I ran back into the bedroom where I had first found Mama, where Jenna had been sleeping so soundly when I left her in the trailer. I closed my eyes and hummed, but Jenna went right on shrieking. She shrieked while Carletta banged on the back door, and she was still shrieking after the banging stopped.
I was alone in the trailer with Jenna and after a time I looked out the window and saw Carletta wander off into the woods. It was still my instinct to chase after her. Despite everything that had just happened, part of me wanted to try and rescue her again—but I could not leave Jenna and focused on her instead.
I unbuttoned the top of her pajamas and she shrieked louder when my cold hands hit her skin. I fed her a knuckle and she chomped down hard and suckled as I searched her body for wounds. I didn’t feel any tears or bleeding but I was not foolish enough to take much comfort in that fact. I knew full well something might have happened inside, though I did not allow myself to dwell too long on what that might have been.
“Baby girl,” I said, and stroked her hair.
She worked my knuckle and I wished I had the bottle to offer. I wished I had one more scoop of formula, but that was gone now and there was only the blanket and the papoose and the two of us together in the dark room.
I buttoned her pajamas back up and felt the fever like a flame on her back. I needed to try and cool her down and carried her back to the porch, where I took a scoop of snow from the rail and brought it back inside.
I hated to do it, especially now that there were some stretches of breath between her screams, but I broke the snow up anyway. I put some to her lips and packed the rest to her forehead and stood there and held her through the howling.
I held her until the snow had melted and streaked her face in cold streams and then I dried my hands on my jeans and wiped the water away. I held her close and hard and after a time she finally stilled herself in my arms.
I smiled as I walked her back into the room, but there was no glint of recognition from Jenna. The fever was in her eyes now and she looked back at me without seeing anything at all.
I set her on the carpet and lay down beside her. I hummed a lullaby, though it was more for myself than Jenna. Jenna was already on her way back to sleep.
I knew I should stay awake to keep watch, to monitor the fever, but I turned in to Jenna and closed my eyes anyway. I held close to her and whispered that everything was going to be fine, though I doubted that it would be. I felt myself drop toward sleep and didn’t have the strength to fight it. I was drained of every reserve I had. I was pure empty.
Chapter Sixteen
The drive to the farmhouse was freezing without the windshield, but Shelton could not be bothered by such momentary discomforts, such trivialities. Shelton had just been through a metaphysical experience and for the first time since Jenna went missing he knew exactly what it was he was supposed to do.
Shelton had seen Old Bo’s spirit in the woods and it was no coincidence that he had collided with the buck only moments later. What had happened was this: Old Bo had somehow entered the buck, had somehow become the buck as it charged the Silverado. Then Shelton had struck the deer, in effect Old Bo, and killed his best friend all over again.
Shelton knew because he had felt Old Bo’s presence as he stood above the buck and watched it writhe in the bloodied snow. He saw Bo’s soul itself inside the animal’s darting, fear-crazed eye, and when he raised the shotgun to end the gruesome labor of the death he knew that everything that had happened since Bo’s passing was not bad luck or unrelated folly.
Jenna’s disappearance, his near-catastrophic pursuit of Little Hector, and now the dead buck: all of it stemmed from that one terrible, cowardly betrayal of his faithful companion. Shelton had left his dog to rot like some piece of forgotten meat and that single act would taint everything black until it was put right. What Shelton needed to do now, what he had needed to do all along, was return to the farmhouse and deal with the corpse of his beloved friend.
There was a thump beneath the Silverado’s hood as he drove, a rattling in the vents, but everything considered, the truck had come through the collision in fine shape. It had been a good-size buck, an eight-point and heavy for this late in the winter, and Shelton knew he was lucky the truck was running at all.
He crossed Jackson Lake for the farmhouse and remembered the day he’d come home from prison. He’d been nervous about seeing Old Bo, was afraid his best friend, and maybe his only real friend in the world, would begrudge him his absence.