“It’s a slow night. It’ll get louder soon. What do you mean—you expected something different? You’ve walked here before, haven’t you?”
“It’s a bit of a rough area for a woman to walk alone, Jerry.”
“Good thing you’re no longer alone,” he said, tucking her hand through his arm and filling her chest with butterflies. “You warm enough?”
“It’s a little chilly,” she admitted, so he paused to layer his coat over her shoulders, and in its fibres she smelled a spicy hint of cologne along with a whisper of oil from the car. When his hand bumped hers, she reachedout and took it, and her thumb gently stroked a callus on his thumb. The way he smiled after that warmed her even more than his coat did.
“It’s amazing to me that we both grew up along this river, but never met,” she mused. “Didn’t you say you used to play hockey out in Petite Côte?” She was surprised to see him stiffen, but he didn’t stop walking. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s not important. An old wound,” he said, his voice thick.
“I know a thing or two about wounds,” she said gently. “Bandages help, but they need air to heal.”
He stopped walking and let out a long breath. “I suppose you’re right. And if you’re going to put up with me, I guess you’ll need to know stories like this one. I’m warning you, though, it’s not a happy story.”
He dropped her hand and turned toward the river, his face partially lit by the yellow of a lantern hanging nearby. She waited while he took a package of cigarettes from his trouser pocket, and when he offered her one, she took it. She hadn’t smoked in a while, but this seemed as good a time as any. He lit them both then shook out the match.
“I told you Ernie and I had a long history. It all started on this river. You see, I’ve known him all my life. John and I used to play hockey with him and his older brother.” He paused, breathing in his cigarette. He sank his other hand into his front trouser pocket. “Frank.”
Adele stilled, the smoke curling from her cigarette as she remembered what Ernie had said about his brother. He’d said he’d drowned.
“Frank and John were the same age. They were the loud ones. The leaders. Everyone wanted to be around them, including Ernie and me. We were the younger brothers, and we were like ducklings, following them wherever they went. The winter of ’05, the four of us were out on the ice nearly every day, passing the puck around. Come March, we were still playing, but we shouldn’t have been, and we all knew it. The ice was making noise. It was going to bust through any day. But it was spring, you know? After a long, cold winter, it’s irresistible. We wore sweaters instead of coats. We didn’t need hats. We were young. We were stupid.”
Jerry stamped his heel absently on the ground as if to warm his foot, but it wasn’t that cold. A sense of foreboding came over Adele.
“I didn’t hear the ice break, actually, or the splash. John had just scored, and he and I were yelling about it, but Frank had dropped his stick and was racing toward this gaping hole in the ice.”
“Ernie had fallen in?” He hadn’t mentioned that to Adele.
Jerry nodded. “We both kept yelling at Frank to lie down.” He waved his hand, and the little orange circle at the end of his cigarette cut through the night. “My father always told us that if the ice broke, we needed to distribute our weight, and the best way to do that was on our stomachs. But Frank wasn’t listening.” He sighed. “Just as he got close to Ernie, the ice gave way beneath him, and he went under, too. John and I dropped down right away and crawled toward the two of them. They were splashing and screaming so loud, it’s surprising no one heard us. Anyway, we knew having both of us on the thinner ice at the same time was too much of a risk, so we made a chain of sorts. I was smaller than John, so I crawled in front of him, holding out my stick. John hung on to my ankles so he could pull me back.” He took a long drag of his cigarette, and a faraway look came into his eyes. “The ice was so thin.”
Instead of a man, Adele pictured a scared little boy. Instead of the gentle lapping of the river beside them now, a crackling, broken river of ice.
Jerry cleared his throat. “When we got close, we saw that Frank had a grip on the edge of the ice, but Ernie was flailing around in a panic. He wasn’t a strong swimmer, and Frank shouted at us to help him first. So we did. I held out my hockey stick, but Ernie was splashing too much to grab on. John and I kept telling him to calm down and grab the stick. He finally did, and we hauled him out of the hole, over to the safety of the shore. We left him there so we could go get Frank.
“By then, the ice was in real rough shape. It took us a long time to inch back to Frank. Too long.” He paused, shaking his head. “I can still see him. He kept on fighting, but he was getting weaker and weaker everysecond. When we finally reached the edge of the hole, Frank was gone. We screamed his name, peered through the ice for a glimpse of him, but we couldn’t find him. I swear I almost dove into that hole after him, but John held me back. We heard the ice start to crack again, and he pulled me out of there right away.”
Jerry took a ragged breath. When he lifted his cigarette to his lips, it was shaking. “I’ll never forget Ernie’s face when we returned to the shore without Frank. His lips were blue, and he was shaking with cold, but I could tell. None of that mattered. It was his heart that hurt most of all.”
Adele felt a fresh wave of sympathy for Ernie, hearing Jerry describe the forlorn boy waiting by the shore. Waiting for a brother who would never return.
“Is that how Ernie lost his fingers?” she asked. “From frostbite?”
“No, that happened a little while later. Ernie’s mother took Frank’s death hard; not long after the accident, she had a heart attack and died. His father had always been a drunk with a short temper, but Frank had protected Ernie from the brunt of it. Without Frank around to step in front, Ernie suffered the full weight of his father’s rage. He blamed everything on Ernie. One day, when he was well beyond drunk, he saw Ernie cutting firewood and he snapped. He went after Ernie, forced his hand onto the block, and severed three of his fingers.”
“Oh, God.” Adele’s hand flew to her mouth.
Jerry grimaced. “He told Ernie that since he had failed to use those fingers to save his brother, he had no use for them anyway.”
Tears blurred Adele’s vision. “The poor boy,” she said quietly. “It wasn’t his fault.”
“No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t anyone’s fault,” Jerry agreed. “But Ernie was never the same after that. He became hard, merciless. He took it out on everyone around him, and he’s still doing it. Ever since then, he’s blamed John and me for what happened to Frank, and to his hand. He never misses an opportunity to pick at that wound. So what you sawthat day, with me and him… it’s more than business between us. I wish it wasn’t.”
“I see,” she replied.
It explained so much, she thought sadly. Going all the way back to their first date, when Ernie had told her in passing about his brother, and the family he never had. She thought about the party, how everything had been glittering and extravagant—his way of ensuring his guests loved him, she supposed. Then how he’d turned, bullying them when they didn’t listen, beating Sammy nearly to death for some sort of slight Adele didn’t know. Oh, it all explained so much.
Beside her, Jerry had stopped speaking. He was staring at the river, the moonlight making it a pale blue highway. She remembered the night of the hospital attack, when he had gone back into the tent over and over again to bring out men, how he had stayed with Trent until his death, then refused to leave his body behind. It all came back to Frank, she realized: the boy he couldn’t save.
