swallowed thickly. “Thirsty,” she said.
With his free hand he brought the plastic cup and the straw to her lips and she drank. She drank and drank. All that time in the river, drowning, and now all she wanted was water—there would never be enough of it for her thirst! She emptied the cup and kept sucking noisily at the air of the cup.
“Easy, easy,” he said. “I’ll get you more in a second. I’m gonna go get the doctor now so he can look at you.”
“Don’t go. Please.” Gripping his hand, or trying to. She was so weak.
He smiled. How thin his face was! She felt the tears on her cheeks and watched as he wiped them with his thumb, his good big old thumb.
“I drowned, Sheriff.”
“No, you didn’t, sweetheart. You’re right here with me. You’re just fine. The doctor—”
She squeezed at his hand. “I did, though. We both did. Caroline and me, both together. But it was all right, because we were together. And also—”
He waited. “Also what, sweetheart?”
She rolled her head and looked up at the ceiling, and the tears ran from the corners of her eyes. She shook her head.
She turned back to him, to his eyes. Nothing but love and worry in those eyes.
“Did they find her?” she said.
“You rest, sweetheart.”
“Daddy.”
He swept the hair from her forehead.
“I saw her go under, Daddy. I saw her go. The current got her and carried her off under the ice.”
“OK, but not now. You just—”
“Did they find her? Did they find Caroline? That’s all I’m asking.”
He nodded. “Yes, sweetheart. They found her at the dam. At the power plant in Riverside. The water never freezes there. That’s where she was.”
Audrey watched his face, his eyes. “How far?”
“How far what?”
“How far from where we went in.”
He frowned. He shook his head.
“Daddy.”
“Two miles. Maybe three.”
All that way in the dark, under the ice. Beautiful, strong Caroline.
She turned and looked at the ceiling again. Her body was so sore. She could not lift her free hand, her right arm. As if it were frozen to the ice. The bed. She felt profoundly and forever drugged. Her eyes would not stay open—But stay awake, she told herself. He is sick and he needs you with him. How much time? How much did you waste by sleeping? Stay awake!
“You used to take me fishing there, Sheriff. Remember?”
“That was another dam,” he said. Then he said, “Of course I do. In the summertime.”
“The trout like it behind the dam.” Her heavy lids lowered. Her hand relaxed in his.
“Hush now, Deputy,” he said from far away . . . don’t spook the fish.
“The water’s so cool and deep there, behind the dam. We’d . . . we’d stand on the bank and cast and . . . the bait just . . . down to them in the current.”
10
He was awake and out of bed while the house, and the woods all around the house, were still in darkness, with only a lesser shade of darkness in the east-facing windows, and that shade a good ways farther along than he cared to see in his windows before he was shaved and dressed and downstairs for coffee, but he’d slept poorly, passing in and out of a nagging dream in which he walked and walked, like the last man, over a burned land, and when at last he got up from his bed and walked to the bathroom his legs were all rubber and ache, and there was a thickness in his head and a drainage at the back of his throat that he kept swallowing like a sour rope, and by the time his coffee was brewing he knew he’d taken sick, as his mother used to say, and only then did he remember his trip to the hospital the night before: Tom Sutter coming out to meet him, standing outside in the cold so Sutter could have himself another cancer stick, then the long drive home with no heat in the van and his entire body shivering, until at last he was under his covers and shivering there too until he slept and then shivering in his strange dream of walking. He’d gone out into the world and taken sick and brought it home.
In the kitchen he washed down a handful of aspirin with orange juice, then fried up two eggs, and carried eggs and coffee to the living room. He hauled his chair closer to the fire and took up the old blanket from