Thalo Blue (50 page)

He did, and the needle fell.

But the other car, a blue flashing lion, darted past the curve of the wall, easily on David’s half of the roadway. Despite the fact that the orange line was hidden under ice and snow his first thought was:
That car is in the middle of the goddamn road
.

Its tail skidded out from behind it at the curve up ahead but it seemed to even out and come at him with renewed vehemence.

David again pressed his brakes. This time, too much, and he envisioned slamming the passenger side into the barren rock wall beyond the narrow shoulder. He overcompensated, turning into the skid that formed out of his locked back tires and it did repel the T-bird away from the jagged cliff.

But too much. It brought him too close to the other car which sealed the gap and clipped his front driver’s side bumper at the wheel well. The radio let out a squawk of static.

There was a half-flash of a face. It lay like a sun-burst, bright and clear behind two dark bars, the blind-spots between the two cars’ windshields and driver’s doors. His hand went out instinctively to it—

(
Seeing what? Seeing exactly
what
in that half-moon face?
)

The hand clenched his door’s interior handle instead.

He thought he could still recover from being clipped, but the blue car’s back wheel well seemed to catch somewhere on the back quarter panel of the Thunderbird. Both cars, connected, spun. Everything was turning around. The two vehicles rotated like a serving platter. They were performing a little dance with only the looming mountains, black on black, to watch. There was a shriek of grinding, toothy metal that drowned out the radio static. David’s view through the windshield was shifted towards the left edge of the road where coated pines and that metal guardrail stood. The passenger side screeched into it and the car, still winding, still revolving, now faced the direction he had been driving from all night.

In his realization that the impossible was happening—that they were going over that edge—the front passenger door of his car ripped against the guardrail, tipping the car up and over it. The front hood slammed into the trunks of a stand of pines, and the driver’s door, caught by the other car, finally sheered loose. So did a good portion of David’s arm. Halfway up the forearm was simply gone. There was open space where the door once was and his face and skin were dusted by a fine sparkle of snow from the trees he had collided with. The dull, distant static rose to a steady screech. And as the car tipped forward, snapping the trees, he tumbled away from the noise, out into the chilled air. Armless, witless, and on fire in his mind.

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Thrown free, David collided with the scourged membrane of the water. A shocking bolt of pain ran up from the stump of his arm and through his body. It did not yet register as cold. But in a few minutes the frigid temperature would race through his body and try to shut him down.

He was beneath the surface, awkward and flailing. Which way was up? How far was down? He heard and sensed, but did not see the two cars—a tangled mess together with each other. They pushed the water against him as they too collided into the river. Their impact felt like a house falling on him and his chest compressed.

The air in his lungs stung and he thought he would choke. He needed to breathe and finally burst through to the top for air. His glasses were gone and his eyes saw an unfocused mess of blobs and shapes. Everything was a haze. Where were the girls? Still inside. With that thought ripping into him, he believed his chest would collapse.

All he saw was the gleam—bright, irrationally bright in the darkness—of his Thunderbird’s front end. Only its hood and grille peeked from the water. Bright and reflective, the twin sets of pot headlights were still shining yellow. They were the half-face he had seen flash from the other car—
and
the faces of his daughters—but they blinked and then winked out entirely. It canted, the car, and went under.

His mind screamed at him to do something. To do
anything
. He braced himself and tore into the water. But the river’s current was sweeping him further from the dark blob of the cars and he could see nothing save for its heavy shadow of black against a nearly identical canvas of bubbly midnight blue. Water hurt his eyes and he could not keep them open. There was a gurgle in his ears. The buzzing which he had found himself getting used to in his life was now a roar of grating metal. Or was that the two cars, corpses of metal and seats, grinding against each other beneath the churning waters?

He dove down again and again but could see nothing. He couldn’t breathe. The weight of the cold water on the walls of his chest was a burden too great to bear and he came to the surface, defeated, blue-skinned. All he saw was a darkened figure at the water’s edge, clinging there in the rustling white furls of river.

Dog-paddling with one arm, he pushed towards that figure, slapping the water and grunting for air. He had not yet come to a full understanding of his missing forelimb.

And he had not fully understood that his girls—his two princesses—were gone. Just like their mother. Just like their sister. Gone.

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The Druid came away from that blackness, back to what was the inside of Malin Holmsund.

Getting through things, terrible things, makes it possible to come through them again. You lose a life and taking another seems easier than it might have. Easier than it might have when you were still...
whole
. You lose a limb, and cutting off another seems, not easy, but manageable. You lose everything you have ever loved and taking that from someone else is do-able. Something to strive for even.

Some things you remember.

And some things, they remember you.

IV. The Faraway Place

Zeb had shivered, standing there in the shadows of the towers—his coat had been taken off to make driving more comfortable—and the wound on his chest had felt the bite of the cold. He couldn’t remember what the bells sounded like. Couldn’t remember if he had ever even heard the bells from any of those church towers. On Sundays, did they all ring? Like a swelling symphonic cacophony, an orchestra pit at warm up? Or was there eventually some kind of township ordinance to silence them all, lest one may drown out another?

He had left the towers behind then, had driven along the gravel road. Out from behind the increasingly dirty BMW coupe, a steady billow of dust and snow had streamed like the tail of a comet. He had gotten closer to the house, recognized that he was there when he saw the bend in the road ahead and the way the ice of the lake’s surface crept nearly up to the wheels of his father’s car. And there, with ancient and omniscient trees obscuring the house on its other side, had been the gate. The Great Gate of Redfield, with its big black iron bars flanked by red-brick and mortar posts which no longer supported a set of opaque light shades. No matter; those lights had never worked as far back as Zeb could remember. The posts stood slanted and the middle of the two gate halves where the bars joined and locked sagged to nearly touch the gravel driveway. The drive wound between the posts curving gently north and venturing up the tilt of the messy front yard where, in summer, the white and pink and yellow of clover and dandelions would make random waves in the midst of the rolling sheets of green lawn, punctuated further by wild stems and polyps of crab grass.

The yard slanted upwards with the drive as its spine, at a distinct but not overpowering angle, and the house receded to the north edge of the property where thin brush began. Behind it ran the hills, gaining density of forest and gathering steepness towards dangerous heights. It got heavy with trees and bush almost immediately and cut into the terrain were Zeb’s trails, winding cuts in the stubble, where he had some of his best adventures. The name for those hills, he couldn’t remember—if he had ever even known.

—
Sadie is everywhere.

It’s hot. She’s in the yard on a hammock reading a paperback in the sun. Nearby Dad’s tuning up the old red lawnmower
—

Zeb had gotten out of the Ci, had let it continue to churn a noxious cloud of vapor behind, and had gone to open the gate. The gravel road was blank in patches, snow and ice-covered in others, and he had nearly slipped. It seemed that the winter this north had been alternating between mild and cold this year, thawing and then refreezing. Today was chilly but not terribly cold. In Zeb’s mind, the fact that there was even such a thing as cold out here at the Charlemagne house did not initially make sense. To him it would always have the smell of summer, and the warmth of an August night.

—
It’s evening. Dark. Still warm but cooling with a breeze off the lake. There’s fire in the pit out back, and a hint of starlight on the water. Her face is lit by both, pink with the heat of the flames—

This trip was different. There was newness everywhere, yet a vague oldness wrapped branches and licked the wooden wall boards of the house’s exterior. Supplanting such a solid idea of heat and history seemed fine in a second or two, particularly after he had touched the gate’s cold black bars and had drawn them apart from each other. The Here and The Now was in every corner and those vintage posts skewered the earth and snow at odd angles, as though they strained to keep from falling every second of their existence. Here in the Now but maybe gone in a second or two. Their slant was exaggerated from what he remembered; time had not been kind to them. Sadie had worried about the gate falling, had told Zeb not to play near it. Play down by the boat launch, she had told him, on the sand and gravel at the water’s edge. Careful of the rails, hon. Make sure one of us can see you.

So concerned about the gate’s precarious stature, she had even asked Felix Wagener to reinforce its posts with concrete. With the chill running through him, Zeb had opened the gate and had seen again the shoddy bubbles of gray-white cement nestled at their bases. Mr. Wagener was trustworthy, but not the handiest, Zeb remembered. So he still wouldn’t test his weight against the faded red pillars. To be fair, though, Wagener had said the road was clear all the way to the house, and it was. That was something. On the deck, Zeb had discovered a fresh load of firewood. Wagener was considerate to have left that and Zeb had felt appreciation for such an effort from the old man. The idea of chopping wood with his shoulder hurting did not sent a thrill into him.

The New England style cottage had two floors, the second with narrow dormers facing front and rear, the lake and the hills. It sat comfortably back on the lot, behind three giant pines, the triplets, Zeb had nicknamed them at some point. They shaded the house with their low and lofty boughs of needles, dark and formidably imposing.

—
She’s in the bathroom putting on make-up and leaning over the sink with the door open. A strand of light falls on her from the window. She’s singing. An old song. “
It’s a Beautiful Morning
” by the Rascals, or maybe it’s “Here Comes the Sun.” The Beatles
—

Stairs ascended to that second floor from the break between the living room and the kitchen. It was an informal front foyer that seemed to be all things at once: the east opening, wide and generous, to the kitchen; the path west to an open-plan living room of giant windows; and the gateway up towards the modest second floor. A bathroom and two bedrooms were off the kitchen at the back of the house. Zeb’s room was one of them, a small hovel, only for sleeping. It had a giant double bed with a squeaky mattress and an elderly mahogany wardrobe. He remembered that when his window was open, his nose would find the tang of smoke from the fire pit, or his ears would seize upon the twiddled chirpings of birds. But he would catch neither of those things on this trip. Well, perhaps the birds, some that stayed for the winter, but it was too cold to sit outside for long, even with a raging fire in that pit.

—
She’s at the door of his room asking him if he wants punch or a hotdog cooked for him over the fire. Or maybe a burger tonight instead. She’s holding a bag of buns and she’s in a hurry...but she’s plunking down on the bed beside him anyway. Ruffling his hair as he lays on his stomach and scratches with crayons at some paper. She’s asking him what he’s drawing
—

He suspected that all the wood Mr. Wagener had supplied would go to warming the house. It was bound to be dreadfully cold at night but Zeb welcomed the roughness of it. There was power, but the telephone would not be connected. Phone lines on poles ran back through the woods towards Edan Township but the phone would be lifeless to the ear. There had been no reason to pay for a connection as, barring one trip of Zeb’s in the autumn a few years before, no one had been in this house for years.

When Sebastion had finally turned the key in the front door’s lock and come inside, he had rounded the corner of the little foyer and found the living room furniture coated in off-white drop cloths. The space looked like a John Register painting, or maybe one by Edward Hopper: vacant but imbued with the residue of lives lived, mired like fingerprints left on glass and only evident in a certain slant of light. Each colorless shroud made the room seem like a meeting place for old and tired ghosts, hidden but still sensed, and with no earthly reason left to even stir. Clocks there and in the bedrooms and kitchen were all stopped at drastically different times. Their batteries, as were the ones in the doorbell and smoke detectors would be dead, lifeless little cells as morbidly decayed and empty as those loose-formed white sheets.

—
She’s there at the end of the living room in the big wine-colored chair under that painting she did in university. She’s laughing and holding a glass of lemonade. Turned over on the arm of the chair is a stapled bunch of work papers. The painting, partly obscured behind her head, shows stiff figures in a boat on multi-colored water
—

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