hour,’ Evelyn said, aware as she finished the sentence that she was speaking English as if it were her second language, not theirs. She poured the mother a glass of the red wine she liked and tilted the gin bottle towards the father, who shook his head. ‘Daniel and . . .’ the son, the thirteen-year-old. She gestured to the window, where there was still sun on half of the field of snow, a grey shadow from one of the rises bisecting it.
The father nodded. ‘One last run,’ he said.
‘Thank you,’ said the mother, taking a gulp of wine. ‘Gut, du fängst an.’
The daughter recited the words she had found, her voice like stiff springs.
Although Evelyn had washed her hands she still felt the frog’s body on them, the desiccated skin between the pads of her fingers, the light ridge of bones beneath the skin. It sat in her pocket like a piece of gold. She washed the cooking dishes. Outside the small window, the snow was blue.
In the living room she turned on the lamp, and its warm glow made outside seem darker. ‘Thank you,’ said the father.
There was some exchange between the children and their parents, and she understood the words video and film. The girl left the room and the older sister shut her book and followed her. Eve hadn’t seen the third daughter; perhaps she was asleep in her bunk. Their mother was holding the edges of the rust-coloured raw linen curtains. She pulled them across a little bit then left them open. ‘Die Scheibe ist kalt,’ she said.
‘Close the curtains,’ said her husband.
‘Nein, not yet.’
Evelyn levered open the door of the wood burner and added another log. A splinter caught in the pad of her index finger. She pressed at the buried end, faintly visible through the layer of skin like a drawing viewed through tracing paper. In the small bathroom off her and Daniel’s bedroom, she took a pair of tweezers from the cabinet and tried to pincer it out, but her left hand didn’t have the necessary deftness and the splinter buried further beneath the skin.
In the living room she held out her finger, palm upwards, and the tweezers, to the mother, and said slowly, ‘I have a splinter. Splinter? Could you, please?’
The woman nodded and took Evelyn’s finger in her own. Her nails were short, without varnish. She pushed at the sides of the finger pad and a micrometre more of the black wood emerged, emphatic as a speck of dirt. The pointed ends of the tweezers delicately gripped the splinter and the woman drew it towards her, and out of Evelyn’s body, and held it up into the light. A dot of blood emerged from the skin where the splinter had been. The mother passed the tweezers back, the splinter still stuck to one arm. Evelyn took the finger out of her mouth and said, ‘Thanks,’ her tongue tasting a little of the blood and the resiny firewood. In the bathroom she wiped the splinter off onto a tissue and put the tissue in the rubbish bag that hung on a hook on the bathroom door, its contents – wilted tissues like flowers, flattened cardboard toilet rolls – visible innards through the transparent plastic. Far off in the mountains behind the hut there was a crack. The sound registered through the back of her head like the soft pop of a neighbour’s firework; a long second later she understood what it was.
Evelyn reached behind the gathered curtains, opened the ranch sliders as narrowly as possible and squeezed through into the limpid evening air. Light from the living room cut across the balcony. She thrust her hands into her pockets and felt the frog. The white lights on top of the chairlift pylons glistened with a small bright radius. Rope tow poles on a shallow run could have been skiers crouching in tableau. Down the slope, at the base of the first chair, the ski café lights were still on, an octagonal constellation. She thought of electric fish in the deep. Wind shook over the surface of the ski field like a sheet being thrown on a bed and there was a high, glassy ringing that might have been lift wires or the wind running over the snow.
The door behind her opened and the father said, ‘Excuse me, the alarm in the kitchen is tooting.’
In the living room the parents looked expectant. ‘Well,’ Evelyn said. ‘I think we should call the mountain