Across the Ice

1By the third day of the storm, the cough that had begun in Tomas’s chest had become a rattle, and his forehead burned under Ana’s hand. Their mother was away in the city, and the only medicine left in the cabin was an empty bottle with a cracked label.

2“Grandpa,” Ana whispered, “the store across the lake will have medicine.”

3Grandpa looked out at the lake. It lay flat and grey under the low sky, frozen from shore to shore. The road around it was buried under snow, and walking that way would take most of a day. Across the ice, the store was an hour away. He was quiet for a long time, rubbing the knuckles of his stiff hands.

4“The ice is thick in the middle,” he said at last, “but near the reeds, where the stream runs in, it stays thin all winter. If we cross, we cross my way. Slowly. And you do exactly what I say.” His instructions were explicit.

5They set out with the long pole Grandpa used for ice-fishing. He walked in front, tapping the ice before every step, listening to the sound it made. A dull, solid thock meant safe. Once, near a dark patch, the tap came back hollow and high, and he stopped so suddenly that Ana bumped into his back. Without a word, he turned them in a wide curve away from it.

6Halfway across, the wind found them. It flung needles of snow into their faces and pushed against them like a shove from a large, impatient hand. Ana’s eyelashes froze. She stopped feeling her toes. But every time she wanted to stop, she saw Tomas’s flushed face on the pillow, and she put one boot in front of the other.

7At last the store’s yellow window glowed through the white. Mrs Lind took one look at them, sat them by the stove and pressed hot cocoa into their hands before she even asked why they had come.

8They returned along the road the next morning, behind Mr Lind’s snowplough, with the medicine wrapped inside Ana’s coat, close to her heart. When Tomas finally opened his eyes and asked for toast, Grandpa laughed for the first time in three days. Ana noticed that his hands were shaking, and she understood that he had been frightened the whole way, and had crossed anyway.