Stance rigid, arms tight to my sides, I peered over the edge. The fissure was shockingly wider than I’d first understood—closer to fifteen feet across, the inner slopes pale blue at the top, intensifying to turquoise, indigo, then black as a grave down and down to unspeakable depths. An eight-by-ten-foot block of ice had been cut cleanly out of the wall opposite; the new ice walls gleamed and sparkled.
The girl had been trapped in this? How was it possible?
“What do you think she was running from?”
He took off his wool cap, scratched his oily hair, slipped it back on. “Don’t know, but whatever it was, she was plenty scared. Her expression, man, it was like she was running for her life.”
I got down to my knees, took off my glove, and placed my hand on the ice, as if I could detect its slowly beating heart. To be encased in this glacial prison, eyes frozen open in terror, how long had she been like that? I had a feeling we were in a sacred place, that we were being watched, that there was more life around us than we knew.
“What are you doing?”
“I don’t know.” I took my hand away, almost missing the cold as I wrestled my glove back on. Turned and faced him. “So, what’s the deal with Jeanne and those dolls?”
He shifted his weight, squinted into the sun. “She lost her husband and daughter in a car crash. Daughter was only seven. Never really got over it, as you can tell. Those were her daughter’s dolls. Jeanne’s a good person. A good worker, knows what she’s doing. Anyway, we should get back.”
I followed him to the cat. My legs heavy, my big orange boots kicking up little tornados of snow with every step.
Wyatt opened my door for me. “I’m sure it’s pretty obvious by now. Nobody normal comes here. This place is just natural selection for people who want to leap off the edge of the world.”
* * *
THE SUN HAD dipped behind the mountains by the time the cluster of yellow buildings came into view. I was glad to see them. Wyatt toured me through the Cube and the Shed, all the while droning on about Jeanne’s prowess repairing you name it, how she’d saved their asses in more than one dicey situation, and how she could practically throw a cake together out of cocoa powder and dust. I couldn’t concentrate on a word of it.
Ignoring Wyatt’s monologue, I stopped a few yards from the Shack, the questions I’d been yearning to ask tunneling up my throat. Above us hung a nearly full moon, luminous among beating stars, its beams freezing us where we stood.
“Which door did Andy leave from that night, do you think?”
Wyatt looked exhausted, even a touch annoyed by my question. “You really want to get into that right now, Val?”
“Where did you find his body?”
He hooked his sunglasses through the zipper pull of his parka and spun away from me. “Come on.” Shoulders slumped, he rounded the building, stopping at a nondescript hillock of snow and ice. He couldn’t seem to look at me. “Here.”
“Was he on his back? His front?”
“Val,” he said quietly, “don’t make me… you saw the pictures.”
“Tell me how you found him.”
“He was on his side, sort of curled up.”
In my mind, there he was, clear as day. A bear of a man made childish in striped boxers, his big feet frozen solid but somehow still tender. On his side, knees up, arms folded against his chest as if to keep himself warm, all the shivering over and done with, a statue now, snow already building in little slopes against his prone body. I looked away from his glowing afterimage and back to Wyatt.
“Which door?”
“How could I know that, Val?”
I approached the closest one and was about to turn away, when something caught my eye. Moonlight revealed a series of scratches, metal glinting silver where the orange paint had been scraped off. I ran my gloved hand over them.
“What are these?”
Wyatt approached, folded his arms. “Those’ve been there for a couple of years.”
I rattled the doorknob, pretended I was my brother, frantically trying to get back in.
“We think a polar bear did it. They’re starving, you know. They come here sometimes.”
“A polar bear?” I turned to face him.
“Why do you think I’ve got a rifle with me every second I’m outside?”
I didn’t answer.
“Look,” he said, placing his hand over the scratches and widening his fingers. “No man’s hand is that big.”
I brushed his hand away and placed mine there, stretching my fingers as far apart as I could. It was true, the spread of the scratches was huge, but a man freezing to death, out of his mind with panic, desperately trying to get back in? Wasn’t anything possible then?