14 Degrees Below Zero

by Quinton Skinner

  “Whose chances?” Stephen asked. “Jay. Please.”

  “We had just broken up.”

  “Who had just broken up? Us? Are you talking about us?”

  She didn’t reply, and she wouldn’t look at him.

  “I’m right here!” he yelled out. “Over here! Look at me!”

  And then she started walking. Stephen jumped off the rock and followed her. He reached out to touch her but there was something stopping him; as soon as his hands got near, she was no longer there.

  “What do you want?” Jay asked, her voice distant. The wind started to pick up. “Nothing here has changed.”

  Clouds had rolled in, and the hillside darkened.

  “I’ve been trying to get in touch with him,” Jay said. “He picked my daughter up from day care.”

  Her words were being carried off by the wind. Stephen had to jog to keep up with her, and he was suddenly crushingly exhausted.

  “What did my father supposedly do?” she asked, turning her face away.

  “Lewis?” Stephen stopped running after her. Lewis had done something, hadn’t he? Stephen tried very hard to remember. There was cold, and snow, and there was Lewis.

  “Wait!” Stephen screamed. “I remember something.”

  “He thought Stephen was—”

  But the last part was cut off by the wind, which had picked up even more, and smelled of the sea.

  “It’s not as simple as that,” he heard Jay say, moving away from him.

  “Jay, I think your father hurt me,” Stephen called out. “I’m remembering now, and I think that’s how we got here. I really do. I think that’s why this place exists.”

  “He’s very protective,” Jay said. “But if you’re suggesting he had anything to do with—”

  “No, there was the snow, and the water.” Stephen shivered.

  “Look, I’m sure this was just an accident,” Jay said.

  “No! It was no accident!”

  Then she was standing right next to him again. He didn’t know how she had traversed the space between them, but now he saw her hair, her face, her beautiful eyes looking not at him but through him.

  “Sorry about this,” she said. “But I have to find Lewis. I have to believe he didn’t do this to you. I have to.”

  And then she was gone.

  22. THE RUSH OF RUNNING TO SAVE HIS OWN SKIN.

  His dreams were of the snow and the void of whiteness. Lewis wandered through fields of white, exposed in its reflective glow, denied the solace of the dark. In his sleep he dreamed of sleep, yearning for rest, tired beyond all measure, wanting nothing more than to stop moving.

  Then he woke up, and in the process of remembering who, and where, he was, he pieced together what had happened since he and Ramona left the movies the night before and set out for the countryside in search of Anna.

  It seemed like many hours they were on the road, though it wasn’t much later than ten when they had stopped. He’d kept off the interstate, opting for a two-lane road heading first west, then south, a lane through the farmlands with no lights and very few other cars. Snow had fallen the entire time. Ramona had slept with Carew in the backseat, and for a while they were lucky enough to travel behind a snowplow moving slowly and noisily through the night. The black canopy above met the snow at the horizon like its sedate twin.

  Carew, on the floor, got up when he saw Lewis stirring and came over to begin slavering all over his master’s face. At first Lewis was too sleep-struck to do anything about it, but he soon marshaled enough will to push the dog’s head away.

  “Get off me,” he said, his voice a thick mess of phlegm. “Carew. Damn it. I mean it. Get away.”

  So had begun many of his recent mornings. But now he opened his eyes all the way and saw the desk and chair, the innocuous art on the walls, the gleaming light through the crack in the curtains, and came fully to grips with the fact that he was in a motel in south-central Minnesota. He half-remembered the check-in, then sneaking in Carew and Ramona.

  “Mama?” Ramona mumbled, her eyes closed as she gave a long shivering stretch.

  “It’s Grandpa, honey,” Lewis said.

  “Where are we?” Ramona asked, still mostly asleep.

  “In a motel,” Lewis told her. “We’re having an adventure, remember? Do you want to watch TV?”

  Lewis flipped on the set and found a cartoon involving pastel dragons that seemed to be pretty firmly aligned with Ramona’s current aesthetics. Then he went into the bathroom, fumbled around with his face for a while, then took three times his usual dosage of his antidepressant. If he’d had whiskey, he would have taken some of that, too, but never mind.

  He knew himself well enough to understand that he was not in his right mind, and probably hadn’t been since Anna died. A cogent argument could be made for the period before that—the festering resentment, the salaryman’s double-life of despair—but he had functioned well in those precancer days, so the death of his wife was an effective cutting-off point.

  Just thinking through all of that took a hell of a lot of effort, and Lewis rewarded himself with a long pee and a prolonged session of hand washing. The cartoon was going in the next room, and the door was cracked, but there was no sign that Ramona had gotten up.

  He couldn’t hurt the girl, could he? No, never. But would it be hurting her to reunite her with her grandmother, if they could all be together again? Would it be a kindness to spare her all the uncertainty of life with Jay?

  Carew poked his head through the door. He looked like he had to move his bowels or eat something. It all boiled down to one or the other.

  “In a minute, boy,” he told Carew. The dog looked so agreeable that Lewis felt his heart soften. “Hey, you’ve been great through this. I couldn’t have asked for a better dog.”

  Yeah Lewis, yeah. But—

  “Just give me a minute,” Lewis said. “I have some matters to think through. Executive decisions, boy.”

  Carew skulked off. Lewis could have done with a shave, or a toothbrush for that matter, but such things could be remedied. It would have helped if he’d planned this out, instead of staggering off half-drunk and picking up his granddaughter with only the scarcest clue regarding what came next.

  Yes, right. What came next. That was the key, wasn’t it? Lewis took another of his pills. He was going to need all the optimism he could muster.

  In the last twenty-four hours Lewis had managed to violate a restraining order, commit what could be called an attempted murder, and effectively kidnap his granddaughter. Jay must have been in a terrible state.

  The guilt threatened to crush him, but he splashed cold water over his face until the wave crested. He rode it out. He wondered what Anna was going to say about all of this—probably she would be mortified. He’d blown up his life, hadn’t he? He’d had dreams in which he was being hunted for committing some crime, usually a murder, and experienced the rush of running to save his own skin. But he always then woke up in his bed, or on the sofa, tucked up like a bug in a rug. And although some part of him wished to scream out that this could not possibly be real, the solidity of the sink and the ragged sight of himself in the mirror testified otherwise.

  How was he going to find her?

  “Grampa?” Ramona said sleepily from the doorway. She was wearing the pants and T-shirt she’d slept in.

  “Yes, my dear,” Lewis said. “What is it?”

  “I got to go potty.”

  “Oh, my, of course,” Lewis said, excusing himself from the room and closing the door to give her privacy.

  He sat down on the edge of the bed and stared blankly at the TV. The dragon show had given way to something about a little round-faced boy and his parents. Lewis tried briefly to grasp the plot, but was distracted by a wave of shivering and chest pains that migrated up into the regions of his jaw and teeth.

  Surely none of this was doing Jay any good. But he would make things right once he found Anna. Yes, she was dead—he knew that. Of all
people, he knew that for certain. But she was revealing herself to him gradually, he was sure of it. He would find her, sort things out once and for all, then disappear for good. One thing he knew: he could not deal with going to prison.

  “The big house, boy,” he said to Carew, who was waiting at his feet. “The hoosegow. Can’t have it. Who’d take care of you then?”

  Carew writhed with confusion but his mouth pulled back in a doggy smile. Carew: the indefatigable optimist.

  “Bless you, boy,” Lewis said.

  Ramona emerged from the bathroom looking alert and confused. She glanced around the room, then came and sat beside Lewis on the bed. Soon she was immersed in the TV show. Lewis tried not to shiver. He didn’t want to worry her.

  “Are we going home today?” she asked during a lull in the cartoon.

  “Not yet,” Lewis said. “I was thinking we’d go get a big breakfast and then do some driving. Maybe some toy shopping. We’ll see if we run into Grandma Anna along the way.”

  “I want Mama,” she said, her gaze still locked on the screen.

  “Well, naturally,” Lewis told her.

  Ramona’s sharp eyes fixed on Lewis. “Why can’t I see Mama?”

  “Oh, you will,” Lewis said, alarmed by, and proud of, the girl’s sharpness. “We’re just going to have a little fun time. Maybe we can see another movie.”

  “Really?” she said. “And get some toys?”

  “Anything you want.”

  “Anything?” She pumped her fists in triumph, and Lewis did the same. In unison they shouted, “Anything!”

  Their good cheer ebbed temporarily fifteen minutes later when they stepped outside. Ramona let out a gasp, and Carew danced on a sheet of ice before taking a copious crap. Lewis let out an involuntary curse and rushed them both to the instinctual safety of the vehicle, where he carefully put the key in the ignition (metal was prone to snapping in these temperatures) and turned on the recalcitrant, grinding motor. It was some time before anything other than horribly frigid air came through the dashboard vents.

  “Oh, man!” Lewis shouted.

  “Man!” Ramona chirped.

  It was one of those mornings when the air cut through clothes and skin, when it felt like the chill was pervading one’s essence—when, in fact, the pain located an essence previously unknown. The parking lot and the two-story motel were covered in snow and ice that had frozen into semipermanent shapes, broken castles and unlikely slopes. When a car passed by, it created a bass rumble of breaking ice and the flopping sound made by tires in which pockets of air had frozen.

  “It’s cold, my dear,” he said to Ramona.

  “Real cold,” she replied, breaking out into a laugh.

  The girl had obviously inherited his mental instability. There they were, on the verge of freezing to death, and she found it humorous. She reached out and tried to write her name in the flaky ice on the window formed by their breath, and pretty soon Lewis was laughing, too. Carew paced back and forth on the backseat, in a rapture of pain and delight.

  Things inside the car improved considerably once the heater started blowing warm air. The tremors in Lewis’s chest subsided, and he actually felt a bit warm, which necessitated taking off his gloves and partially unbuttoning his parka.

  “Hungry?” he asked Ramona.

  “Real hungry!” she shouted.

  “How about you, mutt?” he said to Carew, who responded by licking the back of Lewis’s head.

  “That’s the spirit,” Lewis said as he put the car in gear. He had to concentrate all his will not to drive them headlong into a ditch.

  When they stopped the night before, Lewis had been progressively more terrified by the blowing snow and deepening cold, and had little notion of where he was when he saw the motel sign from the road. Now it turned out they were in a little town bustling enough to support a couple of markets and fast-food joints. He and Ramona had breakfast in one of the latter, which featured an indoor playground where Ramona burned off some energy.

  He was familiar with this part of the state—he used to bring his family to a little place owned by Rebecca Demos, a manager at work with whom Lewis had had an affair about eight years before. He’d made a couple of solo trips down south to the same place, to avail himself of Rebecca’s ample hips and deep need that sprang from her unhappy marriage. Lewis sat with a cup of coffee, listening to the news piped in through unseen speakers.

  “It’s fourteen degrees below zero out there,” said the announcer, a female public-radio type with a northern accent. “And the National Weather Service says it’s going to get colder, with highs through the week well below zero.”

  Lewis blew steam from his coffee up into his face. It was not good driving weather. The smart thing was to keep heading south. He vaguely wondered what had become of Rebecca. She’d moved to Seattle after her marriage finally exploded. As far as he knew, the husband never found out.

  He waved at Ramona, who was hanging with surprising strength from a couple of rings suspended over a lake of multicolored plastic balls. When she let go, she disappeared into their midst. Lewis smiled.

  It was probably advisable to keep an ear peeled to the regional news, to see if he was featured in it. Lewis looked out over the parking lot as a pickup truck equipped with a snowplow pushed all the snow into a small mountain over by the Dumpster. First was a story on budget cuts in state agencies—the usual woe-is-us, end-of-civilization stuff. There was a story about a murder that did not involve Lewis, instead the by-product of a Hmong turf war in St. Paul. There was the usual propaganda about the Vikings, then a prolonged explanation of what Lewis had learned when he stepped outside that morning—that it was ungodly cold out there, and that attaching hope to the immediate future was futile.

  There was no mention of Lewis or Stephen. Which was excellent since it meant that Stephen was most likely alive. Of course, Stephen being alive meant Stephen could tell the police what Lewis had done. But Lewis was not so far gone that he wished death on Stephen. He no longer cared about Stephen. What mattered now was Ramona. And Anna.

  It felt like a certainty now. He and Anna and Ramona were going to end up together. He allowed himself to remember the Sundays when he and his wife babysat Ramona, how sacred and rejuvenating it had been. What would it be like to make that feeling go on forever?

  Ramona came out of the big enclosed play area and started tugging on Lewis’s arm.

  “Come on!” she said. “Come play with me.”

  Her hair was tousled from sleep, and she made an exaggerated face of steely determination while she pulled with all her might in an attempt to get Lewis to stand.

  “Oh, I’m too old for that,” Lewis said. “I’d probably break a bone.”

  Ramona stopped pulling and considered what he had said. “Really?” she asked with wonderment. “Gross!”

  “Oh, yes, old people like me have to be very careful,” Lewis told her. “We can fall to pieces. We can blow away in the wind.”

  “You can not,” Ramona said, delighting in this stuff. She loved it when Lewis played the bad boy.

  “I can’t see! Where are my glasses!” Lewis shrieked in his foggy old-man voice.

  “Stop it,” Ramona said, putting a finger over his lips.

  They hung out in contented silence while Ramona polished off the last of her pancake sticks, meticulously dipping each bite in syrup. There were plenty of ways to pass the time. They both needed new clothes, for instance, and then there was the driving. He felt pleasantly as though time had come to an end. Finally Ramona looked up and said his name.

  “Yes, my princess?”

  Ramona paused and shot Lewis a weird look.

  “What’s the matter?” Lewis asked.

  “Nothing,” she said evasively.

  “Well, what did you want to say before?”

  “This is fun,” Ramona told him. “This is like a vacation. I’m glad Carew came with us, too.”

  Lewis put an arm around her. “I’m glad,�
�� he said.

  “Maybe today we’ll see Grandma Anna,” Ramona added.

  Lewis felt his breath catch in his chest. “I really hope so,” he admitted.

  23. YOU HAVE TO BE CAREFUL ABOUT PEOPLE LIKE THAT.

  Jay woke after her second night without Ramona. She had spent the day before in a horrid circuit between the hospital, her apartment, and her parents’ house. Stephen hadn’t woken, or stirred, or done much of anything. He’d been moved to a room upstairs and was no longer entombed in heavy blankets. Still, machines breathed for him, and he was wrapped in sheets that spared Jay the sight of his lost fingers and toes.

  She had spoken again with officers Wallace and McInnis. Police in the Twin Cities were looking for Lewis and Ramona, they assured her, and come morning they were going to set off a regional alarm that would notify law enforcement in five states—and attract the attention of the media. Jay had given the cops pictures—a head shot of Lewis in front of his house, and Ramona’s photo from her last birthday party.

  “We’ll find them,” said McInnis, with girl-to-girl reassurance.

  When she had first gone to Lewis’s house she found the door partway open to the cold. That scared her more than anything, because Lewis was an obsessive door-locker and window-latcher. She knew that no intentional harm would ever come to Ramona at Lewis’s hands—really, wasn’t the problem that he loved them too much?—but there was a very real possibility that he had lost his mind. The question of whether or not he had hurt Stephen hung over her like a pale shadow. Only he and Stephen knew.

  The Lewis she knew would never hurt Ramona. But was that the man who had her little girl?

  Not having Ramona nearby was like losing a limb. She got in her car and drove, the air crystalline and inert. She shivered hard in her seat, the temperature too low to be believed. Steam vented from apartment building rooftops. The streets were tunneled by plowed and shoveled snow, which was piled high and frozen hard. It had gotten down to twenty-one below during the night.

  It was hard to say precisely where she had spent the previous night; she stayed at Stephen’s side for several hours—his parents had arrived, two amiable granola types who knew almost nothing about Stephen’s life in recent years. She dozed, then drove home in the dark, her poor car sounding like it was barely able to go on, and slept for a couple hours on the sofa.