Speak Softly, She Can Hear

by Pam Lewis

  Naomi lay back in the snow.

  Eddie laughed. “Just like Will said.” Carole shivered again, a racking spasm that made her teeth rattle. “‘The body shivers to create heat and by that very act depletes itself more quickly.’ I remember that line. A genius, that boy of yours. I’ll be going now before I start to get hypothermia myself. I’ve been here much too long.” He jiggled her foot. “I got wet, too. My cuffs.” He got to his feet, and she saw him shine the light into her pack, take out the food, start to walk away, and then stop again. “One more for good measure,” he said, and she felt more liquid sluicing over her hair and the back of her neck. He must have found the water bottle in her pack.

  She listened as his footsteps retreated and stopped. “Think I’ll take these snowshoes too,” he said. “If neither of you ladies mind.” He sat down to put them on, cursing and muttering about the straps. They were beavertail snowshoes, old bentwood ones, three feet long including the tail. They had makeshift rawhide laces you had to wrap around your ankles several times to secure them. She wished he’d hurry up. She didn’t have too long now before she started to lose it for real, before she was so disoriented she’d do something suicidal. She watched Eddie stand and lose his balance. He righted himself, then headed out slowly, knowing enough to keep his feet wide apart as he walked.

  As soon as he was gone, Carole rose to her knees and brushed off the bits of ice clinging to her. The moon was rising, casting just enough light to see Naomi lying with her arms outstretched.

  Carole got to her feet. The air was very cold now and her skin stung everywhere. “Nay?”

  Silence.

  She could see Eddie lumbering up the snowmobile trail. It took only seconds to decide to follow him out. She didn’t dare stay. Her judgment would start to go. Maybe it already had. That was the trouble. You didn’t know. Eddie had been right about that much. She opened her pack as wide as it would go and spread it over Naomi. It was all she had. “I’ll come back,” she whispered.

  He was struggling upward, and she followed at a distance. He would fight up a ways, stop, turn, and look back, as though to check his progress. She would stop and wait for him to turn again and to keep going. She was shivering violently. She crept behind, adjusting to his speed. When they reached the house, she would wait until he went inside, then run for her truck and get help.

  They kept going, Eddie ahead and Carole far enough behind that he wouldn’t see her. It seemed so much longer than it had taken to come in. After a time she realized they were still struggling up the slope, when it should have leveled out by now. The flat part had been the longest. The slope had been short. She looked for landmarks, but it was too dark to see. The water. She remembered now. She’d used the water as the trail marker. She listened for it, and yes, there it was, but wait. It was close by, and the sound was coming from the right. She had to stop and think, to orient herself, knowing her mind was going fuzzy. If the water had been ahead coming in, it should be behind her coming out. So how could it be to the right? Then she remembered the trail junction. Oh, God, they’d taken the wrong fork. They were deeper in the woods. They were moving farther from the house.

  She picked out Eddie’s thick, dark form from the sound of his footsteps. He stopped, waited for several beats, catching his breath, then continued on. She tried to think what she needed to do but couldn’t. Her indecision was so confusing. If only she could decide, then she would know. In that state, she kept walking, but the cold air had hardened the path to slippery ice beneath her. The sound of her own boots seemed to echo everywhere, and she was afraid he’d hear her. She stepped to the edge of the path where the snow was soft and quiet and continued along that way.

  When she looked up again, Eddie was startlingly clear in a wide snowfield broken only by small clumps of evergreens. Where were they? He wasn’t on the trail anymore. He’d headed off into the deep snow where his snowshoes had purchase. He was going away from her, across the snow, unsteadily, sinking to his knees and losing his balance.

  The way the snow lay on the land was trying to tell her something. It was all wrong, lumpy and uneven in a way that suggested forms underneath. Here and there, dense clumps of new evergreens peeked through, like a Christmas tree farm. Then she remembered. Those small trees weren’t new growth at all but the tips of mature spruce trees. The actual trees were fifteen or twenty feet tall, and these were their tops. Over time, the drifting snow had accumulated on the branches. Under the branches, all the way down, were dozens of air pockets.

  Instinctively, she stepped back onto the hard-packed snowmobile trail, where the footing was safe, while up ahead, Eddie stopped. He turned this way and that, his body language that of somebody lost, somebody about to panic.

  “Eddie,” she called to him. She was feeling very calm. She knew what she was about to do.

  The faltering little beam of flashlight jiggled crazily, trying to find the source of the sound. “Who’s out there?” he yelled.

  “Carole.” The sound of her name rang out in the quiet evening.

  The beam of his light clicked off. She felt a flutter of sympathy for the pathetic gesture. He thought she wouldn’t know where he was if he turned off the flashlight. He was scared.

  “Come and get me,” she said.

  He began to move toward her. She could hear the thumpf thumpf, a sound made more distinctive by the hollows beneath him. She pictured what it looked like under the snow, fragile as a spiderweb, airy as a honeycomb. A person’s weight could never be supported by that. It was like ocean foam.

  He must have felt the snow give way, felt the way his weight sank oddly down because he made a sudden, clumsy motion to recover, his arms spiraling. The effect was to drop him farther. Even in that dim light, she could see the thrust of his arms reaching out. She heard the quick suck of breath, the snap of branches deep underneath as his weight broke them and he fell. A dark shadow widened at the spot he’d gone down. It’s like quicksand, Will had said of a spruce trap. Like being buried alive. The more you struggle, the worse you become ensnared.

  She stood listening to his muffled screams, and she made no move to help him. He would be twisting among the branches. He would be grabbing for them, trying to climb back out, but the more he tried, the more snow would cascade down on him. The horror of it. Snow would be filling his mouth and his nose. It would be finding every opening in his clothing.

  “Help me,” he shouted. The whole dark gash began to quiver. He would understand now that to survive, he had to remove his snowshoes. He would try to undo them, but they would be tangled up with the branches. He would reach down first one way and then another, trying to snake his hands through the branches to his feet. With every effort, and she could almost see it happen, he would panic more, realizing that he could never reach his feet. The panic would sink him farther, cause him to sweat, soak his clothing from the inside out.

  She remembered Rita right then, dead on a cold night like this, her naked body deep under snow. She remembered looking down, how she had tried to keep Naomi and Eddie from pushing the snow in on top of her. How she had tried to say something to the dead woman that night. “Rita Boudreau,” Carole called out. “Her name was Rita Boudreau.”

  The shaking stopped. “Carole,” he screamed at her, his voice rising from the pit, bouncing off the mountains. The awareness would be dawning in full. Of the cold and of the fact that he could not get out. He could not remove the snowshoes, could not rid himself of those big paddles anchoring him to the trap, and she would not come to his aid. He called out again. “Please.”

  She looked around. It was so much darker. She’d stayed too long. The movement, the rustling where Eddie had gone down, stopped. Suddenly it was quiet. “Marie,” she shouted. “Her name was Rita Marie Boudreau.”

  Who’s the most important person in a rescue? Will’s mantra, that one. The rescuer was the answer. The person with the strength and the wherewithal. Not the victim. Never the victim. If somebody has to die, it’s got to be
the victim, not you. Because if you die, the victim is going to die. Two instead of one. Simple arithmetic.

  Those were the words circulating through Carole’s mind as she felt her way back along the trail, testing each step to make sure she was still on hard pack and not on the edges. She had to fight to keep remembering, fight to focus on what she knew she had to do. She was thinking victim and rescuer, that she had to find the house now and get help. She had to stay on that path. Back to the house. Test, step. Test, step. It was all she thought about. Have to stay out of the deep snow. Have to stay on solid snow. Not until she stumbled, hearing the stream right there before her, did she realize her mistake. She’d forgotten about the trail back to the house. Again. The other path, the same one Eddie had missed. She was losing it. Focus, she told herself.

  Naomi lay with her hands crossed over her breasts and her wet hair hanging like tree vines, soaking wet. She’d sloughed off the pack and taken off her shirt. Her silver rings were loose on her fingers and her nails black, no gloves on. Carole touched her hair, which had begun to form ice crystals.

  “I need to get you out of here,” Carole said. But Naomi made no effort to stand, and Carole had to help her. She pulled gently at first and then with more force until she felt the give as Naomi let herself be lifted. Carole stood slowly, Naomi’s slight body resting against her own, the incredibly fragile bones. When Carole let go, Naomi fell like stone to the ground. Carole wasn’t sure Naomi even knew if she was there. Do not let the victim of hypothermia go to sleep. She shook Naomi. Her mind groped the whole disaster lexicon. Advanced confusion, feeling hot, stripping off clothing. Will had been so expansive. She pulled Naomi’s clothing back up to cover her, but Naomi clawed it off.

  She felt along the ground, hands raking under the snow for dead leaves, but the leaves were wet. She worked her way up the hill on her hands and knees, feeling the snow deepen quickly, unable to feel anything. Her skin was numb everywhere. She dug with her hands. Under the crust, the snow was mercifully soft and yielding, and she was able to move armfuls of it aside, to get into the hole and press it down, enlarging it. She took Naomi under the arms and inched up the rise to the hole.

  The torso. The heart. Will’s words again. Those were the important parts now. Arms and legs didn’t matter.

  She fingered her own frozen clothing, feeling for something dry, but there was nothing. Everything was soaked through. She felt Naomi’s icy wet sweater. Fumbling, shivering. All she wanted was to lie beside Naomi, to warm her and to sleep.

  Worst thing you can do, Will had said. They’d been in the car, and he’d talked about it. The transfer works against you. Your heat going into the victim. The victim’s cold coming into you. Irreversible. You slip from sleep into death. Just like that. He’d snapped his fingers to show how fast. Need to get out of here. But she didn’t want to. She felt so tired.

  Who’s the most important person in a rescue? She wanted to stay there, to close her eyes and sleep, but Will’s words kept intruding. If you die, the victim will surely die. She was feeling so drowsy, far off and strange, but at least she wasn’t feeling the cold anymore. Against her chest, Naomi’s heart pounded like a jackhammer.

  “Don’t go to sleep.” She slapped Naomi’s arm, then her face lightly. “Say something.”

  But there was only silence. Carole watched the light of the moon on the stream. Cries sounded in the distance. Eddie. One degree of body temperature is lost for every five minutes on uninsulated frozen ground. If you’re wet, the cooling process is twenty-five times faster. At 90 degrees of body heat, the direction is irreversible.

  As if someone had wound her up, she rose to her knees and began to crawl back up the path. She felt nothing. She had to get there, back to the house, to a telephone. The most important person in any rescue. But she was so sleepy. So intoxicatingly sleepy. Take the left path, she told herself. Look for the left path.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  In the hospital, she breathed warm air from a funnel, aware in her sleepy haze of the nurses coming and going, of Rachel and her tinkling bells, and of Will reading to her from something that had a soothing cadence, although she couldn’t much follow the words. Was it a dream? The cold and Eddie’s dark form disappearing into a gash in the snow and Naomi’s dangling broken foot. Lying there, she would shiver so hard, the nurse would have to heap heated blankets over her and wait with her until it stopped.

  When she opened her eyes for the first time, Will was beside her bed. The light was so bright it hurt. “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey.” He pulled the curtains closed and came back to sit on her bed. He took her hand.

  “Where is Naomi?” she asked him.

  He shook his head. “She didn’t make it.”

  Carole closed her eyes in defeat. “And him? Eddie?”

  “Dead.”

  Could it be true? She exhaled, as though Eddie’s hold on her was finally released and she could breathe again.

  “They want to talk to you,” Will said. “I asked them to wait a little bit longer.”

  She dozed off again. She didn’t know exactly when they came, maybe later that same day or the next, when she felt stronger and she’d started to eat. Sheriff Art Weed pulled one of the side chairs over to the bed. Two other men stood behind him. She listened, blinking up at them and trying hard to follow the thread.

  They were pretty sure they knew what had happened, they said. Just wanted some corroboration. Tragedy, it was. City people like that, like herself even, out there in those woods in those temperatures. “Foolers,” they call those days when it’s hot at noon and the temperature skids down to zero by evening time. “And that Mrs. Lindbaeck out in almost nothing at all. Well …” Weed blushed crimson, and Carole, remembering that Naomi had stripped off her shirt, shut her eyes against the image of Naomi’s bare frozen torso. “You know what I mean. Light little jacket like that. Mr. Burbank tells us you went off to the Lindbaecks’ house around four. From the looks of things, you parked behind their car. Did you all go out into the woods together? Is that what happened?”

  Carole had to stop and think. She was so tired. “No.” She shook her head as if to loosen the memory. “They were already gone. I went looking for them.”

  “Oh.”

  “She was—” She couldn’t remember the word, a word she should know. “Naomi wasn’t making any sense,” she said. Then she remembered Eddie saying, It’s called hypothermia, and she shivered. “Hypothermic,” she said to Weed. “She was already hypothermic.”

  “And Mr. Lindbaeck must have gone off to get help?”

  She just stared into Weed’s round pleasant face. He was smiling at her with concern, urging her on. She smiled back and nodded.

  “You’re a lucky woman,” he said. He held up his thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “You came this close.” After they left, she fell into a deep, long sleep.

  In the days that followed, she watched the story spin out on the little TV that hung over her bed. Sometimes Rachel would be there with her, sitting on the bed. Rachel had told her, breathlessly, agog, what had happened that day in Chacha’s, how she’d tracked Naomi down, determined to get the whole story and how Naomi had given her the years at Spence, the night in Stowe, the shocker about Rita, and the other shocker that all these years Carole had thought it was her fault when it wasn’t. It was Eddie’s, something Eddie had told Naomi only the day before, had bragged about it even, and oh, God, Rachel said, if only you’d told us.

  On TV, Eddie was described as a thirty-six-year-old man who had come to Montpelier from New York City and recently married Naomi Irving Lindbaeck, one of two women found earlier by state police and volunteers. Mrs. Lindbaeck had died at Central Vermont Hospital in Berlin. The couple’s friend, Carole Mason of Montpelier, was in stable condition. Implications of tragedy hung everywhere. The newly marrieds had died before their lives together had had a chance to begin. “Authorities tell us that Lindbaeck was going for help for the two women when he became los
t in the darkness, fell through the snow, and was unable to extricate himself,” the reporter said. There was no suggestion that Carole was concealing anything. Reporters kept the story alive, but only as an excuse to educate people about spruce traps and hypothermia and to warn them against going into the woods without food. Water. Dry clothes. Flashlight and batteries. Above all, pay attention to weather forecasts. In the accounts of her ordeal, it was clear that Carole had broken every one of the winter safety rules.

  But she’d come through it, she thought, lying in her hospital bed and drifting in and out of sleep. It was over. Naomi was dead. Eddie was dead. The threat was gone. There would be no more dread, that constant companion, that spirit guide, that force whispering always to hold back, to keep a part of herself in reserve, because there was no telling when she’d need it, when she’d have to pull up stakes again and move on. The truth was a stubborn animal snuffling and nudging at the edges, looking for a way in. You might plug the holes, but there it was, never sleeping, never going away, the awful, exhausting truth. In spite of all her vigilance, in spite of her efforts to keep everybody separate from one another—Eddie from Naomi from Will and Rachel and Morgan and Pepper—to keep them mute and looking the other way, in spite of all that, they’d swum together, sought one another out, until in that small cabin deep in the woods and in the dark of night, with everyone accounted for, the truth had begun to come and then wouldn’t stop, kept on coming and coming.

  And now? She rose and went to the mirror in the bathroom, let the cotton gown fall to the floor, and looked hard at her long white body. Naked but for the bandages on her fingers, she looked at her jutting hip- and collarbones, the pale swath of pubic hair, her small breasts, her dark nipples, and then at her own face. Her eyes were a deep-sea blue against skim-milk skin. She thrust out her chin and stood up straight.

  “Now what?” She said the words aloud and touched her fingers to the glass, joining hands with herself. She’d held that secret for so long, it had become her life—the strongest facet of her personality, with everything else in service to it. It often caused her to fall mute during conversations or to leave the room when the fun began. It held her back, fueled that aloofness, so that she was never able to share the abandon she saw in Rachel and Will and Morgan, the way they could throw themselves fully into laughter and conversation without a second thought—giddy and reckless. But never Carole. Never, because there was always the chance that she would slip, that if she ever dared to speak from the heart, she would reveal herself, and people would know.