Gazing down at her brother now, Zoe felt competing waves of guilt and relief and fear and love. He was curled against her in a crescent like a baby deer. Look at him, she thought. She untied the skateboard from her ankle and tied it to his own. Tag, you’re it.
Downstairs one of the men broke a glass on the countertop.
It nearly woke Jonah. Zoe flushed with anger, and shot off a text to her mother.
It said only: Who??
The moment she sent it, she heard her mother push her chair back from the kitchen table and bound up the stairs. After everything that had happened in the blizzard, the sound of her mother rushing to her was so comforting that Zoe’s anger dissipated in an instant and—before she even realized she was in danger of it—she started to cry.
Her mother pushed open the door of the bedroom and then closed it behind her, so that the wedge of light made the trophies along the wall gleam briefly and then go out. Zoe didn’t want her mother to know how upset she was. She did what she always did in moments of uncertainty, she blurted something random: “So, you back from the store?”
Her mother laughed.
“I am,” she said. “Anything happen around here?”
One of the things that Zoe loved most about her mother was that the woman understood her jokes even when they were totally bizarre. Very often they were the only people in the room laughing, while everyone else fidgeted uncomfortably. Not even her father—when he was alive and when he was around—had really understood Zoe’s sense of humor.
“There’s a stowaway in here with me,” Zoe said, nodding toward Jonah. “We have to whisper.”
“I can do that,” her mother said.
She came to kneel by the bed.
Zoe could just barely make out the outline of her mom’s face in the darkness. Neither of them spoke. The lightness of the moment drained away.
“Is Jonah gonna be okay?” said Zoe.
“Frostbite-wise, yes, he’ll be fine,” her mother said. “But he seems pretty traumatized by whatever you went through.” She paused, and her voice softened. “Can you tell me what happened?”
Zoe searched for an answer that would sound remotely sane. Downstairs, one of the men turned off the Eastern chanting. The other men let out grunts of relief and applauded.
“Who’s down there?” said Zoe.
“That’s not important right now,” her mother said. “But apparently they’re not Buddhists.”
She waited for Zoe to answer the question still hovering in the air.
“Talk to me,” she said.
Zoe’s instinct was always to tell her mother everything, and she wished she could pour out every crazy, hallucinogenic detail about the lake glowing orange, about the movie of Stan’s sins—about X. But what could she say about him? What did she even know apart from the fact that he radiated loneliness? And that she’d been drawn to him.
She fought back the image of his face. She knew if she said too much, she’d make no sense at all.
“The short version,” Zoe said, “is that Jonah and the dogs went in the woods—and I let them.”
Her mother let a few moments go by, like she was waiting for a train to pass.
“Okay, look, I’m sorry to be pushy,” she said. “But I’m going to need a slightly longer version.”
“I can’t, Mom,” Zoe said. “Not yet.”
“Zo—”
“I mean, the longer version is that I suck and I almost got him killed.”
“Zoe, stop. Don’t do that to yourself.”
“All I keep thinking is that when Jonah wakes up, he’s going to look at me like I let him down. And I did. I let the little bug down.”
She shouldn’t have spoken at all. She began sobbing in that awful, hiccupy way. Her mother reached over Jonah to touch her face, but had trouble locating it in the darkness.
“I’m trying to stroke your cheek sweetly,” she said. “Is this your cheek? Am I stroking it sweetly?”
“No, that’s my forehead,” Zoe said. “And that is my nose.”
“Okay, well, picture me stroking your cheek,” her mother said.
“I’m picturing it,” Zoe said, and laughed despite herself as her mother’s hand groped around blindly. “Now stop it, Helen Keller. Please. That’s my ear.”
“Zoe,” her mother said, “your brother loves you like a crazy person—and that will never, ever change. The kid tied a skateboard around your leg.”
Zoe started to say something but was interrupted by a commotion downstairs. She and her mother listened as one of the men stood, his chair screeching against the floor, and said, “Enough of this horseshit, boys.” They listened to the heavy tread of the man’s boots coming up the stairs. Zoe’s mother didn’t allow shoes in the house, so the noise sounded almost like violence.
“I wish I could give you more time,” her mom said. “But I can’t, baby. You’re going to have to tell your story—because the police are here.”
Zoe’s mother shooed the cop out of the bedroom immediately, and asked Zoe to come downstairs when she was ready. Zoe hadn’t seen the police since her father died, and knowing they were in the house stirred some prickly memories. The police were the ones who’d left her dad’s body in the cave. The cop who had just banged on Zoe’s door—Chief Baldino—had decided it was too dangerous to go get it.