She opened the front door of the cabin and paused on the porch. The screen door creaked and settled shut behind her. A cool dry breeze swept across her face as the sun came up over Sheephead Mountain. Wisps of cloud lay across the sky, pink and yellow, like brushstrokes. Miles of brown and gold grass ran out over the barren land. Distant trees dotted the plains, dwarfed by the blue mountains.
She had come out for water and she stood there and did not go for it. This was a thing she let herself have, the standing, the first minute of the day before it became a day with all its work in it. The boards were cold through her socks. Her breath came out of her and hung a moment and was gone. She could smell woodsmoke from the stove and under it the dry mineral smell of the country in the fall, the smell of a thing curing, the grass and the sage giving up the last of the summer out of themselves before the snow. There was frost on the rail. She put her thumb to it and it did not melt at once the way it would have a month ago, and she took that for the small hard fact it was. The mornings had teeth in them now.
There had been a time she woke warm every day of her life and never once thought about it. She thought about it now. She woke these days with a cold in her that the stove did not always reach, a cold that sat low behind her breastbone, and she told herself it was only the season coming and mostly she believed it. Grandma Kate had woken cold like that near the end. But that was a thing she did not let herself carry out onto the porch with her in the mornings, and she set it down now, the way she had learned to set a thing down, and looked at the light on the mountains instead.
At Camp time passed slowly. The place was empty and still, and it absorbed you, lulled you, made you forget how wild the country was. Standing there on the weatherworn planks, Laura felt the truth of it settle in her chest. What had sheltered them for so long had become a trap. The mountains stared her down and made her small. They were a fortress that kept them safe and kept them prisoner both. In the first years she had loved them for the wall they made against the world. She had thought, if a thing wanted to get to them, it would have to come over that, and nothing had. But a wall works the both ways. It had taken her a long time and a great deal of quiet to understand that a thing that cannot get in to you is also a thing you cannot get out past, and that the mountains had not been keeping the world off them so much as keeping the two of them in a jar with the lid screwed down, and that the lid was screwing tighter every cold morning now, one turn at a time.
Behind her in the cabin Henry slept. He would sleep till she woke him or till the light and the cold got into the loft, whichever came first, and lately it was the cold. She could hear nothing of him through the door. He slept the way he did everything now, quietly, giving the world nothing to notice him by, a habit she had taught him and was proud of and grieved over both, because a boy his age had no business being so good at not being seen.
Apart from the camp, the only sign of people out there were the snow fences along Rattlesnake Pass. Ten feet high and from this distance they looked pitiful, defenseless, a row of slatted teeth set into the shoulder of the pass by men in some other age of the world, men with trucks and paychecks and a plan for the winter roads. Those men were gone. Everything those men had was gone. But the fences had stood. She could see them from the porch catching the low light, and she knew from the winters that they would fill white to their tops with the drifts they were built to make and lean into the wind and hold, and come spring they would still be standing there, gray and splitting and stubborn, having done again the one thing they were for. Still they had stood through the icy winter winds and the long summer glare. It gave her some small hope that she and Henry could stand too, out there beyond the horizon. If a thing made of old slats and rusted wire could last out here with nobody to tend it, then maybe a thing made of her and her brother could last long enough to get somewhere better.
Time was running out. She could feel it the way you feel weather coming before you can name what tells you. She didn't know the month but she knew fall was coming, was half here already, in the frost and the shortening light and the way the elk had started to bugle down off the high country in the evenings. Out there felt like a held breath.
In The Before, out there had been something to explore. With their parents to guide them everything was new and mostly kind. People were friendly, most of them anyway. There were parties and parades and ice cream shops that were cold on your teeth, and the long green Saturdays of football with the whole town in one place shouting at the same thing. She could still call some of it up if she was careful, the sound of a crowd, the smell of cut grass and hot asphalt, her mother's hand on the back of her neck in a moving car. That was Before. It had the quality now of something she had read once in a book and half remembered, a country she could no longer be sure she had truly lived in or only been told about.
Now, in The After, out there was an abyss. She had learned not to look at it too long, the way you learn not to look at the sun, because there was a pull in it that could take you if you gave it time. What was out there? She did not know, and the not knowing was the whole of the fear. Somewhere out there were the militant children she had seen in town, grown by now into whatever such children grew into. Somewhere out there was the road her grandfather had driven down and not come back from. Somewhere, maybe, impossibly, out there was her mother. The country beyond the mountains was uncharted and nearly forgotten, a blank at the edge of the only map she had, and she stood on the porch in the cold and understood, the way you understand a thing you have known a long while and only now let yourself say, that soon she and Henry would have no choice but to walk out into that blank and become whatever it made of them.
She picked up the buckets and went down off the porch to the pump. The day had work in it and the work would not wait on her fear. It never had. That was the one mercy of it.