Chapter 7 - The Trek Through the Blizzard
The wind howling down Albany Avenue felt like broken glass against Daniel’s bare cheeks.
His eyelashes were frosted with ice. Every breath burned his lungs with the sharp, dry cold of sub-zero wind chills. The street was completely deserted; even the city snowplows had retreated to wait out the worst of the squall.
Daniel was stumbling.
His left leg had gone completely numb from the knee down. His canvas coat, designed for a heated maintenance shop and not an arctic blizzard, had stiffened like cardboard against the wind.
He reached the corner of Montrose and Kedzie.
The streetlights here were the old sodium-vapor lamps, casting an orange, melancholy glow over the untouched snowdrifts.
Daniel leaned against a frozen mail drop-box, his breath coming in ragged, white gasps.
He reached inside his coat, his trembling fingers pressing against the hard metal points of the tin star tucked near his ribs.
*Just four more blocks,* he told himself. *Four blocks. You promised her.*
He remembered the day Emma died.
It had been an overcast Tuesday in October. The hospital room had smelled of antiseptic and dying flowers. Emma had taken his hand—her skin so thin he could feel every delicate bone beneath—and she had looked at him with eyes that were already looking past this world.
*“Don't let her forget what Christmas feels like, Dan,”* she had whispered, her voice barely louder than the hum of the heart monitor. *“Don't let the hard world make her small. You be the roof over her head. You be the light.”*
Daniel had wept until his shirt was soaked. He had buried his face in her hands and promised her that as long as he had breath in his lungs, Lily would never be alone in the dark.
“I’m coming, Emma,” Daniel whispered into the blizzard.
He pushed himself off the mailbox.
He took one step. Then another.
His boot caught on an uneven slab of snow-covered concrete, and his legs gave out.
He went down hard onto his knees, his hands plunging deep into an icy drift. The cold shocked his system, stealing the breath from his chest. He stayed there for five seconds, the snow swirling around his shoulders like a white shroud, whispering to him to just lie down. Just close his eyes. Just rest for ten minutes.
His phone buzzed in his pocket.
With stiff, agonizingly slow movements, Daniel pulled the cracked device from his coat.
The battery icon was flashing red at two percent.
A video message had downloaded from Martha.
Daniel touched the cracked screen with a shivering thumb.
The video opened.
There was Lily, sitting on their worn blue rug in Albany Park. She was wrapped in Emma’s old yellow quilt, her dark hair tangled from sleep, her enormous brown eyes staring directly into the camera lens.
In her hands, she was holding a mug of warm milk.
*“Hi, Daddy,”* Lily’s small, clear voice drifted out of the tiny phone speaker, cutting through the roar of the Chicago wind. *“Martha said you’re saving people at the hotel. That’s okay. Mom told me that heroes have to work on holidays sometimes because other people need them. But I didn't go to sleep. I’m waiting right here. I have the star, Daddy. Don't worry if you’re cold. I put your slippers right by the radiator so they’ll be warm when you get here. I love you.”*
The screen went black.
The phone died.
Daniel sat in the snowdrift. A hot sob tore through his throat, followed by a raw, furious growl that came from the absolute bottom of his soul.
He didn't stay down.
He slammed his fists into the snow, pushed himself upright, and forced his frozen knees to lock.
He didn't feel the cold anymore. He didn't feel the wind tearing at his hood.
He took a step. Then another.
May you like
He walked down Kedzie Avenue like a man marching through a battlefield, his eyes fixed on the three-story brick walk-up at the end of the block, where a single, small window on the third floor glowed with the warm, uneven light of a discount strand of Christmas bulbs.
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