Lauren could do only so much. The other reason I didn’t die on the floor of the cabin was Grant. He had been the one to find Theresa back at Denny’s house, still with her hands and feet taped together, still on the bed, just as Will had left her. Grant came for the open house at noon, wearing a suit and tie, having no intention of actually making an offer on the property, coming just to talk to Theresa and, God willing, so long as bravery was with him, ask her out. Find some way to ask her out. Because to Grant she’d always seemed like an interesting woman, he’d told me that, and she was a mom, so she could be a mom, which made so many things so much easier. He’d talked to her a few times at the league and it had gone okay, but he’d never made it very far. He’d hung around, watching. Grant’s crush saved me.
He came fifteen minutes before anyone else got there, which was also tremendously helpful for Theresa, as it meant she didn’t have to be found tied up and dehydrated by someone who actually intended to make an offer.
Grant called the police, and soon Theresa was frantically explaining to them Will’s destination. They tried to call me, but nothing—my phone had zonked out in the pool. The sheriff called another sheriff up north, who sent two squad cars to Denny’s cabin. On their way to finding Lauren holding a blood-soaked towel over the hole in my stomach, they found Will down at the bottom of the hill.
The first hospital was in Marinette. Later that same day—still Saturday—a helicopter brought me to Green Bay, where a surgeon dug around in me. It was there that Lauren says I finally stabilized, as there was some concern, up in Marinette, that I would go into cardiac arrest.
I missed all of this.
I have one memory of being in the helicopter, looking up, and seeing Lauren nearby, white tape across her nose, big headphones on her head.
She didn’t know I’d woken up and that I was lying still, looking at her. She was looking out the window and down into the darkness.
By the time the surgeries were over and I was able to stay awake for any length of time, both my parents, Lauren’s mother, and Lauren’s brother, Bobby, had arrived. I have the oddest collection of memories from the next days, when everybody was nearby: my mother in the room with me, knitting in the corner; Haley, laptop in lap, or under arm, or in a bag with the strap slung across her shoulder, joking with me that the family always knew that I would be the one to get shot first; my father, more serious than I’d ever seen him, sitting with a crossed leg, absently working the crossword between long monologues regarding the board at Hedley and his various business transactions. He was so forthcoming about business, in fact, that on the third or fourth day after my surgery, I asked him if there had been some kind of big change in his attitude about life because of what had happened to me. Whether he was going to start recruiting me to work for him again. A half joke. But it sure seemed like something was different.
He laughed. “I think a felony history might create some roadblocks,” he said.
“Reduced charges,” I said. “Besides, it wasn’t on purpose, and besides, I saved someone too. It’s a wash.”
“Oh yes. Excuse me.”
“You know what I thought, though,” I said. “The thing with Denny’s house.”
“What?”
“I thought you were going to try to get me to work for you,” I said. “Eventually. So long as I didn’t somehow fuck up.”
“Your mother would have probably liked that.”
“That didn’t go through your mind?”
“No,” he said. “Are you actually interested?” He tilted his head the other way. “I’ve assumed—perhaps since that’s what you told me—that you have no interest in what I do.”
“That’s not totally true,” I said. It wasn’t, but I understood what he meant, and I understood the assumption. My father made top-tier decisions for a corporation I’d seen throughout my twenties as contributing to the miseries of millions of people.
But then again, this was the fundamentalist view, this was why it was so easy to be single-minded about right and wrong. I had never said to my father: What you do for a living hurts people, let’s discuss it. What you do for a living, and the degree to which you are compensated for it, is shameful. To him—and not just because of his need to be argumentative but because he truly did believe it, and my perspective wouldn’t make sense to him—better instruments in an airplane was a necessarily good thing, and chemical products very obviously reduced pain and saved lives, ultimately.
“Not totally,” I said. “I know it’s complicated.”
“It is,” he said.
“Yes,” I said, looking at him. “It is. Isn’t it?”
He did not know what I meant.
Lauren was around the whole time.
Her nose was broken, and she had two black eyes to go along with the white horizontal stripe of tape across the bridge of her nose.
“You look like a raccoon,” I said to her one day.
“I know.”
She was staying in a nearby hotel; her mother and brother had already come and gone. I watched her as she took the chart from the foot of my bed and read my reports. She was eating a carrot. A full-size carrot, Bugs Bunny style.
“How am I?” I said.
“You’re doing well,” she said, distracted. “Reasonably well.”
She took a loud bite of the carrot.
“How are you?”
Her eyes ticked up.
I meant everything, of course. But I could tell: She’d gone back to the turtle in the shell.
I thought of saying more, but I didn’t know what.
“How’s the hotel?”
“It’s fine.”
She returned to the chart.
We hadn’t talked about it—not enough, anyway. She’d spent at least a half hour in the room with Will, tied to the table, and I still didn’t know what he’d said to her. Or what she had said to him. Or what Will had come up there to ultimately do to her. Maybe he told her. I didn’t feel right about asking. Not yet, at least.
There was also the uncomfortable fact that I had killed someone she’d once loved.
That.
“My dad is saying he wants to come down,” she said. “I don’t really know what to tell him.”
“Tell him to come down,” I said.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “We’ll see.”
She returned my chart to its caddy and said, “That reminds me. Do you want to stay here or move down to Milwaukee? You need another week, but we can take you closer to home, if you want.”
“No,” I said. “Here’s fine.”
She went to the other side of the room, where her purse was on a chair, and withdrew a small white box from it. “I got you the charger,” she said. “BTW.”
What made it so hard to think about, for so long, was that I thought it was just one question. I thought it was: What happened to Wayne? But I shouldn’t have thought about it like that. There were too many distinct questions packed into the one question, like a braided rope. You had to answer each in turn before you could answer one alone.
First, a question with its own branches: Why was Wayne up north that night?
And second, a question with many others: What happened to Wayne when he was up north?
Totally different things.
For now, here’s something:
My cousin Wayne sits in the cabin, eating dinner.
Maybe he’s listening to the wind-up radio. Maybe he winds it.
He’s in here.
It’s cold outside.
Much, much colder than it was supposed to be. Wayne had heard the weather report before coming up and knew it would be warm early, then, the predictions said, it would be in the teens, probably not much snow. And that was the case when he arrived a few days before. Warm first. Then a little colder.
He had no trouble getting his car up the driveway and to the cabin. And he had a day or two of good weather. He did some things around the property.
He decided to stay a little longer.
Then the storm came, which on its own wasn’t the worst thing in the world.
Nine inches of snow.
And it’s gorgeous, worth it when he wakes up the next morning—pristine and perfect white all the way down the hill to the river, frozen over.
But the beauty makes him stay another day. And that is a day too long. The beauty of the snow and ice, out here, with almost no one else around. It’s become dangerous.
It’s a pretty time up here, he thinks, looking out, knowing that he made a mistake.
It’s gotten cold.
Very cold.
My cousin Wayne can feel it rush in if he opens the door just for a second, as though outside the little tiny cabin, heated by just one small stove, an army of a million arctic ghosts stands waiting in the dark, each soldier silent. Whenever he opens the door, as many of them who can fit come rushing into the cabin in order to save themselves, and they bring their cold with them. If he steps all the way out, onto the frozen snowfall, solid enough now to hold his weight, he can feel it even more—he can feel his body crying to go back inside and feel how the exposed flesh on his neck doesn’t register what it feels as cold anymore, how there is an illusion to the impression. The neck sends confused signals of heat and pain. Fucking awesome.
The power of this place is awesome, my cousin thinks.
It’s dangerous to be here, there isn’t any doubt. Real danger. But it’s also interesting, this degree of isolation. No one could get to him if he needed someone. He’s here, this is it. He’s in it. You can feel what it might have been like for the people who inhabited these woods as their home, the Menominee, better wonder at the awesome and overwhelming power of the natural world. Wayne is no coward. Wayne wants to feel it. He especially wants to feel it now. That’s why he’s still here. Fuck it. He doesn’t care about the world that’s back down there. He doesn’t care about jobs, about school, about people. About what his life might turn out to be. About meeting people. Knowing things. He doesn’t care.
He probably shouldn’t be here.
What, Wayne thinks, have I done?
Standing on the porch, feeling this feeling of his neck and considering all these things, my cousin Wayne looks over at his car, parked at the top of the drive. After the snow fell, he scraped it off, so it is not now encased in ice, at least. This is good, because if it stays this cold for too many days—and the radio is saying that it will, and that tonight it will reach forty below in Marinette, so who even knows about here?—his battery will be shot. And that will be a real problem, because that will mean hiking out, which is doable, but dicey. Very dicey. Another storm, another cold snap. Well, he knows the stories. People get lost a lot faster than it seems like they should. So the battery: he has to take it out of the car and bring it inside and keep it by the fire. Tonight. Now. He doesn’t want to do it, but he doesn’t have any choice. Not unless he wants to freeze up here.
He goes back inside, warms up. He smokes a joint.
He’ll need a wrench. Maybe pliers.
He starts looking for his father’s tools.
He avoids looking at the brown jacket hanging on the hook.
My cousin Wayne looks for the tools.
He looks at the jacket again, gets irritated by it, and in a flurry of movement stuffs it wholly into the stove, where it eventually catches.
He liked it.
It starts to smoke up the place. Stupid, but he doesn’t care. He slams closed the iron door.
He thinks of the tools.
Soon, he’s got it. He remembers his last visit here: the fall, his father. The last time they were up together. They’d worked on the boathouse and dock that weekend. October. Denny had left early. My cousin Wayne had stayed an extra day. On his way out, Denny reminded his son to bring up the tools.
Said: “Hey, chucklehead. Bring those up before you go, okay?”
“You got it.”
Wayne, standing near the stove, smelling the burning jacket, is sure of it. He forgot. The tools are still down in the boathouse.
Which is a huge bitch right now.
Wayne puts on his hat, gloves, and jacket, and gets his keys—on his ring there’s a key for the lock on the boathouse door, which he hopes is not completely frozen. The thing sticks as it is.
He trudges down the hill through the snow.
He cannot believe how goddamned cold it is.
He thinks back to the conversation.
He’s worried about it, but he finds, after some scrabbling, that the lock’s not frozen. The metal inside is cold as fuck and swollen, but it’s new from the fall and still lubricated well. He hears it click open, holds the keys in his left fist, tugs at the door.
It’s stuck.
The door is always stuck. Why didn’t they replace the door instead? Here’s a piece of advice: replace the door that’s always stuck. Wayne shakes his head.
Person: Have you ever watched someone attempt to solve a minor problem? I would wager you this: if you presented a hundred people with a sticking door, you’d get the same chain of behavior from each of them.
The door is stuck.
Open it.
Okay, you say.
First you yank. You give a couple yanks. When that doesn’t work, you move on to sustained force. You try a few more yanks after that. You think: Okay. I got you, door. I know your thing. I will push in, then pull.
You try it.
That doesn’t work.
You’re getting frustrated. Eventually, maybe because of the mild frustration, you back up, widen your stance, and lean back so you can use all of your weight.
Which was what I did and which must have been what Wayne did too. And he went ass over teakettle too. Only now, back here in 1994, it’s the dead of winter, the coldest night in twenty-five years, it’s the underworld up here, he’s alone, and Wayne catches his heel on the same rock I caught and plunges backward over the bank and disappears through the ice and into the freezing black water.
Shoop. Vanished.
The clock starts as his life begins to drain from him. The Bright is taking it away from him.
The whole place—river, woods, cabin, hill—is silent while he’s under.
Wayne struggles underwater, then bursts up, gasping.
He cries out, his voice echoes across the property. Water freezes on his face the instant it touches the air. Legs cramped, body shutting down. The Bright’s taking away his life.
And my cousin Wayne, trying to tread water, his torso now numb, knows that there’s a good chance he’s going to die here, which is an amazing, new, alien feeling suddenly there in his chest, something nowhere near any other feeling he’s ever felt. Truly foreign. It may already be over. His mind goes up to the cabin, to the previous night, to the previous day. He thinks: What have I left unfinished? He goes through it, treading water like that. He thinks of his father. He thinks: Everything is finished, either way. He thinks: The jacket was the last thing. I should not have waited so goddamned long for that. He thinks: I should not have said a thing to him. He thinks: I should not have done it.
He’s getting closer to the edge.
He thinks: I don’t want to die.
The cabin is there. He can see it up at the top of the hill. It’s warm. It’s not far. It’s right there. Some people deserve to die. Not him. This is not karma right now, this is not justice. This is not that happening to him, because that is not how it works.
My cousin Wayne, terrified now, struggles at the edge, clawing at the breaking chunks of ice with hands he can’t feel, having to assume his legs are churning, working to drive him up and to shore but unable to feel them. He makes progress, but slowly. It takes too long. His body is cooperating, but it’s using everything he has down here, in the water. He leaves too much behind.
My cousin Wayne does get to the shore. Eventually.
But here, out of the water, down on hands and knees, he has no energy. He looks up. It’s right there. But fuck it all if you can’t even move when you’re in this state. The third stage of hypothermia—his skin no longer even bothering to heat itself, it’s just a suit of soggy leather, body conserving what little heat it has left for his brain, for his heart. Wayne probably feels like going to sleep down here—they say that’s true. It can only be speculation. He knows what that means but he feels it. Some part of him sees the illusion. It’s right there, though.
He can’t stand up.
He wants to. He should be able to. Goddamn it, he should be able to.
He should be able to go three feet.
He tries again.
He can’t.
So he crawls.
He makes it halfway up the hill. And he’s not actually sitting up in his last moments with his back against the tree. That had never been right. I invented that. He’s facedown. His face is in the snow.
I think of him looking up the hill one last time, using everything he has to look, looking at the cabin his father built. I think of that being what he sees before his eyes close.
His face goes down.
I was at the hospital in Green Bay for three weeks—I’d decided that it didn’t matter what hospital I stayed in. And I thought of this image—this image of my cousin’s face, his eyes closing just like that—again and again. I dreamed it, I ran it through in my head, I played it back, I ran it through again. It was simple, but there was more. I knew that there was more.
I read a lot.
I read one e-mail over and over again.
There was only one that really mattered. The one my father sent himself the night before he’d gone up with Billingsworth’s ashes.
October had come, as had a new chill in the air (or so I heard), and I watched a leaf outside my window lose its green. I watched the Packers on my room’s little TV. I surfed. It’s amazing what’s on the internet. You would never think: college newspapers. All college newspapers, their archives going back deep, going back decades.
Sometimes I set the laptop aside.
I was staring at a tree when I heard a knock on my door, turned, and saw Jeremy standing there, one hand in his pocket. He had something under the other arm.
“Whoa,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said.
He looked good. His hair was a little longer than he used to keep it. More important, his skin looked like it had for once seen a little sun. More Hawaii, I thought. Like the picture.
“Can I come in?”
“Of course.”
He entered the room and held up the box he’d been carrying. It was a cheap chess set, the kind that came in a board-game-size box. He shook it a little and rattled the pieces.
“Found it out in the lobby,” he said.
“And you want to play a game to see who gets to have Allie.”
He smiled at that, raised his eyebrows. He held up his left hand, and I saw the ring.
“I see,” I said. “Too late. Congratulations.”
“You have amazing timing with your texts, by the way,” he said, setting down the game and sitting in the corner beside my bed. “You apologized to her while she was at her bachelorette party. Which was the night before the wedding.”
“That’s a coincidence.”
“Yeah.”
“It was a real apology. For what it’s worth.”
“No, I know. She thought so too.”
“Although maybe a text doesn’t count for a full-on real apology,” I said. “Yet.”
“It’s the world. It is what it is. Communication.” He smiled. “Give it until about 2015, right? Then texts will have the same authenticity value as every other kind of communication. Still lagging. Slightly.”
“Well,” I said. “You still sound like a robot.”
“So obviously,” he said, “we heard about what happened. We were both worried. Obviously.”
“Obviously.”
“I had a meeting in Chicago this week so I called your parents to find out how you were. They told me you were still up here.”
“Here I am.”
He nodded again.
“Um, Ben?” he said. “What the hell happened?”
“It’s a long, long, very boring story.”
“I bet.”
“Do you want the short version?”
“If that’s what you’re offering.”
“He was chasing after the girl I was with. I didn’t know him.”
“No, I know,” he said. “The paper had a little.”
When I didn’t respond, he pointed at the chessboard. “You wanna play? Actually? We don’t have to talk. I get it.”
“Not really.”
I had nothing against him anymore, I really didn’t. But I don’t know. Not all friendships have to go on forever. Love dies. We can be content with this. I guess the residue of hating somebody with too much energy can never really be flushed from your pipes either.
“Listen,” I said. “I’m sorry. About the office. About all of that shit. I wasn’t myself.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “I appreciate that, but it’s okay. There were… unspoken problems. Maybe you were just surfacing them.”
“Good God, don’t use surface like that.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I was angry. Not even about Allie.”
“I know.”
There was probably a whole speech folded up inside of me that I could have unfolded right there for him, but I knew he knew what I meant. I knew I didn’t have to do it. I could have. But I didn’t have to.
“I’ll get to it,” he said. “Why I’m here. I came to offer you your buyout.”
I looked at him, thinking. “When does the game come out?”
“The first of January.”
“And how much of this has to do with my parents’ lawyers?”
“It’s not a competition, Ben. No one has to win or lose. We can both win, if we do it right.”
“Is the game even that good?” I asked. “What can a stupid game about puzzles really be worth? It’s not like we invented Jenga.”
“First of all,” he said, “it’s not stupid. Second of all, it’s not about puzzles. It uses puzzles. But it’s more than that. It’s about art too. It’s about the story. It’s an experience. It’s about the way it’s all put together. People pay for that—for the recombinations. That’s what drives the economy now. The how, not the what. People pay for that. And the world is changing. They’re looking for it in different forms. Novels are boring.”
I looked back at my tree.
“Do you see that?” I said, nodding at it.
Jeremy looked.
“Horse chestnut,” I said. “Pretty.”
“Ben.”
“The story’s pretty lame, you have to admit,” I said. “In the game. The crazy dude and his rivers. I can’t believe you guys used that.”
“Whatever you say. We liked it.”
“I’m not just saying it,” I said. “You used the rivers but you used the story it took me five minutes to write. You didn’t actually use the puzzle.”
“I know,” he said. “We couldn’t figure it out.” He laughed. “We both thought the story was better than the puzzle for that one anyway.”
“That’s because I forgot to send you the other part.”
“What part was that?”
I looked back at him. “I tacked that letter up on the bulletin board,” I said. “And there was a number written on the back of a business card I posted next to it. I didn’t explain to anyone what it was. Just a number. But you needed it to solve everything. A key that was off the frame.”
“What was the number?”
“Do you get it?”
“Do I get what?”
“That the whole puzzle was off the page anyway,” I said. “The puzzle was that the puzzle was not where it claimed to be. So it’s a lateral puzzle. You know.”
“So why didn’t you send us the number?” he said. “If it was the actual key to everything?”
“I totally forgot about it.”
“Ah.”
“Slight error.”
“What’s the magic number then?”
“Now I forgot that too,” I said. “I don’t know it.”
“Well,” he said, shrugging. “It doesn’t really matter. We liked the story about the crazy architect and the rivers. So we used it. Either way, it’s the same. We used it for the story. Games need stories. Everything needs stories.”
“You realize that the only reason I wrote all those,” I said, “and sent all of them to her in the mail… you realize I was fucking with you, right? And wasting time? And entertaining people there? And dreaming that I was out of prison and we were back in our little white house, fucking and living?”
“I think you liked making them,” he said, “and still wanted to follow through on what we started. Despite yourself.”
“I have terrible follow-through.”
“And yet you did anyway,” he said.
He got up and went toward the door. He had something new to him—not just the tan and the hair. I had been foolish to concentrate on those things. The way he walked was different. The way he talked. He didn’t seem so fucking scared of everything anymore. He was a real person. I guess.
“We have a sense of what it’s worth already. A lot of smart people have put a lot of resources into it. I mean, we could go a different way—you could sue us for what you think is the right ownership stake, we could spend a few years in court. I’m not intimidated by your family’s money and lawyers, if you think that. For every vicious genius there’s another vicious genius. You can hire as many as you need. There are people behind us. This is really just the first project for the company.”
“All right, Bill Gates,” I said. “What’s the offer?”
He looked past my bed and at the wall. “It’s in the box,” he said. “The check. I just wrote it. Fuck it. You know? You have until the first of January to cash it. I’ll cancel it after that and assume you’re going to litigate. Or do nothing. Feel free to take nothing too.”
I looked at the box.
“Can I ask you a question?” I said. “Unrelated.”
“Sure.”
“Will you look at something for me? I don’t even know—hold on.” I was digging around my bedside drawer. “I don’t even know what it is. Really. And I’m embarrassed to say that I can’t figure it out.”
He looked at me cautiously. “Okay?” he said.
“This is not me fucking with you.”
“Okay.”
“I need your help.”
“I said okay.”
“I think I’m actually blocking it out,” I said, “because I don’t want to know what it is. It seems like it should be easy. I know what it is and I don’t.”
I pulled out my notebook and my father’s phone and rewrote the text of the e-mail for Jeremy, then twisted the pad and let him see it:
Bw/C
(241d,120p)bx.e
(37d,250p)o
(250d,350p)HUGE w.p.
(200d,120p)w.p.
“Context?” he said, staring at the pad.
“An e-mail a person sent to himself.”
Jeremy glanced up. “That’s all?”
I nodded.
“Who?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“When?”
“When did he send it to himself?”
“As in, under what circumstances?”
“Before he was going somewhere.”
“Where?”
I looked at him. “A cabin,” I said. “Up north.”
Jeremy looked at me for quite some time, then finally scratched his ear and looked back down.
“Did I tell you that Allie and I got a boat?”
“No.”
“We have the GPS nav on there and everything, but lately I’ve just been feeling a little overwhelmed by all the gizmos and tech stuff, and so I’ve been orienteering instead, which is when you’ve got the map and the compass and you’re almost pretending like the modern world doesn’t even exist, and those things are all you have?”
“Okay.”
“So it’s a pain in the ass to find the little degree symbol,” he said, “when you’re texting somebody, using a keyboard, whatever.” He shrugged. “So I always just put a d there. Like those d’s. They’re all under three hundred and sixty.”
“What do you mean?”
“They could be compass notes,” he said. “If you were e-mailing them to yourself. Would you know the degree symbol writing an e-mail? Would you bother finding it? And so instead of a map, though, I’m betting the letters are a stand-in for—I don’t know. Buoys, I guess. You know. Markers.”
He tapped a finger on the Bw/C.
“If that’s what it is, it shouldn’t even matter what the other letters are. You just need to know whatever Bw/C is. And that’s your starting point.”
“What about the p’s?”
“Distance. How about paces?”
I closed my eyes.
“Paces.”
“Sure,” he said. “You’ve got direction, then you need distance. So that’s on foot. Find whatever Bw/C is, get a compass, and follow these directions to wherever they lead.”
Now I was staring at the pad, thinking.
“Do you know what Bw/C is?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Yeah,” I said. “Birch with cross.”