Chapter 6 - The Cabin of Ghosts
The road to the cabin had been cleared only as far as the snowplow turnaround at Mile Marker 7. Beyond that lay five miles of unplowed forest service road, choked with four feet of wind-drifted powder and the splintered remnants of hundred-foot lodgepole pines snapped like toothpicks by the avalanche.
I walked.
I didn't have snowshoes. I didn't have a headlamp. I had only my hatred for the man I had spent forty years becoming.
Every step was a battle against the mountain. I would plunge into snow up to my thighs, the frozen crust scraping against my bruised kneecaps, before dragging my other leg forward through sheer, stupid momentum. Within forty-five minutes, my designer shoes were soaked through, the leather freezing into rigid, wooden blocks that tore the skin off my heels.
*“Eleven years ago, you promised that if I ever got lost in the snow, you’d search until you couldn't stand anymore.”*
Her voice from the cloud recording played on an endless, maddening loop inside my head.
I fell after two miles. My hands sank deep into a snowdrift, the icy crystals biting into the palms until they went completely numb. I lay there with my face against the snow, staring up through the pine boughs at the cold, indifferent stars.
It would be so easy to stay here.
Hypothermia, the medical manuals said, was a peaceful death toward the end. You stopped shivering. You felt a wave of profound, hallucinatory warmth. You took off your coat because you thought you were on a beach, and then you went to sleep and never woke up.
Clara hadn't taken off her coat.
She had dragged her shattered leg across six miles of this hell. She had crawled through drifts with a fractured tibia, with internal hemorrhage, with the body of our child passing out of her in the freezing dark. She hadn't surrendered to the peace of the cold. She had fought every inch of the mountain because she refused to die waiting for a man who wasn't coming.
"Get up," I snarled to myself. "Get up, you son of a bitch. Get up."
I dragged myself to my feet, using a fallen pine branch as a crutch, and kept walking.
It was nearly midnight when I reached the ridge.
The cabin was gone.
Where our hand-hewn cedar retreat had stood for eleven years—the place where we had spent our first three anniversaries drinking cheap Merlot on a rag rug in front of a stone hearth—there was only a white, scarred scar across the mountainside. The crown of the avalanche had fractured eight hundred feet above, peeling off a slab of wind-slab ice three hundred yards wide.
The force of the slide had sheared the cabin clean off its concrete pillars. The roof was crumpled against a stand of Douglas firs fifty yards downslope like a crushed beer can. Kitchen cabinets, shredded down comforters, and splintered rafters were frozen into the avalanche debris like artifacts in a glacier.
I scrambled down the debris field, tearing my trousers, the sharp pine branches lashing across my swollen face.
I found the kitchen area.
Half-buried in the snow was Clara’s yellow canvas duffel bag. The nylon was torn, filled with frozen slush.
I dropped to my knees and tore the zipper open with my bare, bleeding fingers.
Inside were her sketchbooks, their watercolor pages frozen into solid, ice-bound bricks. There was a woolen sweater she had stolen from my closet eight years ago, still smelling faintly of her lavender detergent.
And tucked into the inner zip pocket, protected by a heavy plastic sandwich bag, was a small, white cardboard box from a baby boutique in Denver.
I opened the box with trembling, wooden hands.
Inside was a pair of hand-knitted woolen booties, no larger than my thumb. They were cream-colored, with two tiny wooden buttons carved in the shape of pinecones.
Tucked beneath the booties was an anniversary card.
I unfolded the stiff paper. Clara’s handwriting—clean, elegant, the hand of an architect—was steady across the card:
*Ethan,*
*Eleven years ago today, we had fifty-four dollars in our joint checking account and an old Subaru with a broken heater. You asked me to marry you on this rock, and you told me that money was just paper, but loyalty was bone.*
*I don't know who you are in New York anymore. I don't know who that man is who looks at his watch when I speak, or who hides his screen when he walks into the bathroom. But I know who you were when you built this cabin.*
*If that boy is still in there somewhere, under the suits and the acquisitions, come find us. We're waiting for you.*
*Happy 11th Anniversary.*
*Love always,*
*Clara (and someone new).*
May you like
I held the tiny woolen booties against my cracked, bloody lips and wailed into the empty white canyon until my voice broke completely into the wind.
***
