“I CAN PUSH for a little bit,” I said, moving toward the back where Lucia had settled after turning the boat around and setting out across the muddy water. She slid forward to the bench where I had sat and handed me the oar. I thought for a moment how disastrous it would be to drop it.
My legs wobbled underneath me as I stood, and I grabbed the oar with two hands, stabbed it into the water. The shallowness surprised me. I had expected to have to reach far into the depths to find the bottom, but it was only three or four feet beneath us. I got into a slow rhythm of plunging the oar, pushing the boat forward, lifting, bringing the dripping oar back beside the boat, and dropping it in again. The movement helped keep me warm.
Lucia sat completely still, staring forward. All around us the water moved, creating small crests. I looked back, but the bank was far off. I couldn’t see Miho.
In front of us, far in the distance, a dark rise became visible, a thin line along the gently swelling surface. I had nearly forgotten about the knapsack. It had become a part of my body, an extra appendage, and the way it bounced against my side as I walked had become a kind of comfort. We reached in and took what we wanted, and soon the small bits of food were gone. A small amount of water remained. How would we ever hike back up with so little water, with no food? But this was not a question my mind attached itself to. The only remaining desire was to get to the bottom and see if my brother was there. After that, who knew?
The far bank came up on us quicker than I expected, and our boat ground up against rocky beach. Lucia and I crawled out, dragging the boat farther in until it was lodged firmly between two boulders. I pulled the oar up onto the flat slab that made up the rest of the bank. I wished Lucia would say something—I thought I would feel less lonely if she did.
“Here we go,” I said, hoping for some kind of an answer.
She nodded, her eyes bright again, eager. She took off in a slow jog, her feet padding ahead, away from the water and into another narrow canyon. It was maybe twenty feet wide, flanked by the same kind of cliff walls that made up the rest of the abyss. I wondered how she could run—gravity felt heavier there. My feet were a burden to lift with each step.
I had lost track of the shape of our surroundings and the direction we were walking. Our wanderings had gone down, that I knew, but once at the bottom of the ledge, once we crossed the bog and left Miho behind, any sense of direction disintegrated.
Beneath our feet was hard rock, and the path twisted and turned even deeper into the mountain. I had a sense that if I could see high enough up, there would be a sliver of blue sky, but the cliffs rose up all around us. The light was dim.
“Lucia,” I said.
She slowed, turned to look at me. But I had no other words. I had only wanted to hear my own voice, to make sure I wasn’t disappearing.
We came to an iron gate. It was tall, too tall to climb over, and its imposing doors swung on hinges somehow attached to the stone. They were tall and narrow, formed with metal fastened to itself with rivets. There were no signs of rust.
I walked up to the gate and stared at it. I swung the knapsack around in front of me and reached deep inside, my hand sliding along the seams. There it was. The key I had found, the key Kathy had always been asking me about. I pulled it out. It was cold in my fingers, and something about it made me afraid. I handed Lucia the knapsack, and she slung it over her shoulder and watched me with expectation in her eyes.
I put the key into the lock. It didn’t go in smoothly, but as I struggled to turn it, the entire gate groaned, and there was a loud splintering sound as the latch was freed. The gate moved toward me almost imperceptibly, and I reached my fingers along the inside edge and pulled. It was heavy but swung soundlessly, as if it had recently been oiled. Lucia didn’t run ahead of me. She nodded, and I couldn’t tell if it was a movement of agreement or a lifting of the chin indicating, “You first.” I reached back and slipped the key into the knapsack now dangling over her shoulder.
We walked through the gate, and I noticed there was no lock on the inside. This gate was not for keeping people out of the area we had just entered—it was for keeping people in. I stared at it. Would it stay open? If it closed, would it lock us in automatically? I searched for anything to wedge in the gate and hold it open until we returned, but there was nothing.
I turned away from the gate, and Lucia sidled up beside me. We put our arms around each other to stay warm, and I felt such a fatherly affection toward her. Her presence was a gift. I wondered again where she had come from, why she was here.
The cliff walls pressing in on us widened into an open space of what appeared to be deep, rich soil, and the light increased, if only a little. I could feel my spirits rise. There were large, beautiful trees everywhere, their heavy limbs swaying in a breeze. The cold that had felt nebulous or intangible solidified there in that glade, made itself present in a way it had not been anywhere else.
A light snow fell as we walked among the trees. They were shaped almost like people. The wide bases of their trunks split into several exposed roots before plunging into the frozen earth. Could there be a warm undercurrent of water? But what of the lack of light? It was a strange and nonsensical place, the lime-green leaves coated lightly in white snow, the rich earth carpeted with grass and filled with glassy puddles, the trees whose branches moved and shifted like arms.
Lucia ran off, vanished among the trees, and her absence left a lonely, frightened space inside of me. The shadows in that place were strange. They seemed to move of their own accord, somehow separate from the object that made them. A tree’s shadow might appear to be billowing in a storm while the tree itself was standing nearly still. Or the dim shadow cast by the walls where we had entered shimmered and moved like a liquid, but the walls were fixed.
From some of the deeper shadows I thought I could hear something. Voices? Or maybe it was only the wind? I was so cold. So cold. Could I even trust my senses anymore? How much longer until my body gave in to hypothermia?
“Lucia!” I shouted, a sense of frustration rising toward the girl. I did not like being left alone in that place. Why was she always running off?
The snow fell heavier, and I moved farther in among the confusing trees with their incongruent shadows. It was like a swirling of my vision. I realized the ground had gradually gone from grass to icy puddles and then to a solid block of ice—the trees somehow grew up and out of that shallow, frozen lake. The trees looked more and more like terrified people waving me off, motioning for me to go and never return. Warning me.
“Lucia!” I shouted again. The wind blew harder, and the snow stung my eyes, blinding me until I stumbled out into a clearing, all of the trees shrinking back from this open space. Here the ice was clear all the way down to the depths, and the snow stopped suddenly. I wondered if I was dead or alive. The stillness was vast.
“Lucia!” My voice was weak and hoarse, scratchy in the cold, and puffs of steam escaped every time I shouted. But she did not reply, and I grew more frustrated, nearing anger. Where was that girl?
Across the vast pool of black ice I saw movement. Lucia? But no, it wasn’t movement so much as something that didn’t blend in with the complete stillness, something that didn’t move so much as shift. I looked closer, peering through the darkness.
I walked forward carefully, skeptically. Could my greatest hope be right there? But I hadn’t taken more than five or six steps forward when a sound made me stop suddenly. I was awakened by fear. It was the sound of creaking and a grinding split. The ice under my feet was not as thick as I had thought, and a gentle thread of water oozed up through the crack. I stopped. I peered into the darkness again.
Could it be him?
A man Adam’s size, with long black hair, down on hands and knees, was isolated on a tiny rock island in the middle of the frozen lake. I took another step toward him, and this time the ice cracked in the shape of a spiderweb. I took a step backward.
“Adam?” My voice came out tenuous like the ice, cracking in the cold.
Somehow in that great stillness, he heard me, and he looked over. It was too far away to see his eyes. He didn’t have a shirt on. His pants were torn and frayed and sliced so that they hung around his legs like rags. He seemed to be looking for the source of the voice, then turned his face upward, toward the nothing sky, and gave a maniacal laugh.
“You fooled me again!” he screamed, and in his voice I could hear every torment known to man. “Well done! Yes! Well done!” He slammed his hands against the ice and his shoulders shook. I thought he must be weeping. I wanted to shout for him again, but I didn’t want to cause the same reaction. He was obviously hurting himself.
But I couldn’t help it.
It was him.
“Adam!” I shouted, looking frantically around for another way across the ice. I took a few steps back, slid to my right ten or fifteen yards, and walked forward again tenderly, leading with my toes. The ice was turning to fire under my feet. But when I had walked the same distance forward, the ice groaned and split.
“No,” I groaned. “Adam!”
Immediately I wished I hadn’t called for him again—my voice seemed to be making him crazy with agony. He struck his forehead on the ground in front of him. He screamed. He grated his fingers along the rock.
I felt it before I saw it, a blur of movement to my left, coming out of the trees. Lucia ran across the ice, and as she did, a word erupted from her. It seemed to have the force of all the gathered words she had held in.
“Daddy!”
I caught my breath. I stopped blinking. The world spun.
Lucia, running toward Adam, was shouting “Daddy!” over and over again.
My throat swelled and I knew it was true. Maybe I had known the first time I saw her, recognized something in her eyes or the way she looked at me or how she pushed her hair away in some familiar gesture of Adam’s.
“Lucia!” I shouted, trying to warn her. “The ice!”
But she didn’t stop. She only glanced at me and sprang from side to side, here and there. In some places I could tell the ice had split under her while in others it remained flat and firm. She didn’t run straight but seemed to follow some pattern. Maybe she could see where the ice was thicker. Maybe a shallow place ran from where she had emerged out to the small island where Adam knelt. Or maybe she was simply lucky.
I watched the knapsack sway and bounce on her back, the precious knapsack holding the last of our water. And the key.
She arrived at Adam’s rock, clambered up, and sat quietly beside him. He did not look up. I wondered if he could see her. Maybe he thought she was simply another in a long line of hallucinations. She studied him, her head tilting to the side, then she reached out a hand and, with the gentlest touch of her index finger, lifted his chin so that his eyes rose to hers. They were like a precious statue, the father on his knees, the daughter lifting his face so that he could see her.
Even from where I was, I could see him begin to tremble, first in the weakness of his arms, and after that his hips, and eventually his whole body. Lucia lifted her other hand and held his face, her tenderness propping him up. She leaned forward and kissed his forehead.
The ice under my feet cracked further, and I shifted back and away from Adam’s rock, alarmed at the distance growing between us. I stared down at the ice to see if things were stabilizing, but hairline fractures were still forming, so I took a few more steps back. When I looked back up, Lucia was taking off the knapsack and placing it on the rock. She took out the water and funneled some into Adam’s mouth. I worried about how much she was giving him and if we’d have enough to get us back out.
Adam drank, sat back on his haunches, and stared at her as if she was a vision come to life. He said a few words I couldn’t hear, and she leaned forward and hugged him, even in his wretchedness, his filth. This time his shoulders trembled, but in sobs. He kept leaning his head back and looking at her in amazement, then embracing her again.
The water under me churned, which was strange because I hadn’t moved. I looked out over the black expanse of ice, and it all seemed to vibrate as if in an earthquake. The ice trembled. Some distance off, at the edge of what I could see, a large piece of ice broke from the rest and stood up on end. The whole earth seemed to groan.
“Lucia!” I shouted. “The ice!”
We must have realized it at the same time: this was not a lake we were on but a river, one so massive I couldn’t see the far bank. The water beneath us was moving, and the ice was beginning to break up. The sound of it was like the splitting of the mountain. I became more and more frantic as the seconds passed, as the river moaned, as the ice fractured.
“Hurry!” I screamed, my voice as broken as the river, and yet still they remained on the rock. I could tell she was pleading with him, and he was shaking his head, his long black hair swaying in pendulum movements. She wept, she pleaded, she hugged him, and still he remained, sitting back on his heels, refusing to move.
She pointed across the ice. He looked at me. Our gazes locked, there at the bottom of the abyss, with the world collapsing around us. I wanted to shout to him to get moving. I wanted to raise my hands and gesture wildly for him to hurry, the ice was breaking, this was his chance. I wanted to get on my knees and plead. But all I did was stand there, my shoulders slumped.
I had caused this. He was here because of me, because I had forced him to fly that day, because I was more concerned with my own reputation and possessions than anything else. I wondered if he had somehow discovered that it was my fault, that the accident never would have happened without my insistence that he get out of bed that morning and fly the plane.
He stood. Lucia was tiny next to him, but strong. He leaned on her and they climbed gingerly down the shallow side of the rock and began making their way across the ice. She ran ahead, I guess because their weight together would have been too much, and beckoned to him. As they grew closer, I could hear her voice encouraging him, pleading with him to keep coming, telling him he could do it. He followed her, barely able to walk, sometimes falling to his knees. At one point his legs went through the ice, and he sprawled forward, spreading out his weight, inching himself forward.
It started snowing again. Lucia arrived to me before he did, and we backed up, hoping to find thicker ice or shallower water farther back toward the trees. Still he kept coming. Now he could walk, his bare feet white on the ice. I was shaking with cold but also warm from the exertion, the stress, the emotion.
There he was, standing in front of me. Could it be true? I waited for him to evaporate, a mirage. I had waited so long for this moment.
He wouldn’t look directly at me. His eyes flitted here and there, nervous and unstable, and I understood why Lucia had reached out and taken his chin in her hands, directing his uncontrolled glances. But I waited, and eventually our eyes met.
“Adam,” I said, my voice shattered, miniscule, lost.
For a moment I thought I was truly looking at myself, another version of me, one that had never made it out of this place but had withered away here at the bottom for endless years, endless decades, tortured by all the wrong I had done. It should have been me. All along, it should have been me.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and his gaze sharpened, but he said nothing. “I’m sorry,” I said again, and I put my hands on his shoulders as if I was going to shake him. He seemed so lost.
“The knapsack,” Lucia whispered, her voice barely registering in the midst of the river’s chaos and my overflowing emotions.
“What?”
She didn’t answer. She sprinted back onto the ice that continued to break up, clashing against itself, upending in sharp angles and shards.
“Lucia!” I shouted.
Adam, too weak to continue in the midst of everything, fell to his knees and broke through the ice. The ice around my own feet followed, and I plunged through. For a moment we clawed at each other, trying desperately to rise. The water was dark underneath the ice, and in a panic I lost my sense of up and down. But it was shallow there where we stood close to the trees, and my hands soon found the muddy bottom. I pushed off, up, and burst through the surface.
My brother had already pulled himself to safety and crawled the rest of the way to the trees. He sat there, his back against a trunk that resembled a forlorn mother with branches reaching down like arms. The trees’ shadows were darker then, like bottomless ditches. I pulled myself aching and frozen from the water. How long could we survive, wet as we were, hungry as we were, cold as we were? I gathered myself on all fours and the ice creaked. I didn’t think I had the strength for another submersion.
I crawled along a line where I thought I would be safe, looking toward Adam’s rock for Lucia, wishing she would show herself. I choked back tears at the thought of losing her there, in that lowest of places. Just when I gave up, she appeared, coming up out of the icy water, gripping the rock, pulling herself up. She lifted the knapsack and started to put it over her shoulder but stopped. She stared at it. She peered through the darkness and spotted me.
Freed from its icy bonds, the river flowed faster than before, and the flat spaces of ice had become bobbing, miniature glaciers sliding away. Lucia seemed to gather her courage. She jumped from one floating ice island to the next. She vanished into the water, then pulled herself up again, crawling onto a slowly spinning slab. She was swept toward me briefly, jostled by other moving pieces of ice. She prepared herself to make another running leap, had second thoughts. Her face was sad. Her lips were a straight line. All around us was the sound of ice colliding, cracking, creaking.
She threw the knapsack hard in my direction, her arm a slingshot, and I crawled toward the spot where it landed, on ice in shallow water. I grabbed it, and a wave of relief washed over me so that I almost felt warm again. I looked at her, a smile on my face. She gave me a thumbs-up. Throwing the knapsack had knocked her to her knees, and she paused there for a moment on all fours. She tried to smile, but I could tell she was afraid.
Then the ice she was on tipped up at one end. She slid toward the other edge, bracing herself, clawing for something to hold on to.
“Lucia!”
She went under, and I lost sight of her.