CHAPTER ELEVEN
What the Cold Keeps
Morning arrived without any particular mercy, gray light seeping through the pavilion's tall windows onto a room that looked, in daylight, even more like the aftermath of something than it had in the dark hours before, blankets tangled where they'd been dropped, cots pushed askew, thirty people moving through the wreckage of a night none of us would ever fully put behind us.
I woke to find Sam already sitting up beside me, his eyes open and fixed on nothing, and I understood, without needing to ask, that he hadn't slept either, that the two of us had simply lain there through what remained of the dark, listening to the wind and thinking our separate, overlapping thoughts about a man who had been laughing with Walt over a checkerboard less than a day before.
"How's Walt?" I asked, my voice coming out rougher than I intended.
"Quiet. He's out at the shed." Sam rubbed a hand over his face, the gesture of a man trying to physically press some order back into himself. "Has been since first light. Denny went out to sit with him a while, though I don't think either one of them's said much."
I found my father exactly where Sam said he'd be, standing just inside the equipment shed's doorway with Denny a few feet off, giving him the certain measured, wordless company of a man who understood that some grief needed witnesses more than it needed conversation.
The cold in there was its own kind of terrible mercy, the same cold that would keep Everett's body safe and dignified until help could reach us, and I watched my father look at the carefully wrapped shape resting on a makeshift platform of pallets and blankets with an expression I recognized from the worst days of his own life, the particular stillness of grief too large to move through quickly.
"I keep thinking I should have checked on him again before I turned in," Walt said, not turning around. "One more time. Just to be sure."
"You checked on him plenty, Dad. Marion said his heart could have gone at any moment, day or night, storm or no storm. There wasn't anything you missed."
"I know that. Knowing it and feeling it are two different animals completely.
" He finally turned, and his face, in the flat morning light, looked older than I remembered it looking the day before, grief carving new lines into it overnight the way grief always did.
"He told me once, over that checkerboard, that he'd eventually started thinking there were things he still owed people.
I wonder now what he meant by it. Whether whatever it was, he ever got the chance. "
I thought of Everett's careful, unreadable smile the night he'd told me nearly the same thing, working up to it, he'd said, still working up to it, and felt a small, cold unease settle beside my grief that I didn't have the words yet to explain even to myself. "I don't know, Dad. I wish I did."
We walked back to the pavilion together, the three of us, the wind still gusting hard enough to sting exposed skin, and found the whole crowded room sitting in a hush I'd never heard it hold before, even through the worst of the previous night's howling storm.
Marion moved among the cots with still purpose, checking on people the way she'd checked on Everett, though there was nothing left now to check for beyond the ordinary business of grief, whether anybody had managed to sleep, whether the children needed distracting, whether anybody's hands had stopped shaking yet.
Theo sat pressed close against her side, his notebook nowhere in sight, his small face pale and serious in a way that made my chest ache to look at.
"Is he really gone?" Theo asked me, when I sat beside him, his voice small in a way it hadn't been in a long while. "I keep thinking maybe I fell asleep and dreamed the bad part."
"He's really gone, sweetheart. I'm so sorry.
" I put my arm around him, and felt him lean into it, small and solid and grieving in the specific uncomplicated, total way children grieved, without any of the adult instinct to hide it or manage it or make it smaller for anybody else's comfort.
"It's all right to be sad about it. He was your friend. "
"He taught me to think two moves ahead," Theo said, thick. "He said that was the trick to checkers. Thinking past the move in front of you." He wiped his face with the back of his sleeve, fierce and embarrassed. "I don't want to play checkers anymore. Not for a while."
"That's all right too."
We sat with that a long moment, the pavilion settling slowly around us into the low, cautious murmur of a room trying to figure out how to keep functioning through grief it hadn't asked for, and I found my gaze drifting, more than once, toward the equipment shed's far door, toward the cold, terrible fact of a man's body kept waiting there because the weather had made even that small dignity impossible to manage truly, and felt the complete weight of our situation settle over me freshly, thirty one people snowed in together with nowhere to put our sorrow except into each other's company, no roads, no phones, no way to summon anybody who might have shouldered even a little of this for us.
Reagan Hollis found me midmorning, sitting alone near the window with a mug of coffee gone cold in her hands, and I settled beside her without asking, recognizing in her posture some part of it of my own morning, the particular hollow exhaustion of somebody who had fought hard for a life and lost anyway.
"I keep running it back," she said, quiet, not looking at me. "Wondering if there was something I missed. Something Marion and I both missed."
"Marion doesn't think so. I don't either." I wrapped both hands around my own mug, more for the warmth of holding a piece of it than any real interest in drinking it. "You did everything two trained women could do, with nothing but lanterns and your own hands. Nobody could have asked more of you."
"I keep telling myself that. Some part of me isn't listening yet.
" She finally looked at me, her eyes red rimmed and tired in a way that made her look considerably older than the young woman I'd exchanged three words with two days before.
"I've done this job five years. Lost people before, plenty of times.
It's never gotten easier, precisely, but it's never felt quite like this either.
Maybe because there's nowhere to send him after.
No hospital, no funeral home, nobody to hand him off to so someone else can carry the next part of it.
" She shook her head. "It feels wrong, leaving him out there in that shed.
Even though I know it's the only thing we can do. "
"It feels wrong to me too," I admitted. "But it's what we've got. And we're doing it with as much care as we've got in us."
"That's something, I suppose." She managed a small, tired smile, the first I'd seen from her that whole grim morning. "Thank you, Josie. For sitting with me a minute. I didn't realize how much I needed somebody to."
"Anytime," I told her, and meant it, and thought, watching her at last drink some of her own cooling coffee, that this entire storm had a way of handing us small, unexpected kindnesses right alongside its cruelties, strangers becoming the people you leaned on hardest, in exactly the moments you needed leaning on most.
Dad called what amounted to a household meeting that afternoon, the whole crowded pavilion gathering loose around the two stoves while he stood, hat in hand, and said plainly what all of us had already understood without anybody putting words to it yet.
"We're going to keep Everett just where he is, treated with every bit of care and respect we'd give any one of our own, until the roads clear enough for the coroner's office to reach us properly," he said, his voice steady despite the grief still sitting plain across his face.
"I know that's a hard thing to sit with.
It's a hard thing for me to sit with too.
But it's the right thing, and it's the only thing available to us, and I'd rather all of you hear it plain from me than have it sitting unspoken and worse in the back of everybody's mind. "
"How long do you think that'll be?" Otis asked, gentle, no trace of his usual careful detachment in it.
"Denny thinks the worst of the storm breaks by tomorrow night, maybe the night after.
Roads clearing enough for anybody to reach us thoroughly could take longer still, depending how bad the drifting's gotten.
" Dad looked around the room, at all the tired, grieving, frightened faces turned up toward him, campers who'd known Everett only a handful of days and yet felt his loss plainly enough regardless.
"I know this isn't the winter any of you signed up for.
I'm sorry for that, more than I can properly say.
But I promise you, we'll get through it the same way we've gotten through every hard thing this place has ever handed us.
Together, and with as much kindness for each other as we can manage. "
Nobody argued, and nobody, I noticed, moved to leave the gathered warmth of that shared grief either, the full room settling instead into a long, soft togetherness that asked nothing of anybody beyond simply being present for it, Sylvie's hand finding Gil's without either of them making a show of it, Nina resting her head against Jared's shoulder, Deloris standing a little apart as always but not quite so far apart as she usually kept herself, and I found myself thinking, watching that strange, sorrowful, oddly tender assembly, that grief, handled honestly and shared out generously enough among willing hands, had a certain way of making even strangers feel considerably less like strangers by the time it was through with them.
I found Sam alone near the woodpile late that evening, restocking the nearest stove with the same deliberate, deliberate focus he brought to any task that needed doing with his hands while his mind worked at something else entirely.
"You're thinking about the case," I said, not a question.
"I'm trying not to." He set another log carefully into place, watching the flames catch. "It doesn't feel right, letting my mind wander toward Corliss and Pratt with Everett not even fully buried yet. Feels disrespectful, somehow, like I'm not giving the man's death its due weight."
"I don't think thinking is the same as not grieving, Sam. You're allowed to hold both."
"Maybe." He straightened, and looked at me a long moment, some part of it careful and unsettled behind his eyes. "He said something to you, didn't he. The other night. About working up to something."
"He did. A piece of it he said he owed someone. A promise he'd been putting off." I hugged my arms tighter against the cold radiating even this close to the stove. "I keep turning it over, Sam, and I don't like where my mind keeps going with it, but I can't seem to stop it going there regardless."
Sam didn't answer right away, and in the quiet between us, with the fire popping soft and the wind still grinding steady against the windows and somewhere out past the far door a good man lying wrapped in the cold because the world had simply not left us any better option, I understood that whatever hushed promise Everett Boyle had carried into that pavilion with him, we were both, without either of us saying so plainly yet, already beginning to wonder if it had anything to do with the mystery that had haunted the two of us for a year.