But these boots… if they didn’t make his father smile, then nothing would.
Paulie took off the boots and got on his knees. He sniffed inside the boots. They smelled just like Eggah; like a big, sweaty scallion.
When he came down the stairs, Eggah didn’t even mention the boots. Like he forgot all about it already. Eggah said that his daddy was sick and that he needed his rest. The night before, he hadn’t looked all that sick to Paulie. Maybe a little tired, but not sick. In fact, Paulie couldn’t remember his father ever being sick, even the time he ate a whole platter of deviled eggs at a family cookout and his face turned purple.
Paulie asked for breakfast, but Eggah only growled at him. Very cranky! Very rude! This made Paulie cry, so much so that he couldn’t even see straight, his eyes all blurry from the tears. Eggah was being a meanie and Paulie didn’t like it one bit.
He thanked Eggah for the boots, but Eggah only yelled louder after that. His new friend calmed down some, once he started taking more drinks from the big bottle that daddy usually kept hidden.
Eggah drank a lot of the bottle and burped. He said that, “It’s time you start callin’ me your Dad.” Paulie had stopped crying by this point, but something in the way Eggah said those words made him want to cry again. But he didn’t. He felt like it would make Eggah mad again.
Maybe, thought Paulie, he was angry because he wanted his boots back. Maybe he changed his mind. Suddenly, the boots made him feel really guilty.
“When a big person talks at ya’, then you gotta talk back, ya’ hear?”
Paulie nodded, but he wasn’t sure why. He felt like he shouldn’t have given in with a nod. “Can’t hear you?”
“Yes, Eggah.”
“Not Edgar. Not anymore. Dad. You’re going to call me Dad, just like I called my own pop. You got it?”
“Daddah’s my daddah,” Paulie protested, causing Eggah’s face to turn bright red. He looked like he was eating spicy peppers, like the time his grandparents took Paulie out for Mezzican food. “Daddah’s sick? Daddah’s in the hospital?” Changing the subject never hurt things too much, especially when an adult was sore at you.
“I’m your Dad now. Don’t act like a retard.”
“Not,” Paulie started to say, a new set of tears bursting out of the corners of his eyes. “My Daddah.”
Eggah snapped, “Your Daddah’s dead. You know what that means, ya’ little shit? You know what dead means? D-E-D, he’s dead as all get-out.”
Yes.
Paulie knew what dead was. Just like S.A., the chinchilla. Just like his mom’s great aunt Trudy. Just like the caterpillar he found in the driveway that time, all squished, sticky, and messy. Dead meant it wouldn’t ever play again. Wouldn’t talk. Wouldn’t eat. Wouldn’t take naps. Wouldn’t do anything fun. Dead was dead, and nothing else happened after something was dead.
No, his daddy wasn’t dead. People died when they got really old and gray and have wrinkles all over their bodies. That’s what his daddy had told him. His mother had said the same thing. The thing that Eggah was saying was a big lie.
“Got a thick skull on you. Now that I’m bein’ a’charged with learnin’ you something, I’ll get that skull fixed up just right, you bet.”
Paulie went into a full eruption of tears now.
That was when Eggah got super-mad. He said something about his own daddy again (heleftmeyoushitheleftmeandnowyoursleftyoutoobutyouluckedthefuckoutwithme!!!), and that’s when he started to hurt Paulie. It didn’t hurt too badly at first, when he whacked him in the arm with a wooden spoon from on top of the stove. Then he picked up a metal thingy, something that looked flat and square. It was the thing his mommy made peanut butter and jelly pancakes with.
The flat thing for making pancakes hurt a lot. Eggah hit Paulie in the back of his legs and he fell down on his knees, crying out for his real daddy (not this mean, mean man that wanted Paulie to call him something he wasn’t). The meanie hit him three more times, each time a little harder than the last. Paulie wanted to be dead, just like Eggah said his father was. It hurt so bad that Paulie closed his eyes, sobbing into the iced over floor tiles. His tears froze and stuck to his cheeks. That hurt almost as bad as the pancake-thing.
“What are you gonna call me, son?” Eggah asked, pacing around the kitchen, practicing swings with the metal flipper. “Gonna call me your pop?”
Before Paulie could respond, he started to see stars in his eyes. His chest was going up and down, like he couldn’t breathe at all. He couldn’t speak because he couldn’t get any air in his lungs.
This only made Eggah madder.
When he hit Paulie the next time, on the back of the head, everything went dark.
Paulie slept.
Chapter One
Annie parked the snowmobile on what once was the throughway of her street, directly in front of their house. Her home was almost unrecognizable. In another week or so, she’d be able to climb on the second floor’s roof without much of a boost.
Only four months earlier, she’d been out at the very same curb, gathering up leaves from the oak trees peppered about their property. It seemed like another lifetime, another world, another person. But hadn’t she been just that—another person? The woman that she was back then was dead and buried, presumably beneath a dwarfing drift of snow, somewhere near the bodies of her captors, somewhere near Tony’s body.
She paused long enough to soak in the upper half of the house. The lower half was invisible now, awash in piling drifts. A steep incline led up to the second floor window, to their bedroom. That would be the best bet if she was even able to take those final steps. Her energy was depleted to the point that her vision was wavering in and out. She’d once read about Mount Everest climbers, each claiming that the final steps to the summit were the most difficult, when it was easy to claim victory even though it hadn’t been actually achieved. She felt the same on the occasions she went jogging around the neighborhood, cutting off the last few steps at her turnaround point, pronouncing to herself, “Close enough.”
But this wasn’t close enough.
Not until she had her baby in her arms again. In fact, she wanted both of her babies, if the older one would still have her. She felt she’d paid for her sins, tenfold, but that wouldn’t mean much to Christian. He was better than that. And for that, she admired him. She didn’t deserve him.
Lifting her aching legs over the hull of the snowmobile, her body screamed for respite, to rest for only an hour if the world would allow it. The storm had eased off during the last stretch but it was picking up momentum again. With every ebb, there were two bouts of flow, composed of snow, ice, wind, blustery madness. Such was this new world that they lived in.
Once she had her family by her side, how long would they survive? A month? Two months? Maybe longer, if the temperature rose even ten degrees. Her mind drifted, though she just wanted to forge ahead: How long did the original Ice Age last? A million years? She wasn’t sure, but it certainly wasn’t a blink of the eye.
Every torment she’d endured sang inside of her bones as she trudged through the snow, her eyes fixated on the window to their bedroom. The climb was steep, but doable.
She dug her fingers deep into the frosted surface of the incline, feeling the horrid chill through the gloves. It felt more and more like the gloves held little consequence against the subzero temperatures. If she survived, they (whoever the hell they were) might have to amputate some of her fingers from the frostbite. It seemed dramatic to give in to such worries, but it was still a possibility. Anything was a possibility at this point.