Free The Cage by Audrey Shulman Page B

asked.
    â€œBig as the bears.” He touched two fingers to his nose. “Their breath’s noisy.”
    â€œYou’ve been close enough to hear that?”
    â€œYes.”
    She gave up. She knew him no better than before. She thought asking him questions made him nervous, although he never fidgeted or tried to cut the conversation short. Instead he sat still, waiting for her questions to end.
    She could imagine him doing almost anything. Baying suddenly deep and wild as a wolf, or leaving them two weeks into the expedition, simply walking off across the snow heading due north.
    Beryl also asked Butler about the springtime. He had spent several years up here, working on different projects for
Natural Photography
or the Canadian government. He told her about spring while sitting next to her at lunch. He tended to lean in close when he spoke to her, much closer than he did to Jean-Claude or David. She didn’t know if he was attracted to her or if this was just the way he talked to women. She found herself leaning backward, giving ground. He exuded a warm heat and breathed through his nose with an audible whisper. Even his face was larger than her’s. On her it would have stretched almost down to the base of her neck.
    Butler said, “Spring comes fast and noisy. There isn’t muchtime for it to get to summer. The temperature suddenly rises into the fifties and the sun shines. The snow melts all at once. The ground never thaws more than a few feet deep, even in the middle of summer, so the water has nowhere to go except into the harbor. It backs up on the unmelted harbor ice.”
    Beryl imagined the water weighing down the still frozen sea ice, building up slowly over the pier back to the first house and then to the second, flooding through the town and forming a thin milky skin in the night as smooth and perfect as glass, shattering each morning with the first door that opened. The waves moved out from that first door, broken ice tinkling outward across the town.
    Butler said, inching even closer to Beryl, “The whole town is flooded. The weather’s already hot. People wear T-shirts with thick winter pants and boots for sloshing through the water. Then one day the ice in the harbor finally cracks. It booms loud as guns. The water runs into the sea, the town’s drained, and the next day the ground is dry and warm.”
    Beryl leaned back full against the booth, her head tucked into her neck in an effort to move back from Butler’s face. David, she noticed, was staring down at his soup, stirring it. Jean-Claude watched her and Butler, motionless, one hand holding out a piece of toast, the blush rising to his cheeks again.
    After a moment, Butler shifted a little away.
    Beryl knew a spring only a week long would surprise her so much she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She would stay up listening to the groaning of the ice, the high-pitched keeningof tension as though through a boat’s hull ten miles wide, the sharp clanks like metal against metal, the gentle crinkling of water on her doormat.
    She imagined Butler on the day after the ice broke, standing in the center of a dry warm town, thankful the strange spring had passed.

CHAPTER 11
    That weekend the temperature plummeted. Three more inches of granulated snow fell overnight and Beryl went for a walk in the half-light of early morning through the still-falling snow. She needed some exercise and wanted to test out her new
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parka. She wanted to get away from the others for the first time in a week. A month ago, the temperature had hit the seventies; now, walking across town in the early morning, the air was so cold the snow squeaked like Styrofoam beneath her feet. The streets were deserted except for occasional cars that rolled by with steamed windows, blurred warm faces inside. Several people in the cars stared at her. She met no one else walking.
    She walked quickly, trying to make a wide circle through the