I’m stuck.
I climb out of the truck, and after several attempts at packing down the snow in front of each tire, then trying to accelerate slowly out of the deep snow, but listening to the tires just spin in place, I realize the entire truck is high-centered, resting atop the packed snow.
Without a winch or a tow truck, I’m fully fucked.
I kill the engine and the headlights fall dark. I check my cell phone, but there’s not even a blip of a signal, no way to call Ben, or that little tow truck company I passed back in town. I’m too deep into the wilderness now. I’m on my own. I grab the backpack on the seat beside me, filled with mostly convenience store snacks, a flashlight, and a notebook for jotting down the things I will relay to the family or police later. I cinch the pack closed, slip the small silver book-charm into my pocket, along with the truck keys, and step out into the snow.
I will follow Maggie on foot.
And in some strange way, walking away from this shitty old truck feels like the full demise of my life. Rock bottom.
I have nothing more to lose.
* * *
Tree limbs sag overhead like carcasses of the dead. But the snow has stopped falling and the clouds have separated enough to see the quarter moon. Space Donut Hole, my sister Ruth called it when we were little. She’d pretend to reach up into the sky and pluck it down with her grubby, lollipop-sticky fingertips, then pantomime taking a big bite out of it while rolling her eyes in exaggerated delight. My little sister loved to make me laugh.
This is the memory of Ruth I prefer.
Not the one that came later.
When I found her crumpled in the corner of a shitty motel room outside Duluth, Minnesota, right along the shore of Lake Superior. She’d been missing for a month when I finally decided to go look for her. A whole wasted month. But she’d gone missing before—chasing bad boyfriends and dead-end jobs serving drinks at dusty, cigarette-clouded bars. She’d call every few months, promise that she was fine, then slip off the map again. The last time I saw her before she vanished, she looked strung out, on more than just booze, and I was worried about her. A ticking in my ears that wouldn’t go away, telling me that something wasn’t right this time—that she was worse than usual.
I don’t know where things went wrong for my sister. She’d always been tough, thick-skinned and thick-skulled, even as a kid. And after our parents died only a few months apart—colon cancer, then lung cancer—she decided everything was fucked anyway. She was only twenty when they passed away, and my sister became a don’t-piss-her-off-or-she’ll-pop-you-right-in-the-face kind of girl. It’s also what I loved about her. Her sturdiness—she was built to last. Her I-can-take-care-of-myself attitude. But it also made it difficult for her to ask for help, to admit when she needed her big brother.
I tracked her afterimage for a week and a half, using a broken seashell I found in the box of her belongings she’d asked to keep at my apartment months earlier. When I dug through the cardboard box, looking for something of hers to use, I recognized the shell from a trip we took to Pacific City, Oregon, when I was twelve and she was seven. She’d held on to it after all those years—tucked away in that box. A piece of our childhood. Broken, just like she was.
I had the shell clutched in my hand when I tracked her to that motel room and pushed open the door, left ajar. It was four in the morning, and when I saw her, I stood stock-still in that doorway. I knew the slack look on her face, the drooped shoulders, the strange half-closed eyelids. I’d seen the look before.
I knew my sister was gone.
I crossed the room and knelt beside her and held her in my arms like she was seven years old again. Like when we were kids and she’d wake from a nightmare and crawl into my bed. I wept, too, an awful heaving of my rib cage, like some brittle place inside me was trying to crack open. It was the cold, hard realization that I’d found her too late. My parents were long buried in the ground, and now my only sister was dead too. I was painfully, sickeningly alone.
The police said she died sometime in the night, in the early hours before I found her. The front desk clerk at the motel said Ruth checked in around ten in the evening. Another guest, whose right jawline twitched when she spoke and her eyes were unable to focus on anything for longer than a few seconds, said she saw no one enter or leave Ruth’s room.
This wasn’t a homicide; her death was exactly what it looked like: suicide.
The empty bottle of prescription pills beside the sink told the story that her toxicology report would verify—overdose. Oxycodone, to be exact, with a dash of muscle relaxers. And she hadn’t taken just four or five, she’d taken roughly twenty. Enough to finish the job.
The detective on the scene suggested that it might have been an accident. Maybe she didn’t mean to take as many as she did. She didn’t intend to end her life.