The Shuddering Part 11

"Morning," April murmured, failing to offer Jane a smile.

Jane turned away, silently carrying her mug of coffee down the single step that led into the living room, giving the couple some room while her own hostility simmered just beneath her skin. April didn't care whether she offended anyone, scowling at virtual strangers, dodging conversations, spending entire days at ski lodges in some pathetic attempt to derail everyone's good time. She was the one who stormed through halls in the dead of night, slamming doors, waking up the house, and Jane was self-effacing enough to still be nice to her. Jane glared at her own reflection in the window, disgusted with her own tolerance.

"What are you doing?" she heard April ask. "Admiring the view?"

"We're snowed in."

"That's not my problem."

Jane frowned at the landscape. An empty deer feeder stood a handful of yards away from the living room window, half-buried. Their dad used to drive more than twenty miles to buy bales of alfalfa during the summer, back when the cabin was used during every break she and Ryan had from school. They'd pile the feeder full, and Jane would spend hours watching deer meander outside the window-sometimes with babies, sometimes with fuzzy antlers atop their heads. During one winter, right before Christmas, one of them was bold enough to wander onto the deck. It had nearly startled their mother to death. Mary Adler had looked up from the dishes and stared straight into a buck's big black eyes. When she had screamed, the animal took a flying leap off the deck's icy stairs. Their dad had been hysterical about it all day, swearing it had been the funniest thing he'd ever seen.

"What do you want me to do, Ape?" Sawyer's tone was steady, soothing. He was blessed with the ability to keep a cool head in the most strained of situations. His composure had always made Jane feel safe; if the world were to suddenly catch fire, Sawyer could pacify her until it consumed them both.

"All I know is that we're leaving," April said. "Today. This morning."

"How?"

"I don't know. Figure it out. Why don't you go wake up your friend, go plow the road? Speaking of..." Her words tapered off.

Jane looked back to the kitchen just in time to catch Ryan's entrance. His hair was wild, sticking up in every direction. He s.h.i.+elded his eyes against the glare of the snow, then greeted the fighting couple with a few gravelly words: "Plow it with what, my d.i.c.k?"

Jane looked away, biting back a bitter laugh, a flare of vindication igniting at the pit of her stomach. Ryan had a way with words. He was rough when it was called for, and he never hid his true feelings; they were twins, but complete opposites, like yin and yang.

"We've got two days left, remember?" Ryan reminded them. "It'll take us two days of this awesome vacation to shovel the drive, and maybe then, if we're lucky, we'll be able to get our a.s.ses back to civilization." The sound of a mug being pulled from an overhead cabinet. "But don't count on it." Coffee pouring into a cup. "We may be stuck here till spring."

"What?" April asked, alarmed.

"He's kidding," Sawyer a.s.sured her.

"Am I? Have you looked outside? Remember the winter break when we got stuck here for two weeks?"

"I'll try the Jeep," Sawyer resolved. "Throw it into four-wheel drive, see what happens..."

"You're delusional." Ryan laughed. "I bet there's two feet out there. Even if you get to the bottom-"

"I'll try it," Sawyer insisted.

"We really have to get home," April added, as if trying to fool them into believing that this attempt at a sudden departure had nothing to do with her, but with circ.u.mstances beyond her control.

Jane peeked into the kitchen just in time to see Sawyer leave. April followed him a second later. Ryan was left standing in front of the sink. He caught sight of his sister out of the corner of his eye and shot her a look.

"Did you hear them last night?" Jane asked quietly, making her approach.

"I heard her," he said. "f.u.c.king maniac. I knew it the second I set eyes on her."

"Knew what?"

"That she's as crazy as a bag of cats."

Jane bit her tongue, taking a sip of coffee.

"I have my radar set to bats.h.i.+t. I can smell a psycho from a mile away."

"She didn't seem that-" Jane snapped her mouth shut, cutting herself off midsentence. No. She wasn't going to defend that chick, especially not to Ryan.

"What?" he asked. "That bad? Don't bulls.h.i.+t me. You saw it too. I know you did. If she thinks they're going to make it out of here today, it's proof of her insanity."

"I'll make breakfast," Jane told him, not wanting to talk about it anymore. If the conversation continued, it would only be a matter of time before she lost her cool and burst into tears. Abandoning her half-drained cup, she turned to the fridge. "Maybe you should go help him."

"Help him do what? Get stuck? Pretty sure he's got that covered." Ryan took a seat at the dining table.

Standing in front of the open fridge, she closed her eyes, her heart flipping inside her chest.

"The moment he told me she was coming, I just had this feeling," he continued. "Like, 'Well, that's it, there go our plans, shot to h.e.l.l before they ever had a chance.'"

"Then you should have said something," she said softly, pulling a carton of eggs from the refrigerator.

"Like what?"

"Like 'Don't bring her.'"

"Right, because that would have gone over great." He grumbled into his mug, shaking his disheveled head. "This trip was doomed from the start."

"Then why are we here?" Jane asked. Ryan blinked up at her, surprised by the insistence in her tone.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that if you knew this was going to suck, why did you still want to go through with it? Why couldn't we have done something else?"

"Like what?"

"I don't know, anything. He could have come out to Phoenix."

"Great idea," he said under his breath.

"We could have driven up to Denver."

"And you would have agreed to that?" he snapped, snorting at the idea of it. "I would have said, 'Hey, Jane, let's go visit Sawyer up in Denver,' and you would have said, 'Oh, great idea, let me pack my bags'? Bulls.h.i.+t, Jane. I've been trying to get us together for years and you've been evasive every time. Oh, no, you can't, you have stuff to do for school. Oh, it's bad timing. Oh this, oh that, oh dear sweet Jesus, not Sawyer Thomas."

She swallowed against the lump in her throat as her eyes burned.

"The only reason you came up here was because it was our last chance," Ryan said, the edge in his voice evening out, skirting around apologetic. "The only reason I was able to talk you into it was because of Zurich, and even then you hesitated. Even then you had to invite someone to come up here with you as a security blanket."

Sweeping a hand across her cheek, she cleared her throat, fighting like h.e.l.l to keep her composure. "And you regret that I did, right?" she asked. "You regret finally meeting Lauren. I can tell by the way you can't keep your eyes off her."

"I don't regret meeting Lauren," he confessed. "Lauren is f.u.c.king amazing."

Jane stared into the sink, her fingers gripping the edge of the counter.

"But you know what?" he asked.

"What?"

"I sort of resent it."

A flurry of anxious b.u.t.terflies erupted around her heart. Resent? Her gaze shot across the kitchen. Ryan was looking right at her, his expression s.h.i.+fting from unsteady to justified, as though he'd just unearthed some terrible secret.

"It's true, then," he said steadily. "There was an ulterior motive. You knew what was going to happen, that we were going to dig each other. How ironic that I should meet a girl I actually like weeks before packing up my s.h.i.+t and moving halfway across the world."

She clenched her teeth, suddenly hating him. "And you?" she asked, shooting a quick look toward the hallway to make sure n.o.body was eavesdropping before narrowing her eyes and glaring at her brother. "You didn't have an ulterior motive?" she hissed, keeping her voice down.

"Oh, I certainly did," Ryan confessed without missing a beat. "But that got as screwed up as this whole trip, and I hate to tell you, but that isn't my f.u.c.king fault."

She looked away from him, taking a steadying breath. He was right; it wasn't his fault. It wasn't anyone's fault. Things were just twisted, too muddled to ever get back to the way things were-back when she and Ryan and Sawyer were the Three Musketeers, always together, always laughing, never lonely or angry or unsure.

"You're right," she said after a long while. "He will get stuck."

"He's already stuck," Ryan said to himself.

"You should go out there with him. If he's going to leave, at least it'll give you more time-"

Ryan shoved himself out of his chair. "There are plenty of rooms. She didn't mind spending an entire day alone in the f.u.c.king lodge, but now she can't sulk on her own in here? What's the difference?" He crossed the kitchen to meet Jane at the sink, turning her to face him by looping his arms through hers and pulling her into an unantic.i.p.ated hug. Jane sighed against his shoulder, mutely shaking her head at their situation. "I love you," he told her.

Lifting an arm to press the hem of her sleeve to one of her eyes, she eventually stepped out of his embrace and grabbed the carton of eggs from beside the sink. "How many do you want?" she asked, sniffling.

"Three," he said.

Jane looked up at him, forced a smile.

Ryan stared at her for a moment, then gave her shoulder a squeeze and turned away, wandering down the hall.

"This is f.u.c.king crazy," Ryan concluded while waddling through the snow, careful not to kill himself as he descended the deck stairs. "This snow and this idea. What the h.e.l.l happened anyway?"

Sawyer plunged his hand into the precariously balanced powder on the railing, pus.h.i.+ng it overboard. "I don't want to talk about it."

They rounded the corner to spot the Nissan and Jeep, heavily frosted, the tires half-buried in the drift.

"Dude." Ryan gave an incredulous laugh, motioning to the vehicles to punctuate the scenario's insanity. There was no way this plan was going to work.

"Didn't your dad have some sort of plow attachment for the snowmobile?" Sawyer asked.

"Like twenty years ago. He doesn't come up here in the winter anymore. He never got over that winter break."

"Then why did we come up here? You didn't think it was possible that we could get snowed in?"

Ryan held up his gloved hands. "I checked the forecast. I checked the d.a.m.n thing like a half dozen times. You want a bulls.h.i.+t job? Predict the f.u.c.king weather."

"Look." Sawyer sighed. "I wouldn't care if it was just us, you know? But she's driving me insane."

"You want to tell me what happened?" Ryan asked, punching holes in the snow with each step. "Or are you going to cryptically whine about it for the rest of the weekend?"

"Just help me, okay?"

"I'm trying to help you. Want me to call her a cab? Request an airlift?"

Sawyer finally reached his Jeep and drew his arm across the hood. A thick blanket of white slid forward, exploding just beneath the front b.u.mper.

"There's no G.o.dd.a.m.n way," Ryan said. "This isn't going to work."

"Are you sure that plow isn't in there?" Sawyer nodded toward the garage.

"I didn't see it. It isn't as though Pop was ever exactly handy, you know? He doesn't have some epic supply of usefulness stashed away for times like these."

Ryan continued to shuffle down the driveway toward the road, leaving Sawyer to knock snow off his car. He stopped at the crest of the hill, looked down the length of the drive-a good quarter of a mile, its rough surface and various potholes completely invisible beneath a blanket of white. Had there not been trees on either side of the road, it would have been impossible to tell it was there at all.

"This is insane," Ryan said softly, then raised his voice, craning his neck to look back toward his friend. "Even if you do get down there, you still have, like, five miles to the highway, and that highway is going to be closed, man. You're going to fly off the road and kill yourself."

But Sawyer didn't reply. With half the Jeep uncovered, he waded to the other side.

"Since when did you stop caring about life?" Ryan asked. "I know things are complicated, but say yes to the future. Be reasonable."

"Hey, Ry?" Jane's voice came around the side of the house, clear as a bell in the silence of a fresh snowfall. Ryan looked toward the cabin. He couldn't see her, but he knew exactly where she was-hanging halfway out of the kitchen door, wincing against the cold.

"Yeah?" he called back.

"When you're done, can you check for alfalfa under the deck and put it in the deer feeder if it's there?"

"Are you kidding?" he mumbled, but replied before she had a chance to ask him again. "Yes, dear," he chimed, then plodded back toward the cabin just in time to watch Sawyer pull open the driver's-side door. He had to give it a firm tug before it gave, frozen to the doorframe. Sliding inside, Sawyer banged his shoes together, trying to loosen the snow from the treads of his boots and folds of his jeans.

"I'm trying to help you," Ryan told him. "It was a miracle getting her up here." He nodded at the cabin, at the voice that had just spooled across the blanket of snow. "You do realize that, right?"

Sawyer kept his silence.

"And since when do you not answer me when I ask you a question, anyway?" Ryan asked, clumsily adjusting his trooper hat with gloved hands. "I mean, I respect your privacy and everything, but since when did we get to that point?"

The Jeep's engine rumbled to life.

Sawyer leaned back in his seat and sighed.

"You don't want to talk about it." Ryan held up his hands. "I get it. But you realize you're making a huge mistake, right? You do realize that this crazy s.h.i.+t..." He waved a hand at the house. "It's just going to get worse, yeah?"

"It's called responsibility," Sawyer said. "Maybe you've heard of it."

"You mean the stuff it takes to run a successful business?" Ryan quipped back. "Yeah, I've heard of it. But responsibility doesn't have to take over your life."

"No?" Sawyer raised an eyebrow at his friend. "Is that why you're moving? Because it hasn't taken over?" Sawyer stepped on the gas, revving the engine. Ryan stepped away from the car as Sawyer swung the door closed.

"It's part-time," he said, raising his voice, trying to yell through the window gla.s.s and over the engine's roar. "What you're getting into is full-time for the rest of your G.o.dd.a.m.n life." The Jeep started to roll backward, crunching snow beneath the back tires.