I am in the shadow of the pine tree, on my hands and knees, and I stop all movement. I hold my breath to listen. It might be a motion sensor. It has to be. Then I notice that the lights of the cabin are off. Total darkness on the other side of the glass. Those lights were on this morning. I remember.
I hear the glass sliding door open. Although the light blinds me from seeing who is on the deck, I know that I am not alone. A small figure steps into the light, a woman. Her arms are stretched out in front of her as though she might be holding a gun.
I shake my head. “For fuck’s sake,” I mutter. “What next?”
“Mikhail?” Ana calls out.
“No, not Mikhail. Max.”
CHAPTER 43
I close my eyes and wait for the sound of the gunshot. I don’t move. I’m not sure if I am even able to move.
With my head down, I don’t see Ana’s ghostly silhouette slip out of the light. I don’t hear the movement as she slides the deck door shut. The next thing I hear is the basement door opening. I raise my head to see her standing at the door.
“What are you waiting for?” she asked. “Come in.”
I climb to my feet once more and stumble toward her. Ana is wearing the same clothes I’d left her in, except now she is wearing a pair of men’s galoshes and has a blanket draped around her shoulders.
“What were you doing out there?” she asks. “You scared me to death. I thought it was Mikhail coming back.”
I can’t talk. I feel like my body is starting to shut down. I’m not sure what I would say if I could speak. I can’t tell her the truth. Finally I manage to say. “Mikhail’s gone.” I won’t explain what that means. For all she knows, Mikhail made it into Canada and is on his way to some other country with no extradition treaty with the US.
Ana leads me up a staircase and to the main room of the cabin. She guides my shoulders until I am sitting on a large sofa. She kneels at my feet and tugs at the frozen laces of my boots. I want to shoo her away, but I know that my fingers would never be able to grip something as small as a shoelace. My feet scream to life as she slides the boots off. Then she gently peels my socks off of my swollen feet. She lifts each foot to inspect it. Then she reaches up and unbuckles both my snow pants and my jeans.
“Take off your clothes,” she orders before walking to the kitchen. I can see her putting water into a kettle as I start stripping down. She reaches into a cupboard and pulls out a fistful of tea bags, opening the kettle and dropping them all in. Then she retrieves a spice jar and adds several spoons full of something red to the concoction.
I wriggle out of my coat and shirt. I have to lay down to get out of my snow pants. They are so stiff they can stand on their own. My jeans are also wet, and cold, but not frozen. When I am in my underwear, I begin to shake violently. I fall onto the couch, and Ana is at my side again, tucking a thick, down comforter around me. My shivering tugs at my shoulders and back. My jaw rattles and the muscles in my neck cramp up.
Ana climbs under the comforter and wraps her arms around my chest. She lays her head against my cheek and twines her legs around mine. She stays there until the shivering stops. Neither of us say a word. When my breathing returns to normal, she looks up at me and smiles.
The whistle on the kettle shrieks to life, and she slips off the couch. She pours the boiling mixture into a large pot, the kind that can hold a dozen roasting ears or more, and adds tap water, sticking her finger in occasionally to test the temperature. When she seems satisfied, she carries the bowl to the couch, laying it on the floor.
“Sit up,” she says.
I do, and she lifts my feet into the bowl. The warm water hurts and I clench my teeth to bear it. I ask, “What is this?”
“It is tea and cayenne pepper. It will shrink the swelling and help with the healing.”
The chemicals in the water swirl around my toes, and I start to feel sensation—painful at first, but sensation nonetheless. She folds the comforter around my chest, making sure that no part of my skin is exposed to the air other than my ankles and my face. I lean my head back and close my eyes.
I can hear her moving around the kitchen again, opening cupboard doors and shuffling things around, all in a muffled attempt to be quiet, probably for my benefit. I must have fallen asleep briefly, because the next thing I know, she’s nudging me awake. She has a bowl of soup in her one hand and a glass of water in the other.
“You need to eat,” she says.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
“Shhhh.”
I drink almost the entire glass of water and put the remainder on a small table beside me. I place the soup bowl on my lap and lift the first spoonful to my lips. Chicken-noodle soup. The salty, hot liquid rolls down my throat like some miraculous elixir, healing the burn and bringing life back to parts of my body that had shriveled to dust over those many hours on the lake. As I eat, Ana lifts my feet from the warm bath she had created, drying each with a towel.
She has a tube of something and squeezes a dollop of the lotion onto her hands, rubbing her palms together. Then she starts massaging the lotion onto my feet, paying particular attention to my toes.
“What is that?” I ask.
“Aloe. You have blisters from frostbite.”
Her touch is soft and comforting. A warm bliss inches up my legs and into my chest. She wraps my feet in gauze and strips of a cotton T-shirt. When she is finished with the bandages, I thank her, hand her the soup bowl, and lay back on the couch. I wait for her to come back. I expect that she will want to know what happened to Mikhail. I close my eyes to think of something to say, and I promptly fall asleep.
I awaken in a heavy darkness splintered by spikes of moonlight riffling through the naked shoots of the birch outside, the rays tipping the walls and furniture into crooked angles. I rise onto my elbows to look around and am reminded that I am in Mikhail Vetrov’s cabin. Everything comes rushing back to me.
I wonder if there had been a dream that jolted me awake, some night terror that sent me scurrying back to consciousness before the pain became too much to bear. Had I been visited by Jenni, or the wolves? Or had some new memory, a vestige of my day on the ice and my unspeakable deed, come in the night to haunt me? I touch my temple and feel no sweat. No heart palpitations. No remnant of a nightmare. This time, I had simply awakened for no reason, good or bad.