Ransacked. The word dragged down his spine like the tip of a dagger. Just inside the door a large bookcase had been tipped over and lay partially blocking the entryway. Books jumbled on the floor around it. Peering past the corner of the front closet, he saw a small living room and the open doorway to a cluttered kitchen. A lamp burned on an end table, but otherwise the house was dark. The couch had been pulled away from the far wall and the contents of two large cardboard file boxes dumped on the coffee table. Manila folders and loose papers fluttering in the breeze.
Matthew knew he should get out of there, grab his phone from the car, and call the police. He’d half turned back toward the open door when he noticed the bits of flattened snow spread across the rug. Small, diamond-shaped chunks that looked like they’d fallen from the tread of someone’s boots. A part of his trained soldier brain was still alive inside him and it kicked on, slipping back into combat focus. Whoever had trashed the house had done it recently. It was possible the intruder was still lurking somewhere inside. The thought should have scared him. Instead it pushed him forward, stepping over the bookcase and into the room.
He followed the trail of snow to the kitchen, where the house’s sliding back door stood half open on its runners. His mind said: Escape hatch. A few cabinet drawers had been pulled loose, silverware and dishes all over the linoleum floor. Matthew stooped to retrieve a large chef’s knife and noted that this part of the house looked as if it had been tossed in a rush. Most of the intruder’s attention had been paid to the living room.
The knife was dull and flimsy but he carried it to the back hallway, seeing no snow on the carpet there. The two doors—bathroom and bedroom, he guessed—were shut. Everything looked dry and undisturbed. When he was sure the rest of the house was quiet his pulse eased back to normal and he returned to the kitchen. There was an old rotary phone on the far wall and he stepped through the pots and pans to pick it up, trying to decide if he should dial 911 or call the landlords.
A blur of motion caught his eye through the open yawn of the sliding door. A figure dressed all in black was making its way across the frozen river, already halfway and clamoring as fast as it dared on the ice. It was too far to gauge the person’s height or even tell if it was a man or woman, but from the way it moved Matthew knew it wasn’t a skier or fisherman. Before he knew it, he was into the yard, following a fresh set of diamond-tread boot prints past the porch swing to the river embankment. His own new hiking boots felt good on his feet, but he slipped going down the incline, skittering a few yards on his ass before pulling himself upright. He got to the river’s edge just as the figure reached the opposite bank and started up the mountain. In a few seconds he would lose sight of the person in the thick stands of ponderosa pine and Douglas fir.
“Hey!” he shouted, feeling foolish, but not knowing what else to do. His voice echoed off the cliffs as the figure spun around, pausing when it saw Matthew standing seventy-five yards away with the knife in his hand. Whoever it was wore tight-fitting winter sports gear, a dark hat, and a balaclava that covered everything but the eyes. It could’ve been an hour, maybe just a heartbeat, that they stood staring at each other, before the figure broke off and ran into the trees.
Matthew’s gaze followed, noticing for the first time a new housing development halfway up the mountain. He saw no lights on and realized the condos there were still under construction. Installation decals on the windows, one panel of bare Tyvek yet to be covered on an exterior wall. No one lived there yet. After the short climb from the riverbank the figure could cut through the complex’s parking lot to the highway without anyone seeing. There might be someone waiting there, or a car stashed on one of the turnoffs from the main road. The rational part of Matthew’s brain knew he couldn’t catch the intruder now that they were gone from view. Still, he started out onto the ice, cupping his hands to his lips as if he might call out again.
He’d taken two experimental steps before he realized he’d made a mistake. The ice here was covered by a layer of slush that had begun to eat away at it. If he’d looked first or tested it with his weight, he would have noticed it was thin and lighter in color than on the rest of the river. But in his rush he stepped out thoughtlessly, not seeing he’d chosen the wrong place until it gave way beneath him like a trapdoor.
The sound of the ice breaking was no louder than a snap of his fingers. He dropped four feet into the frigid river. The cold shocked him stiff, every bone in his body trying to jump out through his skin. He bobbed to the surface once, sucking a breath before the current took him under again. He slipped beneath a shelf of ice, eyes shocked wide, briny green water filling his nose. The knife fell from his hand and brushed downriver like a silvery fish. Through the murky water he saw the underside of the ice tumble by overhead, the dim light of day behind it. He imagined the river pulling him all the way out into the frigid lake. In just a few minutes, he would be dead. His body would drift along the lake floor, food for fish and frogs until the spring thaw. Eventually, some fishermen would find him tangled in a beaver dam or a group of kids would discover him bloated and bobbing at the bottom of a swimming hole.
Then the gray sky reopened above him. He came up for air in a slush-filled eddy, gasping, just his head and shoulders above water. It felt like he’d been under for an hour, but he saw in an instant the current had only dragged him fifteen feet downstream. He could still see his dad’s house at the top of the embankment. An air-raid horn went off in his ears, blasting one word: SWIM. He stretched and kicked, his lungs on fire, the animal instinct to save himself sizzling like a live wire. He took two perfect strokes, swinging his arms overhead like some forgotten swim coach must have taught him twenty years ago. His muscles uncoiled as his fingers cut the current, tapping into strength in his core and low back he didn’t know he had.
He was still close to shore. The water around him wasn’t deep. In less than three seconds he’d propelled himself to the bank and with a lunge managed to hook a hand over the tip of a rock. The river ripped against his grip, the rock’s sharp edge cutting into skin, but he held on. Belly down, he swung his other hand over the rock and hauled himself inch by inch out of the water.
The second wave of cold didn’t hit him until he collapsed in the dirt. He coughed up stringy drool, a rotten, fishy taste in his mouth. He saw the skin of his fingers, white and nearly dead, felt his hair plastered to his face. The army part of him took over again, recognizing the all-over ache that came before hypothermia. He had been in the water less than ten seconds, but it could still kill him. He got to his feet and struggled up the bank on dead legs, tearing off his soaked jacket and shirt and leaving them at the top of the hill. He stripped the rest of the way once he was back inside the house—boots and socks squishing on the kitchen floor, pants stuck so hard to his body that he had to sit down and use both hands to pull them off. He ran nude to the living room and pulled a wool blanket from the front closet to drape around his shoulders. In the bathroom, he pulled towels from cabinets and dried his head, chest, arms, and legs. Cranking the thermostat, he squatted over a baseboard vent and let warm air blow up under the blanket. Pressing his forehead to the wainscoting until the feeling returned to his body.
Back in the kitchen with his hand on the phone, he paused, still naked under the blanket. His pants and boots leaked pungent river water on the floor by the door. His shirt and jacket were still in a heap at the edge of the yard. Securing the blanket with one hand, he carried his pants to the bathroom and tossed them over the shower rod to dry. He leaned his boots against the vent but knew he would need to find something to wear before he could venture outside for the rest of his clothes. Stepping out of the bathroom, he took another long look down the hall before walking to the end and turning the knob on the remaining closed door.
The door led to a rear bedroom, where a large square of carpet had been cut away down to the subflooring. A dark stain covered the exposed plywood. The landlords must have called in a specialized cleanup company after his dad’s suicide. The mess had been scrubbed almost away, but blood had soaked into the surface of the wooden sheeting in ways that would never totally come up. Matthew sank to his knees, letting the blanket pool around him like a cape. He reached out to touch the stain, passing his fingers over the texture of the plywood, smelling the reek of bleach and citrusy cleanser. He closed his eyes and for the hundredth time since the cop had told him the news, tried to conjure an image of his dad’s face. It wouldn’t come. The search for any memory came up blank. He wanted to cry. He willed himself to break down, to collapse on the floor and scream himself hoarse, hot tears burning his face—but he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t focus. His thoughts ran like water in every direction. “Come on,” he said out loud, knowing no one else was there to hear him. “Cry, damn it. Just cry.”
He was kneeling in the spot where his dad had killed himself. Under the blanket he was naked and cold, his skin still prickling from the river, but he couldn’t shed a tear. It was just like in the car after the neurologist had diagnosed his brain injury—when his mom had started crying and all he could do was sit there feeling relieved. Now all he felt was dumb fury: Anger at whoever had broken into the house. Anger at himself for not being able to remember his dad. He took a deep breath and opened his eyes, noticing for the first time the relative order of the bedroom compared to the rest of the house. It confirmed his suspicion that the intruder hadn’t made it this far inside. He imagined the person in the middle of trashing the place when the rental car turned into the driveway. Whoever it was must have seen him coming and run for the back door.
The bed was stripped to the mattress, but there were clothes in the dresser, shirts hanging in the closet. He picked out a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, both too big for him, smelling of tobacco and sandalwood soap. He took a flannel shirt off a hanger and was buttoning it up when he noticed the long document box on the floor at the back of the closet. This one was still full. He lugged it to the middle of the room. It was stuffed with composition notebooks and loose-leaf pages, all filled with a man’s tiny, squarish handwriting. He saw stumpy lines of poetry, places that were underlined, scribbled over, whole pages crossed out. Nearly an entire box of unpublished poems, most without a date or name listed anywhere. There were also a few five-year-old bank and credit-card statements. He looked at them long enough to see his dad’s accounts had been running on empty even then and set them aside for later.
At the back of the box was a tattered flap of newsprint, folded lengthwise and taller than the rest. Matthew pulled it out, the paper feeling soft as tissue in his hands. Spreading it open, he felt a crackle of electricity as he saw the headline that ran across the top: NORTHSIDE STORE LOST TO FIRE. Underneath was a black-and-white photograph, smudged and dotted with fingerprints, showing a crowd of police and firefighters standing around the burned remains of a building. Neighbors loitered in the back of the frame. It reminded him of the scene at the house fire the night before, but of course it wasn’t the same. As his eyes fixed on the photo, he had the sense of his mind detaching from the moment and drifting through the darkness of his past. A door seemed to open, a crack of light widening into a summer afternoon.
And then he started to remember.