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“I mean . . . this isn’t, like, Christmasland, right?”

“No,” she said. “It’s the doorway. He probably doesn’t need to come here to cross over, but it’s easiest for him here.”

Angels held trumpets to their lips, drifted and swayed in the flecks of snow.

“Your doorway—” he said. “The bridge. It’s gone. It was gone by the time we hit the bottom of the slope.”

“I can get it back when I need it,” she said.

“I wish we could’ve brought those cops through with us. Led ’em right across. Maybe they could’ve pointed all those guns at the right guy.”

She said, “I think the less weight put on the bridge, the better. It’s an avenue of last resort. I didn’t even want to bring you across.”

“Well. I’m here now.” He still held a glossy package of ANFO in one hand. He slipped it gently back in with the others and hefted the backpack. “What’s the plan now?”

She said, “The first part of the plan is that you give those to me.” She took one strap of the backpack. He stared at her for a moment, the pack between them, not sure he ought to allow her to have it, then let go. He had what he wanted; he was here now, and no way she could get rid of him. She hooked it over her shoulder.

“The second part of the plan—” she started, then turned her head and looked toward the highway.

A car slid along through the night, the light of its headlamps stammering through the trunks of the pines, casting absurdly long shadows across the gravel drive. It slowed as it approached the turnoff toward the house. Lou felt a dull throb of pain behind his left ear. The snow fell in fat goose-feather flakes, beginning to collect on the dirt road.

“Jesus,” Lou said, and he hardly recognized his own strained voice. “It’s him. We aren’t ready.”

“Get back here,” Vic said.

She grabbed him by the sleeve and backpedaled, walking him across the carpet of dry, dead leaves and pine needles. The two of them slipped into a stand of birch trees. For the first time, Lou noticed their breath smoking in the moonlit-silvered night.

The Rolls-Royce Wraith turned onto the long gravel road. A reflection of the bone-colored moon floated on the windshield, caught in a cat’s cradle of black branches.

They watched it make its stately approach. Lou felt his thick legs trembling. I just need to be brave for a little while longer, he thought. Lou believed with all his heart in God, had believed since he was a kid and saw George Burns in Oh, God! on video. He sent up a mental prayer to skinny, wrinkled George Burns now: Please. I was brave once, let me be brave again. Let me be brave for Wayne and Vic. I’m going to die anyway, so let me die the right way. It came to him then that he had wanted this, had often daydreamed of it: a final chance to show he could lay aside fear and do the thing that needed to be done. His big chance had come at last.

The Rolls-Royce rolled past them, tires crunching on the gravel. It seemed to slow as it came abreast of them, not fifteen feet off, as if the driver had seen them and was peering out at them. But the car did not stop, merely proceeded on its unhurried way.

“The second part?” Lou breathed, aware of his pulse rapping painfully in his throat. Christ, he hoped he didn’t stroke out until it was all over.

“What?” Vic asked, watching the car.

“What was the second part of the plan?” he asked.

“Oh,” she said, and took the other bracelet of his handcuffs and locked it around the narrow trunk of a birch tree. “The second part is you stay here.”





In the Trees


ON LOU’S SWEET, ROUND, BRISTLY FACE WAS THE LOOK OF A CHILD who has just seen a car back over his favorite toy. Tears sprang to his eyes, the brightest thing in the dark. It distressed her to see him nearly crying, to see his shock and disappointment, but the sound of the handcuff snapping shut—that sharp, clear click, echoing on the frozen air—was the sound of a final decision, a choice made and irreversible.

“Lou,” she whispered, and put a hand on his face. “Lou, don’t cry. It’s all right.”

“I don’t want you to go alone,” he said. “I wanted to be there for you. I said I would be there for you.”

“You were,” she said. “You still will be. You’re with me wherever I go: You’re part of my inscape.” She kissed his mouth, tasted tears, but did not know if they were his or her own. She pulled back from him and said, “One way or another, Wayne is walking away tonight, and if I’m not with him, he’s going to need you.”

He blinked rapidly, weeping without shame. He did not struggle at the cuffs. The birch was perhaps eight inches thick and thirty feet high. The bracelet of the cuff barely fit around it. He stared at her with a look of grief and bewilderment. He opened his mouth but couldn’t seem to find any words.

The Wraith pulled up to the right of the blasted ruin, alongside the single standing wall. It stopped there, idling. Vic looked toward it. In the distance she could hear Burl Ives.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

She reached down past the cuff to finger the paper hoop around his wrist; the one they had given him in the hospital, the one she had seen back in her father’s house.

“What’s this, Lou?” she asked.