Friday, 7:40 a.m.
Room 314, Oxbow Memorial. A warming blanket hummed over him like a small refrigerator, a clip on his finger sent its number to a screen, and I had been watching the number for nineteen hours. The doctor had said the scan was clean, and that he couldn't say what a brain does after four minutes without air until the brain said so. They had sewn my lip at four in the afternoon, seven stitches, upper left. I'd told the resident a window.
His hands lay outside the blanket, palms down, the way he leaves them on a horse's back before he lifts a foot: the nails cracked, hoof-black still under them after three nurses and a basin of soap. Osric had come at three with a duffel of my clothes, seven left socks and a jar of pickles and Callum's other boots, and the boots stood under the window, laced, because he steps out of them without bending.
At 7:40 the number went up two points, and his hand moved on the sheet.
His eyelids flickered. His mouth worked once on nothing, and his eyes came open and went to the ceiling and then to me.
They knew me. It took a second.
"Hanne," he said, in a voice that was a scrape but was his, and then, "Did you eat something?"
I laughed, and bent forward until my forehead was on the rail of the bed, and stayed there.
"A granola bar. Dagny had one in her truck."
"That's not eating."
"It's what there was."
"Liar." His hand found my hair. It shook. "What did they do to your mouth?"
"A window."
"Left side." He looked at it, and the scar pulled at the corner of his own mouth. "Well. Now we match."
* Rae Solberg came at half past eight with a legal pad, looking as if she had slept in her car, and asked him, before he had properly finished waking, whether he wished to support a complaint against his wife.
"No," Callum said, before she was done asking. "I refused the hospital, Ms. Solberg. That was mine. Write it down."
She wrote for longer than no takes.
Then she took me to the family room, a couch and a box of tissues and a child's drawing of a house taped to the wall, and I gave her both doses in order: the times I'd written down, the half tablet, the milliliters in the cocoa, the lie I'd told her in my own yard. It took fifty minutes. My lip pulled at every hard consonant. Osric sat with his elbows on his knees and said nothing at all, which I had not known he could do.
"Nobody saw the second dose but you," Solberg said at the end. "You could have left it out."
"Then I'd be carrying two doses and telling one. I carry enough."
"Get a lawyer, Dr. Sorley," she said at the door, and then stopped with her hand on it. "I counted your pentobarbital in your yard yesterday morning. It was the most honest drug box I've counted in six years."
Osric didn't get up until she'd gone. "Tiede's got your horses fed," he said. "He says a farm with no animals on it is only a rumor."
* Dagny was asleep in two waiting-room chairs pushed face to face when I went back along the corridor, her boots on the seat of the second, one hand curled round an empty paper cup. I took off the canvas coat Osric had brought me, which smelled of the mudroom, of boots and horse blanket and cold, and put it over her and tucked the collar up under her chin. She didn't wake.
He was sitting up when I came in, with a cup of ice in his hands and the window full of sun. On the tray table sat the zip bag the emergency room had put his things in: a wallet dried stiff, a watch stopped at two minutes past noon, his wedding ring.
"Sit," he said.
I sat. The chair was still warm from me.
"I was drinking," he said, and I waited while he found the rest. "That night. She asked me for the keys at the cabin. She held her hand out, and I said I was fine, and she said, 'Cal, it's saying no,' meaning the ice, meaning me, I never knew which. They drew my blood at ten past three and it came back under the limit, three hours and eighteen minutes after. I worked it back that week on the back of the citation, with a pencil. I knew what it had been. I let the number say what it said." A chip of ice clicked against the plastic. "She had her hand on the glass. I never told Dag that. Flat on the glass, and the handle wouldn't turn."
I didn't look away. It was the one thing I had to give him, and he watched me give it.
"I'm not the one to be shocked," I said. "A voice told me the man in my bed wasn't you, and I believed it inside an hour, because it gave me something to test. I tested everything, Cal."
"You tested everything but me."
"You never gave me anything to ask about."
His mouth went thin. "No," he said. "I didn't." He set the cup down on the tray. "I went to ask him about her. The one time in twenty-five years I asked anybody anything, and I picked the one man in the world I was afraid to ask." He almost laughed. "I'd have done better asking you."
After a while he said, to the blanket, "I'm not going to say it's all right."
"I don't want you to."
"It isn't. Not today." His hand lay on the sheet. "But it isn't never." He turned it over. "What did you get me back with?"
"Breath, mostly. The foal mask."
"Upside down?"
"Upside down."
Then he reached over to the tray and opened the bag and took the ring out and put it on. The knuckle was swollen from the lake, and he had to work it over a quarter turn at a time, and he wouldn't let me help. When it was down he left the hand on the blanket, where I could see it.
Dagny stood in the doorway in yesterday's canvas jacket, her eyes red, looking as if she'd leave if we asked.
"Get in here, Dag," Callum said.
She came in and gripped the rail at the foot of the bed. "There's another card coming. March. I'll bring it myself."
"Kettle Lake," Callum said. He was looking at me, not at her. "The eleventh. Will you come?"
"Yes," I said.
* The sheriff had sent two counts against me to the district attorney in July, and they sat in her office in Marten Falls marked pending. The board had suspended my licence the week I reported myself, and the sign on the clinic door said OSRIC QUIST, DVM, alone. Osric told me in August, on my porch, where he had been that Tuesday night: in the Lindahls' calving pen with a breech heifer, Bob and both boys holding the light. The Northline letter had been a buyout at full value, which he had been trying, badly, to get me. I let him say all of it.
* The jail rang on the ninth of January, at a quarter to seven in the morning, while I was in the barn soaking Pilot's pellets in the dark.
It was a nurse from the medical wing, a tired woman at the end of a night. Mr. Tessier had died a little after four, in his sleep, they thought. He had asked them to ring me, and to tell me one thing, and she read it to me off a piece of paper so she'd get it right. She lies down once she trusts the barn. Don't take it personally till then.
I thanked her. I said it in my clinic voice, which was the only one I had to hand, and she said she was sorry for my loss as if it were one, and rang off.
I put the phone in my coat and set the bucket in the stall, under the brass plate I had unscrewed from his barn door in the fall and screwed to mine, and sat down in the shavings in the corner, with my back against the boards, and Pilot put her nose in the bucket and pushed it round to get at the last of it, as she does.
I had not cried in the ambulance, or in Room 314, or in Rae Solberg's family room with the child's drawing on the wall. I cried then, in the dark, for a man who had stood in that aisle with his cap against his chest and asked me for a stall. I had liked him. I'd liked him with my whole back turned to him, and he had counted on it, and I still couldn't make the liking go anywhere. It sat in me like a stone in a hoof.
The barn door rolled. Callum came down the aisle in his barn coat over his pajamas, with two mugs and the flashlight, and saw my face in its beam and turned it off.
"Is it him?"
"A little after four. In his sleep."
He came into the stall and let himself down into the shavings beside me, slowly, favoring the shoulder, and put a mug in my hands. Neither of us said anything. The mare ate.
"I liked him, Cal," I said. "That's the worst of it. I stood right there and nearly told him everything."
"I did tell him everything." He held his mug in both hands and looked at the mare over it. "Twenty-five years of it. At his kitchen table, with the coffee going cold. He listened like nobody ever listened to me in my life." He was quiet a moment. "I'd go back and do it again. I don't know what that makes me."
"It makes two of us."
He put his arm round me, the mug and all, and I leaned into the coat, which smelled of hoof and cold and him.
Pilot lifted her head out of the empty bucket. She stood a moment, looking at the two of us sitting in her shavings as if we'd been delivered there by mistake. Then she folded her front legs, and let her great weight down after them with a groan like a barn door, and lay beside us in the shavings with her legs tucked under her and her nose an inch from my boot, and blew out a long breath, and shut her eyes.
She had never once lain down for me.
We left the farm at seven on the eleventh of March and drove three and a half hours north, and he said perhaps forty words, most of them about the road. I didn't ask for more. There is a silence that shuts a door and one that leaves it open a hand's width, as ours does at night.
The ice at Kettle Lake was twenty-two inches thick, and I didn't believe it. The bait shop had a hand-lettered sign on the door, ICE 22 INCHES — CLEAR, and I bought a spud bar anyway, five feet of steel chisel with a point on it.
Dagny's maroon pickup was already at the public access, with a Port Ashby dealer frame, and she got down and stood with her hands in her jacket and her eyes on her brother.
"You look like hell, Cal."
"I've been told."
I went out in front of the two of them and tested every fifty yards. You lift the bar and let it fall, and you look at the hole it makes, and you listen. My father said good ice gives back a flat dull thump and rotten ice rings, like a spoon in a cup of tea, and I don't trust a sound on its own any more than he did. I checked every hole. At two hundred yards the lake boomed, a great low note that came up through my boots and ran off under the whole white field like a hay wagon crossing a plank bridge, and I stopped with the bar in my fist.
"It's cracking because it's cold," Dagny said behind me. "It isn't cracking because it's going."
"I know."
"You've tested it eleven times."
"Twelve," I said, and lifted the bar and dropped it, and it thumped.
She shifted the old gas auger to her other shoulder and fell in on my left, a step behind, where I could hear her boots.
Callum came last, with his hands in his coat and his head down. I looked back once. The town sat on its hill, a grain elevator, a water tower, and at the top a low brick building with a flight of stone steps and a line of letters over the door. KETTLE COUNTY COURTHOUSE. It read the right way round. Below it, where the town road ran down to the landing, the old ice road had gone out onto the lake every winter of his life, and a man in a dark coat had once stood on it for thirty-six hours and never sat down. I didn't look at it long.
"Here," Dagny said.
She stopped where the orange stakes ended, and lined up a dead pine and a gray cabin on the north shore with her arm out. I didn't ask how she knew.
"The channel's under us," she said. "Last to freeze, first to go."
I put the bar down and it thumped, and I didn't test it again.
Callum was looking at the ice between his boots. It was clear here, black and green, with white lace of bubbles frozen into it at every depth, and it went down farther than I could see.
Dagny took a white envelope out of her jacket. The same kind, soft at the corners, Cal in the looped, forward-leaning hand.
"I didn't want to mail it," she said.
He took his glove off and opened the envelope with his thumb. One sheet, folded once. He read it in no time at all and held it out so I could see.
Twenty-six. And under it a dash and the letter D.
"There," Dagny said. Her voice cracked and she went on through it. "I've said it to your face."
She lit a cigarette then. It took three tries, and the smoke went up straight in the still air, a thin gray line, and Callum watched it go. He put his arm around her shoulders, auger and all, and pulled her against his side. She stood there stiff as a post. Then she didn't.
I moved off a few yards and looked at the pine.
The mill whistle went at noon, thin and long over the water from town, and for the length of it nobody on the ice moved. The whistle ran down. The lake boomed once, far off, and settled, and held.
"Wren," Callum said.
He said it out loud, flat and plain, the way you'd try a board before you put your weight on it. Then he said, "Wren Tessier," and took his cap off and stood bareheaded in the wind with the card in his other hand.
* We were home by ten. He drove every mile of it with both hands on the wheel.
I went down to the barn with the flashlight while he let the cat in. Pilot was lying down in the end stall, which she does now, and she didn't get up for me. She put her nose out and blew into my palm, warm and grassy, and her pupils in the flashlight were small and brown and ordinary.
I stepped out of my barn boots on the mat, next to his. The kitchen was dark except for the light over the sink, where he stood, and he touched the pale thread on my upper lip with one finger, and then his own. The twelfth card lay open on the counter by the toaster and the Post-it. I put it in the drawer under the wall phone with the other eleven and shut it.
He went up ahead of me, slow, one hand on the rail. I didn't take the wall side. I went up after him down the middle of every tread, where the gray paint is worn pale, and the fourth knocked like a hoof on a trailer floor, and the ninth let out its long wooden groan, the house's opinion.
At the top he turned round and waited for me.