Page 32 of Out of the Cold

But no, he couldn’t leave. He’d worry the whole time he was gone that Lucy was in trouble. She might let her fire go out or set the alarm off again. Or worse.

He’d have to make it through the day here. Yet another reason his life would have been easier if she’d never come.

Getting out of bed, he pulled on his running pants and shirt and went outside. The bright light hurt his eyes, and the cold seared his lungs. He hadn’t drunk any water, but he didn’t care. He needed to move, to chase away all thought, all memory.

He headed for the trail, walking first until his muscles warmed up. He was running before the first steep incline, his breath coming hard and fast. This was what he needed, what had kept him sane this past year. His only thought was where to put his feet. His body was a machine, and it did what he told it to. If only his mind would cooperate the same way.

This was the world he’d fallen in love with as a kid, the one that had kept him going during every challenge he faced. After Ricky died, he’d gone back to church to find solace, but he’d left as empty as he went in. The mountains were his church now.

He looked up at the vaulted blue sky and tried to wipe his mind clean.

Forty minutes later, he came off the trail at a jog and slowed to a walk, breathing hard but evenly. Through the trees, smoke was drifting up from Lucy’s chimney.

At least she was keeping the fire going on her own.

After he’d showered and eaten, he worked on some projections his business partner Eddie was waiting for, but ignored Eddie’s call. Dimly he heard Lucy calling to her dog.

She was lonely over there. He could see it in her eyes, but he wasn’t the one to ease it.

He made himself work until five o’clock to prove that he could. When he finally let himself have a glass of whiskey, he barely tasted it. He drank to be numb, in the age-old way guilty men before him had—in search of oblivion.

Night fell outside and the lights in Lucy’s cabin came on—first the living and dining area, then her bedroom. She appeared in her window as if in a picture frame, her hair down around her shoulders, then the blinds shut her away.

He hadn’t looked at a photo of Ricky since he got here. He’d cleared them all from his phone and saved them on his computer, nested deep in a subfolder within backup folders. But he still had a framed picture of the two of them together, his arm around Ricky as they smiled at the camera, celebrating Ricky’s driver’s license.

He’d buried it in a box with books and photos of his family, then couldn’t bring himself to leave it behind when he came here.

Standing up, he turned on the light and went into the bedroom, where he pulled the box out of the closet. He set it on the coffee table, his hands shaking as he lifted the lid. He remembered everything about Ricky’s face, recalled the exact expression he wore in the picture—pride mixed with exasperation that Gabe was making such a big deal out of this rite of passage. But he needed to see it.

He went through the whole box without finding it. How could that be? It was a framed photo, not something that could be easily missed, and he distinctly remembered putting it in there.

Dumping everything onto the coffee table, he went through each album and photo again, one by one, picking them up and putting them back in the box.

It wasn’t there.

He kicked the box across the room, where it crashed into the pile of firewood and sent logs rolling.

In the racket he’d made, it took a few seconds to recognize the knock on the door. He stood there, breathing hard, his mind racing.

Where had it gone?

Another knock. “Gabriel?”

He stood perfectly still, willing her to go away. But of course she would have seen him. The curtains were wide open, the lights on.

“Is everything okay?”

“Go away!” he roared.

The doorknob turned, and she walked in.

He stared at her in disbelief.

She looked at the box he’d kicked, the wood that lay scattered haphazardly, the bottle of whiskey.

“Gabriel, what’s wrong?”

“You shouldn’t have come here.”

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