Freeze

by Daniel Pyle

  She smiled and told him he was a good boy.

  Warren took a deep breath, and his body eventually calmed down. He used the poker to scoot the two new logs closer together until the flames had risen and the fire was roaring. In all his winter garb, he was getting hot. He pulled off some of the layers but then remembered he’d be going back out again soon enough. He turned away from the fire instead to go looking for some tweezers and antiseptic.

  “Hey,” Tess said.

  He stopped and turned around.

  “I need to tell you something.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “Before the glass broke, I thought I saw something. Something…” She looked down and scratched Bub’s head again.

  Warren waited.

  “Something like a hand,” she finally said, speaking the words so quickly they were practically one, somethinglikeahand.

  “A hand?”

  She nodded.

  “Like a human hand?”

  Now she looked up at him. “I don’t know. The glass was frosty. It was just a shape. But it hit the window twice, and…and it looked like a hand.”

  Warren ran his fingers across his mouth. “I was just out there, and I didn’t see anything. Definitely not a person.”

  “I know it sounds crazy.”

  He sat down in the other chair. “You might be a little stressed out right now, maybe even in shock, but I don’t think you’re crazy. If you say you saw something, I believe you did.”

  She chewed at her lower lip.

  “I doubt it was a person,” he said. “It was probably just a bird or a clump of snow blown out of a tree, but when I go out to start the truck, I’ll look for prints. Okay?”

  She nodded and grinned.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Just, if this was a movie, you wouldn’t have believed me. You’d think I was out of my mind until some psycho broke in in the middle of the night and raped us both to death.”

  The fire crackled, and Warren let out a short huff of a laugh.

  “First of all,” he said, “what kind of porno snuff films have you been watching?”

  She gave him a ha-ha-very-funny half grin.

  “And second, this isn’t a movie. If it was, I’d look like Robert Redford.”

  Tess smiled, reached over and grasped his hand. “Redford’s got nothing on you.”

  “That’s just the trauma talking.”

  She patted his hand. “Probably.”

  He shook his head, got out of the chair, and went looking for some medical supplies.

  3

  While she waited for him to come back, Tess curled her legs under herself and watched the fire.

  She hadn’t taken off her apron after the

  (accident? event? phenomenon?)

  incident in the kitchen, but she did so now, balling it up and tossing it in the empty chair.

  She leaned over and kissed the top of Bub’s head. “Do you believe me, too?”

  Bub stuck out his tongue and licked the back of her hand.

  “Well, I’m glad the two of you do, because I’m not so sure I believe myself.”

  Bub said nothing.

  “I was just imagining things, right? It was just snow or a bird. Like he said. Right?”

  Still no comment from Bub. He left his chin on the arm of the chair and panted.

  The fire hissed, popped, and…tinkled?

  Tess frowned and stared at the flames.

  The noise came again, fluctuating tones like the ringing of a cheap wind chime. But the sounds weren’t coming from the fireplace.

  She turned toward the kitchen.

  Footsteps on broken glass. There’s someone in the kitchen!

  “Warren?”

  Bub looked up at her, whined.

  It wasn’t Warren in the kitchen. She knew that. She could hear him in the bathroom on the opposite side of the house, rummaging through drawers, looking for tweezers.

  The tinkling sound came again. Bub lifted his head off the chair, turned toward the kitchen, and growled.

  “Warren?”

  “Just a second,” he said. “I can’t find the damn things…are you…wait, here we go.”

  Bub’s growl had become a full-fledged rumble. His muscles rippled from his shoulders to his limp, unmoving tail and then tensed. For the first time ever, she was almost afraid of him. When she looked at the dog, she saw not a domesticated animal but a wild beast, a savage, wolf-like creature. She thought if she reached out and touched him, he might whip around and bite her hand clean off.

  “Warren!”

  “I’m coming,” he said.

  Except he wasn’t. Not yet. She heard him returning items to the bathroom drawers, shoving them in all willy nilly probably, not that she cared about that right now.

  Something moved in the kitchen. She watched it edge around the doorframe. Not a hand or an arm or any other body part, but a chunk of ice, like a horizontal icicle, forming on the trim while she watched.

  No, that’s not real. You’re imagining that. Warren was right: you’re hurt worse than you thought. A chunk of that glass went up through your tear duct and into your brain. Like an accidental lobotomy. Close your eyes and it’ll go away.

  Except, if she was imagining it, what was wrong with Bub?

  He’s picking up on your emotions. Dogs do that. You know it.

  The icicle on the doorframe elongated, thickened. The tinkling sound got louder than ever.

  Tessa Marie! You close your eyes. Right now!

  She did. She squeezed them tight and counted to ten. The fire crackled and blazed. Fresh waves of heat billowed out.

  When she opened her eyes—first one and then the other—the icicle was gone and Bub had calmed down. Somewhat anyway. He still faced the kitchen, and he still had that tenseness in his back, but he’d stopped growling. When she put a hesitant hand on his back, he turned around and (instead of biting it off) gave it a quick lick.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “It was nothing. I’m sorry if I scared you.”

  Bub turned back to her, licked her hand again, and dropped onto the doggy bed between the two chairs. He let out a stinky little fart and closed his eyes.

  When Warren came into the room, Tess blew out a long breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

  “Is everything okay?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” She thought maybe that was the most honest answer she’d ever given.

  He dropped a bag of cotton balls, a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, a small bottle of liquid bandaid, and a pair of tweezers onto the chair beside her apron and gave her a concerned look.

  “I’m just…freaked out,” she said.

  He nodded. “Of course. Taking a broken window to the face is definitely freak-out worthy.” He bent down to pet Bub but then turned and headed for the kitchen instead.

  For a second, Tess wanted to scream at him to stop, to stay out of there. But what was she afraid of? Ringing sounds? Imaginary icicles? Even if what she’d seen had been real, it was nothing to be afraid of. An icicle in the middle of the house was weird, but nothing to freak out about. There was a blizzard outside, after all. There was ice all over the place.

  Yeah, but growing horizontally out of the doorframe so quickly she could actually see it forming?

  It doesn’t matter. It wasn’t real. You were imagining it.

  Warren had disappeared into the kitchen. “I’ll have to cover this,” he said from around the corner. “Not that there’s a lot of heat in here to get out, but this place will be an icebox when we get back if I don’t at least tape a trash bag over the hole.”

  “Yeah,” she said. But she wasn’t thinking about the heat. She was thinking about the shape smacking the glass, cracking it, and about the icicle growing out of the doorframe like some sort of twisted, Tim Burtonesque stop motion.

  Quit it. You’re going to drive yourself crazy.

  Warren came back into the room, kneeled beside her chair, and put his
hand on her chin. His skin was rough, calloused, but his touch was as soft and caring as ever. He turned her head to the left and the right and then grabbed the tweezers.

  “Again,” he said, “this is my one-hundred-percent-non-medically-trained self talking, but I really think you got off lucky. There’s one piece here.”

  He lifted the tweezers to her cheek, pinched them together, and pulled out a small chunk of glass. The extraction hurt just a little bit, like getting stung by a bee in reverse.

  “And here.”

  He pulled the second piece from her jaw and one more from just beneath her left ear. None of the shards were any bigger than a fingernail clipping.

  Warren patted her leg. “There might be more beneath the skin, but that’s all I can see.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  He used a peroxide-soaked cotton ball to dab at her face, wiped a few spots a second time, and then sealed some (but not all) of the cuts with the liquid bandaid.

  “No point in getting any but the deepest ones.” He chewed his lip and squinted as he brushed the liquid into her cuts, like a painter adding the last fine details to a canvas. He spent the most time on a single wound that ran down from her forehead and must have been several inches long at least.

  “The rest have stopped bleeding,” he said. “For the most part anyway.” He closed the liquid bandaid and tossed it back onto the other chair. “I’ll get you a fresh towel. In case any of these others start dripping again.”

  “Okay. But not one of the good ones.”

  He smiled, took her hand in both of his, looked her in the eye, and said, “I love you.”

  She opened her mouth to respond but couldn’t find the words. Warren was a caring, loving man, and a fantastic husband, but he rarely let the “L” word pass his lips.

  “I…love you, too.” She said.

  He smiled, gave her a quick kiss, and stood up.

  “I’ll be back in a sec.”

  She nodded. When he was gone, she stared back into the fire and tried to think of anything but broken glass, ice, and shadowy, smacking hands.

  4

  He grabbed her a fresh towel (one of the least grungy-looking rags from the drawer beside the sink) and stoked the fire. When he was sure she was comfortable—at least for the moment and as much as you could expect given the circumstances—Warren left Tess in her chair and hunted down his keys.

  After the power went out, they’d talked about driving out of the mountains and into town, but in the end they’d decided against it. They didn’t have money for a hotel, and they didn’t know any of the townies well enough to ask for a spare room. They’d have ended up sleeping in their car or some kind of homeless shelter, which wasn’t any better than making due in their own home, power or not. They had enough food to last them several weeks and wood to keep themselves warm, so they’d agreed to hunker down and wait out the storm. After all, it couldn’t snow forever, right?

  Warren found the keys on the dresser in their bedroom and stuffed them into one of his snowsuit’s side pockets. He found a snow shovel and an ice-scraper in the hall closet and brought them into the living room. There was probably already a scraper in the truck, but he couldn’t remember for sure and didn’t want to trudge all the way out there only to come up empty. And he’d need the shovel for sure. The truck was half buried in the snow. He’d have to do plenty of digging before he’d have any kind of chance of driving it farther than a couple of inches.

  You really think you can get it down the mountain anyway? Seriously?

  He wasn’t sure. Although Tess seemed to be okay, there was a chance she wasn’t. Scary, unfair, but true. He couldn’t just sit here and hope there weren’t shards of broken glass shredding her innards to pieces.

  That’s probably an exaggeration and definitely a little morbid.

  Maybe, but sometimes life is a little morbid. Like it or not.

  He retrieved his scarf from the kitchen floor and wrapped it back around his face. When he told Tess to sit tight and moved to the front door, Bub started to get up off his doggy bed.

  “No,” Warren said. “You stay here.” He said it in his most masterly voice, and Bub dropped back onto his belly with a huff that was eerily human.

  Warren stuck the scraper in his pocket, took a long breath of semi-warm air, opened the door, and stepped back out into the storm.

  The wind and snow surged when he moved through the doorway, as if it had been waiting for him. For a second, he couldn’t breathe—the wind had jerked the breath right out of him. He lowered his head and gasped.

  They hadn’t used the front door in a couple of days. If it had opened outward, or if there had been a storm door or a screen door that did, he might not have been able to get out that way. The snow hadn’t drifted against this side of the house as badly as it had in the back, but it was still at least a foot and a half deep. Snow spilled in through the entryway and onto the hardwood. He used the shovel like a walking stick to help himself climb out onto the snow and pulled the door closed.

  The truck sat in the driveway beside the house. Not that you could see the driveway. Or much of the truck, for that matter. The snow had drifted against the cab and the tailgate and left only a few bare patches of paint and glass. Warren hefted the shovel, ducked his head, and shuffled toward the vehicle.

  They had a garage—a detached structure someone had added on after the home’s original construction—but although Warren had promised himself he’d get the storage boxes and junk organized before winter came that year, he hadn’t gotten around to it, and there was barely room to park a bike inside the space, let alone a honking GMC. He wasn’t sure if he’d call his failure to clean up lazy or absentminded (he didn’t like to think of himself as either), but he guessed it didn’t matter; if the truck had been tucked into the nice, dry garage at that very moment, he’d probably still have had to dig a ramp in the snow to get it anywhere.

  One more time: you really think you’ll be able to get it anywhere anyway? In this mess? You’re kidding yourself. You’d need a monster truck with ten foot wheels and a snowplow mounted on front.

  Pushing his way through the blizzard, it was hard to argue with that thought, but he still had to give it his best shot.

  Warren wasn’t sure how long it took him to get to the truck—several minutes at least, although it felt like much longer. The storm had taken a turn for the nasty, and the snow smacking him in the face wasn’t the least bit soft or fluffy. Bits of ice rained down on him and into him, seeming to come from every direction at once. He used the shovel to brace himself when the wind gusted or he came across an extra slippery patch of ground, and although he nearly fell once or twice, he managed to avoid it. Barely.

  He circled the GMC to let himself in through the passenger-side door. The snow hadn’t piled up as badly on that side, had come up only to the wheel wells, in fact. Once Warren used the ice-scraper to chip away most of the ice holding the door shut, it opened with relatively little fight. He leaned the shovel against the truck and crawled into the cab.

  Out of the wind, the storm didn’t seem quite so bad. Cold, sure—disgustingly cold—but no colder than it had been a million times before. He sat there for a moment, unable to see out through the snow-covered windows, wisps of smokey breath drifting out of his mouth, feeling claustrophobic but happy to have escaped the swirling snow and biting ice. At least for a minute.

  But he couldn’t stay still for long. As his body relaxed, the warmth seeped out and the cold snuck in. He felt it around his neck and in the cuffs between his gloves and sleeves, felt it wrapping itself around him, squeezing, like a snake.

  He shivered, rubbed his arms, and reached for the keys.

  He couldn’t find them at first; for one frightening moment, he thought he must have dropped them somewhere between the house and the truck. If that had happened, he might never have seen the things again. But the keys were there, tucked so deep in the pocket of his snowsuit that he couldn’t get to them witho
ut taking off his glove and going in barehanded. He pulled the ring out, poked the GMC’s key into the ignition, and twisted.

  Nothing.

  He frowned and tried again.

  Twist.

  Nothing.

  Turn.

  Bupkis.

  He put his glove back on and stared at the dashboard. As if a warning light might come on and tell him what had gone wrong.

  Could cold weather keep the truck from starting? He wasn’t sure. He’d never pretended to be a mechanic. He knew how to fill the vehicle with gas and which of the pedals was the brake, but he was pretty clueless otherwise. He could admit it and wasn’t ashamed. Not everybody could know everything about everything. Engines had never been one of his specialties.

  Still, expert or not, he knew he’d started the truck when it had been this cold before. Colder even. He tried the key one more time and shook his head when nothing happened.

  He wondered if maybe he ought to look under the hood.

  What good would that do?

  At least he could see if there was something obviously wrong. A broken hose or a corroded battery.

  Do you remember the snow? There’s at least a foot of it out there on that hood. You’re going to shovel it all off for what’s bound to be a useless look at the engine?

  Yes, he was. Tess had been in an accident. His wife had been in an accident. He wasn’t going to risk complications to her condition to avoid some manual labor. What kind of sorry excuse for a husband would?

  He left the keys in the ignition and let himself out of the truck. The storm hit him harder than ever. The wind had stopped gusting and seemed to be blowing with a constant intensity Warren had never experienced, the kind of thing you might see in news footage of a hurricane. He ducked his head, grabbed the shovel, and went to work.

  It was hard to judge how long it took to clean off the hood. Partly because his watch was on the nightstand in their bedroom, but mostly because he had to pause so often to huddle against the blizzard. By the time he’d finished, cleared off all but the last few patches of ice (and the new snow already covering up what he’d just cleared off), he felt cold, sore, and beaten. Like he’d been raped by a yeti.