north side and branches droop like the oily wings of cormorants I once saw along a northern coast after an oil spill. I slog along the trail, listening to the whirring silence of snow sifting through fir and pine, and my own labored breath.
After a few minutes, I stop. Trees surround me, and I can no longer see David’s tracks or where the trail has gone. I search for landmarks, but any familiar deadfall or boulder is buried in snow. Everything is changed, as if I’ve never been here before.
Perhaps I haven’t. I turn a circle but can’t see the house. I don’t even know which direction it is. This slope catches the wind, and my tracks, too, are fast disappearing. I begin retracing them but come to a halt when the space ahead of me seems to fall away steeply. I don’t remember this drop-off….
I look straight up through the trees. “The woods are lovely, dark and deep/But I have promises to keep/ And miles to go before I sleep/And miles to go before I sleep.”
“David!”
My scream sounds muffled in the snowy silence. I draw a deep breath and try again.
“David, I’m lost! David!”
CHAPTER 5
I stand rooted to the snowy slope like the fir trees around me, screaming David’s name. My snowshoes sink inch by inch into foot-deep powder.
I listen hard into the rushing silence but hear only the sigh of the wind through the trees. My eyes strain to see past the flurry of whiteness until even the distinction of vertical pine trunks disappears, and I am snowblind.
Vertigo gathers momentum like an avalanche in my brain. I take deep breaths, fighting it, but lose the battle. The sky spins. I summon all my strength behind my hoarse voice.
“David! Can you hear me?”
Then I am falling.
Not through snow, but into a wall of leaping flames. The hillside, the sky, the world is engulfed in fire. Bright wings beat wildly inside my head, fighting to escape. I am running through flames … glass walls explode … my foot connects with something soft, something human that shouldn’t be there. And I am falling through fire….
When my eyes jerk open, I’m lying in the snow. An unbearable nausea, like seasickness, washes over me. Cold burns my face.
I hear a muffled sound. David’s voice?
My elbows tremble when I push myself up and struggle to my feet, clinging to a tree while the world swims around me. I hold my breath and listen.
“Roberta! Keep yelling so I can find you!”
Heat floods through my stiff limbs. His voice sounds far away, but I fix on its location and the vertigo disappears.
Keep yelling, he said. I can do that.
“I’m here! Over here!”
Breathless but weirdly elated, I suck in air and call out again. I struggle to move but am stuck in the snow.
A dark shape materializes from the whirl of falling flakes—Sasquatch in a red ski cap. An overgrown redheaded blackbird. I start to laugh.
By the time David wraps me in his insulated arms, I’m giggling wildly. I feel his warm breath against my cheek, but he isn’t laughing. He holds me tightly until I quiet down. Then he turns me away from the drop-off and guides me through the trees with a gloved hand.
His breath comes through the red mask in steamy puffs. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming out? I’d have waited for you.”
I don’t answer. I don’t remember the answer. It doesn’t matter anyway. What matters is that he knows how to find the trail. My knees tremble lifting the clumsy snowshoes.
“Maybe we ought to mark the path with yellow flags or something,” I suggest, trying to sound normal. But my voice shakes so that when I hear it, I start to laugh again, but only a little.
“Good idea. If I’d realized how low the visibility is, I wouldn’t have come out until later. I nearly got lost myself.”
This isn’t true, of course. He’s trying to make me feel better about my helplessness. David grew up in these woods; he came here with his parents every summer of his first eleven years. In the winter they used to cross-country ski here. After his parents divorced, he even came back once with his dad, before they gave up trying to talk to each other.
When I see the outline of the house ahead of us, my heart makes a painful leap that catches in my chest. If it were possible in snowshoes, I would run.
My confidence returns as we get closer to home, though I don’t let go of David’s arm. At the back porch I turn to look out across the white wonderland. The snowfall has lessened for the moment, the sky lifted. Mountain peaks shrouded in clouds angle downward in frosted slopes that sink away toward the valley.
Severely beautiful. We stand a moment in silence.
“How about some hot chocolate?” I say, as cold seeps beneath my layers of clothes.
“Sounds good. After I feed the birds, I’ll come in.”
Not many species of birds winter here, but David feeds the hardy ones every day. From our sunporch windows I can watch them gobble seeds and suet, insulating their tiny bird bones from the cold. Sometimes I spend entire mornings watching them scratch and peck atop our picnic table and beneath it. I wonder where they sleep in the subzero Canadian nights, and how they manage not to get lost.
That evening the TV weatherman says the blizzard is over and the pass has been cleared. I digest this news with mixed feelings.
The next morning David gets ready for work. “Why don’t you get dressed and go with me?” he says. “You could poke around the museum this morning.” He knows I love spending time there alone, especially in the Rungius gallery. The artist’s wildlife and landscape paintings are breathtaking; I never tire of seeing them.
“At lunch I could drop you off at the shopping mall,” David says. “Or the library.”
“I’ll be fine here. Really. I don’t feel like going to town today.”
He gives me a quick goodbye kiss before he goes out the door. I hear his Jeep start up and plow down the unshoveled driveway.
When I’ve cleaned up the breakfast dishes, I settle on the sun-porch with my needlework. The butterfly on the pillowtop blooms yellow and black, its stripes vibrant in the warm cone of lamplight. The colors are satin beneath my fingertips. Secure in this familiar way, I let myself think about my postponed doctor’s appointment, and about what happened yesterday morning in the snow.
The dreams of Rockhaven come less frequently now, just as Dr. Bannar predicted. Except for the nights when I don’t take the sleeping pills she prescribed. Sometimes those sleepless nights are a refuge, a time zone separate and unconnected to my repetitious, panic-filled days. In the quiet dark, I take out the past like an old locket and turn it over and over in my hands. I try to believe that when I’ve done this a specific but indeterminate number of times, I will be able to put it away forever.
It isn’t working. How long can I live this way before I step over the edge again?
At midmorning David phones, ostensibly to ask if I want anything from the store. I know he’s checking on me; he’s such a worrier. I list bagels and milk and whatever fresh vegetables at the market look edible today.
By lunchtime I have finished embroidering the orange-and-blue spots on the butterfly’s hindwings. I am rethreading with black, looking forward to outlining the teardrop-shaped swallowtails, when the telephone rings again. Impatient, I pick up the receiver intending to tell David I’m not a child and he doesn’t need to keep calling.
My stomach lurches at the sound of the bass voice that reverberates across the line. It needs no identification, but he gives one anyway.
“It’s