Snowblind (20 page)

Nothing.

He set his camera on the coffee table and picked up the remote control, settling back onto the couch, careful not to rouse Isaac. After a storm he usually liked to be outside taking pictures. Today would have been the perfect day for it, warm sun melting ice and snow all over town, but instead the gauzy drapes were drawn to keep out prying eyes. Isaac had pleaded with him and Jake had thought it a small concession. The kid had obviously suffered some kind of trauma. He would speak about it when he felt comfortable enough. Until then, Jake just had to keep from going nuts.

Aiming the remote, he started surfing channels in search of a movie or one of the home-improvement shows he always thought would inspire him to complete some of his projects around the house. He bounced through a couple of news stations as well and landed on a flick with a young Denzel Washington before he froze and started back through the channels.

Hurrying through the news stations he had seen a photograph of a boy, a familiar face, for it belonged to the kid sleeping on the couch beside him. A terrible car accident in the middle of the storm, a Mercedes upside down, half submerged on the edge of the Merrimack River. Husband and wife dead. Police searching for their son, Zachary Stroud.

Isaac had been reborn as Zachary Stroud.

Local police and volunteers were searching for him. The state police were putting divers into the river, though the current might have carried the boy miles beneath the frozen surface, at least according to the news anchor.

Only the current hadn’t carried the boy anywhere. He was asleep on Jake’s couch.

A terrible paralysis gripped him. Jake stared at the television, not wanting to look at Isaac—at Zachary Stroud—not wanting to think about all the people searching for this boy. Divers in the river. Relatives who’d already lost the boy’s parents and didn’t know the kid was alive. Alive and safe. Snoring on Jake Schapiro’s couch.

He should call. He knew that.

But the ache in his heart would not let him.

He had just gotten Isaac back. Somehow, through means he would never have believed possible the day before, his brother had returned to him. Now he had to think about what to do—the
right
thing to do. Reincarnated somehow, Isaac was here with him. If he called the police, if he handed the boy over without telling their mother, without giving her the chance to speak to her dead son, it would be an unimaginable betrayal.

Jake simply couldn’t do it.

Isaac doesn’t want you to,
he told himself.
He doesn’t want anyone to know he’s here.

But it was more complicated than that, wasn’t it? Rationalizations wouldn’t cut it. Even if this kid was Isaac, he was also, somehow, Zachary Stroud.

“Jesus,” Jake whispered.

Not a prayer, but nonetheless a plea. He had to talk to someone, but who would believe him? Who would listen to this crazy-ass story and not try to interfere? Whom could he trust? He racked his brain but couldn’t come up with anyone he dared share his story with.

Then he glanced at Isaac, sleeping so peacefully, and it hit him. There was one person he could call, one who would understand, maybe the only person in the world who might believe him. Someone who no longer had any connection with Coventry and would be too far away to interfere.

Jake rose from the couch and went to the kitchen, opening the drawer where he kept the phone book. Beneath it were all sorts of business cards, take-out menus, and scraps of paper going back a long while. He found a torn blue scrap upon which he’d hastily scrawled a cell phone number he’d acquired six months before.

It won’t work,
he thought.
She’ll have a new one by now.

But he picked the phone up off the kitchen counter and dialed the number, then stood and listened to it ring and ring.

In the moments before sunrise, even the forgotten corners of Seattle took on a glow that suggested their best days were still ahead. Miri Ristani jogged past the silent hulk of the Brimstone Brewery, her breath fogging the crisp winter-morning air, her heart keeping rhythm with her feet as she ran. Four years earlier, when her wanderings had first washed her up on the proverbial shores of the haven that Seattle had become for her, the old Brimstone Brewery had been a brick eyesore of boarded windows and rusted pipes. Now it was being refurbished as a nightclub with upper floors dedicated to studio space for artists and musicians, just another way in which the passing days seemed to be scouring the rust off the face of the whole Georgetown neighborhood of Seattle. One of the oldest neighborhoods in the city, it was somehow also one of the newest. Its rebirth had not yet arrived, but it was gestating nicely.

Miri ran with a steady, even gait, breathing the winter air, understanding with every step that her friends were frustrated by these early-morning runs. Bad enough to be out alone so early in the summer months, they would say—had often said—but to run the streets of Seattle before dawn by herself, a woman alone, was just asking for trouble. She raced past a bagel shop, the smell of coffee spreading up and down the block, then crossed to the other side of the street to avoid roadwork. The storefronts were familiar territory to her by now, a florist, a karate school, a tiny Chinese restaurant, a Laundromat … and sprinkled among them, plenty of abandoned shops with soaped windows and drooping For Lease signs. The neighborhood might be improving in spite of the economy, but it still had a long way to go.

Still, she wasn’t afraid to be out in the dark alone. In the years since her high school graduation, Miri had walked far more dangerous streets and come through unscathed. Alone never bothered her. Alone, in fact, had become her sanctuary. Five years earlier she had hit the road, put Massachusetts behind her, and not stopped until she hit the Pacific Ocean, which seemed like it might be just far enough away from her mother in order for her to breathe.

On mornings like this, just breathing was enough.

As she rounded a corner past a pub that still reeked of last night’s beer, she saw the sun coming up over the tops of the buildings to the east. Its reflection flared in a hundred storefront windows and she felt as if she were entering some brilliant hall of mirrors. This early on a Sunday morning the only people on the street were workers headed home from the night shift and people like Miri, who knew that half the beauty had already spilled out of a day by the time nine o’clock rolled around.

She relished her isolation. Breathed it in. Blessed the spirit of winter.

Felt her cell phone buzz against her abdomen.

Just the vibration threw off her stride. She considering ignoring the call, but at half past seven on a Sunday morning it could only be something urgent, so she slipped the phone from its clip and glanced at the screen as she darted around a tree that grew up out of the sidewalk.

Call from …
JAKE.

The contact listing on her phone didn’t have a last name for Jake, but she didn’t need clarification. There were other guys in her life with the same name but the rest of them needed modifiers, either last names or Jake-From-Philosophy or Jake-From-the-Gym or Jake-From-Oklahoma.

Miri held the vibrating phone by her hip as she ran on another half-dozen paces. The idea of talking to Jake opened up so many questions in her mind, little windows that offered views of parts of her heart she wasn’t sure she felt like seeing again. Six months had passed since she’d last spoken to Jake, six months since she’d had contact with anyone from home. This early in the morning he could only be calling about something terrible or something wonderful. He’d know she would be awake—if anyone truly knew her, Jake was that someone—but courtesy would keep him from dialing the phone unless it was urgent.

The dread that clutched at her nearly stopped her in her tracks but she managed to take a deep breath and keep going. She exhaled, phone still vibrating in her hand.

Maybe he’s getting married,
she thought,
calling to tell me he’s engaged.

But Miri didn’t think so. She thought it must have something to do with her mother, that the bitch-queen Angie Ristani had finally drunk herself to death or ended up in jail for slapping a cop or inadvertently killed one of the patients she was supposed to be nursing back to health. Miri hadn’t spoken to her mother in two years and had no interest in hearing about her now.

Not even if she’s dead. Not even if she’s dying, and needs you?

“Fuck,” Miri whispered.

She slowed her run, the rhythm of her heart now as off-kilter as her stride, and answered the call.

“Hello?” she said, coming to a halt.

Silence greeted her. The line sounded flat and empty. She glanced at her phone and saw that the call had ended. Jake had either given up or been shunted to voice mail. Breathing, feeling the winter chill creeping in now that her muscles were at rest, she watched the phone and waited for it to tell her there was a voice message. A full minute passed before she decided that Jake had simply hung up.

With a glance to make sure she wouldn’t bump into anyone, Miri started walking toward home. Her heart still beat its running rhythm and her arms and legs felt good, ready to work, but her phone seemed an anchor in her hand.

At the intersection with Carpenter Street she turned left instead of right, toward home. Four shifts a week, in between classes at the university and the tutoring she did to help pay for school, Miri worked at a café and performance space called Mocha, which would have been cooler if it hadn’t been across the street from a hair salon. There was nothing hipster about blue-haired old ladies.

Still, she loved Mocha and the friends she’d made while working there. Right now she wanted coffee as much for warmth as for the companionship it would bring. Most of the time she preferred being alone, felt her soul expand in isolation, her understanding of the world growing. But not today.

Swearing quietly, she glanced at her phone and went to the Recent Calls screen. Her thumb hovered over
JAKE.
She didn’t have to call him back—if it was something important he would call again—but her heart held a certain amount of guilt where Jake Schapiro was concerned. When she’d left Coventry, she’d left him as well. Sometimes she felt like it was good to be rid of him, healthy to put behind her a relationship that had been poisoned by mutual grief more than a decade before. Other times she missed him and resented him for being the one person from Coventry she hadn’t been able to forget.

The phone buzzed in her hand.

This time she didn’t hesitate.

“It’s awful early,” she said, glancing ahead at the welcoming sight of the stylized, steaming coffee cup on the sign in front of Mocha, a block away. “Tell me it’s good news.”

No sound came through the phone. Even the telltale hollowness of an open line was absent. The call was just as flat and dead as the first one had been.
Must be dropping calls,
she thought, and was about to hit the red button to end the call when someone spoke.

“Miri.”

She froze, phone clutched to her ear. The Mocha sign seemed a thousand miles away. Winter seemed to sense an opening, sliding into the space between clothing and flesh and then somehow between flesh and bone. When she inhaled, she felt the frost in her lungs.

The voice did not belong to Jake.

“Miri, honey?”

Impossible.

“Daddy?”

Niko Ristani had wandered off in a blizzard in search of help and ended up frozen to death. Her father had been dead twelve years, but there could be no question—it was his voice on the phone.

“Come home, Miri. I need you here. Jake and Allie need you, too.”

The February morning had made her skin so cold that her hot tears stung her face.

“Daddy,” she whispered, staring at the Mocha sign ahead but feeling as if the ground had suddenly slanted, as if she had slipped sideways out of the world. “Is it really you?”

“The storm is coming back to Coventry, Miri. Everyone we loved is in danger. I want to help them but the only way I can do that is through you.”

A hiss of static burst from the phone, a wail and shush that might have been interference or might have been wind and ice.

“I don’t understand,” she said softly. “What kind of—”

“Miri,”
he said, his voice almost lost in the static.

The line went dead. Numb, not breathing, she looked at the phone. Two words were on the screen—
CALL FAILED
—but there were two other words echoing in her mind, the last words she thought she had made out amid that hiss before the call had been cut off.

Come home.

ELEVEN

The lunchtime crowd that Sunday at The Vault could have been charitably described as thin. The plows had finished up their work in midmorning and the sun had done a perfect job of melting whatever ice remained on the roads. The temperature had risen above forty degrees—warm for February—and narrow little streams of snowmelt ran along the drifts and into sewer gratings. The warm-up would not last very long, especially with a more troubling storm just days away, but for the moment Coventry was a winter wonderland. People should have been out taking advantage of it, but there were fewer than fifteen customers inside The Vault.

Halfway through playing an obscure old tune by The National, TJ glanced at the clock. He hit a wrong note and sang over it, hoping nobody noticed. The hands of the clock were crawling toward one
P.M.
and he knew Ella must be thinking the same thing he was—where were the Faithful? They never used the phrase at the restaurant, but at home that was how they always referred to the people who rolled in between twelve and one, after the eleven o’clock Mass had gotten out. Without the Faithful, there wasn’t much point in opening for lunch on Sundays.

As he sang and played he glanced around the restaurant again. He spotted Mrs. Bridges and Mr. McFarland, a pair of single oldsters who had become regulars for Sunday lunch. At their age, he figured, they didn’t call each other boyfriend and girlfriend, but Ella had told him they’d both lost spouses to cancer and seemed to have a very nice thing going on Sundays—Mass, and then lunch at The Vault. Their presence reassured him that there hadn’t been some church boycott of the restaurant, but that was cold comfort.