Rainbow Lake

“What time did it stop snowing?” Rick asked his wife without turning around. She sniffled before she answered, and Rick wasn’t sure if it was because of the head cold or the crying. Maybe both.

“I think around four in the morning,” Sheila said from the couch, her voice raspy and mousey all at once. Rick had only heard her speak like this twice before. And neither time had been good. He nodded once to acknowledge her answer.

He stood at the large picture window in the living room, looking out at the backyard. He had his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his blue jeans. His thick plaid shirt hung open, revealing a stripe of pale skin. Sleep still clung to his eyes and his hair. His voice was only just getting back to normal, losing the rasp that always haunted him for twenty minutes or so after he woke up. 

The low back deck, the smattering of spruce, pine, and bare aspen trees, and every inch of ground sat covered in a thick layer of snow— probably a foot and a half deep. Their backyard had no fence because the house was on just under ten acres of land. Their nearest neighbor was three-quarters of a mile away, on the other side of the country road on which they lived. Their property backed up onto a massive national park. So, one could argue that their back yard was, in fact, several hundred thousand acres of pristine wilderness. And right now, it was all covered in snow.

Rick shifted and looked at the thermometer he had affixed to one of the deck’s railings some ten years earlier when the one his father had put up finally gave out. It read 5-degrees Fahrenheit. His eyes wandered slowly back to the footprints in the snow. They led away from the house, starting at the sliding-glass back door twelve feet to Rick’s right and ending somewhere in that freezing white wilderness.

Sniffle. “Rick? Can you please go find her? I don’t understand why you won’t just go. You can follow her footprints. Please, Rick.” 

“Do you think she would want me to go find her?” Rick asked softly, still staring at the footprints.

“What? Of course she would. What are you talking about, Rick? What’s gotten into you?”

Rick shifted from foot to foot, his bare feet cold on the hardwood floor. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know.”

He formed more words in his head and started to speak them, but they seemed to catch there, in his mouth. His mind kept churning, wanting to talk to his wife, wanting to tell her his thoughts like he had been doing for almost two decades. But, the words caught in his mouth, and they piled up so fast that he felt he was going to choke on them all.

Rick shut his mouth and swallowed. His throat was dry. He walked to the kitchen and reached into a cabinet for a glass. He could feel Sheila’s eyes on him from where she sat on the couch. She could see him over the breakfast bar that denoted the end of the living room and the beginning of the kitchen. He pulled a glass out and tried to keep his hand from shaking. 

The small light turned on as he pressed the glass against the fridge’s water dispensing mechanism. A powerful stream of water shot into the glass, sending drops out to splash lightly on his hand and the fridge’s sleek silver exterior. He stared into that water as the glass filled. His eyes began to burn. He pulled the glass away, stopping the stream of water, and turned around. He didn’t want his wife to see him wiping tears away. Not now.

He gulped the water down and set the glass down absently on the counter. He stepped toward the living room and stopped. “I’m—,” he said to Sheila, then stopped, looking outside. He turned and stared back at the water glass on the counter, then back out at the footprints in the snow. He usually brought her water first thing in the morning. Now she was . . . gone.

“What is it?” Sheila asked. “Rick? Look at me. What’s going on?”

Rick kept his eyes on the footprints. Small snowflakes were floating down out of the sky, joining their fallen brethren. “It’s starting to snow again,” He said. “I’ll go.”

It took him ten minutes to get dressed in his snow gear. When he was ready to go, he stood at the back door and looked out, his gloved hand on the door handle. “I love you,” he said. “I’ll be back soon.”

“Do you want me to call the police?” she asked.

“No. Not yet.”

“You have your phone?” 

He nodded at the glass door. “I’ll be back.” His breath had made a ragged circle of diaphanous condensation on the glass. Looking at it made him uneasy, although he didn't know exactly why.

Rick stepped out into the snow and slid the door shut behind him. He took two steps before he heard the door slide open. Turning, he saw Sheila standing there at the threshold. He smiled and stepped back and embraced her.

She whispered, “I love you,” in his ear.

He released her, turned, and walked away, following the slowly-filling impressions in the snow. He was soon out of view of the house, stepping in the footprints to make his going a little less cumbersome, even though he had to shorten his stride to do so. There was no telling how far she went, and he’d need to conserve his energy to bring her back. He would have to carry her. 

He made his way through the winter wonderland, through the falling snow, his face stinging with the cold. His thoughts were a blizzard in their own right, seeming to pass through his mind darkly and uncountable, settling on his heart with a weight he’d never known before.

His vision clouded, and he lost the tracks for a minute. Making his way back to the trail, he tripped over an old dead tree trunk hidden by the snow. He laughed, a false and bitter sound to his ears, made all the worse by the immense quiet the snow engendered. But he laughed all the same, and in the span of one breath, he was crying.

“I’m sorry,” he sobbed, rocking back and forth on his knees in the snow. “I said I wouldn’t do this,” he told the silent landscape. The trees stood stoic, impassive to the emotion in his voice, a voice that sounded like an adolescent’s— like his own voice from thirty years ago.

“I couldn’t even keep my word to you. Not this last time. Not so many times. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Mom. I’m sorry.”

Time slipped away from him in his grief, or it marched on as it always had. He couldn’t tell. But the snow was falling harder when he released a shivering sigh and wiped his face with the back of his cold glove.   

Rick got to his feet again and followed the footprints, which were now barely visible, so fast was the snow falling. 

There was a small lake around the next bend, which meant he was about halfway up the valley that encompassed his house at its lowest point. Somehow he knew that he would find her there. Even before he rounded the copse of spruce trees, he knew it. 

He stopped in the snow and thought about the time, when he was nine or ten years old, he had walked up to the little lake with her. It was amidst the lush green of summer. The sparrow-hawks were out diving around for their lunch, and the squirrels clattered up and down trees, chittering away. On this particular walk, his mother had gesticulated and explained and teased out his imagination, describing how a massive glacier had formed the valley. A job that took millions of years, she said, and he believed her. He’d always believed everything she said because she’d never given him cause not to. He loved her for that the most, he thought, standing there in the soft frigid assault of snow and memory and sorrow and love— that grandest of all emotions.

He could almost hear her voice, picturing her as she danced around, trying to get a rise out of him— which she never failed to do. But he was alone in the snow, the summer splendor just a vivid memory. His thoughts drifted once again to all the ways he’d disappointed her over the years, real and imagined.

He shook his head and walked on. When he came upon Rainbow Lake, he expected to see a figure out in the middle of it, on the ice. Or maybe on the other side. But he saw none. No slight, stooped woman taking small, deliberate steps. No energetic and smiling woman from years past, either. Nothing. No one. 

But the footprints in the snow . . .

Rick walked up next to the frozen surface of the lake and stopped. He raised his head slowly, inspecting each footprint in the snow on the surface of the lake. His breath caught when he saw it. The footsteps ended right before a jagged circle of freshly-broken ice near the middle of the lake.

He moved his mouth and reached a hand out, but no sound came, and he did not step forward. Surely she knew that the lake wouldn’t be fully frozen. The first real freeze of the winter was just a week past. Surely she knew that. Surely she knew. She had lived in these mountains for almost 60 years. Surely . . .

“When you wake up, I’ll be gone.” 

The words came into his head again, as they had been doing all morning, again and again. She had told him last night. She had warned him as she sat amid the bottles of painkillers that barely worked anymore, amid the gemcitabine and the sunitinib and the everolimus and the gemcitabine and the suppositories, next to the blood pressure monitor and C-Pap machine on loan from the hospice care company. 

“I’ll be gone. But don’t you come after me,” she had said. And she’d made him promise. But he had thought that she was nearing the end, that she would be gone in another sense. Not like this. 

But still, he had promised. And here he was, standing on the edge of Rainbow Lake, peering at his mother’s watery grave, knowing that she had done it deliberately, that this was where she had wanted to die, where he was going to scatter her ashes, as per her request.

Rick stepped out onto the surface of the ice without even realizing he was doing it. He took a step and heard the ice creak and crack under him. Is this why she made me promise? he asked himself, unable to look away from the end of her footprints, the broken ice.

“I’ll be gone,” she had said. “But don’t you come after me. I know you’ll want to. You’ll be hurting bad. You’ll want to do anything you can to get me back, but you won’t be able to. So don’t try . . . You were too young when your father died, but it nearly killed me. Don’t let this do the same to you. You’ve got Sheila. She loves you, and you love her. So you just remember that.” She paused, taking his hand in hers. “I love you. I’ve always loved you so, so much.”

“I love you too, Mom,” he’d said to her, unable to cry, then, for reasons unknown to him. “Thanks for . . . everything.”

She smiled at him. A sad, knowing smile. “Promise me you won’t try to come after me.”

“Mom—”

“Promise me.” 

“I promise, but—”

“Good,” she said and laid back on the bed, closing her eyes. It was the last word she said to him. She fell asleep as he sat beside her bed in a recliner, as had been his habit. Before long, he was sleeping, too. When he awoke in the morning in the chair— over two hours ago now— she had been gone.

Presently, Rick stared out at the hole in the ice. He took a slow step back toward the shore as the ice groaned in protest.

“I’m glad we got to say goodbye,” he said.

There was no answer, but he thought he heard her voice, silent and soft as the falling snow.