Paul Curtin - Gray Snow

She hadn’t even noticed. Her arms settled downward. “You killed them.”

“Michael was trying to kill me .”

She lowered her voice, thinking Aidan might hear. “You’re a liar. Kelly’s out there too.”

He took a step closer to her. She got up and stepped back in equal measure. He licked the inside of his cheek and put his hands up as if in surrender. “Elise, you need to listen to me.”

“Listen to you how? So you can tell me you didn’t mean it? That you were just defending your home?”

“I was defending my home. Your brother wanted me dead.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not.”

“Did you kill Andrew?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Did you?”

“No,” Sean yelled, rubbing his face from brow to chin, calming himself. “I don’t know what happened to him, okay? I swear to you. I swear.”

His expression almost made her believe it. She wanted to believe him. They had so much history. Three wonderful kids, two taken way too soon. Almost twenty years of love and intimacy she couldn’t just disregard. And yet… “I saw what happened.”

“Come on, Elise.”

“No,” she said, taking another step back and pointing a finger at him. “My brother’s blood is all over your face and both of them are dead. My brother—” She stopped and blinked. Her brother. He was really gone. “Why’d you do it?”

“He was going to shoot me.”

She didn’t believe him. Michael talked a big game, but she had never believed for a moment that he would do it. He wasn’t the type. Yet, he had come downstairs after the gunshot, not saying anything to her. She asked herself why he had been silent. Michael had shot at someone—the noise had come from upstairs. But he didn’t shoot Sean. Her jaw dropped slack. “You dressed Kelly up like you.”

“Wait, now. Stop. That’s not what happened.”

“You made Michael kill her.”

“That’s not what happened,” he said, angrier.

“She was wearing your coat, Sean.”

“I know what it looks like.”

“What is it then? What is it?”

“I got up this morning,” he said, “and I was suiting up in the garage when she came out. I asked what was going on, and she said she wanted to talk privately. I needed to gather wood, so I said we could talk while I worked.”

“She was wearing your coat, Sean.”

“I’m getting to that. She was cold—shaking. So I gave her mine. I went inside to get my other one. I said I would be right back, and she put it on.”

“You’re a liar.”

“Elise, I grabbed my other coat and was about to walk outside from the garage not a minute later and I heard a gunshot. I looked outside. I still had the coat in my hand and then Michael shot her again. There was nothing I could do. I swear.”

A tear rolled down her cheek.

“Michael thought it was me. He thought he was taking care of me .”

She clenched her fists and then slowly released the tension. The pieces seemed to come together, but she didn’t want to believe it. It was too neat. Too reasonable. Yet, she looked into the eyes of the man she loved, saw the sincerity there, saw how he wasn’t deflecting. He could be—

He said, “So I grabbed my rifle and I hid in the woods. I thought he might come out to finish me off, so I hid.”

“Finish you off with the shotgun.”

He nodded. “Elise, I did what I thought I needed to do. He was going to kill me.”

“He’s my brother, Sean.”

Sean said nothing for a while. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” Her cheeks were streaked with cold tears. As he placed his hands on her face, she stopped resisting and put her hands over his fingers. “I didn’t know what else to do,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.”

“He was my brother,” she said, spittle flying from her mouth as she cried. “He’s gone.”

He pulled her close. Her body collapsed into his, but he held her up and allowed her to wail. She wondered how she could live with so much death, when safety was just an illusion and there was no hope for anything better. No hope of sunshine or green grass. No hope for spring to remove all that black, blood-stained snow outside. No hope for a life where betrayal and lies didn’t put people into the ground.

She dreamed of a better world and prayed for God to end the one she was in now.

ELISE WOKE IN a cold sweat. Under an array of sleeping bags and thick blankets, she should have been roasting, but her skin was cold and clammy. The walls and the ceiling seemed to move in toward her. She took in a stuttering breath.

She rarely left the living room or the kitchen. The air never changed, always smoky and hazy. When she opened her eyes, she swore she could feel every millimeter of her eyeball pulsating. She rolled over.

Her head throbbed so badly that even the dim light made it feel like lit gasoline was being poured into the curves and valleys of her brain. She closed her eyelids and tried to ignore the pain, but it didn’t yield even for a moment. She couldn’t get her brother and sister-in-law off her mind. She missed the conversations she and Kelly had been having. Some days, she would hear a man’s voice and her heart would leap, thinking it was Michael. But it wasn’t. She’d never hear that voice again.

Sometimes, she would follow the voice and find Sean playing with their son. He would look up at her and smile, but something in his eyes didn’t fit into place. Every day she watched him. He had great sincerity in those eyes, but there were moments, fleeting moments, where there was something else—a flash of calculation like a mathematical formula was running through his head. It was the worst when they ate dinner. For the first minute, he would watch her and Aidan eat. No words. Just watching. As if they were chewing what little he had left.

The headache persisted, so she got up and went toward the stairs. There were a lot of medicines closer in the reserves, but that was off-limits. God forbid Sean catch her there.

She snatched a flashlight off the coffee table and tiptoed toward the stairs when something behind her hissed. Her chest tightened, Elise spinning around and pointing the flashlight at Sean, sitting with his upper body sticking out of the sleeping bag. He put his hand up to block the light, and she diverted it away. Sean never left her alone for more than a few minutes. He was always asking where she was going, what she was doing, and why. Always hovering.

“Where’re you going?” he whispered.

“I have a headache.”

“There are pills downstairs.”

“I don’t want to search for them.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“No, I don’t want Aidan to wake up and find nobody here.”

“I can get them.”

That was it . He was trying to be nice, to help. “I’ll be back in less than five minutes. Don’t worry.”

He nodded and slipped back into his sleeping bag. Though the conversation was over, she felt his eyes on her back.

Always watching.

With her hand against the wall and the flashlight like a spotlight in the dark hallway, she rounded the top of the stairs and entered the bathroom. She planted her hands on the sink. Every few seconds the pain flooded into her temples and receded. She shifted over to the wooden cabinet and opened its small doors. When she brought the light up into it, she had to recoil at the sudden brightness.

She set the flashlight on the sink pointed toward the wall, grabbed at the bottle of extra strength pain killers, popped off the top, and put a few into her hand. She looked down at them and poured out a few more. One by one, she popped them into her mouth and swallowed them with her spit. Then she put the bottle back.