The sky is as gray as ever and the snow dissolves as soon as it hits my hands. I think it’s on the verge of rain again because, even on the boat floor, nothing seems to be sticking now. The powder turns to water. It must be the stove—spreading its heat out through the wood. But that can’t be it. The weather is changing. The ice has passed, and we’re on to warmer waters. More rain again. And when I finish another pattern, scanning the distant nothing, the sea reveals itself farther. Evaporating mist, and just the flat brown. No more foaming swells, and no more shadows of the ice monsters.
I imagine that I’m wrong, and that the shore might really reappear, until I convince myself that I’m sure it will. That it’s just a matter of time. How long will it take for the white shore to come back, guide us around? But each minute means there’s less of a chance, I remind myself. And a dot on the map appears in my head—it moves away from the coast—out into nothing—toward Nebraska. The great wide suction that waits for us there.
Maybe we’re already in the pull—maybe we don’t even have to drift any farther—the great Waterspout alley. I tell myself the stories, the ones I remember hearing by the fire on the Sea Queen, the ones Cap’n told about the vortex where the Great Plains once were: that once it catches you, its current drags you in, spits you out past Tennessee. And by then, you’ll have wrecked, he’d said. But if you didn’t, you’d be spit out past Carolina, and that’d be worse—right into the foaming Atlantic. One graveyard or the other.
It starts to run through my mind what the drug must feel like. What Ernest must have felt like when he took it. How it made him immune to the exposure. Immune to his body’s warnings. Pulling us like a horse until his body gave out. All through the night. He had to know what he was doing. But he’d wanted to live as much as we did. Why did he make the sacrifice? He’d been so happy. He’d been so nice to me. Really seemed to like me. It doesn’t make sense why he’d do something he knew would kill him—make him go. Leave us.
It must be part of what the drug does. The reason he didn’t stop and take rest. It must screw up your judgment. Make you forget all caution. Drive yourself right down into the snow, collapse into the powder and lose everything.
It hits me that he might have used some on the way to Nuke Town. To lead us through the blizzard. But he can’t have. He didn’t need it then. He hadn’t been shot yet.
The fog stops retreating and everything is a stale snapshot of gray and brown in each direction. Time freezes. I can’t tell how many minutes are passing anymore. My eyes feel so heavy, but each time they drop, and warm black overtakes me, I force them back open, remembering the enormous ice needle. It stands out in my head, and then I see the enormous ice mountain. Its shadow, racing away. It keeps me awake.
I look under the tarp flap to see if anybody’s moving. Russell’s legs poke out, and Voley’s brown mass is just a shadow underneath. Both asleep. The bags slide out some, riding the white slush, and I shove them back under. The white sticks again, covering everything. When I stand back up and look at the sea, the fog has all burned off. Clear miles in every direction and no sign of a storm or shadow. It hits me—this is it—this is when we would see the shoreline, if we’re ever going to see it again. And I check and check, trying to see its trace. Just a small bump. Part of me thinks I see something, but then I realize that the color I see appears in every direction. Just some trick of the eye where the brown and the gray meet. There is no shoreline. There is nothing. Just the canvas brown. Not even a sign of the mountains. I close my eyes, and give in. The cold wakes me.
Everything in my body is stiff, and when I check the tarp, the flame is still going, and Voley and Russell haven’t moved at all. But the sky has darkened a shade, and I wiggle my toes and fingers, trying to bring some life back into them. I almost forget to survey the ocean. When I finally unlock my joints enough to wipe the snow from my head, I get to work wiping it off the boat. It moves easily from my glove to the sea, and I watch the sea dissolve the clumps of white. And when the boat is cleared, and the tarp is no longer sagging down, I realize I haven’t looked out to sea. And there it is. A long shelf, crawling across the horizon.
Without the fog, I see the thing clearly. I move to wake Russell, but pause, trying to understand how it could be so long. Questioning whether it’s an ice floe or an island. A swell raises the boat and I have a clear view—and there, next to it, I see the small needles. So far away that they must be the same size as the big one from before. And when the boat falls, I get the awful sense that we’re drifting toward the ice shelf. Instead of waking Russell I try to grab the oars but I can’t. My fingers have no power to grip anymore. And then, with the next rising swell, it becomes clear to me: it’s not one long shelf. It’s a thousand pieces, all smashed together. A pack of ice forever. And in the other direction, toward which my own hands are useless to take us, the empty sea.
I call Russell and shout that there’s more ice, but my voice is cut out by a sound. It starts soft, but I can’t say another a word—I stop and listen. It comes from the sky. Far away, like thunder. My eyes go to the brown, checking to make sure the swells are flat, and that a storm isn’t raging in some distant speck of sea that I hadn’t noticed. Everything’s flat and calm. And then I scan the gray sky, expecting some terrible darkness, the sign of a thunderhead, flashing death, warning for what’s about to come: a squall, or something nastier, that will bury us below the ice shelf. Spill us into the stabbing ocean. But there’s nothing in the sky either—no color to mark a storm, no dark light flash, not in any direction. But the thunder sound continues. Then it starts to increase, getting louder. When I realize what it is, I drop to my knees and nearly lose the tarp, unhooking a knot to get to Russell in time.
Russell! I yell over his face. Voley wakes up first, startled that I’m so excited when I should be resting, enjoying the new warmth and the quiet lapping against the hull. Russell moans but doesn’t wake, and I shake him until he finally opens his eyes and looks at me—shock spreading on his face as he realizes he’s been asleep for too long.
Listen to that, I order him. And his head turns, his eyes on the tarp ceiling where the stove smoke rolls along and then out into the sky. He stares baffled, and then, from blank expression his face twists to recognition—plane!
I tug on him until he’s moving on his own, and then we stand at the back, the direction of the sound, and steady ourselves as the boat rocks. We train our eyes up, looking for something. Anything. Something to shoot by. A silver bullet hurtling through the gray.
I push the thought of rescue away as soon as it comes—I know they won’t be able to see us. I don’t even mention the possibility to Russell. But I ask him what it means, and who’s flying it. He just keeps his head on the clouds, watching for the roaring shape to appear. Like he has no words left to make a guess. Like a guess is a distraction we can’t afford, because the thing will be gone in another moment. And then, it will be as if it never happened. After it passes, and the noise fades and then disappears altogether, he answers me. Says he has no idea. But the direction, he tells me. He says it like it’s some important fact—as if the way the sound traveled is important to us. I ask him what he thinks that means, and he says, They flew that way. But when he points, it’s like he’s noticing for the first time what’s looming in the distance. In just the direction of the plane. The impossible pack.
We can’t go that way, I tell him, because I think he’s considering it. Going toward the pack because the plane did. He looks in every other direction, weighing our options. I look with him, expecting something to be different. Some sign of the coast, some sign of a storm cloud. But it’s just the nothingness gray, everywhere, except for the ice. We can row back, I tell him. He tells me there is no back, because we don’t know which direction we came from anymore. And then he says it, that fast, letting go of his original plan: We won’t see her again.
I know what he really means—that we’ve lost the Resilience. That Ernest’s haul was for nothing, becau
se losing the shore means losing the Resilience, and losing the ship means losing our only shot. Nothing to navigate by now. No markings. Just the ice pack and the sound of a plane. People flying a plane. Somewhere over the pack.
My mind tricks me into the revelations I know Russell must be having—that a plane means a runway, and a runway means a city. Part of me wants to tell Russell he’s right, we should follow the sound. Before we forget which direction it went. Before we lose sight of the ice altogether. I ask him if we’re seeing it wrong, and that’s not ice at all way out there. That maybe it’s land. The ice-coast of some new island. Something that wasn’t on the map. A new stretch of the Rockies. But I stop myself—it’s too flat. No mountain looks like that. Hugs the water like a long table. And then, Russell asks me: What do you think?
He wants me to decide again. Because each way is as hopeless as the other. There is the sound and the ice, or there is the nothing. And either one could go on for hundreds of miles. So will the plane, I tell myself, and we’ll never catch up to it. Never reach wherever it was flying to. Before I can respond and tell Russell that this one’s on him, and that I’ll go whichever way his gut’s telling him, a splash interrupts. Somewhere out on the water, somewhere close. Did you hear that? I ask. But he’s already looking, trying to find the source. I look for it with him—nothing but long swells and the gloom surround us. We stare and grow cold watching the emptiness. I start to think the plane was a hallucination we shared, and this is another one. The exposure is killing us. Or maybe I’m in another dream. Freezing to death somewhere back in the snow. But then I spot the ripples. Just a tiny disruption in the flat.
Before I can even tell him where to look, a rocket erupts from the ocean. And then another. Two pale blue forms vault up—beautiful missiles, shining where there is no light—and then they splash again and disappear. But they come back. Over and over, the two creatures jump—high out of the water, soaring, kissing the salt air, and then dropping back underneath the darkness. They carry on—up and down, into the air and arcing back down next to each other like it’s a race. Their long smooth noses are so close I feel like I can reach out and touch them. And then I know—they must be friends of the whale. My Wyoming whale. Tell him I say hi, I shout. Russell looks at me like I’m crazy, but I don’t care. They’re incredible, impossible. And once they’re done playing, and never resurface again, it’s all the nudging that Russell needs, because he says, They’re heading toward the ice, it’s a sign. I remind him that he doesn’t believe in signs. That when he tells me sleep is for the dead, he also tells me that signs are for those who can’t survive. He doesn’t tell me I’m wrong, but he says it’s still up to me. My choice. Which way? he asks again.
I dig my gloves into my pockets and look up. Trying to find the smear of the sun. Everything is the same up there. No trace of light. A perpetual half-night. I wait for the sky to tell me something, to clue me in. A sign for me. Because Russell’s weakening, his submission to supernatural coincidences, becomes contagious—a cure for desperation. The great surrender of our own power. If I can just convince myself that there’s a sign. Something that will tell me the right choice, the right way to go. Because I want to make it. Still. Even without Dusty, even without Ernest. I want to make it as much as ever. But there’s never been a sign. Just death and moving. Trying to get to the next warm and dry place. And the only real sign here is that the plane and the dolphin show me that Russell is reaching after certainty where there is none, that he’s losing his wits. I tell myself this over and over, hoping to take a stand against his signs, to tell him we’ve drifted in a straight line from the Rockies. And that if we just row in the opposite direction of the ice pack, we’ll find the coast again. Follow it all the way around to the Resilience. To all the food stored in it, all the fuel, all its warm beds, shielded from the weather, going to waste right now under the sturdy deck. The maps on the shelves. The instruments to navigate. The ammo. The blankets. The dry clothes. The gear to fish. Sitting uselessly somewhere off the bank of the mountains, where it’s still raining, just waiting for us. As I’m about to tell Russell I’ve made up my mind, that we’re going to turn around, Voley barks. He’s up on his haunches, leaving the tent by sliding himself through the snow. He looks in the direction of the ice, the dolphins, and the plane. Russell’s delusions. And he keeps on barking. I watch the water, looking for it to break, or to find some ripples that he must see, but there’s nothing. The cold is making him lose it too.
He knows, Russell says. And then, like that, the decision is made. I never tell him what I want. He says we have time. There’s plenty of time before we get to the ice, he tells me. Just sleep a little. Get something to eat. Where the ice is, there has to be more land. And he says it’s the only time we’ll both be able to get sleep for a long while, as if he knows the future. Sleep now, while the weather’s calm, the seas are flat, and the ice is still far away. We’re drifting that way. That’s enough for now.
I tell him that if we sleep too long, we’ll wreck. Or the snow will tip us. But he comes in close and looks at me, his eyes telling me I’m wrong. His hair falls down from the wet, hanging across his eyes, and he brushes it away. His brown eyes beat into me and he wipes the snow off of my face. Then he shoves his hand into his pocket. I think he’s taking out one of the maps, something to convince me we’re making the right decision. I wait for it, knowing it’s meaningless before he presents it, because we can’t position ourselves on it. But it’s not what I think—it’s a faded square. Too small to be a map. Something I know I’ve seen before. He hands it to me. I cup my hand to block out the snow and lift it up to see. The photograph.
“Alice. That’s her name,” he says. “I want to tell you…” And like that, he grabs my hand and leads me back out of the snow, underneath the tarp roof. Voley wiggles his way back in without yelping, his barks dying down and then quieting altogether. No trace of what alarmed him out on the ocean.
The smoke rolls over us and Russell pushes his body against mine, and then Voley somehow manages to pull himself right on top of both of us. I lean and pull to help him until he’s sitting half on my chest and half on Russell’s. And together, the three of us lie, staring up at the dots of snow that drift down onto the tarp, tiny shadows on the ceiling, slowly connecting and darkening until the smoke rolls by and melts them. And Russell tells me about his daughter.
Chapter 21
“The green in her eyes,” he says. “And her voice. Mostly a laugh.”
I listen and stare at the picture, wiping away two droplets of water. The color is gone, and the image is faded, almost a blur. But still, I think I can see the green there. And auburn hair. But the face is clear—high cheeks and a jaw just like Russell’s. And then, he carries on, deeper into memories. I close my eyes and clutch tightly to the picture so that the wind can’t rip in and take her away. The picture is enough for my mind to see the rest. I shut my eyes and there she is. She looks just like him.
“She had these games. She always made a new one though, as soon as I learned the old one. She got tired of them so fast, wanted to do something new. At four years old, I swear—one of them, it was baseball. I never told her that. She had this all on her own, somehow in her head. Wack the ball and run away. And she yelled at me and laughed—chase me, Daddy. I would chase her down. I never told her,” he says. “You know…” he says, turning his head into me. I open my eyes and he’s Alice’s father now. I can’t get around it. It’s her face, watching me. “You remind me of her.”
Part of me wants to tell him things he already knows—like it wasn’t his fault she died, or that he’s done so much for me and I can never repay him. That he saved my life so many times. But I get it from his face—he starts to smile—and I know for sure—it’s not a sadness. I don’t have to fix it. He sees her still too. Something in me. I want to ask him if that’s why he picked me out of the rain, because of his daughter. Why he’s taken care of me for all these years. But I can’t bring myself to say a
nything. I just wait, watching his eyes roll up to the tarp again. Voley wiggles around until he slides down between us. I watch him push his old paws up to my face, through the water slush and snow that’s leaking in. It hits me that he’s doing better, and I think Russell must be giving him medicine when I’m not looking, because there’s no other explanation. The pain is leaving his body, or else he’s as numb as I am. Maybe that’s it—we all just can’t tell that we’re in pain anymore. But Russell seems to feel it right now—pain and happiness and sadness all at once. And as the boat hits a high swell, higher than it should be, I want to jerk into panic. But he calms me down, tells me it’s okay. And then he keeps talking.
The Snow (A Post-Apocalyptic Story) Page 21