Page 19
"I know."
"Say it back."
"I'm not letting go either."
He moves. Deep and steady, his eyes never leaving mine, and I wrap my legs around his hips and my arms around his neck and let it build. It crashes over me, hard, and I cling to him and shout his name. He drives in once more and goes rigid, groaning into my throat, pulsing hot and deep inside me, and doesn't stop shaking for a long time.
The fog closes around us. Nobody can see us. Nobody can hear us. Everything in the world that isn't him is white.
He lies on me with his face in my neck. Neither of us moves.
"You're freezing," he says at last, and his voice is steady again.
"I'm fine."
"You're blue." He sits up and zips me into his jacket like I'm a child, and I laugh until I'm crying.
He takes my hand, and he doesn't let go of it all the way down.
At the creek crossing he unclips his walkie and keys it, and Edna answers on the first word.
"Got her."
A pause. The crackle of her thinking.
"Mm," says Edna. "Happy Halloween."
His shoulders shake, and it takes me a second to understand he's laughing. I've never once heard it. I want to record it. I don't have a microphone for it.
Epilogue
Cole
My mother gets out of the airport shuttle at Edna's two days before Christmas, and I walk down the porch steps in the snow, and she doesn't let go of me until my arms cramp.
My mother is smaller than I remember. She smells like the same hand cream. She says my name into my coat, and then she says it again, and I stand there with my arms around her and let the snow land on both of us.
"You're thin," she says.
"I eat."
"You're thin, Cole." She leans back and takes my face in both hands. She looks at the beard. The grey. The scar. She looks for a long time. "There you are."
Edna doesn't say a word about the twelve minutes. She hands my mother a cup of tea and a muffin, which is the kindest thing she's ever done.
She stays three days. She sleeps in my bed, and Nora and I take the quilts in the radio room. She sits at the table in the second chair and tells Nora about the pickerel, and my handwriting, and the winter I fell asleep on the floor beside the radiator and she stepped over me for a week. She cooks. She straightens my maps. On Christmas morning she hands me a pair of wool socks and watches me put them on, and neither of us says anything about the four years.
On the twenty-sixth, the shuttle leaves Golden at one.
"I'll drive her," Nora says. She says it fast, at breakfast, before I can put my boots on. "You have the repeater. And it'll be girls' time."
"I can—"
"Stay." She's already got her keys. "Say goodbye here. It's better."
I look at her. She's been quiet nine days. Sleeping hard. Pushing her plate away at breakfast, then eating four pieces of toast at ten at night. Standing at the sink with her hand flat on her stomach, and taking it off when she sees me.
I haven't asked. I've been waiting for her to say it first.
