The Edge of Everything (Untitled #1)(6)

Zoe should have been excited at the discovery, but she felt terror wash through her instead. Whatever it was up there in the snow, it wasn’t moving.

She didn’t want to get any closer. She didn’t want to know what it was.

She didn’t want it to be her brother.

It took months to walk the next 15 feet. And even when Zoe was only a few steps away—even when the flashlight was shining right at it, bathing it in a sickly yellow light—she couldn’t figure out what it was. Her mind refused to take it in, refused to record it.

She forced herself forward. She hovered over it. She peered down. It was a dark, tangled mass. It looked lifeless and still. Zoe held her breath and willed her eyes to focus.

It was the dogs.

Since they were both black Labs, you couldn’t tell where Spock’s fur ended and Uhura’s began: they looked like a dark rug flung onto the snow. Zoe knelt down. They’d dug a shallow pit to shield themselves from the wind. She took off a glove and laid a hand on one, then the other.

They were breathing! Something that felt like birds’ wings flapped around in her heart.

The dogs were groggy, halfway between sleep and something worse. It took them a minute to notice that she was rubbing their bellies. Eventually, they began shifting in their icy bed. Spock snorted and sent a puff of fog into the air. Uhura craned her head in Zoe’s direction. She seemed to recognize her and to be grateful she was there. Zoe felt too wrung out to cry or she would have.

Spock and Uhura wriggled some more, trying to wake themselves up. And as their bodies untangled and parted, as they became two distinct animals again, she finally saw something she should have seen immediately, and what she saw made her hate herself for ever thinking they were idiot dogs. They were beautiful dogs! They were brave and glossy and gorgeous Montana dogs!

Because they were lying on something. On someone. They had dug a pit with their paws and pulled him into it—she could see where their teeth had torn his green hoodie—and then lain down on top of him. On top of Jonah. They had lain down on her brother to keep him warm.





two


Jonah was stiff as a mannequin.

Zoe wrapped him in his coat. She blew on his frozen fingers to heat them, though she could barely force any breath out of her body. And she took him up in her arms. She figured she’d have to go back for Spock and Uhura but they shook themselves off and waddled like ancient snow creatures out of the pit. Spock whined. He couldn’t believe what he was being asked to do. Uhura snapped at him, as if to say, “Get over it!”

And then Zoe ran. Through the dead trees, toward Bert and Betty’s. She draped Jonah over both arms and when her arms felt like they’d snap, she heaved him over one shoulder, and when it felt like that shoulder would break, she heaved him over the other. She was shaking too hard to aim the flashlight, so the beam bounced crazily in front of her. It was a miracle that she didn’t smash into a tree and bust both their heads. She was like an animal running. Her heart was pounding, not just in her rib cage but in her ears—loud, like someone drumming on a bucket.

The joke was, she was probably going a tenth of a mile an hour, staggering through the snow like a drunken yeti. But she was getting there. She was covering ground. When she could finally see Bert and Betty’s house through the trees, she totally lost it and cried. Even the dogs barked with something like happiness. Actually, Uhura sounded happy, and Spock sounded like he was yipping, “Are we there yet?”

Zoe laughed, and whispered to Jonah, “Oh my god, Spock is such a wuss.” He was too out of it to reply, but she could feel his little-boy body breathing against her chest—a wheezy but unmistakable in and out, in and out—and that was answer enough.



Bert and Betty’s house looked like a capital A. It stood about 200 feet back from the lake, on a couple of acres of land that had been spared by the fire way back when, even though the flames swirled around it. The skies were black and the blizzard had begun to die by the time Zoe got to the front steps with Jonah wriggling in her arms. The door was unlocked. That should have seemed strange—the police had sealed the place up and Zoe’s mom checked on it every few days—but her brain couldn’t absorb the information. It just kept pinging with the word shelter, shelter, shelter.

Zoe held the door open for Spock and Uhura, but they hesitated on the steps. They’d never been allowed in the house.

“Go,” was all she had the energy to say.

They looked at each other, then scrambled inside.

The flashlight had died so she felt her way to the living room in the dark, and laid Jonah on a couch. She covered him with blankets, cushions, even an antique wedding quilt she pulled off the wall. He said one feverish word (“Me?”) then fell into sleep like a stone thrown in a well.

Zoe reached for a lamp but the electricity had been shut off. The heat, too. And probably the water and phone. But she didn’t care. She lit some candles around the room, which was all they needed.The house was so much warmer than the woods that the couch might as well have been a hammock on a beach. And they’d made it. They’d made it. Now that she had set Jonah down her arms were so light they floated.

There was a spiral rag rug on the floor. She picked it up, shook some dirt out of it, and wrapped it around her like a cape. It was scratchy and stiff, but she didn’t care. There was a smell in the room that shouldn’t have been there—cigarettes—but she told herself she didn’t care about that either. She noticed a scuzzy-looking sleeping bag bunched up in front of the fireplace like dead skin a snake had sloughed off. It shouldn’t have been there. And there was a collection of empty booze bottles, all different kinds, making a miniature skyline on the floor. They shouldn’t have been there. She didn’t care, didn’t care, didn’t care.