slightly. “And I’ve come back, because my life is here now. At least, I want it to be.” She pulled her coat around her, hugging it closer to her body, and fumbled for her hat and gloves. It was almost fully dark, and the temperature was plummeting. A beam of light pierced the darkness, as the overhead light in the kitchen snapped on. Outside the stream of light, the meadow seemed as alien and remote as the face of the moon. “I’ve got to go. It’s so nice to meet you. I’m glad you’re happy here.”