In weather like this, they didn’t need to worry much about being seen. For more than two hours, Mama drove high up the mountain. Where the snow was deep, her touch on the throttle was light. They rode up hills, down valleys, across frozen rivers, and around cliffs of soaring rock. Mama kept the snow machine’s speed so low it was barely faster than walking; speed wasn’t their objective now. Invisibility was. And the sled needed to stay steady.
They came at last to a small lake high on the mountain, ringed by tall trees and cliffs. Sometime in the last hour the snow had stopped falling and the clouds had departed to reveal a velvety blue night sky awash in swirls of starlight. The moon came out, as if to watch two women in the midst of all this snow and ice or to mourn their choices. Full and bright, it shone down on them, its light reflected across the snow, seeming to lift skyward, a radiant glow illuminating the snowy landscape.
In the sudden clarity of the night, they were visible now, two women on a snow machine in a glowing, silver-white world with a dead body on a sled.
At the frozen lakeshore, Mama eased off of the gas, came to a trembling stop. The insect drone of the engine was the loudest noise out here. It drowned out the harsh sound of Leni’s breathing through the neoprene face mask and helmet.
Was the lake fully frozen? There was no way to know for sure. It should be, at this high elevation, but it was early, too. Not midwinter. The snow radiated with moonlight across the flat, frozen lake.
Leni tightened her hold.
Mama barely turned the throttle, then inched forward. In this dark, they were like astronauts, moving through a strange, impossibly illuminated world, like deepest space, the sound of cracking ice all around them. In the center of the lake, Mama killed the engine. The snow machine slid to a stop. Mama dismounted. The cracking sound was loud, insistent, but not the kind of sound that mattered. It was just the ice breathing, stretching; not breaking.
Mama took off her helmet, hung it on the throttle, and removed her face mask. Her breath shot out in humid plumes. Leni set her helmet on the duct-taped vinyl seat.
In the silver-blue-white light of the moon, ice crystals sparkled across the surface of the snow, glittered like gemstones.
Quiet.
Only their breathing.
Together they pulled Dad’s body off the sled. Leni used the emergency shovel to clear a divot in the snow. When she came to the glassy silver ice, she put her shovel away and retrieved the auger and the chain saw. Mama used the auger to drill an eight-inch hole in the ice. Slushy water seeped up, bounced the round disc of ice.
Leni pulled off her face mask and shoved it in her pocket, then started up the chain saw, the wa-na-na-na excruciatingly loud out here.
She pointed the blade downward, stuck it in the hole, and began the long, arduous process of turning the hole into a big square opening in the ice.
When Leni finished, she was sweating hard. Mama dropped the animal traps beside the hole. They landed with a clank.
Then Mama went back for Dad. Grabbing hold of his cold white hands, she dragged him over to the hole, tucked him up close to it.
Dad’s body was stiff and still, his face as white and hard as a tusk carving.
For the first time, Leni really thought about what they were doing. The bad thing they’d done. From now on, they would have to live with the knowledge that they were capable of this, all of it. The shooting, the carrying of a dead man, the covering up of a crime. Although they’d had a lifetime of covering up for him, looking away, pretending, this was different. Now they were the criminals and the secret Leni had to protect was her own.
A good person would feel ashamed. Instead she was angry. Howlingly so.
If only they had walked away years ago, or called the police, asked for help. Any small course correction on Mama’s part might have led to a future where there wasn’t a dead man on the ice between them.
Mama dragged the traps apart, forced the black jaws open. She pushed Dad’s forearm into the maw. The trap closed with a snap of breaking bone. Mama paled, looking sick. Traps broke both of Dad’s legs—sn-ap—became weights.
The northern lights appeared overhead, cascading in swirls of yellow, green, red, and purple. Impossible, magical color; lights fell like silken scarves across the sky, skeins of yellow, neon-green, shocking pink. The electric-bright moon seemed to watch it all.
Leni stared down at her father. She saw the man who had used his fists when he was angry, saw the blood on his hands and the mean set to his jaw. But she saw the other man, too, the one she’d crafted from photographs and her own need, the one who’d loved them as much as he could, his capacity for love destroyed by war. Leni thought maybe that he would haunt her. Not just him, but the idea of him, the sad and scary truth that you could love and hate the same person at the same time, that you could feel a deep and abiding loss and shame for your own weakness and still be glad that this awful thing had been done.