By Shelly Catterson
But here lies the disturbing part: the face, the one attached to the body in the ice, looks familiar. In the pale ghosted expression, Chloe hears volumes. She hears whale songs and endless stories behind the scar across his cheek. Though she can’t place the history, why his face represents any sliver of her past, or a dream, a previous life. He holds so much in his empty frozen hands, just beyond her reach.
The lake keeps him there, elusive and alone, but Chloe visits almost every day. She has to walk her dog, Taku, anyway. And besides, if she misses a day, she misses him. She can’t explain the frozen man to her husband Jude, so she dismisses her visits to the lake as exercise, getting outside, taking in some hazy Alaskan sun.
For now, no one will question her, except the dead man, the only one who knows exactly why she walks this far. From the front porch to his face in the ice: almost two miles one way, up and down hills in both directions. But the avalanche chutes aren’t dangerous yet.
On that first day, Chloe thought about calling the sheriff, a white man she doesn’t trust. But something in the frozen man’s eyes stopped her. He was only half-frozen then. Belly up and his head nudged into a shallow cove. She guessed he had drowned soon before, a day or so. Then the cold set in and the ice started holding his features. But his eyes seemed fluid for several days, they seemed to drown in their own depth and they kept Chloe from calling anyone. She didn’t even tell Jude. She didn’t want to worry him. And he would definitely call the sheriff. Plus, a therapist for her.
It was bad enough that she often thought she recognized her Mexican mother in women who were very much alive, and white, like Jude. Or rarely, she thought she saw her father, her mother’s white boss at the cannery along the coast.
Jude understood how much she wanted her parents to be alive, but he worried about her when she followed strangers in town, and even asked the strangers if they used to live near the ocean. Reality and the truth always crush Chloe.
Jude’s father was a bush pilot who had disappeared somewhere north of Talkeetna, his plane and body never found. Twelve years old when his father didn’t return, he still says, You don’t get over something like that. Without any evidence, You always wonder. Jude knows that Chloe understands, since she was abandoned at six years old, left in a neighbor’s houseboat, and barely remembers the skin of either parent, or even how to pronounce her original name, Xochil.
Ten years ago, Chloe looked towards art school, for more direction with her sculptures. With new freedom from the group home and insane with love, she made plans and sketches and messes. But instead, she inherited money when her favorite foster parent died in a nursing home. Now Jude doesn’t know what she does all day while he builds cabinets in town. He’s almost afraid to know. She doesn’t even bother to walk down to the mailbox and bring home their newspaper, letters and bills, plus treasures she found, feathers and intricate moss.
And they’ve drifted so far apart, he doesn’t even ask.
When the snow moved in, Chloe kept a decent-sized branch near the lake to sweep off the ice where she couldn’t reach her mittens. She wanted to be able to see him, but the ice remained too thin for walking. If she fell into the lake, Jude might find out, and call the sheriff. Jude would know her secret, how she could hide the truth from a dead man’s family, and he would probably leave her.
And even though she knew by instinct the man already lay dead in the lake, more than long gone, Chloe still feels guilty for not checking, for not making sure. Cold water preserves bodies, slows heart rates, but Chloe only crouched on the edge of the water and watched him. She didn’t want to move at all, let alone to find out what she already knew: hope had vanished, and winter hovered right at her heels.
She tells herself she could handle Jude leaving, that she would survive; she always did before. She imagines her time alone, reading in bed without keeping anyone else awake. Or a long road trip to Mexico, sleeping wherever she wanted, learning to call herself Xochil. But she doesn’t let herself imagine how much she’d miss Jude.
* * *
While helping chop firewood at his friend, Sully’s place, Jude flashes back to an old drawing Chloe gave him on Dia de los Muertos, Day of the Dead. A holiday she maybe remembered from her mother or read about in one of her books. The drawing, a portrait of him. The features distorted but then perfectly recognizable all the same. Except she drew a scar on his cheek, a faint lightning bolt. He asked her why and she said simply, “I like scars.”
When he pressed her about the scar, she said, “Life just fucking hurts, so why not show pain on the skin?” She knew him well enough back then, she knew his hidden orphan scars, and she was still Chloe. So therefore, odd.
Chloe swore more than all his fishing buddies put together. On her own by then, but Sully still quietly nicknamed her Group Home Girl. With her dark skin, Sully maybe called her worse when Jude couldn’t hear. And yet Jude knew that the Native boy who designed the gorgeous Alaska flag was a full orphan too, and this was reason enough to love an artist like Chloe. Besides, Jude couldn’t resist calling her all the time, even from work, the bar, the laundromat. He wanted to soak up anything she gave him, to absorb her pain and his own. He adored how strange she was, how she mocked him and wanted to drink him in all at once.
Sully stops chopping wood long enough to ask Jude if he still wants help taking down the old snag. Jude has no idea what Sully’s asking, what he means, if Sully’s now calling Chloe an old snag. But then Jude remembers the dead tree in their front yard, too close to their cabin. His friend offers help.
Jude only nods, and raises his axe. He wonders what happened to his marriage, or how he wound up here, questioning his entire life as he splits spruce into kindling.
The snow begins flying as Chloe walks down the hill to the lake. Taku races, a flash of black fur through the snow, then digs her face into the new flakes, eats with dog manners. Though she brought a warm jacket, Chloe can still feel how cold she’ll become during her walk back home. And once she stands above him, she can’t bear the snow; she can’t stand the thought of his face being more and more covered through the night, and through winter.
So she waits, wanting to protect him. As she sweeps snow off the ice, she tries to remember his familiar features, tries again to remember why she knows him.
Jude returns from Sully’s to find their cabin empty. He stomps through the dark livingroom, snow spraying off his boots. He leans against the counter, against the cabinets he made from barn wood, gorgeous old growth Doug Fir. He even learned how to add glass to the front panels, since that’s what Chloe wanted. She wanted to see the pottery her friends made. Now he feels sick with his own art, his time devoted to a mundane life with a mysterious woman. He imagines his life without Chloe, and wonders if he’s ready to leave, if this is the night to drift away. The wind outside howls stronger than the wolves, slips through cracks under the windows and makes the curtains sway. The new storm windows would be next spring’s project. But who knows where he’ll be by then.
He turns to the clock. Already past 6:00, and she has Taku. Maybe she has everything she needs, maybe she’ll be fine, and maybe this is his best chance. He digs through her tiny desk to find a pen with waterproof ink. He sits down with an almost-sealed envelope and starts writing. The insides of the envelope, patterned for privacy, though the overwhelming quiet brought them here; the silent words dragged them to this place where he sits writing the love of his life a note. He writes and signs the envelope with love, but then he finds his jacket, his toolbox, his music, and heads for his truck. The worst of the winter is almost here; it’s good he’s leaving now, before he gets snowed in and feels even more trapped.
Just during the short walk to the driveway, he leans hard into the wind. He doesn’t hear the dead tree moaning and creaking, doesn’t think much under the blur of finally leaving.
But after sitting in his truck for one surreal hour, unable to turn the key in the ignition, picturing how precious Chloe looked in the morning, wild-haired and grumpy, knowing how even today he didn’t need encouragement to make her coffee, his muscles begin to cramp. He listens to his own doubts, but only randomly notices the frigid draft through his truck.
And then he is startled by the noise, the wind created by the falling spruce and the sound of crushed metal and splintering windows.
He is surprised by his own screaming, but even more surprised by the position of the tree right on the windshield, right in his face, but not on his skull. His skull feels intact, just his legs aren’t there, not where they’re supposed to be; they’re trapped under the tree and the dashboard.
In the dense silence that follows, Jude sits in his own blood but he can watch a corner of sky. The wind rakes away a spot through the clouds and in the gap, he witnesses something. He still feels desperate, but also certain of one miracle: the Northern Lights. For a minute or several hours, they dance in wild colors above him, greens and blues, above his dead legs. And then, just as eloquent and appropriate, they disappear.
But right before he faints, before the night goes black again, he sees Chloe, sees their dog, her paws against the mangled door and his woman’s puzzled face at what used to be a window and for a moment, he feels grateful. He hears whale songs.
Chloe uses her inheritance to pay the hospital bills, to pay for physical therapy, to buy the wheelchair and medications. For three months, she doesn’t walk down to the lake. Sully helps her build the ramps, though Sully can barely look her in the face. Sully doesn’t know much, but she wonders if he knew about the note. If Sully knew before her that Jude planned to leave. Chloe only found the note after spending two weeks at the hospital with Jude. But Sully commits himself to pained silence for Jude’s sake, loyal to his friend. He muffles his silence under the scream of a chainsaw as he cuts up the old spruce for firewood.
Still writhing in shock, Chloe can’t help grieving what didn’t happen. She grieves the loss of Jude, though he lived, he is still here, through the blur of his painkillers. But if it weren’t for that spruce, Jude would be gone. Plus, he could be dead. She could have walked ten miles a day between the lake and the cemetery. This thought needles her, makes her body shake, as if Jude tried to cut away all her roots and leave her without water. Animals, surviving off her flesh. Her skeleton, years from now, out in the ice.
Jude listens to Chloe’s warnings about getting sick, but he still wheels himself out onto the porch each night, dragging the down comforter. He wants to feel the night air, not just shooting pain of his flesh straining to heal. He can’t remember Chloe being so over-protective, let alone appreciating her concern. But still, he rolls outside. He sits and he waits. As he wishes away the pain, he also wishes more feeling back into the stumps below his waist, where his nerves are slow to recover. But more than anything, he wishes for the Northern Lights, for a sign of what made sense after the tree almost took his life.
He knows that Chloe waits just inside the door until he wheels himself back inside, shivering and disappointed. He studies her face as she lifts him into bed. Where did she find the muscles, and where was he, so far away that he missed her arms and all they could lift? Where the hell did he live before that storm? And why does she vanish into the loft each night?
Now Jude keeps her from the lake, all the snow probably thick beyond belief. But being home all the time gives her new permission to make art again. When Jude naps or pours himself into newspaper crossword puzzles, she finds her way into the garage, where she once dreamed of making a studio. Now she simply makes due with what she still has, fueled by grief. Jude is alive and with her, but she misses her other face in the ice.
And since Jude can no longer sleep in their bed in the loft, she makes up a bed in the livingroom. But then she climbs the ladder after he falls asleep, after she arranges what’s left of his legs under a down comforter. In her loft, she reads more books than ever before. But she can’t sleep for more than a couple hours, or remember what she read. Her dreams haunt her, images of her mother who never speaks, but only turns and walks into the ocean.
From the livingroom, Jude listens to her pages turning, but resists calling to her. After each nightmare, she appears, she rubs his chest as if to exorcise the screams from his lungs. She tries singing to him in Spanish.. Sweet, but still in the loft of her mind.
On his worst days, he wonders to himself, then he admits, and believes: he must be too hideous now. Another tragic orphan, and a burden, draining the last of her money. So far from a full man, and she has to take care of him and their house, plus be repulsed by him each morning he wakes up, still alive.
He would give almost anything to walk to the mailbox.
At night, during fitful sleep, he dreams of a Wolverine. An elusive predator who challenges Grizzlies. Even in the dream, he wonders how a broken man like himself deserves to see such a rare creature. But still, he walks away from the lake, up the hill, following the animal’s tracks. He follows until he feels his own hackles rising and knows the Wolverine circled back and watches him from the trees. He realizes he is being hunted.
And then Jude stops. He looks down and finds himself sprawled on the snow, back in a puddle of his own blood, his legs gone.
Her first visit back to the lake gives her a tremendous sense of homecoming and mourning. She feels as if she returned to the group home where she spent years of her life when she wasn’t in foster care, to a place where people always left, the paint always cracked, even the smells too lonely. Chloe spends an hour, trying to clear snow, the ice thick enough to hold her. She can hear snow settling in the avalanche chutes.
But before she can glimpse his face, she has to leave. Both her sweat and tears begin to chill, threatening to freeze as she crouches above his body. Taku keeps lifting her paws off the snow; she tries to bite the ice between the pads of her feet. She whines at Chloe.
Chloe and Taku run back up the hill and all the way to their cabin. Chloe slams through the door, her lungs full of flames as their dog jumps into bed with Jude. Chloe stands for a moment breathing and crying and then she collapses on the mattress, right next to him, next to his thumping pulse and flannel shirt. She rolls against him, against his tired crossword puzzle, and she rests.
“What’s wrong?” he asks, slowly at first and then without pausing between questions, his face leaning in close, eyes searching her entire body. “Why are you crying? Did something happen? Are you hurt?”
She only shakes her head and keeps shaking. Even their dog watches, dropping her head to one side. Chloe can’t tell Jude what she knows, can’t stop crying long enough to say her crazy thought: I’m alive.
I just realized that I’m still here.
A couple months later when Chloe goes for her walk, Jude has an urge to look at his tools. While waiting to heal, he’s respected Chloe’s time making art. She told him she’s almost finished with a big project, a surprise.
But now Jude wants to fix something, anything. He wheels himself through the snow to the garage and her studio. Inside, he finds nothing dusty or covered in oil. In every direction, he finds art. More specifically, newspaper. Bonded together with papier-mâché, but molded into every inch of the garage, spread flat and painted in the perfect image of a lake, trees at the edges and a figure standing in the middle. Jude wheels his chair in closer, right to the edge of paper water and studies the paper face. But when he does, he almost tips himself over backwards. He assumes he must be hallucinating, and then remembers he stopped taking those painkillers. His blood, no longer drunk on illusions.
And yet he stares into his own face, his own body stands on the surface of the water, healthy legs and a wise knowing expression in his eyes. One torn slice of his old crossword puzzle across the left cheek, still unpainted, with only one word missing, just below the eye.
Here in her studio, Jude quickly knows why she collects the newspaper like an obsession, right down to his crossword puzzles as soon as he finishes. But even with this project, Chloe waited until he finished his puzzles, realized as many words as he could. Even all those days between new papers, when the weather prevented deliveries. She stayed.
And maybe, if she’s patient, he could learn to weld. Welders could do some work sitting down. He could find a different garage, get Sully to set him up. He has to do something, anything, somehow more than everything he used to do. As the doctor told him and Jude feels more and more each day, his spinal cord is fully intact. He just doesn’t have his whole legs now. There is still more physical therapy.
But even sitting in her studio, faced with his own face, a paper body wearing his flannel shirt, Jude knows that Chloe lingers way ahead of him, far beyond where he can roll his wheelchair.
His entire broken body aches for her.
She catches Jude in her studio when she returns from walking to the lake. He blushes all the way down to his shirt, a reaction that takes her back years. His eyes so wide, they keep her quiet, only breathing.
“I’m amazed,” he says. “How did you remember me so well, how I used to look before the tree?” He no longer uses the word accident.
“Remember you?” Chloe asks, confused.
“I recognize myself here. I mean, my mind is okay today, I think.”
“Your mind?” Chloe asks, sounding like a lame therapist, until all the paper shifts before her eyes. She sees both faces at once. And Jude isn’t dead, under ice.
“Well, I think I know how my face looks, we have that one mirror at my level…” But his voice sputters as he watches her face. His boat sinks.
And finally, she says her favorite expression from the group home, but her mouth speaks as if her tongue is paralyzed. She says, “For fucksake.”
And otherwise, her lungs betray her, making her almost limp as she reaches for Jude’s wheelchair. She definitely should have told Jude before, when the body appeared. Only insanity kept her from telling him.
“What is it? Are you okay?” he asks again, though he’s the one who can’t walk. But Chloe only leans into him and sits on his armrest. She moves her own arm across his back, warmth he feels through his jacket.
Chloe continues to swear, but reveals nothing. Jude feels her ragged breath against his neck. He shudders, but Chloe doesn’t notice. He remembers his lips against her sternum, his hands cupping her breasts. She swore then but only from the pressure of their heat, from losing all her other words in his unbroken skin.
Jude’s head falls back; he studies the paper ceiling to stop the images in his mind, his pelvis burning. But Chloe’s weight against him only grows more unbearable, until he spins his wheelchair, using all his strength. Chloe slips from his armrest, reaching out as she falls, but her hand misses his. She lands in a pile on the paper floor.
Cradling her wrist, she stares up at Jude, but she also sees his face in the ice. She watches the two faces melt together as Jude brushes past her in a flurry, his wheelchair out the door before she can even steady herself, or consider walking.
She convinces herself with one question: who else could look so much like Jude, besides a ghost of Jude himself? But again, his eyes keep her quiet for a long time. As usual, she is too quiet.
The swelling begins in her wrist as she remains on the floor, trying to decide what color would best suit Jude’s eyes. She no longer needs to worry about how to show that scar across the cheek of a dead man, a mirage, a lover she cannot touch.
Jude’s paper body looms over her, ready for new paint, stoic and alive.
Back inside their cabin, Jude sets the brake on his wheelchair so he won’t return to the studio, to Chloe and her lake. Alone, he sits next to her bookcase and reads her books, dropping them to the carpet when he grows tired of their words. The wild modern art books he drops spine-first to see which page will open, if the images inside might speak to him. He does this several times, but he cannot forget Chloe out there, cannot shake his urge to start cooking something for dinner. Taku watches him, groans if Jude glares back at her too long. Until she hears something and lifts her paws up to the windowsill.
He doesn’t understand Chloe, why she could only swear. How she could create her memory of him and then turn on him at the same time. Like her calming his nightmares but still sleeping in the loft.
He can only take her personally.
And all the time, he wants to take her to bed. He wants to walk and carry her to bed. But he can only drift into a time soon after they met, when they couldn’t even wait to get home; they stopped at their neighbor’s barn, and again along the river. Jude tackled her in the grass, making sure Chloe didn’t fall too hard, making sure she saw his face, what he meant and how he wasn’t going anywhere. He only wanted to take off her blazing red skirt and take her to a planet neither of them knew yet.
That’s all he wanted. Just her.
When he sees the Wolverine, he first assumes he’s dreaming again. Except Taku also watches through the old rippled window. They watch the Wolverine out near the driveway, right next to the woodpile. For a moment, their eyes seem to catch. Predator and prey. Taku growls low in her throat.
But the moment only flashes, until the Wolverine hears a door open and slips back into the shadows. Jude still feels tempted to call out to Chloe, to keep her safe.
On the floor of their livingroom, the last art book lies, spread open to a black and white photograph of a pristine lake. Chloe finally comes inside, dark paint on her forehead, eyes shining. She steps on the book, on the lake, but only focuses on Jude. He unlocks his brake and rolls himself into the kitchen, slams open a drawer full of knives. He remembers most of them as a wedding present.
After everything on this planet, he doesn’t understand exactly why Chloe stops him before he cuts a scar down his cheek. He doesn’t understand exactly what causes both her hands to reach out and not let go, to strain against his remaining muscles, what causes her to finally stop him. But she does stop him; she won’t let him leave, not unlike the old spruce that they still burn in their woodstove.
Later, when he can speak again, he catches Chloe cradling her wrist. The swelling looks painful. Instead of going out onto the porch for his nightly ritual, Jude lifts himself from their couch into his wheelchair. He returns to the kitchen to find some ice and makes promises to Chloe, work and windows and whatever she needs. He hopes she listens.
And in the spring, when she falls through the lake ice, Chloe feels the water seep through her clothes to her brown skin, feels everything slow down, feels him watching her, frozen and unable to move.
But when the water finally closes his eyes and his body begins to sink, Chloe finds herself alone, and stronger. Her hands, the one wrist still tender, break apart the ice, fists pounding into numbness until her hiking boots reach the bottom of the lake. Her jaw begins to rattle teeth. Her lungs, half-full of freezing water, truly want to breathe. Time slows and blurs across one round planet, spinning and unbelievable.
The ocean tides off the coast of Mexico pull at her.
At this moment, Jude sits back in his wheelchair, and raises his welding mask. Though he rests in a rare path of afternoon sun in Sully’s garage, his spine clenches. Chloe usually calls him by this time of day, to see if he wants a ride, or if Sully can drive him home. They have their weekly therapy session this evening.
But now home suddenly feels too far off, too far out of his reach, even with Taku waiting for him on her blanket in the corner. Cold water seems to drip down his spinal cord, and makes Jude wince.
The entire ride home, Jude can’t shake his instinct until he sees their cabin, and the body from her studio. Chloe’s paper version of him stands on the front porch, poised as if to welcome them home. Sully says one word, which speaks volumes, “Whoa.”
After telling Sully only that there was too much stuff in the garage for welding, Jude understands the surprise. But for Jude, the figure calms him, shows him that Chloe made her choice. Chloe cut that sculpture out of her studio in favor of her husband. Now she will share her studio with Jude. Taku lifts her paws up to the dashboard and cocks her head at Chloe’s artwork.
“If you weren’t sitting right next to me, man,” Sully says, “I would definitely think that’s you.” He shakes his head slow, and says, “Creepy.”
Jude actually laughs when Sully offers to keep him company but is so obviously spooked by the paper body, by the mirror of his friend. “I’ll be fine,” Jude tells him, and in a rush, a thin blanket over all his wounds, he even wonders if he might be. He’s obviously gone mad.
Still, Jude imagines hosting a Summer Solstice party at their cabin, friends greeting the paper Jude before walking inside. Maybe decorating him with a necklace of wildflowers, Fireweed and Lupine. And eventually, over the seasons, watching him dissolve under the weight of Alaskan weather, into the snow and rain and dirt.
Outside the truck, Taku remains by Jude until they reach the porch. Once Jude wheels himself up the ramp and inside, Taku strays long enough to nudge the familiar stranger in the crotch. Jude watches from the doorway. The pressure of her wet nose is just enough to tip the paper body backwards. The ghost falls lightly against a wrinkled window, and rests there, looking up.
The overhanging porch roof blocks his full view, but still, when the Northern Lights appear, he won’t miss them.
Finally out of the lake, Chloe stands for a moment, dripping water onto barely new grass, catching the sensation of her legs and her pulse, the earthquake inside her body. Pausing here, she only wants to go home, to bearhug Jude when he gets back from work. Already late in calling him, and they can’t miss therapy, not today.
She forgets to look over her shoulder for him, to remember all their dreams and visits. She forgets which way to walk home. Instead, she imagines painting the Northern Lights into their studio, across the ceiling and walls. She imagines sparks from Jude’s welding falling as comets.
And contrary to what her mind believed, a man frozen in ice can leave her. That tepid spring day, his body vanishes much the same way he arrived: through the shallow waters of a still empty lake, and the deep troubled folds of her petrified heart. But even a man frozen in a lake can leave, if she lets him. Just as her mother drown in the ocean, listening to whale songs and her own lungs.
Alone again, remembering, Xochil finds herself dying to sleep in their livingroom, in Jude’s bed, right on the ground floor. To float in the Gulf of Mexico with him watching, to leave offerings for her mother. Dried marigolds and wet paintings, letters and candles.
But now she must attempt this last stretch, past avalanche chutes, and past the Wolverine studying her every step, while her body shakes off the ice and strains to bring her home.
