On the Bitter Edge of a Snowfall

I’m running alongside the gurney as they wheel my little brother into the emergency room from the ambulance bay. I’m majorly pissed off because they keep trying to help me—

“Sir, we need to warm your hands—,”

“Can we see your hands?”

“We need to get you to an exam room to check your extremities—,”

“Sir, if we don’t take care of you, frostbite can develop severe gangrene—,”

—when they should be helping him. Fuck my hands. My brother’s not breathing.

I knew better.

~

The wind picked up. Will and I looked to the horizon and saw the clouds rolling in.

“Well that looks bad,” said Will.

“Dammit,” I said. “Have we been out here that long?”

I dug at my glove and sleeve to peel them apart and view my watch underneath. I discovered that no, we hadn’t been out here that long.

“What the Hell,” I grumbled.

“Guess it was moving faster than you thought,” said Will.

“We better get home,” I said, grabbing the two rabbits we had acquired this morning and turning in the direction of the cabin.

“What about the rest of the traps?” asked Will.

“We’ll just leave them for now—,”

“Yooou said we needed to get through them today—,”

“I know what I said,” I bit back.

“—‘cause the storm’s coming and we need the meat to get through it,” Will pressed further.

“Fine! I was wrong. Yah’ happy?” I barked.

Will just gave me a shit-eating grin and chuckled softly before following me. On the verge of graduating high school, he thought he was some clever hotshot. Like he was all grown up and responsible or something. Which apparently meant he got to rail on me now. Don’t know where he got that idea. Maybe it was the fact he now stood eye level with me instead of being my little pipsqueak of a brother. What-friggin’-ever.

~

I’m not allowed in the operating room where they’re warming Will back up, so a nurse has finally coerced me into an exam area to check my hands and feet. I guess I have nothing better to do.

By the time she’s satisfied that I’m not going to die of frostbite-driven blood poisoning, my mom and Uncle Mike have burst in through the privacy curtain. Mom, of course, immediately grabs me about the head and squishes me to her chest. I endure it because I know how scared she is. Under all the anger, I’m scared, too.

“Oh, thank God you’re all right,” she gasps. When she let’s go, she asks “What happened? They’re saying Will is severely hypothermic?”

“He wouldn’t listen, Mom,” I snap, but even as I snap, I feel the tears well in my eyes.

~

“We’re never going to get back before this thing hits!” I snarled at the sky as we hauled ourselves through the deep, dense powder.

“It’s a snowstorm, Charlie,” said Will. “Big friggin’ deal.”

“‘Big friggin’ deal,’” I mocked back at him. “You’ve lived out here just as much as me, dude. You know how dangerous this crap can get.”

“Okay, when was the last time you were in white-out conditions?” Will argued. “We don’t get blizzards like we used to. It’ll probably be really pleasant to walk through. Like a wintery wonderland!”

“Five to eight inches in less than two hours isn’t a wonderland, dumbass,” I said.

“Just get out your compass and follow that home,” said Will. “We know the way.”

“That’ll only work if we get across the bridge first,” I reminded him. “After that it’s a straight shot, not before. And I don’t think we’re even going to make that.”

“Then screw the bridge,” said Will. “We’ll just cross the river. It’s frozen over anyway.”

“Whoa, dude, no,” I say firmly. All the anger went out of my voice, leaving only my vehemence. I even turned around and stopped our progress. “No. We’re not crossing the river on the ice. That’s a better way to get dead than being stuck in a blizzard.”

“It’s like two degrees out, Chuck.” Will continued to buck me. “I think it’ll be okay.”

“No,” I insisted even harder. “That river’s still moving under there. There’s no knowing what spot is too thin from the flow. And when you go through, you’ll be going with the flow, too.”

“If we go through. We’ll just be careful,” said Will.

“Okay, NO!” I finally shouted at him. “Absolutely not! It’s not worth it, William! And that’s the end of it! I’m putting my foot down!”

“What the Hell do you mean, ‘you’re putting your foot down’?” Will barked back. “You’re not in charge of me!”

“Yes I am!” I yelled. “Yes I am! Dad left and that made you my responsibility! I’m the one who looks out for you, especially out here! So I’m not going to let you drown in that fucking river!”

“We’re not kids anymore, Charlie!” Will came back. “I’m a legal adult! I don’t need you to take care of me!”

“Being eighteen doesn’t mean you know what’s good for you!” I retorted.

“Well neither does being twenty-two!” Will countered. “You’re the one who wanted to come out here in the first place! And if you want to beat the storm home, you’ll have to cross the ice. If you don’t want to do that, then you don’t do that. I’m crossing the river here.”

His logic made my jaw set. It was my fault we were deep in the woods to begin with. Maybe my judgment was on the fritz today. Maybe it was Charlie’s turn to make a decision for us, and maybe it would be better than mine.

~

My leg jumps incessantly as I sit in the waiting room. Uncle Mike isn’t bothered sitting next to me. He’s a very stoic person. I’m not bothering Mom, either. She’s off pacing the room to release her nervous energy. I guess I get it from her. When we’re anxious, we need to move our bodies.

“He’ll be okay,” Uncle Mike tells me. Apparently he wasn’t bothered, but he did notice. “They’ll get him warmed and he’ll start right back up. He’s young and tough.”

“And stubborn,” I bite back.

Uncle Mike doesn’t scold me. He can hear the pain driving my frustration, no matter how much I try to bury it.

“I told him it was stupid to cross the river,” I continue. “We should have gone to the bridge. I knew better. I shouldn’t have let him make that decision. I knew better. But he was so stubborn.”

“He’s always been that way, honey,” my mother says as she passes close to us on one of her rounds.

“I know,” I almost whisper back. “I’ve never been able to get him to change his mind when he wants to do something dumb. ‘Don’t climb the dead tree, Will.’ At least he survived that one.”

“He’ll survive this, too,” says Uncle Mike calmly, quietly.

“He better,” I grumble.

Mom recognizes one of Will’s nurses when she comes through the OR doors. My mother is not a shy person and moves surprisingly fast. Raising two boys on her own has made her confident and efficient like that. She immediately flags down the nurse and presses her for information.

“You’re working on my son, Will?” she asks firmly.

“Yes,” the nurse replies, required to stop in her tracks.

“How’s he doing?” she asks.

“We’re still warming him,” is the nurse’s answer.

“Still?”

It’s not a reprimand or a judgment. It’s just concern from my mom, and the nurse can hear it in her tone. So she makes her explanation clear and precise and confident to be reassuring.

“We warm hypothermic patients as quickly as we can, but it can still be a slow process,” she says. “Working too fast can be just as bad. We will let you know as soon as there’s a change in his condition.”

“Have you at least restarted his heart?” my mom asks.

The nurse pauses. I can tell she wishes my mom hadn’t asked this, because she hates the answer she has to give.

“Not yet.”

~

“You know what, no.”

I grabbed my brother’s arm as he made to step on the river ice. He shook me off angrily.

“Oh for fuck’s sake, Charlie!” he shouted at me. “Get over yourself!”

“No, you get over yourself!” I shouted back.

“We’ve lived in these woods our whole lives!” he continued. “I know when ice is thin! We’ll make it across just fine. You wanted to beat the storm. This is our option!”

“Will—,” I tried to grab him again, but he smacked my hand away.

“Get off of me, man!” he yelled.

Then he stepped off the riverbank and began to work his way across the ice.

I watched him go… and with every careful step he took—testing, listening, shifting his weight—I felt my heart skip. So I stepped off the bank, too, and followed close behind him.

It was a good thing I did, too. Because about two-thirds of the way across the river, the ice gave out beneath my little brother with absolutely no warning.

What I did next was stupid. Trying to catch hold of someone dropping through a thin spot of ice usually means you go with them. But the luck of it—the good and the bad—was that the ice was exactly as I expected it to be: oddly thin in unpredictable places, and oddly thick in others. Though this was why Will went through at all, it was also why when I dropped the rabbits and dove to catch hold of his wrist the thick section immediately behind the thin one held my falling weight. That, and the fact that I somehow grabbed him, was a miracle.

The rest was shear, desperate force of will. The first hurdle was the sensation of my arm going into the water. As my brother’s body pulled me down, my limb dipped beneath the surface past my elbow, giving me such an agonizing shock that I could have involuntarily opened my fist. Somehow I held on. At least I knew why Will wasn’t doing anything to help me recover him. His whole body went into this frigid water. I wouldn’t be moving either.

So when I had to pull him out, I was pulling his full weight while also fighting the current dragging at him, and I only had one arm since the other had to scrape at the surface of the ice to gain any kind of traction. My ragged bellow of exertion and pain echoed through the empty woods as the muscles and tendons shredded in my arm.

But finally his head and shoulders surfaced and I could hook my other hand under his opposing armpit. Now able to leverage with my legs, I heaved him the rest of the way out of the water. He was already shivering violently and uncontrollably.

It was adrenaline that allowed me to grab him by the top of his coat and drag him across the last third of the river ice at a ridiculous, reckless pace until we reached the shore.

“I told you! I told you!” I screamed at him as we went. It wasn’t anger that raised my voice, but fear.

When finally we were safe on the bank, I checked to see if he had inhaled any water. With a firm prompting, he coughed up a little bit of the river, but thankfully not enough to drown him. Nevertheless, he was still quaking from the shock of the submersion.

“I told you,” I repeated, and suddenly I was whimpering it at him, and tears were falling down my cheeks. “I told you.”

“That… s-s-sucked,” said Will.

He was barely able to catch his breath, but somehow he managed to cough out a chuckle.

“Don’t laugh,” I said with an unwilling smile. “It’s not funny.”

“I c-can’t… feel anything, Charlie…,” he said.

Then the wind picked up. My wetness from my tears amplified the sting when that air hit my face. Will cried out as he felt the same sensation I did, but over his entire body. I looked up at the sky to see it darkening rapidly.

I couldn’t take off his drenched clothes, not with the storm coming in. And there was no way I could start a fire and keep it going if this snowfall came with such a strong breeze. Our only option was to haul ass back home. So I looked down at Will, my face set with determination.

“All right, little brother,” I said to him. “We’re going home. On your feet; let’s keep you moving!”

I took hold of him about his upper arms and heaved him upright. He was still in shock, still shaking, but managed to hold his weight once I got him vertical.

And then we walked off toward the cabin….

… and Will stumbled along beside me, struggling through the snow with numbed legs…

… and the wind picked up and the snow started to fall. As bitter cold as it had been, the temperature dropped even more. It was hard to set my phone to send out an SOS signal when my fingers were so chilled the screen could barely read my touch…

… and finally I had to sling my brother’s arm about my neck to keep him upright and moving. “You stay with me, Will, God dammit!”…

… until he began to lose his ability to move at all. Then I carried him over my shoulders as far as I could. In spite of my lungs burning from the effort and my windpipe searing from panting in the sub-zero air, I tried to keep him talking if I could, just to make sure he stayed awake….

“We’ve skied in worse, right?” I asked.

“Way worse…,” he replied.

“We’ll have to make s’mores over the fire, the way we’ll get it roaring.”

“Torch one for me….”

“You and your carcinogens…. We should build a snowman after the storm’s passed. Haven’t done that in years. You wanna?”

“Sure, Charlie….”

“Find funny places to put the carrot,” I smiled. “We always find funny places to put the carrot. Right, Will?

“…Will?”

But he had stopped responding. I noticed his limbs growing stiff in my hands.

So I laid him on the ground and tried to wake him.

“Will?!” I shook him. “Will! Hey! Wake up! Talk to me, man! Will!”

But he wouldn’t wake up. I ripped off one of my gloves and shoved aside his scarf to try and find his pulse… but there wasn’t one.

“WILL!”

It was then that the forestry rescue helicopter thudded into existence overhead.

~

“Stupid,” I mumble under my breath.

“Hm?” Uncle Mike asks, not having heard.

“It was stupid,” I snap at no one in particular.

“Honey, these things happen,” Mom says from the chair she’s finally settled into. “It doesn’t help either of you now to get angry at Will for making a mis—,”

“That’s not what I was talking about,” I retort, though I immediately feel bad for cutting her off so harshly. I start again as gently as I can muster, thought that isn’t much. “I mean… sure, that was stupid, but…. It was stupid.”

I can feel my breath catch in my throat. I’m finally realizing why I’m so angry. And I’m not really angry at my brother.

I lock my gaze on my mother.

“Why the fuck did I need to check the traps?”

The OR doors open and one of the doctors walks out. He calls our name, and all three of us are instantly on our feet and walking toward him. There’s hope in our movement, anticipation; we want so desperately to know what’s happened to Will. And none of us really want to acknowledge the look on the doctor’s face.

“How’s he doing?” Mom asks.

The doctor’s voice is somber when he says, “We did everything we could, but even after we brought his core temperature back up to normal, we couldn’t get his heart beating. I’m very sorry.”

Hypothermia slows the body’s function. Shivering is an early defense; a fast movement to try and warm up the body. But once the cold truly sets in, the victim begins to slow down. Their motions, their speech, even their thoughts. Their organs, too. Until, finally, they stop altogether.

The moment my brother died, I felt as if the whole world had stopped moving. Will had frozen to death, and time froze with him. Or maybe I did.

And all for a couple of rabbits I’d left behind on the river ice.

I knew better.