4. The Departure

Early the following morning, Andrew's old beige Saturn chugged along the heights of Highway 61. The radio stopped picking up any stations, and the silence was setting Andrew's teeth on edge. Out the passenger window, Lake Superior was a smear of darkness dotted here and there with patches of ice. The sun flashed off them occasionally, turning them into blinding shards of glass.

When he'd gotten back to Magic's, locating the cabin where his mum was had taken another six hours on his desktop, zoomed in on the maps. Dozens of times, he started to assume that even if the cabin was there, he'd never find it. Or maybe it was there, and it was spelled to be invisible on the map. It would complicate his search, but even if he didn't find it before he left, he was going out there and looking for it anyway. Fortunately, he was rewarded for his obsessive determination. He'd found the little cabin on the map, the photo taken during a heavy snow and barely visible. It was significantly north of Duluth, so far he would practically be in Canada, somewhere west of a town called Tofte. He downloaded the region's map on his phone and extensively marked up with stops including a snowmobile rental, several vacancy motels along the highway, ranger stops along Superior Hiking Trail in case he got lost, and numbers for emergency rescue services. He had flares, an emergency radio, several changes of clothes, protein-dense foods, and a 24-pack of water bottles. His trunk was packed with a box full of instant heat packets, a package of new wool socks, hunter's gear including heavy denim overalls (to his dismay—not his favorite kind of aesthetic for men), an orange winter jumpsuit, face masks, and all his weapons including a new set of hunting knives. He knew how to survive outside, he just preferred being indoors.

Andrew had also repaired the wire to hold Micah's blood on a pendant, and it served as a comfort around his neck. He'd said he didn't need it anymore, but this was different. Now, it was more like a lover's token. A lover Andrew had spurned, but still.

"Yeah, you blew it there," he muttered to himself. "Best thing that ever happened to you. You self-sabotaging sonofabitch." He glared out at the lake. Why couldn't Micah have just come with him? What godforsaken trauma response was Andrew stuck inside that he had rejected the most caring and compassionate man he'd ever met? And Micah loved him. Supposedly.

That was the whole problem. People never…chose him first. Micah kept saying he did, but even Andrew's own mother and father hadn't. Not really, not for long anyway. Andrew's father turned on him when he discovered Andrew to be gay, and his mother repeatedly chose drugs over Andrew's wellbeing when he was a teenager. After that, Andrew didn't give anyone else the opportunity to reject him. Until Micah.

And now…Micah's lips on someone else, right in front of him. Andrew blinked, trying to shake off the image, trying to remind himself that Micah hadn't welcomed that kiss. But maybe he'd still liked it. It was easy within the dark stormcloud of Andrew's mind to imagine Micah kissing a carefree woman and wondering if Andrew was worth the trouble.

Cinder blocks seemed to drop onto Andrew's chest, his head spinning like a balloon slipping out of a child's fingers and into the sky. Andrew groaned, thumping against the headrest, harder and harder while it clattered around in his head that He left Micah and that was probably it. Who would wait around after being told to walk away?

"Fuck," Andrew growled, gritting his teeth.

Stepping on the acceleration, he flexed his fingers and then picked his hands up off the wheel. The Saturn drifted to the right and lurched toward the guard rail between him and the water. Andrew's chest seized and adrenaline blazed down his spine. His body instinctively clenched and his palms slapped down again on the wheel. Back in control, he tapped his brakes, fixed the wheel, and burst into tears. Alone, he didn't bother to stifle himself. His eyes and nostrils streamed, relentless and yet detached from his thoughts as his throat burned with his despairing screams.

He imagined the Saturn smashed to plastic pieces on the basalt below. Imagining him crumpled in the cockpit of the car, bloody, and finally dead. It was what he deserved, honestly, for leaving Micah like he had, at home in the dark with a vague promise of making sure he texted when he could.

The ride into the wilderness made Andrew feel like he never knew anything else besides biting cold, bleached white, powder-blue, and a roaring wind tunnel. The snowmobile he'd rented was deafeningly loud, and it took all his attention to drive one for the first time. The rental shop had let him pay to leave his Saturn in their parking lot, happy enough that he'd paid them extra to rent the snowmobile for a week.

Propped in the clip over the speedometer was his phone, an arrow moving with vague accuracy along the downloaded map of the space west of Temperance River and north of Heartbreak Creek. Very maudlin names, thought Andrew, like the white people had named them after they survived their first long winter.

Snow crackled under the ski blades as Andrew mounted a mild incline. The dead forest parted slightly, the trees thinning. Superior rose defiantly over the horizon to the east, such a dark blue as to look almost black, vast as a sea.

A copse of pine rose between him and the water, wistfulness tugging at Andrew's chest when the lake was obscured. He'd have to make sure he went down to the shore before he went home, even if it was wickedly cold. As he gazed off to his right at the trees, his shoulder blades began to tingle—not with the cold, for he'd already gone numb. He scanned the trees more closely, slowing the snowmobile to a quieter crawl.

The boughs of a hemlock stirred, nudged aside by something nearly as formless as a cloud.

Curious and a little bit unnerved, he killed the engine and let the muffled silence envelope him. Flipping up the visor on his helmet, Andrew pulled up his knee and reversed in his seat, hands on his thighs, gazing silently, patient.

Every time his breath puffed out, he was convinced it was more movement in the trees, but it was just the space he was taking up himself. Maybe he'd imagined it in the first place. But he was in no hurry, and if there was something watching him, then he was going to wait until it showed itself.

"It's all right," he called gently, his voice carrying on the slipstream of the frozen air.

Fox? Coyote? Maybe a frightened deer? He wasn't sure how much more the wildlife diversified this far north. He'd probably be able to spot a moose—

A flash of golden eyes.

Andrew sucked in his breath and held it. He didn't blink, didn't sniffle, even though his nose ran.

Under the deep green boughs of the hemlock—no, the color did not remind him of Micah, of course not—the keen golden coins of the creature's eyes bobbed lower, showing Andrew a quivering black nose and the edge of a pointed ear with tawny fur. The sound of the animal's large paw sinking into the top layer of the snow drifted across the still air like a snowflake.

Golden coins blinked, slowly, deliberately, and then the animal vanished into the gray wash of shadows under the trees.

Finally breathing—gasping, honestly—Andrew touched his fingers to his forehead as he swallowed a giggle of delight. The flash of its thick tail as it vanished all but confirmed that Andrew had just met the eyes of a wolf.

He faced the hemlock for a few more minutes, memorizing the shape of the branches and the deep saturated tones of gemstone green and umber. With a satisfied shake of his head, he turned around on the snowmobile and flipped the visor on his helmet back down, gripping the handlebars and giving them the complicated twist and flick to start the engine. When he turned his eyes back toward the path forward, the snowy hillscape was altered and the bones of a building reared out of the burial mound of winter.

It was the cabin. It sat atop the crest of the hill where there had been nothing moments before. Two stories high with a stone chimney, it was made of whitewashed lumber, the shingles on the roof faded and loose. Smoke drifted above it, making Andrew yearn for the warmth from the inevitable fire crackling in the fireplace inside. The sketch of a snowy staircase led up to it from where Andrew's snowmobile had stopped. A cairn of hand-placed rocks stood some feet tall beyond a wraparound porch bearing dried reeds and bound antlers. Except for the one closest to the front door, the windows on the first floor were closed behind red shutters.

Speaking over his shoulder in the direction of the presumably nearby wolf, he said, "I mean, I really shouldn't be surprised Mum's cabin appeared out of thin air. Is this your doing?"

If this was how his trip started—locking eyes with a wolf, who made his mother's cabin appear—then maybe this was what he needed after all. He dismounted the snowmobile, patting the breast pocket of his snow suit to feel for the torque Ingrid had given him.

The cabin door swung outward on silent hinges. A woman held the door open with her knee, emerging into the tundra with a rifle aimed at Andrew's head.

Though his heart did an uneasy little somersault, he obligingly put his hands up.

"This is private property," called the woman, with a rolling Irish brogue, faded around the edges like a thirty year old newspaper. She had auburn hair streaked white and chopped above her shoulders, wearing an oversized flannel jacket, a thick knitted scarf, worn denim, and heavy winter boots. Her face had changed very little: still as narrow as Andrew's, slender and down turned lips, with heavy dark circles under her brown eyes. Immediately, instinctively, Andrew wanted to throw himself into her arms and cry while she stroked his hair and told him it would all be okay. Damn the pain, damn the heartache, damn the wounds they cut into each other's hearts. Mum was still mum. Rifle pointed at his head or not.

When he remained motionless, she said loudly, "You've gotten lost and you should go back the way you came."

Tingling, Andrew slowly lifted off the heavy helmet, and then pulled off his mask. He brushed back his loose hair from his face, crooked the helmet under his arm, and called up, "Can we talk first, Mum?"