Chapter 12
Within seconds Zach twisted the hut’s lock behind him. He pressed his face against the door’s window. No signs of life. The only sound the wet surge of his own blood.
At some point the snow had stopped falling. In the slice of the outdoors visible through the glass, the smooth sheet of white was only marred by his own tracks, curlicues of blowing snow already softening them.
Nothing. There was nothing at all.
Zach rolled the soft hairs at the nape of his neck around a finger and pulled. It calmed him; satisfyingly painful. He peered out the window for one minute, two, until he was sure there was nothing to see, that no creature hunted there.
He set his wet boots next to the woodstove to dry, put another log on the fire, and held grateful hands up to the stove’s renewed heat. His damp socks steamed and he wavered, drained.
Everything he knew standing there feeling himself begin to thaw, the spread of warmth dissolving his fear, told him his mother had been right when she said fire was the most important ingredient for surviving in the winter wilderness.
The primordial draw of it made it impossible to go upstairs.
The intensity of his trembling slowed, then stopped.
Someone had left the red bottle of lighter fluid only a few inches from the stove. He frowned at this and moved it beside the woodpile, the plastic hot to the touch.
Braver now that the strange sounds were a memory, Zach trotted to the hut’s front door to peek out in the direction the creature’s yowl had seemed to come from.
No new tracks had been left behind by any living thing.
The bolt of the keypad lock was firmly in place, the group’s footprints on the porch transformed to uneven depressions by the wind and the new snowfall.
There was the dim silhouette of the woods where the crows had circled over the strange creature, and on the horizon hovered a yellow, diffused brightness.
Though Zach knew it had to be the distant lights of town, in that moment he saw it as warmth radiating from the place where Bonnie lay sleeping and safe.
Zach counted the boots paired neatly by the door, one through six, a reassuring reminder he wasn’t alone. Bram’s boots lay on their side in a pool of snowmelt. Zach moved them next to his own by the stove, standing them proud and bending the tongues out so that they would dry by morning.
Zach curled up on a couch, pulling his coat over himself like a blanket, Mr. Fantastic tucked under his chin, and a hand gripping the lump of survival essentials his mother had secreted in an inner pocket of his jacket, things she said everyone should always have in the backcountry.
A small box that contained a folding knife, compass, water purification tablets, and of course, matches.
The satisfying camping kind where the orange flaming part took up most of the stick.
There was no bloodthirsty monster in the woods. The men would be happy. Bram would be happy. Things would be okay.
As okay as they could be.
Zach closed his eyes, drifting. No matter how he fought it, every night he traveled back in time as he traversed the space between waking and sleeping.
Because no matter how his mind scratched at it, he knew he didn’t fully understand what his parents had said. And because he couldn’t help returning again and again to the night that had been the last time before the worst time.
His father’s thundered criticisms had woken Zach when his parents had returned from their night out. Grace had laughed when she shouldn’t have, talked too much, drank too much, smiled too little, interrupted, hadn’t listened. She embarrassed him. Why couldn’t she ever? Why couldn’t she just?
But when his mother finally spoke, it wasn’t her normal sputtering defenses or weepy, slurred apologies. Instead, her voice trickled exhausted through Zach’s bedroom wall. “I need—quiet. I’d—I’d like it—I’d like you to sleep somewhere else tonight. Please.”
Bram’s voice had the gravelly righteousness of the Underself. “So you humiliate me, and now you want me to leave? No.”
Bonnie squeezed Zach’s hand. He’d been asleep when she’d snuck into his room, already anticipating trouble.
Like him, Bonnie was attuned to the patterns of the house.
She knew when their parents dressed up, went out, it meant that when they returned there was a good chance there would be a reckoning, their father furious over whatever he had decided their mother was and wasn’t.
And Bonnie didn’t like to be alone when that happened.
“I didn’t say leave—I just need quiet—I can stay in the guest bedroom, or you—”
“Please. Would’ve been nice if you’d needed quiet at dinner tonight, instead of interrupting me every time I brought up the business. You knew the whole point was getting Jim to invest. It’s like dealing with a child.”
His mother didn’t respond. Zach heard something inside him whisper, “At least it isn’t me. At least he’s not mad at me.” He squeezed his sister close to fight off his shame at this thought.
“I needed him to sign on, but instead we got the Grace show, everyone pretending you’re so hilarious, so clever. That’s pity, them laughing, you know that? Laughing at a drunk. You think he’s going to invest now? After that?”
“Maybe it’s better he doesn’t.”
“What?” Bram snapped, the sound a menacing curl that made Bonnie bury her head into Zach’s chest. “What did you say?”
“Nothing. Nothing! It’s just maybe—with the business the way it is…”
The children waited for Bram’s voice to fracture walls, cull their mother to a shadow, turn her raw and repentant then quiet as a stone.
That was all necessary before there’d be peace. And tomorrow they’d all pretend nothing happened.
“What do you know about my business?”
“Nothing, I just mean with the, uh, economy—”
“The economy! Christ, you’re a joke.”
“Just let me—let me—I’ll sleep in the guest bedroom. For tonight. How’s—”
“You want me out of my own bedroom, in the house I own, and you’re giving me that face, pretending you’re some victim? Poor you. Why do you do this to me? I give you everything. What more do you want?”
Zach flinched. When his father held the scales, if on one side sat honesty and on the other saying whatever his father wanted to hear—which was always “sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m the problem here, you’re right”—compliance without question was the only way to bring things to balance.
“I want a—a separation,” his mother said, voice so low Zach barely heard her.
The children exchanged a wide-eyed stare. In the ensuing silence, Zach pictured his father’s expression, just as surprised at this unprecedented turn as his children. Just as shocked that their mother had stood up to him. Quietly, stutteringly, but even so.
Already Zach floated into another life, another house, where he and Bonnie came home only to their mother, and she was a real mother, the mother who took them into the mountains rather than whatever she became in the house, his heart beating with a yes, yes, yes drum of hope even as his gut roiled with hot fear of Bram somehow intuiting his disloyalty.
What journey might lay between this moment and that dream?
And would there be anything left of Bram at the end of it if he was no longer their leader, commander, dictator?
When his father finally spoke, the edges of his anger were softened by a kind of curiosity. “What’s your end game here?”
“There’s no game.”
“Is this some kind of sick joke? A divorce?”
Bonnie hugged her brother tighter. He rubbed the spot between her birdlike shoulder blades the way that had soothed her since she was a baby.
“I—I didn’t say that, I said I just needed quiet, to be—to have space. A separation. Only for a little bit, just to—”
The Underself leaned into the injustice, a blameless victim. “You would be that cruel? Rip our family apart like that?”
“You’re their father, you—”
“I know that, Grace,” Bram interrupted. “But what are you? A mother? No woman would drink like you and dare to think of herself as a mother. I’ve sheltered you.
Protected you. Provided for you. At your age, you think you’re going back to that so-called modeling career?
Or that they’re going to let you pretend to keep up with the guys at Mountain Rescue?
And we have a prenup. You divorce me, you’ll have nothing. ”
Their mother laughed. Laughed! An icy, rueful laugh Zach had never heard before. Her audacity filled him with horrified wonder.
“There’s nothing to have, Bram,” she said. “You don’t have anything.”
In response, a sudden smashing noise made the children jolt, the muffled words and sounds that followed unintelligible.
Into Zach’s head sprung the image of his father slapping a jar over his miniaturized mother, the Underself sealing that jar, lifting it, his mother captured like an insect, running on the infinite, uphill plane of glass Bram spun ever faster.
Their mother’s voice shook. “You stay right there.”
“Everything in this house is mine to break.” A pause. Another crashing sound, Bonnie’s grip tightening. “I don’t have anything, huh? Then what was that? Looked like ‘something’ to me.”
“There’s nothing. It’s all lies.”
His mother kept talking when she should be going small and smooth and unresponsive. And she knew that. She knew better than anyone. She was the one who’d told Zach, If you’re attacked by an animal, you fight back. Unless you’re fighting with a grizzly bear or your father. Then you play dead.
“You’re crazy, Grace. We live in a goddamn mansion. What’s your Range Rover, some fantasy? What is so wrong with you that you always try to ruin everything, even yourself?”
Their mother’s voice cracked, ruptured by what sounded like grief. “You. You’re the one who—breaks things. You’re a bully.”