CHAPTER ELEVEN

1962

I drifted through the still house, already knowing I wouldn’t find my mother. The rooms had that deep quiet of something missing. When I went upstairs and opened her bureau, I found the red drawer liner staring up at me. In the dressing room, clothes still hung in neat rows, but they weren’t the sorts of things she would ever need. She’d taken her long black coat, so I guessed she planned on going out somewhere nice. Dresses with delicate beading were wrapped in plastic that touched the floor, and shawls embroidered with South American designs remained stacked on the shelf beside handbags I’d never seen her use. I felt so lost when I saw her yellow pillbox hat, just waiting there, left alone on one of the shelves where she’d removed other more essential items. I started pulling things off the shelves. Downstairs, I rummaged through the coat closet, as if by some miracle I could find her hiding there.

When I checked the garage, I found she’d also taken the Studebaker. No one had come for her; she’d left on her own. But that didn’t make me feel any better. I stepped into the spot where the car should have been, stared down into a black pool of oil, and clutched my arms around myself to keep out the cold. I could see my breath, and the sharp shape of rakes hanging from the far wall made me feel like crying. Above the row of tools, gray flakes fluttered against the dirty windowpane. I walked out the side door, sat down on one of the elm stumps, and waited for my father to come home from work. We were on our own now.

*   *   *

When I saw my father’s car turning in, I raced to meet him. He reached over and opened the passenger side door, and light flooded the warm interior of the car. “Get out of the cold, just for a minute,” he said. “You shouldn’t be standing out here.”

“She’s gone,” I said, gripping the edge of the window, eyeing the thin layer of snow over everything. I suddenly realized that my mother had really left. What kind of girl could cause such a thing—a mother who left without a thought or a note or a goodbye?

I went around the front of the car and got in beside my father, as he guided the car down the remaining portion of the drive. I didn’t look at his face because I didn’t want to see what I knew he had to be feeling. When the snow melted off my hair and trickled down my forehead, I caught the drops with the sleeve of my coat. “All Mother’s things are gone,” I said. “And her car, Daddy.”

“More space for this one,” my father said, patting the wheel of the Packard. “No reason for you to kill yourself in the cold.” He got out and opened the garage door, his trench coat spreading like a bat wing in the headlights.

I felt like I barely knew him. He never told stories, and most of the time it seemed he only spoke to her. He only looked at her. She was all that mattered. I didn’t know what was going to happen now. I was cold and wet. There wasn’t a soul in the world I could claim to know well, no one who wouldn’t shrug their shoulders and roll their eyes if I just lay down in the snow and gave up. Life wasn’t like this for the cobs at school. Only for the Bowman boy whose parents had been killed, and Cora maybe, whose own brother had told me he hated her. Some of us just hadn’t turned out right. It didn’t seem at all fair.

My father got back in and parked the Packard in the Studebaker’s spot. When we filed into the silent kitchen, I started to cry. I didn’t even try to hold it back. I told myself it wasn’t because of my mother, and yet for years afterward I would be left wondering what I had done to make her go.

“I’m always making everyone cry,” my father said. “I’m not sure exactly how I do it. Am I such a terrible man?”

I just couldn’t imagine our lives. I didn’t think I could fill her shoes.

“I got you one of those hoops,” he said. “With pink stripes.”

“Where is it?”

“In the trunk.”

“You don’t understand what I’m trying to tell you,” I said. “Mother’s things are gone. She left us. I was only trying to let you know.”

“Oh, no, Puggy,” my father said. “She wouldn’t do that.” He took off his hat, put it on the table, and started making a drink. “Didn’t she tell you? She went to Kansas City to visit a college friend. There’s no reason to be upset.”

“Who’d she go visit?” I asked.

“What’s-her-name. One of those panty-raid girls.” He filled his glass with ice. “Somebody-or-other Kimball. She’ll be back.”

*   *   *

We sat in the living room watching the news and waiting for the pot to boil. I was trying to make spaghetti as the newscasters told the world about the storm and the two high-wire circus performers who had plummeted to their deaths. Snow was falling heavily all over the Midwest. They were predicting up to a foot in some regions of Nebraska and Kansas. Travel advisories were in effect. It seemed like everything was happening at once.

My father took his feet off the ottoman and set his drink on the end table beside my grandmother’s collection of ceramic frogs. He leaned forward, his arms on his knees, as we studied the laced pattern of snowflakes on the television screen decorating our section of the map. “What time did she leave?” He checked his watch.

“I don’t know.” I wanted to tell him it didn’t matter. We had never been enough for her. Why couldn’t he see that?

My father stared out at Van Dorn as if the hooded glaze of streetlights might tell him something. “Well, they didn’t mention a storm in Missouri.” He sighed.

“But the snowflakes were covering it.” I could tell he was worried, and I wanted to show him I was worried too. I took a ruler off the letter desk, opened the French doors, and pressed the ruler into the snow to test how many inches had fallen. When I was a little girl in Chicago, there had been a blizzard the day after my parents’ annual New Year’s party. Some of the guests who had passed out in the spare rooms or on couches were trapped, and my mother made them mimosas. My father and I had closed ourselves in the library to watch the snow. He had pretended to pull a quarter out of my ear, and I had screamed, thinking everything inside me had turned to silver. “Things could be worse,” he’d said. “Some people only produce pennies,” which had made me even more upset. I remember his face looking preoccupied as he sat me down and went through how he’d done the trick. Then we put on our boots and ventured outside. We walked through the hushed city streets hand in hand, making guesses about how much new snow was falling. Later my father had plunged a yardstick into the snow.

“Three inches, Daddy,” I said, stepping back into the living room and closing the door behind me. “Do you think she’s all right?”

“Of course. She’s probably already in Kansas City.” My father turned off the television and sat back down. “I’ve been thinking.” He drummed his finger on the side of his head. “About getting a new couch. She’d like that, don’t you think?”

I shrugged.

“Oh, yes.” He slapped his hand across his thigh. “She definitely would.” Then he lay down and put one of the old couch cushions over his face and sighed into the crease of it.

Watching him lying there so helpless, I wanted everything back the way it had been. I wanted Lucille to brush my hair and smooth everything over. I wanted some kind of order in our lives like normal people had.

“What are you doing?” I said.

My father didn’t answer.

*   *   *

Upstairs, I opened my bureau drawer and unfolded the telephone number I’d found in my mother’s jewelry box, repeating the digits over and over to myself as if I might lose it on the way to my parents’ room. I crept softly inside. Wandering through the dark, I ran my fingers over the bedspread, the base of the lamp, the cool glass surface of my mother’s vanity table. I smelled all her glamorous scents. In the mirror, my face glowed pale blue in the snow light.

Moving the telephone off the nightstand, I threaded the cord into my mother’s dressing room, turned on the light, and closed the door. Crouching in a plastic curtain of my mother’s bagged dresses, I dialed the number, then let it ring for a long time.

“Hello?” he said, finally.

“Hello.” My hands were shaking. “Listen. You don’t know me, but … I’m calling to see if my mother’s there.”

“Well, that all depends on who your mother is,” he said slowly, and laughed as if it was some sort of joke.

“Ann Peyton Hurst.”

A pause followed, as if the phone had gone dead. I brushed a bit of plastic off my face and cinched forward on my knees. “Hello?”

“How did you get this number?”

“I found it.”

“Who is this?”

“This is her daughter. Who’s this?”

“Nils Ivers. Maybe you haven’t heard of me. Your mother was an Ivers once. For about two months.”

“I really need to get in touch with her,” I said. “There’s a blizzard.”

“Well, there isn’t any snow here.” He paused. “Is she leaving someone else now?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Where are you?” he said.

I didn’t answer for a second. “Lincoln, Nebraska,” I said finally. “Where all those murders happened.” I hoped that might impress him. I thought of him as a man who might like a story like that.

“Well, you’re on the line with LA, sugar. This is a long-distance call.”

“That doesn’t matter,” I said suddenly. “We’re rolling in money.”

“Sounds nice. How old are you?”

I paused. Fourteen was too young. “Seventeen,” I told him.

“I bet you’re beautiful.”

“Everyone says so.” I felt like my mouth was moving without my mind telling it what to say.

“I bet you look just like her.”

“I do,” I lied. “People can’t believe it. We wear the same clothes,” I said, eyeing her yellow pillbox hat. It was the strangest feeling, I felt like a puppet with someone else pulling the strings.

“You sound like quite a sparkler. A real Roman candle. Have you ever thought about the movies? I always thought your mother should be in the movies.”

“Sometimes,” I said. “But I’m more interested in other things.”

“Like what?”

“Horses and stuff. Listen, I can’t talk anymore. I have to go,” I said.

“What’s the rush? Is it an emergency? Has she gotten herself into trouble again?”

“What kind of trouble?”

“She hasn’t tried to harm herself?”

I felt a new kind of fear creeping in. I no longer knew what to say.

“Don’t worry.” He tried to reassure me. “I’m sure she hasn’t. She knows she’s her own best investment.”

“I’m tying up the line.”

“Ahhh,” he said. “I get it. Your boyfriend. He give you his jacket?”

“He told me he’d call,” I said. “I have to go.”

“Wait,” he said quickly. “People thought I didn’t love her. They were wrong. I did.”

I hung up the phone and leaned my head back against the wall and counted the dresses my mother had left behind. My heart was thumping so hard I thought it might break my chest. Downstairs, the spaghetti pot was boiling over.

*   *   *

More than a foot of snow fell during the night, and the following day it kept on coming. Shapes in the garden dulled, then changed, leaving alien imprints on living room walls like the last sigh of a sinking ship. The morning Star didn’t arrive until evening. On the radio, the voices of Lincoln expressed concern about the roads and announced long lists of canceled or postponed events. Time had stopped as the snow piled up. From the window, it was hard to see the street. The yard was a long white cape that would have looked nice with my mother’s hair.

My father worked in his study with the door shut, but I couldn’t imagine what he was doing. It didn’t seem like anyone could possibly be working. Everything normal had stopped. Putting on my boots, I forced my way down the drive. The snow was almost up to my knees, and it was hard to pick up my feet. I imagined how the elms would have looked, all glistening. The tops of the rhododendrons swelled like bubbles trapped on a frozen surface. When I opened the mailbox, the metal door creaked with cold. Snow tumbled off the top, a tiny avalanche—nothing inside. I watched the lights of a plow round the corner with the steadiness of a tank coming to rescue Lincoln from an invading army. Bring provisions! I imagined the neighbors screaming. No one had a voice. The world wouldn’t listen. In my fantasy, everyone had lost someone, and my mother was just one more memory hidden beneath so much snow. Emergency conditions, I told myself. My father was as silent as the hushed winter world.

Stories are easier to imagine in a snowstorm. It doesn’t really matter what is true and what isn’t when it’s just one mind thinking alone. I wrote this down on a pad of paper and read it over and over to myself. It made me feel brilliant. I became so excited by what I’d written that I wanted to tell my father. I waited outside his study door until he finally opened it.

“You startled me!” he said, as I shoved the paper at him without explanation. He held it out at a distance, squinting down at my writing because he wasn’t wearing his reading glasses. “‘It doesn’t really matter … what’s true and what isn’t true,’” my father read slowly, “‘when it’s just one mind thinking about something alone.’” He seemed to consider this for a moment. Then he nodded and raised his eyebrows. “Where did you get that idea?”

“From my head,” I said. Suddenly all kinds of things were going on there. It didn’t seem so horrible, the idea of my father and I being trapped here together. I could cook for him, iron his shirts, dance with him when he got lonely. I had taken a dance lesson once.

“I’m impressed, Susan. That’s intelligent.” He handed the paper back to me. “You’ve got a point. I don’t agree with it, though.”

“Why?”

“Because I believe in fact. A fact is a fact. I’m a rational thinker,” he said. “Drives your mother crazy.”

I hoped he wasn’t going to start talking about her. I hoped she wasn’t truly crazy, the kind that made you want to hurt yourself. But I didn’t think that was possible. She loved herself too much.

We ate what we could find in the cupboards, canned foods collecting dust on the shelves left over from the days when my grandfather had been alive. I tried to take over, make progress, but I found myself imagining stories trapped inside cans for years, denting aluminum with angry little shouts and the need to be heard. When the lids were opened, swollen metal sighed with relief.

I found canned peaches. My father and I ate them with forks right out of the can. “It’s funny,” he said, between bites. “I was just remembering the time my sister Portia tried to bury herself in the snow and then yelled for someone to come and dig her out. I’d entirely forgotten until now.”

“Why did she try to bury herself?” I asked.

“It had to do with a story our mother told us about our grandparents,” my father said. “There was a terrible blizzard in McCook. Your great-grandparents, Elsa and Hans, were recently married and had just come from Sweden. They barely knew anyone in Nebraska, and they barely knew each other.”

“Why did they get married if they barely knew each other?”

“Oh, I don’t know, it was different then.” My father frowned. “Marriage wasn’t always about love.”

“How about with Elsa and Hans?”

“Not at first. Several feet of snow fell, trapping them inside with no food for days and nothing to keep them warm. My mother always said the snow forced them to endure an entire lifetime in one week. And only then did they fall in love. Mother always said it was love that kept them alive. Neither could bear to watch the other die. So they lived—for a long time, anyway.”

“How did they keep each other alive with love?” I wanted to know.

My father shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know, it’s just a story your grandmother liked to tell in an effort to point out the positive. It was the Depression. Things were hard.” He took a bite of peach and frowned. He had told me before about how it had been. Good men who had lost jobs lined up downtown in the hopes of laying their hands on a government shovel. My grandfather had always paid my father to dig out the driveway, but during those difficult years, he hired men, the first three needy strangers who came to the back door looking for any kind of work. “Our friends the Johannsons lost everything,” my father said. He leaned his chin on his hand and looked out at the snow. “I think Portia went a little crazy. It had snowed day after day. After I dug her out of the flower bed, she wrote love notes to some boy and scattered them all over the house. I’d find her by the front door staring out the little window, waiting for someone to come rescue her.”

“Why did the story make Aunt Portia do all that?” I asked my father.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe she just wanted to be saved.”

“From what?”

“Well, don’t we all want that in some way?” my father said.

I wanted to know what it was he wanted to be saved from.

“From humanity, Susan. There’s too much brutality and unfairness in the world. People do horrible things to hurt each other.”

“Like Starkweather,” I said.

“And Hitler. And all the Communists.” But we both knew what we were really talking about. Loving my mother had scratched us raw, and that only made us want to be more tender.

*   *   *

There was no school the next day. My father went to work, and I was left all alone to wander the house. I took an old album off the bookcase and opened it to a photograph of my father and Aunt Portia standing on either side of the elm tree in the garden. My father looked about my age. His face was smooth without the creases of worrying, and one of his arms looped around the back of the trunk, the hand reaching out to pull my aunt’s long auburn braid. My aunt’s eyes were piercing. She stared directly at the camera without smiling, unaware of what her brother was about to do. The elm looked tall and stately, as if it could never die, and there was no hint of my father’s coming back to the very same house to fill his father’s shoes, or that my mother would leave him just before a crippling blizzard in November of 1962. There was no hint of plumpness in Aunt Portia’s features, or Uncle Freddy, or the three unremarkable children she would bear him. Portia and Thatcher were names that held the promise of Victorian love affairs. What had they dreamed of in their beds at night?

Out the window the snow had stopped, but the world was still hushed under its spell. It seemed to me like everything would be frozen forever. I put on an Everly Brothers record and my mind wandered through the big blank day, reeling from fantasies involving Portia’s mysterious love to those where the Bowmans’ son took my face in his hands and kissed my lips in a bedroom where Starkweather and Fugate had made love and murdered, all in the same breath. The boy spoke sweet words to me with the voice of my mother’s first husband: You’re a real Roman candle.

I don’t know why I wanted to hear that man’s voice again, but I did. It wasn’t just that I wanted him to tell me something more about my mother, about the different ways she might try to harm herself. I wanted him to tell me something shocking, something that had more to do with me. I went into the foyer and sat down at the telephone table, dialing the number I had committed to memory.

He answered right away.

“Hello,” I said. “It’s me again. Susan.”

“Well, hello, honey. Find your mother yet?”

“That’s why I’m calling.”

“That hurts. I thought you’d call because you missed me. Do you?”

“I don’t know. Do you miss her?” I said.

I could hear him fumbling with something, a pot or a dish. “No.” Nils sighed.

“Is that because she’s with you?”

“No,” he said, chuckling. “You’re pretty sharp. But she’s not the type to come crawling back, is she?”

“Why are you home in the middle of the day? Don’t you work?”

“What are you, a detective? Why are you home from school?”

“It’s a snow day.”

“Hmmm,” he said. “Can your boyfriend make it to come and visit, or are you all alone?”

“He isn’t allowed over. It’s against my father’s rules.”

“I bet you break the rules sometimes, though, don’t you? Your mother sure did.” Nils laughed.

“You mean when she ran away with you?”

“And other times. Never mind. What’s he like, your boyfriend?”

“Well, he’s very strong. He’s faced a lot of tragedy, and that’s what I’ve been trying to help him through.”

“How do you do that?”

I paused. “He’s tough in front of everyone, but when he’s with me he whispers all the things he’s secretly scared of. I just let him cry it all out,” I said. “Sometimes he cries so much my hair gets wet with his tears.”

“What color is your hair?”

“Black.”

“Like your mother’s?”

“Yes.”

“What else do you do with your boyfriend to help him through?”

“We take walks,” I said.

“That can’t be it,” Nils said. “Boys want more than walks. It’s why they waste time taking walks to begin with.”

I didn’t know what to say anymore, so I just sat there with the receiver to my ear, but I couldn’t hang up.

“Anybody there?” he said softly, as if he was afraid of waking me. He spoke in that same hushed voice, like he was trying to imagine or remember a particular moment. “Tell me, did he take your virginity, Susan?”

I hung up the phone.

All at once, Nils was right there inside me, seeing the things I saw, feeling what I felt, twisting it all around. He could move through wires and tangle up my heart. There wasn’t any space between Los Angeles and Lincoln, Nebraska. Distance and time came together at a broken stoplight, and my mother and I and Nils were all crashing into each other head-on.

The ring of the telephone broke the stillness, and my heart flipped over. It jangled my nerves. It rang and rang: three, four times. I ran to the living room and covered my ears with the couch cushions and mashed my lips up against the arm. Nils could do anything. He had lost my mother’s money. He had made her crazy. He had done something horrible to her, something unforgivable; I knew that now. That was why she did the things she did to us.

After the phone stopped ringing, I went up to my parents’ bedroom and started in. I emptied out drawers and ran my fingers along the cracks looking for false bottoms containing secret stashes of love letters. I poked my fingers into cold dark holes and pried apart hinges. I took out the insoles in heels and dumped the contents of purses on the dressing room floor. When I found nothing, I sat on my knees staring in amazement at the mess I had made. The room looked burglarized. I left it that way and went downstairs and opened the drawers in the letter desk where my mother kept addresses. I sifted through stacks of postcards from people I had never heard of, but none were from Nils.

A shaft of sunlight spilled into the living room and then disappeared behind a cloud, leaving a shimmer of dust in its wake. And when the telephone rang for the second time, it was a sign. I watched my hand pass over the rotary, my fingers wrap around the receiver. The cold line tickled my arm. It was the only thing I could feel. “Hello?” I said.

“Susan?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s Cora. I forgive you.”

*   *   *

The cat was frozen solid, stuck on its hind legs, its claws tangled in the mesh of the Lessings’ screen door. A layer of snow had fallen over the poor animal’s black fur. Beneath a white dome piled high like a Klan hood, the green eyes were glassy, opaque with frost.

Cora and I stood on the back steps, staring at the cat in disbelief. “I thought you’d want to see it,” she said, wiping tear streaks off her round cheeks. “He didn’t think it was safe to come home until it was too late. You’re the first person I called.”

“Thanks,” I said, sounding more insincere than I had wanted to. I watched my breath float up in the sunlight like a cloud of dust and then returned my eyes to the cat.

“What do I do with him?” Cora said.

“What about your parents?”

“Poppy’s away on business. Mummy’s working up in the studio. She’s in an artistic fugue.”

“Is she an artist?”

“Well, Mummy’s working in new mediums. She collects feathers and makes sculptures. But it’s not that. I don’t want to upset her. She’s been upset for a while, really.” Cora looked down at the cat again and sniffled into her glove. “It’s not like I can bury him. I can’t even touch him. Toby won’t come out of his room. He’s put something against the door so I can’t get in.”

I stole a glance over my shoulder at the Bowmans’ house. A light was on in an upstairs window, but I couldn’t see anyone inside. I imagined the woman from the garden removing her jewels, sitting down on her knees in the very spot where the bodies had been found, putting her face in her hands. Because of the snow, she couldn’t go out. The snow made her remember everything. Her memories were probably spinning so fast now that she couldn’t control them. Everything that had happened there was flooding into her mind.

“I’ll touch him,” I said to Cora, crouching down on my knees and knocking the dome of snow off the cat’s head. I had never touched anything dead before. But I wasn’t really touching death, I assured myself. There my fingers were, inside a glove, reaching out for snow and ice. “He almost doesn’t look real,” I said. “It’s like wax.”

“He’s real to me,” Cora said. “He’s Cinders. He sleeps on my pillow. He was waiting all night in a blizzard for me to let him inside, wondering what he’d done to deserve this. I should have left the door open.”

“In a blizzard?” I put my hand on her shoulder because that’s what I figured a friend should do. “There wasn’t anything you could do. It’s your brother’s fault for chasing him off.”

Her pale eyes narrowed bitterly beneath the edge of a striped knit hat. “I guess,” she said.

We decided to build a sepulchre in the snow, where the cat could be kept until the earth softened or Mr. Lessing came back from his business trip with a better idea. It’s what people did in the “hinterland,” Cora said, when the ground was too frozen for burial. We fashioned a hut out of snow in the back of the garden beside the stand of trees, with a mouth just wide enough for the cat’s body.

I told her my great-grandparents were snowed in without food, that they had survived on the plains of Nebraska against impossible odds by keeping each other warm with their love.

“That sounds made up,” Cora said, sitting back in the snow to catch her breath. She’d stopped crying. “Nobody can keep each other warm with love. Unless you mean by doing it.”

“That’s not what I mean,” I said. “I think people in love can keep each other alive just by the power of feeling.” When I was twelve, I’d snuck downstairs one night and watched my parents dance around the living room in the middle of the night. They had seemed so in love to me then, as if they were holding each other up with love, like they’d crumble without it.

“How do you know?” Cora said.

“I just do.” I pretended to concentrate on fortifying a wall, but I could see her looking at me.

“Who is he?” Cora said. “The one you love.”

“Nobody you know.” A wind sent a fresh storm swirling down from tree limbs. Snowflakes shimmered like crystal in the bright sun, beautiful little pinpricks that made you squint your eyes. I imagined the Bowmans’ son watching me from an upstairs window in the neighboring house. I wondered if it was possible to love someone you had never met.

We got up and walked back to the house in our own footprints without speaking a word. Together, Cora and I freed the frozen cat from the mesh screen and carried him back through the tunnel of snow to the sepulchre. Cinders’s legs stuck out like branches. The whiskers were stiff and clear, brittle as burnt sugar. One snapped against my coat when I lifted him. I was afraid of where our hands and breath made prints of warmth. In places we had touched, the layer of ice melted away to reveal wet black fur beneath. We reached the edge of the trees and set the cat down in the snow. “Toby should be doing this,” Cora said. Her voice was breaking again.

“Don’t worry,” I assured her. “We’ll make him pay.” I liked the sound of those words in my mouth. They were powerful, like Dr. No or John Wayne in The Alamo.

“You’ll help me?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’m your friend.” I picked up the cat again to prove my point, starting to guide it into the chamber as best I could. After that, I started packing snow into the hole without a second thought.

The sun was sinking low behind the trees, casting emaciated shadow trunks in the snow.

“Since we’re friends now, I have to tell you something,” Cora said, looking over at me. I waited to hear what she’d say. “I don’t have any other friends.”

“That’s okay. I don’t either. And my mother’s left us. She thinks my father fired the housekeeper without telling her, but that was only an excuse. She’s always wanted to leave. I think she has a secret lover.”

Cora gathered a bit of snow off the sepulchre and pressed it to her cheek. When she took her hand away, an angry red splotch stayed behind as if the cold had burned her.

“I’m making a wish,” she said. “I wish things were different. I wish I had Cinders. What do you wish?”

“I don’t have any wishes.” I stared up into the frost-covered branches. “I’m a rational thinker.”

“Everyone has wishes.” Cora took off her mitten. She leaned forward, and carved CINDERS into the side of the sepulchre.

“I want someone to love me,” I admitted finally.

“I thought someone did.”

“No. Not really.”

“Me too,” Cora said. “I want that too.”

*   *   *

When I got home, my mother’s belongings were still scattered everywhere. Her brown coat with the fur collar lay draped over the chair in the foyer, the belt trailing on the rug. Upstairs, I knew, shoes and shirts and wrinkled skirts spilled out of her closet, as if she’d been frantically looking for something when the bomb struck. One high heel teetered at the top of the staircase right where I’d left it. Strange shapes fluttered along the walls in spotty sunlight. Everything looked caught, frozen underwater. I was lost, stuck between worlds, diving for treasure in a sunken ship.

“Hello,” I called, to see if anyone was there. “Hello?” The house was silent.

I went into the living room. Sharp light cut through the French doors like a thousand diamonds and, feeling the sudden urge to let in some air, I swung them open. An icy wind tore straight through the garden and into the living room. My mother’s note cards blew off the letter desk and circled on a sudden gust before coming to rest on the Oriental rug in the moment of stillness that followed. I shut the doors.

Warm again, I lay down in the scatter of white cards. I could almost see them cramped with words: Meet me by the elms; I’ll be swinging from the branches. I closed my eyes. I was here. It was just me, falling into a half dream with no one to wake me up.

Outside, icicles broke free of gutters, piercing the hedges like sparking arrows. Snow shuddered past the windows in sudden bursts of flour, burying everything. There was no sense of time or place.

Somewhere deep below, the boiler pumped. Knitting needles tapped the radiators, and my grandfather’s ghost stared into the night as Hans and Elsa dug through decades of snow. Before long, I saw the pale blue illumination of a beautiful dream.

A terrible blizzard hit McCook, Nebraska, early that first spring. Snow kept on falling for days. Even before kissing like newlyweds were supposed to, Elsa and Hans scurried down the ladder and looked out the window in the hopes that the storm had passed while they’d been asleep. But one day they woke up to find there wasn’t any morning. Snow had covered the windows and buried the house almost entirely. In the barn, a calf had died of cold trying to nurse from its mother’s frozen udder. An icicle had formed around her tail. But Hans couldn’t get to the animals. He and Elsa had nothing left. Their stomachs groaned with hunger. They drank melted snow for water. Hans and Elsa lay in bed under blankets holding each other, but they never slept. They lost track of time, living by the light of candles and lanterns, waiting for the sod roof Hans had just finished to buckle beneath the weight of snow and freeze them on the bed where they lay, clutching each other like two twins foot to forehead in a womb. Each assumed the other to be asleep and thought, I don’t want to die beside this stranger. I am completely alone.

When Elsa peeked at her husband through half-closed lids, she saw a face that was blank with sleep and knew Hans was dreaming about her hair. After all, it was the only reason he had married her. And when Hans wrapped his arms around his wife and touched a golden strand with the tip of his finger, he felt like he was touching an impossible emptiness. He had heard somewhere about woman’s intuition and wondered how it was that this girl could spend the last moments of her life asleep, never telling him what would happen. It was selfish.

Somewhere in the middle of a day after what seemed like years, a fierce wind shook the house and a piece of the roof fell in. Hans grabbed Elsa’s hair in his fist. “What’s going to happen?” he screamed.

“Let go!” she cried, and pushed him away. “How should I know? You’re the man. You do something.”

Hans stared down at the piece of sod. “But what?” he said, reaching out again for the beacon of her hair.

Elsa slapped his hand away and climbed down the ladder to the room below. Sweeping her fingers over surfaces, she opened and closed drawers in the dark until finally she felt the cold metal shears. Anger burned her heart with afire, and she wasn’t chilled or hungry anymore.

“Don’t try to go outside or anything,” Hans said, coming down the ladder. “You’ll only drown in snow.”

“That isn’t possible,” she said, as she lifted her arms above and behind her. “You can’t drown in snow. You suffocate.” Her nightgown spread out like wings, her golden hair caught for a moment in candlelight. Hans saw how long and beautiful it was, surprised by waves every now and then, like sudden rapids in a river. And then he saw the scissors. “Don’t be stupid,” he said.

“I’m not. I’m being smart.” Elsa held out the curtain of her hair.

Hans tried to imagine what his father would have done. His father had been a sergeant. “I am your husband, Elsa,” he said. “I command you not to cut your hair.”

Elsa brought the shears to her scalp. Golden hair fell in piles. Hans pushed his chest against her nose. Elbows met jaws, met knees, met teeth. Hans grabbed. Elsa bit. Loose hair caught like corn silk in the corner of mouths. Scissors sliced skin. Hans stepped back and pressed the cut with his thumb. Elsa covered her mouth with her hand, and stared at the hair on the floor between them and the drop of her husband’s blood that had fallen. Then Elsa tasted blood in Hans’s mouth. The horse bucked, and Hans bit his tongue.

She knew what he’d been wondering. How fast had his father ridden before falling on that field outside Stockholm? Hans’s mother claimed he’d gone down fighting, but Hans couldn’t quite bring himself to believe. He’d found the box beneath the bed with the uniform, the mustard stain, the holes in the back of the coat where the bullets had gone in. Hans was thinking how no one else’s father had fallen in battle. It wasn’t fair.

And then Hans, too, fell. Elsa could smell it: the leather, the sweat, the dung, as rocks in the road rose up to meet him. She felt the pebble bury in his scalp and found the jagged white scar with his fingers, only they weren’t just his fingers, they were his father’s fingers, and they were her fingers.

“Hans,” she said. “I’m sorry I cut you.”

“You didn’t,” Hans said.

“I did.”

“Really,” he said. “I didn’t notice.” There was a bump in Elsa’s nose he had never noticed, and a dimple where the right cheek met the smooth rise of lips, and in the premature crease in her forehead from too much frowning, he found the first boy Elsa had kissed. He’d lured her behind the crates in her parents’ storeroom with stories of spiders having babies. But Elsa knew that spiders did not “have” babies. “They’re not babies,” she’d said, bending down. “They’re not even spiders,” and then he’d grabbed her. His lips had been like cardboard—Hans could feel them—his spit like the glue Elsa had used to fix the button eyes on her Mookey doll after the dog had bitten them off. Hans could feel that glue and Elsa’s disappointment, the frown when the buttons wouldn’t stick. “You should have sewn them on,” Hans said.

“I suppose.” Elsa pressed a rag to his finger to stop the bleeding. Hans liked the smell of her ear. He liked it so much he couldn’t let his breath go. He kept breathing in and in until his face turned blue. “Stop,” Elsa said quietly. “I’m afraid you’ll die.”

“What are you most afraid of?”

“You, Hans.”

“Don’t be.”

“What makes you feel most alone?”

“You, Elsa.”

“Not anymore, though.”

“No. Not anymore.”

Elsa touched Hans’s jawbone, and Hans ran his fingers through the scruff on Elsa’s scalp. The hair was patchy and ragged, but it felt to Hans like a field of wheat. Hans’s jaw was smooth in Elsa’s hand, like the graceful bones in a wing. Hans traced the outline of ribs beneath Elsa’s nightgown. “This one points out in a funny direction,” he said.

Elsa found the scar on his scalp. She laughed. “You’re losing your hair.”

“Come on, Elsa, let me touch it more.”

“Hands,” Elsa said in English. “I’m going to call you Hands.”

Hans and Elsa lay intertwined on the floor like two figures petrified in lava. Their breathing slowed. Crystals formed in the creases of smiles. But soon a pick scraped wood outside as snow fell away, and each felt the other’s heart stir.

Hans and Elsa blinked in confusion and covered their eyes to keep out the sudden light. Men stood in the doorway, holding shovels and lanterns, their mouths hanging open like woodpecker holes. Ice had collected in their beards. To Hans and Elsa, it could have been any moment in history. The men could have been Vikings on a frozen shore or explorers discovering a secret cave. It could have been the ice age.

The men put their hands over their hearts and cried for joy. “It’s been so hard. So many are dead. But you’re alive. You’re alive!”

“Oh,” Hans said, stretching and yawning, peering at the men through half-closed lids. “I forgot.”

“Yes, remember?” Elsa said, rubbing sleep out of her eyes. “We were going to die.”

I wanted my great-grandparents’ story to be real, just the way I had dreamed it. I vowed to make it real, even if it took me my whole life.