A Late Hard Frost

by Stephanie Joyce Cole

  Katy moved closer and whispered in her ear. “He doesn’t look too bad. You know he’s going to come over here. And I don’t think it’s me he’s sizing up.” She giggled. Cass gave her a playful push but her stomach turned over. It was nothing. Even if he did come over, so what? They were in a bar. Guys talked to women in bars. Nothing was going to happen.

  Almost as if he’d heard Katy, he slid off his stool and sauntered in their direction, weaving his way through the maze of tables. Katy giggled again. He stood in front of them, smiling, hoisting his half-empty glass. “Can I buy you girls a drink?” He exuded too-sweet aftershave layered over a sharp, citrusy reek of laundry detergent. He put his free hand onto the back of Cass’ chair, and his arm brushed against hers.

  Her breath caught in her throat. Blood roared in her ears. The years fell away and she dropped back into the smoky bar in Chicago. Zack, hoisting himself onto the barstool next to her, goofy and a little drunk, introducing himself. Zack, sliding his big eyes at her sideways, drawling compliments. “Can I buy you another drink, pretty girl?” Her, buzzed from her first week of classes and two glasses of celebratory wine, but a little lonely. She’d been desperate to leave Alaska, she’d yearned for a life that hummed and bustled, a life that she could take at a full out run, but now home seemed so very far away. Zack grinning at her, ordering another round. “Come on downtown with me. I know a better place than this dump.” Her, not even wondering about the dark path through the park, just moving a little closer to him because it was so hard to see. Her, thinking she wouldn’t mind if he kissed her. Deep in the park, his friends calling out to him from beneath the gigantic oaks, the tips of their cigarettes punctuating the blackness like specks of hell. “Zack, who you got there with you?” His hand tightening on her arm...

  No. No. She shuddered, pushing the images away, shoving the horror down deep, so deep it couldn’t hurt her. Katy was staring at her, waiting for her to say something, for her to make the call. But she couldn’t talk. The urge to run, to escape, was too strong. “No, I...No.” She pushed herself off the stool and shouldered her way across the room and out the door. She stood under the bright light from Scully’s sign, her breath huffing into airborne pools of frost, a dark terror stabbing into her chest.

  In a few moments Katy was beside her, wrapping her in the coat she’d left inside, and asking if she was okay. She just shook her head. As they stood shivering in the icy night, the churning mass of panic leached away, bit by bit. What she needed was another drink. She’d told Katy she was fine, that she’d just felt dizzy for a minute, and then she asked Katy to drop her off at the gallery.

  But she hadn’t told Nick anything about that when she slid up next to him at the back of the gallery. He worried about her too much as it was. When she saw him, she felt the remnants of the terror disappear completely. Nick was there, so she was safe, and all was well.

  ~ * ~

  Nick watched Cass’ jeep rock from side to side on the rough road. She parked next to his truck but she didn’t get out right away. Just when he was about to go outside to see if she needed help with something, the jeep door creaked open. She hesitated, stepping out and hanging on to the door handle with both hands, then slamming the door shut and turning towards the cabin.

  He opened the cabin door for her and glanced down into her face. Her eyes were rimmed in red. He didn’t know what to do. Before that night, he would have put his arms around her, pulled her close, and held her. Before that night, he would have comforted her, he would have taken care of her. But everything was changed between them. Damn. What did he do now? He held his arms stiffly at his sides as she drifted past him into the kitchen.

  “How are you, Cass?” His words sounded gruff. He cleared his throat and tried again. “I’m sorry I haven’t been by to see you before this—”

  She raised her hand, palm extended, to stop him. “It’s all right, Nick.” Her voice was high-toned and soft, almost a whisper. “I needed some time to think, too.” She paused. “Thanks for coming by today.”

  He stood straighter and tried to collect his thoughts. He needed to put this right. Not only for Cassandra, but for any future he still might have with Merry. Perhaps he’d screwed it up so badly that he had lost them both, but he had to try. That night was a stupid mistake. A gigantic and idiotic mistake. If he apologized to Cassandra, and he was so desperately sorry, perhaps she could forgive him and they could move toward what they had before. He didn’t want to lose Cass. She had been a part of his life for too long. And he couldn’t face Merry until he had straightened out this mess. Merry might not want to have anything to do with him after she learned about what had happened, but he at least he could tell her how he felt. Perhaps, perhaps...

  He took a deep breath and held onto the back of one of the kitchen chairs. “Cass,” he started slowly, shaking his head. “Cass, I am so sorry. That night should never have happened. I was drunk, but that’s no excuse...”

  She faced him straight-on, then, her face distraught. Tears slipped in shiny paths down her cheeks. “Nick...” She looked at the floor.

  “Nick...I’m pregnant.”

  ~ * ~

  He watches the window from across the meadow, behind a tree. He can only see snatches of them, when they walk by the glass. Nick is back. That bitch let him back inside. Nick hasn’t been around in a while, and he thought Nick was long gone, gone for good. He hisses a curse and spits into the rotten snow. He needs to think. He needs to do something. Nick being around isn’t part of the plan.

  Chapter 6

  Cassandra’s period wasn’t even that late, only two weeks, when she’d had the first inkling that she might be pregnant. The idea squirreled its way into her mind, unbidden, as she tallied the days. The rape in Chicago years ago had brutalized her internal organs, left them shredded and bleeding, and the hospital doctors talked to her then about permanent damage, about scarring and the unlikely probability that she might ever be able to conceive. She’d hardly listened to them. The pain drugs numbed the aching throb in her abdomen, but they also enveloped her in a welcoming, forgetful fog. With enough morphine, nothing mattered. And when she did open her eyes, flitting into consciousness, Nick had been there. Nick, who had known her all her life, and who had come to find her and make her safe and take her back home.

  In the five years since, the scars that haunted her weren’t the ones patterning her abused organs. There had been a few nights when enough red wine fogged her memories, and her need to be touched overwhelmed the terrors. She’d meet a stranger, usually in a bar, usually a visitor passing through. Those nights always ended badly, with her uttering a few terse words and leaving as quickly as she could. Afterwards, it wasn’t getting pregnant that worried her. Afterwards, she obsessed about getting herself clean, scrubbing her body until her skin was scalded and sore.

  But with no sign of monthly bleeding since her night with Nick, she had to face up to the possibility. Once the thought entered her mind, it crowded out all else. She stared at a wall, frozen in place and seeing nothing, and when she tried to work, the sides of her pots warped and buckled under her shaking hands. She’d driven up to Kenai on a day when gray sleet whipped out of the sky, stinging her face as she left the cabin, puddling into thick, stiff mud at the bottom of the front door steps. She cranked up the jeep’s ancient sound system, wanting screaming voices to crowd out the dread in her brain. On the wet road, the wipers rattled back and forth, back and forth, losing their battle with the half-frozen rain, leaving crusty opaque ice chunks to rim the windshield, narrowing her field of vision. She tasted blood. She’d bitten chapped aching fissures into her lips over the past few days, and in the hot blast from the truck heater, those cracks split and spilled.

  In Kenai, it was less likely she’d be seen by anyone she knew. At the Walmart, she put on her impassive face that discouraged conversation and bought the kit, not meeting the cashier’s eyes, shoving the small package deep into her bag. As soon as she arrived home, she headed for t
he bathroom. There had to be proof, immediate proof, that this insanity wasn’t happening. Her throat closed as she stared at the stick in her hand with its incriminating stripes of color. “No...no...” She doubled over and then slipped down onto the bathroom floor.

  As she huddled on the tiles, her first panicked thought was to schedule an abortion in Anchorage right away. She’d take care of it. She wouldn’t have to tell anyone. No one would ever know. She’d never longed for children, never even thought about having children. Even now, with the damning stick that shouted proof of pregnancy resting in the chipped sink, the kernel of life within her simmered like a malignant growth, a malicious and ill-formed tumor, not with the promise of a new person. It gnawed at the carefully constructed shell of control she had built around her life.

  But it was Nick’s baby. No, not a baby yet, just the whisper of a baby to come, but it belonged to Nick too. After all that he had done for her, could she make this decision on her own? Didn’t he deserve to know? Didn’t he deserve some say?

  She shook her head and tried to be honest with herself. She was thinking about what she needed and wanted, not what Nick needed. She relied on Nick. He was always there for her. If she was going to get an abortion, she wanted him to help her, to be with her. But could there be a chance, perhaps just the slightest chance, that a baby might change things between them? She knew he loved her. He showed it in everything he did for her. Could a baby tip the scales? A baby might make Nick understand that they should be together, have a future. She recognized her reasoning was self-serving, but it wasn’t that hard to nudge her thoughts in that direction. After all, Nick had lost contact with his first family, and she knew how deeply he regretted that loss. After he got over the shock of this happening, maybe he would welcome the idea of a baby, a new start, a new family.

  Her fingernails were digging deep welts into her palms. She and Nick still hadn’t talked about their night together. Early the morning after, he had dressed quickly and awkwardly, and stumbled out of her cabin muttering embarrassed broken sentences, obviously seriously hung over. She didn’t even know if he remembered what they had done that night, though she was sure he had a good idea what had happened between them. Her naked body next to him when he awoke in bed told that tale. Since then, his silent absence was a puzzle. But there were the flowers, the crushed and mangled half-frozen bouquet of carnations and daisies she found on her doorstep two days after the night they’d spent together, with no note. So unlike Nick, who wasn’t one for shy gestures. She wondered if they were meant as an apology, if they were in place of words he wasn’t ready to speak yet. Whatever they meant, they gave her hope and a reason to be patient. She’d carried the wilting flowers into her studio and prodded them upright in a tall, slender vase. She kept them long after they died and faded into brown mush, as she waited for Nick to call.

  And now Merry was coming back. Merry, whose quiet presence had broken through Cass’ carefully guarded barriers to allow their friendship to blossom, who had eroded away the loneliness that Cass hadn’t even known was there. She might already be back in Homer. There was no way to explain all this to Merry. A bolt of anger flashed through Cassandra’s brain. If Merry had kept in touch, Cassandra wouldn’t be in this situation. She slumped against the bathroom wall. But if Merry had kept in touch, Cassandra wouldn’t have had the night with Nick. Cassandra knew Nick was drunk and hurting and lonely that night, but she had wanted him for so long, had loved him for so long. When he put his arms around her, finally, a wave of gladness swept over her. At last.

  Cassandra had taken a deep breath, then another. Now that the pregnancy test had confirmed her fears, she and Nick had to talk. It was time. When she struggled up from the bathroom floor and reached for the phone in the kitchen, the red message light was pulsing. She punched the button and heard Nick’s gravelly voice. “Cass. We need to talk.”

  ~ * ~

  Hearing her say the word “pregnant,” Nick stopped breathing. He had turned to stone. He couldn’t move. In an instant, his life tilted, changed, and sidestepped from an ordinary existence into the realm of the bizarre. Tears glistened on Cassandra’s cheeks. Despair and fear lived in her eyes. She looked at him as if he could save them, could fix this, but his brain was thundering and bursting.

  “Pregnant.” He repeated her word, not knowing why, hoping beyond hope that he hadn’t heard her correctly. “You’re...pregnant.”

  She nodded. “I just found out. I...” Her voice caught and faded as she drifted to stand by the window, looking out into the meadow. He waited for her to say the next thing, but she said nothing.

  He ran his fingers through his hair and stared at her back. Fragments of memories streaked through his brain. He’d been in this place before: Anya, his wife, pregnant with Cindy, so many years ago now, the discovery delighting both of them. But then Cindy growing up without him, the casualty of Anya’s affair and their brutal divorce, stuck with a stepfather who molested her, refusing to have anything to do with the father who abandoned her and moved to Alaska. And now Cassandra was pregnant. Christ, she was almost young enough to be his daughter. He opened his mouth to speak and closed it again, saying nothing. What was there to say?

  He had to say something. He cared so deeply about Cassandra, and this was all his fault. Such a fucking jackass.

  “Cassandra, I’m sorry.” His voice rasped and he cleared his throat, shaking his head. “I am so sorry.” He paused. “Have you thought about what you want to do?”

  Was that the right way to put it? He reached for one of the kitchen chairs and sat down heavily. Whatever path this took wasn’t going to be pretty.

  Cassandra shook her head but didn’t turn back to the room. “I don’t know, Nick. What do you want to do?” Her voice was faint and seemed to come from a place very far away. Outside, a raven shrieked, three harsh caws, and its shadow dipped into the kitchen window and was gone.

  He couldn’t believe what she was asking him. What he wanted was that this had never happened. What he wanted was everything back the way it used to be, the easy way they had of being with one another, the way he took care of her and she delighted him. Not lovers. Not just friends. More like family.

  He bent his head and rubbed his hands together, feeling the callouses grate and catch. His palms were slippery with sweat. “Cassandra, I will be here for you. Whatever you want to do. I think it’s your decision, not mine.” Christ, was she thinking about keeping it? A baby?

  Cassandra turned then, and walked towards him, not meeting his eyes. “I don’t know what I want to do. I didn’t even think this could happen to me after...Chicago.”

  His breath was ragged. His body tensed with a frantic impulse to get up and run. What he wanted right now, more than anything else, was to get out of this room and never look back. But that wasn’t going to happen.

  “I’ll support you in whatever way you want.” The words came hard from his mouth, sounding flat, but it was the best he could do. He paused, not wanting to ask a question that might have a devastating answer, but it had to be asked.

  “Are you thinking about keeping it?”

  She didn’t answer for a few seconds. An eternity. “Maybe.”

  Blood pounded in his ears. This was insane. But he’d hurt her enough. He couldn’t scream out the truth. Merry was back. He wanted to do everything he could possibly do to get the night with Cassandra behind him, so that he could confess to Merry, try to make Merry understand, find some way to go forward. But now that was going to be impossible. A baby.

  He stood and put his hands on Cassandra’s shoulders, pulling her into his arms. She was almost as tall as he was, and she always stood strong and straight, but now she huddled and shook like she was going to break apart, a frightened bird with a broken wing. Whatever happened, he had to stand by her. Whatever she wanted, he had to help. This was all his fault. He’d ruined enough lives. He had to do whatever he needed to do to make sure Cassandra got what she needed. Even though it was going to
mean that the life that he had almost found was lost. Lost forever.

  Chapter 7

  Merry waited in her motel room all evening, certain that Nick would show up at any minute. She stretched out on the lumpy bed, listening for the squeal of tires in the parking lot, her breath quickening every time she heard footsteps near her door. For a few minutes late in the evening, she clicked on the massive old television strapped high to a shelf across the room, but the jumbled sound made her more nervous and jumpy. She closed her eyes and imagined Nick arriving, knocking, how it was going to be when she opened the door. His graying red hair would be brushed back from his forehead and the wrinkles around his eyes would gather and crinkle as he grinned at her. He would hug her so close, and she would bury her face in his huge jacket, his musky scent surrounding her.

  But he didn’t come. He didn’t come.

  In the late night, she dozed on the bed, still waiting, still hoping, still in her clothes, as flits of dreams briefly made her hopes seem realized, dreams of Nick walking in to find her. But when she awoke at three in the morning, groggy and confused, the dream images splintered around her. He hadn’t come. She pressed her face into her pillow.

  Around seven in the morning, she woke again and curled her knees to her chest. Her brain pulled up all the logical excuses: He wasn’t in town, the note had blown away from the rock holding it down, by the time he got her message it was too late to come over.

  She shook her head and abandoned the last idea. He would have come, whatever the time. She gathered her scattered thoughts. All her plans, as vague as they were, began with reuniting with Nick as the first step. She didn’t have a clue about what to do now.