over the stone floor of my rooms, settling on the flakes of ash from the hearth, filling the air with light and warmth—and still, I saw only the endless darkness of the truth: I would spend my life alone. Never would I find love or have a child. Never again could I pretend to be like other people. A normal life could not be for me; it wasn’t written in my genetic code.
One night, a banging at my door woke me. I pulled myself out of bed and, with the help of my crutch, hobbled to the door and unbolted the lock. Sal stood in the hallway, Dolores’s wheelchair parked before him.
“Get in,” he said, gesturing to the wheelchair.
“Where are we going?” I asked, half asleep.
Sal gestured again to the wheelchair, with its shining copper armrests, Dolores’s pillows on the seat. “Now.”
I lowered myself into the wheelchair, adjusting the pillows to cushion my wound. Sal pushed me down the corridor and steered me through a series of narrow connecting hallways, before stopping abruptly at a door on the east side of the castle. He opened the door directly onto the east lawn, where I could see—standing in the snow—Vita.
Sal parked the wheelchair, lifted me out of it, and carried me over the east lawn, his boots crunching through the snow.
“Sal, put me down,” I said. “I want to walk.”
To my surprise, Sal released me. I limped behind him, the snow soft under my feet. Perhaps spring was coming. I didn’t know the month, but the harsh bite of winter had left the air. Vita stood on a flat of snow before the high, dark mountains. I limped past the frozen pond, past a dead animal lying in the snow, blood staining an ellipse of color around its body. It was a rabbit, I saw, half-eaten by some wild creature, its long furry foot jutting into the air. Something about the position of the body, and the bloodstained snow, reminded me of Dr. Ludwig Jacob Feist.
At last, I made it to the top of the east lawn, where the castle grounds met the mountain. Sal greeted Vita, nodding at me as if he had delivered a trophy.
“I brought this, like you wanted,” Sal said, and took a leather pack from his shoulder. “Bernadette says she’s low on some things.”
“Thank you,” Vita said, taking the pack. She opened it, examined the contents, then nodded to Sal. “Tell Bernadette to send me a list of what we need.”
Sal nodded in return and turned back to the castle, leaving Vita and me in the dark, windy night. It was moonless, without a cloud in the sky. Stars filled the darkness, an uncountable explosion of brilliance, proof that we were just one small piece of an immense, burning universe.
A gust of glacial wind blew down over the east lawn, cutting through me. My teeth began to chatter. Vita shot me an assessing look, one part pride, another part exasperation. “Surely you’re not so sensitive to the cold as that?”
“My grandfather would have said exactly the same thing,” I said. “He was always taking me out in the snow underdressed.”
Vita nodded, as if she knew exactly what I meant, and then, sliding out of her coat, she handed it to me. The warmth of her body lingered in the silk lining, as delicate as an embrace.
“Tell me. What was the date upon which my son killed himself?”
I gave her a sidelong glance, wondering why she had decided to ask this now. “I believe the death certificate said July 1993.”
“And he left no note?” she asked. “No explanation?”
I shrugged. “Not that I know about.”
“It is so . . . unlike my son,” she said. “He was a very strong-willed man, with great moral conviction. I can’t imagine that he would harm himself.”
“My grandmother Marta had died that year. Maybe he missed her.”
Vita thought this over for a minute. Then she shook her head. “I don’t doubt that they were extremely in love and that my son missed his wife when she was gone. But that wasn’t the reason.”
“Then what?”
Just then, as if in answer to my question, I saw it—something moving at the edge of a cove of evergreen trees. An ibex, I thought. A wild animal feeding on rabbits. I couldn’t see more than a shift of movement in the shadows, a presence obscured by spruce and cedar branches.
“These are the Icemen,” Vita said and walked quickly up to the trees, leaving me to struggle behind.