19. Knox
KNOX
All Activities Cancelled.
BLIZZARD
Supper: Sandwich boxes
First thing the morning of the twenty-first, I reached for Madeleine, but her side was empty and cold.
The cold sheets told me she’d left hours before.
I’d come up with a dozen reasonable reasons.
She couldn’t sleep and maybe went to her own bed so as not to wake me.
Or it could have been an early maid-of-honor thing with Ivy.
All of it was plausible. And yet I knew my worst fears were true.
She’d left on purpose. And she’d seen me standing at the window and went inside her cabin without a backward glance.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, she’d seen me at the window and nodded as if I were a mere acquaintance, then marched into her own cabin and closed the door. It was a dagger right in my heart because I knew what it meant. She was running away.
I’d stood at my window for a few minutes, waiting for her to come back out and head to me, as if she’d just forgotten something. That didn’t happen. The door stayed shut all day.
That night the rest of them had game night at the lodge — Pictionary, from the sound of the hollering that carried across the yard.
I didn't go. Couldn't sit in a room with all those people and act like a man whose life was fine.
Her door never opened either. I know because I watched it from mine, off and on, until the lights went out over there around eleven.
She’d been upset about the Mindy slip. I should have known it was a bigger thing than she’d said out loud to me. I should have been more sensitive and asked more questions. Instead, I’d just allowed myself to feel safe and sure with her against my chest. Idiot.
And I’d told her I loved her. Good lord, could this get any worse?
I was still pacing when the storm came in, arriving like a freight-train out of the northwest. Lights flickered and finally went out. Daylight thinned and flattened as wind hit the cabin broadside, causing the whole frame to shudder. Snow drove sideways past the glass thick and fast.
This was bad.
A text came from Finley that everyone should stay inside until further notice.
Finley
Check your porches. We’ve delivered boxes with enough sandwiches to last you several days.
Text this number if you need anything and we’ll do our best. But please STAY INSIDE until this passes.
There are guide ropes run between the cabins and the lodge.
If you must go out or have lost your way, find the rope and follow it hand over hand.
It will bring you in. Do not let go of it.
If the weather report is right, you won’t be able to see your hand in front of your face out there.
We’ve seen storms come through here like this one before, and it’s no joke, so please take care of yourselves.
I opened my door and sure enough a box was tucked under the small table that sat between rocking chairs on the porch. Leave it to Caspian and Elliot to keep everyone fed even during a storm.
I took the box of food inside and stuck it in my mini-fridge. I paced some more. Finally, I texted Madeleine.
Knox
You okay?
No answer. Not even the three dots.
This was enough to convince me that I should go over there. What if she was sick? Maybe her phone wasn’t working. She might not know about the box of sandwiches on her porch.
Before I could talk myself out of it, I had my boots on and my coat half-buttoned.
When I stepped off my porch, the cold took the breath clean out of my body.
Wind shoved me sideways off the porch step and I went down on one knee in snow already past my shins.
My bad ankle suddenly throbbed. Regardless, I got up and kept going.
Her cabin was right there, fifteen feet away. I could do fifteen feet.
It took me a while.
The snow was coming so hard I couldn’t open my eyes more than a slit.
Even then, I couldn’t see a darn thing. No cabin, no ground, just white sleet and snow driving past at a slant.
I found her wall with my hands and followed it to the door.
When I got there, breathless, ankle screaming at me, I knocked.
Nothing.
I knocked again and called her name but the wind took my voice and tossed it away behind me. Thus, I knocked harder, pounding the flat of my fist on the door hard enough that it would leave a bruise.
“Madeleine!” Pound. “Madeleine, it’s me. Open the door, it’s freezing. Just talk to me. Please, just open the door.”
More nothing.
I knew she was in there. I’d seen her go in and not come out. There was a thin warm line of light under the door. She was mere feet away on the other side of two inches of wood. I felt her in there in that way you feel someone in the dark.
“Madeleine, please.” I put my forehead against the door. “Whatever happened—whatever I did—I don’t even know what I did. Just tell me. You don’t have to open the door. Just tell me through the door. Please.”
Still nothing.
The light under the door didn’t move. No footstep. No shadow across it as the wind continued to shriek down the mountains. I banged my forehead on the door, begging a woman to let me in.
Who was I?
At the moment, a man who couldn’t feel his feet. A man who understood that the woman he loved would rather sit ten feet away and listen to you pounding on the door and not caring if you froze or not.
She didn’t care that I was out in the cold.
How could that be after the days we’d shared?
I’d thought we were finally past her turning cold on me but I was wrong.
Sharp pain in my chest was almost unbearable.
I needed relief. Something to take away this pain.
I turned away from her door at long last and headed into the storm.
I’d go back to my cabin and drink the bottle of Jack Daniels I had in the cabinet.
But the blizzard had taken the ranch away, leaving only a white wall of ice.
I stumbled in the direction of my cabin, at least I thought so but I couldn’t be entirely sure.
There were no shapes visible. No landmarks to tell me where I was in relation to my cabin.
Everything in every direction was the same howling white nothing, no lodge lights, no tree line, no dark shape of a building anywhere, no tracks.
In fact, my own filled in behind me fast as I made them.
I put my hand out in front of me. The snow was coming so thick I could just make out my own glove.
I told myself, the cabin’s right behind you, ten steps.
I took ten steps. No cabin. I took ten more, angling where I was sure it had to be, and the ground dropped away under me.
I cursed under my breath as I realized I’d walked off the packed path into an open meadow.
Was this the sledding hill? Or the meadow that led to the horse trail. I truly had no idea.
Real fear, cold and clean, cut right through my aching heart.
People die in this. I knew that much. People die fifty feet from their own front door in weather like this, walk in circles till the cold takes them, and they find them in the spring.
I couldn’t feel my feet, and my hands had stopped hurting, which some far-off part of my brain knew was worse than hurting.
The wind was so loud I couldn’t hear myself think, and every direction was the same.
I turned around twice trying to find the way I’d come and lost it completely.
Then, I understood, with a strange flat calm, that I had gotten myself good and truly lost fifteen feet from where I’d started.
I was lost in a snowstorm and was probably going to die.
Or lose my fingers to hypothermia. Which would be worse than death.
I hollered. I don’t think I even formed a word, but I put everything I had left into a sound. The wind ate it whole.
I hollered some more as the thought occurred to me—Madeleine would never even know what happened to me.
She’d open that door tomorrow and I’d be gone and she’d never known I was out here.
No, that was wrong. She heard me knocking and refused to answer the door.
Maybe she left me out here on purpose. The only way to get rid of me was to send me out in the storm because I’d so stupidly thrown myself at her.
And I was going to pay with my life. Why hadn’t I just left well enough alone?
Those thoughts hurt so much that I didn’t even bother hollering again.
Instead, I stumbled forward and went down hard over something buried, a fence rail maybe and dropped to my knees.
This is where I would be when the storm passed.
Dead. Probably one of the staff would find me first. I’ll have ruined the wedding.
All because I was a complete and utter fool over a woman.
I stayed down a second in the snow because, God help me, it was starting to feel almost warm down there, almost restful.
I thought about my boys, my brothers, how true and loyal they’d been.
What a good life we’d all made together.
They would miss me. They loved me. That came with an utter clarity.
I curled up in a ball, sleepy now and resigned to my fate.
Think about yesterday, I told myself. What it felt like to have Madeleine in my arms. I’d go out thinking of her.
Even though she’d sent me out here in the storm to die alone.
A hand closed on the back of my coat and hauled me up out of the snow like I weighed nothing.
Grant.
I couldn’t see him so much as feel him, a big, dark shape bent into the wind, one fist knotted in my collar, his mouth close to my ear, bellowing. But I only caught about one word in three.
“—got you—don’t fight me—this way—”
He pulled my arm over his shoulders and placed his arm around my back, then turned us both into the wind, seeming quite sure where to go. Some direction I couldn’t have found with a map and a week to look. But he walked us out of there like a man who saved idiots for a living.