The Shuddering

stairs, the dog hesitated, looking back to the cabin. Confusion washed over Ryan’s face as his dog vacillated between staying and going.
    “Maybe it’s too cold,” Jane suggested, but she knew that was impossible. These dogs raced the Iditarod. They trekked across Siberia. There was something more to Oona’s reluctance—something that made Jane uncomfortable. It was enough to make her want to pull Lauren and Ryan back inside, refuse to let them go, but it didn’t change the fact that April was out there somewhere and it was growing colder by the minute.
    Sawyer had insisted he go out to search with Ryan and Lauren, but Ryan had protested. Both he and Lauren were already dressed in their gear and ready to go, while Sawyer’s stuff was out in his Jeep halfway down the drive. Allowing Sawyer to accompany them would have slowed down the search party, and the snow was starting to fall. Sawyer had eventually relented; leaning against the kitchen island, he pressed buttons on his phone as if a certain combination would magically grant him a bar or two of service.
    Jane watched him try again to send a text message to April’s phone, only to have it fail like all the others. She looked away, her attention veering back to the dog.
    Oona whined at the top of the steps, watching her owner continue without her. She barked as if telling Ryan to stop, then lay down in the snow and put her snout on her paws, offering up a pair of puppy-dog eyes.
    “Come on back inside,” Jane said. But the dog didn’t respond. Jane shook her head and closed the door, left to stand in a hauntingly quiet house. Sucking in a breath, she narrowed her eyes at her long-abandoned coffee cup upon the counter, then swigged the cold dregs like a shot of tequila.
    “Aren’t you hot?” she asked. Sawyer was still wearing the jacket he’d pulled on earlier that morning, as though somewhere in the corner of his mind he was planning on spontaneously getting up and walking out.
    Sawyer’s gaze wavered from his phone down to the secondary jacket he’d brought with him—much lighter than the one he had worn snowboarding, insubstantial against what was going on outside.
    “Well, you’re making me nervous.”
    A faint smile crossed his lips, assuring her that he remembered that particular pet peeve. She couldn’t stand it when people kept their coats on with no intention of leaving. It made her anxious, as though the situation hinged on her every word. Abandoning his useless phone on the island, he unzipped his jacket and shrugged out of it, dropping it on to one of the dining table chairs before returning to his original spot. Jane’s attention snagged on his faded black Sisters of Mercy shirt, almost hating him for bringing that particular shirt with him—he must have remembered, must have known.
    “Is that what I think it is?” she asked, staring at a well-worn logo against faded black cotton—the outline of a star behind a featureless profile. But he didn’t have to respond for her to know it was the very shirt she had stolen from his room, the one shehad slept in after their first night together while his parents had been out of town. Jane had loved that room. It was an extension of its owner, smoky and mysterious, the walls plastered in torn-out magazine pages and band posters. She would sit at his desk, picking dried wax from the varnished top while he played her his favorite songs, stuffing CD after CD into his crappy stereo. That room had always been dark, the red curtain hanging heavy over his window, choking out the daylight. He had books about medieval warfare and music theory; stuff she could hardly wrap her mind around, but she’d flip through them while lying on his bed, inhaling a deliciously noxious mix of cigarettes and candle smoke. Jane had walked away from that relationship with a lot of things: a love for the strange and unusual, a weakness for the scent of clove cigarettes, and an ache in her heart whenever she heard one of the hundreds of songs he would play for her on a loop. But she’d given back that T-shirt. Even after a dozen washes it had held his scent, so she folded it up, tucked it into a box, and mailed it to Boston a few weeks after she had lost him to the world. It was a decision she regretted, a decision that tied her heart into a knot with the shirt’s sudden reappearance.
    “Same one,” he replied. “A little worse for wear.”
    Jane looked to her hands. “Why did you bring it?”
    Sawyer held