We’re OK, she wrote finally. More later. I gave Jonah some Pringles dipped in cake frosting. Is that cool? Rufus is OBSESSED with you. Go 2 sleep, now! XO.
Zoe went on Snapchat and Instagram for a while, hoping that life might start to seem normal again. It didn’t. How could it, after Stan and X and the hole in the ice?
She crossed the hall to her room and stood, tired and unsteady, in the doorway. On the wall at the foot of her bed there was a photo of her and her dad from one of their caving trips. They were wearing matching one-piece flight suits, which they’d bought at the Army Navy in Whitefish for 17 dollars a piece. Zoe had a battery-powered headlamp. Her father, being a dork, used an old-fashioned carbide lamp that looked like a miniature blowtorch. In the photo, he had a wide, geeky smile and some pretty crazy bed head. Her dad had always had bed head—he used to call it “hair salad.”
Zoe heard Stan’s voice spreading like dye in her brain: “You barely knew who he was. And then he died in some goddamn cave? And nobody even bothered to go get his body? What the hell kind of people are you?”
The words raced around her mind, like birds chasing one another.
Was it her fault that she hadn’t known her father better? He was never around! Zoe’d had no choice but to rely more and more on her mom. Her mother had dropped out of medical school and worked multiple jobs to support the family while Zoe’s dad came and went. She’d thrown everything she had into being a mom—and she raised the kids to be resilient and strong. When Zoe was a baby, her mother dressed her in onesies that said Hero and Protagonist. Her father’s love might have been like a candle or a lantern, but her mom’s was better: it never went out.
Zoe was too tired to think anymore, even if it was only 9:30. She stripped off her clothes for bed. Her whole body felt dirty and sore. Her legs were stubbly, her breath was horrendous, her shoulders were tender from where her bra straps had dug into her skin. She should have showered, brushed her teeth, something. But she couldn’t do even one more thing today. She fell headlong into bed, like someone who’d been shot.
Her mother finally made it home in the middle of the night. Zoe heard the front door whoosh open in her sleep. She felt relief wash through her, and immediately had a dream in which she was a child again, laying her head on her mother’s lap. She wanted to talk to her mom, but couldn’t pull herself out of sleep. When she awoke again, hours later, it was because she heard voices—men’s voices—rising up through the floor.
She tried to shut them out. She refused to open her eyes. She tried to grab on to the dream she’d been having but couldn’t quite catch its tail.
There was music downstairs now, but it was weirdly out of place—Buddhist chanting set to keyboards, acoustic guitars, and finger cymbals. That meant her mom was trying to calm everybody down. Or she was trying to annoy them so much that they’d leave.
Zoe was wedged up against the wall—at some point in the night Jonah had crawled in with her. He always started from the foot of the bed and tunneled up under the sheets, like a gopher. She could feel the heat of his body against her back. She could feel his tiny toes against her leg.
The front door slammed. Somebody had gone outside for a cigarette. Zoe heard him coughing and crunching around in the snow. She smelled the smoke slither in through her window. The man pulled open the door again—so hard that it slammed against the side of house—and came back in without bothering to knock the snow off his boots.
Zoe turned onto her back. Pain shot up her neck in sparks. Soon the voices were impossible to ignore. They were squabbling like pigeons. Zoe was never going to fall back asleep. What the hell was going on? She drew in a long breath and released it slowly. She finally opened her eyes.
It was still night. That was a surprise—she’d assumed it would be morning. There was no moon. No wind. The snow gave off a faint blue light and the pines stood mysterious and still, as if they’d just been talking to one another. Zoe took her phone from where it was charging on the windowsill. It was 3 a.m.
She tapped the flashlight app and swept the room with it. Her mother must have been in and out because there were plates, glasses, and bowls huddled on the floor, like a ruined city. Zoe had no memory of any of it. There was red pepper, aloe leaves, sprigs of mint, a bowl of water with some yellowish tincture suspended in it like a cloud: it looked like either a frostbite remedy or a voodoo ceremony.
Nearby, there was a fat paperback lying open on a chair—a time-travel romance about a guy in a kilt. Its pages fluttered like overgrown grass in the wind. Her mother must have sat watching them for hours. She had also bandaged the cut on Zoe’s forehead—she’d been in med school just long enough to learn to administer excellent first aid.
Zoe shone the flashlight over Jonah. His cheeks, which had been chapped by the wind, were glistening with aloe now, and his fingertips had been individually wrapped. For a moment, the light came too close to his eyes. He winced but kept on sleeping. One thing about her brother: he slept fiercely. He would sweat through his T-shirts—he was wearing one now that said I Do My Own Stunts—and make such an indignant harrumph of an expression that it always cracked her up. What was he mad at? Who was he fighting, or protecting, in his dreams?
As Zoe shifted in bed, she felt something tug at her leg. She peeled back the comforter and sheet. Jonah must have been afraid that she’d sneak out of the room without telling him, so—as a kind of alarm system—he had tied a skateboard to her ankle with yarn. When he was scared, he hated waking up alone. It made him feel wobbly inside, he said.