Ray Gorham - Daunting Days of Winter

“Yes. Rose Duncan. You’re Jennifer, right?”

“I am. I’m sorry, I don’t recognize you at all. Should I know you?”

The woman shook her head. “No, we’ve never met, but I know a lot about you, though Kyle didn’t tell me you were expecting. I only knew about your older children.”

“The baby’s not mine,” Jennifer explained. “Her mother died, and I guess I’ve kind of adopted her. How do you know us so well?” She looked at Rose warily, not comfortable with her level of familiarity.

“I can’t believe he didn’t tell you about me. I helped him in Wyoming when we had a big snowstorm back in October. He stayed with me for several days, before the roads cleared and he got back on his way. You don’t know how glad I am to find out that he made it safely. I’ve worried about him for the past four months.”

Jennifer’s mind raced back over the details Kyle had told her about his journey home. She thought she knew about most things, but Rose Duncan’s name was unfamiliar.

“Maybe he didn’t tell you about me. I’m sure there were a thousand other things that happened along the way. It’s nice to meet the woman a man would walk two thousand miles for. You’re just like Kyle described.”

Jennifer let out a puff of air. “I’m so sorry. I feel like I’ve let you down. Do you have family in the area? You’ve come an awful long way. There must something else that brought you this direction.”

Rose shook her head. “No. Just Kyle.”

Jennifer’s mind was racing, trying to recall what Kyle had said about the storm. She thought back to the meeting where Kyle had spoken to the community and remembered someone asking about it. If she remembered correctly, Kyle had said that he’d been saved by an older woman, but…

“He showed up in my yard in the middle of that terrible blizzard. Would have frozen to death if my dog hadn’t alerted me…”

This woman wasn’t older, maybe a few years, but not what you think of when you say older. Why hadn’t Kyle said anything about Rose?

“He stayed for four days, so we really got to know each other. He told me all about your family. Then when my homestead was attacked and my dog killed, well, it sounds strange, but Kyle was the only person I could think of to go to, after what I had done for him and all the time we’d spent together. I know it sounds silly, but here I am.”

Jennifer felt herself go cold inside, like someone had pulled a plug in her heel and let all of the life in her just drain out. “So, you’re saying you spent four days with my husband, then decided to follow him halfway across the country?”

Rose nodded. “I guess so. It sounds kind of creepy when you say it that way, but I guess that’s what it boils down to.”

“Can you excuse me for a minute?”

Rose nodded, smiling politely. “Do you have a bathroom I can use? After so long on the road, it would be nice to use an actual bathroom again.”

Jennifer indicated down the hallway. “There’s a bucket of water in the bathtub; use that to flush.”

She hurried downstairs to where her kids were playing a game of Risk. “Emma, I’m going out for a minute; take care of the baby. David, you help her.”

“You okay, mom?” David asked as he rolled the dice. “You don’t look very good.”

“I’m fine.” Jennifer went back upstairs, grabbed her coat off of the arm of the couch, and let herself out. She walked, trancelike, down the street, her mind churning over her conversation with Rose. Why would a woman, she wondered, follow a man five hundred miles across two states, on horseback, under such trying circumstances? The question repeated itself over and over in her mind, and none of the answers she came up with were good.

She thought back to when she was a young girl, and her mother had learned about her father’s indiscretions and the things he did while he was on the road. At the time, she couldn’t understand why it was so devastating for her mom, why she cried alone in her bedroom at night, even weeks after the revelation.

At that age, when boys weren’t that important, she had just thought it was because her mother was too fragile to handle rejection or disappointment, and that her mother was too dependent on her father. But after she married Kyle, Jennifer knew what it meant to give yourself to someone else. It was more than just sharing a last name and an address. It was letting them into your heart. It was putting all your weaknesses and vulnerabilities on the table and trusting them to still love you. Marriage was not being able to see a future without your partner in it, knowing that someone loved you, in spite of your silly mess-ups or odd little personality quirks. It was being the only one that belonged in that particular place in their heart, forever, no matter what happened.

It wasn’t finding out that you were just there for when they needed something, at their convenience, to be used interchangeably with whoever else might come along. She had never fully understood what her mother had experienced, until now. The wound was bitter, and painful, and devastating.

Jennifer walked numbly along the top of riverbank, picking her way past the boulders that dotted the bank. The water was low this time of year, but it was cold and still deep enough to be dangerous. She wanted to cry, but no tears came. The day had left her feeling so hollow she wasn’t surprised there was nothing left.

She looked out across the water, swift, cold, and deadly, and she crawled down to the edge, dropping her head into her hands. “You’ve done it, God. I’ve wondered for the past five months where my breaking point would be. Thought maybe I was tough enough to deal with whatever you threw at me, but I was wrong. I’ve endured separation, indescribable fear, evil, more death than I ever hoped to see, losing my husband twice, nearly losing a son, and now you have to rip my heart out too?”

A sob escaped her lips, and she shuddered, losing her grip on the rock and sliding down to the ice at the water’s edge, her legs splashing in up to her knees. The water was icy cold, causing her to jerk involuntarily, but she left her legs in, the temperature rapidly making them more and more numb. “Do you even care about me? Do you even know I’m alive, or did you just wind up this world and step back to watch it all fall apart?”

The river was rocky near the shore, then the bottom fell away to a deeper section where David liked to come and fish, though he never caught many to speak of. She estimated the water to be at least five feet deep, maybe six, not necessarily deep enough to be deadly, but fully dressed and with the cold temperatures, it could be dangerous. She didn’t have her gun, it was still on the floor beside the couch, but at least this way, her death could look like an accident.

Ten, fifteen minutes tops, she thought, and she would have no more worries, no more disappointments, no more struggles, no more anything. It could all be over. How nice it would be to not go to bed with your stomach hurting from hunger, or have to worry about what tomorrow might bring. If there was a heaven, maybe she would still make it. God embodied love, and surely He would understand what she’d been through. If hell was where she ended up, how could that be any worse than this. In fact, maybe it would be better, since she wouldn’t be cold or hungry. And, if there was nothing at all, well then there would be no struggles, no heartbreak, none of the crap that life seemed so happy to jam down your throat every day.

She stood up and reached out to swirl her hand in the water. It gave her goose bumps up and down her arms and across her back. She looked out to the deeper water, wondering how cold it would feel and how long it would hurt and if drowning or hypothermia would take her first. She took a step forward. The water was deeper and came up to her thigh. She gasped as the cold gripped her legs and the current tugged at her. She paused and looked around, knowing someone from the militia might come by and see her at any moment. She began to cry, wanting so much for all the pain to go away, but scared to take another step forward.