The Edge of Everything

by Jeff Giles

  She looked out at X one last time. She saw him stagger a few feet, then fall to one knee in the snow. She made herself turn away.

  Zoe opened the door of the house, a difficult maneuver now that Jonah was sleeping in her arms. She found the Post-it on the fridge where her mother kept all the contact information for the police, and—holding it between her teeth—struggled up the staircase with her brother.

  Jonah’s bed was small and shaped like a ladybug. When Zoe finally lowered him onto it, he rolled onto his side without waking, and began drooling onto the pillow.

  She sat on the floor by Jonah’s bed with her phone, and e-mailed the picture of Stan’s license plate to the police, along with a message that read: “This truck belongs to the man who killed Bert + Betty Wallace. With the poker from their fireplace. His name is Stan something. His truck is still at their house. He’s maybe 45 + about 6 feet tall. Skinny. Buzz cut. Messed-up eyebrow. You’re welcome.”

  Once she’d sent the e-mail, she scrolled through the clump of texts that had finally broken through. There were some from Dallas (who was “full-on stoked” from “rocking out” in the blizzard), Val (who had missed it entirely because she was napping), and her mother (who was just generally frantic). Part of Zoe felt abandoned by her mom, but she couldn’t help but smile as she read her stream of messages: Roads horrific. Can’t even get out of grocery store. So sorry, Zo … Still horrific. Still sorry … Don’t let J eat cereal before bed. Try gluten-free waffle … ARGH. Radio says snowplows aren’t even going out tonight. No way to get up mountain … Still in grocery store! Will live in grocery store forever, eating chemicals and pesticides, like real American … Are U OK? … U know what? If J wants cereal, he can have it … OMG Rufus just rescued me in his big-ass van, like a knight. NO, he’s NOT in love with me—I heard that! I’m going to crash on his couch … Tell me you’re OK? … Can’t sleep. Worrying about you. Did J want cereal?

  Zoe sat pondering what to text back.

  We’re OK, she wrote finally. More later. I gave Jonah some Pringles dipped in cake frosting. Is that cool? Rufus is OBSESSED with you. Go 2 sleep, now! XO.

  Zoe went on Snapchat and Instagram for a while, hoping that life might start to seem normal again. It didn’t. How could it, after Stan and X and the hole in the ice?

  She crossed the hall to her room and stood, tired and unsteady, in the doorway. On the wall at the foot of her bed there was a photo of her and her dad from one of their caving trips. They were wearing matching one-piece flight suits, which they’d bought at the Army Navy in Whitefish for 17 dollars a piece. Zoe had a battery-powered headlamp. Her father, being a dork, used an old-fashioned carbide lamp that looked like a miniature blowtorch. In the photo, he had a wide, geeky smile and some pretty crazy bed head. Her dad had always had bed head—he used to call it “hair salad.”

  Zoe heard Stan’s voice spreading like dye in her brain: “You barely knew who he was. And then he died in some goddamn cave? And nobody even bothered to go get his body? What the hell kind of people are you?”

  The words raced around her mind, like birds chasing one another.

  Was it her fault that she hadn’t known her father better? He was never around! Zoe’d had no choice but to rely more and more on her mom. Her mother had dropped out of medical school and worked multiple jobs to support the family while Zoe’s dad came and went. She’d thrown everything she had into being a mom—and she raised the kids to be resilient and strong. When Zoe was a baby, her mother dressed her in onesies that said Hero and Protagonist. Her father’s love might have been like a candle or a lantern, but her mom’s was better: it never went out.

  Zoe was too tired to think anymore, even if it was only 9:30. She stripped off her clothes for bed. Her whole body felt dirty and sore. Her legs were stubbly, her breath was horrendous, her shoulders were tender from where her bra straps had dug into her skin. She should have showered, brushed her teeth, something. But she couldn’t do even one more thing today. She fell headlong into bed, like someone who’d been shot.

  Her mother finally made it home in the middle of the night. Zoe heard the front door whoosh open in her sleep. She felt relief wash through her, and immediately had a dream in which she was a child again, laying her head on her mother’s lap. She wanted to talk to her mom, but couldn’t pull herself out of sleep. When she awoke again, hours later, it was because she heard voices—men’s voices—rising up through the floor.

  She tried to shut them out. She refused to open her eyes. She tried to grab on to the dream she’d been having but couldn’t quite catch its tail.

  There was music downstairs now, but it was weirdly out of place—Buddhist chanting set to keyboards, acoustic guitars, and finger cymbals. That meant her mom was trying to calm everybody down. Or she was trying to annoy them so much that they’d leave.

  Zoe was wedged up against the wall—at some point in the night Jonah had crawled in with her. He always started from the foot of the bed and tunneled up under the sheets, like a gopher. She could feel the heat of his body against her back. She could feel his tiny toes against her leg.

  The front door slammed. Somebody had gone outside for a cigarette. Zoe heard him coughing and crunching around in the snow. She smelled the smoke slither in through her window. The man pulled open the door again—so hard that it slammed against the side of house—and came back in without bothering to knock the snow off his boots.

  Zoe turned onto her back. Pain shot up her neck in sparks. Soon the voices were impossible to ignore. They were squabbling like pigeons. Zoe was never going to fall back asleep. What the hell was going on? She drew in a long breath and released it slowly. She finally opened her eyes.

  It was still night. That was a surprise—she’d assumed it would be morning. There was no moon. No wind. The snow gave off a faint blue light and the pines stood mysterious and still, as if they’d just been talking to one another. Zoe took her phone from where it was charging on the windowsill. It was 3 a.m.

  She tapped the flashlight app and swept the room with it. Her mother must have been in and out because there were plates, glasses, and bowls huddled on the floor, like a ruined city. Zoe had no memory of any of it. There was red pepper, aloe leaves, sprigs of mint, a bowl of water with some yellowish tincture suspended in it like a cloud: it looked like either a frostbite remedy or a voodoo ceremony.

  Nearby, there was a fat paperback lying open on a chair—a time-travel romance about a guy in a kilt. Its pages fluttered like overgrown grass in the wind. Her mother must have sat watching them for hours. She had also bandaged the cut on Zoe’s forehead—she’d been in med school just long enough to learn to administer excellent first aid.

  Zoe shone the flashlight over Jonah. His cheeks, which had been chapped by the wind, were glistening with aloe now, and his fingertips had been individually wrapped. For a moment, the light came too close to his eyes. He winced but kept on sleeping. One thing about her brother: he slept fiercely. He would sweat through his T-shirts—he was wearing one now that said I Do My Own Stunts—and make such an indignant harrumph of an expression that it always cracked her up. What was he mad at? Who was he fighting, or protecting, in his dreams?

  As Zoe shifted in bed, she felt something tug at her leg. She peeled back the comforter and sheet. Jonah must have been afraid that she’d sneak out of the room without telling him, so—as a kind of alarm system—he had tied a skateboard to her ankle with yarn. When he was scared, he hated waking up alone. It made him feel wobbly inside, he said.

  Gazing down at her brother now, Zoe felt competing waves of guilt and relief and fear and love. He was curled against her in a crescent like a baby deer. Look at him, she thought. She untied the skateboard from her ankle and tied it to his own. Tag, you’re it.

  Downstairs one of the men broke a glass on the countertop.

  It nearly woke Jonah. Zoe flushed with anger, and shot off a text to her mother.

  It said only: Who??

  The moment she sent it
, she heard her mother push her chair back from the kitchen table and bound up the stairs. After everything that had happened in the blizzard, the sound of her mother rushing to her was so comforting that Zoe’s anger dissipated in an instant and—before she even realized she was in danger of it—she started to cry.

  Her mother pushed open the door of the bedroom and then closed it behind her, so that the wedge of light made the trophies along the wall gleam briefly and then go out. Zoe didn’t want her mother to know how upset she was. She did what she always did in moments of uncertainty, she blurted something random: “So, you back from the store?”

  Her mother laughed.

  “I am,” she said. “Anything happen around here?”

  One of the things that Zoe loved most about her mother was that the woman understood her jokes even when they were totally bizarre. Very often they were the only people in the room laughing, while everyone else fidgeted uncomfortably. Not even her father—when he was alive and when he was around—had really understood Zoe’s sense of humor.

  “There’s a stowaway in here with me,” Zoe said, nodding toward Jonah. “We have to whisper.”

  “I can do that,” her mother said.

  She came to kneel by the bed.

  Zoe could just barely make out the outline of her mom’s face in the darkness. Neither of them spoke. The lightness of the moment drained away.

  “Is Jonah gonna be okay?” said Zoe.

  “Frostbite-wise, yes, he’ll be fine,” her mother said. “But he seems pretty traumatized by whatever you went through.” She paused, and her voice softened. “Can you tell me what happened?”

  Zoe searched for an answer that would sound remotely sane. Downstairs, one of the men turned off the Eastern chanting. The other men let out grunts of relief and applauded.

  “Who’s down there?” said Zoe.

  “That’s not important right now,” her mother said. “But apparently they’re not Buddhists.”

  She waited for Zoe to answer the question still hovering in the air.

  “Talk to me,” she said.

  Zoe’s instinct was always to tell her mother everything, and she wished she could pour out every crazy, hallucinogenic detail about the lake glowing orange, about the movie of Stan’s sins—about X. But what could she say about him? What did she even know apart from the fact that he radiated loneliness? And that she’d been drawn to him.

  She fought back the image of his face. She knew if she said too much, she’d make no sense at all.

  “The short version,” Zoe said, “is that Jonah and the dogs went in the woods—and I let them.”

  Her mother let a few moments go by, like she was waiting for a train to pass.

  “Okay, look, I’m sorry to be pushy,” she said. “But I’m going to need a slightly longer version.”

  “I can’t, Mom,” Zoe said. “Not yet.”

  “Zo—”

  “I mean, the longer version is that I suck and I almost got him killed.”

  “Zoe, stop. Don’t do that to yourself.”

  “All I keep thinking is that when Jonah wakes up, he’s going to look at me like I let him down. And I did. I let the little bug down.”

  She shouldn’t have spoken at all. She began sobbing in that awful, hiccupy way. Her mother reached over Jonah to touch her face, but had trouble locating it in the darkness.

  “I’m trying to stroke your cheek sweetly,” she said. “Is this your cheek? Am I stroking it sweetly?”

  “No, that’s my forehead,” Zoe said. “And that is my nose.”

  “Okay, well, picture me stroking your cheek,” her mother said.

  “I’m picturing it,” Zoe said, and laughed despite herself as her mother’s hand groped around blindly. “Now stop it, Helen Keller. Please. That’s my ear.”

  “Zoe,” her mother said, “your brother loves you like a crazy person—and that will never, ever change. The kid tied a skateboard around your leg.”

  Zoe started to say something but was interrupted by a commotion downstairs. She and her mother listened as one of the men stood, his chair screeching against the floor, and said, “Enough of this horseshit, boys.” They listened to the heavy tread of the man’s boots coming up the stairs. Zoe’s mother didn’t allow shoes in the house, so the noise sounded almost like violence.

  “I wish I could give you more time,” her mom said. “But I can’t, baby. You’re going to have to tell your story—because the police are here.”

  Zoe’s mother shooed the cop out of the bedroom immediately, and asked Zoe to come downstairs when she was ready. Zoe hadn’t seen the police since her father died, and knowing they were in the house stirred some prickly memories. The police were the ones who’d left her dad’s body in the cave. The cop who had just banged on Zoe’s door—Chief Baldino—had decided it was too dangerous to go get it.

  Zoe slipped out of bed, careful not to wake Jonah, and dressed in the dark. Minutes later, she padded down the stairs, and peeked out at the kitchen table, where her mother sat with Baldino and two of his troopers. Baldino was big, blustery, unpleasant—and actually bald. Just now, he was scratching like a dog at a scaly red rash below the collar of his shirt.

  The chief sat next to a skinny young trooper whose last name was Maerz. Zoe remembered him being slightly dopey, but harmless. The chief obviously detested him.

  The third cop at the table was Sergeant Vilkomerson. He was the only one who’d ever bothered to tell the Bissells his first name—it was Brian—and the only one to hug them at her dad’s funeral service in town. When Zoe entered the kitchen, Vilkomerson stood and pulled out a chair for her. Unlike Baldino and Maerz, he’d taken his shoes off out of respect for the rules of the house, which were posted at every door.

  Officer Maerz had been asking Zoe’s mom boring background questions about Zoe—where she went to school and if she had any hobbies. Zoe’s mom had been stalling so Zoe could get dressed and think through what she wanted to say. Her mother had her laptop in front of her on the table. It was open, for all to see, to a page entitled, “The Rights of Minors During Police Questioning.”

  Zoe loved her mother’s feistiness and felt proud that she’d inherited it. Her mom worked six days a week managing a dumpy spa called Piping Hot Springs (“Relax and rejuvenate in one of our healing pools!”). She also worked as a hostess at a great café called Loula’s, in Whitefish, and directed traffic on a road crew whenever they repaved Route 93. Even so, Zoe knew her family was always short on cash. She knew her mom felt like she was running down a train track, just a couple of steps ahead of the train.

  Zoe’s mother told Officer Maerz that Zoe’s hobby was collecting trophies, which seemed to impress him. The truth was that Zoe literally collected trophies—she thought they were ugly and ridiculous and awesome so she bought them at yard sales and thrift stores. If you went into her room and didn’t know any better, you’d be amazed that one girl could be so good at swimming, public speaking, archery, macramé, ballooning, and raising livestock.

  Zoe’s mom began rambling magnificently now. She described hobbies of Zoe’s that were entirely made-up. One of her supposed collections—32 of the 50 official state spoons—so piqued Maerz’s interest that Zoe was afraid that he’d ask to see it.

  Zoe sat down next to her mother.

  “I am all about state spoons,” she told Maerz. “I’m starting to worry that I’m too into them.”

  Zoe’s mom bit her lip, and kicked Zoe gently under the table.

  “Yeah, okay,” Chief Baldino said gruffly. “I think we’re done with the icebreakers.”

  He signaled to Maerz that he’d be taking over the interrogation since Maerz clearly wasn’t up to it. (Zoe’s mom shot her a familiar look—the look that said, Alphas are the worst.) Maerz shrank in his chair, looking hurt.

  Baldino slid a piece of paper across the table to Zoe.

  “Can you confirm that you sent this e-mail to us at nine fifteen last night?” he said.

  Zoe glan
ced down. When she looked back up at Baldino, all she saw was the man who had abandoned her dad’s body.

  “Yes, I sent that e-mail,” she said, “which is why it has my name on it.”

  Baldino put on reading glasses that seemed weirdly dainty for such a fat, overstuffed armchair of a man, and read the e-mail aloud. Zoe’s mom grimaced when she heard the name Stan—if her dad had known him way back when, in Virginia, her mother must have, too—and again when Baldino got to the sarcastic final sentence, “You’re welcome.”

  “I assume those are your words?” said Baldino. “Since they have your name on them?”

  “Yes,” said Zoe.

  “So how about you tell us how you know all this?”

  Zoe’s mom made a show of scrolling down the webpage, then nodded to her. Zoe knew she couldn’t tell the whole truth, but she could at least tell nothing but the truth.

  “Jonah and I were trying to find the dogs,” she said.

  She glanced at Officer Maerz, who had been sullenly taking notes ever since he’d been removed from power, and then at Sergeant Vilkomerson, who gave her an encouraging you’re-doing-good sort of nod. Baldino folded his arms tightly across his chest and puffed his stomach out so far that he looked seven or eight months pregnant.

  “We got caught in the blizzard,” Zoe said. “We went to Bert and Betty’s place to warm up. We used to stay there all the time.” The memory was so painful that she couldn’t help but add, “After my father died—and you guys refused to go get his body.”

  Baldino was unfazed by the remark, but everybody else shifted unhappily in their chairs. Zoe’s mom leaned over and whispered, “Don’t, honey. That’s not fair.”

  Zoe pulled away from her, surprised.

  “How is that not fair?” she said.

  Baldino interrupted before her mother could answer.