The deer’s skull, with its reaching antlers like skeleton hands, seemed to hover in the darkness. The Ghost Ranger stood out of the light in the middle of the road at the edge of town. Perhaps he had been there all along, but he stood completely motionless as if he hadn’t walked up, simply appeared. But his reasons for being out here were the same. The ranger nodded, making himself complicit with Peter. He’d been watching Cooper, too. Peter nodded back, more out of politeness than anything else, then regretted it immediately. He dashed back indoors, closing the door firmly behind him and ran upstairs. He stood in the corner of the bay, careful not to be seen, and the clock ticked. Peter wondered how it was even possible for a sound to be at once constant and yet able to fade in and out of a room like that. He pressed his hands to the glass and peered out, but the Ghost Ranger had gone. Snow flurried over the town smothering Cooper’s footprints, and soon they were gone too.

12

Cooper didn’t come home. Peter took one of the two twin beds and lay facing the wall waiting to hear the creak of the other mattress behind him, followed by his name being called tenderly from the darkness. But it didn’t come, and somehow the empty bed became an emptiness inside him, the cold across his back keeping him awake no matter how much he pulled the blankets over him. In the last month on the trail, when wild winds ripped across the tent, the two of them had been able to lie in their sleeping bags watching the snow tumble across the gauze window and never once feel the cold. The steady rhythm of Cooper’s breath across Peter’s neck was warm. The heat radiating from his palms as they held hands was warmer still. And they could lie like that, talking, sleeping, stirring to kiss, listening to the storm, but somehow in another world of their own making, the heat between them never once dipping lower than a glowing ember. But not now. The space between the two beds was a cold chasm. Peter rolled over, gazing into the darkness where Cooper should’ve been, except if he’d come back and not called out his name, that would only have been worse. Not a chasm, but a canyon so vast that love, struggling to breach the divide, would simply fail and plummet into the bottom and be lost.