IT HAD BEEN MARCH BUT nowhere near spring this far north. Impossible even to imagine earth and warmth. The snow rose into drifts six feet high; the trees were structures, frames. Ben loved their stark, dark lines against the white.
Out on the ice, a few locals had cleared trails out to their fishing holes. On weekends you could find them here, hunkered over the perfect circles they’d cut in the ice. They had thermoses of stew and battery-operated socks to keep warm. They came for the church-like solitude as much as for the thorny pike who lurked a dozen feet down.
Once, summers and summers ago, he and Frank had tried to reach the bottom, diving down, but the thick reeds frightened them—they seemed animate, reaching out for the boys with greedy tentacles, and they had twisted back to the surface, translucent and wavering, so clear they could see dragonflies on the other side, and laughing, broached the air, tossing the water from their hair. Summers ago. The summer of Otto.
The sun had not yet topped the encircling mountains, so the land lingered in inky shadow, reluctant as a sleepy child. Frank must have heard Ben coming. Sound traveled on such still winter mornings—the tapping of a woodpecker might seem close but was half a mile away.
Frank was standing on the lilac-colored ice.
Ben had stopped the truck. He got out and stood.
Frank smiled. “Helluva morning for fishing.”
But Frank wasn’t fishing. He was holding a large rock, so heavy he struggled to carry it. Heavier than Otto. The rock was tied to Frank’s waist.
Ben had put his hands deep in his pockets. The air was crisp. He’d taken a step forward, then stopped as he saw that Frank had also taken a step forward. He could not run the distance between them, and he should not.
“It’s all right,” Frank said. “I’ve done my best.”
“No.” Ben shifted his gaze to the ice. To the fishing hole just past Frank, a black spot in the white. “Please.”
Frank took another step out. The rock was heavy and awkward in his arms, he cradled it. “Maria isn’t coming back.” He shifted the weight of the rock. “I’m just tuckered out, Ben.”
Ben had wished he could fix it, somehow. He’d closed his eyes. He was not so bold as to imagine he was dying with Frank, but he was afraid of living without him. Please don’t leave me, he thought. Frank was his friend, his brother, all he had, and that was the reason he wanted to run across the ice and pull him back. It was also the reason why he did not. Frank had lived for all these years with what Ammon had done—he had borne the burden, he had done his best. Ben thought of the basement and how Frank had lived above it. He had sat at the kitchen table and eaten his huevos with Maria and the children, while right there, under his feet, below the floor boards and the rafters, was dark and remembering.
The beginning and the end was Ammon. Ammon had done this. Ammon’s work upon a boy, the concerted application of that fucker’s dark polluting spite for years and years. And the yield was a man who could not sustain himself.
“I’ve signed a couple of forestry reports for you, left the dates blank. They’re in the cabin.”
“Frank—”
The hole in the ice was like a mouth, rounded in surprise. O. It was a portal to another world, it was a socket, it was a fishing hole, it was the period at the end of a sentence.
“And I gave them Wilder. They said it wasn’t enough. But I wouldn’t give them you. I couldn’t do that. They don’t have you, Ben. You’re clear, you’re in the clear. So, you know, go clear.”
Ben had neither stepped forward nor back. He had not been able to leave the spot on which he stood. He had been fearful. This moment ended some way of living and began another he did not yet know the shape of, could not imagine.
When Ben had opened his eyes Frank was gone. For a time he wondered if Frank had lost his nerve and cut the rope. Maybe he’d survived hypothermia and swum under the ice to the other side of the lake, to a warm getaway car, and was on his way to Juarez with Maria. Ben toyed with this particular fantasy, and how he may be called to corroborate the suicide—“Yes, I saw Frank Wilson drop through the ice and he did not come out”—and therefore collude in his friend’s escape. Frank was going clear, not Australia, but a hacienda in a sleepy Mexican village, a rooster on the fence, a dog asleep in the dust, Maria and the boys eating ripe oranges from a red tin bowl.