Freeze (2 page)

Bub nosed his way inside as soon as the opening was wide enough, barking, scurrying. Warren watched him slip on the linoleum. Then the dog was around a corner and gone.

Again, Warren followed.

Snow fell from his boots, and he slipped twice as he hurried down the narrow back hallway.

He found Tess on the kitchen floor, her face a bloody mess. For a second, Warren was sure she was dead, that she’d fallen into the window and slit her jugular and bled to death right there, alone. His heart pounded; a sob rose halfway up his throat and stopped there, choking him. But then she moved, looked up at him with bloody, teary eyes, and said his name.

Bub had already gotten to her. He licked her hands and face and neck. Warren moved to pull him away, but Tess wrapped her arms around the dog’s neck and pulled him against her.

“I’m okay,” she said. “It’s okay. I’m okay.” She said it several more times, maybe trying to convince herself as much as Bub and Warren.

Warren stood there for a second, stunned and confused, before dropping to his knees beside her and lifting her chin to get a better look at her face. His heart had slowed somewhat, but he still couldn’t seem to breathe. He didn’t think he’d ever had to work this hard to get his body to do the things it was supposed to do on its own.

He unwound his scarf and dropped it to the floor between them. “What happened?” He tried to ask it as calmly as possible but wasn’t quite able to keep the hitch out of his voice.

Dozens of cuts lined her face. Beads of blood seeped from the wounds and ran down her cheeks and neck. One long cut arced from her forehead back to her ear. It was bleeding worse than any of the others but not exactly gushing. She’d grabbed a dishtowel from somewhere and must have been using it to wipe herself up. The towel was covered with red splotches. Broken glass littered the floor behind her and the counter around the sink.

“I…” She shook her head, and fresh blood welled in her wounds.

“I don’t know. I mean, the window broke, but…” She shook her head again, more softly this time. “You tracked snow into the house.”

He looked back at the mess of tracks he and Bub had left on the floor and then returned his focus to his wife.

“It’s okay,” Warren said. “I think it’s going to be okay. Most of these cuts don’t look bad—or not
too
bad. I’ll warm up the truck. We’ll get you to the hospital.”

“Just to be safe?”

He kissed her bleeding forehead. Her skin was freezing. “That’s right. But first, let’s go in and sit by the fire, warm you up. I’ll find some tweezers and pull whatever shards I can. No sense taking a long, bumpy drive with your face still full of glass.” Again, he thought he managed to sound much calmer than he felt. They’d both had their fair share of accidents, and he guessed they were lucky this had been the worst of them, but it was impossible to look at Tess’s bleeding face and think anything about the situation was lucky.

“Do you think we can?” She squeezed the rag with her bloodstained fingers. She looked down and wiped absently at the back of her hand.

“Sure,” he said, trying not to look at the blood, afraid he might break down. “The bigger chunks anyway. I—”

“No, I mean get to town? Do you think the truck will make it?”

Cold wind and swirls of snow blew in through the broken window. Warren looked at her for a second, watched the blood welling in her wounds, saw the dazed look in her eyes. “Definitely.”

In truth, he wasn’t sure at all. The truck had good snow tires on it, and it was a reliable vehicle, but there was a
lot
of snow out there. They’d have to make it down their mile-long private drive before they hit the nearest mountain road, and even if that road had been plowed (which it almost certainly hadn’t), it would still be all kinds of slick and nasty.

“I don’t think so,” she said. Her eyes were clearing. “I’m okay. It’s not worth risking our lives.” She tried to get up, slipped, and fell back onto her butt.

Warren steadied her. “Easy. Let me help you up.”

She wrapped her arm around his neck, and he pulled her to her feet.

“It’s riskier if we
don’t
go,” he said.

She gave him her infamous don’t-be-stupid look. “It’s not that bad. Seriously.”

“No offense, hon, but you’re not exactly a doctor. You could have glass in your eye and go blind. Or you might have swallowed some. You could be bleeding internally right now and not even know it.”

“I thought you said it didn’t look bad.”

He led her toward the living room, Bub right behind them.

“Yeah, I did. And it doesn’t. But what do I know? I’m not a doctor either.”

Warren ignored the sofa and the recliner, which were on the side of the room farthest from the fireplace and looked dark, cold, uninviting. They’d moved two armchairs next to the hearth on the first night of the power outage, and that was where he led Tess. She dropped into the nearest chair and leaned her head against the tall backrest.

The fire hadn’t died down completely, but the single remaining log was half gone and wouldn’t last much longer. Warren took two logs from the pile in the corner of the room, the pile he’d gone out to replenish, and placed them in the fireplace. It took them a moment to catch, but when they did, fresh waves of heat came rolling out.

Bub moved beside the chair and looked up at Tess. When he whined, she patted his head and scratched him under his chin.

“I’ll be fine,” she told him. “Why don’t you lay down on your doggy bed.”

He didn’t. Instead, he sat down and rested his face on the arm of her chair.

She smiled and told him he was a good boy.

Warren took a deep breath, and his body eventually calmed down. He used the poker to scoot the two new logs closer together until the flames had risen and the fire was roaring. In all his winter garb, he was getting hot. He pulled off some of the layers but then remembered he’d be going back out again soon enough. He turned away from the fire instead to go looking for some tweezers and antiseptic.

“Hey,” Tess said.

He stopped and turned around.

“I need to tell you something.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“Before the glass broke, I thought I saw something. Something…” She looked down and scratched Bub’s head again.

Warren waited.

“Something like a hand,” she finally said, speaking the words so quickly they were practically one,
somethinglikeahand
.

“A hand?”

She nodded.

“Like a human hand?”

Now she looked up at him. “I don’t know. The glass was frosty. It was just a shape. But it hit the window twice, and…and it looked like a hand.”

Warren ran his fingers across his mouth. “I was just out there, and I didn’t see anything. Definitely not a person.”

“I know it sounds crazy.”

He sat down in the other chair. “You might be a little stressed out right now, maybe even in shock, but I don’t think you’re crazy. If you say you saw something, I believe you did.”

She chewed at her lower lip.

“I doubt it was a person,” he said. “It was probably just a bird or a clump of snow blown out of a tree, but when I go out to start the truck, I’ll look for prints. Okay?”

She nodded and grinned.

“What?”

“Nothing. Just, if this was a movie, you wouldn’t have believed me. You’d think I was out of my mind until some psycho broke in in the middle of the night and raped us both to death.”

The fire crackled, and Warren let out a short huff of a laugh.

“First of all,” he said, “what kind of porno snuff films have you been watching?”

She gave him a ha-ha-very-funny half grin.

“And second, this isn’t a movie. If it was, I’d look like Robert Redford.”

Tess smiled, reached over and grasped his hand. “Redford’s got nothing on you.”

“That’s just the trauma talking.”

She patted his hand. “Probably.”

He shook his head, got out of the chair, and went looking for some medical supplies.

3

While she waited for him to come back, Tess curled her legs under herself and watched the fire.

She hadn’t taken off her apron after the

(accident? event? phenomenon?)

incident in the kitchen, but she did so now, balling it up and tossing it in the empty chair.

She leaned over and kissed the top of Bub’s head. “Do you believe me, too?”

Bub stuck out his tongue and licked the back of her hand.

“Well, I’m glad the two of you do, because I’m not so sure I believe myself.”

Bub said nothing.

“I was just imagining things, right? It was just snow or a bird. Like he said. Right?”

Still no comment from Bub. He left his chin on the arm of the chair and panted.

The fire hissed, popped, and…tinkled?

Tess frowned and stared at the flames.

The noise came again, fluctuating tones like the ringing of a cheap wind chime. But the sounds weren’t coming from the fireplace.

She turned toward the kitchen.

Footsteps on broken glass. There’s someone in the kitchen!

“Warren?”

Bub looked up at her, whined.

It wasn’t Warren in the kitchen. She knew that. She could hear him in the bathroom on the opposite side of the house, rummaging through drawers, looking for tweezers.

The tinkling sound came again. Bub lifted his head off the chair, turned toward the kitchen, and growled.

“Warren?”

“Just a second,” he said. “I can’t find the damn things…are you…wait, here we go.”

Bub’s growl had become a full-fledged rumble. His muscles rippled from his shoulders to his limp, unmoving tail and then tensed. For the first time ever, she was almost afraid of him. When she looked at the dog, she saw not a domesticated animal but a wild beast, a savage, wolf-like creature. She thought if she reached out and touched him, he might whip around and bite her hand clean off.

“Warren!”

“I’m coming,” he said.

Except he wasn’t. Not yet. She heard him returning items to the bathroom drawers, shoving them in all willy nilly probably, not that she cared about that right now.

Something moved in the kitchen. She watched it edge around the doorframe. Not a hand or an arm or any other body part, but a chunk of ice, like a horizontal icicle, forming on the trim while she watched.

No, that’s not real. You’re imagining that. Warren was right: you’re hurt worse than you thought. A chunk of that glass went up through your tear duct and into your brain. Like an accidental lobotomy. Close your eyes and it’ll go away.

Except, if she was imagining it, what was wrong with Bub?

He’s picking up on your emotions. Dogs do that. You know it.

The icicle on the doorframe elongated, thickened. The tinkling sound got louder than ever.

Tessa Marie! You close your eyes. Right now!

She did. She squeezed them tight and counted to ten. The fire crackled and blazed. Fresh waves of heat billowed out.

When she opened her eyes—first one and then the other—the icicle was gone and Bub had calmed down. Somewhat anyway. He still faced the kitchen, and he still had that tenseness in his back, but he’d stopped growling. When she put a hesitant hand on his back, he turned around and (instead of biting it off) gave it a quick lick.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It was nothing. I’m sorry if I scared you.”

Bub turned back to her, licked her hand again, and dropped onto the doggy bed between the two chairs. He let out a stinky little fart and closed his eyes.

When Warren came into the room, Tess blew out a long breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

“Is everything okay?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” She thought maybe that was the most honest answer she’d ever given.

He dropped a bag of cotton balls, a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, a small bottle of liquid bandaid, and a pair of tweezers onto the chair beside her apron and gave her a concerned look.

“I’m just…freaked out,” she said.

He nodded. “Of course. Taking a broken window to the face is definitely freak-out worthy.” He bent down to pet Bub but then turned and headed for the kitchen instead.

For a second, Tess wanted to scream at him to stop, to stay out of there. But what was she afraid of? Ringing sounds? Imaginary icicles? Even if what she’d seen had been real, it was nothing to be afraid of. An icicle in the middle of the house was weird, but nothing to freak out about. There was a blizzard outside, after all. There was ice all over the place.

Yeah, but growing horizontally out of the doorframe so quickly she could actually
see
it forming?

It doesn’t matter. It wasn’t real. You were imagining it.

Warren had disappeared into the kitchen. “I’ll have to cover this,” he said from around the corner. “Not that there’s a lot of heat in here to get out, but this place will be an icebox when we get back if I don’t at least tape a trash bag over the hole.”

“Yeah,” she said. But she wasn’t thinking about the heat. She was thinking about the shape smacking the glass, cracking it, and about the icicle growing out of the doorframe like some sort of twisted, Tim Burtonesque stop motion.

Quit it. You’re going to drive yourself crazy.

Warren came back into the room, kneeled beside her chair, and put his hand on her chin. His skin was rough, calloused, but his touch was as soft and caring as ever. He turned her head to the left and the right and then grabbed the tweezers.

“Again,” he said, “this is my one-hundred-percent-non-medically-trained self talking, but I really think you got off lucky. There’s one piece here.”

He lifted the tweezers to her cheek, pinched them together, and pulled out a small chunk of glass. The extraction hurt just a little bit, like getting stung by a bee in reverse. 

“And here.”

He pulled the second piece from her jaw and one more from just beneath her left ear. None of the shards were any bigger than a fingernail clipping.

Warren patted her leg. “There might be more beneath the skin, but that’s all I can see.”