She looked around.
“Where’s Dad?”
Dee whispered, “Come outside. I don’t want to wake Cole.”
“What’s wrong?”
The tears were starting up in her eyes again. “Just come on.”
When Dee told her daughter what had happened, Naomi cupped her hand to her mouth and ran to a far stack of pipes and crawled into one on the bottom row. Dee stood in the snow with her eyes welling up again, listening to the pipe distort Naomi’s sobbing like some tragic flute.
Cole stared at her, grave as she’d ever seen him, but he didn’t cry. They were sitting on a patch of dry pavement in the road in the warmth of high-altitude sunlight.
“Where did they take him?” the boy asked.
“I don’t know, honey.”
“Why did they?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are they going to kill him?”
The questions came like little stabs of reinforcement, shoring up the horrific reality of it all.
“I don’t know.”
Cole looked back toward the construction site. “When is Naomi going to come out?”
“In a little while. She’s really upset.”
“Are you upset?”
“Yeah, I’m upset.”
“When can we see Daddy again?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know, Cole.”
The boy stared at a trickle of snowmelt gliding down the pavement. “This is one of the worst things that ever happened, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” She could tell he was mulling something over, sorting out the ramifications.
“If we don’t find Daddy, does that mean you’re my wife and I get to be in charge of Naomi?”
Dee wiped her face.
“No, sweetheart, it doesn’t mean that.”
In the afternoon, Dee walked over to the pipe where Naomi had holed herself up for hours and crouched down by the opening. Inside, her daughter lay unmoving, and she reached out, touched her ankle.
“Na? You asleep?”
Naomi’s head shook.
“There are some buildings just up the road. I thought we could check them out, see if there’s food. Warm beds to sleep in.”
No movement. No answer.
“You can’t lay here indefinitely, wishing things aren’t the way they are.”
“I know that, Mom. I know that. Can you just give me thirty minutes, please?”
“Okay. But then we have to leave.”
The shadows stretched as they walked through slush to the top of the pass.
The lodge had been vandalized.
The restaurant raided.
Refrigerators contained nothing but rotting vegetables and fruit. Spoiled jars of condiments that she almost considered eating.
Dee had to break glass to gain entry to one of the tiny cabins. They climbed through the windowframe. Just as cold on the inside, but at least there were two bunk beds along the wall.
The kids crawled into bed and Dee unlocked the door and went back outside. Walked down to the road and stood at the crest of the pass. Thirty-five miles away, Grand Teton punctured the bottom curve of the sun and the nearer peaks were catching alpenglow. The snow and the rock the color of peach skin.
Watched the sun drop, wondering where Jack was in all that darkness.
She closed her eyes, spoke aloud.
“Jack, do you hear me? Wherever you are, whatever’s happening to you in this moment, know that I love you. And I’m with you. Always.”
She’d never said anything with such desperation. Closest she’d ever come to prayer. Wondered if the intensity of what raged inside her could carry the words to him on some secret frequency.
Beneath the stars, she started back toward her children, the snow crunching under her footsteps. A part of her still thinking that when she walked into that little cabin, Jack would be there, her sensory memory still operating on the default of his proximity.
In the total darkness of the cabin, she could hear Cole and Naomi breathing deeply. She pulled off her crumbling shoes and took a bottom bunk—sheeted mattress, no blanket. Hoped her children dreamed of something other than what their life had become.
* * * * *
IN the morning, Naomi had barely the strength to rise out of bed, and the prodding it took rivaled the difficulty Dee had experienced trying to rouse her two months ago on the first school day of the year.
They wandered outside, having slept through most of the morning, and now it was almost warm and the sun was high and there were only patches of snow in the shadows and the forest. They ate as much of it as they could get down.
The pavement was dry. They started down the other side of the pass, Dee cold and more lightheaded than when she donated blood. The spruce trees and the sky seemed to have lost their vibrancy, almost sepia-toned, and the sounds of the forest and their footsteps on the road came muffled.
She wondered if they were dying.
In the midafternoon, Dee glanced up and saw that Naomi was sitting in the road, swaying over the double yellow like windblown sawgrass.
Dee eased down beside her.
“Are we stopping?” Cole asked.
“Yeah, for a minute.”
The boy walked over to the shoulder to investigate a brown sign riddled with buckshot that warned, You Are Now in Grizzly Bear Country.
“I think a rest is a good idea,” Dee said.
“I’m not resting.”
“Then what is this?”
“I’m so hungry and tired and Dad’s probably dead. I just want to die now, too.”
“Don’t say that.”
Naomi turned slowly and stared at her mother. “Don’t you? Be honest.”
“We have to keep going, Na.”
“Why do you say that? We don’t have to do anything. We can stay right here and waste away or you can put us all out of our miseries right now.”
Her eyes flickered at the Glock tucked into Dee’s waistline.
It surprised Dee as much as it did Naomi when she slapped her daughter hard across the face.
Whispered, “You get the f**k up right now, young lady, or I will drag your little ass down this mountain so help me God. I didn’t raise you to quit.”
Dee struggled back onto her feet as Naomi slumped across the road and wept with what little energy she still had.
Dee crying, too. “Come on, Cole, let’s go.”
“What’s wrong with Naomi?”
“She’ll be okay. Just needs a minute.”
“Are we leaving her?”
“No, she’ll be right along.”
They had covered barely a mile by evening when they left the road for a boulder-strewn meadow. No snow or running water anywhere. As the thirst stalked them, all Dee could think about was all the snow they’d passed up earlier in the day, how she should have taken a container from the restaurant at the pass, packed it with ice for later.