The Divide

Table of Contents

 

 

 

“This beautifully written novel includes everything a reader could want. . . . The characters truly come to life, and the reader gets to know them as intimately as friends and family.
The Divide
will keep you up late reading just one more page.”—
The Sunday Oklahoman

 

“Compellingly readable.”—
The Times
(London)

 

“[Evans] reminds us that the destruction of all that’s familiar—whether by human hands or by nature—eventually ceases to be the story. What remains is how people survive.”

—
The Washington Post

 

“While Evans reveres his backdrop, he ultimately is more interested in getting the reader to go inward than outside. In Evans’s hands, that’s a journey worth taking.”

—
USA Today

 

“When the frozen body of a young woman is discovered in a remote creek in the Rocky Mountains, the heartrending story of a family in crisis begins to unfold. Reaching back in time, members of the seemingly perfect Cooper family present their version of the events, emotions, and twists of fate that forever altered the benign course of their collective lives. Sure to be a runaway success, this lyrical novel runs the gamut from devastation to despair to deliverance.”—
Booklist

 

“[Evans] handles male and female characters, kids, parents, and grandparents with equal confidence. And the scenes portraying marriage breakup and its fallout are unsettling and convincing.”—
The Sunday Times
(London)

 

“[Evans] gracefully transports us to the golden, sun-warmed open spaces of Montana as well as its cold, unforgiving mountain ranges.”

—
The Edmonton Journal
(Alberta)

 

“A compelling novel.”—
The Vancouver Province

 

“Both tragic and redemptive. As with Evans’s other novels, the landscape figures as prominently as the characters. . . . This is an engaging story that Evans’s fans will want to read.”—
Library Journal

ALSO BY NICHOLAS EVANS

SIGNET
Published by New American Library, a division of
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,
Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2,
Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124,
Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)
Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,
New Delhi - 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany,
Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue,
Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

 

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

Published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin
Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a G. P. Putnam’s Sons edition.

 

First Signet Printing, February 2007

Copyright © Nicholas Evans, 2005

All rights reserved

 

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

 

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

eISBN : 978-1-101-04364-6

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am greatly indebted to the following for their kindness, patience, and help with my research: Charles Fisher, Glenys Carl, Blaine Young, Bruce Geiss, Alexandra Eldridge, Buck & Mary Brannaman, Daisy Montfort, Andrew Martyn-Smith, Jill Morrison, Dennis Wilson, Sarah Pohl, Barbara Theroux, Doug Hawes-Davis, Dan Pletscher, Tom Roy, Elizabeth Powers, Sara Walsh, Jake Kreilick, Jeff Zealley, Gary Dale, Roger Seewald, Rick Branzell, Sandi Mendelson, Deborah Jensen, Sonia Rapaport, Richard Baron, Pat Tucker & Bruce Weide, Fred & Mary Davis, and George Anderson.

Many thanks also, for support of several crucial kinds, to Ronni Berger, Aimee Taub, Ivan Held, Rachael Harvey, Elizabeth Davies, Gordon Stevens, Larry Finlay, Caradoc King, Sally Gaminara, Carole Baron, and Charlotte Evans.

—CALVIN SASHONE,
Creative Mythology

T
hey rose before dawn and stepped out beneath a moonless sky aswarm with stars. Their breath made clouds of the chill air and their boots crunched on the congealed gravel of the motel parking lot. The old station wagon was the only car there, its roof and hood veneered with a dim refracting frost. The boy fixed their skis to the roof while his father stowed their packs, then walked around to remove the newspaper pinned by the wipers to the windshield. It was stiff with ice and crackled in his hands as he balled it. Before they climbed into the car they lingered a moment, just stood there listening to the silence and gazing west at the mountains silhouetted by stars.

The little town had yet to wake and they drove quietly north along Main Street, past the courthouse and the gas station and the old movie theater, through pale pools of light cast by the streetlamps, the car’s reflection gilding the darkened windows of the stores. And the sole witness to their leaving was a grizzled dog who stood watch at the edge of town, its head lowered, its eyes ghost-green in the headlights.

It was the last day of March and a vestige of plowed snow lay gray along the highway’s edge. Heading west across the plains the previous afternoon, there had been a first whisper of green among the bleached grass. Before sunset they had strolled out from the motel along a dirt road and heard a meadowlark whistling as if winter had gone for good. But beyond the rolling ranch land, the Rocky Mountain Front, a wall of ancient limestone a hundred miles long, was still encrusted with white and the boy’s father said they would surely still find good spring snow.

A mile north of town they branched left from the highway on a road that ran twenty more with barely a bend toward the Front. They saw mule deer and coyote and just as the road turned to gravel a great pale-winged owl swerved from the cottonwoods and glided low ahead of them as if piloting the beam of their lights. And all the while the mountain wall loomed larger, a shadowed, prescient blue, until it seemed to open itself and they found themselves traveling a twisting corridor where a creek of snowmelt tumbled through stands of bare aspen and willow with cliffs of pine and rock the color of bone rearing a thousand feet on either side.

The road was steeper now and when it became treacherous with hard-packed snow the boy’s father stopped so they could fit the chains. The air when they got out of the car was icy and windless and loud with the rush of the creek. They spread the chains on the snow in front of the rear wheels and his father climbed back into the driver’s seat and inched the car forward until the boy called for him to stop. While his father knelt to fasten the chains, the boy stamped his feet and blew on his hands to warm them.

“Look,” he said.

His father stood and did so, brushing the snow from his hands. Framed in the V of the valley walls, though far beyond, the peak of a vast snow-covered mountain had just been set ablaze by the first reach of the sun. Even as they watched, the shadow of night began to drain from its slopes below a deepening band of pink and gold and white.

They parked the car at the trailhead and they could see from the untracked snow that no one else had been there. They sat together beneath the tailgate and put on their boots. The owner of the motel had made sandwiches for them and they ate one apiece and drank steaming sweet coffee and watched the shadows around them slowly fill with light. The first few miles would be steep so they fitted skins to their skis to give them grip. The boy’s father checked the bindings and that their avalanche transceivers were working and when he was satisfied that all was in order they shouldered their packs and stepped into their skis.