14 Degrees Below Zero (18 page)

“You do brighten up the place, kid,” Fowler said.

“Gee . . . that’s nice of you guys,” Jay said, profoundly embarrassed.

“Go get that little girl of yours,” Fowler said. “We’ll lock up and shut everything down.”

With a lightness in her step, Jay went out into the snowstorm and crunched her way down the sidewalk to her car. It was amazing, in a small and quiet way, how much it cheered her to learn that her co-workers actually liked her. They would never know how much their affection bolstered her, because now she realized she had forgotten that she had a place in the wider world outside of Lewis, and Stephen. She had assumed that the world was empty to her, and she useless to it. Now it felt different. She could grow and leave them behind—
they
could, she and Ramona. Things didn’t need to stay the way they were. It was the kind of wisdom Anna used to impart.

Jay decided to stop off at the apartment before going to pick up Ramona—she had a copy of
Lion King II
that needed returning, and she figured once they were home they’d want to lock up and let the elements conduct whatever diabolical business was at hand. She left her boots on, trailing water across the floor to the VCR. Just before she went out, she thought to check her voice mail. The dial tone gave that little stutter that indicated she had messages.

The first was from a couple of hours ago: “Jay, it’s Andrea. How are you? Nice weather we’re having. I thought I’d invite myself over later and bring a pizza or something. I want to hang out with you guys! Give me a call.”

Jay switched the phone to her other ear as she worked the
Lion King
back into its plastic case. It might be nice to see Andrea. It might also be nicer not to see anyone at all.

It was, she thought as she pressed the button to retrieve the second of her two messages, a hell of a time to have broken up with her boyfriend. She might have liked to split a nice Barolo with Stephen in front of the electronic hearth that night, and a warm body would be nothing to turn down.

“I’m calling for Jay Ingraham,” said a woman’s voice on the line. “I’m a nurse at North Memorial Hospital. This is in connection with Stephen Grant.”

Jay put down the video.

“We got your name from a secretary where he works,” the woman went on. “There’s been an accident and we’re trying to locate Stephen Grant’s next of kin for medical authorization. Please call as soon as possible.”

The woman gave a phone number. Jay frantically repeated it to herself over and over until she could find a paper and pen. Then she let out a cry she wouldn’t have believed had come from her, had she not been entirely alone in the room.

19. IT FELT LIKE A VISIT TO A CHAPEL OF HELPLESSNESS.

L
ewis found that parking his car in the driveway was not unlike leading a dog-pulled sled up a narrow mountain pass while blind drunk and incapacitated with a fever. Somehow he managed it, though for all he knew his car was now installed on his, or his neighbor’s, lawn. None of the familiar visual markers were visible. All was white.

He rushed inside, slipping on the steps. The wind had whipped the snow into piles on his porch, and he had to sweep away a drift with his foot to get the door open. When he stepped inside, Carew came rushing up in a panic.

Geez, Lewis, where have you been? What have you been doing? Do you see what’s happening out there?
the dog said, shifting back and forth on its feet, tail twitching with anxiety.

“Hey, boy,” Lewis said, bending down to take its head in his hands. “Don’t you worry about a thing. Lewis is here.”

The dog actually seemed
skeptical
of Lewis, but mellowed out after Lewis refilled the big food bowl in the kitchen. Carew set upon his snack with the lust of the condemned while Lewis went to the living room.

What had he done?
Killed
Stephen? For the crime of turning Lewis’s daughter against him? For challenging the bonds of loyalty from which Lewis derived all his sense of self and worth? Stephen had to die for
that
?

He turned. She had been there, he was sure of it.

Lewis paced a path from the front window to the side window, monitoring the storm, imagining Stephen breathing his last breath in those shallow frigid waters. He replayed those moments, the way he’d charged Stephen, then seeing Stephen fall and witnessing the terrible momentum of the younger man’s body down the wooded slope. The worst part was not going down to help. Lewis knew. He was not in full control of himself, but he had made a conscious decision to leave Stephen down there, alone, with no one around.

With no one to bear witness to what Lewis had done. Unless Anna had been there.

“Come on,” he said to the empty room. “Where
are
you?”

Worse still, perhaps, was that in searching his heart (pacing now to the sunroom, which was dark and snowed-in), Lewis could not locate any feeling of remorse. Regret? Yes, maybe, he would rather that
that
had not happened. But there was no deep remorse in his emotional terrain at the moment. It may have been a matter of shock. It may also have been that he did what needed to be done.

Like before.

He had to operate on the assumption that he would be caught. There was the matter of the restraining order—yes, that was public record and would immediately come to light after Stephen was discovered. Stan, trusted Stan, would not lie if the police asked him about their conversation of the day before. He was too honorable for that. Lewis would be jailed, tried, and sent to prison.

It was unacceptable—not just the prospect of losing his freedom but, more important, losing his ability to care for Jay and Ramona. They would be alone, Jay losing both her parents within a year. At her age, with her disposition, it would be a devastating blow.

Where
was
she?

Lewis went upstairs to the room he’d shared with Anna. The bed was made and unslept-in. The curtains were drawn wide to the silent storm outside. Lewis went to the small box of Anna’s things that he kept on the dresser—some of her perfume bottles, little boxes where she kept her pins and female things—and touched each item carefully, as he did when he desperately missed her and wished she were there.

“I know, I fucked up,” he said softly. “I’ve got to find some way to make it better. I’ve got to think.”

His mind was not working properly. That was clear when he flashed on the gas can in the garage and considered the possibility of filling the downstairs with gas and setting the house on fire. He saw smoke pouring from the windows, the roof collapsing, himself driving away hard and fast with Carew in the back.

“No, that’s not the way,” he said. He put down Anna’s things, carefully arranging them the way they had been.

“Think it through, Lewis,” he said.

What this boiled down to was
responsibility.
Stephen had gotten in the way of Lewis discharging his responsibility to Jay and Ramona, and he’d gotten himself hurt. Dead, rather. First hurt, then dead, immediately thereafter. That was the usual order of things.

Lewis stifled a laugh. It was not the time for laughter.

Women and children first. Was that not the motto for any husband and father—for any good man? He had helped Anna, in his way, when her body broke down and betrayed her. He had done his best.

“You know I did my best,” he said to the empty room.

His breath was even more ragged than usual. Lewis leaned against the wall as he endured an attack of dizziness, then a series of sharp stabbing pains in his chest. It didn’t seem psychosomatic, but then who knew? He was willing to accept that these might be his final moments on planet Earth—but if they weren’t, he was at least going to do something meaningful until his body broke down.

He didn’t believe in an afterlife, but if there was one, surely he was linked eternally with Stephen and Anna. Actions might indeed reverberate through eternity, with meanings and linkages spiraling and intersecting beyond space, time, and meaning.

“Stop thinking like a hippie,” he whispered.

Lewis went into the bathroom, took out his little basket of pills, and sat down on the edge of the bathtub. There on top was the antidepressant. He had already taken his dose that morning, his carefully monitored and calibrated chemical ration that was supposed to fend off all the guilt, anger, and fear.

“Well, gee whiz,” he said.

Opening up the childproof jar, he looked inside. The pills were white, scored in the middle, and inscribed with some manner of pharmaceutical arcanum. Lewis popped one out and, lacking a glass in which to place water, chewed it up and swallowed it. It tasted strange, which was to be expected, but not entirely terrible. It was actually a fairly evocative flavor, tinged with an exotic complexity. Shrugging, he flipped out another one, chewed it, and swallowed it.

“OK, now I’m going to be
really
well adjusted,” he said, getting up and putting the remaining pills in his shirt pocket. He saw Carew watching him from the hall, his head cowed, nervously pacing, watching Lewis with supreme uncertainty.

“Wait until I get everything figured out,” he ordered the dog.

Downstairs he had that glass of water and chased it with a small glass of whiskey. It was the wrong order, sure, but these were desperate times. The whiskey tasted good, as whiskey often did, so he poured another one, bigger this time.

Ordering things, that was what was important now. Time was short. Someone was going to come upon Stephen, and then things were going to change drastically and, almost surely, very quickly.

The most important thing in his life, from the moment of her birth—that blessed, sacred moment, the sight of her clenching hands and the shock of dark hair on her precious head—was Jay. It was paramount that he do everything in his power to help her be happy and whole—and, in the most stark and unsentimental analysis, he had taken a step in the right direction by dispatching Stephen. It had taken him a step closer to finding Anna.

No, that was crazy, wasn’t it? There had been a fight and Stephen fell. Lewis might get a sympathetic jury to acquit him.

But he couldn’t count on it. A prosecutor could make Lewis out to be some sort of unhinged, vengeful father.

He laughed a little and took a long drink of his very good whiskey.

Now that Ramona was in the picture, there was a new balance to Lewis’s world. He had to look out for her. And she had been so close to Anna. In a rush of clarity he realized that Ramona was a key to finding Anna.

He had some more whiskey, which did wonders toward quelling his chill and the pains in his chest. You could never tell that to a doctor, though, they’d all become teetotal, marathon-running health doctrinaires.

Back to Ramona, who was the point, after all. She needed protection and nurturing—two things that Jay was only sporadically able to provide, given the fact that she was not exactly doing a bang-up job of looking after
herself.
Now, should Lewis be locked in a cell and the key at least metaphorically thrown away, said chain of events would likely lead to Jay becoming even less capable of providing Ramona with the sort of environment she needed.

On the surface, it was a knot no man could unravel. But Lewis had faith in himself. It appeared that he was going to have to improvise.

A little more whiskey tended to free up the mind, or so he had heard.

The phone rang. Lewis ignored it.

This was looking more and more like the kind of situation in which a man had to play it by ear. Ramona came first, and he couldn’t help Ramona if he was an inmate upstate for the remainder of his useful days. So he had to get to Ramona, and he had to get himself out of the reach of the authorities.

He looked out the window. Anna was in the snowy garden. Then she was not. He opened the window, letting in a rush of snow and icy wind.

“Lewis,” Anna said. “Come on. I’m outside.”

Lewis pressed his face to the screen. He squinted and focused, but could not see her where she had been.

She hadn’t been wearing a coat. That was all wrong.

None of this was Jay’s fault. Lewis, feeling better by the moment, was going to make life better for everyone.

“Come on,” he said to Carew. “We’re going for a drive. We’re going to get Ramona. Then we’re going to find Anna.”

Yeah yeah, Lewis, good idea, Lewis.

Just getting to the hospital was a terrible dreamlike odyssey, with Jay’s car skidding along Broadway through the north end of town like a bobsled, and about as controllable. Every other driver seemed to be going fifty percent too fast or too slow. The storm had shifted gears into the truly surreal; more than a foot was on the ground, and the radio announced that at least another foot would fall before it was all over. The schools were closing down, and there were power failures all through the city and the suburbs.

Jay called Ramona’s day care on her cell phone along the way. The worker who answered—her name was Janet—sounded irritated at first when Jay said that Ramona would have to stay late, but softened considerably when Jay gave her the reason. Jay also explicitly told Janet not to tell Ramona what was going on.

Lewis, normally omnipresent, was still lying low. His cell phone rang and rang, which meant that he had it turned off. He wasn’t answering at home, either. Jay couldn’t remember Lewis’s schedule well enough to figure out whether he was working, and she didn’t have the number at Marshall Field’s. Lewis’s disappearance was a source of anxiety for Jay, though it was doing battle with a couple of others against which it stood little chance.

An accident.
The nurse on the phone had refused to get into specifics, which apparently was a matter of policy. But it had sounded serious, and after Jay dredged up the names of Stephen’s parents and where they lived—Bob and Cathy Grant, of Mendocino, California—she left right away.

Finally she saw the hospital on a small hill like an Alpine castle, lights shining from windows through the veil of snow—which meant at least
their
power was on. She negotiated through a series of turns and switchbacks seemingly designed to repel visitors; twice her wheels bumped into curbs or barriers, she couldn’t be sure which. This day was turning out to be sheer hell on her suspension.

After parking on level three of the ramp—crowded, since obviously the business of sickness and dying was not deterred by bad weather, and might have even been enhanced by it—Jay followed the signs to the emergency room. When she got there, she found herself immobilized.

There was a little African-American boy holding a bloodied cloth to his mouth. Nearby, a woman stretched out over three open seats, her eyes closed and her lips moving. Down the way, a guy intently picked shards of glass out of his arm and dropped them with dainty care on the tiled floor.

All of this was within the bounds of what Jay could handle. But it was the smell of the place, and the low acoustic ceiling, and the way the light seemed to come from nowhere at once, that brought Jay suddenly back to the countless hours—weeks, probably, totaled up—that she had spent in hospitals during Anna’s sickness. Jay had never set foot in one until then. Each time she had come with her mother, or to see her, felt like a visit to some chapel of helplessness staffed by secretive clergy who barely understood the mysteries they dispensed.

She went to the desk. There was a woman there, middle-aged, wearing one of those smocks all the nurses wore, talking on the phone. She wore glasses on a chain, and held up a hand to tell Jay to wait.

Which Jay did. She put her hands on the countertop and took a few deep breaths. Stephen was in here somewhere. She had to quell the urge to go looking for him. That was not a good idea. There were surely terrible sights behind the curtains that ran down the hall.

The nurse finished her call. “Can I help you?” she asked, managing to act as though Jay wasn’t a complete intruder.

“I got a call,” Jay said. “I’m a friend of Stephen Grant.”

Farther down the desk was a young woman in boots and a parka. She had short blond hair and was watching Jay closely.

“Stephen Grant. Yes,” the nurse said, her manner rapidly shifting to guarded warmness. “Wait here a minute. I’ll be right back.”

The blond woman took this opportunity to approach Jay with an outstretched hand.

“Gretchen Nelson,” she said. She had that Viking pixie look so common in those parts, a flawless hardy beauty that Jay had always felt herself somehow in futile competition with.

Jay shook the woman’s hand. Under these circumstances, it seemed not at all odd that a perfect stranger should come up and introduce herself. Jay shifted so that she could see little other than the bureaucratic mess behind the desk. The sight of the sick and ailing was more than she could comfortably take.