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Raph is on his feet, reeling away from the spreading hole. He nearly makes it to shore before he collapses on his knees. I watch him instead of watching the plane’s slow surrender to the water, and I don’t move until I feel the ice twitch under me again.
I drag myself toward shore. My chest hurts. It’s hard to breathe. I realize I’m sobbing, my whole body clutching up with it. I move forward on my elbows, pushing weakly with one leg and dragging the other behind me. I leave a streak of red on the ice.
The shore is close and miles away, and it only seems to get farther, but the ice under me is solid now. Solid enough to rest.
I check Raph again. Not moving. I shut my eyes.
The world contracts to the steady roaring in my ears. The ground seems to pitch under me, but I know it isn’t the ice. Just whatever damage I’ve done.
I don’t sleep, exactly, but I drift. I half-dream, and in the dream I’m flying. Bo is beside me on the seat, and home is ahead. I’ve made it. I’m safe.
I don’t ever want to wake up.
•••
I DON’T KNOWhow long I’m on the ice. When I come back to myself, back to the ground, the first thing I notice is that I can hear again—sort of. One ear is still full of the ocean-roar sound, but from the other I can make out the muffled sounds of the wind and the creaking ice and my own breathing.
My leg has stopped bleeding. I hurt, but that’s nothing new. I push myself cautiously upright, touching my head—tender—and my chest and my limbs, checking that everything is in one piece.
When I’m certain that I’m not dead, I look around. The plane has vanished. The hole is ragged, twice as big across as the plane, and still only a fraction of the lake’s surface.
Raph lies on his back maybe twenty yards away, his head rolled to the side away from me. I squint, trying to tell if he’s breathing, but I can’t see. I pull the rifle against my body. I still have the last shot.
Getting to my feet takes a full minute. Even then I wobble, but I take one step after another and draw close to Raph. By the time I’m ten steps away I can see he’s breathing—uneven, shallow breaths.
Five steps away and I have enough of an angle to see his face. His eyes are closed, his face oddly swollen. A bubble of blood forms at the corner of his mouth. It expands slowly, turning pinkish as it thins, then pops, splattering his face with tiny red droplets.
I lift the rifle and step forward. Two more steps. I’m close enough that he could grab me, if he moves, but he’s not moving.
One of his hands is on his chest, the other flung out away from me. He’s on his back, but his legs are twisted to the side, and the stray, strange thought floats through my mind that it can’t be very comfortable.
One bullet. One bullet I’ve been saving for him, and here’s my chance.
“Hey,” I say. He doesn’t move.
I inch forward and nudge his shoulder with the rifle. He still doesn’t move.
He isn’t going to wake up. I’m not going to get to look him in the eye. And even if I did, he would never have felt sorry for what he’s done. Never felt guilt or shame or regret. He’d just have hated me. I can’t make him hurt like I hurt.
But I can kill him.
I level the gun at his chest and wrap my finger around the trigger. One tug and I’ll be done. Put a bullet through his heart. Or maybe his head.
I hold there. Seconds drag past. My breath comes out in quick, sharp puffs of fog. Just one little pull, hardly a twitch. A few muscles, one finger. Boom, dead. Easy.
And yet I don’t pull the trigger. I lower the gun. Raph’s breath hitches, then resumes.
He’s nothing. Less than nothing. Killing him won’t do anything. It won’t bring my dad back.
I sit down. I put the rifle over my lap, and I watch his chest rise and fall and rise and fall. The pauses between his breaths get longer, the rasping louder. But it goes on. And I watch. I’m too tired to move. Too wounded. And I need to know that he’s dead. I need to be sure.
It’s an hour, maybe two, before it finally stops. It happens suddenly and quietly. A ceasing. No death rattle, no dramatic last collapse of his chest. The stillness creeps up on me. I only realize it’s there long seconds after it’s begun.
I wait longer, to be sure. I touch his cheek. It’s already cold, like he’s been dead all along, even though I know it’s just from the frigid air.
I feel like I should say something. Something fierce or forgiving, angry or aloof. But I don’t feel anything toward him now, and I have nothing to say.
I look up at the sky. It’s clear as glass and vast as heartbreak, and endlessly, endlessly empty. But it doesn’t have to stay that way. The plane is gone, but I’m not lost. The satellite phone is on Raph’s belt.
