“Oh, you sneak!” he shouted, sliding back down the snow wall.
But Grace was too fast for him. Laughing that little-girl laugh that had always broken his heart, she lunged for his pile of premade snowballs, grabbed two, and began to barrage him with his own arsenal. One hit him on the thigh and he turned instinctively and let the other hit him in the head so it didn’t get him in the face.
“That’s it!” he cried, laughing, and tackled her in the snow.
Grace giggled uncontrollably, trying to catch her breath as he rolled around with her in the snow, pretending the two of them were in a life-or-death wrestling match. He maneuvered her so that he ended up on his back on the floor of the snow fort with Grace astride his chest, victorious.
“No!” he yelled. “Don’t hurt me! I surrender!”
“You are defeated! Now you must do my bidding!” Grace declared, echoing things she’d heard him say in similar play-battles over the years.
“Yes, master,” TJ said, marveling at the happiness in his daughter’s eyes.
She remembered nothing of what had happened in the days leading up to the blizzard, and for that he would be forever thankful.
They heard a car horn honk as it pulled into the driveway.
Grace jumped off him. “Mom’s home!”
She dived for the tunnel and TJ’s pulse quickened. He scrambled after her, grabbed her by one boot and the back of her jacket, and hauled her to him. Grace kicked at him, playful but obviously irritated.
“Let go!” she yelled, giving him a look that made him dread her teenage years.
“Hang on.” He climbed up to look over the top of the snowbank, watching Ella park in the driveway and turn off the engine. “Okay, now you won’t get run over. Go ahead.”
In one smooth movement, Grace turned and grabbed a snowball from his stash, hurled it at him, and then rabbited through the tunnel. TJ could only laugh as he clambered over the top of the snowbank and slid inelegantly down to the driveway.
“No fair!” Grace said when she saw him.
She might have protested more, but Ella popped open her car door and emerged with a cardboard tray of Dunkin’ Donuts cups. TJ caught her eye and she rewarded him with a smile. What they had been through together—the fear they’d felt for themselves, for each other, and most powerfully for their little girl—had changed things between them. It was as if they had seen each other clearly for the first time in a very long time.
“I thought you guys might want something to warm you up out here,” Ella said.
“Hot chocolate!” Grace announced, throwing her arms around her mother and hugging her before stepping back with hands outstretched to receive her drink.
“And coffee for Daddy,” Ella said as she handed Grace her hot chocolate. “Cream, no sugar, and a double shot of espresso.”
“A double shot?” TJ said. “Daddy’s going to be wide awake tonight.”
Ella gave him a sly grin. “There’s something to be said for a wide-awake Daddy.”
Grace blew on her hot chocolate but it was too hot for her to drink yet. Instead, she began to regale her mother with tales of the glorious snowball fight that she and her father had been engaged in, complete with a blow-by-blow account of her cunning deceit and the claiming of his personal stash of snowballs. Ella listened closely, nodding her encouragement in all the right places.
Watching mother and daughter together, TJ felt a fresh lance of sorrow pierce him. He missed his mother and he feared for her soul, now that he knew with utter certainty that such things truly did exist. He had prayed every night since that somehow she would find peace … find rest. In his prayers, he always thanked her, hoping that somehow she would hear him or know how grateful he was to have his daughter back.
He and Ella had been on the verge of tearing apart their beautiful family. His mother had sacrificed herself to give them a shot at making things right, and he had no intention of letting that go to waste.
“Here you go,” Ella said, handing him his coffee as Grace took a careful sip of hot chocolate. “Sounds like Daddy got his butt kicked.”
“It won’t be the last time she outsmarts me.”
Ella nodded proudly. “It’s what daughters do.”
TJ smiled. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
At lunchtime on Saturday, Jake and Miri walked together along the sidewalk on Washington Street, careful not to let their hands stray into the narrow gap between them. Jake wanted to take her hand, but he had wanted to hold Miri’s hand for more than twelve years. They had come downtown to have lunch at The Vault, and he knew it would be foolish of him to make more of it than it was, no matter what had passed between them on Wednesday night. That had been amid terror and desperation and they had clung to each other for assurance based on the deep fondness they’d always had for each other.
He told himself that and tried to believe it, for her sake if not his own.
“It took them forever to get the sidewalks clear,” Miri said.
“I think they were more focused on getting the power back on,” Jake replied. “I hear there are a ton of neighborhoods in Atkinson and Methuen and Jameson that are still blacked out.”
When she didn’t reply, he realized that she had paused to stare at the low-slung gray sky with wide, haunted, hopeful eyes.
“It’s snowing,” Miri said.
She glanced around and Jake followed suit, understanding instantly that she was looking for her father. For several long seconds they stood there waiting, but if Niko Ristani’s ghost still lingered in their world, he did not show himself then.
“Just a flurry,” she said.
Jake went to her. “Maybe that’s best. We don’t know what another major blizzard will bring.”
Miri took a deep breath and then exhaled, nodding as she started walking again. A few lonely snowflakes floated down around them, a winter afterthought. She had been at the hospital with her mother all the afternoon and evening before, and then had gone to sit with her again that morning. Angela was out of intensive care but still had not regained consciousness, and her doctors were troubled. Miri had made it clear that she did not want to dwell on it. Their lunch was meant to be a break for her, a chance to breathe the air and think about the rest of her life, not just her mother’s fate.
“Come on,” she said. “I’m starving, and it wouldn’t hurt my feelings if I could get a cup of coffee.”
“I think we can manage that.”
“Of course, you can’t get a decent cup of coffee anywhere here. I used to think Dunkin’ Donuts was the alpha and omega of great coffee, but now I’ve been spoiled, living in Portland.”
Miri glanced sidelong at him as they passed in front of a little antiquarian bookshop.
“When I go back, maybe you should give it a try,” she said.
Jake tried to meet her eyes but she looked away. He felt the space that separated them more keenly, now, their hands parallel pendulums never meant to touch and yet drawn together as if magnetic.
“Me in Portland?” he asked.
Cars went by. Across the bridge, Mass had ended and the church bells began to ring.
“Why not? You like coffee, don’t you?”
Jake let that sink in, let it slide around in his brain for a while. They passed the red awnings of the pizza place that had retained all the decorations from the Mexican restaurant that had occupied the space before it. Coventry kept changing, always evolving, but it was still home.
“I’m in the middle of half-a-dozen different projects at the house,” he said. “Nothing’s finished. And with Isaac here … I can’t leave now. Not when we don’t know what’s going to happen with custody and everything.”
Miri nodded again. “I know. Of course you can’t.”
She turned her face to the sky, trying to catch one of the few, errant snowflakes on her tongue. With her hair a wild tangle of curls falling around her face, she looked perfect and innocent, the same pretty girl he had fallen in love with in the sixth grade.
“I know you’re not going anywhere until you know how things will work out with your mother, but maybe you could think about something a little more long-term,” Jake said.
Miri cast a thoughtful glance at the sidewalk beneath her feet. They had gone another half-dozen paces before he felt her hand brush his, fingers seeking his grasp. Jake smiled as they continued on, hand in hand.
“Maybe,” she said. “It’s something to think about.”
And the snow continued to fall.
In his heart, Doug knew what he had experienced, knew that Cherie had somehow taken up residence in Angie’s soul, that for a short time he and his wife had been reunited. She had loved him, and she certainly hadn’t blamed him for her death. That ought to have lifted a weight off him and to an extent it had: much of his guilt had been exorcised. But he missed her now more than ever. Her death had haunted him before, and now he was plagued by the ghost of the second chance he had lost.
The snowmobiles were all back in the Porters’ barn. He’d had to backtrack and take the one Franco had been using and drive it over to the next street, banging on doors until he found someone with a working phone. Once the EMTs had carted Angela away, he had worked fast, dumping all the stolen goods onto the back deck of the first house they’d robbed. He’d put all three snowmobiles back in the Porters’ barn, wondering how long it would be before the Porters noticed the bent strut on the one he’d crashed and if they would figure the whole thing out.
The Coventry police had a whole host of mysteries to unravel, according to word on the street and the local paper. Bodies all over town, including two dead cops. A bunch of stuff stolen during the blizzard and then just left behind, not far from where the corpses of two known felons had been found. Thanks to Angela’s injuries, the trail might lead back to Doug eventually—the police seemed far from convinced that she could have sustained such serious internal injuries in the snowmobile crash he’d concocted—but as far as he knew, the only person who could actually connect him to Baxter and Franco was Keenan, and the detective was dead.
It didn’t seem fair, even to him. A white hat like Keenan dead and Doug Manning, whose hat had always been gray at best—still alive. If the cops never put it all together, if he had really made it through all this untouched, maybe that was the universe making its apologies for taking Cherie from him. He’d gotten to see her again, talk to her again, make love with her again, even if it had been through Angela. He had been furious to have her taken from him a second time, until he realized what a gift it had been.
He had been given a reminder of what it felt like to see himself through her eyes. It had him thinking that maybe fate gave second chances for a reason, that maybe the trouble in his life had never been that he wasn’t successful enough, but that he’d never tried hard enough to appreciate what he had. He missed Cherie desperately and Angela was definitely
not
the answer, but he was alive, and that was a start.
While she had been in the ICU, the hospital wouldn’t let him visit because he wasn’t family. Her condition was still considered critical, but she had her own room now and visitation rules were different. Miri had put him on a list of approved visitors, and he was grateful for that. Angela might not be Cherie, but they had known each other a long time and he was partly responsible for the events that had gotten her busted up in the first place. Whatever came now, he would look out for her as best he could. It was what Cherie would have wanted.
Now he sat in a hard plastic chair beside Angela’s hospital bed, watching sitcom reruns whose laugh tracks seemed like cruel taunts to the unconscious woman whose situation seemed so dire. From time to time he glanced over to see if she had woken or at least moved, but there was no indication of life save for the steady rise and fall of her chest. The machines monitoring her vital signs blinked in silence.
And then she stirred.
“Hey,” Angela said, an uncommon tenderness in her voice.
Doug turned to her, smiling. “Hey, yourself. You’re alive, in case you’re wondering.”
She turned to him, eyes fluttering open as she reached out to take his hand.
Her eyes were a bottomless, wintry blue.
And her touch was like ice.