Sunrise

I turned Darla around and pointed at the bank with my stump. She nodded wearily, and we started retracing our steps.

Crossing the snow berm again to get to the bank was the worst part. I crawled up three-legged but still slipped backward over and over. I gritted my teeth against the pain, paying for every foot of height I gained with bloody knees and a bloody palm.

We found a hollow in a corner of the bank protected from the wind. The snow was shallow there. I dug downward. We needed a fire, something to help us survive the night. All I found were shards of glass from the bank’s windows and a few chunks of burnt lumber.

Darla was digging a hole in the side of the snowdrift at the edge of this sheltered spot. I picked up a large piece of glass and tried to carve a charred stick of wood with it, holding the wood between my numb feet. I had a vague idea that I could make a fire bow. Instead I cut my only hand.

Darla had almost disappeared inside the snowdrift. I grabbed a brick and started beating it against the wall. There were no sparks, no matter how hard I knocked the bricks together. Still, I kept trying until Darla laid a shaking hand on my shoulder and motioned for me to follow.

We crawled into the tiny space she had excavated inside the snowdrift. She kicked at the ceiling of the tu

“We’re going to die here, right?” I said.

“Probably,” Darla sighed.

My mind wandered through a long silence. In the darkness and false warmth of Darla’s embrace, I imagined we were drifting through a surreal landscape of blue fields and emerald sky.

Darla’s soft voice called me back. “You . . . you think there’s anything after this?”

“I don’t know.” I’d been devout once, attending Sunday school and services, well, religiously. But that had ended about the time I turned twelve. Now I wasn’t sure. “If there is an omnipotent God, he’s an asshole for allowing all this to happen.”

“I hope there is something after this,” Darla said. “Mom was sure of it. She had unshakeable faith—even the eruption didn’t change her belief. . . . I’d like to see her again.”

“You think you can get married in heaven? Or purgatory, or whatever?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“I wanted us to . . . I’d been, I thought that little jewelry store in downtown Stockton might have—”

“That’s why you wanted to go downtown—you must have asked me four times.”

“Twice. I wanted a ring. To propose the right way, you know.”

Darla kissed me. I was so cold that I couldn’t even feel it. Sad—that I couldn’t appreciate our last kiss. “When you were passed out back there in Stockton and I had to put my hand on the block, I had this strange daydream—just a flash, a single image. We were standing in front of a huge crowd, in a wedding dress and tux—”

“You’d look great in a tux,” I said.

“Shut up. Let me finish,” Darla said. “We were holding hands, your right and my left, in front of all those people, and I wanted that picture to be true. So I put my right arm on the block.”

“I wondered why. That’s a pretty stupid reason to give up your good hand.”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re supposed to be more practical than I am.” “Yeah.”

“I wish I’d gone ahead and proposed, ring or no ring. I’d have liked to see that picture you daydreamed. I’d have liked being your husband.”

“Look, Alex,” Darla’s voice had shifted, low and fierce now instead of wistful, “there are people who get married but live separate lives, people who marry and divorce before they’ve been together even as long as we have. They say marriage is a sacrament, that it’s a legal contract, but here’s what I think it is—a commitment. And by that standard, we’re already married, more married than most of the people who have the license. I’ve watched

Alyssa, I know she still lusts after you, and she’s far sexier than I’ll ever be—”

“No, she’s not.”

“Oh, bullshit. I’ve seen your tongue hanging out when she sashays past. Max worships the snow she walks on.” “It’s hard not to look,” I conceded.

“That’s not the point. Even when you thought I might be dead, you kept faith with me. And sometimes I catch you looking at me, and even though you look nothing like him, you remind me of how Dad used to look at Mom.”

“I love you,” I said.

“I’m not sure what I ever did to be worthy of it—” “You—”

“Never mind. You said God’s an asshole, but did you ever stop to think, if not for the volcano, we’d never have met?” “And we wouldn’t be dying in a snowdrift.”

“It was worth it, Alex.” I felt her teardrop land on my nose. “It was worth it.”

I held her tightly. It got harder and harder to talk as we froze slowly to the ground, merging with it. Finally we drifted off, arms wrapped around each other, entering the longest night as one.

Chapter 39

I woke in excruciating pain. My skin was on fire with a heat that tingled and surged and spiked, as if thousands of sharp needles were being poked into me one after the other. I’d gone to Hell, and the welcoming committee was a thousand berserk acupuncturists.

I tried to open my eyes. A flickering, reddish light blinded me. Maybe I really was in Hell. My head was foggy; I couldn’t focus. I shook my head, trying to clear it, but that resulted in pain so intense drowned out the needles in my body. I lay still for a moment, trying to collect my thoughts, to understand what was happening. The front side of my body was uncomfortably hot, almost burning. There was something rough against my skin. And someone was pressed against my back. Not Darla—but I couldn’t have said how I could tell.

Darla. I forced my eyes back open, heedless of the glare, propped myself up on a wobbly arm, and looked around.

We were still in the corner of the ruined bank. A large fire blazed, shielded from the wind and Stockton by the bank’s brick walls. Darla was nearby, facing the fire on her side like I was. A woman was pressed up against my back, another pressed against Darla’s back. A thin man with a face as hard and sharp as a hatchet—maybe in his early forties—fed the fire while a seven- or eight-year-old girl dug in the snow and ash, finding charred scraps of lumber and passing them to the man. The little girl was wrapped up tight, in an oversized pink coat with a fur-trimmed hood. Only her cherubic red cheeks and face were visible.

“Shh,” the woman behind me said. “Lay back down. You need to warm up, sleep, and heal.”

“Darla,” my voice sounded more like a frog croaking than human speech.

“She’s okay. Let her sleep. You’re safe. If we’d wanted to harm you, all we had to do was nothing.”

That made sense. I lowered myself back down, noticing for the first time that both the woman and I were wrapped in several blankets. I put my head on her arm and slept.

I woke to the woman shaking my shoulder. “Wake up, wake up,” she whispered. “We got to move on before daybreak. If we could find you, Red’s men could too.”

The mention of Red snapped me to full awareness. Darla was standing nearby, the firelight playing in red shadows across her skin. She was struggling to step into a pair of long johns one-handed. The woman—girl, I saw now—who had slept against her was trying to help.

I stood, shivering in the frozen air. To shiver was joyous—it meant my body had warmed up to the point where it knew the difference between hot and cold. My remaining fingers throbbed, my toes felt like someone was actively sawing at them with a knife, and the scrapes on my back hurt, but otherwise I seemed okay.