“I told you not to breathe into your sleeping bag.”
Robin’s voice drifted into Anna’s cloudy brain and she smiled. Her face might not have moved, but, in her mind, she welcomed the young woman. It was good to have her company again.
A soft warmth crept under the bundling around Anna’s throat, and she wondered if, unlike the depictions in literature and lore, Death did not have a cold and bony hand but one warm and open, a kind and relieving touch welcoming saints and sinners alike, taking away the pain of the suffering, the cravings of the addict, the sorrow of the bereft.
“She’s not dead.” The warmth receded, and Anna knew she’d flunked the test. Her bell wasn’t tolling. Death had not come for her.
A new blessing came in its stead. The warmth that touched so briefly at her throat spread over her face. “Anna, you’re not dead,” Robin’s voice told her. “Since you’re not dead, you have to wake up or you will be dead. Come on, wake up.”
Anna opened her eyes. Robin’s hands were on her cheeks, her face only inches away, so close it was hard to bring into focus. “You’re not dead either?” Anna asked.
“Just hungover,” Robin said.
It took Anna’s cold brain a minute to put two thoughts together.
“Ketamine.”
“Yeah. Adam freaked. He was afraid what happened to his wife was going to happen to me. He got hold of Gavin and Gavin came and took me to Feldtmann tower.”
“She only looks light,” said a voice. Robin’s face moved away, and Anna saw the speaker, a tall, slender, Byronesque man with the deep-set green eyes of a poet offset by the square jaw of a pugilist.
“The wog,” Anna croaked.
“I am the wog,” Gavin said and smiled, a sweet blink of teeth and good nature. “Robin and me and Adam.”
“Adam’s dead,” Anna said. The words should have meant more to her than they did. By the shock she saw in the faces of Robin and Gavin, she knew she had told them a horrible truth. To her, it seemed so long ago, hundreds of years. One didn’t cry over history, didn’t break down when telling the third-grade class that George Washington was dead, Napoleon lost at Waterloo or Atlanta was put to the torch.
“Bob Menechinn’s dead,” Anna said, to see if the news felt any different. “I killed him.”
Robin and Gavin did not react with shock this time, just a minute freezing of the facial muscles. Robin put her deliciously warm hands back on Anna’s face. “You poor thing,” she said as Gavin said:
“Did you kill Adam too?”
Anna tried to remember all those thousands of years ago. “I don’t think so,” she said finally.
“I killed Katherine,” Gavin said.
“You did not!” Robin cried.
“You thought I did.”
Robin reached up a hand toward Gavin and he took it, his glove swallowing the slender fingers and palm.
“Put your gloves on,” Anna said.
“I’ll try Ridley again,” Robin said and rose to her feet. “Dispatch has been trying to raise him for half an hour,” she told Anna. “Gavin and I were out skiing. We called in as soon as we heard.”
“Blew your cover,” Anna said. She was too fog-brained to count how many laws and park regulations the two of them had broken, but it was enough to land them in jail or the poorhouse if the judge levied the full penalties and fines.
“You were in trouble,” Robin said simply.
“Gloves,” Anna said so she wouldn’t cry and watched as the biotech obediently put her gloves back on before using the radio.
Gavin squatted beside Anna. He was graceful, the towering length of him folding neatly, effortlessly. “Are you hurt?” he asked.
“Dislocated shoulder and broken or badly bruised ankle,” Anna replied. Said succinctly, it didn’t sound all that bad, not like it should have. She decided she’d keep the limping and weeping and whining parts to herself. Why not? The witnesses were all dead.
Gavin began a proficient physical check, starting with her pulse and body temp.
“EMT?” Anna asked.
He shook his head. “Eldest of seven,” he said.
Robin interrupted: “Do you think you can survive a ride out on the Bearcat?”
“Out of gas,” Anna said, and Robin went back to the radio.
“Hot packs. Tell him we need hot packs,” Gavin said. As with Robin, his winter gear was worn and idiosyncratic. In place of a hood, he wore the same woolen tasseled hat Robin sported. They were probably the only two people in the world – other than the Lapps – who didn’t look silly with reindeer on their earflaps and pointy tufts on their heads. “Who is the president of the United States?” Gavin asked, to see if Anna was oriented in time and space.
“The blue rucksack,” Anna said suddenly. The old canvas day pack they’d found shredded at the scene of Katherine’s death had bothered Anna. Like Anna, both Bob and Katherine had all-new gear. It was out of character for Katherine to carry a beat-up canvas bag. The affectation fit with Robin’s boyfriend. “It was yours. You had scent lure, didn’t you? To make the wolves go where you wanted them to.”
“It was mine,” Gavin admitted. “I forgot I had the canisters of lure in it when I left it with Katherine. I only meant her to have food and water while she waited for help.”
“‘HELP ME,’” Anna said. “On the window.”
“Ski wax,” Gavin said. “It grows opaque as it cools.”
Anna said nothing. If scribbling a magic message on the glass and vanishing into the night was his idea of rescue, he wasn’t worth accusing.
Gavin read the thoughts she chose not to express in words. “Katherine said she’d phoned Bob and he was arranging the rescue. She promised to keep our secret. She wanted Bob to look the fool, be discredited. I didn’t think anyone was still at the bunkhouse. It seemed a good time to further the hoax,” he said.
Anna closed her eyes so she needn’t see the misery on his face. She’d had sufficient misery to last at least a few days if she was careful and didn’t blow it all in one breakdown. Gavin’s confession exonerated the wolves. Covered in scent lure, bleeding, running, flopping about in true helpless-prey fashion, no self-respecting predator could have resisted Katherine. Not and held its head up at the next carnivore convention. The poet in Gavin would have him suffer the guilt of Katherine’s death. Had she more energy, Anna would have reassured him it was an accident, that Katherine had broken open the canisters in a fall or opened one not knowing what it was. Instead, she just sat with her eyes closed and listened to the crabbing of the radio as Robin clicked and talked and then, finally, Ridley Murray answered.
Anna roused herself to shout: “Ask him why in the hell he wasn’t answering his radio!” That, at least, had been her intention. Instead, she heard herself whisper “Why didn’t he come?” in the voice of a little girl, the one Bob Menechinn said nobody cared about, nobody would rescue. That little girl embarrassed Anna and she hoped her whisper went unnoticed.
“Ask Ridley what’s kept him,” Gavin said.
Gavin heard Anna’s little-girl plea. Him, she didn’t mind so much. He had the same feel as Robin did, as if the two of them were not quite of this world, raised in bubbles, maybe, or from another dimension where good always won out, the cream rose to the top and the poor were not always with you.
Undamaged, Anna thought and wondered how damaged she was.
“Ridley and Jonah are just leaving Feldtmann. I’ll go back to Windigo and get gas. Enough to get you home,” Robin said to Anna.
“I’ll go,” Gavin said.
“I’m faster,” Robin said.
To Anna, Gavin said: “She is. Like the wind.” He seemed proud of her, and Anna liked him for that too.
“It’s too far,” Anna said, thinking of how far Robin had already come that day.
Robin smiled. Ten miles on easy trails had probably not been “too far” since she was nine years old. “I won’t be long,” she said and pushed off with the sudden grace of a bird taking flight.
“I’m guessing an hour or a little more. Downhill with no pack, she’ll make good time. Coming back with the gas can will take longer, but she doesn’t need to bring more than a gallon at the most. Eight pounds. That’s nothing for Robin,” Gavin said reassuringly.
The blanket and tarp Anna had wrapped around herself for warmth were beginning to feel like a shroud and one that was shrinking noticeably. They had done their job, she was found alive, now she wanted out. “Unwrap me,” Anna said.
Gavin looked alarmed, and she knew he was remembering the tales of finding people naked and dead of the cold. A rare but not too rare hypothermic reaction was to feel hot. In late stages, victims would sometimes take off their clothes and lie naked in the snow.
“I’m okay,” Anna said. “No running naked for me. I’ve got to move. I’m getting crazy. Crazier. Can you reduce a dislocated shoulder?”
“I’ve never done it,” Gavin admitted.
“Me neither. I learned it in EMT training. It looked easy enough. Align the arm, pull, snick back into place. One… two… three.”
“Two sounds like it would be pretty painful,” Gavin said.
“We’ll numb the shoulder with ice first,” Anna said, then: “Oh, hey, that’s already taken care of.”
Gavin laughed.
Unwrapping her was more of a job than she’d anticipated. Expecting to stay in her blue-and-brown cocoon for the foreseeable future, Anna’d rolled herself in the fabric more concerned with putting as many layers between herself and the elements as possible than with eventually getting free.
“Help me stand,” she said, pushing away the last of the tarp. “I have to get up. Help me. Then we can reduce the shoulder.”
Gavin put one arm around her back and gave her his other to brace herself against, so she could control how much pressure was on her shoulder and ankle, and began to draw her to a standing position beside the snowmobile. “Anna, maybe you should-”
“No,” Anna interrupted him. “My arm is useless, numb. I’ve got to reduce it. I can wedge myself against the seat. You’ll have something to brace against-”
“Anna, you’d have to take off your coat,” Gavin said reasonably.
“No. Why would I?” Confusion was clouding Anna’s brain. Instead of making her cautious, it made her desperate, angry.
“I couldn’t see what I was doing. Where the lump was. Which way to pull to make it go back into the socket,” Gavin said.
“I’ll take the damn thing off,” Anna snapped.
“You’d lose too much body heat, and it would hurt you too much unless we cut the coat off. It won’t be long. Robin’s fast.”
Hysteria. Most of Anna wanted to give in to it, go with it. Breathing slowly through her nose, she gained enough rationality to wonder what made the human mind want to spin over the edge, what evolutionary genius thought this would ensure the survival of the species. Maybe it was the flip side of being self-aware. Dachshunds had bad backs because of the long spine. People had craziness because of the big brain.
“I can wait,” Anna said after a time. Gavin looked relieved.
“Let’s keep you warm,” he said kindly. He helped her to the seat of the Bearcat and wrapped her legs in the army blanket, then sat behind her and put his long arms around her. “Lean back,” he said.
“Consider me your sofa.”
Menechinn was dead wrong. The girl did get rescued.