by KT Morrison
“Fuck-shit-fuck,” Nia hissed, slamming on her brakes. The car whipped left and right, fighting for traction, struggling to find it in the streaming snow. Dead ahead, two cars in the roadway, no lights. A sedan on the right, trunk popped open, crumpled bumper. The back was raised off the road, wheels up, nose pointed in a snowy ditch. She twisted the wheel, yanking hard into the skid. On the left, the back half of a compact SUV. The nose was smashed, the motor mangled. Broken plastic and glass littered the road between the two, a shredded peel of curled rubber lay in a spreading puddle. “Fuck!” Nia yelled, her heart screaming out of her chest. German engineering beyond her comprehension took over, thought for her wheels, got her straightened then stopped.
They came to rest in a puddle of gas. Didn't even stall. She turned to Odie, Odie turned to her, both their heads on slow oscillation. Eyes wide and mouths agape, she saw her hand had formed a claw over Odie’s chest, bunching up her coat. Had no memory of putting her hand out.
“Shit,” she sighed. A smile peeled her lips.
Odie said, “Can you believe that?”
“Are you okay, baby?”
“I'm fine, Mom.”
“Wow,” Nia said, putting the car in reverse and backing away from the wreck and onto the shoulder.
“Look, Mom,” Odie said, pointing out the windshield.
Nia parked and watched where Odie showed her. Two figures, bundled in parkas, hunched over, were trying to open the passenger door of the SUV. They were barely visible in the sleet.
“Stay here, baby, she said, “Keep your seatbelt on, okay?”
“Okay,” Odie said, but she wasn't paying attention, her worried eyes wide and watching out the window still.
“Odie, stay here,” she said again, controlling a rising panic in her own voice. She undid her seatbelt and put herself into Odie’s side and hugged her, ran her fingers through her hair and pressed her daughter’s head to her shoulder. “It's okay, baby, just a fender-bender. You stay here. I'll go make sure everyone's okay...”
“Okay,” Odie whispered.
Nia backed out of her BMW, wind blasting up her wool overcoat and stinging her round tummy. Should have tucked that shirt in.
“Fuck,” she hissed, closed her eyes to the stinging snow. She stumbled through the storm, clutching her coat around her neck and fumbling her iPhone out of her pocket with her frigid hands. She called 9-1-1, making her way across to the far shoulder. She told the operator where they were and was told help was already on its way. They asked her to stay on the line and she did.
The two in parkas were men, Sikhs, desperately calling to each other in mournful foreign sounds as they wrenched the passenger door open finally, a loud metal groan slicing through the cold. There was a woman in the passenger seat, awake but in shock. She was in her fifties, grey hair pulled back in a tight bun, a beautiful colourful sari shimmering under her open coat.
Across the road, the driver door of the car pointed in the ditch creaked open. Kicked far then bounced back to close on a leg sticking out with a galosh pulled over its boot. A man stumbled out, hand over one half of his face, blood from a cut on his forehead streaming backwards over his bald pate somehow.
She held the phone to her chest and yelled, “You all right?”
He didn't look up, but he waved his hand at her. He was in pain.
“Anybody else in your car?” she yelled now.
He went to his knees, rotating his shoulder around in a circle. “Ah,” he hissed, “No. Fuck.”
“One injured,” she told the operator. “He’s got a cut on his head but he’s conscious, he’s walking...”
She sidestepped around the door the two Sikh men had wrenched open. They were both huddled around this woman that might have been wife and mother to them. Between the men kneeling at her side, Nia saw the woman’s boot twisted up, the sole facing her, toes down, hanging over the lip of the door fame. The footwell of the SUV was crushed up into the cabin. It was splashed with the brightest red blood she’d ever seen. The woman’s foot was in the boot.
“Aw, no,” she said to the operator, looking away. “There’s a middle-aged woman, her foot is...I think it’s severed...”
“Mommy!”
Odie was out of the car. Nia could see the passenger side of the BMW left open, could hear its dinging all the way across the road, through the wind.
“Odie, don't come over,” she yelled. “Get back in the car!”
Odie was chewing her lip, standing nervously on the shoulder of the opposite side, looking to the right, like she was preparing to cross the road.
“Odie, no,” she yelled again, threw her phone in her pocket. “Don’t, please,” she said, and she stepped on the road to cross and intercept her.
Odie crossed too, came to meet her in the middle of the pavement, as snow sizzled in wild drifts around their feet and the tails of Nia’s long black coat snapped in the wind.
On their left, bursting through the snowy brume, a Jeep was blasting broadside towards them, so impossibly fast, billowing snow around it. Front wheels were reefed hard, pointing into its careening.
Nia dropped to her knees, looked in her daughter’s big black eyes, saw herself in there, all that she was and all that her daughter would be. She clutched her tight as she ever could, tighter than she thought was possible, her arms going right around, nails clawing at her own coat as she fell, Odie’s calliopean wail razing her brain but she was eternally grateful to hear it.
GEOFF
He wasn’t sure what time Nia was bringing Odie home but it seemed like it was getting late. The weather wasn’t the best and he’d told her he’d be in the city on Tuesday and he could pick her up then. Nia had insisted on coming today. It was fine, he missed his little girl.
“Pippet!” he called, clapping his hands.
He’d taken a walk. Brought his iPhone in case they called to cancel or got to the cabin and he wasn't there. It was frigid out and the wind whipped the snow across him like needles. But he’d been at work now for seventeen hours without sleep. These walks were keeping him sharp. There were trails that snaked all through Crown Land just 400 metres from the shore where he docked the boat when he came in off his island. Getting out and away from it all was healing him greatly. He’d walk with Odie, hand in hand sometimes, and she’d teach him about nature, things she’d read in the Audubon books he bought her. She even loved his new companion.
“Pippet!” he called again, clapping incessantly now and peering through the sideways snow.
She came then, bounding over a fallen trunk, the craggy spine of it filling up with dry flaky snow. Bell jingling, panting and happy. A border collie, one blue eye, rescued from a local shelter where it had been shot in the hind leg by a hunter. Sometimes, Pippet’s foster had told him, they used dogs up here to hunt and when the season was done they’d just shoot them all instead of taking them home. Pippet had healed and she could run like the devil.
“Hey, girl,” he said and she came to him, his obedient lady, down on her rump, tail wagging, wanting nothing but a pat on the head. He gave it to her, said, Go, then with exaggerated excitement she did. Went off again into the bush, bell letting him know where she was out in the storm.
Across his shoulder his satchel slung, bumping against his behind as he tromped with his head down through the snow. Packed himself a sketchpad and some charcoal but never even brought them out. His hands would be too cold. Just habit now, bringing his pad with him wherever he went, especially out on the trail. Somewhere along the way he’d lost that passion for creating from life and he was falling in love with finding it again.
The trail descended, low to a section where, no matter the weather, the atmosphere changed. Colder and damper as he sunk below the spiralling old cedars on either side of the rocky snow-covered path. There was a stream ahead that Odie liked to jump across. It had rained yesterday, before it turned to snow, and the water was really moving. It wasn’t a difficult crossing, only as wide as a table. The water on
it was rough enough today to form churning whitecaps.
As he hopped he noticed an odd static whitecap. He turned as he landed, curious, and got low. Jutting out of the stream was a jagged white crystalline tooth, masquerading as a babbling peak. He took his mitt off and he got to one knee and reached to touch it. It was stone. He grasped it, wiggled it from the ground it had imbedded in and pulled it free. Heavy, large, the size of a football. It was solid quartz.
“Holy shit,” he laughed.
He’d walked this trail almost every day and somehow it had been swept here today waiting for him to find it. He heaved it to his chest, had to be ten pounds, dried it against his pants then and tucked it into his satchel, down a canvas divider that kept it separate from his paper. The weight of it pulled the strap down on his collar. He trudged on, shaking his head at his incredible find.
He called for Pippet again as he got to the shore. The snow was fleeting, drifting fat and osculant, taking its time in the sudden absence of the wind. He pulled his canoe from the bushes and set it in the water as Pippet’s jingling announced her frenetic arrival. She jumped in the canoe and took her spot in the bow.
As he pushed off into the black, and the shape of his island came clearer through the falling snow, he could make out two figures on his dock. Two, shoulders hunched from cold, side by side, disembarking from the rowboat that had been docked at shore.
NIA
When she saw him her heart leaped in her chest. Her good friend, husband, and lover. The greatest man she had ever met. Didn’t ever notice it when she had him because he didn’t like to wear it on his sleeve. He kept his best things hidden.
“Not a word, Odie.”
“Why?”
“Tell him tomorrow. He worries. I want him happy while I’m here, promise?”
She groaned and stomped a foot, snorted out her nose like an angry bull.
“Promise, Odie?”
“Fi-ine,” she said.
She and her daughter had almost bought it today, but she didn’t want to bring grief to Geoff’s doorstep. He suffered enough over the last year. What Odie might think was an exciting story her father would not.
He emerged from the flurry in a cedar strip canoe, paddle thrust to one side to steer as he coasted on the black waves towards the dock. Bright blue Gore-Tex, beanie pulled low, his beard was shaggy once more but he was no longer hollow. He’d found his way again and for that she was eternally happy.
Up front, perched in the bow of his canoe, his new girlfriend that Odie couldn’t stop talking about. Wasn’t great but she could deal with it better than Geoff with Jenny. A black and white dog with a long coat fixing her with an intense, knowing gaze.
She waved to him and she saw a smile somewhere in that fur on his face. Odie skipped ahead, keeping pace as she ran the dock, her father floating alongside below her. He slipped in next to the dock where it met the shore, getting the canoe up on the rocky slope where he jumped out and pulled the boat up and flipped it upside down to rest under the white pines.
“Odie!” he called then, turning just in time to have her leap onto him. He hoisted her up and he carried her. His dog trotted a happy circle around him, but kept its distance. “How was the drive?” he asked her.
She ran an imaginary zipper across her mouth, clamped firmly shut in a straight line.
He pinched his face to a funny perplexed frown and shook his head. He said, “What does that mean?”
“My-mown-mow,” she shrugged, talking with her cheeks puffed out and her mouth pouted like a fish.
“You’re a weird kid,” he said, touching his forehead to hers. She laughed and hugged him.
“Hey,” he said to Nia as she made it to the end of the dock and stood in the snow collecting over the pine needles. Fat flakes swished between them, almost sideways.
“Hi, Geoff,” she said.
He looked up to the sky, blinking quickly as his lashes were pelted with snowflakes. He gave Odie’s cheek a quick peck, said, “Who wants a hot drink?”
GEOFF
Odie wriggled on his hip and he was so glad to have her home again. A week in New York City had set them behind on their book. He wasn’t worried because, frankly, Sparrow House wasn’t worried. Krista had slowed the milestones on Geoff and Odie’s book. Told the powers-that-be they had something major on their hands.
He headed up the snowy slope with his daughter clinging to him, watching ahead as Pippet darted over the crest, made a quick survey, then bounded to the right towards the cottage. “Oh, shoot, Odie,” he said and stopped.
He paused on the slope, one knee bent, foot higher up the grade and he put a hand behind him to the satchel slung over his shoulder and resting at his rump. His mitten worked under the flap, searching. Nia paused as well, watching him with warm expression. She was looking very healthy, her olive skin glowing, her face full and content looking.
They smiled at each other as he found it and pulled it from his canvas bag. He held the quartz in one upturned hand so both Nia and Odie could see it.
“Whoa,” Odie said, her hands going to it to touch it, snow melting against her hot cheeks where they landed. “What is it? It looks like a dinosaur egg...”
“It’s just a chunk of quartz I found.”
“Where did you find it?” she asked him as she pulled the heavy rock to hug it to her chest.
“Right in a stream. Right in front of me, waiting to be found. You know the trail, where it goes through that rocky section, where it gets low and there’s all those old tall cedars...”
“Yeah?”
“...there’s that stream cuts across...”
“I know.”
“...right there, sticking up out of the water.”
“It’s so cool.”
“You want it? For, like, a bookend or something?”
“Yeah, wow, Dad. It’s so pretty. Thanks, Daddy,” she said and she kissed his beard.
Nia stood below them, watching, a gentle smile on her face, her eyes glassy.
He said, “You coming?”
“Yeah,” she sighed and took another step.
“Hey, Nia?”
“Yeah?”
“Have you met my new friend?”
“No,” she laughed. “But Odie told me all about her.”
He called over the crest, “Pippet!”
His little friend came in a rush, paused at the ridge, face and chest visible, tongue hanging.
“Come here,” he said, and she did, bounding to him. “Sit, girl,” he said and she did.
“Nia,” he said, smiling, nodding his chin down to his dog. “She’s good, Nia. She won’t jump or bite. Pet her.”
“Okay,” she said, shuffling next to him. She crouched down with a little difficulty, getting low to face his dog. “Hi, Pippet,” she said, and she ran a glove over his dog’s brow and Pippet closed her eyes, her dog lips assuming something resembling a smile.
“That’s a good girl, Pippet,” he said.
Nia stood then, getting upright, awkwardly like her back was sore.
“Come on, Nia,” he said to her, nudging his head towards the house, “we’ll get you warm, get you a coffee.”
She nodded and headed up the slope.
“Geoff?”
He turned, said, “You okay?”
“Would you hold my hand?” she said, extending her slim calfskin glove to him. “I don’t have the best shoes,” she laughed, looking down and lifting the toes of her loafers up out of the snow.
She looked so innocent, so devoid of all the badness she’d carried before. Her eyes were calm, a black sea of ataraxia.
He took her gloved hand in his mitten, felt her fingers squeezing him through their protective layers. He held her tight, squeezed her fingers the way she was squeezing his.
NIA
Geoff held her hand and walked her with Odie on his hip the whole way up the back slope of the island, where it fell to a snowy beach. The stormy black water lapped at the shore. Smoke curled from the
chimney, poking up from the place that was to be their refuge. The last time she’d been here was with Geoff and the real estate agent, a year and a half ago. It was quite different now.
Walking that craggy expanse at the foot of the cottage, making their way to the glass doors below its peaked roof, she could see the inside of the space lit with warm lamps. It wasn’t evening yet, but the sky was so stormy that the daytime was dark. She could see into the place where her husband lived and shared with their daughter. A fire in the fireplace. A recreation of his studio up against the huge windows that looked out over Little Hawk Lake. There was a black shape, some rectangular obverse inside, blocking out where she should have been able to see the doors to the bedrooms.
“Here, Nia,” he said, stepping up onto the low cedar deck under the eaves and holding her hand still, helping her make the step up in her Gucci loafers.
“Thanks, Geoff,” she said, stepping up to join him, stand at his side, looking in the windows of his happy little home.
“Come in and see,” he said, and he stepped across the deck and opened the door and held it for her to pass through.
She stepped into her husband’s home, felt its warmth, felt the amber light touch her skin. It was wonderful to be in the domain of the man she loved.
“Oh, Geoff,” she said, looking around at all his things. She stood in a space so similar to his garage studio, all his familiar furniture and computers, and his Herman Miller chair. On the left was the kitchen. He’d had it redone in marble and subway tile and painted wood and stainless appliances. She inhaled deep, feeling her heart surge for him. She felt happiness in this place and he deserved that.
On the right was a family room. No TV, just a couch and books and Odie things. Bright pink little girl stuff she’d left here and she was sure Geoff didn’t clean it up because it kept him company when Odie was away and staying with her. She knew him.
Straight ahead was the black plane she’d seen from the slope, not making sense of what it was from afar. She walked to it. Ten feet across, maybe six feet high. A painting in progress, up on an easel. She was struck by it. Here was his sadness. This was where he let out all the pain. It touched her, hurt her. The painting made her feel small and insignificant. She’d done this to him. She’d made him like this. But somehow in it there was truth. Her husband had made sense of his pain. He’d contained it and learned from it. That was why she loved him. That was the kind of man he was. A tear spilled from her eye. It was from pain and sadness and grief, but in it there was hope too.
