Her hands were leaving her in spite of the two pairs of gloves she wore, and her feet had been gone for some time. In a way, this was almost a relief. The numbness at least shut the mouth of her clamoring arthritis.
Stella began to limp now, making her left legwork harder. The arthritis in her knees had not gone to sleep, and soon they were screaming at her. Her white hair flew out behind her. Her lips had drawn back from her teeth (she still had her own, all save four) and she looked straight ahead, waiting for that yellow-and-black sign to materialize out of the flying whiteness.
It did not happen.
Sometime later, she noticed that the day’s bright whiteness had begun to dull to a more
uniform gray. The snow fell heavier and thicker than ever. Her feet were still planted on the crust but now she was walking through five inches of fresh snow. She looked at her watch, but it had stopped. Stella realized she must have forgotten to wind it that morning for the first time in twenty or thirty years. Or had it just stopped for good? It had been her mother’s and she had sent
it with Alden twice to the Head, where Mr. Dostie had first marveled over it and then cleaned it.
Her watch, at least, had been to the mainland.
She fell down for the first time some fifteen minutes after she began to notice the day’s growing grayness. For a moment she remained on her hands and knees, thinking it would be so easy just to stay here, to curl up and listen to the wind, and then the determination that had brought her through so much reasserted itself and she got up, grimacing. She stood in the wind, looking straight ahead, willing her eyes to see… but they saw nothing.
Be dark soon.
Well, she had gone wrong. She had slipped off to one side or the other. Otherwise she
would have reached the mainland by now. Yet she didn’t believe she had gone so far wrong that she was walking parallel to the mainland or even back in the direction of Goat. An interior navigator in her head whispered that she had overcompensated and slipped off to the left. She believed she was still approaching the mainland but was now on a costly diagonal.
That navigator wanted her to turn right, but she would not do that. Instead, she moved
straight on again, but stopped the artificial limp. A spasm of coughing shook her, and she spat bright red into the snow.
Ten minutes later (the gray was now deep indeed, and she found herself in the weird
twilight of a heavy snowstorm) she fell again, tried to get up, failed at first, and finally managed to gain her feet. She stood swaying in the snow, barely able to remain upright in the wind, waves of faintness rushing through her head, making her feel alternately heavy and light.
Perhaps not all the roaring she heard in her ears was the wind, but it surely was the wind that finally succeeded in prying Alden’s hat from her head. She made a grab for it, but the wind danced it easily out of her reach and she saw it only for a moment, flipping gaily over and over into the darkening gray, a bright spot of orange. It struck the snow, rolled, rose again, was gone.
Now her hair flew around her head freely.
“It’s all right, Stella,” Bill said. “You can wear mine.”
She gasped and looked around in the white. Her gloved hands had gone instinctively to
her bosom, and she felt sharp fingernails scratch at her heart.
She saw nothing but shifting membranes of snow — and then, moving out of that
evening’s gray throat, the wind screaming through it like the voice of a devil in a snowy tunnel, came her husband. He was at first only moving colors in the snow: red, black, dark green, lighter green; then these colors resolved themselves into a flannel jacket with a flapping collar, flannel pants, and green boots. He was holding his hat out to her in a gesture that appeared almost absurdly courtly, and his face was Bill’s face, unmarked by the cancer that had taken him (had that been all she was afraid of? that a wasted shadow of her husband would come to her, a scrawny concentration-camp figure with the skin pulled taut and shiny over the cheekbones and the eyes sunken deep in the sockets?) and she felt a surge of relief.