Nevada Barr - Winter Study

Anna had to turn and face forward before her skull broke free of her spine. The fear boiling beneath her breastbone solidified into a jagged piece of ice colder than the lake. “I need you to kneel there, directly behind me.” She pitched her voice to carry. “Put both hands wide on the ice – the piece I busted loose – and don’t let it come up when I move forward. Don’t push it down; just don’t let it come up. Got that?”

Wind sang across the parka’s hood over her ears. Beneath her, broken edges of ice grated against one another, the sound of teeth grinding in a nightmare.

“Bob?” She was afraid to try to look over her shoulder. She was afraid he wouldn’t be there.

“Answer me, God dammit!” she snapped.

“You broke through?” he asked. Relief that he responded at all, that he’d not left her, was so great, irritation at his slowness almost vanished.

“Yeah. You need to stabilize the floating ice so I can get off.”

“Why don’t you jump?”

“Jesus!” Anna started to turn; her world tipped, the low edge sinking farther, water rushing up to touch the side of her boot. “Fuck! Jesus. God.” Anna got religion all of a sudden. “That’s why,” she snapped. “Hurry up.”

There was no reassuring sound of size-thirteen boots crunching closer.

“I weigh twice as much as you do. If you broke it, I’ll go through,” he said.

“No you won’t. I think it busted along a fault line, or whatever ice gets. It’s not thinner here than anywhere else. The whole thing just broke loose when I stepped on it.”

Jumped on it, she reminded herself. Should she die, she wanted to be sure she knew who’d been responsible. “I jumped on it,” she amended, hoping the confession would give him courage. “If you lie down and slither on your belly, your weight will be distributed over a greater surface area. It’ll hold you. You probably don’t even need to do that, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea. Lay down and…” She was starting to babble, as if by keeping a rope of words spinning out she could drag him closer, talk him down like the clichéd stewardess-cum-pilot in old disaster movies.

“That’s not a good idea,” Bob said. “We’ll both go in if I get any closer. Let me call Ridley.” He sounded mature, reasonable; he sounded as if she should believe him.

“What the fuck is Ridley going to do?” she said, suddenly more angry than afraid. “He’s on the other side of the island in a snowstorm. My legs can’t hold out much longer.”

Till she said it, she’d not allowed herself to think it, to notice that her muscles, tired from two days’ hard walking with a heavy pack on her back, were starting to twitch as she stressed them in her ongoing balancing act. Tiny muscles, seldom used, were being called into play as the infinitesimal weight shifts were executed. They weren’t strong. They wouldn’t last. When a knee buckled or a leg cramped up, she was going to lose her delicate balance.

“I’ll call Robin,” Bob said, and she heard him busying himself with his radio. “Hey, Robin,” he said. Winter Study didn’t bother with radio protocol. With so few people, it wasn’t necessary, and their natural contrariness when it came to NPS regulations demanded they eschew it. “Anna broke through the ice. It won’t hold me, I’m too heavy, and somebody’s got to get closer to her than I can. Where are you?”

“Lake Richie.”

While Anna and Bob had set a single trap, she and Katherine had completed their side of Intermediate and moved on to Richie, the next lake in the short chain. They were an hour’s walk away.

“Why don’t you go ahead and start toward us,” Bob said authoritatively. “They’re coming,” he added unnecessarily.

“I heard.”

Bob wasn’t going to do as she asked. He had it set in his mind that the ice wouldn’t hold him. Or he was afraid that it might not, which amounted to the same thing. Anna fought down the urge to scream and shriek imprecations and obscenities. Sharp, hot tears sprang into her eyes and promptly froze like the Ice Queen’s splinter.

Arguing a person out of being afraid – particularly when they wouldn’t admit to being frightened – seldom worked, and Anna didn’t try to do it now. A tic started in her left thigh muscle above the knee, a flick of the skin the way a horse’s hide will flick to shake off flies.

“I suppose I could just balance here till the ice refreezes along the seams,” she said sarcastically.

“How long do you think that would take?” he asked seriously.

Anna was going to die and there would be no one but an oversized clown to witness her demise. “Come around to where I can see you, would you?”

“The ice won’t-”

“Big circle, Bob, big circle, stay as far out as you need to just-” She stopped to let off the steam building in her brain. She’d been about to say “just move your fat ass,” etc., etc., expletive not deleted, but, from what she’d observed of Bob Menechinn, he wouldn’t respond well to that approach. “Keep well back from me,” she said instead. “The ice is solid there.”

For a moment, he didn’t speak or move, then she heard his boots squeaking over the snow to her left. He loomed into her peripheral vision then, finally, to where she could see him without straining. Pissed off as she was, the sight of him relieved her. He didn’t look like he was about to run off and leave her to perish. She had that going for her.

“I need you to go to the shore and get a tree limb, a long one, as long as you can manage.”

Bob looked toward the shoreline. Though less than half a football field away, it was murky, dark and out of focus behind falling snow. “Visibility is getting bad,” he said. “I’d be afraid I wouldn’t be able to get back to you. I don’t want to leave you alone out here.”

Anna cocked her head the way a Jack Russell terrier will when it’s trying to figure out what its master is saying. The visibility was bad, and she knew, as close as they were to the shore, connected by radios, if he went into the trees he could still get turned around and be unable to find where he’d come in off the lake.

“Don’t go into the trees,” she said. “There’ll be something along the shore. Something is better than nothing.”

“I don’t want to leave you alone,” he said. “It would take too long.”

His words sounded fine, his voice was even and strong. Still, she suspected his sudden devotedness had more to do with not wishing to go into the spooky old woods alone.

Blinking past the snow and the shards of tears frozen in the inner corners of her eyes, she tried to see who he was, a key to move him. Mockery wouldn’t do it. His ego was too fragile. In a way, he reminded her of the psychotics she’d worked with in the lockdown ward where she did her brief mental health internship when she was getting her EMT. Men and women shared a common room, with a television set between the men’s ward and the women’s ward. Anna’d spent her time there, too ignorant to be of much help to the nurses and too small to be of much assistance to the orderlies, who looked more like bouncers or second-string football players than upstanding members of the medical profession.

It had been a number of years ago, back when “crazy” was as much a medical diagnosis as an insult. The ward wasn’t for neurotics; the people who ended up there were desperately ill. Most had lost so much of their world to mental illness and the drugs administered to control it that they didn’t care what was said to them. It had little to do with what they heard. Those who could still interact tended to respond instantly, and sometimes violently, if their delusions were challenged. Anna’d always thought it was because somewhere inside they still knew the difference between the reality around them and the one that they forged for themselves, and they believed when the illusion they had of themselves died they would die too.