The Edge of Everything (Untitled #1)(15)

Nearby, there was a fat paperback lying open on a chair—a time-travel romance about a guy in a kilt. Its pages fluttered like overgrown grass in the wind. Her mother must have sat watching them for hours. She had also bandaged the cut on Zoe’s forehead—she’d been in med school just long enough to learn to administer excellent first aid.

Zoe shone the flashlight over Jonah. His cheeks, which had been chapped by the wind, were glistening with aloe now, and his fingertips had been individually wrapped. For a moment, the light came too close to his eyes. He winced but kept on sleeping. One thing about her brother: he slept fiercely. He would sweat through his T-shirts—he was wearing one now that said I Do My Own Stunts—and make such an indignant harrumph of an expression that it always cracked her up. What was he mad at? Who was he fighting, or protecting, in his dreams?

As Zoe shifted in bed, she felt something tug at her leg. She peeled back the comforter and sheet. Jonah must have been afraid that she’d sneak out of the room without telling him, so—as a kind of alarm system—he had tied a skateboard to her ankle with yarn. When he was scared, he hated waking up alone. It made him feel wobbly inside, he said.

Gazing down at her brother now, Zoe felt competing waves of guilt and relief and fear and love. He was curled against her in a crescent like a baby deer. Look at him, she thought. She untied the skateboard from her ankle and tied it to his own. Tag, you’re it.

Downstairs one of the men broke a glass on the countertop.

It nearly woke Jonah. Zoe flushed with anger, and shot off a text to her mother.

It said only: Who??

The moment she sent it, she heard her mother push her chair back from the kitchen table and bound up the stairs. After everything that had happened in the blizzard, the sound of her mother rushing to her was so comforting that Zoe’s anger dissipated in an instant and—before she even realized she was in danger of it—she started to cry.



Her mother pushed open the door of the bedroom and then closed it behind her, so that the wedge of light made the trophies along the wall gleam briefly and then go out. Zoe didn’t want her mother to know how upset she was. She did what she always did in moments of uncertainty, she blurted something random: “So, you back from the store?”

Her mother laughed.

“I am,” she said. “Anything happen around here?”

One of the things that Zoe loved most about her mother was that the woman understood her jokes even when they were totally bizarre. Very often they were the only people in the room laughing, while everyone else fidgeted uncomfortably. Not even her father—when he was alive and when he was around—had really understood Zoe’s sense of humor.

“There’s a stowaway in here with me,” Zoe said, nodding toward Jonah. “We have to whisper.”

“I can do that,” her mother said.

She came to kneel by the bed.

Zoe could just barely make out the outline of her mom’s face in the darkness. Neither of them spoke. The lightness of the moment drained away.

“Is Jonah gonna be okay?” said Zoe.

“Frostbite-wise, yes, he’ll be fine,” her mother said. “But he seems pretty traumatized by whatever you went through.” She paused, and her voice softened. “Can you tell me what happened?”

Zoe searched for an answer that would sound remotely sane. Downstairs, one of the men turned off the Eastern chanting. The other men let out grunts of relief and applauded.

“Who’s down there?” said Zoe.

“That’s not important right now,” her mother said. “But apparently they’re not Buddhists.”

She waited for Zoe to answer the question still hovering in the air.

“Talk to me,” she said.

Zoe’s instinct was always to tell her mother everything, and she wished she could pour out every crazy, hallucinogenic detail about the lake glowing orange, about the movie of Stan’s sins—about X. But what could she say about him? What did she even know apart from the fact that he radiated loneliness? And that she’d been drawn to him.

She fought back the image of his face. She knew if she said too much, she’d make no sense at all.

“The short version,” Zoe said, “is that Jonah and the dogs went in the woods—and I let them.”

Her mother let a few moments go by, like she was waiting for a train to pass.

“Okay, look, I’m sorry to be pushy,” she said. “But I’m going to need a slightly longer version.”

“I can’t, Mom,” Zoe said. “Not yet.”

“Zo—”

“I mean, the longer version is that I suck and I almost got him killed.”

“Zoe, stop. Don’t do that to yourself.”

“All I keep thinking is that when Jonah wakes up, he’s going to look at me like I let him down. And I did. I let the little bug down.”

She shouldn’t have spoken at all. She began sobbing in that awful, hiccupy way. Her mother reached over Jonah to touch her face, but had trouble locating it in the darkness.

“I’m trying to stroke your cheek sweetly,” she said. “Is this your cheek? Am I stroking it sweetly?”

“No, that’s my forehead,” Zoe said. “And that is my nose.”

“Okay, well, picture me stroking your cheek,” her mother said.