In a Distant Valley, page 17
Does she, like Nate, dream of ghosts?
With no one around to witness his lapse in duty, he sinks into a chair and allows himself to think of Rose in ways he rarely does, mostly from a sense of loyalty to his dead wife, or to his daughter, or for no reason other than his own insecurity. Here he is, thirty-one years old, and he’s only ever slept with Bridget. Only ever kissed Bridget, too. In some ways, he might as well still be a virgin.
He might be barely awake at the moment, but he’s still alive.
Maybe Rose isn’t sitting at her table. Maybe she’s lying in bed with the blankets pulled up to her chin, staring up at the snowy treetops swaying in the wind. Maybe she’s thinking of the mundane things that make a Monday morning—homework tucked into backpacks, PB&J sandwiches cut into triangles and loaded into brown paper bags.
Or maybe she’s lying under the blankets musing over less tangible things, her thoughts churning like the snow outside her window. Imagining the soft pressure of Nate’s mouth against her own.
A deep-throated rumble and a strobe of lights jolts Nate out of his half-doze. Strange, he thinks, watching the plow push another inch of snow out of the street and onto the sidewalks. Strange to think of Rose thinking of him, to feel as if he is inhabiting both his mind and hers, his body and hers, at the same time.
He returns to the desk, skimming more reports as the light outside shifts from black to gray. Somewhere above the snow and the clouds, the sun is rising as it always does; the earth just goes on spinning.
Forty more minutes, and he will drive to Davis Road, walk into his house, lock his gun and badge in the safe he keeps in the front hall, climb the stairs, and fall onto the bed still in his uniform. Sleep away the morning and half the afternoon.
At 5:50, the phone rings. Even though it’s a sound Nate has been girding himself for all night, it hits him like a shock to the chest.
“Dalton Police,” he answers. “Is this an emergency?”
“Nate?”
For a wild, hopeful moment, he thinks the voice belongs to Rose, that she’s calling to tell him she’s been thinking of him, too.
“Can you hear me, Nate? It’s Molly.”
Trying to ignore the disappointment flooding his body, he says, “Yup, I hear you. What’s going on? Everything all right?”
“Oh, we’re fine out here, don’t want to cause a panic. But I knew it was you on duty, and I wanted to call and tell you Phil and I saw the truck again, last night. Same one that’s been parking out in the woods.”
“Was it parked out there again?”
“No, someone kept driving it up and down the road in front of the house.” Molly pauses to tell her dogs to sit down; she’ll feed them in a minute. “Must have been three or four times, right around midnight—we were checking on the horses; they get a little morose in weather like this.”
“Are you sure it was the same truck? Did you see who was driving it?”
“I’m sure. It was Tommy Merchant.”
The thudding in Nate’s chest could be fear. Or vindication. Or both.
“How certain are you?”
“I’d know that weaselly face anywhere,” says Molly. “But if you need to do your police thing and check everything out, Phil managed to spot the plate. 8401 DB.”
Nate flips back through the pages of his notepad to the information he jotted down a couple weeks ago as he idled behind Tommy’s Chevy at the Diner. Same plate. Same truck. Same person.
“You might also want to know that not long after we saw the truck the last time, we heard some gunshots.”
“How close?”
“Hard to tell. Not close enough to spook the horses at least.”
“Why didn’t you report this last night?”
“We didn’t see him schlepping a poached animal out of the woods, and it’s not exactly breaking the law to go tooling around, is it?” says Molly. “Plus, if you cops were called out every time someone hears a gunshot in a woods town like this . . . ”
It would be easy to be annoyed with her, but what she’s saying is true enough.
“The last time you saw the truck,” Nate asks, “was it headed toward town, or away?”
“Away.”
“I’m going to look into this. Please don’t mention it to anyone in the meantime.”
“I’ll keep my mouth shut,” she promises. “But you and I both know you don’t have to say something in this town for everyone to know it anyway.”
A few minutes later, Chief Halstead walks into the station, bringing the smell of wet boots and acidic burps in with him. Nate, so tired a few minutes ago, is fully alert. He needs to get out of here, drive out along Route 11 to see if he can find the truck and catch Tommy in the act of whatever he’s doing.
When he lays out this plan, however, the Chief looks at him as though he has lost his mind.
“Forget the fact it’s snowing like a sonofabitch,” he says. “If Merchant really has been out there poaching, you know it’s up to the game wardens to investigate.”
“But . . . ”
“Write the report, leave a message at the warden’s office, and go home to get some sleep.”
“I just . . . ”
“It’s an order, Nate.”
Bruce might argue with the Chief. Dyer might pretend to give in and then go rogue as soon as he leaves the station, hauling ass out to the tote road to prove his own instincts. Nate writes the report. He leaves a message at the warden’s office. Then he gathers his things and steps into the morning, where snowflakes fall on his cracked lips, reminding him how desperate he is for a sweet, cold glass of water.
At the blinking yellow light on Main, he has a burst of rebellion. Bridget wouldn’t take no for an answer. Rose, either. Both of them would do something even if they had been told by someone they couldn’t. Maybe he can’t push it so far as driving out to the Lannigans’, but he can make a detour past the Diner, just to see if Tommy is there.
Odd, Nate thinks, when he sees the parking lot covered in over a foot of undisturbed snow. He expected to feel satisfied, or at least validated, at the absence of Tommy’s truck. But as he idles on the side of the road staring at the empty lot, the buzzing adrenaline in his chest is replaced by a queasy ache in his stomach.
What would a good cop do with this proof of possible wrongdoing?
Keep the details to himself. Follow protocol. Don’t bring emotion into play.
Nate’s eyes ache from the blur of flakes falling around him. He doesn’t know how anyone manages it, this relentless balance of right and wrong, good and bad, love and law. He starts the slow drive home, still trying to understand.
STORM DAY
Rose wakes up as snow tumbles down, glittering in the Christmas lights Adam and Brandon won’t let her remove from the trailer no matter how many times Marian Gallagher tries to say the season of joy is over.
The clock on the nightstand reads 4:48, too early to get out of bed and too late before the day begins to fall back asleep. Rose doesn’t mind, though—she’s always liked this time between true night and new morning, these dream-drenched moments all to herself while the boys sleep down the hall, floating in their own imagined worlds.
Rose’s bedroom, located at the farthest end of the trailer, is always the coldest in the house, and things are no different today, even with several quilts piled on top of her. If ever there was a moment to crave another warm body curled around her own, it’s now. Not just any body, though.
Nate.
She usually tries to keep these thoughts far away—it’s better to ignore the things you can’t have, to pretend you don’t want them. But in her half-awake state, she lets herself imagine the way he might mumble her name in the dark.
When the screaming jolts her out of the limbo between dream and reality, Rose’s first thought is that something is wrong; one of the boys is hurt or sick or dying or dead. Or Tommy, still angry she refused his offer last night for another cup of coffee or a longer conversation, is here to steal her kids from her, and they are begging her to rescue them.
She has never moved so fast before, out of her room and down the hall, and then there is blind panic when she sees both Adam and Brandon missing from their bunk beds. But the screaming continues, and where is it coming from, what has happened, what has Tommy done; what has she let happen?
Running into the living room, Rose finds both boys jumping in front of the TV with grins on their faces.
“Snow day, Mum!”
“Mumma! Snow day!”
“It’s on the news. They rolled it across the screen. Brandon, didn’t I tell you they were gonna roll it?”
They continue to hop around like frogs on speed, making plans for their suddenly wide-open day—snowmen and snowball fights and a snow fort big enough to stand up in.
Rose’s heart is going to explode out of her chest like the thing from Alien; all that will be left of her will be bones and slippery intestines. She could shake their perfect beautiful little bodies for scaring her so bad. She could yell about inside voices and give a lecture on the need to respect mothers who leave up the damn Christmas lights even though she secretly agrees with the mean neighbor lady that it’s time to take them down.
Rose crouches on the shag carpet, feeling the soft give of the trailer floor beneath her knees. “Get over here,” she says, opening her arms to gather them in.
While the boys eat cereal and hold a serious debate about who would win in a fight, Captain Planet or Inspector Gadget, Rose calls Vera.
“I just saw it on Channel 8,” Vera says before Rose can finish saying hello. “Don’t worry about coming to work today.”
“Are you going to keep the clinic open?”
“I think so. Even though the roads are a mess and most people will probably cancel their appointments, there are always those few who decide they’re smarter than the weather.”
“To be fair, people do have to go to work. The world doesn’t stop for a little snowstorm, you know?”
“Work is one thing,” Vera says, “but driving twelve miles on unplowed roads to hear me confirm you have a cold that will resolve on its own? Anyway, if patients do come in, I’ll have Richard there to help me keep things on track.”
“Just don’t let him reorganize my desk. The last time he covered for me, I couldn’t find my stapler for two days.”
“I’ll do my best. See you tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” agrees Rose. “I’ll wear what I would’ve today—black tights, red dress.”
“Gray pants, pink sweater for me. Now go, spend some time with your boys. Tell them I say hello.”
Rose turns to see Adam and Brandon standing behind her. The Crunch-Berry cereal milk has turned both their lips faintly blue. She knows what they need from her—permission to play in the snow, promises to bring them back in to fill their bellies with soup and cocoa, things that will heat their blood and give them energy to go back out to build more snowmen, more snow forts. It doesn’t matter if their father is mad at her, because he’s not here. For now, it’s just her and these boys, here on Larch Street.
“Bundle up,” says Rose. “We’re going outside.”
ENJOY THE SILENCE
Greg can’t see the forest. Not as it should actually exist, anyway.
A forest should never be only one thing, but many things—pine, spruce, cedar, birch, oak, maple; bushes and bracken and last year’s leaves littering the ground, giving shelter for next season’s pollinators. You should be able to trace individual branches of trees from trunk to tip. You should see evidence of a million little lives that call this place home.
But right now, all Greg sees is a world turned monotonously white. Snow has covered every tree, every branch, every bush. Trees of all species are draped in white cloaks like behemoth wizards. No peek of sky. The road is gone, replaced by a white ribbon stretching far ahead and far behind the truck.
“We are so fucked,” says Angela, fists clenched around a steering wheel that isn’t going to steer them anywhere anytime soon.
“It’s okay,” Greg says, even though he’s never felt less confident that things will be okay. “We’ll figure something out.”
“How?”
“I’m just trying to stay positive.”
“Do you know how annoying that is?”
The warm intimacy that existed between them the night before disappeared the moment they woke to find themselves stranded in the middle of the wilderness. Greg wants to point out it was Angela who drove them here in the first place, her idea to go into the woods in a snowstorm. But he went along with her plan, unquestioning, and though he should have woken her up when she dozed off last night, her head on his shoulder, he let himself drift to sleep. So maybe it’s his fault, just as much as hers, that they’re stuck here now, out of gas.
“Try the ignition again.”
“It’s useless, Greg.” Angela zips her coat up to her chin.
Their words turn to clouds the moment they hit the air. Both of them are dressed in several warm layers, but neither of them has a hat or mittens. Angela is wearing boots; Greg only has an old pair of Nikes, worn thin at the sole and about as effective at heat retention as a piece of construction paper.
“I’m supposed to be at work right now,” says Angela.
Hope flares in Greg’s chest.
“That’s good,” he says. “Bev will call your house, ask Cindy where you are. That will get people looking for us.”
“Momma’s probably in a NyQuil coma as we speak. But your parents are home, right?”
“They called yesterday to say they were going to stay at Sarah’s last night. Aimee, too. And with the snow, I don’t know when they’ll make it back to town.”
“When they do, though, they’ll see you’re gone and send someone out.”
“Except I didn’t tell them where we were going since, you know, I didn’t know where we were going.”
“So you do think this is my fault.”
“I didn’t say that.”
Last night, the truck felt like a cozy den, just big enough for the two of them. Now, the cab has turned fetid, filled with the smell of stale mouths.
“Do you have any food in here, Angie? In your purse, maybe?”
“Do you see a purse in here? Have you ever in our whole lives seen me with a purse?”
“What about water? Is there a bottle in the glove compartment, or—”
“Do you seriously think I wouldn’t have brought out some water if I had some? Jesus.”
“You don’t have to be so mean.”
“You don’t have to be so . . . whatever you are.”
It occurs to Greg with something between hysteria and hilarity that they could actually die here, taken by hypothermia before the next log truck rolls through after the storm is finally over later today or tomorrow. Or maybe this is an untraveled road, and no one will discover the vehicle or the bodies inside it for days, or weeks, or months.
“I’m sorry,” Angela says. “I’m being a total bitch about this whole thing.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself. I’m feeling bitchy about it, too.”
She hugs her knees to her chest; in her red jacket, she looks like a bird folding its wings around its torso, trying to keep a frail heart warm and beating.
After a few minutes, unable to watch her shivering so violently, Greg asks, “Can I?”
He waits until she says yes before wrapping his arms around her and pulling her closer, right against his body.
“I have a lighter,” she says, teeth chattering. “We could start a fire.”
“No firewood. It’s all buried out there.”
“We could use it to melt snow, then. You know, for drinking water.”
“What do we use to drink it? I’m assuming you don’t keep any mugs in here.”
“You’re right,” she says. “You are getting a little bitchy.”
For the first time since they woke up to find themselves marooned on this white island, they almost laugh. Angela shifts in Greg’s arms so her head is tucked under his chin.
“Do you remember that day at the river?”
“Hard to forget.”
“Why’d you do it? What were you thinking, coming out there after me?”
“Honestly, Angie, I wasn’t thinking at all.”
“Weren’t you terrified?”
He remembers the terrible pain of his arms plunged into a river made of frozen knives, the terror in her eyes as she screamed, desperate for safe and solid ground. And then the horrible, helpless feeling after he pulled her out and they lay on the ice, neither of them able to move back toward land.
“Not terrified, exactly,” he says. “It was more . . . disbelief. Like none of it was real. Like we were stuck inside some stranger’s dream.”
“Yeah,” says Angela. “I know that feeling.”
He wants to know what her life was like after she left Dalton, what it is now, what she wants it to eventually become. He longs to know about the drugs and the booze and the rehab and anything else that might have broken her a little bit at a time, or made her stronger day by day, breath by breath. Last night, she seemed to want to tell him at least some of it. Maybe now, as they sit here waiting for almost certain death, is the time to ask again.
Or maybe now is the exact wrong time to mention these things; maybe it’s too cold to go so deep. They’re not here to therapize each other, Greg thinks, almost laughing again at the absurdity of it all, how life finds ways to echo itself on and on infinitely, in a thousand strange ways.
Huddled together, they fall into silence thick as the snow that now completely encases the truck. Every muscle shivers, and their teeth clack out a desperate SOS no one outside this tomb will ever hear. That’s the thing about winter dens—they are built to be private, made to stay hidden.
