He had come up the driveway on foot, because there was a birch across it a hundred yards up, a big one, split right down the middle under its own ice and lying across the gravel with its crown in the ditch. He had climbed over it. He had walked the rest of the way up in the dark with his headlamp off, because the batteries were going and he wanted to save them for the pole, and because he knew the driveway the way he knew his own hands, every rut of it. He was thinking about nothing. He was too tired to think. He was thinking about whether there was any of the venison chili left in the freezer and whether it would still be frozen, and about whether Dell had remembered to put the screen in front of the stove at night, and about a transformer on the Finland road that had blown in a green flash in front of him that afternoon like the end of the world.
He had seen the orange square of the living room window and felt something unknot in his chest. The stove was going. Good boys.
Then he had heard Gudrun's voice out on the porch, on the phone. He had stopped at the bottom of the steps, because she sounded upset, and he did not want to walk in on the middle of whatever it was. He had thought, wait a minute. He had thought, let her finish.
And then he had heard her say it was a three-hundred-dollar coat and it was four months late. And he had heard her say he's eleven, and I know how old he is. And he had stood there in the dark in his tan work coat with the reflective tape gone dull with ice, not moving, and heard his wife say about his son, let him freeze a little. He's not mine.
He had climbed the steps without knowing he was doing it. He had said it before he knew he was going to say it. His voice came out of him sounding like somebody else's, very low and very level.
"What did you just say?"
Gudrun spun around so fast she nearly dropped the phone. In the dim glare from the bottom of the hill he could see her face go white and then, slowly, something else, a stillness, a kind of terrible patience.
"Rasmus," she said.
"I asked you what you said."
"Gudy?" said the phone, small and tinny. "Gudy, is that him? Is he there?"
"I'll call you back," Gudrun said, and pressed the screen, and put the phone in the pocket of her parka. She did not look away from him. "How long have you been there?"