I went back inside and forced myself to eat a bit of breakfast, a cold hunk of leftover elk meat that stuck in my throat. Then it was back outside with both dogs now, I put them on the line and instantly they began to bark and tug at the sled. I took them round the perimeter of the yard a couple times to get the eagerness out of their legs, then gee’d them toward the house and cut through the middle of the yard, where Helen waited.
I knelt, pried my fingers under her. There wasn’t no give to her. Her body stiff, her clothes froze to the ground. I strained and felt something pull in my back. She tore free all at once, I tumbled back under the sudden release, and hit my head against the edge of the sled.
Her eyes filled with sky. The kindness in her face was gone, everything gone. I thought of the way I had sent her off a few days before. You’re not my mother. I don’t need a mother. And I don’t need you.
A wail grew inside me. I choked it off before it could escape.
I took my glove off and tried to close her eyes, but the lids wouldn’t stay shut. Instead I fetched an old blanket from the barn and covered her. Wrapped her as careful as I could.
Even bundled that way, she was near impossible to move. However much she’d weighed in life, death had doubled it. I panted as I drug her, the blanket bunched in my fists. Pulled her onto the sled, then stood with my hands on my knees, catching my breath. Went round and lifted her legs, spun her on her back till she was mostly on the rig. I fumbled with knots as I tied her body down with the same ropes we used for securing gear. Perversely glad that it was such a great effort. I deserved to struggle. Killing someone shouldn’t be an easy thing.
On the trail, I could almost convince myself it was just another run. Except the quiet of the woods didn’t cool my mind and send my heart thrumming like usual. I remembered Hatch, the possibility of him, and waited for the hair on my neck to stand up. But the threat of him seemed distant now. Inconsequential. Not a word from my vocabulary, but Helen’s. All I could hear was her voice—
Tracy?
—and feel her concern, she’d carried it with her as she’d drove out to the house to check on me, despite the poor weather and the way the truck had fishtailed, her worry when she’d found the house empty, the impulse she’d felt to check the shed, a suspicion inside her, paired with amusement and nostalgia for her own young infatuation, that there was something growing between me and Jesse.
I shook my glove off and sunk my teeth into the flesh of my own hand, deep enough to draw blood. Pain shot up my arm, electric and bracing. I couldn’t get lost in Helen now. I had work to do.
The sled spilled out onto the lake and the dogs carried me over the ice, and all the breath went out of me. Ice, solid as stone, thick, and my mind like a panicking bird, throwing itself against a wall. No chance of the sled breaking through. No tools in my basket for chipping away at what had to be a good four or five inches of ice. It hadn’t occurred to me how cold it had got after an early winter of strangely warm days, and it had been ages since I come to the lake, I had trained and hunted most of the winter in other parts of the woods. I had imagined the water swallowing Helen like a throat, the floes of ice holding her under till the spring melt. Till I could find a way to tell Dad what I had done.
I drove my two-dog team across the ice, north, more out of habit than hope. I remembered, the day Old Su died, dropping a stone into the water and how the ripples had sent the floes bobbing. I steered the dogs back toward the middle of the lake, searching for a crack, for a dark spot where the ice was thin enough to punch through. I remembered, too, the shape of the tool my dad, Helen’s dad, used to drill a hole in the ice, our hands round our hot mugs as we sipped and waited, the tug on my line when I caught a fish. I squeezed my eyes shut, shook my head. Tried to ignore Helen’s life, playing out inside me and distracting me.
We traveled south, the dogs fresh and keen.
The sound of a blade on ice, feel of the frozen air on my face as I spun, then toppled, landed hard, my brothers laughing at me.
North again.
Round in circles, the dogs galloping and their tongues wagging, and me on the back of the sled trying to hold down the panic rising inside me, trying to ignore what I’d took from Helen, every memory she had of ice. Solid ice, all around.
I finally brung the dogs to a stop near the west side of the lake. Leaned on the handlebar and wrapped my arms round my head. With no more sound of the runners or the crunch of eight paws on ice, it was even louder inside me, the memory of Helen’s brothers laughing, the whisper of her skates’ blades. She shouted, Hey, Pop, watch! and I felt the toe of her skate catch the ice, her head, my head, turning before my body did, my whole self suddenly spinning. I shook my head again, plugged my ears with my fingers.
Stop it! I hollered.
My voice bounced against the ice, then the day was quiet. I opened my eyes, seen my dogs looking over their shoulders at me. Heard water churning. Falling. Finally able to think straight, I could see the lake in front of me instead of the Montana lake in Helen’s memory. No more laughter and shouting in my ears. Instead, I heard the rush of the waterfall, west of here. The little cove where the river emptied into the lake. The water there never completely froze over, no matter how cold it got.
Let’s go! I called out. The dogs lunged forward and we followed the sound.
It didn’t take long to reach it, a jagged shelf of ice round a hole at the base of the waterfall, maybe two feet wide. I undone the ropes that held Helen on the sled and pulled the blanket away. Twisted the fabric of her coat in my hands and hauled her out of the basket. She landed hard, her head thudding on the ice, and a cry startled from me.
The dogs watched as I drug her by the feet toward the water. Their breath condensing on the air. Sliding her across the ice wasn’t no easier than dragging her over the snow, I coughed and wheezed. She stuck to the surface of the lake and I heaved her toward me. Took a step back, toward the hole.
The scrim of ice cracked underneath me, then give way.
The cold gripped me, I gasped and my insides turned to ice, then I bobbed to the surface, sputtering and gulping air, my arms and legs flailing and splashing and the water and cold like a vise round me, crushing my chest. My whole body a heart, slamming itself round but stuck in one place. I wrenched my head back to keep it out of the water. Seen the sky. A bird flying overhead. Gliding across the quiet of the day till that quiet was broken by the splashing and gasping of a girl about to drown or freeze to death.
The thought calmed me down enough I stopped struggling. Sunk again, so tired, nothing under me, it would of been so easy to go under and not come back up. Easier than admitting to Dad that Helen was dead, I had killed her. Boots heavy on my feet, clothes weighing me down. Quiet now, for the bird. For me. Helen laid on the ice, staring unblinking at the sky and waiting for me to join her.
Instead, I kicked. Rose up, grabbed the edge of the ice. It broke off in my hand. I kept kicking till I was on my belly, my forearms on the ice now, my coat sleeves freezing to the surface of the lake. I wrenched them free, kicking, inching forward onto the shelf of ice, my cheek on the lake now, my shoulders. A cracking sound under me, straining. Half out of the water. I couldn’t go back in. I kicked harder, my eyes on Helen’s shoulder. My fingertips brushed the top of her head. Kick. Kick. Still holding my breath. I exhaled. Flung my arm forward. Grabbed Helen’s coat. Pulled myself across the ice till I laid at her side.
Funny how warm I was then. How far away everything was. The dogs was barking, they’d been making a ruckus the whole time I was in the lake, I realized now. They would be how Dad would find me, days from now, following their hungry barks till he come to the lake.