Bonnie Nadzam - Lamb

“Why?”

“Because no one else in the world calls me Gary. You’re the only one who knows me this way. Like I’m the only one who knows you as Emily. They’re our true names. If you could see through my flesh”—he took her hand and put it on his chest—“Gary would be the name written across my heart.” He kissed her on the temple and the forehead and the mouth. “You were wonderful.” He kissed. “You saved us, do you know that? Just like you said you would. And we have luck on our side. I want to tell you something, okay? Something I’ve never told anyone in my life.”

“What?” She sat up a little and looked at him.

“I’m telling you this so you’ll understand how precious you are to me. It’s about my brother.”

“You have a brother?”

“Three brothers.”

“Oh.”

“You won’t tell anybody about this, will you, Tom? You’ll give me your word?”

She nodded.

“My littlest brother, Tommie. He disappeared.”

“Where?”

“Nobody knows. He was just your age, just a little bit older. He was twelve.”

“He was kidnapped?”

Lamb was whispering now. “I don’t know, we never knew. He used to sleep behind the gas station, in his sleeping bag.”

“Why?”

“Our house was kind of a sad place. I think you know how that can be. And one morning he just… didn’t show up. Didn’t come back.”

“Not ever?”

“Not ever.”

She was quiet a moment.

And look. The two days that Lamb and Linnie and Tom spent arranged in this way—the dark early mornings with Tommie in the bunk room, she in her beautiful nightgown and he in his big sheepskin coat; breakfast with Linnie back in the cabin, back in the fold-out couch—the AM radio and eating canned sausages and mandarin oranges with their fingers; the evenings of sitting with Linnie beside the fire in the cold, sharing a cigarette in the dark, the smell of snow and cold dirt and dead grass in the wind; running a piece of chocolate or a kiss or a surprising mouthful of whiskey to the girl in her snug little sleeping bag nest. So much love all over everyone—they were sweet days for everybody. Any one of them would tell you so.

It was late afternoon and already dark when Linnie and Lamb woke on the fold-out couch under piles of blankets and the heavy throw rug he’d pulled over the top of all of it. She sat up and looked out the window behind them.

“Hey,” Lamb said, “why don’t you lie still and let a man sleep.”

“There’s someone out there on your road. Actually, two someones.”

David sat up beside her and they watched a white suburban follow a black jeep.

“They’re going to Foster’s.”

“The old man?”

“His wife is dying down there.”

“Oh. How sad.”

“She’s all hooked up to machines and in the same bed all the time. I’ve seen him wash her face with a bowl of soapy water and a washcloth.”

“So sad.”

“Sometimes the caretaker goes first. Know what that means?”

“What?”

“I’m going to have to find some backup girls to assist me on my deathbed.”

“Oh, please, you act like you’re an old man.”

“I am an old man.”

“You are not.”

Lamb got up and poured some of the steel-cold river water outside the door into the enamel coffeepot and set it on the woodstove. He opened the door and turned the wood, added another piece.

“Do you think they need help with something? Seems like a lot of activity, doesn’t it?” She was up on her knees looking out at the road, the blankets pulled up around her shoulders.

“What I think,” he said, and tore off the rug and the blankets one at a time to reveal her, bare and shivering on the dusty threadbare couch, “is that there’s a cold front moving in.”

“Yeah, you think?” She reached across the couch for one of the blankets in his hand.

“We’ll get the first big snow. It’s time,” he said and appraised the sky. “Maybe they’re just stocking up down there, having the visiting nurse come in and straighten up camp and make sure everything’s in working order before the snow falls.”

Clouds drooped and condensed and there was a wet white circle of vapor around the sun.

“Think we’ll get snowed in?”

“Maybe, if it drifts. It’s covered up the windows before.”

“Snow cave.”

“We’ll gather up all the blankets on the property and load them up on our bed, and board up the bathroom window, right?”

“Okay.”

“I have a lot of stock in the shop. We’ll bring in piles of it so we don’t have to move from the stove here.”

Lamb and Linnie watched the front come in, the clouds sagging and seeming to fall between them and on top of the cabin and shop. While they ate their canned stew and pan-fried biscuits in the cabin, the wind finally stopped. The tree outside the window went completely still. The constant rush and clatter of the wind went dead, and the snow came. It came light and gently and fell straight down like gauzy curtains and it was thick and heavy and wet—odd snow for fall in the mountains. A low groan rumbled around them. Thunder and snow. Lamb shook his head and held Linnie on the pull-out couch before the window.

“It’s wonderful. It looks like the lightning is going to touch the ground.”

“Because we’re so high up.”

“Can’t I come live with you and be your love?”

“You’d get tired of it out here. There’s nothing to do.”

“You’d be here.”

“Oh, you. Come here.”

The night was mild, the snow poured like still pools of white milk into the ditches and over the dirt road and in every crack and crevice until everything was blue-white in the dark. Lamb did not leave Linnie’s side all night, trusting his girl to sleep tight and warm in the shop. In the small hours the wind picked up again and swept all the snow clouds south and east and what snow had fallen piled up in drifts against the shop and cabin and across the road.

It was only just past dark, very early in the morning, when they were both awakened by a knock at the door. Lamb pulled on his Levi’s and peeked out and opened the door. A fine smoke of snow blew in at foot level. When he opened the door the man spoke in a low voice, and it was for Lamb as though his head was filling up with snow, his thinking brain temporarily blanked out, eclipsed by the sudden flash of danger.

“She had the fire built up good in the shed and swore she was all right,” the man said, indicating Tommie, “but she looked a little bugged out to me.”

Tommie glanced up at Lamb, her face very still and her lips white. “My stomach hurts,” she said.

Lamb stumbled as he opened the door wider, looking back into the room at Linnie, who was wrapped in the blanket and the rug. She sat up straight but could not move. She was not wearing any clothes. Unthinking, he opened his arms to the girl and she went to him, teary and dead silent.

“Stomachache like you’ll throw up?”

She shook her head in his flannel shirt.

“Dad said you had a snowplow we might use. Didn’t think you’d be awake, thought I’d return it later this morning.”

“Oh,” Lamb said, smiling and looking stupidly from the man to Linnie, ignoring the girl now. “Oh good. Yes, sure.”

“Is she okay?” the man asked Lamb, and suddenly Linnie saw that, somehow, this child was Lamb’s and did not belong to the man at the door. She was the ghost, the dead girl, the girl swept off the swing set. Linnie’s mouth went sour and her limbs went hot and liquid and when she spoke she heard her voice as if it were coming from someone else, someone outside of her.

“Who is that, David?”

He made a sheepish face. “Linnie, this is my niece.”