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.It was weird.I don’t know what that was about, but—”“We don’t know that any of what’s happening is connected to the lights.It’s total speculation.”“I agree, but what if Cole changes? What if he becomes violent?”“Jack, I’m just telling you, if it turns out.I want you to shoot me.”“Dee—”“I’m not kidding, not exaggerating, just telling you that I do not have it in me to handle that.”“You have a daughter, too.You don’t have the luxury not to handle shit.”“‘Should we kill our son if he becomes a threat?’ Is that the question you’re dancing around?”“We have to talk about it, Dee.I don’t want it to happen and us have no idea what to do.”“I think I already answered your question.”“What?”“I would rather die.”“Me, too,” Jack said.“So what are we saying?”“We’re saying.we’re saying he’s our boy, and we stay together, no matter what.”* * * * *AT dawn, Jack crept out of bed and dressed in the dark, grabbed the shotgun leaning against the bedside table and took it with him out into the living room.He unlocked the front door and stepped outside.Freezing.A heavy frost on the grass.The desert purple.Still black along the western fringe.He walked across the meadow into the trees and sat down against the base of an aspen.Everything still.Everything he loved in that dark house across the way.His breath steamed and he thought about his father and he thought about Reid, his best friend in the humanities department, and the pints they’d put down Thursday nights at Two Fools Tavern.The remembrance touched something so raw he disavowed it all, on the spot.Focused instead on the coming hours, and all the things he had to do, and the order in which he might do them.Nothing before this cabin mattered anymore, only the given day, and with this thought he cleared his mind and scanned the trees that rimmed the meadow, praying for an elk to emerge.He took the chainsaw and felled aspen trees until lunch.His stitches held, so he fished the rest of the day, taking three cutthroats and a brook trout out of a section of the stream a quarter mile upslope that boasted an abundance of deep pools.The water clear where it passed over rock and green where the sun hit it.Black in the shadows.In the late afternoon, Jack stood across the stream from Cole watching the boy float aspen leaves into a cascade.He reeled in and set his rod down and waded across.Climbed up onto the bank and sat down dripping in the leaves beside his son.“How you doing, buddy?”“Good.”Cole pushed another leaf into the water and they watched the current take it.“You like being here?” Jack asked.“Yes.”“I do, too.”“These are my little boats, and they’re crashing in the waterfall.”“Can I sail one?”Cole offered a leaf, and Jack sent another golden ship to its death.“Cole, remember the aurora you watched with Alex?”“Yes.”“I want to ask you something about it.”“What?”“Did you feel different after you saw it?”“A little bit.”“Like how?”“I don’t know.”“Did you have strange thoughts toward your mom and your sister and me?”The boy shrugged.“You could tell me, you know.I want you to know that.You can always tell me anything.No matter what it is.No matter how bad you think it is.”“I just wish you had seen the lights, too,” Cole said.“Why is that?”“They were real pretty.More than anything I ever saw.”They drained the cooler as the sun dropped and carried it back to the cabin, fish flopping inside against the plastic.Jack and Dee sat in rocking chairs on the front porch drinking ice cold bottles of Miller High Life from a case that had been left behind.They were watching great spirals of smoke swirl up into the sky sixty miles northwest near the base of Grand Teton.“What’s burning out there?” Dee said.“I think that’s Jackson.”They ate dinner and put the kids to bed.When they came back out onto the porch, the sun had finally crashed, leaving the flames of that distant, burning city to stand out in the darkness like an abandoned campfire.Jack cracked open a new pair of beers, handed one to Dee.Tired and strangely satisfied with the soreness in his body.He’d been rehearsing how he would say it all day, the last two days even.Figured he might as well get on with it, though the phrasing had completely escaped him.“Does it feel to you,” Jack said, “like we’re starting a new life?”“Little bit.How many days have we been here?”He had to think about it.“Three.”“Feels longer.A lot longer.”“Yeah.”He could feel the good beer buzz beginning to swarm in his head.Didn’t know if it was the altitude or malnourishment, but he couldn’t think of the last time two beers had gotten him this close to drunk.“I need to tell you something,” he said.“What?” she laughed, “you’re seeing someone?”None of the permutations of this conversation, as he’d imagined it, had involved Dee asking that question.His head cleared so fast it left him with a subtle throbbing at the base of his skull—a premonition of the hangover to come.“Two years ago.”Dee’s face emptied of the lightness of the moment and her bottle hit the porch and the beer fizzed out and drained through a crack between the two-by-sixes.The air suddenly reeked of yeast and alcohol.“Lasted a month,” he said.“Only time I ever.I ended it because I couldn’t stand—”“One of your fucking TAs?”“We met in—”“No, no, no, I don’t want to hear a single detail of any of it and I don’t ever want to know her name.Nothing about her.Just why you’re telling me this now.In this moment.I could’ve died never knowing and you took that from me.”“When we left Albuquerque, our marriage was on life support.I mean, three nights ago was the first time we’d been together in.I don’t even know—”“Seven months.”“Dee, I know I’ve been checked out on our family, and for a long time.Because of guilt, depression, I don’t know.These last nine days have been the worst, hardest of our life, but in some ways, the best, too.And now, it feels to me like we’re starting something new here, so I don’t want to start it with any lies.Nothing between us.”“Well, there is now.And.why the fuck would you tell me this?”She shrieked it, her voice bouncing back from the invisible wall of trees
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