The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [67]
“Next time,” Carrie said, “I’ll have you guys over for seal soup.”
HE STAYED IN HIS SLEEPING BAG well past sunrise. He thought the girl would think he was just sleeping, resting from the long day of walking. He wasn’t. Dawn came and went. The sun never broke through the clouds, leaving the sky above them a sullen white that blended with the horizon.
He had his back turned to her, to their snowed-in tracks. The man on skis could have followed them, and readied to attack, and he wouldn’t have seen it coming. Instead, he just remained frozen, on his side, and stared blankly at the white expanse in front of him, an endless emptiness that stretched out and almost seemed to curve with the earth, no trees, no brush, nothing but white upon white.
She was quiet for the longest time; perhaps she didn’t want to wake him, or she was scared something was wrong. The wind had died with the sunrise. The entire world fell silent, dead.
“It’s hard for you to breathe today,” she said. He could hear her working the grasses, braiding, twisting, her mouth opening and wetting them.
He said nothing. He had nothing to say.
“I can tell by how you take a breath and then hold it, for too long. I used to do that lots. Not just because I couldn’t see, but from other things. Other things in my life that made it hard, you know. Hard to want to take one more breath. I know how it feels.”
She put her hand on his shoulder. He couldn’t feel any warmth from it through the sleeping bag, but he could feel the weight of it, where she left it resting on his arm, and then she patted him gently, as if he were a sick puppy.
“There’s going to be days like this when we don’t want to live no more. I had plenty of days like that, so many days in that house by myself, you know. So many nights, when everyone was sick, all that sickness and dying. Crying at night. Screams. Then quiet. Just black nothingness. And those smells. I didn’t want to live with that quiet and those smells. I wanted to know why I was being punished again. I never did anything wrong and God was punishing me by letting me live.”
She took her hand away, maybe to brush at her tears, but he couldn’t be sure.
“I thought about walking out on the tundra or into the river. The .22 wasn’t powerful enough, you know, for that. And I couldn’t get my legs to take me outside. I was too scared of what might be outside. Sometimes I worried that I would go out there and I would see again. I would see everything that had been ruined.”
For a long while she fell silent. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine her world for a moment. Perpetual darkness, a world of only sounds and smells—but then she had something else, that sense of hers, some ethereal understanding of the world around her. He wondered if this was common to blind people, or just the girl, and the strange circumstances that allowed her to still be there, alive.
“I wanted to die, but I was too scared. I didn’t want to die alone. Now I know at least I’m not going to die alone, and I’m not scared. We find reasons to want to live.”
He took a deep breath and let it out. The cloud of warm vapour from his lungs hung in the air around his face and slowly disappeared. He unzipped his bag and sat up.
“Let’s get moving,” he said. “Can’t mope around all day and feel sorry for ourselves, can we?”
She smiled and began packing her grass weaving bundle and her sleeping bag. He scanned the horizon in all directions to make sure they were alone and then stood up and stretched. He watched her bundle the sleeping bags and the grass inside the tarp and place them on the toboggan.
“You’re not going to die,” he said to her, and they started off across the snowy tundra, travelling east toward the river.
24
Instead of going to the town they turned and headed west a half mile toward what looked like a giant black drive-in theatre screen. The morning was calm, clear, and a slow gathering of light began to form to the east. He remembered his first flight out of town and the pilot mentioning something about White Alice, the