They land in a heap on the creekbank, and Lance registers that the wind has been totally knocked out of him—judging by the gasp he heard from Robbie, he’s not alone. Robbie regains his breath first, though, and he uses it to laugh.

Lance lifts himself onto his elbows and glares to his right, where Robbie lies flat on his back beside him, though their legs are still tangled together.

“At least the ice didn’t break this time,” Lance observes with a smile, and Robbie laughs some more.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Robbie

They walk hand in hand into the clearing that surrounds the old Taylor place. Robbie is struck by the sight of it.

The house was always shabby, but it’s in rougher condition than ever now. He can see where broken windows have been papered over with cardboard and plastic, and a sheet of water-stained plywood looks to be screwed to the roof, probably to patch a hole.

Lance is beaming. “I don’t know why, but I felt like I had to come out here,” he murmurs. A young woman stands beside the child in the snowsuit who Robbie saw in the woods. Both of them are watching Robbie and Lance with cautious expressions. “And I still don’t know why I felt it, but this is Nora, and her daughter Alice. And, Robbie, Nora’s my sister.”

Robbie might not have believed him so easily, but Nora is the spitting image of Lance. In fact, she’s the spitting image of a younger Lance; manhood made him taller and stronger than he was as a child, but she’s small and slight like he used to be. She’s painfully slender, too, like he was back then. Robbie is bit in the heart by the familiar impulse to feed her and give her something warm to wear.

Alice, on the other hand, looks snug in her snowsuit, and her plump cheeks are still flushed with color from the excitement of spying a stranger in the trees. She’s been watching warily, but when she notices that he and Lance’s hands are linked, she instantly relaxes and wriggles out from under her mother’s arm.

“I’m Alice,” she says. “Lance is my uncle.”

An hour later, Robbie isn’t sure how he feels about walking away.

“But it’s so cold,” he tells Lance, not for the first time. He’s following Lance toward the blue car he last saw in the impound lot. He has mixed feelings about seeing it again now. He knows Lance has plenty to tell him, and he has a feeling some of it will be hard to hear.

“They’ve got a generator and a heater. They’ve been making it just fine, and there have been colder nights.” Lance glances past Robbie at the house, where they’ve left Nora and Alice behind a closed door as night falls; the temperatures have already begun to drop. “I want to help them, too, but if I do too much too soon, I don’t think Nora will like it.”