NOW
Sometimes the only thing to fear . . . is yourself.
Sunday, November 8.
Before the waitress delivers my breakfast, I take the sugar packets out of the container on the diner table and quickly sneak them into my pocket. I wolf down the “Kluhane Bay loggers’ three-egg special” she brings, then call her back to ask for more toast. I break the toast into bits, use them to mop up bacon fat and yellow smears of egg residue on my plate. I gulp down the rest of my coffee, then shoot a glance around the diner.
It’s empty.
The server has gone into the back.
I drink the contents of the cream pitcher. My belly is now bursting. Even so, I take a white napkin and wrap it carefully around a leftover piece of crust that I simply can’t fit in. I slip the crust into the pocket of my loaned down jacket where the sugar packets are hidden.
The diner is warm, yet I keep the jacket on because a deep-seated cold still lingers at the very marrow of my bones. The doctors said I’m fine. They said I was lucky. They all said the same thing—the cops and paramedics, the search and rescue people. I believe it. I am incredibly lucky, and I thank the stars that aligned in order for me to survive.
And here I am, with only a bandage around my skull plus a headache and a few cuts and bruises. I’m the one who made it.
For in the end, there can only be one.
And to make it to the end is to reach a beginning, is it not? Wasn’t it T. S. Eliot who wrote words in that vein? That the end is where one starts, and only those who have risked going out too far can possibly learn just how far one can actually go?
Perhaps I will feel warm again tomorrow. Perhaps then my feral need to eat will subside.
A movement outside the window attracts my eye. It’s the female police officer, Constable Birken Hubble, coming up the sidewalk from the lake. Hubb, the others call her. Hers was the first face I saw when I came round at the tiny facility that serves as a hospital in this remote northern town. She’s one of the three cops stationed in Kluhane Bay, this place I found myself in after being plucked by helicopter from the raw jaws of the wilderness.
I watch her walk. Hubb is short, blonde, and substantial, with a gun-belt swagger more akin to a waddle. She has a pink-cheeked, happy resting face that peeps out from under a muskrat hat with furry earflaps. Behind that deceptively congenial countenance, she’s still all cop, though. I know something about wearing a Janus mask. Perhaps that’s why they’ve sent her to fetch me—they think I might slip and tell her something. They believe I am hiding something.
The Kluhane Bay Mounties want to interview me again, formally, they said, at the tiny clapboard Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachment down the road from the lake. They already asked me countless questions at the hospital after I was evacuated, and after I’d been stabilized by the doctor and nurses. I’ve told them everything I can.
The diner door swings open. Hubb enters with a blast of cold air. She wipes her nose with the back of her big black glove and nods at me. I’m the sole patron in the establishment—hard to miss. The diner occupies the ground floor of the only motel in town. I’ve been put up here by the cops.
I rise from my chair, pull on the gloves I’ve been loaned, and ask the waitress to put my meal on the hotel tab. I follow Constable Hubble out into a biting wind that blows from the lake.
As I walk alongside Hubb, hunched into my borrowed jacket, the wind makes my eyes water and my nose run. With my gloved hand I dig into my pocket for a tissue I put there earlier. As I pull out the tissue, the wrapped toast crust comes out with it and tumbles to the frozen sidewalk. I stop in a flare of panic, then quickly snatch it up from the ground. I tuck it safely back into my pocket, and joy suddenly fills my soul. I laugh. I have saved the toast. I will not go hungry later. And it’s beautiful out—the misty swirls and tatters of clouds, the soaring, snowcapped peaks all around, the lovely quietness and isolation of this remote northern British Columbian town.
I am struck by the poignant, incredibly sharp, almost unabsorbable exquisiteness of the world, of just being. It’s a feeling incommensurate with the direness of my situation. But fifteen days ago I was dropped into a fathomless pit, right into the black wilderness of my very own soul. And down there I saw the Monster, and the Monster looked back into my eyes, and I saw that the Monster was me.
But I turned away from those accusing eyes. I climbed and clawed my way back out. And I left the Monster down there. Far, far away.
I have been saved.
Reporters will come. Cameras, questions, judgment. It’s a gauntlet I must yet run. But right now, on this crisp, snow-blown morning on the shores of Lake Kluhane, it’s just Hubb and me. I have a pocketful of sugar and a toast crust, just in case.
Once inside the police station, Hubb ushers me into a tiny windowless room with dirty-white padded tiles. In the center is a bolted-down table, plastic chairs, one on either side. I glance up at the ceiling and spy a small camera in the upper corner.
“Sergeant Deniaud will be with you in a moment,” Hubb says, and closes the door. Almost immediately the suffocation starts. My hands clench and unclench. I met Sergeant Mason Deniaud at the hospital. He was with the search party who helped bring me out of the woods.
The clinic nurse told me that Mason Deniaud is new in Kluhane Bay. He’s a veteran big-city homicide detective who—for some reason yet to be ascertained by the members of this small community—has opted to relocate to this northern policing backwater.
I eye the camera again. And a bead of unease lodged deep in my chest begins to swell and pulse.
The door opens.
Deniaud enters holding a file of papers and a notebook and pen. His dark hair is shot through with silver at the temples. He wears an RCMP uniform and a bullet-suppression vest. I imagine as a homicide investigator in the city, he’d have dressed in nice suits with a tie. His eyes are gray, his gaze equal parts shrewd and assessing, and wounded. This man has been damaged. His is a quiet demeanor that belies some dangerously dark and crackling undercurrent beneath his skin.
What are your secrets, Mason Deniaud?
What lies do you tell?
Because we all lie.
Every one of us, and whoever claims they don’t is the biggest liar of all.
A flash blinds me—a memory. Blood. Terror in the eyes of another. My heart beats faster.
“How are you feeling this morning?” Mason says as he goes to the opposite end of the table. He sets his file and notebook down on the table before shucking off his RCMP jacket. He drapes it over the back of a chair. “How’s the head injury doing?”
I touch the dressing on my brow, almost expecting my fingers to come away bloody again. I feel only the rough, comforting fabric of the bandage.
“I . . . Much better, thank you. Just a small headache.”
“Sleeping okay at the motel?”
“Yes,” I say. “And you—did you sleep well?”
His gaze ticks to mine.
He studies me.
He’s assessing whether my question is born of innocent politeness or whether I’m mounting a subtle challenge to his authority—trying to make him human, less law enforcement official, put him more on my level.
“Yes. Thank you,” he says calmly.
But the lines at the corners of Mason Deniaud’s eyes tell a different story. I suspect he’s not slept well, and perhaps insomnia is some kind of new normal for this ex–homicide cop. I’m not a bad profiler of people. I know all about new normals.