The Overnight Guest(5)
Wylie didn’t like Tas much, and the feeling was mutual. They seemed to have come to the understanding that they would have to coexist for the time being.
She unlocked the front door, opening it just enough to let Tas out, and shut it behind him. Still, cold air, snow, and sleet found their way into the house, and Wylie shivered.
One minute passed, then two. Tas, not fond of the cold, was normally quick about doing his business and would scratch at the door to signal that he was ready to come back inside.
Wylie went to the window, but the panes were fogged over and lacquered with ice. She rubbed her eyes, gritty from staring too long at the grainy photos, and leaned her back against the door to wait. She wouldn’t be able to sleep until the sun rose.
The lights flickered, and Wylie’s heart flipped in panic. She stared at the lamp and held her breath, but the warm glow remained steady. She added more wood to the fire. If the power went out, the pipes could freeze, and she would have a real mess on her hands. Wylie opened the door a crack and peered out into a sea of white, but there was no Tas.
“Tas!” she called out into the dark. “Here!” The rain had transformed into hard pellets that hit the house with an incessant rodent-like scritch-scratch. Wylie couldn’t see past the weak light that spilled from above the door. “Great,” she muttered as she reached into the front closet for a spare set of boots, an old barn coat, and one of the many flashlights she kept stowed around the house.
Once bundled up, she stepped outside, careful not to slip on the steps leading from the porch to the front yard.
“Tas!” she called again in irritation. She hunched her shoulders to the biting wind and ducked her head to combat the sting from the tiny beads of ice striking her face.
Several inches of snow had already fallen, and now of all things, it was sleeting, transforming the yard into an ice rink.
Another flash of uneasiness went through Wylie. Heavy ice or snow on the power lines was sure to lead to their collapse and an outage and complete darkness. She wanted to find Tas and get inside.
Using the porch rail to steady herself and the beam from the flashlight to guide her, Wylie eased along, calling out to him. She squinted through the dark and aimed the flashlight toward the lane that led to the road. Two eerie red orbs flashed back at her. “Tas, you come here,” she ordered. He lowered his head, ignoring her commands.
In resignation, Wylie began the trek toward the stubborn dog. She bent slightly forward and moved, flat-footed, trying to keep her center of gravity directly over her feet. Still, she slipped, landing with a thud on her tailbone.
“Dammit,” she snapped as she got to her feet again. The sleet had worked its way into the gap between her coat and her neck. Her hands were bare, and she longed to shove them in her pockets but didn’t dare. She needed them out, extended, in case she fell again.
Tas stayed put. As Wylie got closer, she saw that Tas’s attention was squarely focused on something on the ground in front of him. Wylie couldn’t tell what it was. Tas circled around the object, sniffing at it tentatively.
“Get away from there,” Wylie commanded. As she shuffled forward, she could see that it was not an object but a living or once-living creature. It was curled in a tight ball and covered in a sheath of ice that glistened in the light from the flashlight.
“Tas, sit!” she shouted. This time, Tas lifted his head to look at her, then obediently sat back on his haunches. Wylie crept closer; her eyes followed the coil of the body. A scuffed shoe, the faded blue of denim, the downy gray of a sweatshirt, a shorn head of dark hair, a small fist pressed to pale lips. A thin, frozen river of blood branched out around its head.
What lay before them was no animal. It was a little boy, frozen to the ground.
3
“Maybe we can go outside and play?” the girl said as she peeked around the edge of the heavy curtain that covered the window. The sky was gray and soft drops of rain tapped at the glass.
“Not today,” her mother said. “It’s raining and we’d melt.”
The girl gave a little laugh and then hopped off the chair she had dragged beneath the window. She knew her mother was teasing. They wouldn’t actually melt if they went out in the rain, but still, it made her shiver thinking about it—stepping outside and feeling the plop of water on your skin and watching it melt away like an ice cube.
Instead, the girl and her mother spent the morning at the card table cutting pink, purple, and green egg shapes from construction paper and embellishing them with polka dots and stripes.
On one oval, her mother drew eyes and a pointy little orange beak. Her mother laid the girl’s hands on a piece of yellow paper and traced around them using a pencil. “Watch,” she said as she cut out the handprints and then glued them to the back of one of the ovals.
“It’s a bird,” the girl said with delight.
“An Easter chick,” her mother said. “I made these when I was your age.”
Together, they carefully taped the eggs and chicks and bunny rabbits they created to the cement walls, giving the dim room a festive, springy look. “There, now we’re ready for the Easter Bunny,” her mother said with triumph.
That night, when the girl climbed into bed, the butterflies in her stomach kept chasing sleep away. “Stay still,” her mother kept reminding her. “You’ll fall asleep faster.”