Evelyn got him to one of the booths, and the getting there was a second battle, slower than the first and no less desperate. She hauled and coaxed and half-carried him across the diner floor, his frozen boots scraping the linoleum, his weight pulling her sideways with every step, until she could ease him down onto the cracked vinyl of the nearest booth. He sagged against the backrest like a man who had forgotten how to hold himself upright, his head lolling, his breath shallow and uneven, and Evelyn stood over him for a moment with her hands on her knees, trying to get her own breathing under control. Her chest ached in a way that frightened her, a deep, spreading ache that seemed to come from inside her ribs rather than from the muscles she had strained, and she pressed her palm against it again, waiting, counting, willing it to settle. It did not settle quickly. It settled slowly, grudgingly, the way a storm settles, and she took that as permission to keep working.
She went to the bathroom and ran the water until it was lukewarm, holding her hand under the tap and adjusting it by feel, because water too hot would have been worse than useless on skin that had been frozen, and water too cold would have done nothing at all. She brought back wet towels, wrung out and folded, and she worked over him with a care she had not used in a long time, wiping ice from his beard, from his eyebrows, from the creases around his eyes. His skin was gray under the ice, a color she had seen before only on people who were already gone, and for a moment her hands stilled, and she thought about Henry's face in the morning, and about how gray could mean an ending. Then she saw his chest rise, shallow but definite, and she kept working. She peeled back his gloves with clumsy, frozen fingers, and she saw the frostbite on three fingers, the skin white and waxy and frighteningly still, and she wrapped them gently in a damp towel and then in a dry one, because that was all she knew to do, and because doing something was better than standing there watching.
The wound on his head needed stitches. She could see that plainly enough: a gash at his temple where he had hit something in the fall, blood drying dark against his skin, the edges uneven and raw. She did not have the tools or the knowledge to stitch it, and she knew enough not to pretend otherwise. She cleaned around it as gently as she could, pressing a folded towel against it to slow the bleeding, talking to him all the while in a low, steady voice, the way she had once talked to Danny when he was small and had fallen off his bicycle, as if words themselves could be a kind of bandage. She told him he was inside now. She told him the storm was outside and he was not in it anymore. She told him his brothers were still out there, and that she had heard him, and that hearing was the first step toward helping. She did not know if he heard her. His eyes stayed closed. His breathing stayed shallow. But his hand, when she took it to check his pulse again, was a fraction less cold than it had been, and Evelyn clung to that fraction like a lifeline.
She sat down for a moment in the booth across from him, because her legs would not hold her any longer and because her chest was aching in that deep, frightening way again. She looked around her diner, at the empty tables and the cold coffee and the neon flickering its seven-second heartbeat through the window, and she thought about how strange it was that a place could feel both empty and full at the same time. A stranger was breathing, shallowly, in her booth. Forty-nine other strangers were dying on a mountain pass. Her own life, which had felt so small and finished only an hour ago, suddenly felt large again, not with hope exactly, but with consequence. She thought about Henry, who had built this diner to be a place where travellers could stop and be warm. Henry had never been a man who turned people away from his door.
She thought, too, about the pills, and about the way her own body was keeping score. She had already taken too many today, and she knew it, She pressed her hand to her chest and felt the irregular thump, and she made a bargain with herself: one thing at a time, and she would worry about the cost when the morning came.
Then she went to the phone behind the counter and dialed the sheriff's office, her fingers stiff and clumsy on the rotary dial, her breath still ragged from the effort of dragging him inside. It rang six times before Deputy Harrison picked up, six long rings in which Evelyn imagined the empty office, the coffee gone cold there too, the deputy deciding whether to answer at all. "Black Hollow Sheriff's Department." His voice was flat, professional, already tired, as if the night had been long for him as well. "This is Evelyn Vale. I need help." She said it plainly, without preamble, because there was no time for preamble and because she had learned, over years of running a diner, that plain words got heard faster than polite ones. "Mrs. Vale, middle of the night. What's wrong?" The question was not unkind, but it was not urgent either, and Evelyn felt a flash of anger at its ordinariness, at the way a night like this could sound like any other night to a man sitting in a warm office.