Ah, the cost of education. No one ever tells you what it will take from you. All you can see are those dollar signs at the end of the stage, as a colored tassel bobs in your periphery and the grey-haired dean offers his hand and a rolled up piece of paper. Not one gives you even a hint what it’ll be like out there. Even though every one of them has been here before.
David wiped at his nose to push up the specs again. The sweaty knuckle of a finger pushed against the lens, leaving a smear there which made one of his headlight beams a blurry blob of yellow on falling white flecks. He cursed under his breath but he didn’t dare take his hand from the wheel for more than a second. He didn’t dare to wipe the glasses on his shirt. He was nearly blind without them and his concentration—even through a now foggy lens—needed to remain on the sheen of winding road ahead.
God, it felt lonely out here. All around was darkness. At odd intervals of the journey there were thin lines of white—mountain peaks presumably—but for the most part they were invisible guards that stood cloaked in themselves and the night where they lived. Black on black. Silent and staring. But what were they guarding? He had not passed another car for an hour or more, and found himself expecting an opposing set of headlights around every bend. Yet none came. And the snow, while still light and fluffy, was coming down stronger. Even so, the air was tranquil. Nothing howled against the windows. He envisioned standing outside himself on the edge of the roadway in the quiet. But it felt longing and distant to do that so he pulled himself back inside the car almost immediately. His grip tightened on the steering wheel.
David had tried the radio before the dinner, gas and smoke stop in Canmore, but had found only static. He left it tuned to what sounded like the strongest am signal but had shut it off. Now, feeling a little fatigue, he reached a reflexive hand down to the knob on the T-bird’s dash to give it a flick. The static was there, but in its squall, he thought he heard a tune. A tender finger played with the knob, alternating between a firm grip on the wheel as he navigated corners and over increasing ridges of soft powder and a loose touch on the radio dial.
The song came up then: Sixty Years On. He recognized Elton John’s long drawn voice atop the caressed keys of an imaginary piano. He thought he remembered the lyrics for this one. And he was right. The static seemed to swell and recede as he made his away around elbows on the narrow roadway. The rock face came closer, then allowed a shoulder, then came close again. The song drifted in front of the static in the signal and then behind.
To his left, pieces of guardrail flashed metallic in the yellow tint of the headlight beams. They were, like all the trees beyond them, dusted in snow that was falling heavier the further west he went. There was so much snow coating things this far out that it actually seemed to make the night a little brighter. There was a subtle glow on that guardrail, and on the dead-looking branches just on the other side of it. Beyond that thin strip of wintered foliage, the edge of the roadway gave way to a declining slope. It was a stark angle with rushing waters of a river not far below. David caught glimpses of its white-capping surface, its turbulent rapids, when the road and the edge came to him and the car at a certain angle.
Tricks of geography, he thought. More specifically, tricks of geometry. Given the T-bird’s distance from the river’s farthest edge and the angle of the slope down to it, there was a formula that could be derived to figure out the distance straight down to where the river was churning away. He could use that to presume when and how much of the rushing waters he would be able to see but there was no time for that now. Luckily, though, the song and the quick mathematical diversion had refreshed him a little. How much further did he have to drive?
He thought he could actually hear the river down there, among the rumble-hum of the Thunderbird’s engine and static-mix of the radio. But no. He knew that was his tinnitus, an indistinct drone that sometimes came to him in his ears. At times, and he could never discern exactly why, it sounded like a metal-grating buzz. It came particularly loud and noticeable when he was tired or anxious. And the current moment would qualify as both. He tried to force himself calm again.
Looking over a shoulder at the back seat to check on the girls again, taking his intent eyes from the road for a fraction of a second, David scolded himself. They were still sleeping soundly, like two beautiful princesses, the same girl on the outside, but two different souls within. Ashleigh and Davina.
Elton John’s tune finished, Then Pink Floyd’s Remember a Day played with its spooling guitar squawk rising and lulling, and then it stopped abruptly before the end, leaving just a moment of dead air. But another song began in the static haze that threatened to overtake the music completely. It was Behind Blue Eyes by the Who and David thought it ages since he had heard this one. Cripes, he thought, breathing a clean sigh. Must be some late night DJ veering from the playlist. It’s either very very late out here or very very early but there’s someone out there in the nethers, spinning these tunes, playing them just for me. And he must be feeling pretty secure with his job at the moment.
David smiled.
There in the dark.
On the roadway of packed snow, polished over.
They were going to be okay. David and his girls were going to come through this. They were going to be fine. The drive where his knuckles were white on the Thunderbird’s wheel would end. This intolerably lonely night with unseen mountains pressing in on all sides and that quiet river below would be in the past. Morning would come. The job interview would work out. And the bills—somehow—would get paid. His little girls were there. Those little dark heads of hair seemed to say that to him, seemed to say that all three of them would be okay.
He worried, laughable to say this in his head now after so much had been corrected, that he had gone insane. There in his bed, reeling from Leighton’s death, and baby Leighton’s too, he had found himself thinking the strangest thoughts. He had come to that part when there was no more sleep to be had but morning was a long way off. No more sleep left to take, that’s right, but more night than can be handled unless you drown it away in unconsciousness.
But he laid there awake, eyes open, floundering in strange ideas. There came a point when he was certain that he would stand up from the mattress, pull on a shirt and pants and go out into the night. He would say to himself, yes, just need cigarettes. A pack from the launderette down the road. But he would get to the launderette and he would not come back. He would keep going. Just keep on going.
That was an insane thought; those were insane nights. A long way from this one. They were times when thinking that you are insane precludes being insane. Can a person already mad know that he his mad? Or would that person have to still retain sanity for such a thought to occur?
It was a whirling circle on top of itself, round and round, again and again, topsy-turvy. A problem with no solution. A mathematical impossibility with no correct answer. He pushed passed it. And he stayed. He had to.
How could he not? Those were his princess-girls.
All three of them were going to make it through.
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Another set of headlights finally came. They blinked past an invisible corner up ahead in the dark and then were gone again. And to David, they seemed to be coming incredibly fast. He tapped his brakes and immediately the back end of the Thunderbird fishtailed a little. The rear of it came side to side in a gentle sway and his sweating fingers coiled tighter around the wheel of the beast, trying to tame it.
He did, and the needle fell.
But the other car, a blue flashing lion, darted past the curve of the wall, easily on David’s half of the roadway. Despite the fact that the orange line was hidden under ice and snow his first thought was: That car is in the middle of the goddamn road.
Its tail skidded out from behind it at the curve up ahead but it seemed to even out and come at him with renewed vehemence.
David again pressed his brakes. This time, too much, and he envisioned slamming the passenger side into t
he barren rock wall beyond the narrow shoulder. He overcompensated, turning into the skid that formed out of his locked back tires and it did repel the T-bird away from the jagged cliff.
But too much. It brought him too close to the other car which sealed the gap and clipped his front driver’s side bumper at the wheel well. The radio let out a squawk of static.
There was a half-flash of a face. It lay like a sun-burst, bright and clear behind two dark bars, the blind-spots between the two cars’ windshields and driver’s doors. His hand went out instinctively to it—
(Seeing what? Seeing exactly what in that half-moon face?)
The hand clenched his door’s interior handle instead.
He thought he could still recover from being clipped, but the blue car’s back wheel well seemed to catch somewhere on the back quarter panel of the Thunderbird. Both cars, connected, spun. Everything was turning around. The two vehicles rotated like a serving platter. They were performing a little dance with only the looming mountains, black on black, to watch. There was a shriek of grinding, toothy metal that drowned out the radio static. David’s view through the windshield was shifted towards the left edge of the road where coated pines and that metal guardrail stood. The passenger side screeched into it and the car, still winding, still revolving, now faced the direction he had been driving from all night.
In his realization that the impossible was happening—that they were going over that edge—the front passenger door of his car ripped against the guardrail, tipping the car up and over it. The front hood slammed into the trunks of a stand of pines, and the driver’s door, caught by the other car, finally sheered loose. So did a good portion of David’s arm. Halfway up the forearm was simply gone. There was open space where the door once was and his face and skin were dusted by a fine sparkle of snow from the trees he had collided with. The dull, distant static rose to a steady screech. And as the car tipped forward, snapping the trees, he tumbled away from the noise, out into the chilled air. Armless, witless, and on fire in his mind.
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Thrown free, David collided with the scourged membrane of the water. A shocking bolt of pain ran up from the stump of his arm and through his body. It did not yet register as cold. But in a few minutes the frigid temperature would race through his body and try to shut him down.
He was beneath the surface, awkward and flailing. Which way was up? How far was down? He heard and sensed, but did not see the two cars—a tangled mess together with each other. They pushed the water against him as they too collided into the river. Their impact felt like a house falling on him and his chest compressed.
The air in his lungs stung and he thought he would choke. He needed to breathe and finally burst through to the top for air. His glasses were gone and his eyes saw an unfocused mess of blobs and shapes. Everything was a haze. Where were the girls? Still inside. With that thought ripping into him, he believed his chest would collapse.
All he saw was the gleam—bright, irrationally bright in the darkness—of his Thunderbird’s front end. Only its hood and grille peeked from the water. Bright and reflective, the twin sets of pot headlights were still shining yellow. They were the half-face he had seen flash from the other car—and the faces of his daughters—but they blinked and then winked out entirely. It canted, the car, and went under.
His mind screamed at him to do something. To do anything. He braced himself and tore into the water. But the river’s current was sweeping him further from the dark blob of the cars and he could see nothing save for its heavy shadow of black against a nearly identical canvas of bubbly midnight blue. Water hurt his eyes and he could not keep them open. There was a gurgle in his ears. The buzzing which he had found himself getting used to in his life was now a roar of grating metal. Or was that the two cars, corpses of metal and seats, grinding against each other beneath the churning waters?
He dove down again and again but could see nothing. He couldn’t breathe. The weight of the cold water on the walls of his chest was a burden too great to bear and he came to the surface, defeated, blue-skinned. All he saw was a darkened figure at the water’s edge, clinging there in the rustling white furls of river.
Dog-paddling with one arm, he pushed towards that figure, slapping the water and grunting for air. He had not yet come to a full understanding of his missing forelimb.
And he had not fully understood that his girls—his two princesses—were gone. Just like their mother. Just like their sister. Gone.
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The Druid came away from that blackness, back to what was the inside of Malin Holmsund.
Getting through things, terrible things, makes it possible to come through them again. You lose a life and taking another seems easier than it might have. Easier than it might have when you were still...whole. You lose a limb, and cutting off another seems, not easy, but manageable. You lose everything you have ever loved and taking that from someone else is do-able. Something to strive for even.
Some things you remember.
And some things, they remember you.
IV. The Faraway Place
Zeb had shivered, standing there in the shadows of the towers—his coat had been taken off to make driving more comfortable—and the wound on his chest had felt the bite of the cold. He couldn’t remember what the bells sounded like. Couldn’t remember if he had ever even heard the bells from any of those church towers. On Sundays, did they all ring? Like a swelling symphonic cacophony, an orchestra pit at warm up? Or was there eventually some kind of township ordinance to silence them all, lest one may drown out another?
He had left the towers behind then, had driven along the gravel road. Out from behind the increasingly dirty BMW coupe, a steady billow of dust and snow had streamed like the tail of a comet. He had gotten closer to the house, recognized that he was there when he saw the bend in the road ahead and the way the ice of the lake’s surface crept nearly up to the wheels of his father’s car. And there, with ancient and omniscient trees obscuring the house on its other side, had been the gate. The Great Gate of Redfield, with its big black iron bars flanked by red-brick and mortar posts which no longer supported a set of opaque light shades. No matter; those lights had never worked as far back as Zeb could remember. The posts stood slanted and the middle of the two gate halves where the bars joined and locked sagged to nearly touch the gravel driveway. The drive wound between the posts curving gently north and venturing up the tilt of the messy front yard where, in summer, the white and pink and yellow of clover and dandelions would make random waves in the midst of the rolling sheets of green lawn, punctuated further by wild stems and polyps of crab grass.
The yard slanted upwards with the drive as its spine, at a distinct but not overpowering angle, and the house receded to the north edge of the property where thin brush began. Behind it ran the hills, gaining density of forest and gathering steepness towards dangerous heights. It got heavy with trees and bush almost immediately and cut into the terrain were Zeb’s trails, winding cuts in the stubble, where he had some of his best adventures. The name for those hills, he couldn’t remember—if he had ever even known.
—Sadie is everywhere.
It’s hot. She’s in the yard on a hammock reading a paperback in the sun. Nearby Dad’s tuning up the old red lawnmower—
Zeb had gotten out of the Ci, had let it continue to churn a noxious cloud of vapor behind, and had gone to open the gate. The gravel road was blank in patches, snow and ice-covered in others, and he had nearly slipped. It seemed that the winter this north had been alternating between mild and cold this year, thawing and then refreezing. Today was chilly but not terribly cold. In Zeb’s mind, the fact that there was even such a thing as cold out here at the Charlemagne house did not initially make sense. To him it would always have the smell of summer, and the warmth of an August night.
—It’s evening. Dark. Still warm but cooling with a breeze off the lake. There’s fire in the pit out back, and a hint of starlight on the water. Her face is
lit by both, pink with the heat of the flames—
This trip was different. There was newness everywhere, yet a vague oldness wrapped branches and licked the wooden wall boards of the house’s exterior. Supplanting such a solid idea of heat and history seemed fine in a second or two, particularly after he had touched the gate’s cold black bars and had drawn them apart from each other. The Here and The Now was in every corner and those vintage posts skewered the earth and snow at odd angles, as though they strained to keep from falling every second of their existence. Here in the Now but maybe gone in a second or two. Their slant was exaggerated from what he remembered; time had not been kind to them. Sadie had worried about the gate falling, had told Zeb not to play near it. Play down by the boat launch, she had told him, on the sand and gravel at the water’s edge. Careful of the rails, hon. Make sure one of us can see you.
So concerned about the gate’s precarious stature, she had even asked Felix Wagener to reinforce its posts with concrete. With the chill running through him, Zeb had opened the gate and had seen again the shoddy bubbles of gray-white cement nestled at their bases. Mr. Wagener was trustworthy, but not the handiest, Zeb remembered. So he still wouldn’t test his weight against the faded red pillars. To be fair, though, Wagener had said the road was clear all the way to the house, and it was. That was something. On the deck, Zeb had discovered a fresh load of firewood. Wagener was considerate to have left that and Zeb had felt appreciation for such an effort from the old man. The idea of chopping wood with his shoulder hurting did not sent a thrill into him.
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