After his confession about the Spikes, they had spent two days discussing the inherent dangers of the trip. The difficult passage. “It won’t be easy,” Cal had said, feeling a sting of fear. “There might be rough bodies of water to cross and animals that come out at night. Who knows.”
Frida had made up her mind. She told him it would be fine, that they just needed to get to the Spikes. Cal thought she was being na?ve. “August must have had good reason to warn us to stay away,” he’d said. She argued he was being a wimp. No one would get hurt; Cal’s suggestion that she tie a pillow to her chest as a bulletproof vest was absurd, and she told him so.
“The worst that’ll happen,” she said, “is that they’ll send us away.”
Cal had said nothing as he tucked their pistol into the backpack.
That morning three days ago, Frida had left a rag hanging over the solar torch by the door, a signal that she’d gone to do some chores. Laundry, probably. But so early? He’d been a little relieved she was gone, actually. He felt exhausted by her, all her anger and questions. And yet, when he’d first turned over in bed and found her side of the mattress empty, it scared him. As far as he was concerned, Frida was the only person left in the world. He wasn’t being poetic; it was a fact. And she might be carrying their child. She would become a mother. He couldn’t lose her.
Cal had gone so far away from his own mom. That was the thought that rattled him until Frida returned. All he could think about was how distant he was from everything: from Ohio, from his dead parents, his boyhood. He wasn’t even thirty, and already everything from his past was unreachable, not just Cleveland, but Plank, too, and L.A. The California he used to know. Sometimes Frida was so busy missing her own family she forgot Cal had lost one, too. At least her parents were still alive somewhere.
One of the last times he’d talked to his mother, she wanted him to come home for Christmas. “I’ll show you the new short I’ve been working on,” she said. Cal had been noncommittal, asked if she’d used actors, as planned, or something weird like Popsicle sticks. She was easy to distract if handed the right questions.
It was his second year at Plank, and he hadn’t been back home since the day he’d left over a year before. He would have to fly, and the rising gas prices meant his father would have to sell his car to afford the ticket. More and more people were giving up driving altogether, and though Cal’s father would still have the diesel truck, he’d have no backup. It was too risky. Cal was afraid, too, that his return flight would be canceled (that had become common lately), and he’d be stranded in Ohio. He could not stand the thought of missing his last semester at Plank.
When he talked to his mom again, it was really cold there. She said it was unrelenting, that ice was spiderwebbing across every window of the house, that there was so much snow she had a hard time opening the front door. She couldn’t afford to pay the heating bill, even with the money his dad had lent her. Cal’s parents had never been married, had never even been in love, and Cal’s mother didn’t like to lean on his father for a thing. Not that there was any more money to give her.
Every time Cal tried to call after that, the line was dead. How many times had he tried? Not enough. Plank didn’t get the news right away. It wasn’t until some other kid’s parents learned about the storms, and thought to call the school in case any students had family in Ohio, that Cal knew for sure. The delay had almost been a blessing; he’d been spared the truth for as long as possible. Not that he hadn’t worried. The week before the news arrived, he hadn’t been able to get in touch with either of his parents, and he didn’t know if they were okay, if they were alive, if Cleveland even existed anymore.
He should have asked to get off campus, to go online to find out, but he didn’t.
When he learned that his mother was dead, he’d walked down the steps of the farmhouse, past all the boys with their books, past the cluster of Adirondack chairs that gave you splinters if you weren’t careful, past the rusted tractor and the sleeping sheepdogs, and into the fields, deeper and deeper. He fell down in the mud, and he stayed there until he was too cold to move. Micah had come to retrieve him. “Come on, friend,” he’d said, and pulled him off the ground. He wouldn’t let Cal go until they were inside.
Cal’s mother had probably frozen to death in the house he had grown up in. Even now, he imagined her wrapped in the old green-and-white afghan, shivering in her big sleigh bed, in her big bedroom that had once belonged to her parents.
He’d insisted on staying on at Plank. He went to class, he wrote his papers, and when the holidays came around he stayed on campus by himself. He celebrated New Year’s Day in the stable with the horses, and he never talked about what had happened until Frida arrived for commencement. It’d been easy to tell her.