“I did it. I put it in your bag.” Anna puts her hands together as if in prayer, pleading. “I’m sorry? I mean, yeah, Dan knew—I got him to let me have the master key. That’s why he made that shitty joke tonight. But I had to beg him! You were having those dreams, and I just wanted to see if it would, you know—trigger something for you. An image, something cool. Something I could use? I really didn’t think—”
But Maeve is whirling with relief.
“Holy fuck. I’ve been driving myself crazy.”
“To be honest, I thought—” Anna pauses, trying to find the words. “I guess I thought you’d see the gag right away. Then when you didn’t, I don’t know. I just let it play out?”
Maeve puts her face in her hands, then looks up. She starts to laugh.
“No, it’s fine. It’s good, actually. I built this up into a huge thing. So stupid of me. Like I said, my ex—Iain—” She shakes her head. “I’m just used to things being scary, I guess.”
“I’m so sorry,” Anna says again. “We’ve got to get you used to something better. It was a dumb prank.” She gets up to go, then changes her mind, hovering there. “You’ve been through a lot, huh?”
Maeve moves up onto the bed.
“Iain? I only wish—” She glances away and then back again, meeting Anna’s eye. It’s been a long time since she had a girlfriend like this. “The real truth is I’m just sorry I didn’t kill him myself.”
There’s a silence and Maeve wonders if the admission was a mistake. Too much. But Anna comes close again, perches on the edge of the mattress.
“Just remember,” she says, “you got yourself out. That’s the person you are: you got yourself out.” She stays there a moment longer, then nods to Maeve. “You sure you don’t want me to bunk right in with you?”
Maeve says no. She needs to feel like an adult. She needs to feel at home in her skin.
“We’re getting out of here tomorrow,” Anna says. “I promise. But tonight, take this—” She hands Maeve her mug of whiskey, still half full. “I don’t need any more. And you could use some sleep.”
She douses the lantern before she goes, closing the door between their rooms softly behind her. Maeve sips the whiskey in bed, the buzz reaching her cheekbones. Just as she’s drifting off, there’s a knock or some sound from next door.
“Anna?” She lifts her head a little, but her eyes are heavy. There’s no other noise. Maeve thinks, It’s the bear, outside. A nonsense thought.
She knocks on the wall, shave-and-a-haircut.
“Good night,” she calls to Anna, or to no one, since Anna is already asleep. She sets the empty mug aside and sinks down into her duvet, wrapping herself up. Safe.
Sim’s wrong about her. She didn’t get frostbite. No tether can hold her down.
She’s built for whatever comes.
Day 6
IN THE MORNING, there is still no change—no signal and no road crew blasting up the hill in a high-powered plow. Maeve doesn’t wake to any sound of rescue. She wakes up because it’s cold.
This is the first thing Maeve notices and it’s the first morning she’s woken like this: shivering under her extra blankets, under the feather duvet. Her breath hangs in the air. Not a puff, but pure mist.
Karolina is up and by the fire, so the lobby is warm when Maeve comes down. Dan with a serious look to him, drinking tea but not speaking. Karo looks like she hasn’t slept. She wants to call a meeting, but the others are still straggling in: Sim, carrying a piece of whalebone he’s whittling into some small detail, his own fingers bone white with cold. Justin still in his robe. Sadie, silently trucking hot water from the fire to the kitchen to wash some cups, then crouching by the hearth to make coffee. When nine o’clock rolls around, Maeve runs up to get Anna—it’s strange that she’s not down here yet. Every other morning, she’s been up and around long before nine.
“Anna?” Maeve leans on the door in the hallway, knocking. When there’s no answer, she tries going into her own room and knocking on the adjoining door. “Anna! It’s late.”
When there is still no answer, Maeve wonders if she can just barge in.
She hesitates at the door. What if it’s just that Anna couldn’t sleep last night, or she’s finally lost her nerve? Maybe she hasn’t overslept. Maybe she wants to be alone. There’s a part of Maeve that gets it. Why not just stay in bed until this is all over?
“Oh, Anna, for God’s sake,” she says, opening the adjoining door and swinging into the room.
But Anna is not in bed. The bed, in fact, is barely rumpled, as though she’d gotten up and thrown the covers back into place to keep her spot warm while she—what? Went to pee? Got a drink of water?
The bathroom door stands open, but Anna is not in there either. Maeve hesitates for a moment and then, childishly, pulls the wardrobe door open. But there’s only Anna’s winter coat hanging in there, alone among the empty hangers, and the boots she wore the day before on the hike.
Maeve crosses back, passing through her own room again—as though Anna could somehow have snuck by her, a game—and then goes downstairs, expecting to find her there now, drinking the last of the coffee by the fire. But in the lobby, Sadie is the only one by the hearth, stirring her own cup with a tinkling spoon. Karo looks up.
“Well?”
“She isn’t here?” Maeve says.
“Where?”
“I mean, she didn’t come down while I was gone?”
Karo gets to her feet.
“She isn’t up there,” Maeve says. “So she must be down here somewhere.”
“Christ,” Dan says. “How many times do I have to say everyone stays together till this is over?”
Karo doesn’t say a word to this but simply turns and walks into the dining room, the heels of her boots clicking against the wood floor. Justin looks up from where he’s been relacing his own boots by the fire.
“I haven’t seen her since last night,” he says. “Sadie? How about you?”
Sadie taps her spoon against the rim of her mug a final time before answering.
“I think she was planning to sleep somewhere else. If you know what I mean.”
Karo arrives back from her quick tour of the kitchen just in time to hear this.
“What do you mean?” she says. She glances sharply at Dan.
“She came down and got an extra key—”
Maeve cuts in. “She wanted to keep me company. I was anxious,” she says. “Anna slept in the room next to mine.”
Sadie’s face changes on hearing this—less smug, more stung. It’s not what she was expecting. Karo pulls the master key from the desk.
“So you didn’t really check her room at all,” she snaps. “You just checked your own and the one next to it.”
She starts for the stairwell, but when Maeve jumps up to join her, she spins around.
“No,” she says. “Everyone else waits here.”
Maeve stays put, but her heart is ringing in her chest. Stupid of her not to check Anna’s usual room. She turns slowly back to the fire. Sim meets her eye from where he’s working, knife in hand. Then he looks away, goes back to it.
After a minute, they hear Karo’s steps echoing down the stairs. She’s running.
“She’s not in either room. She’s not in the common room on any floor. Are there any other rooms she has a key to?” She looks at each of the men in turn.
“Why am I a suspect?” Justin says.
“It’s not funny,” Karo says. “What if she went outside?”
“Why would she go outside?” Justin stomps a foot heavily into his boot. “To make sure the wasteland is still intact? To play damsel in distress?”
“Her coat is still—” Maeve starts, but Dan speaks over her.
“She sleepwalks sometimes.”
Karo’s face stiffens, but she doesn’t turn or acknowledge him. To Justin: “She smokes,” she says tautly.
There’s a moment when no one says anything.
“Even if sh
e did go out, Nielssen screwed up the lock,” Dan says. His voice is calm and even, meant to restore order. “I looked at it yesterday afternoon, couldn’t fix it. You wouldn’t have any trouble getting back in.” But he’s already on his feet. “Right. For once, we split up—everyone take a floor, that way there’s no possibility of missing her. Meet back here in twenty.”
Maeve takes the back stairwell on her own, the soft clang of her footsteps echoing against the walls. It’s quiet and she wishes she’d thought to check for Anna’s bag when she was still up in the room, her cigarettes, any hint of where she might have gone. It crosses her mind, briefly, that this might all be a game: hide-and-seek, a great joke on Anna’s part. That they will return to the lobby to find her there, feet up by the fire, laughing. Y’all need to lighten up.
She’s in the second-floor hallway calling Anna’s name when Sim comes around the corner from the other stairs. Before he can say anything, she holds a hand up and pulls back.
“Not now.”
He slows down, and then he surprises her.
“Of course. Maeve—”
She’s already turning to go but he reaches out and brushes her arm, gently, then lets his hand fall to his side. She looks back over her shoulder, wary.
“I wanted to apologize, actually.”
This isn’t what she’s expecting and it catches her off guard. She stays there, mid-turn, a protective stance.
“For last night,” he says. He comes a little closer, but not much. “I was drunk, and pushy. I was an asshole. You don’t need that.”
Maeve has an urge to scan the hall, to see if this is for someone else’s benefit. After a moment, she lets herself glance to her other side, but they are alone.
“It’s all right,” she says finally. “Thank you. Thanks for saying that.”
“Everything is—it’s just a lot right now, and I shouldn’t have pushed you like that.”
“Okay.”
It occurs to her that they were all supposed to split up and search for Anna, but he has come searching for Maeve instead.
“I should go—” she begins, meaning to break away.
“So we’re all right, then?”
She’s about to say, Yes, whatever, just go back to looking for Anna, when she hears the shouting.
At first, she thinks it is good news.
Maeve spins, leaving Sim to jog behind her as she goes flying down the stairs and arrives breathless in the lobby. Not only shouting. A pounding noise—Dan is kicking at the glass, the whole door shuddering with the effort. Anna’s frozen body in his arms.
The lock has engaged after all. Sadie has to push the door open from the inside to let him in.
“We need blankets!” He’s cursing as he rushes inside: “Move! Where the fuck was everybody?”
He saw something from the third-floor window, he says—the words pouring out almost too fast for them to catch. A shadow or some weird chunk of ice. He ran outside and that’s where he found her: Anna, half burrowed against the wall, almost out of sight. Her knees curled tight into her chest.
Dan lays her down by the fire to start CPR, but her legs are still half pulled into her body, and he has to try and straighten them to give himself room. Close by, Sadie sinks to the ground as though her own legs have given out.
She is not wearing a coat. Anna. Her hair and shoulders frosted with the night’s snow.
Maeve stares, stunned. Maybe Karo was right—Anna went for a smoke. But then something happened. Something went wrong.
Dan is already pounding on Anna’s chest, counting under his breath. The violence of it: fingers splayed, arms and shoulders rigid with exertion. Hard enough that Maeve is afraid he’ll break Anna’s ribs. His face twists. One-two-three-four—
No one is running for blankets.
Karo drops to her knees beside him.
“Dan—” She wraps one hand around Anna’s wrist and lays the other at her throat, waiting for the throb of a pulse, even a weak one.
But Anna is beyond blue. Her limbs flex stiffly under each thrust, like she’s made of hard plastic, a CPR practice mannequin he’s throwing around.
“Dan,” Karo says again. Less gently this time.
It doesn’t register; he just pounds and pounds and pounds, still counting.
“Dan!” Karo pulls back. Her hand on Anna’s wrist loosens; her other hand, at Anna’s throat, has a tremor in it. “Dan, it’s too late. It’s too late, she’s gone. She must have been dead for hours. Dan!”
But he still goes on as though he hasn’t heard. It seems to Maeve he really hasn’t, that he can’t hear anything but his own voice.
“Stop!” Maeve yells. Her hands are clenched tight.
Justin lunges in from somewhere and grabs him by the shoulder, but Dan pushes him off. When Justin drops to his haunches and tries again, Dan wheels around on one knee and punches him, hard, his fist connecting to Justin’s jaw with enough force to send the other man reeling onto his back. From the edge of the room, Sadie screams.
Sim leaps between the two men, and Maeve finds herself on the ground, shielding Anna’s body with her own, as he wrestles Dan away and finally shoves him against the couch and holds him there.
“She’s dead, okay?” Justin’s voice, cracking, as he pushes up from where he’s sprawled on the ground. He spits into the fire. His saliva is bloody: a tooth has come through his lip where Dan hit him. “She’s dead,” he says again. He wipes at his mouth and then his eyes with the back of a hand. “You don’t have to break her apart! She’s gone. It’s too fucking late.”
He spits again, and the tooth comes free, hitting the stone hearth like a thrown pebble. Justin brings the hand back to his mouth—like he’s checking that this has really happened, he’s not seeing things.
“Holy shit, you knocked my tooth out—I lost my tooth!” He surges toward Dan again, but Sim pushes him back, keeping the two men apart.
“Stop fighting!” Sadie rises on her knees, the final syllable extending into a high-pitched shriek as though the sheer sound will call them off. But it’s Karo who stops it, shouting hoarsely over everyone—“No! No more!”—until the room rings with new silence.
Maeve pulls up from where she’s crouched over Anna and looks down. Anna’s eyes are open and unmoving. Maeve waits, staring back at her purposefully. Willing Anna to blink, her lips to tremble. Blink, goddamn it! Anything, anything at all to prove them wrong, show she’s still there. A hum rises in Maeve’s ears, the swoosh of her own pulse. There’s a long moment where it feels as though she is in a room of her own: glassed in, separate. Then she hears something behind her and turns to see it’s Sadie—rigid with fear, alone and weeping. Finally showing her youth. Maeve almost reaches out to her, thinking of the first strange moment they saw each other. What she needed was kindness—it’s what she needs now, but Maeve has failed at it all, every chance. She turns back to Anna.
A few yards away, Dan pushes Sim off and pounds a fist back against the couch—once, twice—but it all seems remote. Like something she can see from a distance, out of the corner of her eye, through water.
Anna does not blink.
When she feels Karo’s hand on her arm, Maeve raises her head, but Karo barely blinks herself. Just looks at Maeve, nods. Behind them, Sadie sobbing low: “I hate this place.”
Karo takes Sadie’s hand and tugs her away.
The door is still standing open and snow swirls into the room.
Maeve gets to her feet, wooden, to close it. At the couch, Dan rises to meet her. Sim stops him again, a hand on his chest, but Dan shakes him off.
“Fuck off.” He reaches the door at the same moment as Maeve and goes to shove her aside.
But Maeve just stands in the cold and thumbs the latch. “It works now,” she says. Quietly: “You fixed it after all.”
She steps out of his way. Dan pushes the door closed and it locks, and he opens it again. Closed, open, closed. Open. Trying to understand.
Sim lifts his face to hers
and their eyes meet before she looks away again. She’s shivering. Dan’s shoulders tighten, but he doesn’t turn around.
The cold feels like the only thing. Maeve moves closer to the window. Outside, she can see a trail in the new layer of snow leading around toward the front of the building. The path is packed down hard, almost into ice, as though Anna tried the doors over and over again, pacing between them to keep warm.
When she can’t stand it anymore, Maeve turns to find they’ve all moved back, away from Anna—Karo, Sadie, Justin, Sim—all of them now sitting with their knees drawn in, keeping warm, their eyes fixed anywhere but on her body.
For a few minutes nobody speaks.
“She must have made noise,” Maeve says suddenly. “She must have banged on the doors, she must have yelled out.” The words burst out of her, hateful. “I mean, you can see where she went back and forth. You can see it.”
From the doorway, Dan glances down at Anna, then anywhere else. The back of the lobby. The front desk. The ceiling. Sim picks up his piece of bone and goes back to carving, the knife grinding a coarse dust that catches on his clothes. Karo plays with her necklace.
Maeve keeps on, louder.
“But no one heard her. None of us. We just slept through it all. Like fucking monsters.”
She grows cold at the thought and tries to push it away. Her eyes flick to each of them in turn, from Karo to Sadie to Sim to Dan. Then back to Justin, nursing his wound.
An accident. But really? No one heard her out there in the night? No one heard her knocking or calling out for help?
No one?
As if in response, the wind outside picks up, howling its way into the room, and with it a wash of new snow. Dan fights to get the door closed a final time. The only one focused on Anna is Justin, his face swollen now, and a furious sorrow in his eyes.
Dan moves heavily toward the fire.
“Where would you like me to put her,” he says. Slow and even.
Karo drops the necklace back against her collarbone.
“I don’t know. My office or some other room. Someplace safe.”
“You can’t just leave her lying on a bed,” Justin says. “We have to put her where it’s really cold.”
The Retreat Page 14