Chapter Eight
––––––––
Prophet
Six inches of new ice has grown over the water hole by the time I get down to the creek, thick enough at the edges to stand on without a second thought.
I test it anyway, the way Lily taught me, every morning, no matter how solid it looks.
She told me once that five years of habit kept her alive out here, and I’ve come around to treating her habits as instruction.
The spud bar rings clean against the surface near the hole, high, no hollow note underneath, and I break through the skin that’s grown back overnight.
The center never quite freezes. Even at thirty below, something keeps moving down there, stubborn, refusing the cold’s terms entirely.
The forest holds its own kind of stillness this time of morning.
Dark spruce stands close and silent on either side of the bank, no birds working the branches yet, no wind worth mentioning.
I crouch at the edge a moment longer than the chore requires, and watch the dark water churn under its skin of ice.
A thing can keep moving long after everything around it has decided to freeze solid.
I don’t know why that thought catches the way it does.
I let it go, the way I’ve learned to let most of these thoughts go, and fill the buckets.
I haul the buckets back up to the cabin, my breath smoking ahead of me the entire walk.
My knuckles ache worse this morning than they have most mornings, a deep, settled ache that has nothing to do with the cold and everything to do with whatever left my hands last night.
Last night sits in my chest the same way that ache sits in my knuckles.
Familiar, but not going anywhere on its own.
Lily has the stove going by the time I’m back, coffee already poured, and neither of us mentions what happened in the dark a few hours ago.
Not at first. We eat. Bear works the floor between us for scraps with his usual shameless patience, head swiveling from her plate to mine and back, weighing his odds.
The cabin holds its ordinary morning sounds—the stove ticking, the wind testing the eaves, and underneath it all, last night sits in the room with us too.
Not a wound. A door somebody left open. Neither of us has crossed the floor to shut it.
I’m the one who finally walks through it.
I set my cup down. My hands are steady now, the ache fading the way it always fades by midmorning, but I find myself looking at them anyway, turning them over on the table the way you’d check a tool for damage after using it for something it wasn’t built for.
“I want to understand what I did,” I say.
Lily doesn’t look up from her coffee right away.
When she does, there’s a different look on her face than the one I’m used to.
Not the wariness from the first weeks. Not the careful blank she wears when she’s deciding how much of herself to hand over.
Something closer to curiosity. The look of a woman who’s spent her life taking things apart to see how they work, finally handed something worth the trouble.
“Describe it,” she says. Not soft. A question put the way she’d ask a patient where it hurts, expecting precision instead of poetry.
I think about it before I answer, because the truth deserves better than the first thing that comes to mind.
“Something that’s been held back too long,” I say.
“Compressed. And then it found a way out.” I turn one hand over, study the palm, expecting a mark that isn’t there.
“Clean, when it happened. Righteous, if you can use that word for a feeling. The way a fight feels once it finally starts, after too many hours of standing around talking.” I look up.
“I didn’t aim it. It aimed itself. Same as ducking. ”
“A reflex.”
“Yeah.”
“Did it cost you anything?”
I think about the ache in my knuckles this morning, worse than usual, and decide there’s no point lying to a woman who’s already caught me out twice.
“Some. I’m slower this morning, I feel heavier.
As though I spent something I don’t have an easy way to put back.
” I shrug, because there’s nothing else to do with that fact except hand it to her plain.
“I’ll take it over whatever was coming through those trees. ”
She sits with that for a while, turning her cup in her hands, and I watch her decide something. I’ve gotten good at watching her decide things.
“I was a doctor,” she says carefully, the way you’d test a board before you put your weight on it.
Not a doctor the way a person says it, filling silence at a dinner table.
This is more of a confession. “Not a GP. Cardiothoracic surgeon.” She tests the second phrase the same way, her voice flat with disuse, the words stiff, needing to be worked back into shape before they sit right in her mouth again.
“Hearts... lungs at Lake Erie Heart Institute.”
I don’t say anything right away. I’ve learned that much from her that some truths need room around them before anybody starts handling them.
I watch her instead, the way her thumb works a slow circle against the rim of her cup, the way her eyes have gone somewhere else entirely, somewhere with bright lights and a room full of people who used to know her name before they knew anything else about her.
Whatever happened to put that career behind her instead of ahead of her, she isn’t handing me that piece yet, and I don’t ask for it.
A man learns to take what’s offered and leave the rest closed.
So, I give her one of mine in return, since that seems to be the way this morning is heading.
“I had brothers,” I tell her. “Or men who’d have used that word for me.
There’s a room I can almost see with a table, a dozen of them, maybe, and a chair that was mine and nobody else’s.
I don’t know where the room is. I don’t know their names.
I only know the word fit when it came to me. Brothers.”
She looks at me for a long moment, and doesn’t ask the obvious question, the one about whether I want to find that room again. I think she already knows the answer is complicated, and I think she’s decided not to make me say so this morning.
“Do you miss it?” I ask instead. “Lake Erie Heart Institute.”
She considers it the way she considers everything, turning it over before she lets any of it out where I can see it.
Bear, sensing the weight of the question before either of us has finished asking it, gets up from his spot by the stove and crosses the room to lean his whole considerable body against her leg, and she puts a hand down into his fur without seeming to notice she’s done it.
“I miss being good at something...” she says finally, “... in a room full of people who knew it.”
“You’re good at this.” I mean the cabin, the trapline, keeping a man and a dog alive forty miles from anything with nothing but her own two hands and a stubborn refusal to quit. I mean all of it.
“Survival isn’t a career.”
“It’s harder than most.”
That gets something out of her I don’t see very often, not quite a laugh, but the shape one would take if it ever got all the way out. Gone fast, but there.
Bear’s tail thumps twice against the floor, satisfied with himself, as though he’s the one who put it there.
I try again that afternoon, only this time I go at it harder, pushing into whatever has my past locked away instead of waiting for it to open for me.
She’s across the room working on a snare while I sit at the table with my eyes closed, fists planted on my thighs.
The first few tries give me nothing. Same empty black I’ve found every time I’ve gone searching since I woke in the snow with no fucking clue who I was.
I keep pushing until my teeth hurt from grinding them and sweat crawls cold between my shoulder blades.
Somewhere behind all this, there’s a life I lived, and I’m getting real fucking tired of being shut out of it.
Then something gives.
It isn’t sunlight. There’s no sun, no fire, no place I can point to and say it came from there. It’s everywhere, burning through me without heat, under my skin and inside my bones, and for one hard second, I know it. I fucking know it.
I belonged there.
More than belonged. I was made there.
Something moves beneath my shoulder blades and pain tears across my back so fast my hands slam flat against the table. I can almost feel the weight behind me, huge and heavy, muscles I don’t have anymore trying to move something that is no longer there.
“Prophet?”
I hear her, but can’t answer yet because another piece is coming, and I’m terrified that opening my mouth will scare it off.
There are others around me.
I can’t see their faces, but I feel them.
Thousands of them, maybe more, and I know where I stand among them without anyone having to tell me.
There’s an order to us, something older than rank or patches, and I have a place in it.
A purpose carved so deep into me there was never any question of choosing it.
Then I hear the sound. It rolls through everything.
My eyes open and Lily is staring at me from across the room, the snare forgotten in her hands.
“Fuck.”
She sets it down. “What did you see?”
“I don’t know if seeing is the word.” I drag both hands over my face, trying to hold on to pieces already bleeding away.
“There was light everywhere, but it didn’t come from anything.
It was in everything. In me too.” My throat feels too tight, and I swallow against it.
“I wasn’t alone. There were others, more than I could count, and I knew them even though I couldn’t see a single fucking face. ”
Lily doesn’t interrupt me, so I keep going.