Quickies

CORE DEEP

Twenty-six degrees below zero, almost total darkness and white-out conditions, but Mary didn’t notice any of it as Finn trudged up behind her, the thick cloud of his breath misting over her shoulder as he watched her work.

“What’s your depth?” He had to yell to be heard over both the drill and the generator running it, but Mary didn’t acknowledge his question, too engrossed, determined. Another ten feet. And then another. She’d pulled two cores on her own already-they were bagged and tagged on the sled she’d dragged along behind her on the snowmobile to the site. Both her shoulders and her head ached, but she didn’t care.

He moved to help her as the mechanical swirl of the drill began to rise to the top, like a dark barber’s pole or a terrible, twisted candy cane. It was heavy without an ice core in its center, but twice that now with its frigid contents. Mary stepped aside, letting him lift it out of her hands, pulling it free and turning it sideways, carrying it over to the makeshift work station. She’d set that up, too, in only the glow from one generator-powered work light. It was December twenty-second, the eve of the winter solstice, and they had officially moved into twenty-four hour darkness at the North Pole.

“We’re at almost four thousand meters.” The steam of her breath joined his as they bent over the thick length of ice, together sweeping chips from its surface with small brushes. The tubular metal cradle it rested in measured the core down to the millimeter.

Finn sat back on his haunches and gave a low whistle. “Christ, Mare. That’s deeper than anyone’s ever gone. Ever. And this is firn.”

The excitement in her belly burned almost as hot as her cheeks and she nodded, noting the measurement in a notebook she pulled from her pocket. The pens they had were the same ones astronauts used in space. Regular ink froze quickly out here. She’d finally grown used to handling pens and other small instruments with thick gloves on instead of the thin latex she was used to.

Glancing over at Finn, watching him work as he wrote out a label and pressed it onto the surface of the polyethylene bag, she thought that only he would be crazy enough to suggest running off to the North Pole in the dead of winter. But she’d been wrong. There were plenty of others on the team at first, with the goal of providing the deepest and most comprehensive Arctic ice core data ever collected in the hopes of helping boost the research on climate change. She had jumped at the chance to work with firn-snow so cold all the time it never melted from year to year-and, too, with Finn.

Without Finn, she never would have known about this opportunity, let alone taken it, leaping with a blind faith the girl her father had once called “Miss Microscope” would never have considered without the solidity of her best friend, Finn, beside her. As one of the world’s most renowned paleoclimatologists, he’d been on hundreds of Arctic expeditions, but she’d been naively excited beyond words when they started this project, at the thought of being a part of history, and too, of spending time away from the world with Finn. And now that the rest of the crew had left, going home just in time for the holidays and leaving them to finish up the last of their project, they were truly alone.

Mary rubbed her gloved finger over the surface of the core-ice frozen for seven-hundred and fifty thousand years and pulled from a depth of almost two and a half miles. No human being had ever touched anything so deep before. If the bitter cold didn’t do it, the incredible rush of that realization should have been more than enough to give her goose bumps under her parka, but that wasn’t what caused the shiver that ran up her spine, nor was it the heat from Finn’s body next to hers.

She had discovered something even more bottomless, more infinite. And she was hungry for more, determined to prove to Finn that what she’d found wasn’t some statistical anomaly.

“I’m going deeper.” She stood, turning toward the drill, leaving him to bag and tag the latest core, but Finn caught her arm, shaking his head.

“It’s enough.” He nodded toward the sled. “Let’s pack up and get back to base.

It’s freezing, it’s midnight and you’re sick.”

“I’m not sick.” Looking longingly at the drill, she sighed and let him lead her to the snowmobile. He sat her on the seat, pulling her parka hood around her face as if she were a child. “Finn! A ninety-nine degree fever doesn’t qualify as sick!” She brushed his coat-tightening hands away. “Would you quit?”

“I’ll pack us up.” He gave her a long, steady look. “Okay?”

She relented, sitting back down to wait. It didn’t take him long to break it all down and pack it onto the sled. Her head did ache, and her face burned, but she was sure it was more from the bone-numbing chill than from her little fever. It was just a cold, but he acted like she was at death’s door. The thought of examining the cores she’d pulled

that night perked her up as Finn climbed onto his snowmobile, starting it and motioning her to follow.

They had a thick dark rope running from their drill site to the base half a mile away so they wouldn’t get stuck out in the snow in white-out conditions and could always find their way back. Their camp, now empty of the rest of the crew, consisted of an insulated trailer with a huge satellite dwarfing its dark surface mounted outside. That was where they slept and ate, but the lab was built mostly underground, and that’s where they parked to unload.

“You stay here!” Finn cradled one of the cores in two hands, turning sideways to take it down into the lab.

She’d never met a man so good at giving orders. He would have made a great drill sergeant-if he wasn’t such a brilliant scientist. Mary slid off the Arctic Cat, killing the engine before hefting a second core from the sled and heading down after him. He gave her a sour look as he passed, heading back out for the third one and the rest of the equipment. What was he going to do-fire her? It didn’t matter out here in the middle of nowhere. She’d directly defied him and returned to the site to drill tonight, and she had no intention of following any more orders, except perhaps the insistent ones in her own head. It had always been her motivation-her curiosity, that sense of discovery.

She had to know.

The lab had been built months before the crew arrived. It was a wonder of modern engineering, a simple, elegant self-supporting steel arch which could take the great load of snow without even one internal support. Their grant had paid for everything, even the heavy airlocked door that opened up to what was paradise

compared to the work environment outside. Ambient air temperature remained at a constant seventeen degrees Fahrenheit underground, quite balmy compared to the negative temperatures above. Drifting snow-the kind they had now, white-out moving toward blizzard conditions-were only a factor because they had to maintain access to the portal.

She turned on the light and the arctic fluorescents, resistant to cold, flickered and came alive. To Mary, it was heaven, and she flipped her hood back, her lungs aching with the change in temperature, sucking air not quite as sharp and bitter as before.

She’d never been so aware of her own body as she had become on this trip. The extremes of the environment had forced her to acknowledge her own corporeal nature, something the safety of a job in her lab at home back in Massachusetts had never compelled her to do. Sure, they had winter there, a change of seasons…but nothing like this, the deep, constant incomprehensible cold.

“Come on, Mare.” Finn had the third core, kicking the door shut behind him.

“Let’s go to bed.”

She looked up from where she was sliding the first core she’d drilled out of its bag. He didn’t mean together, dummy. But her heart felt as if it were beating somewhere in her throat and she was glad her cheeks were still red from the cold to cover their flush. Instead of answering him, she finished sliding the bag free and set the core into the cradle of the scale, recording the weight in another section of her notebook.

“You are so stubborn.” Finn watched as she traded her thick gloves for latex, inspecting the length of ice for a crack-free sample and, using a fine saw, separating it out.

“And you are so bossy,” she countered, cutting off a few millimeters of the sample, weighing the largest section on another scale and recording the reading. Five-hundred-and-two grams. Perfect. Selecting a smaller polyethylene bag, she placed the sample inside and then set it into their flash cooler. It would take the sample down to negative eighty degrees Celsius.

“You’re really going to do this tonight?” He sighed as she began sawing at another length of the core. This one she would put into the plasma mass spectrometer.

“Go to bed, Finn.” She waved him away as she inspected the sample, her trained eyes looking for cracks or imperfections.

He pulled his own heavy gloves off and reached for a sterile latex pair. “I’m not going without you.”

She smiled, holding up her sample like a trophy. “Then fire up Old Bessie, because I need to see this reading or I’m never going to be able to sleep.”

They worked well together-they always had-their timing in sync, anticipating one another’s next motion with a deft precision that came from years of moving together in the same space. Finn took the sample from her hand and carried it over to “Old Bessie"-their plasma mass spectrometer. Compact and light, it was the size of a small television and attached to a laptop for reading output.

Mary used an instrument they jokingly called “the tweezers” to extract the frigid sample from the freezing unit and lift it carefully out of the bag. It was a perfect record of history, an effective time capsule, storing a snapshot of the earth’s atmosphere seven-hundred-and-fifty thousand years ago. The tests would tell them the age of the ice within a few years here or there. It would also tell them all the common meteorological data from that time period-precipitation amount, solar activity, air temperature, atmospheric composition.

But she wasn’t interested in any of that. The millions of tiny air bubbles in the ice had revealed something to her even more amazing than greenhouse gases or evidence of climate change.

“Into the cheese grater with you.” Mary placed the sample into a round, stainless steel extraction flask, closing the door and turning on the machine. It would grind the ice into fine chips in a vacuum, release the air and trap the gasses without any contamination to taint the sample. This, too, was attached to a laptop, and the results would be analyzed by computer.

She couldn’t resist coming to watch for the results of the spectrometer over Finn’s shoulder. The laptop just showed a slow-moving bar that read, “Analyzing -

Please Wait” beneath. His hood was thrown back, and she noted the way his jaw clenched and unclenched, the way he pointedly didn’t turn to look over his shoulder at her.

She also noticed the way his dark hair curled at the nape of his neck-long, too long. He needed a cut, but of course there was nowhere to get one out there. She wondered if he would let her do it, and just imagining running her fingers through the black raven’s wings of his hair made her feel breathless.

“Well, there it is.” Finn sounded annoyed as he pointed to the screen and she almost laughed.

“I told you the last one wasn’t a contaminated sample.” She fought the smug urge to stick her tongue out at his back.

He rolled his eyes, pulling his latex gloves off and reaching for his warmer ones.

“Two samples don’t make it conclusive.”

“Did you run it through the gas chromatograph?”

“Does Old Bessie moo?”

Mary touched the laptop screen, pointing to one of the longer spikes. “So this one here…”

“Unidentifiable.”

“Finn! Look!” She grabbed a three-ring-binder from the table, flipping it open and holding it up next to the screen. “It’s exactly the same as the last one. Look at the graph.”

“I’m looking.” He was looking, but he wasn’t happy about it.

“And this…” She turned the other laptop on the counter, finished analyzing its own data, so he could see the reading from the other machine. “See here? It’s the same. Unidentified.”

Finn shrugged. “It doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

“What are you afraid of?” She couldn’t believe his nonchalance, his lack of curiosity about this new discovery.

He quickly turned off the power to the laptop, not even shutting it down the way he should have. “I’m afraid you’re feverish and I’m going to have to radio us out of here before you start hallucinating.”

Hurt, she felt her chest tightening and confronted him, her hands on her hips. “I’m not hallucinating lab results, Finn.”

“Okay, so you got the results you were looking for,” he snapped, reaching over and stabbing the power button on the other laptop. “Can we go to bed now?”

Her face and body felt frozen, colder than she’d ever been out in the arctic chill. “I bet you every single one of these deeper cores will show us the same thing. It’s getting stronger, you know, more concentrated, the deeper we go.”

He shrugged again, turning toward the door, a dismissal.

“There’s something down there!” She wanted to throw something at his head and her hands clenched into fists. “Something no one has ever discovered before!”

“Well, if it’s down there, it will still be there in the morning, won’t it?” he asked over his shoulder, opening the door and letting in a blast of frigid air. “Are you coming?”

She’d butted heads with him before-they’d had playful, week-long disagreements back and forth sometimes. But she had never experienced him like this-cold, dismissive, obdurate.

Her righteous elation dampened by his reaction, Mary snapped her own gloves off and reached for her warm ones, the action an assent, and he watched her put them on before he went out the door. She knew he expected her to follow him, and she did, feeling dizzy with her discovery and his trivialization of it. Leaving everything, she just turned out the light and shut the door behind her.

Her cheeks felt as if they were on fire as she trudged after him in the powder, and the cold hit her like a wall, actually stopping her breathless in the dark. Finn’s retreating back, heading toward the trailer, was just visible through the blowing snow.

Her heart hammered hard in her chest, her legs like lead, and she managed to call out to him once before she went down to her knees.

“Finn!”

For a minute she thought he wasn’t going to stop, that he was going to childishly storm off and leave her. And she didn’t think she could get back up. Her legs felt too weak, trembling, and she let her body go, collapsing on the snow and rolling to her back, giving up. It didn’t matter. He didn’t believe her, he didn’t care. None of it mattered. The stars were bright jewels in a velvet sky, so close she felt she could reach out and touch them, and she actually stretched a hand out into the darkness.

Then he was kneeling over her, wedging his arms beneath, lifting.

“I think I’m sick,” she murmured.

“Ya think?” His gruff comment was the last thing she remembered before the stars blinked out.

She woke up shivering in a cold sweat to find him beside her. She sensed more than saw him-it was completely dark, their rooms were small, his knees pressed right up against the edge of her cot as he shifted in the chair.

“Finn?”

“I’m here.” His voice was soft, and there was no anger in it.

She rolled toward him, clutching his knee, sure now. She didn’t know if it had been the fever that had given her the sudden flash of realization, or if was just something that had bubbled up from below her consciousness, a deeper intuition. “I know what it is.”

His answer couldn’t have surprised her more. “So do I.” His hand pressed against her forehead but she was cool now, almost clammy, and he stated the obvious

“Your fever broke.”

“No, I mean…what we found.” She swallowed, sitting up cross-legged, her back against the wall, her bare knees pressed to his denim-clad ones. He’d undressed her down to her flannel shirt before putting her to bed, and the thought might have embarrassed her if she hadn’t been so eager to tell him what she knew. “I know what it is!”

“So do I,” he said again, reaching for the light on the small table, turning it on.

She was too aware now of her state of undress, the way her dark, tousled hair fell around her face. She ran a hand through its length, smoothing, looking at him watching her, his face unreadable, his gaze moving quickly up from the “v” of her flannel to meet her eyes. He picked up a stoppered test tube off the table and held it up. “I’ve been in the lab for hours tonight, testing samples.”

“What time is it?” she croaked.

“Near morning, I guess.” He shrugged. Morning didn’t mean much out here without the sun. They were living blind, groping around for answers in the darkness, and the metaphor didn’t escape her as Finn offered her the test tube. “This is what you found.”

She took it, peering in at the crystallized substance in the bottom. “It’s a solid?”

“Yeah.” He snorted. “And a gas. And a liquid. I’ve run every test we have, and the computer’s analyzed the data in every possible configuration imaginable, and it all comes up the same.”

“Unidentifiable,” she murmured, staring at it, amazed.

“And atomic structure? This…it’s got to be a new element.”

Her breathless wonder was broken by Finn revealing another piece of even more unlikely information. “It has no atomic weight, Mare.”

“That’s not possible.” She just stared at him.

“I know.” He shook his head, half-smiling, and shrugged. “It has volume, it has mass, it takes up space. But you can’t measure it. It has no atomic weight. “

“But…”

Just when she was coming to terms with that impossible fact, he dropped another, equally as implausible, into her lap. “It also has no half-life.”

“What?” She held the sample up to the light, frowning. “Are you sure you tested it right? Maybe there’s something wrong with the computer…”

“Please.” Rolling his eyes, he sat back in the chair with a sigh. “I’ve been calculating atomic weight and half-life since I was in high school. Everything decomposes and gives off some sort of radiation, right? But this doesn’t. The graph won’t move-it’s a solid flatline. This stuff is…it’s infinite. It’s some sort of infinite energy source…”

“I know.” Mary couldn’t begin to explain her feeling, the certainty of her strangely drawn conclusion. She had no logical basis for it, although Finn’s research was going a long way toward convincing the Miss Microscope part of her that her intuition was correct. Taking a deep breath, she closed her eyes, and just said it, “It’s God.”

When Finn didn’t respond-she’d expected laughter, at the very at least, coupled with a sarcastic comment-she opened her eyes to look at him. He was thoughtful, staring at the test tube in her closed fist. She went on, “You feel it just as much as I do.

I know you do. What we’ve discovered…all the laws and rules of physics, of the entire universe, just turned upside down. This proves—”

“This doesn’t prove anything.” He did laugh then, shaking his head. “You might as well say we just proved the existence of Santa Claus. It would hold about as much weight in the scientific community. Hell, why not? We’re at the North Pole, aren’t we?

Let’s just call the new element Santa Clausium!”

“I think…” She took a deep breath, ignoring his sarcasm, and pushed forward. “I think it’s here for a reason.”

“Well, in that sense, I guess everything’s here for a reason.”

“No, I mean here.” She waved her hand around. “Up here. In the Arctic. Frozen at that particular depth.”

“What do you mean?” He frowned.

“I think it wanted to be frozen.”

It took a moment for him to respond. “Are you saying…this substance… is sentient? “

She ignored his disbelief. “I also think it wanted to be found.”

He laughed. “I think maybe your fever’s back.”

“It’s everything and nothing all at once.” She reached out, opened his fist, and put the test tube in it. He looked down at their hands, and then back at her, his eyes searching. “It’s an infinite source. What else, Finn? What else could it be?”

He opened his mouth to deny it, she knew him well enough to know, but she pressed her fingertips to his lips, shaking her head. “Don’t think. Just feel. Hold it in your hand and feel it.”

It was an incredibly unscientific request, but he swallowed and did as she asked.

Shaking his head, looking pained, she knew he was struggling with the part of him that required facts, proof. He had them now in his very hand, and still his mind wanted to deny it. She searched his face as he opened his eyes and knew which part of him had won.

“It’s everything. It’s nothing.” His voice actually trembled and she nodded, silently agreeing. “It’s limitless power. For good or evil, that’s what this means.”

The idea was thrilling, beyond words, and she naively mused aloud for a moment. “In the right hands…”

Finn shook his head, his eyes flashing. “In the wrong ones…”

The endless possibility of that thought hung there between them. Mary closed her eyes with the weight of it, leaning her head back against the wall. She felt like crying, laughing, screaming. It was in her, everything at once, almost too much to bear.

“Are you okay?” His hand was warm on her forehead and she wanted to turn her face to it, encourage him to touch her, to bridge the gap. “Fever?”

“No.” She opened her eyes, watching his hand fall to his lap. “Just…it’s…” She shrugged, unable to say, but he nodded.

“I know.”

This time it was her voice that trembled when she asked, “What are we going to do?”

Finn closed his eyes again, pursed his lips, that pained look briefly crossing his face for a moment before he looked at her and said, “The right thing.”

The right thing.

Mary reached for the test tube, meaning to take it from him, set it aside, but he caught her hand, turning it over. She thought he was going to place the substance there, but instead he lifted her palm and kissed it, his breath hot against the sensitive inside of her wrist, his lips impossibly soft.

She stared at him in wonder, daring to ask, “So, just what is the right thing, Finn?”

“Right now?” His eyes searched hers, looking for an answer that had always been there. “Right now, it’s this.”

There was no resistance in her. She let him lean in and capture her mouth, press her back and then down onto the cot, welcoming the weight of him. She heard the faint

“tink” of the test tube hitting the floor and then rolling as they came together on the small confines of her little bed, mouths slanting, tongues seeking heat.

Never had she wanted him more. If she could have cracked herself open to the core, absorbed him completed into her, she would have. Instead, she wound herself around him by degrees, her fingers in his hair, her legs twined with his, her arms snaking around his neck, her tongue circling the hot recesses of his mouth. Finn didn’t object, his hands roaming up under her flannel, exploring the soft valley of her waist, the indent of her navel, and-oh, god, finally-the sloping curve of her breast, the rise of her hardening nipple.

Her room was never warm. She went to bed every night nearly fully dressed, but now she was suddenly hot, more than feverish, her body on fire with a heat that could melt ice. Eager, she tugged his dark turtleneck out from the waistband of his jeans, her hands roaming the hard arch of his back, the wings of his shoulder blades, his muscles tight and thick but melting under her touch. Finn helped her pull his shirt off, and she took a brief, breathless moment to admire the broad, masculine emerging shadow of him above her before her trembling fingers found the buttons on her own shirt, working her way down while he worked up from the bottom, their hands meeting in the middle.

He looked at her and groaned when she revealed herself, shrugging out of the shirt, wearing nothing then but the thin barrier of her panties rubbing against the hard press of denim between her thighs. He caught one of her dark-tipped nipples between his lips, his tongue bathing it with the heat of his mouth, a shocking juxtaposition to the cool air. Her body arched all on its own, her hand moving between them, seeking the softness of her mound and the hard press of his cock as they rocked together.

Finn gasped when she cupped her hand over the denim bulge and then pressed his hips forward hard, trapping her hand, his mouth covering hers, tongue plunging deep. His excitement made her bold and she quickly unbuttoned and unzipped him, maneuvering to slide her hand in and pull the length of him out.

“Oh god,” he murmured against her throat, nuzzling there, making her nipples stand up as she stroked him against the inside of her thigh.

Yes, God, she thought, feeling it, something, coursing through her as they moved closer toward coupling, her mind flashing momentarily on the impossible, unknown crystallized substance resting in a test tube underneath them somewhere. She wanted to tell Finn, how incredible it was, how perfectly divine, but when she looked into his eyes, she thought he already knew.

“Off,” she insisted, shoving his jeans and boxers down his hips, and he obliged, both of them naked now except for the brush of her panties, which were gone in a whisper as he reached down there to touch her.

She wanted him inside of her, now, forever-she couldn’t wait. He was as hard as bedrock in her hand, and she rubbed the tip of him up and down her slit, displacing his probing fingers and making him shudder in response, his hips already moving.

“Please,” he begged, looking down at her with half-closed eyes. “Oh, god, Mary, I need you…”

“Yes.”

She opened to him completely then, and he took her, his cock aimed to perfection, drilling deep, making her gasp with his precision. She didn’t let him go, grinding her hips upward, wrapping her legs around his, seeing him grit his teeth, that pained look crossing his face for a moment, and she knew he was holding back.

“No,” she whispered, rolling her hips, meeting his beginning thrusts. “Don’t hold back, Finn. Please. I want you. All of you.”

He took a quivering breath, shaking his head, his eyes wild, hungry. “If you knew…”

“I do know.” She touched his cheek, traced his lips, feeling the pulse of him buried in the hot recesses of her body, every muscle taut, waiting for him to let go. It was beyond pleasure, beyond sensation itself, just out of reach, as if waiting for them to catch up. “I feel it. Don’t you feel it?”

“Yes.” The look of bewildered longing in his eyes made her slip her hand behind his head, pulling his mouth to hers and kissing him hard as he began to move in her.

They rocked together, the heat of their bodies, their breath, filling the little room.

There was no holding back now, their soft cries melting together as they moved toward some blissful destination shimmering on the horizon, and she watched it recede with every motion forward, an aching mirage. Desperate, greedy, she clung to him as if he could take her there, the thick pound of his cock driving her hard against the cot as she begged him for more.

“Harder,” she gasped into his ear, her teeth raking his neck, his shoulder. “Oh Finn, please, I’m…”

“Coming,” he groaned, thrusting deep and she felt it burst, the energy trapped between them released in a bright, white hot explosion.

“There,” she whispered, her eyes closing, her body giving in to the sensation, expanding, contracting, filled with everything and nothing all at once. Eternity had never been so close.

There wasn’t room for them both on the little cot, but Finn made himself her bed, rolling beneath her, finding the edge of her sleeping bag and pulling it over them for warmth. There weren’t words, and Mary didn’t miss them. Instead, she pressed her cheek against his chest, listening to the steady beat of his heart, and felt nothing but awe as they drifted off together toward some even deeper destination.

“You said we were going to do the right thing.”

“This is the right thing, Mare.” Finn was heading out the door, and she followed, like she always did, feeling small. “We’re scientists. We can’t possibly let this discovery go unreported. This is bigger than relativity!”

“And we know how well that turned out,” she grumbled, pulling her parka hood closer as they headed toward the snowmobiles. He had loaded the ice cores she’d pulled onto the sled, and now meant to take them to the drop-off point. The helicopter he’d radioed would be there in less than an hour.

“We need bigger equipment to test this with,” he insisted, reaching back and grabbing her hand, pulling her with him. “An accelerator, for one. We have to be sure we’ve found what we think we’ve found.”

Mary stopped, pulling him up short, and he turned to look at her. “You’re not sure?”

“I don’t know.” Finn shrugged. “That’s what I want, though. I want to be sure.”

“I’m sure.”

“Good for you.” He looked defiant, and it reminded her of the Finn she’d experienced the night before, in the lab.

“I know what we found.” She caught both of his gloved hands in hers, squeezing so he could feel her. “I know what I felt. I know what I feel. “

“What does that have to do with anything?” He frowned, but his eyes softened when he looked at her face.

“It has everything to do with everything.” She smiled, wanting to kiss the frown line creasing his forehead. “Finn, I love you. I’ve loved you for as long as I can remember.”

“Aw, Mare…” He swallowed, looking away, down at the snow.

She took a deep breath. “Don’t do this.”

“I have to.” His jaw tightened and he left her standing there, trudging toward the snowmobile. It was running, the headlight a beacon in the darkness. She turned, making her decision, knowing she couldn’t go with him and turn their discovery over to the rest of the world.

“Hey!” His voice, calling her, made her turn back. “Mary! Quick!”

She couldn’t see well enough in the darkness, but his voice was panicked, and she broke into a run. The snow under her feet was lightly packed, but it had stopped falling at least, giving her a clear path to him.

“What’s the matter?” she gasped, and then turned to where he was pointing, his eyes dark with anger.

“Did you do that?” His voice was angry, and she winced.

The bags on the back of the sled were empty. She knelt beside them, running her gloved hands over the surface. The ice cores were gone. They hadn’t melted-there was no water or residue inside-and they hadn’t evaporated, either, because the bags were completely flat, as if nothing had ever been in them in the first place.

Mary looked up and met Finn’s accusing eyes. “I didn’t. Finn, I’ve been with you the whole time!” It was true, and he knew it.

His shoulders slumped, his face falling. “Then what…how in the hell?”

She took his offered hand, letting him help her up. “I don’t think we’re supposed to understand.”

“Oh fuck that.” He threw up his hands, reaching over and turning off the snowmobile. “What the hell are we here for, if not to understand?”

“We can’t see it…touch it…taste it…” She turned her face up to the sky, completely clear now, the stars even brighter than before. “We can just feel it.”

“I don’t feel anything,” Finn growled, kicking at the sled.

“I think you do.” She reached out and squeezed his gloved hand, feeling him give, just a little.

“Fuck,” he muttered, but he slipped his arm around her waist, pulling her in closer.

“Look.” She pointing to the horizon where a slow, lazy rainbow of colors danced in the sky-the aurora borealis, a rare event this time of year.

“Goddamnit, Mary.” Finn’s voice was choked as he pressed his lips to her forehead. “I love you. You know I do.”

She smiled, her eyes filled with the ever-changing, infinite light of the universe, and spoke the truth with a certainty she’d never understood until that moment.

“I know.”

All These Years

She likes adventure with security

And more than one man can provide…*

I’m supposed to tell you how old we were, how long we were married and all that stuff? You want to know how many kids we had, what we each did for a living, and just exactly how it all happened, down to the last rationalized detail, do I got that right?

That’s how these tales are spun?

Like it matters.

That kind of stuff was like the water all around, and I was just a fish in the bowl, bumping up against the glass.

I sure wasn’t thinking about any of that on my way home, an awful ache in my belly from eating at some damned new Mexican place down the street for lunch. I’d asked a buddy to punch me out and left an hour early just to get home to the minimal comfort of my own toilet, and I wasn’t sure I was going to make it, even then.

Molly’s car was in the drive, and I smelled supper before I even opened the back door. Something experimental, I could tell already, thick and heavy with spice, and that made my bowels clench in agony as I passed the stove. The menu was on the refrigerator-she liked to print them out, for me, she said, so I’d know every day what we were having, no surprises, on thick white paper with funny dancing silverware on the top-but I didn’t stop to read it.

I only had one thing on my mind. Two left turns, and I had my hand on the bathroom doorknob. I hadn’t even stopped to wonder where she might be-the TV was off, but that wasn’t unusual. Her laptop wasn’t open on the kitchen table, either. No music was coming from the basement, where she had her elliptical and her rowing machine all set up. But I wasn’t thinking about any of it-her routine, how she moved through her day without me there-it was like water, air, life. It just was.

And then, it wasn’t.

A man knows the sound of his wife’s pleasure. He knows it like he knows the sounds of his house settling, the ticking of the furnace, the creak in the boards by the stove. After a time, it becomes a familiar sound, a comfortable sound, one that carries heat and light, like the lamp that goes on by the front door every night at six.

I understood that sound, and how to elicit it, as well as I understood how to turn on the switch to the light above our bed. My fingers knew their way in the dark, where to touch and grope, just the right pressure, how to ease that tension past the point of resistance. It was an easy movement, practiced, sure. No surprises.

Dusk was settling outside. It was almost that time of year when we set the clocks back, and dark came earlier every day it seemed, so they were just shadows rolling under the covers until I turned the lights on. She knew I was there, I think, even before I flipped the switch. Something about her shifted, the sound of her changed, and for a moment her soft moan sounded like a lament.

“Jim…” My name in her mouth, the same mouth I had kissed a thousand times, a mouth cherry-red from kissing another man-the man poised above her in our bed.

My bowels turned to water in my belly. I turned out the light and bolted into the bathroom, barely making it to the bowl.

She said, “You’re not the man you used to be…"

He said, “Neither is this guy…"

Not the fucking man I used to be. Right. Twenty pounds heavier, I was considerably balder and grayer, my hands calloused and work-worn. The man I used to be was younger, thinner, a little less rough around the edges, sure. At least on the outside.

But the man I used to be drank a fifth every night. The man I used to be liked to fight, anyone or anything, it didn’t matter. It was the making of a fist that felt good. The man I used to be had left them all once, on a Christmas Eve, of all nights. The man I used to be had spent that night in a motel, considering options, points out west and beyond. That man had come home in time to see the kids open presents.

No, I wasn’t the man I used to be. Thank fucking god. And neither was the guy shoving the tail ends of his dress shirt into his suit pants, glancing furtively at me as he gathered his tie and suit coat and slipped on his expensive shoes. I was never this guy-soft hands, soft life. What did she see in him? I watched from the doorway as he turned to face me fully for the first time, his eyes only holding mine for a moment before dropping to the floor.

“I’ll call you—” he murmured, glancing at my wife.

“No, you won’t.” I stood fully, putting my hand across the door frame and blocking the exit. “What you will do is walk out of my house. And count yourself lucky for that.

Walk out of my house, away from my wife, and if you ever…” I took a deep breath, swallowing hard, the hand by my side clenching into an involuntary fist. “If I ever see you… hear you… if I fucking SMELL you anywhere near me or my family again…”

I let the threat trail off and watched his eyes move from me to the space under my arm, and I knew he was thinking about running for it. I dropped my arm, stepping into the room, and waved him out. The urge I had to shove him through the wall was so strong I had to clasp my hands behind my back as he passed.

When I heard the side door swing shut, I turned back to my wife. She was still nude and hadn’t moved to cover herself. Her body and her eyes made no apologies.

Instead, she just looked incredibly sad. I sighed, sitting on the edge of the bed, and put my head in my hands.

All these years…

Where have I been?

Well, I’ve been down the road to work and home again…*

She couldn’t answer my question. It was simple, really. “Why?”

Was it me? What had I missed? How had I failed her? Those thoughts occurred to me as I turned to her and asked that one, simple question. I saw the endless days, the routine that had become our life, stretching out behind us and disappearing into a vanishing point.

But we’d made it so far, I thought, looking at the tremble of my wife’s mouth, the fists her hands made on the sheets. The various life dramas had never derailed our train. Yeah, I felt the same ice water needling in my chest when she told me about the lump in her breast, and there was the low ache of those two miscarriages between Henry and Clara.

And the worst, at least for me, was the time the baby ran out into the street and I couldn’t catch her in time. It had been months afterwards, Molly sitting by her side in the hospital, and me, still back and forth to work every day, coming in exhausted at night to see the baby, little Sassy I always called her, so still and quiet and small. She recovered physically, but she never was quite right again. A lot of my paycheck still went to pay for the special school half a state away.

Was that the point when it had broken? I wondered. Like some crazy cracked cup that we superglued together and used anyway, hoping it wouldn’t leak? Something in me knew, though. It wasn’t any of the big things, the storms, the hurricanes that had hit us over the years. It was that endless, gentle lapping of the waves against the shore, wearing away the sand. Erosion. That’s what they called it.

I looked at my wife and I wanted to touch her. I didn’t know if I wanted to hold her or hit her, but I wanted to feel her in my hands, her familiar flesh under my fingers. I fought the urge, gripping the edge of the mattress as I watched her face change-

sadness, fear, regret, love. So much love. Still. After all these years.

“I just want to know why, Molly.”

That’s when the dam broke. The leak became a deluge and she spilled past the cracks that I hadn’t even seen in the surface of our marriage.

All these years…

What have I done?

I made your supper and your daughter and your son…*

“Do you remember last year, when my sister offered us her timeshare?”

I stared at Molly, knowing that she was going to make some impossible connection, and just nodded.

“What did you say, Jim? Do you remember?”

I shrugged. “What does that have to do with… anything?!”

Molly’s lip trembled and she nodded. “You said, 'Why do we need to go somewhere for a vacation? What’s wrong with staying home?'”

I blinked at her. “Are you telling me that you were fucking some suit in our bed because I didn’t want to go to Disney World?”

Molly sighed, closing her eyes and then opening them to me again. “You always miss the point.”

“I guess you got my fucking attention!” I snapped, gritting my teeth.

She sat up on her elbows, her eyes flashing. “Well, it’s about time!”

My chest was too tight for me to speak. I curled my fingers around the mattress edge and took a deep breath.

“Jim…” Her eyes dipped down and caught mine. They were the same bright blue, eyes that had caught mine a thousand times before this one, but today there was something new there. I didn’t know what it was and I didn’t know if I wanted to know.

“Where have you been?”

I shook my head at her, trying to clear it. What did she want from me? “Work.

Where I always am.” I couldn’t get the image of her beneath him out of my head.

She sighed. “Yeah.” Shifting onto her side, the sheet pulled over her hip, and her breasts dipped, too. I looked at the large, brown areolas, her nipples fat in the center,

and wondered if he had found that sweet spot at the bottom edge. I closed my eyes, hating how beautiful she still was to me in that moment.

“But Jim…” she sighed. “Where have I been?”

“I don’t know,” I murmured. “You tell me.”

I felt her hand moving over mine, soft and warm, her fingers as delicate as ever.

“I don’t know, either. Raising kids, making supper, the same thing, day after day… I don’t know who I even am anymore…” I allowed it for a moment, just a moment’s worth of pressured comfort, before shaking her loose.

“Maybe you need some time to find out?” I saw that there were tears in her eyes and only the smallest part of me cared. “Is this your version of a mid-life crisis, Moll?

The cooking lessons, the computer classes…” I stopped, something suddenly dawning on me. “That’s where you met him, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she agreed softly. “But it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t matter.”

I snorted, swallowing past something stuck in my throat. “He looked like he mattered when he was fucking you in our bed.”

I don’t know if the pained look on her face matched mine or not. It felt awful, saying it, feeling it. I wanted to say more, and I wanted it to stop, to end it, to leave right now and never look back. Staying was the hardest thing I’d ever done.

Just sitting there in the pain of it, the both of us, drowning in the flood.

I’m still here…

And so confused,

But I can finally see how much I stand to lose…*

I don’t know how long it was before we spoke again. It grew dark outside, dark inside, in spite of the lamp light. My belly ached, my balls were drawn up like two rocks,

and Molly shivered, but she still didn’t cover herself. I thought I knew why. She just looked at me, like she was waiting for something. I was waiting, too. I didn’t know for what, until it happened.

The timer in the kitchen sounded with three short, sharp blasts. Dinner was ready. Menu was on the fridge. It was time for me to walk through the door, home from work, ready for Molly’s embrace and a quick kiss before I got changed and ready to eat whatever she’d concocted for the evening meal. I had taken to picking up two beef jerkys at the gas station and eating them on the way home, just in case. Of course, I didn’t tell her that. Keeping the little things secret had never seemed to matter.

“I hate the crap you’re cooking lately.” I gave a quarter turn toward her on the bed.

She nodded. Almost smiled. “I know.”

“I could kill you with my bare hands.”

“I know.” Her mouth trembled again, but no tears fell. “I thought… I don’t know what I thought. I wasn’t… thinking…” Her voice was thick, trembling, too.

“I want…” I held my hands out in front of me, palms up, just looking at them.

“Fuck, Molly… what are we going to do?”

She slipped her hand into one of mine, using my steadfast weight to pull her to sitting beside me, the sheet pooled in her lap.

“I don’t know.” Her voice was hoarse. “Will you hold me?”

I shook my head, swallowing thickly, still seeing him, like a ghost, hovering over our bed. But I did. I pulled her familiar body into my arms and held on. She melted into me, like she always did, fitting perfectly in all the right places.

“This doesn’t mean—” I started, brushing her hair off my cheeks. “I don’t know what this means.”

She nodded, and I could feel the edges of her pain flowing into mine, somehow, as if they were one thing. Love didn’t stop, like turning off a light switch, as much as I willed it to.

“It doesn’t matter…” she whispered. I could feel her tears wetting my shirt.

“Nothing matters, except you… Jim… I’m so…”

“Don’t say it,” I choked, lowering my head to hers, holding her a little too tight.

“Don’t… just… don’t…”

She didn’t and I didn’t and we didn’t… we just sat, and rocked, and felt it, the love and the pain that ached like a raw wound between us. It was us. After all those years, there was no separating it anymore.