Winter Study (22 page)

She had won; she would make it.

Straps
followed the pack toward the bottom of the lake, tugging down her arms,
pinioning her elbows to her side, prying the end of her sleeve from its
tenuous marriage with the ice, her hand from where it battered
ineffectually at the buckle of her hip belt. Water closed over her. The
narrow margin of sky receded as she sank. She forced her eyes wide to
keep the light in them. Cold burned her sclera like acid.

Kicking with more force than she’d believed she had in her, she moved upward. Half a foot, a foot, the light grew stronger.

The
Sorel boots filled with water. Her feet moved as if through freezing
mud. Then she couldn’t move them at all. Wriggling eel-like, she tried
to struggle out of the bondage of the shoulder straps, but her coat had
swelled with water, the fabric stuck to the webbing. Desperately she
pummeled at the release on her hip. Anna fought till her last gasp of
air put the last of its oxygen into her blood and her lungs began to
push against her rib cage, shoving the panic of their need through her
bones and into her heart.

The
hip belt released, and she used the last of her air to kick for the
surface. Then she stopped. Fell back and down and back. The drag on her
hips gone, but the pack still holding her fast to her upper arms,
pulling her headfirst toward the bottom of the lake.

The light grew watery and faint. Anna watched as her feet floated up past her eyes.

The
cold that had hammered into her face and neck soaked through the layers
of clothing. At first, it seared her flesh, then it didn’t. Icy fingers
crept up her legs, down the neck of her parka. Her feet were gone to it
already, she couldn’t feel them.

One
arm came free of the confining straps, the hand with the bloated
mitten. Anna watched it as it drifted out from her body. Above it, the
irregular half-moon shape of light was no bigger than the palm of her
hand.

Oddly
detached, she watched it shrink to the size of a half-dollar. A gentle
bump stopped her fall. She rested on the bottom of the lake, the moon
of light feeble in the liquid sky. Quiet surrounded her. Her breathing
stopped, her heart starved and pounded throughout her body, a frenetic
drumbeat in a deaf world. The water was so clear she could see gravel
on the lake bed, a vestige of weeds as unmoving as if sculpted in stone.

Dropping arrow straight from the world above was a single line, inked black against the gray of the water. At its end, a

D

was
written in crushed script. The foothold trap on the line of kinkless
chain. She had wanted to trap a wolf with it, wanted to stroke its
living fur and feel its breath.

Cruel to want that,

she thought. To frighten such a grand creature that she might be close to it.

Water
was clearer than air; she could see each individual link in the chain
she had carried so far. She marveled that an entity as fierce as the
lake could be so completely still; not a ripple showed its power yet it
had swallowed Anna as neatly as a trout swallowing a fly. The lake had
slipped away into silence. And the water was so clear, soon, Anna
believed, soon she would be able to breathe it.

The
trap was an ugly thing, a reminder of the metal rampage humanity with
its mines and forges and industry had loosed on the world. Anna didn’t
want it to be in her eyes when she drew the lake into her lungs and
took her first breath in this new world. As she mustered the energy to
turn her head away, the foothold trap leapt; a quick jerk upward, then
fell again, the way an angler’s bait pretended life to lure greedy fish.

Anna wondered if she was a fish yet.

The
line jerked again. Lazily she reached for it, wanting to make it be
still, make it part of the lake with her. Her fingers fumbled. The trap
swayed away. Slowly it drifted back. She threaded her hand and wrist
through it and pulled, a tiny pull, maybe not a pull at all.

The
crescent of light dimmed. Her brain was shutting down. The pounding
from her heart eased to a soft rush, waves breaking lazily against
sandy beaches. Bands of pressure within her lungs pressed outward,
attempting to break through to the air.

When she was asleep, she would breathe in the lake.

Ophelia.

HOOKS
CAUGHT IN HER MERMAID MOUTH, cutting the flesh and trying to drag her
from the sea. Anna tossed her head from side to side. Fishes chewed at
her face; she felt the ripping but not the pain. A hammerhead shark
rammed into her chest and the air blasted out of her.

And in again.

“Annnhhh. Annnh.”

Breath out and in and vomiting, her lungs caught fire, her throat burned with charred flesh.

“Annh. Annnh.”

Hot lead spewed from her scalding her tongue, blistering her lips.

“Annhh. Anhhh.”

The
noise maddened her, and she knew she was crying as she descended to
hell in fire and ice. Her eyes would not open, as in dreams of
blindness they had been sewn shut. Screaming, she forced her lids wide.

She
was out. She was on her side, one arm stretched over her head. Her
right eyeball was so close to the ice, she could see crystals moving by
in fits and starts. The endless embrace of the lake was being scraped
off. A machine gun battered through her head. Her teeth were chattering.

“Annnh.”

Anna had not made that sound. Fish did not speak. Fish got fried over hot coals. She was looking forward to that.

“I’ve
landed four-hundred-pound marlin that were easier to reel in than you.”
This was grunted. Anna had been caught by a bear. Too bad. Bears ate
their fish raw.

“Are you alive?” The bear pawed at her and she was rolled onto her back.

“Hey, Bob,” she said when she saw his red, sweating face.

“Are we going to have to get naked in a sleeping bag together?” he asked.

“Throw me back in,” Anna croaked.

13

Bob was a hero.

When
Anna had gone under, trap and line snaking after her, he’d stomped on
his end of the chain to stop it. For a nanosecond, he waited to see if
she would resurface.

“Nanosecond”
was Bob’s assessment of the time. Anna was fairly sure it had been at
least five minutes, never mind that she could only hold her breath for
two, and that was under ideal conditions.

The
ice was paper thin, Bob told Robin and Katherine, and he’d tugged on
the chain so Anna would be able to see it, then pulled her from the
lake bottom.

Anna
was sufficiently grateful to have been saved from a watery grave that,
for a while, she forgot it was Bob who’d put her there. She chose not
to remind him of this because he had raised not only her from the dead
with nothing but brute strength and determination but her pack as well,
trailing behind her by a single shoulder strap.

She
remembered nothing of their return to the cabin but knew without a
doubt she would have died if Bob had not taken quick action. He’d cut
her free of the backpack, stripped her wet coat from her, wrapped her
in his own parka and carried her back to Malone Bay.

Clad
in dry clothes and propped on the bottom bunk in a sleeping bag, a
fourth cup of hot Ovaltine in front of her — the first she’d been able
to hold all by herself — Anna listened as Bob again told Robin and
Katherine how he’d run the two miles.

“Flat out,” he said. “I knew she was going to die.”

Anna
doubted he’d managed to sprint the whole way, but he had covered the
ground rapidly. And he was right: she was going to die and now she
wasn’t.

“You saved my life, Bob,” she said. “Remind me to buy you a beer sometime.”

He
grinned hugely, tucking his chin back into his neck. Anna’s words had
been meant to sound grateful and they did. She was. There was no
arguing with the feats of strength he had performed. The man was
powerful and she was grateful to him. Grateful. For some reason, she
had to keep reminding herself of this, and felt small and mean because
of it.

Bob
Menechinn mystified her. One moment, he was a coward shaking in his
boots, a streak of yellow down his back so bright it shone through his
thermal undershirt. The next, he was carrying a damsel in distress
miles through a storm to safety. Anna had long known that everyone has
a panic button. Those who are considered brave are simply people lucky
enough to wander through life without theirs getting punched. She’d
known men who would scale precipitous cliffs, only to fall apart when a
water snake slithered into the tent; women who marshaled the combined
forces of Boy Scouts and church camps but would faint at the sight of
their own blood.

As
near as she could figure, Bob had two Achilles’ heels: he was terrified
of wild beasts who were better armed than he and women who knew he was
terrified. Watching him bask in glory, Anna wondered if that was why he
loved hunting — killing them before they killed him — if that was why
he kept Katherine under his thumb.

Fear
made some people brave and some dangerous. Bob was in the latter
category. Because he was strong, he’d not been afraid he couldn’t carry
Anna a couple of miles. He’d also known fishing her out with trap and
line would not put him in any danger. And there was no risk of failure.
Either he’d succeed or the witness to his humiliation would be dead.

Anna
took a sip of the oversweet Ovaltine. The drink was hot, the cabin so
warm the others had stripped down to trousers and T-shirts. Anna was
packed in goose down and surrounded by plastic bottles filled with
water heated on the stove, yet the core of her was still on the bottom
of Intermediate Lake.

“I
was looking for tracks up in the rocks when I heard that ice crack,”
Bob embellished his tale. “I was on that ice like a man shot out of a
cannon. What a noise! I didn’t think anything but a Remington could
crack like that. Anna was trapped, yelling, ‘Bob, Bob,’ and the ice was
so thin I couldn’t get to her. Man,” he said and shook his head.

“God, I’m sorry,” Robin said to Anna.

“Not your fault,” Anna told her.