Lance feels a familiar satisfaction at getting bundled up in the kind of clothing that can conquer the weather. His earliest memories of winter in the little house with his father are of loneliness and cold. After he and Danny became friends, though, Lance quickly learned to enjoy the snow and ice. The Chases offered him clothes year round, but it was in winter when he was hard-pressed to say yes. Robbie always claimed they had plenty of extra coats and boots and snow pants that Johnny had outgrown. Lance pretended not to notice that most of these items had a suspicious lack of wear, and once Lance even found a tag in the inseam of a pair of fleece-lined jeans.
Armored with all of the appropriate gear, he and Danny were able to spend hours out in the woods during even the coldest months, tunneling in snow drifts, building snowmen and towers and forts, and packing snowballs and throwing them at each other with remarkably terrible aim.
Maybe it’s those memories that lead Lance into the trees by the creek, instead of up the driveway toward the road and the bridge.
When he went to live with his aunt right after his sixteenth birthday, he had to get used to living in a town, on a cultivated street where there wasn’t a flower blooming that someone hadn’t planted, or a tree that wasn’t ringed in mulch. He missed the wildness of Trace County fiercely at first, though it was hard to separate that feeling from all of the other grief. Lance missed home in all the meanings of the word—the creek sound, a steady background music he could hear whenever he paused and really listened; Danny’s laugh; the smell of horses lingering on the jackets Robbie and Johnny left on pegs by the door on the porch; the rumble of tires churning gravel when a vehicle was still miles off; the way the creekbanks clotted with decaying leaves and pine needles to form a fragrant, slick hazard; Robbie’s face and the warmth in his eyes when he smiled at Lance.
Lance has reached the creekbank before he realizes it’s even in sight. It’s masked by ice and snow. He presses his palm against the rough bark of a tree that’s dry-brushed with dark green lichen. He knows the water is still moving invisibly and silently under the shell of ice. He knows it like he knows his own heart is beating without checking his pulse.
Close to the creek’s edge, he can see a jagged-edged oval of darker, thinner ice where an animal must have broken through to drink and that crusted over again but hasn’t frozen solid yet. He studies the bank for clues and sees one clear, cloven hoofprint, but it’s too large to be that of a deer. With a frown, he squints up and down the stretch of the creek, just in case someone’s loose cow is still close by. He remembers the cattle in the road yesterday when they were driving in. The memory is surreal, like that moment should have been longer ago. He feels like he slept a hundred years last night, and awoke as someone else. Not someone new, though. An old self…one he left here in the now-burned farmhouse on the night he ran off and never came back.
He walks along the icy edge of the creek, frozen mud crunching under his loaned boots. Johnny has big fucking feet, he’s learned, and he wishes he’d put on two pairs of socks to keep his feet from shifting so much inside the boots’ stiff, wool lining. He’s already courting blisters.
It’s not the first time he’s wondered what Johnny’s whirlwind tours of Las Vegas, New York City, and Los Angeles mean for Robbie, especially with Danny gone off to school. It’s been hard for Lance to picture Robbie alone.
Before yesterday, he’d hoped—or feared, it was hard to say which—that at least Robbie had still had Megan. And that maybe with the boys fully raised and out of the house, he’d really given Megan a chance, the way he so obviously hadn’t in all their prior years together.
Robbie claimed that he and Megan had really ended things. That’s hard for Lance to imagine. Megan was the villain in all of Lance’s fantasies, which was ridiculous because she was—and probably still is—one of the kindest people alive. And she’s beautiful, patient, and practical. If Lance had been asked to invent a woman who was worthy of Robbie, Megan would have come closer than anyone he could have made up.
But she isn’t here. And Lance has a vivid memory of the way that Robbie was looking at him in the kitchen that morning, and the coffee mug tumbling out of his hand.
Lance hadn’t imagined Robbie’s stare in those moments. And if it meant what he would have assumed it did, if the man had been anyone but Robbie…well, if Lance’s suspicions are correct, then, incredibly, he doesn’t know how to feel. His sixteen-year-old self would have flung himself at Robbie at the merest glimmer of interest, overjoyed.
Now, though—well, it’s been a long time since he was surrounded every day by Chases, never given the chance to doubt he was loved. Back then, if he’d had to choose between Robbie loving Lance like he loved Johnny and Danny, or wanting him, he would have chosen wanting. But since then, he’s had a lot of opportunity to learn just how rare and important love is, and he’s no longer sure he could choose so easily.
Winter was always the only season when he and Danny could walk the creekbank without risking losing a shoe in the silty mud. In warm months, they used to bait danger by wading down the center of the creek, where the regular depth was to their waists, but the rocky bottom occasionally fell out beneath them and they’d dunk themselves to their chins, or sometimes go all the way under.
He likes walking here along the bank, the frozen mud not sucking him down, so that his steps are easy. Walking on water, he thinks with a smile. The snow is a white blanket over the creek’s ice. He takes a sideways step and shifts his weight onto the foot that’s resting on the ice. When the ice holds, Lance walks on across its center, the thick, powdery snow giving him traction. It’s like the forest paved the creek for him, offering a path he can walk alone to the end of the world—or, more accurately, to the creek’s mouth, where it meets the river in a broad triangle of shallow tributaries.
Lance remembers winters past when they used to skate the creek. Though Lance wasn’t much of a skater, mostly wobbling and straining not to fall, ending the day with bruises and aching calves, he liked it when Robbie and Johnny each took one of his hands and towed him. They’d pick up so much speed that the creekbanks became a blur in the corners of his eyes; only their faces were in focus, taking turns glancing over their shoulders to grin at his expression. By the time they wound the entire distance from the yard to the river, his face would be streaked with tears from the cold air and his chest would ache from breathless laughter.
He walks until he can’t feel his feet. Even good winter gear can only keep you warm for so long; when the reservoir of body heat is spent, it’s best to get back to somewhere warm. That lesson is too deeply ingrained for Lance to forget it, so he’s turning back almost without deciding to when he hears an ominous crack. The ice is splitting under his feet.
He scrambles to the bank, but in his haste, he goes to the wrong one. He looks up and instantly recognizes the specific crook in the trunk of one of the big trees.
He knows exactly where he is.
If he leans into the climb and walks up the bank, he’ll emerge into the little weedy clearing with the small, square house.
Lance trembles not from the cold, but from an urge he can’t name. It’s like the indecision in his heart over Robbie and the suggestion of interest he saw in the kitchen. Does he want to go toward it, or veer away?
His head doesn’t have an answer, but apparently his feet do, because suddenly he’s climbing up the bank.
It’s easier than he remembers. He’s bigger and stronger, after all, than he was at sixteen. It just takes six long, careful steps, like lunges on an incline, and he’s up. The burn in his thighs is faint, almost pleasant.
The tree line is more dense than he remembers. The natural consequence of lack of maintenance, he supposes; opportunistic evergreens and young oak trees have created a waist-high underbrush that he has to paw through, and it snags in the coveralls and coat he’s wearing, distracting him so that he doesn’t get his first look at the house until he’s already a dozen feet from the tree line.
Lance had vaguely assumed that the empty house would be moldering, like the old farmsteads in various stages of disintegration on the Chases’ property. The places that had been in half-decent shape had been frequent playgrounds for him and Danny. In hindsight, they’d been lucky never to break their legs in a cellar cavity camouflaged with brush, or trod on a rusty nail as they’d climbed through various newer ruins.
But the house isn’t derelict. Or, at least, it’s not in much worse shape than in all of the years Lance lived there. Also, the house isn’t empty. There’s a path through the otherwise unmown yard to the door, obvious even beneath the snow. And there’s an unmistakable light in the small square windows that stare at Lance like eyes, just as they always used to when he skulked home reluctantly after a day or days of respite with Danny and his brothers.
The last thing he notices is the strange, skeletal shape of a snow-draped bike with training wheels before he unsticks his feet and retraces his steps, fast. Around here, people are likely to point a gun at a stranger who comes out of the trees, and they’re very likely to shoot rather than ask questions.
Lance does have questions, though. Who’s living there? How did he not know? He curses his father, imagining some strange under-the-table deal, though that seems absurd under the circumstances. He’d seen the man himself, five or ten minutes before his arrest. He was hardly in a position to be acting as a landlord.
Maybe they’re squatters? But then, how did they get the utilities on?
Maybe the light was just a trick of the eye.
For some reason, it’s that bike and training wheels that Lance can’t get out of his uneasy mind. He rushes across the ice, which doesn’t show signs of splitting this time, but he still feels like the earth could drop out from beneath him at any second even when he’s safely on the other side. He breaks into a run, like a spooked horse fleeing blindly to the last place it felt safe. He doesn’t break stride until he’s crossed the Chases’ meadow and rushed up the deck stairs to the hayloft, where he leans against the hayloft door.
There, he stops and thinks, breathing hard. He doesn’t want Robbie to remember how irrational Lance can be, so he needs to act normal. He recognizes that his reaction to finding out someone lives in his father’s house, someone he didn’t know about, is out of proportion. He shouldn’t care. It’s barely even his problem. What difference does it make if it’s empty and rotting or if someone’s living there?
Someone with a kid the right age for that bike.
He goes inside, hurrying out of his borrowed coat. He doesn’t see Robbie, but hears water running in the bathroom. He frowns when he finds the bathroom door ajar. Would Robbie be showering with the door open?
All of the confusing, mixed emotions Lance has been avoiding with respect to Robbie come crashing back down. Just like when he went up the creekbank toward his old house before he consciously decided to move, he finds himself stepping out of his coveralls, kicking off his boots, and walking toward the bathroom, through the haze of light and steam emanating from inside.
When he steps into the doorway, what he sees is somehow the last thing he expected.
“Is that a calf?”