I withdrew the straw and placed another dollop of frost on his lips, then on his tongue. Let it melt down his throat.
I sat on the snow again, sucked on the straw. The lemonade was too sweet. I drained the box anyway.
From the car I pulled a duffel bag stuffed with down parkas and ski pants. I yanked them out, laid them across Livvy and Ed.
Looked up at the sky. It was impossibly huge.
Light settled on my lids like a weight. I opened them.
And squinted. Above us stretched the sky, unbroken, unending, a deep sea of clouds. Snow sifted down in dandelion flakes, burst against my skin. I checked the phone. 7:28 a.m. 5 percent power.
Olivia had shifted slightly in her sleep, banked herself upon her left arm, the right trailing loose along her side. Her cheek was pressed into the ground. I tipped her onto her back, mopped the snow from her skin. Gently thumbed her ear.
Ed hadn’t moved. I leaned into his face. He was still breathing.
I’d pushed the phone into my jeans pocket. Now I fished it out, squeezed it for luck, dialed 911 again. For a breathless second I imagined it ringing, could almost hear it, trilling in my ear.
Nothing. I stared at the screen.
Stared at the car, turtled on its back, helpless, like a wounded animal. It looked unnatural, even embarrassed.
Stared at the valley beneath us, spiky with trees, a thin silver ribbon of river unfurled in the distance.
I stood up. I turned around.
The mountain reared over me. In the daylight, I could see that I’d misjudged how far we’d dropped—we were at least two hundred yards from the road above, and the stone face looked even more impassable, more impossible, than it had the night before. Up, up, up my gaze climbed, until it reached the summit.
My hand wandered to my throat. We’d plunged all that way. We’d survived.
I tilted my head back farther still, to take in the sky. And squinted. It all seemed too vast, somehow, too massive. I felt like a miniature in a dollhouse. I could see myself from without, from afar, tiny, a speck. I spun around, wobbled.
My vision swam. Something twinged in my legs.
I shook my head, rubbed my eyes. The world subsided, retreated to its boundaries.
For a few hours I dozed beside Ed and Olivia. When I awoke—11:10 a.m.—the snow was crashing on us in waves, wind cracking like whips overhead. A low growl of thunder sounded nearby. I swept flakes from my face, jolted to my feet.
That same flutter in my vision, like ripples in water, and this time my knees snapped toward each other, magnet-jerked. I started to slump toward the ground. “No,” I said, my voice raw and chapped. I swung a hand to the snow, propped myself up.
What was wrong with me?
No time. No time. I pushed against the ground, stood. Saw Ed and Olivia at my feet, half-submerged.
And I began dragging them into the car.
How did the time creep by? It seemed, during the following year, that the months were passing more quickly than those hours with Ed and Livvy on that inverted ceiling, the snow rising against the windows like a tide, the windshield creaking and popping under the weight of white.
I sang to her, pop songs, nursery rhymes, tunes I invented, as the noise outside grew louder and the light within got dimmer. I studied the whorls of her ear, traced them with my finger, hummed into them. I wrapped my arms around his, braided my legs with his, twined my hands with his. I wolfed a sandwich, guzzled a juice box. I unscrewed a bottle of wine before remembering that it would dehydrate me. But I wanted it. I wanted it.
We were underground, it felt; we had burrowed someplace secret and dark, someplace sheltered from the world. I didn’t know when we would emerge. How we would emerge. If.
At some point my phone died. I fell asleep at 3:40 p.m., 2 percent power, and when I awoke, the screen had gone dark.
The world was silent, except for the scream of wind, and Livvy, tugging breaths from the air, and Ed, a faint crackle in his throat. And me, sobs guttering somewhere in my body.
Quiet. Absolute quiet.
I came to in that womb of a cabin, my eyes bleary. But then I saw light leaking into the car, saw the dim glow behind the windshield, and heard the silence the way I’d heard the noise. It inhabited the