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The snow was knee-deep on the wide-open path to the writing shack, and not quite as deep on
the narrow path through the woods from Danny's workplace to the back dock.
When he passed his writing shack, the writer said aloud, "I'll be back, first chapter. I'll see you soon, first sentence."
Hero had run ahead. There was a grove of cedars, out of the wind, where a small herd of deer had bedded down for the night. Either Hero had spooked them, or the deer had moved on when the wind dropped. Hero was sniffing all around; there were probably deer turds under the snow. The snow in the cedar grove was flattened down where the deer had huddled together.
"They're gone, Hero--you missed them," Danny told the bear hound. "Those deer are on Barclay Island by now, or they're on the mainland." The dog was rolling in the snow where the herd had bedded down. "If you roll in any deer turds, Hero, I'll give you a bath--with shampoo and everything."
Hero hated baths; Danny didn't much like washing the uncooperative dog, either. In the Cluny Drive house, in Toronto, Lupita was the one who washed the dog. She seemed to enjoy scolding Hero while she did it. ("So, Senor Macho--how do you like having only one eyelid? But that's what you get for fighting, Mr. Macho--isn't it?")
There must have been three feet of snow on the roof of Granddaddy's cabin, to which neither the writer nor the dog gave more than a passing glance. If that cabin had been haunted before, it was more haunted now; neither Danny nor Hero would have welcomed an encounter with Ketchum's ghost. If the old logger were a ghost, Danny knew that the poacher's cabin was just the spot for him.
The snow had drifted thigh-high onto the back dock. Across the frozen bay, parts of the mainland were visible in the whiteout, but the far shore didn't emerge distinctly; the mainland was blurred. The clarity of the shoreline was fleeting. In the distance, fragments of the landscape momentarily appeared, only to disappear the next instant. There were no identifying landmarks that allowed Danny to see exactly where the snowmobile portage from Payne's Road came into contact with the bay, but from the vantage of the dock, the writer could make out the shape of the ice fisherman's shack. It had not been blown away by the storm, yet the shack was so indistinct in the steadily falling snow that Danny knew the snowshoer would be halfway across the reach of the bay before he could see her.
What had little Joe said that day at the pig roast? "Plane. Not a bird." And then, because Danny had been watching Katie instead of the small airplane, he'd heard Joe say: "Not flying. Falling!" Only then did Danny see her: The skydiver was free-falling, hurtling through the sky, when the writer had first spotted her, only seconds before her parachute opened. And Amy herself had come consecutively more and more into view. First, it became clear she was a woman skydiver; then, all at once, she was naked. Only when Danny was beside her, in the pigpen--in all the mud and pig shit--did he realize how big Amy was. She'd been so solid!
Now the writer squinted across the bay, into the falling snow, as if he were waiting for another little airplane to appear on the vanished horizon--or for another red-white-and-blue parachute to pop open.
Whoever she was, she wouldn't be naked this time, the writer knew. Yet he also knew that, like the skydiver, she would suddenly just be there--the way an angel drops down to earth from the heavens. He was looking and looking for her, but Danny understood that in the whiteout of the snowstorm, the woman would just plain appear, as if by magic. One second, nothing would be there. The next second, she would be halfway across the bay and coming closer--one long stride after another.
What the writer had overlooked was the fact that Hero was a hunter; the bear hound had one good ear and a very good nose. The growl began in the dog's chest, and Hero's first bark was muffled--half swallowed in his throat. There was no one out there, on the frozen bay, but the bear hound knew she was coming; the dog's barking began in earnest only seconds before Danny saw her. "Shut up, Hero--don't scare her away," Danny said. (Of course the writer understood that, if she was Lady Sky, nothing could scare her.)
The snowshoer was in full stride, practically running, when Danny saw her. At such a pace, and carrying a backpack that heavy, she'd worked up quite a sweat. She had unzipped the parka to cool herself off; the hood, which she'd pushed off her head, lay on the back of her broad shoulders. Danny could see her strawberry-blond hair; it was a little longer than she used to cut it, when she'd been a skydiver. The writer could understand why both Lupita and Andy Grant thought she was younger than Danny; Amy looked younger than the writer, if not way younger. When she reached the dock, Hero finally stopped barking.
"You're not going to shoot me--are you, Danny?" Amy asked him. But the writer, who'd not had much luck with hope, couldn't answer her. Danny couldn't speak, and he couldn't stop staring at her.
Because it was snowing, the tears on Danny's face were mingled with the snow; he probably didn't know he was crying, but Amy saw his eyes. "Oh, hold on--just hang on--I'm coming," she said. "I got here as fast as I could, you know." She threw the backpack up on the dock, together with her ski poles, and she climbed over the rocks, taking her snowshoes off when she gained her footing on the dock.
"Lady Sky," Danny said; it was all he could say. He felt himself dissolving.
"Yeah, it's me," she said, hugging him; she pulled his face to her chest. He just shook against her. "Boy, you're even more of a mess than I thought you would be," Amy told him, "but I'm here now, and I've got you--you're going to be okay."
"Where have you been?" he managed to ask her.
"I had another project--two, actually," she told him. "They turned out to be a waste of my time. But I've been thinking about you--for years."
Danny didn't mind if he was Lady Sky's "project" now; he imagined that she'd had her share of projects, more than two. So what? the writer thought. He would soon be sixty-three; Danny knew he was no prize.
"I might have come sooner, you bastard, if you'd answered my letter," Amy said to him.
"I never saw your letter. My dad read it and threw it away. He thought you were a stripper," Danny told her.
"That was a long time ago--before the skydiving," Amy said. "Was your dad ever in Chicago? I haven't done any stripping since Chicago." Danny thought this was very funny, but before he could clear up the misunderstanding, Lady Sky took a closer look at Hero. The bear hound had been sniffing Amy's discarded snowshoes suspiciously--as if he were readying himself to piss on them. "Hey, you," Amy said to the dog. "You lift your leg on my snowshoes, you might just lose your other ear--or your pecker." Hero knew when he was being spoken to; he gave Amy an evil, crazed look with his lidless eye, but the dog backed away from the snowshoes. Something in Amy's tone must have reminded the bear hound of Six-Pack Pam. In fact, at that moment, Lady Sky had reminded Danny of Six-Pack--a young Six-Pack, a Six-Pack from those long-ago days when she'd lived with Ketchum.
"Jeez, you're shaking so much--that gun might go off," Amy told the writer.
"I've been waiting for you," Danny told her. "I've been hoping."
She kissed him; there was some mint-flavored gum in her mouth, but he didn't mind. She was warm, and still sweating, but not out of breath--not even from the snowshoeing. "Can we go indoors, somewhere?" Amy asked him. (At a glance, anyone could see that Granddaddy's cabin was uninhabitable--unless you were Ketchum, or a ghost. From the back dock of the island, it was impossible to see the other buildings--even when there wasn't a snowstorm.) Danny picked up her snowshoes and the ski poles, being careful to keep the carbine pointed at the dock, and Amy shouldered the big backpack. Hero ran ahead, as before.
They stopped at the writing shack, so that Danny could show her where he worked. The little room still smelled of the dog's lamentable farting, but the fire in the woodstove hadn't died out--it was like a sauna in that shack. Amy took off her parka, and a couple of layers of clothes that she wore under the parka--until she was wearing just her snowpants and a T-shirt. Danny told her that he'd once believed she was older than he was--or they were the same age, maybe--but how was it possible that she seemed younger now? Danny didn't mean younger than she was that day on the pig farm, in Iowa. He meant that she'd not aged as much as he had--and why was that, did she think?
Amy told him that she'd lost her little boy when she was much younger; she'd already lost him when Danny met her as a skydiver. Amy's only child had died when he was two--little Joe's age at the pig roast. That death had aged Amy when it happened, and for a number of years immediately following her boy's death. It wasn't that Amy was over her son's death--one never got over a loss like that, as she knew Danny would know. It was only that the loss didn't show as much, when so many years had passed. Maybe your child's death ceased being as visible to other people, after a really long time. (Joe had died more recently; to anyone who knew Danny, the writer had noticeably aged because of it.)
"We're the same age, more or less," Amy told the writer. "I've been sixty for the last couple of years, I think--at least that's what I tell the guys who ask."
"You look fifty," Danny told her.
