"Is that Dad?"
"Could be. Could be anybody." Gudrun stood beside him. She smelled like woodsmoke and the hand lotion she used at work, something with oatmeal in it. "Get away from the glass, it's cold."
He did not get away from the glass. He stood there until his breath fogged it over, and then he wiped it with the sleeve of his hoodie and kept standing there. Gudrun went back to the couch. Pekka went upstairs with the lantern to find more blankets, and the room went darker, only the stove now.
"Dell," Gudrun said behind him.
"What."
She did not answer for a while. He heard her shift on the couch. "Nothing," she said at last. "Come sit by the stove."
He did not come sit by the stove. He went into the mudroom and pulled on his boots and went out the front door onto the porch, and he did not take anything with him but what he was wearing, the T-shirts and the flannel and the short fleece and the gray hoodie with its three black clips.
The porch was the long covered kind that ran the whole front of the house, with a railing his father had built out of peeled cedar and a woodbox at the north end, against the wall, where the overflow from the woodpile went in winter. Dell went to the woodbox and sat down on the floor of the porch behind it, with his back against the siding and his knees up, where the wind could not quite reach him. It was very dark. With the porch light dead and the windows dark, the only light came from the work lights at the bottom of the hill, which turned the falling ice into a kind of glitter, and from the faint orange square of the living room window behind and above his head.
He did not know why he had come out. He told himself it was to watch the trucks. That was part of it. The other part was that the black coat was lying on the arm of the couch, and he could not be in the room with it anymore.
Everything was ticking. The ice on the railing, the ice on the birches, the ice on the roof of the porch over his head. It was a sound like a thousand small clocks, all running at slightly different speeds. Down at the bottom of the