The Gate Under the Snow
Nora
The last thing I saw before my car left the road was the sign.
SILVER CREEK RANCH. Burned into a plank of old pine, hanging from two chains between the gateposts, swinging in the wind like it wanted to wave me down. I had driven past it a thousand times when I was young. I had ridden under it on the back of a gray mare, with a boy’s arms around my waist. I had promised myself, ten years ago, that I would never see it again.
Then the snow turned to ice under my tires, and the world spun.
The car slid sideways. My headlights swept across white fields, black fence posts, a wall of falling snow. I pressed the brake and nothing happened. I turned the wheel and nothing happened. There was a soft, terrible quiet, and then the front of the car dropped into the ditch with a crunch that I felt in my teeth.
My head snapped forward. My left wrist hit the door. Something in the dashboard beeped three times and went silent.
For a long moment I just sat there, breathing.
The engine had died. The headlights still burned, pointing up at an angle, lighting a cone of snow that fell and fell and never seemed to land. Beyond them, through the white, I could see the dark shape of the gate and the sign still swinging.
“No,” I said out loud. “Not here. Anywhere but here.”
The car did not care what I wanted. Neither did the storm.
I tried the engine. It coughed once and gave up. I held my phone up to the windshield like a prayer. No signal. There had never been signal on the creek road. Once, that was the reason I loved it. Out here, nobody could reach you.
Now it was the reason I might freeze to death in a rental car at the bottom of a ditch, wearing a city coat and ankle boots, twenty minutes from the town I had run away from. My flight home to Denver left in the morning from an airport two hours east. I had been so sure I would make it.
I made myself think like a nurse. I had spent seven years in an emergency room in Denver. I knew what cold did to a body. I knew the order of things. Shelter first. Stay dry. Stay with the vehicle unless help is close.
Help was close. That was the problem.
The ranch house sat a mile up the lane, past the barn and the line of cottonwoods along the creek. I could not see it from here. But I knew exactly where it was, the way you know where your own heart is without looking. If the windows were lit, someone was home.
And if someone was home, it was him.
I gave myself ten minutes.
The heater was dead, and the cold came into the car fast, through the floor and the glass. My breath fogged. My fingers went stiff around the phone. My wrist began to throb with a deep, hot ache, and when I pushed up my coat sleeve, the skin over the bone was already turning red.
I pulled my sleeve back down and did not look at the thin white scar that ran beside it. I never looked at that scar if I could help it.
In the back seat sat the shoebox my grandmother had left me. Gran’s handwriting was on the lid in blue ink, shaky from the last years of her life. For Nora, when she is ready. It was tied shut with a piece of red yarn. I had found it on her kitchen table that afternoon, after the lawyer left, after I signed the papers to sell her little yellow house. I had not opened it. I told myself I would open it in Denver, with a glass of wine and the door locked.
Now I reached back and pulled it into my lap. Maybe I just wanted to hold something of hers.
“You would know what to do,” I whispered. “You always knew.”
Gran had buried her only son three years ago and her husband long before that. She had buried a lot of things. Two days ago, the whole town of Harlow had buried her. I had stood at the front of the little white church in my black dress with my hands folded and my face calm, the way I stood in the hospital when a family needed me to be calm. Behind me, the church had been full of old faces, faces that looked at me and then looked away, because they all remembered the Pryce girl who had left town in the middle of the night and never come home.
At the very back, near the door, a tall man in a dark hat had stood alone. I had seen him only for a second, when I turned to take my seat. When I looked again, during the last song, he was gone.
I had told myself it was nobody.
I had told myself a lot of things.
The ten minutes ended. The windows had frosted from the inside. I could no longer feel my toes. And through the white, far up the lane, I saw two lights moving toward me.
Headlights.
A truck came down the hill, slow and steady, a plow blade on the front pushing a wave of snow aside. It stopped at the gate. The driver’s door opened.
A man climbed down.
He was tall, wide in the shoulders, wearing a heavy brown coat and a hat pulled low against the wind. He walked toward my car, his flashlight beam sliding across the snow, the hood, my face.
He stopped.
Even through the frost on the glass, even through the dark and the snow and ten years, I knew him. I knew the way he stood, with his weight a little more on his left leg. My body knew him before my mind would admit it, and my heart did something it had not done in a decade. It stumbled, the way a horse stumbles in a hole it did not see.
He came to my door and pulled it open. Cold air and snow rushed in. The flashlight dropped away from my eyes, and I could see his face.
Wade Callahan.
He was not a boy anymore. That was the first thing. The boy I had left had been all quick smiles and long legs, with a sunburned nose and a laugh you could hear across a field. This man was harder. His jaw was darker, rough with a few days of beard. There were lines at the corners of his eyes that had not been there before, and a small white scar through his left eyebrow. His eyes were the same. Gray, like creek water in winter. They looked at me the way they always had, as if they could see straight through skin and bone to whatever I was trying to hide.
For a long moment, neither of us said a word.
The snow blew between us. The sign creaked on its chains above the gate.
“Nora,” he said finally.
Just my name. His voice was lower than I remembered, rougher, like he did not use it much. It went through me like heat through cold hands. It hurt.
“Hello, Wade.”
His eyes moved over me, quick and careful. My face. My hands around the shoebox. My thin gray coat. My boots, which were made for city sidewalks and not for this.
“Are you hurt?”
“No. I don’t think so. My wrist, a little.”
“Can you walk?”
“Yes.”
“Then get out of the car.”
I did not move. I could not. Ten years, and this was how it would happen. In a ditch, in a storm, with my mascara probably running and my nose red from the cold. I had imagined meeting him again more times than I would ever admit. In those daydreams, I was always calm and beautiful and far away, and he was always the one who could not find his words.
“I can wait here,” I said. “Someone will come. The state will send a plow.”
He looked at me like I had said something in another language.
“The pass closed at four. The county plow went home at six. Nobody is coming down this road until the storm stops, and the radio says that won’t be for two days.” He leaned down, one hand on the roof of my car, and his face was close to mine now. Close enough that I could see snow melting on his eyelashes. “You’ll be dead by morning, Nora. Get out of the car.”
“Wade—”
“I’m not asking.”
There it was. Under all that new quiet, the same steel. He had always been gentle, but he had never been soft. Not when it mattered.
I got out of the car.
My legs were stiff, and the moment my boots hit the snow, they slid. He caught my arm before I could fall. His hand was huge, wrapped around my upper arm through the coat, and it did not let go.
“Keys,” he said.
I gave them to him. He reached past me, took my suitcase from the trunk, then took the shoebox from my hands without asking and tucked it under his arm. He walked me to the truck. He opened the passenger door and lifted me up into the seat as if I weighed nothing, then shut the door and went around to his side.
The truck was warm. It smelled like coffee and leather and dog. An old black-and-white dog lay on the back seat, her gray muzzle on her paws, watching me with soft brown eyes.
“Hi, sweetheart,” I whispered, and her tail thumped once.
Wade climbed in and slammed his door. Then he sat with both hands on the wheel and stared out through the windshield at the falling snow. He did not put the truck in gear.
“Two days,” I said. My voice shook. I hoped he would think it was the cold. “I’m sorry. I didn’t plan this. The pass was closed, and I thought the creek road would get me back to town. I wouldn’t have come this way if—”
“If you’d known it would leave you at my gate.” He said it flatly. Not a question.
“Yes.”
He nodded slowly, still not looking at me.
Then he turned his head. His gray eyes met mine in the green glow of the dashboard, and I saw something move in them. Something old and deep and furious, held down hard, like a horse held back by a man who knows exactly how strong it is.
“Ten years,” he said quietly. “Ten years you couldn’t come back. And now you can’t leave.”
He put the truck in gear and drove me up the hill, toward the only house I had ever thought of as home.
The Woman by My Fire
Wade
I had prayed for a lot of things in ten years. That she was safe. That she was happy. That one day I would stop listening for her car on the lane.
I had never once prayed to find her half-frozen in a ditch below my gate. But when my flashlight hit that windshield and I saw her face, white and scared behind the frost, something inside me that had been locked up for a decade broke clean open.
I did not let her see it. I drove.
The wipers fought the snow. Juno sighed in the back seat. Nora sat beside me with her hands pressed between her knees, shaking so hard I could hear her teeth. I turned the heat up as high as it would go and kept my eyes on the lane, because if I looked at her, I was going to say something I could not take back.
She had cut her hair. A stupid thing to notice, with her lips going blue. But I noticed. It used to fall to the middle of her back, dark brown, always full of hay and wind. Now it stopped at her shoulders, smooth and straight, like a woman who had a mirror and a schedule and a life I knew nothing about.
The house came out of the snow, dark logs and gray stone, smoke pulled sideways from the chimney. My great-grandfather built it with his own hands. Every Callahan since had been born in it, married out of it, or buried behind it, up on the hill under the pines. I had stopped expecting it to hold anything new.
I parked as close to the porch as I could. I came around and opened her door, and when she tried to climb down on her own, her legs folded under her. I caught her. I did not think. I just picked her up, the way I would pick up a calf caught out in a storm, and carried her up the steps and through the door with Juno at my heels.
She weighed less than she used to. She smelled different. Some city soap, something like flowers. Under it, though, under all of it, she still smelled like Nora.
I put her down in the big chair by the woodstove.
“I can walk,” she said.
“I know.”
“You didn’t have to carry me.”
“I know that too.”
I knelt and pulled off her boots. They were soaked through, the leather dark with water. Her socks were thin and wet, and her toes, when I peeled the socks away, were white and cold as stone. I held her feet between my hands. She made a small sound, half pain and half something else, and tried to pull away.
“Hold still,” I said.
“Wade, I’m a nurse. I know how to warm my own feet.”
A nurse. I had pictured a hundred lives for her, never that. And yet it made perfect sense. She had always been the one who found the hurt bird, the limping dog, the kid crying behind the school. She had always needed to fix what was broken.
Everything except us.
“Then you know you shouldn’t do it yourself with hands that can’t feel anything,” I said, and kept holding her feet.
She stopped fighting me. She leaned her head back against the chair and closed her eyes, and I watched the color come slowly back into her face while the fire cracked and the wind pushed at the windows.
When her toes were pink again, I went upstairs and came back with an armful of clothes. A pair of wool socks, thick and gray. One of my flannel shirts, blue and green, worn soft. A pair of sweatpants that would be much too long for her.
“Bathroom is where it always was,” I said. “Get out of those wet things.”
She looked at the clothes in my hands. Something crossed her face. Maybe she was remembering the last time she wore one of my shirts. I was. It had been summer, and she had worn it to make coffee in this kitchen at five in the morning, and nothing else.
She took the clothes without a word and went down the hall.
I brought her suitcase and the shoebox in from the truck and set them by the stairs. I fed Juno. I filled the kettle. I put wood in a stove that did not need it, because I needed something to do with my hands.
When she came back, the shirt hung almost to her knees. She had rolled the sleeves up three times. The sweatpants were bunched at her ankles. She looked about nineteen years old, and for a moment I could not breathe.
“Tea,” I said, and pushed a mug across the kitchen table.
“Thank you.”
She sat. I did not. I leaned against the counter with my arms crossed, because it was the only way to keep my hands still.
She looked around the kitchen. At the old iron stove in the corner that nobody had cooked on in thirty years. At the calendar on the wall, still on the wrong month. Her eyes stopped on the empty hook by the back door where my father’s hat used to hang.
“Your dad,” she said softly.
“Six years ago. His heart. He was out checking the fence and just sat down in the grass.”
“I’m sorry, Wade. Gran told me. I wanted to write. Call. Something.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.” She looked down at her tea. “And your mom?”
“Lives with her sister in Arizona. Says her bones are done with winter.” I watched her. “It’s just me out here now. Me and Luis, when he isn’t at his daughter’s. He went into town this morning before the storm.”
She nodded. Her finger traced the rim of the mug, around and around. I could see her working up to it, the way she used to work up to jumping off the rope swing into the creek.
“Your wife,” she said. “She won’t mind? Me being here?”
So that was what she had heard. I wondered who told her. I wondered how long she had believed it.
“There’s no wife.”
Her eyes came up fast. “Gran said you were engaged. Years ago.”
“I was.”
“What happened?”
I thought about Megan. A kind woman. A teacher from the next town over. I had asked her to marry me because I was twenty-eight and tired of being alone, and because everyone in Harlow said it was time. Three weeks before the wedding, she found me out on the porch at two in the morning, staring down the lane at nothing. She sat down next to me and asked me, very gently, whose car I was waiting for.
I never answered her. I did not have to.
“It ended,” I said. “It wasn’t fair to her.”
Nora opened her mouth, then closed it. She did not ask why it wasn’t fair. I think she knew. I think that was the reason she suddenly could not look at me.
The lights went out a little after ten.
There was no warning. One moment the kitchen was bright, and the next it was black, and the fridge stopped humming, and the only light left was the orange glow through the little window in the stove door.
“Power line,” I said. “Happens every big storm. A tree comes down somewhere between here and town.”
“How long?”
“Could be a day. Could be four.”
I lit the oil lamps my mother always kept full. I went out to the shed and started the generator, enough to keep the well pump and the freezer going. When I came back in, snow up to my knees and in my collar, Nora was standing at the window with her arms wrapped around herself, looking out at the dark.
“The bedrooms upstairs will be ice by midnight,” I said. “The stove only heats this room. We sleep down here.”
She turned. “We?”
“You take the couch. I’ll take the chair.”
“Wade, you can’t sleep in a chair all night.”
“I’ve slept in the barn with a sick horse more nights than I can count.” I pulled quilts out of the chest by the stairs. My grandmother made them. Heavy and faded, the stitches still tight. “You’ll take the couch.”
She did not argue. She sat on the couch and pulled a quilt up to her chin, and Juno climbed up beside her without asking and lay across her feet. The traitor. Juno never got on the couch for me.
I sat in the chair, close to the stove. The lamp on the table between us burned low. The wind moaned around the corners of the house. Neither of us pretended to sleep.
“Would you have come down to the gate,” she asked after a long time, “if you’d known it was me?”
I did not answer that. I could not, not without telling her about the nights I had driven past her grandmother’s house just to see if a strange car was in the drive. In the lamplight, her eyes were very dark. Her face was thinner than it used to be, and older, and more beautiful than I had let myself remember. She was holding her left wrist in her right hand, rubbing it without seeming to know she was doing it.
“Let me see that,” I said.
“It’s fine.”
“Nora.”
She hesitated. Then she held out her arm.
I left the chair and knelt by the couch. I took her hand in mine, gently, and pushed the flannel sleeve up past her elbow. The skin over the wrist bone was swollen and red where it had hit the car door. I pressed carefully along the bones, the way the vet in town had taught me to check a horse’s leg, feeling for anything that moved wrong. She did not flinch at that.
She flinched when my thumb found the scar.
It ran along the inside of her wrist, thin and white and straight. Old. Neat. The kind of scar a surgeon leaves when he puts a broken bone back together with metal. I knew every inch of this woman’s body once. I had kissed every freckle on her shoulders and every bruise she got from falling off my horses. This scar had not been there.
“That’s new,” I said.
“It’s old.”
“Not to me.”
She tried to pull her hand back. I did not let go. I did not grip hard. I just held on, the way you hold a scared animal, until it understands you are not going to hurt it.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I fell.”
“When?”
“A long time ago. On ice. In Denver.”
She said it too fast. She said it to the quilt instead of to me. Her pulse jumped under my thumb, quick and hard, like something trying to get out.
And I remembered. I did not want to, but I did. A night ten years ago, the last night I ever saw her. She came to the barn late, in a long-sleeved shirt even though it was warm. She kept her left arm close to her body. She would not let me hold her hand. She kissed me like she was trying to memorize me. In the morning, she was gone.
I had spent ten years thinking she left because I was not enough.
I looked at the scar. I looked at her face. Something cold and slow began to crawl up my spine, colder than the storm outside.
“You never could lie to me, Nora,” I said quietly. “Not when you were fifteen, and not now.” My hand closed around hers. “So I’m going to ask you one more time, and this time you’re going to tell me the truth. Who broke your arm?”
