Winter Study

The wolf howled again, and she realized the sound was coming from the phone in her hand. Bob’s ring tone was the call of a loon and Katherine’s was the howling of a wolf. What else? A

The plan was back in place; frail, absurd, but up and ru

“Hallelujah!” A

“Katherine?” came a choked voice.

A

“Bullshit,” Bob said, but his voice was shaky and uncertain. A

“Dickhead,” she said sharply, “I’m not dead. I’ve got Katherine’s phone, pictures, notes on the blackmail and your name’s all over it. I’m calling everybody I can think of to tell them the good news. Give my regards to the boys at San Quentin when you get there.”

She hung up. The phone howled again. Bob. She ignored it. Having replaced her glove, she scooped snow over her boots and lap as best she could with one hand and a shoulder that attacked its host every time she moved.

Zach, her first husband, had been an actor. One of the things he loved most in the theater was waiting in the wings to go on. Quiet, in the living dark of backstage, he said he knew he was where he was supposed to be, in a space only he could occupy; he knew who he was and who he could be. He could be as brilliant as Laurence Olivier, as graceful as Nureyev. The audience might come to its feet in wild applause when he finished his monologue. In the wings, all things were possible.

The shriek of the Bearcat came into the edge of her hearing. Bob hadn’t gotten far. As high as he was, he probably could barely keep the machine on the trail. A

33

The growl of the snowmobile grew reassuringly louder. A

The engine pitch changed. Bob was making the last hairpin turns, climbing the switchback to the ridge. A

There was a final burst of horsepower and the snowmobile came into view. Bob hunkered over the handlebars, thick shoulders rounded down, face raw with cold and wind. He was still bareheaded.

His ears will be frozen off, A

He reached the short, steep climb before the trail opened onto the basalt shelf.

The snowmobile ate up the last ten feet with startling speed. Every cell in her body screaming in protest, A

Her back struck the stone. The tree branch across the trail wrenched violently to the left. The limb jerked from her hand, tearing her glove half off. Her body hurled to the ground beside the rock. Torrents of hurt poured through her, and she wished she had state secrets that she might shout them from enemy rooftops, anything to stop the vicious knives inside her skin. Vision dimmed at the edges. She fought to stay conscious. To pass out now would be to waste all the trudging and weeping this sojourn into physics had cost.

Like a turtle peeking out of its shell, she craned her neck and lifted her head.

Idling unevenly, the riderless machine nosed into a copse of balsam firs munched by hungry moose till they were the size of bonsai trees. She couldn’t see Bob, but he had to be close by. Her wish was that he was dead or dying, but she’d used up the standard three just getting him to answer the phone, bring back the snowmobile and let himself get knocked off of it with a stick. Dead was too much to hope for. The lever had been long enough to take his head off, but she didn’t think she’d managed that. It might have caught him in the shoulder or the chest. If it hadn’t and had only fouled the skis of the snowmobile enough to dump him, he was probably unhurt.

In which case, A

“Not dead. I’m rising, rising, rising,” she whispered to herself, and she pushed up with one arm till she was on hand and knees. The repetition of words swam through her brain with Ellen DeGeneres’s voice and the face of the blue fish she brought to life in Finding Nemo. Comforted by the nonsense, A

The changing mantra in the spirit of a gay blue fish kept her moving. The snowmobile was less than four yards from where the limb had swept her off her rock. Four yards wasn’t a great distance. One hundred forty-four inches was. When she had reached “Whining, whining, whining,” and was less than a body length from the Holy Grail of vinyl, plastic and horsepower, she saw Bob Menechi

He was on his side across a downed trunk a foot in diameter. Legs and butt were on the side away from A

A

Menechi