14 Degrees Below Zero

by Quinton Skinner

  19. IT FELT LIKE A VISIT TO A CHAPEL OF HELPLESSNESS.

  Lewis found that parking his car in the driveway was not unlike leading a dog-pulled sled up a narrow mountain pass while blind drunk and incapacitated with a fever. Somehow he managed it, though for all he knew his car was now installed on his, or his neighbor’s, lawn. None of the familiar visual markers were visible. All was white.

  He rushed inside, slipping on the steps. The wind had whipped the snow into piles on his porch, and he had to sweep away a drift with his foot to get the door open. When he stepped inside, Carew came rushing up in a panic.

  Geez, Lewis, where have you been? What have you been doing? Do you see what’s happening out there? the dog said, shifting back and forth on its feet, tail twitching with anxiety.

  “Hey, boy,” Lewis said, bending down to take its head in his hands. “Don’t you worry about a thing. Lewis is here.”

  The dog actually seemed skeptical of Lewis, but mellowed out after Lewis refilled the big food bowl in the kitchen. Carew set upon his snack with the lust of the condemned while Lewis went to the living room.

  What had he done? Killed Stephen? For the crime of turning Lewis’s daughter against him? For challenging the bonds of loyalty from which Lewis derived all his sense of self and worth? Stephen had to die for that?

  He turned. She had been there, he was sure of it.

  Lewis paced a path from the front window to the side window, monitoring the storm, imagining Stephen breathing his last breath in those shallow frigid waters. He replayed those moments, the way he’d charged Stephen, then seeing Stephen fall and witnessing the terrible momentum of the younger man’s body down the wooded slope. The worst part was not going down to help. Lewis knew. He was not in full control of himself, but he had made a conscious decision to leave Stephen down there, alone, with no one around.

  With no one to bear witness to what Lewis had done. Unless Anna had been there.

  “Come on,” he said to the empty room. “Where are you?”

  Worse still, perhaps, was that in searching his heart (pacing now to the sunroom, which was dark and snowed-in), Lewis could not locate any feeling of remorse. Regret? Yes, maybe, he would rather that that had not happened. But there was no deep remorse in his emotional terrain at the moment. It may have been a matter of shock. It may also have been that he did what needed to be done.

  Like before.

  He had to operate on the assumption that he would be caught. There was the matter of the restraining order—yes, that was public record and would immediately come to light after Stephen was discovered. Stan, trusted Stan, would not lie if the police asked him about their conversation of the day before. He was too honorable for that. Lewis would be jailed, tried, and sent to prison.

  It was unacceptable—not just the prospect of losing his freedom but, more important, losing his ability to care for Jay and Ramona. They would be alone, Jay losing both her parents within a year. At her age, with her disposition, it would be a devastating blow.

  Where was she?

  Lewis went upstairs to the room he’d shared with Anna. The bed was made and unslept-in. The curtains were drawn wide to the silent storm outside. Lewis went to the small box of Anna’s things that he kept on the dresser—some of her perfume bottles, little boxes where she kept her pins and female things—and touched each item carefully, as he did when he desperately missed her and wished she were there.

  “I know, I fucked up,” he said softly. “I’ve got to find some way to make it better. I’ve got to think.”

  His mind was not working properly. That was clear when he flashed on the gas can in the garage and considered the possibility of filling the downstairs with gas and setting the house on fire. He saw smoke pouring from the windows, the roof collapsing, himself driving away hard and fast with Carew in the back.

  “No, that’s not the way,” he said. He put down Anna’s things, carefully arranging them the way they had been.

  “Think it through, Lewis,” he said.

  What this boiled down to was responsibility. Stephen had gotten in the way of Lewis discharging his responsibility to Jay and Ramona, and he’d gotten himself hurt. Dead, rather. First hurt, then dead, immediately thereafter. That was the usual order of things.

  Lewis stifled a laugh. It was not the time for laughter.

  Women and children first. Was that not the motto for any husband and father—for any good man? He had helped Anna, in his way, when her body broke down and betrayed her. He had done his best.

  “You know I did my best,” he said to the empty room.

  His breath was even more ragged than usual. Lewis leaned against the wall as he endured an attack of dizziness, then a series of sharp stabbing pains in his chest. It didn’t seem psychosomatic, but then who knew? He was willing to accept that these might be his final moments on planet Earth—but if they weren’t, he was at least going to do something meaningful until his body broke down.

  He didn’t believe in an afterlife, but if there was one, surely he was linked eternally with Stephen and Anna. Actions might indeed reverberate through eternity, with meanings and linkages spiraling and intersecting beyond space, time, and meaning.

  “Stop thinking like a hippie,” he whispered.

  Lewis went into the bathroom, took out his little basket of pills, and sat down on the edge of the bathtub. There on top was the antidepressant. He had already taken his dose that morning, his carefully monitored and calibrated chemical ration that was supposed to fend off all the guilt, anger, and fear.

  “Well, gee whiz,” he said.

  Opening up the childproof jar, he looked inside. The pills were white, scored in the middle, and inscribed with some manner of pharmaceutical arcanum. Lewis popped one out and, lacking a glass in which to place water, chewed it up and swallowed it. It tasted strange, which was to be expected, but not entirely terrible. It was actually a fairly evocative flavor, tinged with an exotic complexity. Shrugging, he flipped out another one, chewed it, and swallowed it.

  “OK, now I’m going to be really well adjusted,” he said, getting up and putting the remaining pills in his shirt pocket. He saw Carew watching him from the hall, his head cowed, nervously pacing, watching Lewis with supreme uncertainty.

  “Wait until I get everything figured out,” he ordered the dog.

  Downstairs he had that glass of water and chased it with a small glass of whiskey. It was the wrong order, sure, but these were desperate times. The whiskey tasted good, as whiskey often did, so he poured another one, bigger this time.

  Ordering things, that was what was important now. Time was short. Someone was going to come upon Stephen, and then things were going to change drastically and, almost surely, very quickly.

  The most important thing in his life, from the moment of her birth—that blessed, sacred moment, the sight of her clenching hands and the shock of dark hair on her precious head—was Jay. It was paramount that he do everything in his power to help her be happy and whole—and, in the most stark and unsentimental analysis, he had taken a step in the right direction by dispatching Stephen. It had taken him a step closer to finding Anna.

  No, that was crazy, wasn’t it? There had been a fight and Stephen fell. Lewis might get a sympathetic jury to acquit him.

  But he couldn’t count on it. A prosecutor could make Lewis out to be some sort of unhinged, vengeful father.

  He laughed a little and took a long drink of his very good whiskey.

  Now that Ramona was in the picture, there was a new balance to Lewis’s world. He had to look out for her. And she had been so close to Anna. In a rush of clarity he realized that Ramona was a key to finding Anna.

  He had some more whiskey, which did wonders toward quelling his chill and the pains in his chest. You could never tell that to a doctor, though, they’d all become teetotal, marathon-running health doctrinaires.

  Back to Ramona, who was the point, after all. She needed protection and nurturing—two things that Jay w
as only sporadically able to provide, given the fact that she was not exactly doing a bang-up job of looking after herself. Now, should Lewis be locked in a cell and the key at least metaphorically thrown away, said chain of events would likely lead to Jay becoming even less capable of providing Ramona with the sort of environment she needed.

  On the surface, it was a knot no man could unravel. But Lewis had faith in himself. It appeared that he was going to have to improvise.

  A little more whiskey tended to free up the mind, or so he had heard.

  The phone rang. Lewis ignored it.

  This was looking more and more like the kind of situation in which a man had to play it by ear. Ramona came first, and he couldn’t help Ramona if he was an inmate upstate for the remainder of his useful days. So he had to get to Ramona, and he had to get himself out of the reach of the authorities.

  He looked out the window. Anna was in the snowy garden. Then she was not. He opened the window, letting in a rush of snow and icy wind.

  “Lewis,” Anna said. “Come on. I’m outside.”

  Lewis pressed his face to the screen. He squinted and focused, but could not see her where she had been.

  She hadn’t been wearing a coat. That was all wrong.

  None of this was Jay’s fault. Lewis, feeling better by the moment, was going to make life better for everyone.

  “Come on,” he said to Carew. “We’re going for a drive. We’re going to get Ramona. Then we’re going to find Anna.”

  Yeah yeah, Lewis, good idea, Lewis.

  Just getting to the hospital was a terrible dreamlike odyssey, with Jay’s car skidding along Broadway through the north end of town like a bobsled, and about as controllable. Every other driver seemed to be going fifty percent too fast or too slow. The storm had shifted gears into the truly surreal; more than a foot was on the ground, and the radio announced that at least another foot would fall before it was all over. The schools were closing down, and there were power failures all through the city and the suburbs.

  Jay called Ramona’s day care on her cell phone along the way. The worker who answered—her name was Janet—sounded irritated at first when Jay said that Ramona would have to stay late, but softened considerably when Jay gave her the reason. Jay also explicitly told Janet not to tell Ramona what was going on.

  Lewis, normally omnipresent, was still lying low. His cell phone rang and rang, which meant that he had it turned off. He wasn’t answering at home, either. Jay couldn’t remember Lewis’s schedule well enough to figure out whether he was working, and she didn’t have the number at Marshall Field’s. Lewis’s disappearance was a source of anxiety for Jay, though it was doing battle with a couple of others against which it stood little chance.

  An accident. The nurse on the phone had refused to get into specifics, which apparently was a matter of policy. But it had sounded serious, and after Jay dredged up the names of Stephen’s parents and where they lived—Bob and Cathy Grant, of Mendocino, California—she left right away.

  Finally she saw the hospital on a small hill like an Alpine castle, lights shining from windows through the veil of snow—which meant at least their power was on. She negotiated through a series of turns and switchbacks seemingly designed to repel visitors; twice her wheels bumped into curbs or barriers, she couldn’t be sure which. This day was turning out to be sheer hell on her suspension.

  After parking on level three of the ramp—crowded, since obviously the business of sickness and dying was not deterred by bad weather, and might have even been enhanced by it—Jay followed the signs to the emergency room. When she got there, she found herself immobilized.

  There was a little African-American boy holding a bloodied cloth to his mouth. Nearby, a woman stretched out over three open seats, her eyes closed and her lips moving. Down the way, a guy intently picked shards of glass out of his arm and dropped them with dainty care on the tiled floor.

  All of this was within the bounds of what Jay could handle. But it was the smell of the place, and the low acoustic ceiling, and the way the light seemed to come from nowhere at once, that brought Jay suddenly back to the countless hours—weeks, probably, totaled up—that she had spent in hospitals during Anna’s sickness. Jay had never set foot in one until then. Each time she had come with her mother, or to see her, felt like a visit to some chapel of helplessness staffed by secretive clergy who barely understood the mysteries they dispensed.

  She went to the desk. There was a woman there, middle-aged, wearing one of those smocks all the nurses wore, talking on the phone. She wore glasses on a chain, and held up a hand to tell Jay to wait.

  Which Jay did. She put her hands on the countertop and took a few deep breaths. Stephen was in here somewhere. She had to quell the urge to go looking for him. That was not a good idea. There were surely terrible sights behind the curtains that ran down the hall.

  The nurse finished her call. “Can I help you?” she asked, managing to act as though Jay wasn’t a complete intruder.

  “I got a call,” Jay said. “I’m a friend of Stephen Grant.”

  Farther down the desk was a young woman in boots and a parka. She had short blond hair and was watching Jay closely.

  “Stephen Grant. Yes,” the nurse said, her manner rapidly shifting to guarded warmness. “Wait here a minute. I’ll be right back.”

  The blond woman took this opportunity to approach Jay with an outstretched hand.

  “Gretchen Nelson,” she said. She had that Viking pixie look so common in those parts, a flawless hardy beauty that Jay had always felt herself somehow in futile competition with.

  Jay shook the woman’s hand. Under these circumstances, it seemed not at all odd that a perfect stranger should come up and introduce herself. Jay shifted so that she could see little other than the bureaucratic mess behind the desk. The sight of the sick and ailing was more than she could comfortably take.

  “I’m with the Star Tribune,” Gretchen said. “We picked up Mr. Grant’s . . . situation on the police scanner. Are you related to him?”

  “No,” Jay said.

  “Do you know what happened?” Gretchen said, obviously uncomfortable with the prospect that she was talking to someone who knew even less than she did.

  “They haven’t told me,” Jay said. She realized that Gretchen was probably just out of school, and roughly her own age.

  “Um . . . well.” Gretchen took out her cell phone and looked at its screen as though some answers were to be found there. “There was an accident. He fell into the river.”

  “The river?” Jay repeated. “You mean the Mississippi?”

  “Yeah, over by the U. He was wearing some kind of running outfit.” Gretchen put the phone back in her pocket and fumbled until she found a pad of paper. “I don’t know why he was out running in this weather, but he fell into the water. Someone spotted him and went down and pulled him out. I don’t know how long he was under, but . . . well, it sounds pretty bad. I’m sorry.”

  The magnitude of what Gretchen was saying settled over Jay like a soft linen sheet, the air in the room holding it aloft and allowing it to fall in gentle folds. Under the water? Well, the cold had just settled in—and the real cold was coming that night. The river would have been frozen only on the surface. But how had he fallen all the way down?

  “Are you the girlfriend?” Gretchen asked, wrinkling her nose at all the messiness her question implied.

  “Used to be,” Jay said.

  The nurse returned with a woman wearing a white lab coat and actually sporting a stethoscope around her neck, like some fantasy of a doctor. She put her hand on the small of Jay’s back.

  “I’m Dr. Ellis,” she said. She had bland brownish hair and a hint of a mustache on otherwise quite pretty features. Jay got an intense lesbian vibration from her, as well as a sense that she was someone who was proud of how much she could cope with.

  “Jay Ingraham.”

  “The girlfriend,” Ellis said.

  “Formerly.”

/>   Ellis reacted not at all, at first, then chewed on her lip as though this might be the development that put things over the edge.

  “You contacted Stephen’s parents?” Jay asked.

  “One of the nurses did,” Ellis replied. “They’re going to catch the first available flight out of San Francisco. I got the impression that might be difficult, though. They’re closing runways at the airport here. On account of the weather.”

  Ellis seemed to be one of those semiautistic people who were remarkably effective at their jobs. Jay hoped so, anyway.

  “Where is he?” Jay asked.

  Ellis frowned as though this was a matter she had hoped could be avoided.

  “He’s been seriously injured.”

  “How seriously?” Jay asked. “He was underwater? Is he conscious?”

  “Gretchen, I’ll make time to talk to you later,” Ellis said suddenly, and quite severely.

  “I’m not trying to intrude, Doctor,” said Gretchen, whom Jay had forgotten entirely but who was indeed still hanging around.

  “This is not the time,” Ellis said. “Go get a cup of coffee or something. I’ll talk to you when I’m done here. Your deadline’s a few hours off, right?”

  “Right,” Gretchen said, not at all unpleasantly.

  Jay took a moment to register this level of cooperation and familiarity between reporter and physician, the way that they were symbiotically linked by other people’s misfortunes. For a second she wondered if there was more between them, but decided against it. She had Gretchen pegged as engaged to a golf-loving college boyfriend.

  But then, what did she know?

  Gretchen left them, and Ellis folded her arms and let out a surprisingly weary sigh.

  “He was underwater for quite some time,” she said in a bland tone of recitation.

  “How long?”

  “We don’t know for sure.” Ellis put her hand on Jay’s back again, slowly leading her into the corridor. “He was hypothermic when the EMTs brought him in. He’s going to lose at least a couple of fingers and toes. As for the extent of the brain damage, we can’t be sure at this time. We’ll keep him warm and wait for any brain activity. There’s no way of knowing when or if he’s going to regain consciousness.”