“I watched my partner die,” I said. “He was on the floor next to me. I watched the lights go out in his eyes.”
“It doesn’t sound like you had any chance to stop it.”
“I’ve replayed it in my mind a thousand times,” I said. “Ten thousand times. I could have drawn on that guy. I could have at least tried.”
She shook her head. “No way. He already had the gun pointed at you.”
“He was spaced out, Natalie. I might have been able to beat him.”
“Just keep going. What happened next?”
I told her about my own injuries. Three bullets, one in the rotator cuff, the other nicking the top of the lung, the last one bouncing around like a pinball and ending up next to my heart. I showed her my scars. I told her that the last bullet, the one by my heart, was still there.
She touched my chest. “God,” she said.
I told her about the bad years after that. Leaving the force, my marriage breaking up. Then those cabins up north, the ones my father had built, in this little town called Paradise, on the shores of Lake Superior. How I had gone up there, thinking I’d sell them off, but then deciding to stick around for a while. Something about the place. The absolute solitude. The desolate beauty.
I went fast through the rest of the story. Getting talked into trying out the private eye thing, and the wonderful experiences that brought me. Getting my ass kicked, almost freezing to death, watching my father’s favorite cabin burn down. Right up to the recent business with Vinnie and his lost brother. She already knew that story. She was there.
“So how about you?” I finally said. “It’s your turn.”
“Tomorrow,” she said. “I’ve got to sleep.” She got up, wrapping herself in the sheet and leaving me the comforter.
“Where are you going?”
“The other room. I can’t sleep with someone else in the bed.” She left the room, then poked her head back in. “Good night, Alex.”
“Good night,” I said. I thought about maybe leaving, just getting in the truck and driving back home. Instead I just stared at the strange ceiling for a while. One of the candles burned down to nothing, making it even darker. I fell asleep. That was the first night.
Having made our date at the hotel, all I could do was watch the snow fall and wonder how badly it would bury us. I tried to sleep, but the wind was whistling outside and making the windows rattle. I could hear a million tiny snowflakes being driven against the walls. At four in the morning, I got up and turned the outside light on. The snow was already up over the wheels of the truck.
“God damn,” I said. My breath fogged the window. “We’re gonna get buried.”
I knew what I had to do. I threw on some clothes and my coat and gloves. The snow stung my face as soon as I opened the door. I made my way to the truck, stepping through drifts that came to my knees. It was the last thing I wanted to do at that hour, but I knew I had to get out on the road to stay ahead of the snow. Once it got past a certain depth, I wouldn’t be able to plow it at all. This had happened exactly twice in the years I had lived up here. Both times, I had to wait for the county to send in excavators to dig me out. And a private access road with a few cabins was never at the top of their list.
I knocked most of the snow off the windshield, then climbed into the truck and started it up. The wheels spun a few times until they finally found some traction, thanks to a twelve-hundred-pound plow on the front and eight-hundred pounds of cinder block in the bed. I pushed my way out of my driveway and started up the road, through the snow-covered trees.
My windshield wipers were fighting a losing battle. During the night the snow had turned into the heavy wet stuff that sticks to everything as soon as it lands. I cranked the defroster as high as it would go and tried to stay on the road, which was nothing but a rumor anyway. When I had finally worked my way to the last cabin, I tried to turn the truck around, got stuck a few times, used every bad word I knew and made up some, then finally got it pointed the opposite way. I pounded my way back, past the rentals, then my cabin, then Vinnie’s, all the way to the main road.
The snow was mocking me. It was dancing in my headlights and covering up my tracks as soon as I could make them.
I turned around and went back in for more. At least I’d go down fighting.
We had breakfast that next day, the first day of the new year. We didn’t talk about what had happened the night before. She went back to her work, wrapping up dinner plates and putting them in a cardboard box. This was her mission in life, she said. She wanted to use this time to pack up the old house, and to finally sell it. She had been putting it off for so long.
Her hair was pinned up again. She had gray sweats on. Working clothes. I offered to help her. She said she needed to be alone for a while.
She came over by the door and gave me a quick kiss on the mouth. Then I left.
By the time I got home, there was a message waiting on my machine.
“Sorry I was a little weird this morning,” she said. There was a pause. “It’s been a long time for me, if you know what I mean. Give me a call in a couple of days, eh? If you feel like coming back out, I’ll make you dinner.”
That was it. I waited a couple of days. Three, to be exact. I tried not to think about her. It was one night. You were there and something happened and it was great and so what. You’ve got your own problems and she’s got hers.
When I finally called her, she apologized again, and asked me if I wanted to come back out for her beef stew.
“I think you should know,” I said. “My man Jackie does a beef stew that’ll knock you out.”
“So you’re saying you’ve got some high standards.”
“Yeah, but if you’ve got some Canadian beer in the house, you might win me over.”
“Molson Canadian,” she said. “A case in the fridge. Bottles, not cans.”
“I’m on my way.”
It was two and a half hours in the truck again, across the bridge and down the Queens Highway. Of course, up here that’s nothing. You drive two and a half hours to buy your groceries.
It was still light out when I got there. She was wearing the same gray sweats. She had a white handkerchief wrapped around her head.
“You shouldn’t have gotten all dressed up just for me,” I said.
She pulled me inside and kissed me hard. A minute later we were upstairs, in the same bedroom. We went slowly this time. She took the handkerchief off her head and shook her hair. I ran my hands up her rib cage, caressing the soft flesh beneath her breasts. She closed her eyes.
She grabbed my hands as she moved against me. She worked at it harder and harder, all the while biting her lower lip. She looked at me once and then closed her eyes again. A great shudder ran through her body. Then she collapsed against me and whispered in my ear. “Oh God,” she said. “What are you trying to do to me?”
We lay there without talking for a long time, as the sun went down and the light coming through the curtains changed the color in the room. It was the kind of light that usually makes you feel a little sad and tired, the light of a midwinter day that ends too quickly, with spring a long time away. But on this day it felt different.
“What’s this from?” I said, running my finger along her eyebrow. I hadn’t seen the scars on her face the first time, not in the dim light of New Year’s Eve.
“Hockey, what else? I caught a stick there. Fourteen stitches.”
“And here, too?” I touched the long line on her chin.
“I took a dive on the ice. Seventeen stitches.”
“Don’t they wear face guards up here?”
“In college you have to,” she said. “But not out on the lakes. Face guards are for pussies. And Americans.”
We rolled around a couple of times over that one. Then she got up and put her sweats back on. I couldn’t help thinking, what kind of woman invites a man over and doesn’t do anything to get fixed up? Maybe the kind who at the last moment was hoping nothing would happen between them? If that was it, her resolution lasted all of three seconds. Hell if I knew.