Run

The front-page headlines stopped him as he ripped out a sheet—six-month-old bits of news about the war, political infighting, Wall Street, the death of a young celebrity.

“What’s with the blankets over the windows?” he asked as he balled up the sports page and hoisted the first log onto the pyre.

“So our fire won’t be visible.”

Two more logs and then he struck a match, held it to the newsprint.

Jack lay in bed watching fireshadows move across the walls of the living room. Warm under the blanket. Hungry but content.

“We can’t have fires like this anymore,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“When we don’t need them. The winter here is going to be awful. We should save the firewood for blizzards. Nights when it goes below zero. I’m going to have to cut a hell of a lot more wood.”

“So you want to stay?”

“If we can get the food situation under control.”

“I don’t know, Jack.”

“What? You’d rather go back out into what we just escaped?”

“No, but we’ll starve to death here.”

“Not with a seasoned outdoorsman like me taking care of things.”

A tremor of laughter moved through her.

“You noticed any changes in Cole?” he asked.

“No. Why? What makes you ask that?”

“That man in the desert—the one you shot when he came after me? He and his wife had been camping with another couple. They saw the lights. The other couple slept through them. Afterward, they murdered their friends.”

“What does this have to do with my son?”

“You, me, and Naomi, we slept through the aurora. Cole spent the night at Alex’s. Their family went out to the baseball field with the neighborhood and watched. Remember him telling us about it the next day?”

Dee was quiet for a long time.

Jack could see the embers in the fireplace and he could hear his daughter breathing.

“It doesn’t mean anything, Jack, what that man told you. He’s our son, for chrissake. You think he wants to hurt us?”

“I don’t know, but this is something we should be aware of. Today, I caught him staring at himself in the mirror. For a long time. It was weird. I don’t know what that was about, but—”

“We don’t know that any of what’s happening is connected to the lights. It’s total speculation.”

“I agree, but what if Cole changes? What if he becomes violent?”

“Jack, I’m just telling you, if it turns out. . .I want you to shoot me.”

“Dee—”

“I’m not kidding, not exaggerating, just telling you that I do not have it in me to handle that.”

“You have a daughter, too. You don’t have the luxury not to handle shit.”

“‘Should we kill our son if he becomes a threat?’ Is that the question you’re dancing around?”

“We have to talk about it, Dee. I don’t want it to happen and us have no idea what to do.”

“I think I already answered your question.”

“What?”

“I would rather die.”

“Me, too,” Jack said.

“So what are we saying?”

“We’re saying. . .we’re saying he’s our boy, and we stay together, no matter what.”

* * * * *

AT dawn, Jack crept out of bed and dressed in the dark, grabbed the shotgun leaning against the bedside table and took it with him out into the living room.

He unlocked the front door and stepped outside.

Freezing. A heavy frost on the grass.

The desert purple. Still black along the western fringe.

He walked across the meadow into the trees and sat down against the base of an aspen. Everything still. Everything he loved in that dark house across the way.

His breath steamed and he thought about his father and he thought about Reid, his best friend in the humanities department, and the pints they’d put down Thursday nights at Two Fools Tavern. The remembrance touched something so raw he disavowed it all, on the spot. Focused instead on the coming hours, and all the things he had to do, and the order in which he might do them. Nothing before this cabin mattered anymore, only the given day, and with this thought he cleared his mind and scanned the trees that rimmed the meadow, praying for an elk to emerge.

He took the chainsaw and felled aspen trees until lunch. His stitches held, so he fished the rest of the day, taking three cutthroats and a brook trout out of a section of the stream a quarter mile upslope that boasted an abundance of deep pools. The water clear where it passed over rock and green where the sun hit it. Black in the shadows.

In the late afternoon, Jack stood across the stream from Cole watching the boy float aspen leaves into a cascade. He reeled in and set his rod down and waded across. Climbed up onto the bank and sat down dripping in the leaves beside his son.

“How you doing, buddy?”

“Good.”

Cole pushed another leaf into the water and they watched the current take it.

“You like being here?” Jack asked.

“Yes.”

“I do, too.”

“These are my little boats, and they’re crashing in the waterfall.”

“Can I sail one?”

Cole offered a leaf, and Jack sent another golden ship to its death.

“Cole, remember the aurora you watched with Alex?”

“Yes.”

“I want to ask you something about it.”

“What?”

“Did you feel different after you saw it?”

“A little bit.”

“Like how?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you have strange thoughts toward your mom and your sister and me?”

The boy shrugged.

“You could tell me, you know. I want you to know that. You can always tell me anything. No matter what it is. No matter how bad you think it is.”

“I just wish you had seen the lights, too,” Cole said.

“Why is that?”

“They were real pretty. More than anything I ever saw.”

They drained the cooler as the sun dropped and carried it back to the cabin, fish flopping inside against the plastic.

Jack and Dee sat in rocking chairs on the front porch drinking ice cold bottles of Miller High Life from a case that had been left behind. They were watching great spirals of smoke swirl up into the sky sixty miles northwest near the base of Grand Teton.

“What’s burning out there?” Dee said.