The Ghost Lights
Fiction by Craig Davidson
Stars. Fractured starsprays, burning constellations . . . whole galaxies radiating like spokes on a wheel, their epicentres—the suns—dancing with a pinprick of kaleidoscopic brightness.
Black.
Blink.
A steady trickle. Salt water dripping in a sea-cave. Lurking behind it: an ongoing hiss. A serpent sidewinding over wet rocks.
“Uh . . . hwwwuuugnnh . . . ”
A voice. My own. A taste in the back of my mouth: gamey and adrenal like I’ve chewed the liver of some wild creature. A pinworm of pain needles through me—a buzzing wire connecting my clavicle to the bottommost knob of my spine. The wire cools. It’s someone else’s pain now. I’m just holding onto it for a moment.
Dark.
Blink.
I snap to with a snort. Suspended upside-down, belted into the passenger seat of our car. A Volvo: those boxy, brooding Swedish conveyances. We’d bought it the same month Duncan was born. Snow is piled up against the windshield; cold granules of sunlight petal through the fissured glass. Gravity pulls my kneecaps down; my feet are stuck some- where below the glove box, hands splayed on the roof upholstery.
“Dan . . . ”
The word exits my throat clad in choking dust. The air hives with crystalline iridescence: powder from the deployed airbags. The Volvo has an embarrassment of them—a number that struck me as farcical in the austere showroom, the dealer eyeing my pregnant stomach with idle concern. The interior is draped with deflated bladders. My lips are caked with alkaline-tasting dust. Blood in the chinks of my teeth. Acid burn high in my sinuses—did I throw up? No: it’s antifreeze. Must’ve flowed over the cracked engine block and collected on the hood before trickling through the vents with a greasy, burnt-animal stink.
Can’t move my neck. Exhale, test my extremities. Try to crank my head left—the wire buzzes with such intensity that it shocks a strangled scream out of me. Something hovers on the periphery of my sightline, inside the car. A new armature that definitely wasn’t bolted on at the factory.
Duncan.
My heart blood stalls. I will myself into silence. The Volvo won’t shut up: a thousand sly ticks and clicks as parts continue to spin, to cool in the winter air. I train my ears towards one critical sound: my son breathing. There. A consumptive snaffling. A Pekinese with a sinus problem.
Try to move my left arm. The pain is mammoth. I reach cross-body with my right to unlock the seat- belt. My fingers are senseless pegs riveted to my palm. I thumb the lock button. Jammed.
The belt is lashed across my lap, cinched harshly across my shoulder. My own bloodbeat hammers at my temples. Dan keeps a Leatherman in the glove box. I try to heel off my sneaker before realizing they’re both gone: must’ve been flung off my feet in the collision. My knee brushes a stereo knob. The cab fills with the insane screech of The Doodlebops; their helium voices turn cat-yowly before cutting off.
With my big toe I pop the latch. The glove box jars open spilling maps and oil change receipts and the Leatherman, which strikes my incisors and floods my mouth with the taste of rust. I retrieve it from the roof, fumble the blade open. Blood pools in my skull; the hydrostatic pressure must be turning my face as red as potted meat. It’s taxing work cutting through the braided nylon belt. The wire buzzes hotly.
The hacked apart strap hisses through the belt’s eyelet. A moment of weightlessness as I complete a graceless backwards somersault. In that frozen frictionless moment my head swivels instinctively, searching for Dan.
The tree limb—a knotty, carbuncled, ashy-looking bastard—is spiked through the windshield; the saf-T-glas is spiderwebbed where it rocketed into the cab. It must’ve pierced the driver’s side airbag—shreds of white ballistic nylon still cling to the bark— and smashed into Dan’s. . . no. Our car smashed into it. The tree had been standing in a copse of its brethren fifty yards off the unplowed corduroy road. My last clear sight before impact was of that same branch projecting at a perfect ninety-degree angle: a straight jab of oak encased in transparent ice. Its end whittled by sun and wind and rain until only the hardest stuff remained. The heartwood, it’s called.
The branch had gone through Dan’s face. His throat projects vertically only to be brutally shorn off by the branch running on its unbending horizontal plane: together they form an inverted, grisly capital ‘T.’ Something about the way his body hangs makes his death an undeniable fact. There are positions that a body naturally settles upon only once the controlling animus has been yanked out of it.
My mind embraces this notion coldly and effortlessly—dismissing it, nearly—as I fall; by the time my skull cracks the dome light, splintering my vision into shards of spidery fire, I’m more-or-less reconciled to the fact that he’s dead.
I land on the stem of my neck. My left side explodes in white-hot fireworks. I hiss air between my teeth and push desperately against the windshield, snapping off the rearview mirror as I worm between the front seats. Duncan’s car seat hangs down, draped on all sides by deflated airbags.
“Okay, baby. Mama’s here.”
Shift onto my back, propped up on my right elbow. Duncan’s locked into the seat by a meshwork of straps. His head is socked between two huge fabric bananas. The day we’d driven home from the hospital his neck kept giving way, unable to support the bulbous weight of his skull; his head had hung at a terrifying cockeyed angle. The next day Dan fixed the bananas in place. Duncan’s jackknifed at the hips—his body has that shocking elasticity exclusive to babies and Balkan contortionists—feet folding down to touch his forehead. Bright arterial blood falls the wrong way out of his nose: bubbling from the cups of his nostrils, winnowing down the slope of his nose to collect in the tear ducts of each eye.
Bracing my right hand on the carry-bar, I stretch my right foot up to pop the release catch. The seat arcs down and strikes the bridge of my nose. I roll it off my chest gently. Duncan’s face is shock-white, the blood fallen out of it. I thumb up one eyelid: pupil dilated, the whites wormed with broken corpuscles. I probe his fingers through his tiny mittens, up each one of his arms. Toes, feet, legs. Loosen the straps so he can breathe freely.
My gaze wanders left. The tree branch split the gap between the seat and headrest. From this vantage I can see that Dan must’ve jerked his head defensively. The branch displaced a good deal of his neck, shoving his head rudely to one side and snapping his spine. As a paramedic for the Niagara General Hospital, I’ve attended accidents like this. The lights of my ambulance are often the first to bathe the scene. I assay each one critically—triage purposes, y’know? Can’t save everyone. You must cradle a brutal stone of pure expedience in your heart.
Snow is piled halfway up the back windows. A slit of paling winter sky. I consider smashing the glass but my sneakers are up front and I don’t want to cut my only source of locomotion to ribbons. The instrumentation panel is lit—the battery’s still working. I thumb the window button; the glass rises with Swedish precision. I inhale pulverizingly cold air. It’s early December and we’ve hit a cold snap.
The snow is that lacy, powdery variety that mints snowballs that fly to pieces when you chuck them. I elbow through the window, frog-marching until my hips clear the frame. Gingerly I unzip my jacket — too goddamn sheer for this weather — and slip a hand under my shirt collar. The wing-shaped bone running from my neck to outer shoulder is snapped amidships. Textbook greenstick. The break-ends shift against one another tectonically, creating that nausea-inducing buzz.
Late afternoon. I chart the car’s path through the snow: where we’d hit a slick patch, fishtailed wildly, then veered sideways and skipped across the snow as merrily as a stone over a frozen lake. I recall Dan’s face the moment before impact: mashing the brake pedal, darting a queasy glance at me as if to say: Sorry babe, have this sorted in a flash. The Volvo had slammed into the tree, impaling itself, the hood accordioning — “Volvos crumple in zones of lesser consequence,” the dealer told us, “keeping the precious cargo intact”—before flipping onto its roof.
I stand in its 200-foot wake. Tufts of brown grass poke through the flattened snowcrust. The landscape unfolds in shades of igneous metal: pewter sky, sun lowering behind banks of steel- edged clouds like a mylar balloon losing air. We’re thirty miles outside Cataract City, my birthplace.
I recover the sideview mirror, shorn off in the crash. My face balloons up in the glass. Objects are closer than they appear. Blood weeps sluggishly from the bridge of my nose. The Leatherman took a deep chip out of my front tooth; the wind flays the newly-exposed nerve endings: an eerie, Novocain breed of coldness.
My socked feet are already numb. I shove the passenger door open against the weight of snow. Re-lace my sneakers, take a peek at Duncan. Keys in the ignition but it’s no use: the overturned car isn’t going anywhere and besides, the ignition spark could set any number of leaking fluids alight.
Dan’s Blackberry rests on the roof below his body. His blood’s cold and tacky already. The phone’s display is cracked in a thousand places; whatever nameless liquid it is that makes up LCD displays seeps through the screen. We’d only brought the one phone. My idea. A sabbatical from the information superhighway. For a parent with a new child—even a fairly clear thinking one, as I fancy myself—the Internet is poison. You can never be a conscientious enough mother. And your child is never fully healthy, or truly safe.
“We’re gonna be okay, Dunk. Gonna be fine.” Grab the keys, leave Duncan inside the cooling car. When I push the button the alarm system makes a birdlike wheep-wheep; the trunk folds down, spilling its contents. The rich stink of gasoline assaults me. Gas pisses from a series of pinprick holes in the trunk—gas line must’ve ruptured. The air shimmers with fumes.
Crawl inside, fetch Duncan, carry him swiftly to a spot thirty yards clear. I set his seat down beside a maple, trying to keep him out of the wind—but it’s coming from all angles in arctic, bone-searching gusts. He looks warm enough in his puffy parka. Dan and I had laughed to see it in the store, hung on an itsy-bitsy coat hanger. A pixie’s snowsuit.
Needing to salvage what I can, I hesitantly return to the car. Gasoline stains the snow. I pull our belongings clear—my collarbone whines but the cold has a sweetly narcotizing effect. Crushed eggs, sodden bread. Clothes saturated with gas. A sleeve of Arrowroots looks okay. A rasher of uncooked bacon. We were planning on spending the night, leaving tomorrow afternoon. Dan’s friend owns the cabin. It’s isolated. Great for ice-fishing or hunting if you’re that sort, which I’m not.
Track round the car in a wide circuit. The tree limb protrudes from the windshield; its end has the look of a blown-apart firework, wood speared at jigsaw angles. I hear it creaking in the wind: the sound of a Spanish galleon rocking with the waves.
Dan is pinned against the driver’s side window, his face haloed in blood. Stubble glitters like mica on his cheeks. Long eyelashes, which he passed on to our son. His coat, much warmer than mine.
I’m not expecting his body to fall when I open the door. Maybe the tree sawed through his seat-belt, I don’t know, but he drops untethered and his head strikes the doorframe with a sound unlike anything I’ve ever heard. His body bows at an impossible, horrifying angle. I reach inside with my good arm, unhook his feet and lay them on the ground. He’s facedown, forehead flush with the padded weather strip. I grip his hips and turn him over, cradling his head. One eye open, one closed. Something rises inside of me, spiky and full of colours...
Duncan’s crying. The sound carries up over the vault of darkening sky. I race towards the maple, unreasonably terrified that something—a hawk, a bear, a pack of flat-faced hillfolk—is menacing him; I see inky talons sunk into his scalp, a massive bird of prey flying off, my son nothing but a thrashing dot in the twilit sky.
His face is a ghastly shade of red. I pick him up, wipe away the blood on his eyelids—it’s partially frozen already—unzip my jacket and unsnap the nursing bra. He’s fussy, rejecting it; my collarbone screeches when I’m forced to use my left arm to steady his skull. I shove his mouth onto my nipple hard, as the lactation consultant advised. A bad latch but he settles. I relish the elemental heat of his body pressed tight to mine.
I burp him, then sit against the tree and offer him the left. The tree is a column of chilled iron; my body’s wracked by painful involuntary shivers. Duncan’s got an insistent suck. I’ve got milk blisters on both nipples. A few weeks ago he’d spat up blood. I’d gawped at it in the receiving blanket. “Jesus, what’s that?” It’s shocking to see blood come out of your child for the first time. Dan ran in from the bathroom. One side of his face smooth, the other silked in shaving foam.
“What happened?” the triage nurse had asked in the ER. I said, “He puked out a blob of blood.” Dan said: “He didn’t puke out anything; he spat up. He spits up every morning. And it wasn’t a blob, it was a dot.”
Turned out it was my own blood: I’d massaged myself so hard trying to clear a clogged duct that I’d burst a vessel. Duncan sucked the blood out with the milk, it clotted in his throat, then he coughed it up. But as we share the same body for hours a day, it was difficult to discern exactly whose blood.
“You can’t overstate things,” Dan said afterwards. “Words like puke and blob, they... they invoke. They’re invocations. Jesus, Claire. You can pin a tracheotomy stent in a toddler’s throat at an accident scene and your hand won’t even shake. But you’re too damn scared to cut your own son’s fingernails.”
You don’t really understand what it means to worry until you’ve had a child. I’m eaten up with anxiety. I habitually assess the colour, quantity, and frequency of his outputs. Is his urine too yellow, his fontanel too sunken? He’s dehydrated. His shit’s not a robust pumpkin-pie shade? Not getting enough hind milk. I suffer dreams where I’ve lost him in familiar surroundings. I get up three times a night just to make sure he’s still breathing. While bathing him I’m torn between making sure his testicles are clean, to prevent infection, and not wanting to crush or somehow disfigure them.
“They’re incredibly hardy organs,” Dan assured me. “Believe me, he’ll inflict more punishment on them as a teenager than you ever will.”
I can’t picture Duncan as a teenager. A colossal gulf of time and diseases, poisonings, mutilations and senseless calamities separate him from that possibility. I worry all... the... time. It’s a pathology. It exists above all explication.
His fucking urine is always too yellow.
While he feeds I focus. Two choices: stay or go. Who uses this road? Ice-fishers. Poachers. The odd skidooer. I could wait for days. So then walk it out... or walk in to the cabin, though I don’t know how far it might be. I figure we’d driven eight or nine kilometres before the accident; we’d cut of Old Stone Road 10. What use is the cabin, really? No phone, likely no food. Plus it could be set off the road; I could walk right past it.
Duncan slips off my nipple. His eyes hang at half-mast: classic milk-coma.
“That good, baby?”
He smiles, lips rising just past his gumline. The sight crushes my heart in the best possible way— this sweet compression in my chest. Put him back in the car seat, slough off my jacket and drape it over him. Shivering, I return to the car.
Frost glitters on Dan’s eyebrows. Unzip his parka, slip it over his shoulders. It’s warm and smells of him: the illicit cigarettes he used to smoke behind the shed, the cologne I bought for his last birthday. Also tree sap and blood. New smells, fiercely intimate.
I unbutton his trousers with shaking hands— not unlike the first time I did so many years ago in his dorm room, a day-glo constellation glowing on the ceiling. They’re far too long; the warmth they’d provide is erased by how clumsy they’d make me. I pull his woolen socks off and double them over my own.
“I’m suh-sorry,” I tell him, teeth chattering. “Duh-don’t know w-whuh-w-what else to do.”
He’d understand, surely. The ambient glow from the instrument panel kicks off. Battery must’ve died. The Baby Bjorn’s in the backseat. Also a high- way emergency kit. I pocket gauze and bandages, the Leatherman, a Maglite, the Arrowroots and two road flares.
It’s difficult pulling Dan back into the Volvo. He slid much easier in the nylon parka. His shirt collar tears; I wrap a bungee cord across his chest and under his arms. It’s exhausting but it’s nearing nightfall and there are wild animals.
His limp body summons a vision: a month after giving birth I stuck my hand down his shorts. He’d come home from a jog, his long limbs sheathed in sweat. My top was hiked up, Duncan latched onto my left tit. I’d spent more hours topless in the last four months than I had the entirety of my adult life. Dan must’ve thought: I spent months angling for that sight and now the mailman’s just as likely to get a lucky peek. When I’d slipped my fingers under his waistband Dan’s expression was one of pained resignation. Duncan’s feeding took on an amplified rhythm: the liquidy suck-suck of a pool filter.
“He’s occupied,” I said, blasé. “Let’s take a Euro attitude.” Dan started to pull my hand away... then just squinted at the ceiling, lips pursed, as though working over a complex physics equation. His cock was a warm, wrinkled, boneless tube. Like petting a dead Shar-Pei. It struck that I’d never felt him that way—he hardened instantaneously, my touch electrifying his blood. I couldn’t recall seeing him unaroused; maybe once in the shower, a wilted bluebell silhouetted through the curtain.
“I’m sorry,” he said eventually. “Claire, he’s he’s... staring at me.” I got pissed and said the predictably accusatory things: I’m a monster to you, etcetera. Dan bore my outburst with a look of mortified acceptance—a look that terrified me out of the fear it might become permanent.
I tuck his heels inside the car and shut the doors. Duncan’s shivering when I return. I tear off the parka and wrap him while I put my jacket back on. I don the Bjorn and tighten the straps. Duncan settles in, face resting comfortably against my chest. I put the parka on and zip it to my throat.
“You okay in thuh-th-there? Cuh-can y-yuh-you breathe?”
The treetops stand in inky columns against the bruised sky. I could wait until morning—but that means passing the night in the car while Dan’s body stiffens with rigor mortis. I hate ferrying bodies to the morgue for the same reason: even locked in their cold steel vaults, you can hear the unmistakable squeaky-creaky, somehow plastic-y sounds of muscles stiffening and constricting. Limbs get wrenched at impure angles; bodies come out of those vaults looking like Chinese snake puzzles. Unsolvable ones.
I pull the zip-strip on a flare, touch it to the pile of sodden clothes. The gasoline ignites with a soft whumph! The warmth is magnificent. Flames play off the Volvo’s manmade angles, beating back the encroaching dark and somehow reminding me that I’m still human. Everything burns so fucking fast. When it goes out I’m rocked with despair as profound as I’ve ever known.
Ten kilometres to the road. What’s the world record for running a 10k? Less than an hour, surely. Yeah, it was set by a mantis-looking distance runner on a flat track, not a thirty-something para- medic on mat leave with a busted collarbone lugging her infant through calf-deep snow on a winter night, but what the hell…
I kiss the tips of my fingers and press it to the window. “None of this was your fault. We’ll be okay. We love you. We’re coming back for you.”
The Maglite throws a jittery coin of brightness on the snowcrust. I backtrack over the accident’s path to the road. The tire tracks are visible but the snow eddies cyclically, obscuring them by degrees. My knees and elbows loosen up, synovial fluid flowing. I think: It’s nice to be out for a walk! Duncan wasn’t always a fan of them: I’d bundle him into the stroller, sock a soother in his yap and a hundred feet from our house he’d kick up a banshee-wail. I’d keep walking, jaw set in a merciless line, muttering: “I will not be kept a prisoner in my own home, you little bastard.”
Duncan is a bastard. Dan and I never wed. Neither of us needed a ring to cement things. Duncan did that, and he was an accident. The result of some afternoon friskiness and a paucity of prophylactics. Afterwards Dan grinned sheepishly and said: “We can’t make that a habit.” Flash-forward a month: I peed on a stick, the plus sign bloomed and I cried in the bathroom for an hour. But we were at the right age, successful enough in our fields.
I’d never seriously considered motherhood. I’d seen friends fall pregnant, watched them bloat up and bitch about constipation and hip aches and swollen feet. I’d stop by a few weeks after the birth and find a radish-eyed zombie who cried at things of no importance, her grubworm-pale spawn battened on like a craven leech. Or I’d cut through the maternity ward at the Niagara Gen and spy wretched post-C-section mothers toe-crawling to the bathroom to pee. The magic of childbirth—sell that shit walking, all ye earth mothers.
Wind rakes across the ground, snapping my pants against my legs. Duncan only weighs thirteen pounds but it’s a live, quicksilver weight; a persistent stone of pain settles between my shoulder blades. His head is pressed to my chest; he’s got good neck control — a key milestone. I breathe downwards to warm him... then pause, wondering: is it wise to flood the parka with carbon dioxide? The moon hangs in the eastern altar, its polar whiteness rung by a gauzy penumbra.
Duncan’s birth was complicated. The umbilical cord was wrapped around his stomach—dog on a leash. His heart rate plummeted. I was ten centimetres dilated when the emergency c-section was ordered. Duncan came out clotted in vernix, as if someone had smeared him in cottage cheese. His head was bracingly conical; he resembled something H.R. Giger might’ve drawn. Jesus, I’d thought, we’ve got a banana-head. He’d been trapped so long in the canal, his skullbones so pliable that his head was temporarily elongated. I didn’t care. My beautiful banana-boy!
When I held him, he inherited nearly all the love my body possessed. Magnetically, without effort or conscious agency. Love previously earmarked for others was surrendered the way electricity can be rerouted to feed a hungrier grid. A sub-cellular reaction. I knew nothing about this boy. The heart of a serial killer may beat inside his chicken chest.
My breath escapes in ragged plumes. I put on a few pounds of brisket during the pregnancy. I’m rounding back into shape — daily walks, weekly hot yoga — but I ain’t there yet. I turn back, searching for the Volvo; yawning darkness stares back at me. The stars are rarely so visible in the city but here, beyond the reach of streetlamps and ambient light pollution, they are distantly austere.
Duncan reaches one plaintive hand up, seeking my mouth for warmth. I suck on his fingers; they taste of sour milk. My right leg breaks through the crust into a pool of icy water. A gassy, swampy stink burbles up. My foot comes up clung with threads of rotty organic filth. I moan around Duncan’s fingers and squint, positive I’m seeing things in the outer dark — shapes moving beyond the glow of the Maglite. Things darting, things slinking. Coyotes out here. My uncle spied a timber wolf on last years’ deer hunt. Were a baby’s cries a clarion call for predators?
Snow scrolls across my feet; my shoelaces are icing over. I sing softly.
I’m bringing home my baby buh-hum-hum-ble-beee
Whuh-won’t my muh-ma-mama buh-be suh-so p-pruh-roud of muh-me;
Oh! Ouch! It stuh-stuh-stung muh-me!
Bladder’s tight with urine. Consider pissing myself for the momentary warmth it’d bring, but that’s the very definition of short-term thinking. Unbutton my pants, slide them down — fearsomely cold wind races up my spine — and squat. My equilibrium fails, the world tilts on a sneaky gyrus and I pitch forward onto my knees. The snow looms in front of my face; my hands sink elbows-deep. I snuffle snow up my nose and realize, with distant horror, that I can barely feel it: I’m nearly as cold inside as out. How’d that happen so fast?
Pick my way over to some trees. Wind’s not so bad here. Hang the Bjorn on a stubby branch, Duncan draped in the parka. The Maglite, tucked into the Bjorn, casts light off his chin: looks like a tiny sideshow oracle.
Pee while my son watches, smiling. Isn’t mommy hilarious? Compressed snow squeaks under my heels. Stay squatted over the hole in the snow — the steam, heatless, is still comforting. Re-strap Duncan. Head back to the road. Tracks ghostly now. Barest hint of a trail. No visible berm to distinguish road from surrounding wilderness. Walk hesitantly now, fishing for tracks. Frantic sweeps of the Maglite.
“Whuh-whuh-we’re fine, muh-m-my buh-baby boy...”
Stupid. A stupid goddamn idea. A cabin getaway with an infant. But it was doctor’s orders. When Duncan was a month old we noticed one of his pupils was bigger than the other. The left almost fully dilated, right a pinhole. Idiotically, we consulted the Internet. Aneurism! Encephalitis! Rampaging brain parasites! I was a shredded bag of nerves by the time we made it to our GP. She ran cursory tests to rule out the worst possibilities but the issue of his sight remained. Was he tracking properly? Was he going blind?
We were booked at the Sick Kids—it usually took months to secure an appointment, so the fact Duncan was seen on a day’s notice was disturbing. Dan and I sat in a small tiled office. Children’s drawings festooned the walls.
Dr. KRaFt, one read. Thank YeW foR mi NEW eyeS. Lov KateY.
“That’s creepy,” Dan said. “Do you think there’s a letter around here that reads: Dr. Kraft, why did you take my eyes and give them to Katey?”
Dr. Kraft was a tall, shaggy specimen; he looked less like a doctor than a man who’d recently descended from the mountains following a protracted cougar hunt. He affixed a steampunk-looking device onto his head: a matrix of penlights, hinged monocles, and magnifying glasses.
“I’ll need to look at a large nerve running from your son’s eye to the base of his brainstem,” he’d said. “To stimulate it I’ll need to use these drops.” He showed us a squeeze-bottle. “The active ingredient is cocaine. You okay with that?”
“My son’s now had more cocaine in his system than his father,” Dan said afterwards. “Our cocaine-eyed, banana-head bastard boy is growing up too fast.”
The drops ballooned Duncan’s pupils. Dr. Kraft aimed a concentrated beam of light into his eyes, inspecting them with lenses of differing magnification.
“I can’t see anything amiss.” The freight train of relief steamrolling through me was derailed when Kraft continued: “But some maladies manifest slowly.”
He suggested we aim for neutral visual stimuli until further tests could be ordered. So: no bright colours or swiftly moving objects. Hence the cabin: a vacant vista of whiteness for miles.
Duncan’s head shines in the moonlight. He coughs: a bronchial rasp. I picture the cilia — the super-fine hairs studding his lungs — freezing and snapping off. A hummy stink rises out of the parka. It’s been hours since his last diaper change. I fumble out the Arrowroots. I’m not remotely hungry: the cold has invaded my chest, shutting down my appetite. Tips of my fingers blistered with frost-bite. I tear at the packet; the goddamn fucking cellophane stretches, stretches, rips down the seam spilling cookies onto the snow. I kneel, fighting a sudden ripcurl of nausea; my foot splits the crust, coming down badly on a buried root.
I sprawl, dropping the Maglite. Hit the ground on your side, a voice inside my head yammers, not on your stomach! Go down cradling Duncan. The busted ends of bone grind in my shoulder. My scream welds with the forest sounds—it could be the screech of a nightbird.
Wind whips snow into my face. I can barely feel it: only the dim pressure of each gritty flake. Rise onto one knee, try to stand. My left leg can’t support me. I suspect the muscle might’ve torn free of the bone; tendons don’t stretch so well when they’re cold. I picture my Achilles tendon wadded up around my ankle like a loose tubesock. Can’t find the flashlight. Ah well. Moonlight lays a path. Crawl. Nearest tree, digging around. Fingers close on a branch. Pull it up, knock the ice off.
Prop myself up with the stick. Continue on. Much slower now. Duncan’s head lolls, eyes closed. How long since last feed? No idea. Darkening then, dark now. Don’t want him swallowing any more blood, ever. When he coughed up blood I’d felt so bad. Failing him in the most elemental way. My job to nourish and . . . not logical. Other ways. Formula. Nursemaid. Logic’s got fuck-all to do with being a mother.
Howling from somewhere. Wolves? No. Inside my head. Comes and goes. Deal with it, Claire. Deal.
Walk . . . fall . . . walk . . .
Snowstorm out of nowhere. Obscuring whiteness. Flakes thick and lovely. Christmas snow. Touching my neck, melting down my back. Hardly feel it. Fuzziness to my thoughts. Skullcase stuffed with cotton batten. Anxiety fleeing. What, me worry? Years ago I’d encountered a strange scene: a long-haul trucker frozen to death in the back of his cooler truck. Got himself locked in the trailer somehow. By the time my ambulance responded he was a brick of flesh. He’d removed every stitch of clothing and crawled into a cardboard box of herring fillets. This was common enough in hypothermia deaths. The skin-surface nerves die, confusing the brain—it registers cold as hot, intolerably hot, which is why victims are often found naked.
They also seek tight enclosed spaces, like boxes or beneath porches; this is called “rooting” or “tunneling” behaviour. Mucous was frozen down the trucker’s lips—it looked like fangs. Snot-fangs. His expression was serene. Blissful Mona Lisa smile. Death a soft veil slipped over his head.
My head tips forward. Resting a moment… smell of Duncan’s head. Best smell on earth. Baby-head. Bottle that smell, make a trillion bucks. Secretary, get me Ron Popeil on the phone! Try to laugh. Can’t. Jaw locked shut. It’s not so cold anymore. Phantom warmth kindles in my stomach, radiating to each limb. Time is a smooth polished rail. Seconds stretch inside my skull, snap off, fall into a dark pool.
Count my steps. Number one . . . number two . . . numba three . . . numb . . . numma four . . .
Having a boy was another worry. Dan was the only male of the species I understood, and him only marginally. My own father was never much more than a pair of scrutinizing eyes over the morning newspaper. At some point Duncan would become a stranger to me. An acned, surly, testosterone-crazed cipher. “The day will come when he’s a stranger to both of us,” Dan assured me. But there’s always something a father can impart. For a mother there was that sheer dissimilarity of existence — a chilling distance settles in, so much different than the bodily closeness we share right now.
Numm ten . . . nuh elben . . . nuh twell . . . tww- wuhh . . . numba . . . nuh . . . nmmm . . .
Freezing to death. The fact jumps straight out at me. No pain. Extremities only disconnected parts — see them moving around me but have no bond to them. Eyelids frozen shut. Suck on my fingers — blisters come off, mouth full of bitter fluid — rub my eyelids until they come unstuck. Nerves dead at the tip, cold peeling them back to the roots. Wooden fingers, wooden face. Turning into a cigar store Indian. But I’m sweating. I’m positive of that. Should shrug the parka off . . . no.
Duncan.
. . .
. . .
. . . numma fizzteen . . . num . . . nnnuh . . .
Sunk knee-deep in snow. Drifts higher now. Snowshoes . . . would be nice. Legs two blunt tusks stabbing the snow. Frozen straight through? See it: marrow crystallized inside the bone. Will they snap off below the knee? You only get one body. Two arms, two legs. Push that body at the world. World pushes back. World wins. Keep pushing anyway.
Put yourself somewhere warm, Claire. Mexico two years ago. White sand beach. Cabana chair under a blue parasol. Some shithead toting a de-clawed baby tiger on a bejeweled leash — Ten bucks ladee, one Polaroid, good deal, you like? Poor tiger yowling and spitting; the shithead slapping it around, laughing, Happy tiger lubs to hab picture taken wiz you, pretty ladee . . .
Hit a barrier. Snow piled head-high. White wall of it. Jesus Christ. Peer down at Duncan. Alive still? Please. Yes. Breathing shallow. Condensation from our breath has frozen zipper shut. Can’t zip parka any higher. Fingers frozen anyway. Black at the tips. Remind me of licorice pipes . . .
. . .
. . . digging now. Hands and knees. Make a little hidey-hole. Hands wrist-deep, digging happily. A nice place to rest. Dig a hole, lie down and sleep for a while . . .
NO!
Standing now. Squint at the wall of snow. Half-buried something . . . a cup? McDonald’s cup. Big yellow straw. Slawjawed, processing . . . a man-made snow wall. Cup tossed out the window of a speeding car, shoveled clear by the snowplow.
Drag self up the pile. Monumental effort. Feet keep breaking through. Cradle Duncan’s head so . . . sorry, baby. Mommy’s so sorry. Straddle the pile, slide down. Feet jar on pavement. Spikewave of pain . . . wha? No pain. Only pressure.
Pale legs of light spider-crawl over the horizon. Road’s deserted. Peek at Duncan. Tips of his ears and lips blistered with frost. Please. They can do amazing things baby . . . plastics and polymers and grafts and resins and—
In my pocket: The flare. The Leatherman.
First year on the job. Attend a scene at the Dove-wood Arms. Rattiest rat-trap in the scuzziest blocks of Cataract City. Man and woman get into an argument. Guy grabs a knife. Woman takes thirty-odd wounds — all defensive. Stomach, back of hands, buttocks, between the ribs. Arrive just after the police. Blood everywhere. Woman’s curled up on the floor. Still clutching her baby. Held on the whole time. Died a few minutes later. Our blood is the last part of us to cool. Skin first, organs next. Our blood our final vestige of heat.
Weird facts you pick up at paramedic school.
Bite down on the flare. Red phosphorous bubbles down my hand—burns probably second-degree but I can’t feel them. Takes a long time to pull out the Leatherman’s blade. Fingernails tear painlessly from nail beds. Slip the blade under the parka. Only the barest pressure as the tip dimples the skin. Won’t feel a thing. Letting a little warmth out, is all . . .
Staring down at that poor stabbed woman, I couldn’t conceive. How could you . . . ? And think nothing about your own safety? But it’s not such a big leap. Ask yourself: what would you give? Everything. Don’t even think about it. You just give everything. I wasn’t like this before you, Duncan. My love was equalized. And I love everything about you. The sour milkballs that collect in your neck. The way you look at me in the morning — I thought you’d left me forever! This isn’t even me anymore. I am no longer a real person, exactly. I am simply the coldest manifestation of evolutionary theory.
Leatherman slips from my hand. Parka heavy— heavy-warm. Wrap my arms around my waist tightly. Hold that warmth in. Kneel beside the road. Sky’s a bit lighter now . . .
. . . lights? Bright dots hovering in the dawn. Ghost lights? They say the Ghost lights are the last ones you see before you die. Beautiful, ethereal white . . .
Invoke them then, Claire. Speak the words. Make them truth.
The lights of an approaching car. If the driver sees the flare, if he stops, if he has a phone . . . the sky is clear. Visibility good. The Air Ambulance could lift off the helipad at the Niagara Gen and be here in minutes if —
If, if, if . . . invoke it then. Make it so. The driver will see the flare. Will stop, will call. Helicopter will come.
Lights swelling. Coalescing into twins. The lovely tick of a diesel engine. Close my eyes. Blackness constricts my throat — a nugget of pure dark matter in my gorge . . . I see it then. A simple scene, as the most pleasing often are. I’m following a man through the woods. Sun streams onto the canopy of knit branches; my bare arms are tinted chlorophyll-green. The man walks with the cheerful clumsiness of a puppy dog: stepping carelessly, wholly invested in forward motion. The smell of wood sap and somewhere, very distant, the hollow drill-note of a woodpecker. I follow the man cautiously, a hand reaching out to check his reckless momentum— but I pull back, because my only task is to follow. The man turns over his shoulder. Vestiges of Dan, of myself, in that face. He smiles and points with his chin. I know where we’re going. Follow me. The simplest thing. All I want in this world. My foot collides with something on my next step and I’m pitched forward, a cold knot blooming in my stomach, falling, swooning . . .
. . . Fall backwards, Claire. Please for Christ’s sake don’t, don’t you fall forward. »