13. Lily
LILY
Ihave photographed war zones, morgues, and my mother's last breath. I had never once been afraid of a beautiful morning until that one.
I woke because the noise had stopped. Nine days of wind shouldering into the cabin, and then nothing, a silence so complete it had a weight to it, and I lay there a while certain something had gone wrong before I understood that for the first time in over a week nothing had.
The storm had blown itself out in the dark.
I went to the window and the light came off the snow and hit me like an open hand.
The whole world had been dipped in glass and left to set.
Every branch and fence wire and ugly black stump wore a clear skin of ice that took the low sun and threw it back twice as bright, and over all of it hung the hard scrubbed blue you only ever get on the far side of weather that meant what it said.
It was, with no exaggeration left in me anywhere, the most beautiful thing I had seen in two years. That was the trouble with it.
I was dressed and out the door with the Nikon before I had properly decided to be.
It is the only way I have ever made anything worth keeping.
The cold met me clean, no wind left in it now, only the deep still ache of a morning that had strangled the storm overnight and now stood calmly over the body.
I shot like I was starving. A seam of ice rode the length of a single dead blade of grass.
Tank drove a joyful trench through a drift with his whole enormous face.
A fence post threw its long blue shadow forty feet across the white, thin as a drawn line.
My mother's camera warmed in my hands the way it always did, as though it still remembered belonging to her, and I stopped thinking about anything at all except light, which is the nearest thing to prayer I have ever been any good at.
I finished the roll and dug out another with fingers already going numb and kept shooting, because the light was doing something over the ridge I would not be handed twice in a lifetime.
For a little while the book of my life simply stopped turning its pages.
There was no anniversary two days out, no ledger of everything I had lost, no next city already signed for in a folder in my bag.
There was only the cold and the light and the ridiculous dog and the sound of my own shutter and the strange animal fact of being alive on a morning that had every right to have killed us both.
I noticed, somewhere in the middle of it, that I was happy, plainly and stupidly happy, for the first time in two years, and the noticing put me instantly on my guard, because in my experience happiness is only the breath a bad thing takes before it says its name.
I have chased that feeling across eight states and never once run it down.
It had been waiting for me the whole time at the bottom of the snowbank I had driven into.
Nobody warns you that the good things ambush you exactly the way the bad ones do.
Sacha came out to find me flat on my stomach in the snow, photographing a thornbush the ice had turned into a chandelier, and he made the tactical error of standing still long enough to become composition.
"No," he said, before I had even brought the camera up.
"Yes," I said, bringing it up. "One frame.
You owe me for making you eat the soup." "I do not pay debts for crimes committed against me.
" "One. Then I stop forever." He stood there in all that blinding white with his shoulders squared and his entire face laboring to place the sun under arrest, and he looked precisely like a man being photographed against his will for a proof-of-life video, which is to say he looked entirely like himself.
I got the shot. I got it perfectly. "There," I said, turning the frame to check it.
"Grumpy Man, Natural Habitat, Extremely Endangered.
" He was already moving toward me. "Give me the camera.
" "Out of the question. This one belongs in a museum.
" "Lily." "Too late. You are immortal now.
You should smile more. It confuses your enemies. "
For one clean second, standing there being immortalized against his will, he almost let the morning have him.
His shoulders came down half an inch. The corner of his mouth did what, on a lesser man, would have been the opening move of a smile.
Then Tank arrived at a dead sprint and drove his snow-packed skull into the backs of Sacha's knees, and the most dangerous man in the north woods staggered, said something unkind in his own language, and put a hand down to the dog's head without once looking at it, and I thought, there.
That. Whatever that is, that is the exact thing I am not supposed to be allowed to want.
He did not take the camera, and that was the first thing that frightened me.
The Sacha of the early days would have had it out of my hands and the film pulled into the light before I got to the end of my sentence, and instead he only looked at me holding it, and something crossed his face that had nothing to do with any photograph, and I watched the morning drain straight out of him.
It had been happening for two days, since the phone rang in the dark and he came back from the window a colder man.
He had been getting quieter and gentler and further away all at the same time, and standing there in the glare I finally understood what the gentleness had been the whole while.
It was a man being tender with something he had already decided to lose.
"Don't," I said. It came out with more loaded into it than I had meant to pack.
He went still. "Don't do what?" "That. The thing you have been doing since the call.
The long, quiet goodbye you think I am not quick enough to catch.
I have watched a great many people leave, Sacha.
I am practically a scholar of it. And you are doing it right now, without once moving your feet. "
"You are seeing things that are not there," he said, and even he did not appear to believe it. "I photograph what is there for a living. Noticing what is actually in the frame is the entire job. Do not stand there and tell the woman with the camera she invented the picture."
For a moment I thought he might deny it outright, or, crueler still, do the merciful thing and pretend I had imagined the whole shape of him.
Instead he set his jaw and handed me the truth, which turned out to be worse.
"You do not know what you are asking to want.
" "Then say it in plain words, and let me be the one who decides. "
"You want to know what I am." His voice had gone flat and level, the voice from the first night, the one he kept on the far side of a gun.
"I am a countdown. That is the whole of me with everything else stripped off.
There is a clock running on my life that I did not wind and cannot stop, and one day, perhaps soon, it reaches the end of itself, and every person standing near me on that day settles the account.
I am not a man you are allowed to want. I am a man you are lucky to have survived meeting. "
"That is supposed to frighten me," I said.
"It does not. You keep waiting for me to turn sensible and climb into the car with relief, and I keep failing to, and it is driving you out of your mind, because you have already run the numbers and I refuse to come out equal to what you need me to be.
" "You should be afraid of me." "I drove a car through your gate at sixty miles an hour on the worst night of my life.
Fear and I are barely on speaking terms."
"I have been running since the afternoon my mother stopped breathing," I said.
I had not planned to. It came up out of me the way blood does, without asking permission.
"Two years. A new city, a new hospital, a new set of strangers who never learned the first true thing about me, gone again before any of it could get a hand to my throat.
I have made high art of the door. I am the leading authority alive on the door.
" Something in my voice slipped its leash.
"And I woke up this morning in your murder-cabin, in a world made entirely of glass, next to a man with a clock on him and a price on his head, and for the first time since I put her in the ground I did not want the door.
I wanted the room. I wanted to be in the room, and I wanted you in it with me. "
He crossed half the space between us and stopped short, as though he had walked face first into glass.
"I am trying to keep you alive," he said, and it was not cold anymore, it was the exact opposite of cold, it was a man losing a fight he had sworn to himself he would win.
"I know precisely what you are trying to do," I said.
"You are trying to be noble at me. It is the least attractive thing you have done all week, and I have watched you clean a handgun at the breakfast table. "
"Then be un-noble," I said. "For two days.
Be selfish for two days like an ordinary, badly behaved person, and let the arithmetic wait outside in the snow where it belongs.
" He closed his eyes. When a man like that shuts his eyes in the middle of an argument, it is not surrender.
It is a man running the sums one last time behind them, hunting for the version he has not already tried.
"There is no way this ends well," he said.
"I did not ask you for one that ends well," I said. "I asked you for two days."
He looked at me the way a man looks at a language he has spent three years teaching himself to forget.
"The road," he began, and I heard the whole kind, final sentence he meant to build out of it, and I took the first brick away from him before he could set it.
"I know about the road. The radio has the plows reaching the county line in two days, maybe a little sooner.
I heard it the same as you did." So there it was, out in the cold between us.
The countdown he had spent three years living inside and the one I had spent two years outrunning turned out to be the very same clock, and it had already begun to move.
He did not answer right away. The whole glazed morning seemed to hold itself still around us, every iced branch waiting, and he looked at me the way a man looks at the one exit he has sworn he will not take.
I had just told the flat truth to a man who lived on secrets, which was the most reckless thing in a life full of reckless things, more reckless than the gate or the moose, and I had somehow not died of it.
So I put the last card on the table face up.
"I'm leaving in two days," I said. He took a step closer, and the last of the cold went out of his eyes. "Then we're wasting the two days we have." And he kissed me like the storm had only ever been practice.