THE SNOW WHIPPED PAST THE CAR WINDOW LIKE TELEVI-sion static. It fell so fast that the highway was covered with an inch of filthy slush despite the traffic. Cars crept along as eighteen-wheelers blew past without regard. His car handled well in the snow, despite the slush. In front of John, the Thruway stretched away into the dark static while the frosted landscape blurred past at the edge of his headlights. In the distance, separated from the highway by a field and hazy snow, trees reached like black lighting from the ground to the sky.
Trees were critical to his plan. He didn’t want to be in sight of the highway. A drift underneath some trees could hide a body for a long period. It would be quiet, restful maybe. The trees closed in on the road as the mountains swelled and receded around him. Not the peaks of the Rockies, but the Adirondacks or Catskills or whatever would have to serve. A low-gas warning lit on his dashboard. He drove another five miles, swerving once to avoid a compact that a passing truck nearly blew off the road.
The trees hugged the highway now. The snow still fell in light, airy flakes. The weather reports on the radio said that the snow would fall overnight and into the next day. Temperatures were not expected to rise above freezing for at least another week.
He figured that he had gone as far as he could go and pulled over, deep into the shoulder. Getting hit by a passing truck would be effective, but he didn’t want to hang that guilt on some poor driver. He turned the car off, took a deep breath, and waited. With the weather and the darkness, the few cars on the highway in either direction drifted past in cones of spectral white light.
The snow and cold would preserve his body until it melted. He figured it would be in decent shape when discovered, but what did he know? The idea that it would freeze was oddly comforting to him. Imagining it as a piece of frozen steak helped him disassociate from it. When it was discovered, it probably wouldn’t be badly decomposed, if at all. He might be recognizable. Finally, lying down in the snow felt more appropriate than abandoning himself to some river or leaving a bloody mess somewhere. Like he’d left Jessica.
He’d avoided thinking about that night the best he could, like a rancid smell he could ignore, but it hung on him, reasserting itself whenever a whiff of fresh air passed through. He’d never be free of it. It would cling to his family, too, if he didn’t leave with it. Even though he knew, based on the autopsy, that she must have been dead when he returned to the apartment, that she couldn’t have been saved even if he’d been standing there when she was stabbed, she wouldn’t have been there but for him. He could have stopped their fall any number of times before that night, but he wanted it. Only she had hit the ground. He couldn’t make up for that, but he could make it even.
He took a final look around. A pair of lights floated toward him, but they wouldn’t see him this far over on the other side of the highway. He grabbed the bottle of scotch he’d purchased before leaving Manhattan from the passenger seat. The cold washed over him as he got out. The snow was five inches deep on the shoulder, cresting over the lip of his shoe and touching the cuff of his pants. He needed to commit before he could reconsider. He walked away from the road, peeling the wrapping from the top of the bottle as he went.
The snow was deeper in the trees. He hadn’t anticipated that, but there had been snow the prior week. It melted on the road, but not here. With each step, he crunched through a crust of old snow beneath airy, fresh powder. He pulled the top from the bottle, enjoying the feel of the cork sliding free of the glass neck. He took a few quick sips from the bottle—enough to acclimate his throat to the burn and prepare it for the swigs he planned to take as he worked his way deeper into the trees.
He drank a quarter of the bottle before the melting snow soaked his socks and feet. He shivered but didn’t feel too cold. When his resolve faltered, he told himself that it was fate. If he was meant to continue fighting, he’d see the lights of a house or stumble across a road as a car passed. If not, then he was simply completing the choice he’d made in his office standing at his window with Jessica.
Snow drifted down through the windless air. His breath blasted out two to three feet in front of him, strikingly visible. Snowflakes landed upon the icy rind on his jacket without melting. They crusted on his hair. He climbed a rise but could no longer see or hear the highway below and behind him through the trees. He stood for a moment, catching his breath and taking heavier pulls from the bottle.
Maybe Jane and the kids would find the letters he’d hidden. Three days ago, the thought would have terrified him. He’d considered burning them all over the past year, but instead kept adding pages. More fuel, he told himself. More of himself to turn into flame and ash when the time was right. Standing in the trees, though, shaking in the snow, he was relieved he’d left them. The truest parts of himself remained on those pages.
The world around him was naked and clean. The snow fell to his lips, and he loved the taste of it. Only the white noise of the flakes coming to rest in the woods reached his ears. He no longer shivered, but his feet were numb, and his fingers hurt. The slightest breeze touched the trees above him, shaking loose the accumulated snow, which fell to the earth with hollow thuds. He laughed but stopped immediately. The sound of his voice in the woods was unnerving.
A few minutes later, he crested the small rise, coming over into the wind. It blasted him as he came over a slight fold, tearing at his chapped skin. He considered returning to the pacific side of the ridge, but there was no going back, only forward. He swayed, slightly nauseated; the snow hurling past his face gave the impression of motion. He needed to finish the bottle to be sure, but he didn’t want it anywhere near him when he stopped. He drank the final quarter of the bottle in one long pull, telling himself he could move out of the wind once he finished. He threw the bottle to one side. It clinked off a tree and impacted the ground with a hollow whumpf somewhere in the darkness.
Throwing the bottle pulled him to the side, and his legs shook as he regained his balance. He wouldn’t make it much farther.
He started down the far side of the ridge. On this side, his legs plunged into the snow nearly up to his knees as he walked. The time between his steps stretched as it took greater effort to focus through the haze of scotch, fatigue, and numbness. He didn’t know if he was ten feet or eighty yards from the top—he’d lost track of how many steps he’d taken.
He took two steps forward before stumbling on numb legs and sprawling forward into a deep drift. He’d fallen off a small hump hidden by the snow collecting against it, pooling, rising. When he regained his footing, he stood waist-deep in the drift. This was the place, and even if it wasn’t, he couldn’t go any farther.
He dug at the snow underneath him to make a comfortable space in the drift.
He’d imagined that, walking into the woods, he’d be at peace knowing that he’d freed his family from the specter of the man he’d become. But, as he reclined against the rise behind him, it felt like they were dying and that he would live forever with the grief he carried.
The small hollow brought him out of the wind, but it soon pushed snow up and over him. He lay for a long time, staring up at the trees and branches covered with snow and ice, fracturing the dark sky above him, his sorrow fading as he fought to cling to fleeting thoughts of Jane (her eyes, at their wedding, sharing all their secrets for once), Brennan (the squeak of her tiny voice trying to wake him in the morning), and Hunter (an infant, napping on his chest, tiny breaths fluttering across his neck).