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Tears blur my vision. I blink them away.
“Thank you, Bo.”
•••
I BUILD A FIREwhere the old cabin stood, throwing on every downed branch and plank I can find. And then I sit by the lake, my arms around my good knee, my bad leg stretched out in front of me, and wait with an empty rifle on my back.
Snow falls over me, and I don’t shake it away. It settles on me until the chest-rattling sound of a helicopter draws close; it lands near to us on the shore, and the wind of the helicopter’s landing scatters the snow.
Two figures come across the ice toward me, heads and bodies bent.
“We did it,” I whisper, imagining Bo beside me. “You did it. You saved us.”
They speak to me, but I only shake my head. I don’t understand; I can hardly hear.
They lift me up. They take the bodies, too. Raph and the pilot. Not Daniel, somewhere out in the woods, not Bo.
I want to tell them about Bo, want them to take him home, too, but he’s already home, already in his right place here where the sky stretches, empty, to the horizon and there are no human voices to stir the shadows.
I almost tell them to leave me. I’ve made a mistake. Leave me here where I belong. But it’s the hollow me that still stands beneath the trees, and another me that lets them carry me across the ice.
The two of us lock eyes, a winter ghost and a living girl. And then I rise into the sky and she turns back with a four-legged ghost at her side, into the woods to face the winter, and I wonder which one of us is real.
