I passed the tiny ultrasound photo hanging on the refrigerator, edges crinkled and deep lines where Tav had folded it tightly into his wallet.
What did it mean that he’d kept it?
I remembered the moment he’d found out I was expecting over a video call late one night. I’d wanted to wait to tell him in person, but I'd been so overwhelmed with a mix of emotion and worry he’d noticed something was off. Soon I was breaking down as I confessed my secret. Tav was in his car within minutes, driving the five hours to wrap me in his arms. He rubbed my back while I fell asleep that night, and made sure he cleared his schedule for my prenatal appointments.
I only had three, but he attended each of them like the dad I prayed he would be.
I know the baby isn’t mine.
His words from my dream still rang loudly in my ears. I fingered the shape of the tiny black and white form on the glossy paper, thinking I would take this with me when I left the chalet as a reminder that each step I took was a step towards truth. I didn’t know what I might find on the other side of the door, but I would walk headfirst into the fire anyway.
The way Tav spoiled me into complacency in the months since the miscarriage was tempting, his generous gifts and attentive devotions were always intoxicating, but his availability to me only on long weekends and over video chat grew exhausting. Loneliness had been the driving force when I accepted Bradley’s phone call that first day he was back in town. His friendship mattered more to me than I realized, and it was him I thought I would call first if I wasn’t able to find Tav. I imagined hiking out to civilization and getting cell phone reception for the first time—would Tav answer my call? Did he even still have his phone?
The quest for answers drove me into the night, gathering items and rearranging them in my rucksack to make everything fit.
By the time I was falling asleep on the couch, I figured I’d be able to fit two weeks of provisions in my bag. I’d found two new ski poles that would serve as safety tools to help me test the ice and avoid any deep crevices, and they would double as my only weapons.
Despite searching every closet in this house, the rifle that’d been here once was gone.
That meant that I had to make sure I had an alternative fit for any occasion. I could kill a charging wolf or a threatening stranger with a well-aimed ski pole to the throat. I hoped I wouldn’t have to, but I could if needed.
I held the small polaroid in the light, yawning as I thought back on the series of Sundays that’d rocked my life over the decades. The times when Chuck and my mother fought so loudly and so late into the night that I hid under the mattress with a pillow over my ears. I often woke up Sunday mornings to his boots at the edge of the bed, grin on his face as he pulled me out and wrapped me in a hug. He always smelled like mom those Sunday mornings, and I hated him for knowing her so well. I hated her more for letting him into our lives like she did, even though his presence only brought chaos.
IhatedSundays.
I planned on changing that.
This Sunday I would leave the chalet and take back my life.
This Sunday would be the start of something new.
Twenty-Four
The car is gone.
I stood at a large snowbank, snowshoes strapped to my feet, and the place where Tav and I had left the car before hiking into the chalet was empty. I struggled to remember what Tav had said:the car is covered by a snowdrift.
My eyes searched the embankments, heavy evergreen boughs sweeping the snowy forest floor as I tried to estimate how much the snow may have piled up since I’d been on the mountain.
I’d been at the chalet for fifteen days.
How much snow had accumulated since Tav left? And how much had been blown around in the blustery winds that circled this peak?
I stabbed my ski pole into the snow, testing my next few steps as I walked to where I vaguely remembered Tav parking the car. I didn’t think the snow was so deep that I wouldn’t notice if I was standing on top of my own car, but the only other explanation was the bridge, which still looked closed down from my view of it in the cloudy distance. One entire ice-ridden suspension cable hung down into the depths of the frigid waters that lapped at the base of the mountain.
Driving over Deception Gorge at night was a trip in terror, but during the day it was far more terrifying. The frothy white waves licked the base of the rocks where the steel of the bridge anchored to the slippery granite. Everything about Deception Gorge was clouded with mist and treachery. If one bad ice storm could knock out the only means of civilization, why would anyone live on this mountain?
And then I realized the isolation was a perk for a certain sort of people—the kind that had secrets to keep.
I stabbed my pole into the snowbank at the far southern edge of the clearing. I remembered the sheer cliff that dropped down to the water just a few yards around the bend that’d taken me by surprise as we climbed the switchbacks up the mountain weeks ago.
I shivered, wishing again that I would have just begged Tav to find the nearest seedy roadside motel for the night. The chalet was layered with luxury and had become my own house of horrors.
I turned then, heading back out of the clearing the way I’d come. I wound my way through the trees, following my snowshoe tracks the few miles up the trail that ended at the chalet. I wondered if the man that’d delivered my box of rations had taken this same trail, or if there was another that led more directly to his cabin.
By the time I’d crested the small ridge, my thoughts had fallen on a late night call Tav and I had had one night while he was in the city.
With my eyes falling closed, he’d told me a horrifying bedtime story of his parents fighting when he was young. “Time, money, women, parenting, you name it, they fought over it,”he’d said.
