I am tired. I close my eyes and think of Jenni. I can feel her hand on my cheek and the tickle of her breath on my throat as she curls up with me. I am floating on a warm tide, and I can smell the sweet scent of sugar cookies. We are on the floor, in front of that fireplace. I touch the tender curve of her cheek. The nearness of her soft body causes my skin to tighten, and I remember the pleasure of that ache.
She kisses my neck, and her lips move up until they brush the lobe of my ear. She is whispering to me, but I can’t make out what she is saying. I strain to listen. It sounds like a song, but not any song I’ve ever heard before. I listen more closely and hear it again. The sound is soft, quiet, not from a whisper but from distance. It rises and holds, hitting a sharp crescendo before trailing off.
I can’t smell the cookies anymore. I reach for Jenni and she is not there. My hands hurt again, my chest hurts. The throb in my toes has returned. I hear the sound again and realize that it’s the howl of a wolf. I open my eyes. The aurora continues to light the surface of the snow, casting a green haze across the lake.
I try to roll to my side, but my defiant muscles won’t listen to me. Everything hurts. I want to go back to my dream. I want to feel Jenni at my side again. I curse the wolf whose lonely, selfish wail brought me back to this lake. I could try again. I could close my eyes and bring her back to me—this time forever. I know what I’m doing. It’s my choice. I try to conjure up those memories, but the wolf howls again. She won’t let me go.
I grit my teeth, hold my arms to my chest, and roll onto my left side. The effort causes me to cough, sending a jolt of pain through my rib cage and down my spine. I feel like I’m breathing glass shards. I work my hips up until I am on my knees. I shouldn’t have rested. That was a mistake. I should never have let my energy settle away like that. I needed to get up, get moving.
I put one foot under me, then the other, wincing as the blades of pain reawaken my feet. With one last effort, I stand. The cracking of my back and shoulder muscles is almost audible. I look around the nest.
Nothing remains of my deed except the knife in my boot and the auger, lying beside the hole. I drop both through and watch them disappear into the black water. In a couple of hours, the ice will reclaim the hole, the lake skimming a new layer of skin over its wound. In a day or two, the blowing snow will hide the nest. There will be no evidence of my being here—beyond the dead body anchored to the bottom of the lake.
I start back to the cabin, the path lit by the full moon and the waning surge of the Northern Lights at my back. My snow pants are stiff with ice, having been glazed with lake water as I fought to shove Mikhail Vetrov through the hole. The wind catches the bare skin of my neck with the sharp edge of a guillotine, and I lift my hood over my head. When I get to the trees, I pull myself up the bank, pausing on my hands and knees to catch my breath. Just standing back up is like lifting an oxcart filled with bricks.
I climb the first hill, using the aspen scrub to pull myself along the portage. The snow grips my legs. I stub my frozen feet on rocks as I try to get a foothold, and the pain is so jarring that it spikes throughout my entire body and seems to settle beneath the roots of my teeth. One step more, I tell myself. Just one step more.
I crest the hill and see the valley beyond. I know that the snowmobile is at the top of that next hill. If I can make it to the snowmobile, I can make it back to the Durango and safety, but I am convinced that I cannot make it to that next hill. In the moonlight I can see the skeletons of the aspen and birch, black against the moonlit snow in the distance. It is too far.
That’s when I see a shadow moving on the path ahead of me. I stop, my heart thumping hard against its frozen shell. The shadow has halted about thirty feet away, low and dark. She turns, and I can see the eyes of the wolf. I expect them to glow as they do in my dreams, but they look tired, resigned, forgiving. We stare at each other.
I open my arms and tip my head back, exposing my throat. I expect to hear a snarl as she launches at me. I hurt so badly, I just don’t care anymore. Maybe this is how it all should end anyway. I am afraid, but somehow, this seems fitting.
I wait, and nothing happens. When I open my eyes, she is gone. I listen and can hear nothing except the wind. I start walking again, certain that one of only three things can happen: I will succumb to the cold; I will be eaten by wolves; or I will make it to the sled. One more step. One more step.
The valley seems longer and deeper, and the path far more narrow than when I had crossed it last. Tree branches tug at my arms and cast shadows that play tricks on me. I step cross-eyed onto fallen logs or jutting rocks that knock me to my knees. I don’t stay down, though. With my nubby hands, I push myself back up and press on.
I try to fill my head with thoughts to distract myself from the pain, but they evaporate before becoming fully formed. I try to think of a song, something easy to remember, something with a marching cadence. The only one that comes to mind is “My Girl,” by the Temptations. I can’t sing that well on a good day, but as I start my climb out of the valley, I shove that song into my head, whispering the words as I pull and clutch my way up the hill.
I trip on a root and face-plant into the snow. The song plays on. I lift myself up, making it back to my feet as the song tells me about the month of May. I push on, keeping the song playing in my head. At times, I get too winded to whisper the lyrics, so I let the rhythm of the bass guitar drive me forward.
I’m on my third rendition of the song when the snowmobile comes into sight. I’d forgotten that I turned it around when I parked it on the hill. I give a silent prayer of thanks to the fallen saint or random flair of synapse that had put that idea in my head. I’m fairly certain that I would have died trying to lift it now.
I straddle the sled, start it up, and take off.
The wind in my face fills my eyes with tears. I have to blink hard to see the path. A couple times, my eyelashes freeze shut and I force them open by raising the muscles in my forehead and under my eyebrows. In no time at all, I am back at the cabin, and I park where the snowmobile had been idling when I first came there. I leave the motor running and the headlight on so that I can search for my gun.
I see the divots where I’d been standing when Mikhail caught me in the wrist with that first log. I drop to my knees, feeling under the snow in the shadow of a pine tree. I can’t leave my gun here. It’s the only proof of my connection to the man who ordered my wife’s death.
My fingers are numb, and I begin to question whether I’d be able to feel the gun if I brushed across it. I’m so close to being finished, so close to the safety and the warmth of the Durango, yet, I can’t feel a thing beneath the snow.
Then suddenly the light above the cabin’s deck bursts to life.