Eventually, Wolf comes over and rests his heavy head on my lap. The three of us sit there for a long, long, very long time, with the fire burning in front of me and Afon burning up behind me. He's a mountain of a man and I've never been more grateful, becauseit feels like I can fold myself up inside him and stay safe here for as long as I please. He'd never tell me to go. Pretty ironic, to feel that way about a man who literally kicked me out of his life this morning, but I know in my bones it's true.
He'll hold me until the end of time, if that's what it took.
11
AFON
She sleeps.
I don't.
At some point, she went limp against my chest, the last tremor dying out like the aftershock of an earthquake. Her breathing evened into a slow, shallow rhythm, and I felt the exact moment she let go.
From then on, she twitched periodically. Her lips moved like she wanted to speak, but nothing more than a breathy sigh emerged. Wolf has his head on her lap and his eyes on me, one brow raised in that way of his that seems to say,Well. Here we are.
Here we are indeed. In-fucking-deed.
The fire has burned down to a low bed of coals, pulsing orange and gold. I should get up and feed it, but that would mean moving, and moving would mean waking her, and I've seen enough tonight to know that what this woman needs more than warmth is rest. So I stay where I am, back against the couch, legsstretched out, Caroline pulled tight against my chest, and I let her have whatever peace she can steal from the dark.
Meanwhile, I'm thinking about the logging camp.
Not the men who inhabited it—they're taken care of, at least for now. The heavy one and the kid with the gold chain won't be walking anywhere for a while, and Buzzcut's wrist is going to need surgical repair if he wants to hold anything heavier than a spoon again. The ones outside are even worse off.
None of it bothers me. The violence itself never has. It's what comes before and after the violence that eats you alive. The decision to do it, and then the silence when it's done. The in-between part? That's just fucking physics, plain and simple.
No, what I'm thinking about is the snowmobile.
It was a Polaris 850 Patriot. Black, maybe two years old, aftermarket exhaust, studded track for mountain terrain. There are a thousand just like it all throughout the Catskills.
But it's eating at me nonetheless—because I've seen that exact configuration before.
Not at the camp. Before.
Yearsbefore.
There's a windowless room in my memory that I keep locked. Inside that room is a stretch of road outside Saratoga Springs on a November night twenty years ago, and a woman in a blue dress behind the wheel of a Subaru that had already rolled twice before it came to rest against a guardrail.
Inside that room also is the sound of an engine retreating into the trees—not a car engine, because a car would have left tiremarks on the asphalt and the police found none. What they did find were chewed-up tracks in the frozen mud shoulder. A snowmobile, they said. Probably some kids joyriding. Probably unrelated.
Probably unrelated.I still can't fucking believe they said that.
I told the police they were wrong. That the snowmobile had run my wife off the road, that she'd swerved to avoid it and lost control, that this was not a goddamnaccident. They nodded and wrote down everything they said.Sorry for your loss, Mr. Satyrin,they said—and then they closed the case six weeks later.
No evidence of foul play. Black ice and bad luck.
But neither of those things explain why I walked away without a scratch, while Yelena didn't walk away at all.
I buried my wife on a Saturday and started drinking on a Sunday. I did that every night for months. By the time I surfaced from the bottom of the bottle, the trail was frozen colder than the ground they'd put her in.
But I never stopped looking.
You don't stop looking. Not for something like that. You can't. It lodges in you like shrapnel, a fragment too deep to extract, and every time you move wrong or breathe wrong or live wrong, you feel it wriggle.
For twenty years, I've felt it wriggle. I kept my eyes open the whole time. The looking became its own kind of addiction—quieter than the bottle, but just as destructive. It never led anywhere, though.
Until now.
Sitting in this cabin with this woman asleep in my arms, I'm staring at the ceiling and wondering why now of all times is the moment that my past has returned.
