X spoke a few more words, and then Ripper pulled him into a sorrowful hug.
Behind them, Zoe’s mother continued to search for Jonah’s body. They joined her without speaking, picking miserably through the rubble. Every minute that passed without finding him was torture. Zoe’s mother moaned in an almost animal way. Once again, X tried to block out the sound. He listened for something, anything else. He heard grouse flapping around a shattered stump. He heard deer politely crunching through the snow.
And then, listening harder, listening deeper, he heard a sort of rustling beneath the ruins. It was so soft that Zoe’s mother had not noticed it.
The noise was coming from belowground—from where the basement used to be.
X staggered toward the sound.
Ripper followed. She heard it now, too.
Finally, Zoe’s mother turned, as well. In her daze, she’d picked up a twisted hanger and a shattered skateboard. She seemed not to know why she was holding them.
She dropped them and waded through the wreckage to what was left of the basement stairs. They were blocked with crumbling plaster, mangled kitchen chairs, a ruined floor lamp, and a hundred other fragments of the Bissells’ lives.
She and X and Ripper hurled everything to the side. They cleared a path down. They were in the middle of what used to be the basement—it was just a concrete pit now, open to the sky—when they found the source of the noise.
It was coming from the empty old freezer that lay on the floor.
They watched as the lid creaked open. They watched as three trembling beings emerged in exactly this order: two black dogs and the pale little boy who had saved them.
twenty-three
Zoe emerged from the woods and hiked the twisting ribbon of road back toward the beach. She was so numb she didn’t feel the cold. She was so shell-shocked she couldn’t think, beyond wishing—as she had since she was younger than Jonah even—that the cold months weren’t always so snowy and so long. After Bert had gotten senile and absolutely everything seemed to tick him off, he’d liked to say that winter just didn’t know when to shut up.
She passed the spot where the truck had been parked on the shoulder of the road. It was gone now, the only evidence of its existence two muddy ruts in the snow. The truck must have been her father’s. As she walked, she said a silent prayer that she’d never see him again. She remembered what Banger had said to her at the hot springs: “You can’t do what I did to my family and expect them to forgive you … Best thing would be if they decided I was just a bad dream.”
Jonah and their mother deserved to heal.
So did she.
When Zoe got to the beach, she stood awhile and stared down at the row of huts on their stilts: yellow, red, blue. The tide was out, which gave the beach a desolate look. The birds were gone, too. They’d pulled the plastic bags out of the red hut, down the white ladder, and onto the rocks, where they’d torn them apart and feasted on the remains of Zoe and X’s breakfast: French toast, onion rings, chocolate cake.
A raw wind curled in from the ocean. Zoe zipped her coat up to her throat, and headed down to the water in the dark, her feet click-clacking over the loose bed of stones. She rounded up the garbage at the base of the hut. It was gross and cold and scattered everywhere. The plastic bags had filled with air and sailed down the beach. She managed to catch one and stuff it into a pocket. The second one floated out over the water before she could get to it. She didn’t feel like walking into the surf, even in her boots. She watched it go.
It was strange climbing up to the red hut again. It was just a tiny, rickety box, but it felt like her and X’s home somehow. She knew that was stupid. Still, he had brought her breakfast here—breakfast in bed, kind of. And she’d kissed him as he slept. Just ducking into the hut now made her crazy with longing. And there was a surprise, because X’s presence—his magic, or whatever it was—hadn’t yet faded. The place was still warm.
Zoe sat in the hut with her back to the wall. She listened for footsteps on the rocks. She waited. Once, X had told her that he tried not to turn his memories of her over and over in his head because he was afraid they’d fray and fade if he did—and then he couldn’t keep them forever. It was excruciating not to think of him, but she tried. She focused all her energy on listening. In the end, it wasn’t much different from thinking of X because what she was listening for was him. The warmth in the room was like his breath somehow. It made her feel loved. It made her certain that he’d return from her house with Ripper, even if it was only to say good-bye.
Sleep took her by surprise, and she had an intense dream about watching X bathe in the stream.
She woke up an hour later to the sound of barking.
The hut was deathly cold.
All evidence of X was gone. Zoe tried to remember her dream—she grabbed at its receding tendrils—and held it close for a second before letting it go.