A lump rose in the back of my throat. With shaking hands, I pulled my boots and bright red parka over my flannel pajamas, grabbed my cell phone off the kitchen table, and stepped outside. The wind lulled for a brief second as I pulled the door closed behind me, and it slammed shut, rattling the door frame and the windows.
I looked toward his car, angled in front of Mrs. Merkowitz’s yard, wondering if he’d been camping out in her abandoned home. I closed my eyes and focused. I turned in the opposite direction and walked down the center of the road, where the melting slush rippled with the wind. I followed the current down the street, to the edge of the block, toward the lake.
I paused at the intersection, knowing exactly which way to go, but wondering how to do it. I took out my phone and dialed.
“911, what is your emergency?” It was a different voice from when Carson died. A male, bored and muffled. Like his head was down on the desk.
“Please send help to Falcon Lake.”
“What is the emer—” I snapped the phone shut and walked to the crest of the hill. I stood on the top, looking down at the edge of the lake. Someone had painted a handmade sign, red lettering on brown wood. DANGER—THIN ICE, it read. And a man stood beside it, gloved hand resting on the top of the sign, staring at the rising sun across the vast expanse of ice.
“What are you doing, Troy?”
He turned to face me and his mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear him over the roaring wind. So I sidestepped down the embankment and stood on the other side of the warning sign and stuffed my hands deep inside the pockets of my coat.
“Why are you out here?”
“I was just thinking about you. About why you didn’t die. I’m trying to understand.”
“I’ll tell you all about it, just come back with me. We need to get back.”
“We? You’re back to we, now? And here I thought you spent the night on the couch with your neighbor.” He sneered, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. He had been out there. I was right to fear. But I didn’t have the time.
“Come with me,” I said.
“Do you want to help me, Delaney?”
“Yes.”
“Help me understand.”
I squinted against the glare on the lake and pointed toward the center. “I fell out there. I couldn’t find the surface. And then Carson got a rope and—”
“Show me,” he said.
“Show you?”
“Yes, out there.” He pointed to the sign. “It’s not thin anymore. You know that, right?” I did. We’d be skating across the lake now if I hadn’t fallen through. The sign was a lie. The ice wasn’t thin this time of year, but nobody would risk it now. After all, how many miracles could one lake grant?
I looked up the hill, wondering if anyone could see us. If the help I called would find us. I couldn’t see the road or the homes beyond. We were in a pit. Fitting. This was, after all, my hell. This pit around the lake. The lake that had taken so much. My friendship with Decker. My humanity. Quite nearly my life. And I was so angry with it. I wasn’t scared anymore. I was furious.
And Troy, who never gave me enough time to make a decision on my own, gripped my arm and pulled me with him onto the ice.
Troy moved like Decker across the ice, with sure-footed confidence. The surface was slick from the melting snow. It was uncharacteristically warm for January. Still cold, just not as cold as usual. For a moment I was panicked that the ice would melt, but then I remembered how it took a while for the water temperature to catch up to the air. It’s why the lake was still painfully cold in June, and why the water took longer to freeze than the air in the autumn.
I heard a splash with each step, experienced a small moment of panic before I felt the ice beneath my feet. I couldn’t even look down to check. The sun hit the ice at a slanted angle and refracted through the thin layer of water pooling on top, distorting the image.
I bumped into Troy’s back. “Here?” he asked. We were in the middle of the lake, the point of no return, the farthest spot from land. I looked to the far shore and remembered that day, seeing Decker reach Carson on shore, knowing I was slightly closer to them.
“A little more,” I said, feeling more secure once we were nearer land. I shaded my eyes with one hand and squinted toward the far shore and the McGovern home beyond. “Right around here,” I said. Then I looked down, trying to see into the depths. Into hell. I thought I could see movement under the ice, a current, water lapping against the surface.
I stepped back. “It’s too thin.”
Troy gripped my shoulder. “It’s fine. It’ll hold as long as you don’t fall again.” This was a terrible idea. This ice was too new. It had shattered when I fell in, and it hadn’t had time to re-form solidly. I looked back toward our starting point, toward home, and tried to gently dislodge myself from Troy.
“Tell me what happened here,” he said.
“I was going too fast,” I said. “And I fell. Nothing happened for a minute, but I didn’t move. I didn’t try to get up. And then everything just fell apart underneath me.”
“I hear drowning is very peaceful.”
I looked away, back toward the shore, wondering when help would arrive. Wondering if they already came and left. Wondering if they thought it was a prank call and wouldn’t ever come. Drowning was not peaceful. I was terrified. I was frozen. I was useless. But I kept that to myself. I didn’t want to talk to Troy about dying anymore.
“But you didn’t die,” he said. “So what happened?”
“Like I was saying, Carson got a rope. Decker came in after me.”
“So, you would’ve died without Decker. This”—he released my shoulder and gestured toward my body—“was an accident. A mistake.”
“I guess.” Miracle, anomaly, fluke. Nobody had called my life a mistake before.
“So,” he said slowly, thinking while he spoke, “if it hadn’t been for Decker, you’d be dead.”
“I don’t know,” I said. Maybe someone else would’ve saved me. Unlikely, but possible.
He peered at the sunrise again, squinting against the light.
“Troy, come back with me. Please.”
“Funny how it looks like the sun is rising right now, isn’t it? When really, we’re the ones who are moving.”
“Troy—”
“It doesn’t feel like we’re moving at all, though.”
“I need to ask you something.”
He kept looking at the sunrise, then took a deep breath and shook his head. He turned to face me. “Ask and ye shall receive,” he said, and he grinned.
I cleared my throat and said, “If you had one day left to live, what would you do?”
“I’m not playing your stupid game, Delaney.” He brushed the air away between us.
“It’s not a game.” Then I pulled my hands out of my pockets, held them out in front of me, and showed him. My twitching fingers, the only physical release for the itching that had spread from my brain down my arms.
Troy’s mouth fell open, and then the corners of his lips quirked upward, just for a second. “Yeah, I kind of figured.”
“I think . . . I think it’s always been you who was dying,” I said. Because I remembered the feeling, like vertigo, like falling, like nothing else mattered but him, like tunnel vision of the other senses.
He pointed to his head. “The headaches. Probably something left over from the accident. A hemorrhage or a slow bleed or something.” He said it all so matter-of-factly. “But I didn’t know if it was real. If I’d finally be allowed to die, you know?”
If he knew what was wrong with him, maybe there was still time. Maybe help would get here in time. Hoping against hope, I whispered, “Maybe there’s still a chance.”
And suddenly he gripped the side of my arm. The wind howled, and I could barely hear him, but I thought he said, “I think I’m supposed to take you back with me.”
“What?”
He nodded once to himself. “I’m supposed to put you out of your misery.”
“I’m not miserable. I’m alive.”
“You’re a mess. On the inside. You’re dying. You reek of it.” I shook my head and tried to wrench my arm away from him. “You’re sick,” he said.
“I’m getting better.”