第12章 The Long Dark

The storm came back that night and closed the whole lake, and the fathom island was small enough that the wind found it from every side and did not let it rest. They had landed just before dusk, on a strip of flat rock the wind had kept clear, and gotten the plane under the overhang of the island's single cliff and staked it down with lines to the rock, and moved the case and the bag and the papers into the one shelter the island offered, which was a shallow cave under the cliff where Sten had once kept a tin of emergency rations and a hammock of old net. It was not a cabin. It was a hole in the rock with a mouth facing east, and a bed of spruce boughs, and a fire ring of black stones that the lake had worn smooth, and it was the only place in the north where Nessa had ever felt that the water was on her side. They built a small fire out of reach of the wind and lay the boughs down and put the case between them as if it were a third person, and the storm began. It went on for two days. There is a kind of time that only exists inside a storm. It has no hours. It has only the shifting weight of the wind and the small tasks that keep a body from going cold, and the person across the fire, who becomes first a stranger, then a voice, then something else. They talked because talking was the only light they had. They slept in shifts. They told each other the things that could only be said when the world was shut out and there was nothing to do but listen. She had never told anyone the whole shape of the night Sten died. She had told the inquiry a set of facts with the feeling taken out, the way you file a report, and she had told Vesta a little more than that, and she had never once said the part that lived under all of it: that when she was a girl her brother had taken her past the drop-off and let go of her, because he said the water was the one thing in the world that never pretended to be kind, and that a person who learned to trust it anyway had learned the only lesson worth learning. She told Isaak that now. He told her about the ledgers. How he had started as a junior accountant at a firm that did the books for a shipping company with offices in three cities and never a cargo manifest worth reading. How he had noticed, one quarter, that a number did not balance, and how the noticing had become a hunt, and the hunt a life. How the company moved money through a chain of front names, and the front names belonged to people whose real names never appeared anywhere, and how he had spent two years putting the real names back onto the pages. "I could have stopped at any point," he said. "There was a moment, about a year in, when one of them came to my office and sat down across the desk and offered me more money than I will see in my life to forget the whole thing. And I said no. And I have asked myself a thousand times why. And the only answer I have is that I could not stand the sight of the wrong number. It is not courage. It is a disorder." "It is the same disorder I have," Nessa said. "The wrong number is a boat going down with two men in it. You cannot leave it. You cannot round it. You have to go and make it right, even when you know the lake is going to charge you." He looked at her across the fire. "Does it ever get lighter?" "No." She added a branch to the fire. "But you get stronger around it. Or you get used to carrying it. Or you find someone who will carry it for an hour while you sleep." She glanced at him. "I have not had that. Until recently." There were hours like that. The storm gave them no clock, only the changing weight of the wind on the rock and the slow shrinking of the woodpile, and they measured the time by the tasks that kept them alive. Boil snow for water. Dry the socks that had gone wet. Turn the case so the cold did not reach one face of it. Feed the fire just enough to keep the smoke thin and the cave warm at the edges, and no more, because smoke in daylight was a flag. He learned her rhythm by the second day and she learned his, and by the third they could work without speaking at all, which was the first intimacy of the week and the one that lasted. The wind shook the mouth of the cave and the fire leaned and settled. "That is the thing I am most afraid of," he said quietly. "Not the men in the road. Not the water. That I will get used to this, and then it will end, and I will be alone with the numbers again, and this week will have been a thing I tell no one about, ever." She did not answer him with words. She reached across the case between them and put her hand over his hand, and he turned his hand and held hers, and they sat like that for a long moment with the storm on the roof of the world. Then he leaned toward her, and she let him, and the kiss happened the way the ice forms on a wing: slowly, then all at once, and then everything was different. She pulled back first. Her heart was going like an engine at takeoff, and her hands, which had been steady in freezing water two days before, were not steady now, and she needed them to be, because the storm was not over and there was a man on the lake looking for them and she could not afford this. "Not yet," she said. "We are not safe enough for this yet." "I know." His voice was rough. "That is the only reason I stopped." They did not sleep that night, but they did not touch again, and in the morning the wind was still up and the lake was white with spindrift, and out beyond the cliff, invisible through the snow, the deep cold fathom moved under the island with its patient, uninterested weight, and somewhere out there in the same weather Dorn Varek was crossing the lake, and the first thing Nessa heard when she crawled out of the cave was not the wind or the water but a sound she did not expect at all, which was a helicopter. ---