12

Before long, the first flurries of the season whiten Adelaide’s window.

How long, this time, until her daughter brings provisions? A week? A month? The river will soon freeze over, and there won’t be fish for months. Her daughter can be so heartless sometimes.

Adelaide lies in bed longer than she should, watching the glass bloom with fractal patterns. She is not yet ready to rise, to think. She is not yet ready for anything.

Last night, the wild woman was silent for the first time in weeks, and Adelaide had a peaceful night’s sleep. No sorrowful baying. Just the blissful reticence of winter in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

A few nights ago, Adelaide awoke to a new sound. Closer than the wild woman, a much smaller cry: Little Bird, calling out to his mother from inside the cabin. It went on for an entire minute, longer than any minute Adelaide had ever known. His voice, like tin foil, like ice. Barely there, yet almost too much for Adelaide to bear. Adelaide did not know what to do, or if she should do anything at all. But then River spoke to him in their special-speak. Low, rushed. And Little Bird fell silent. That was a hard night.

And yesterday, another hard day. The water was too cold to bathe, and for the first time since the children’s arrival, there was not a fish in sight. Nothing in the woods to forage, nor among the remnants of her garden. Yesterday, they went hungry. Adelaide tries to convince herself that hunger—and hunger alone—is to blame for the children’s growing melancholy.

Becoming a mother again, the idea once romantic, has turned to panic in Adelaide’s heart. It was hard enough the first time, when she was young and resourceful and ambitious. The children are safe in her cabin. They have a warm place to sleep, and she has the best intentions, of course. But what she doesn’t have today is food. The children still refuse clothes, and they continue to watch the windows. Waiting. Hoping, perhaps, for liberation.

Adelaide listens to the clock. She counts the seconds, trying to convince herself to face the day. One . . . two . . . three . . .

The clock ticks, now-now-now.

Outside her window, Henry squawks an unhappy greeting to the sun. Perhaps he’s awoken to find the insects are hibernating as well. Winter has come for them all.

Adelaide pulls herself upright and walks to the kitchen. There is no food to be found, but the trek is a deep-rooted habit, impossible to amend. Her stomach growls in a place so deep that her hips rattle. Today, she will come up with a solution. Today has to be that day. Adelaide grabs her housecoat to make her morning trip to the outhouse. The door squeaks, as it always has, but the two pairs of feet sticking out from the tent in her living room do not move. Adelaide steps quickly outside and shuts the door behind her.

The flurries have slowed in their descent, but the haze obscuring the sun indicates they will fall for a long while today. Adelaide stands just under the eave of her home as snowflakes dance before her eyes, gyrating and spinning onto her cheeks, her neck, her exposed shins. She breathes in the metallic coldness, and though her bones ache and her stomach rumbles, it is glorious. Adelaide, it seems, is grateful for another winter after all.

Adelaide circles her cabin and makes her way to the chicken coop. Henry complains loudly—he is not a winter chicken. Zelda scratches through the dusting of snow, upending sticks and clumps of dirt in the hope of finding a succulent squirming something. Adelaide looks for Moffit, but she is not outside with the others. Adelaide finds her inside the coop, feathers aloft, body shivering. When Moffit sees her, she careens onto the steps, whirling across the ground in a cyclone of copper feathers.

“Oh my, what a greeting.”

Adelaide bends down to find the chicken still quaking. A single brown feather floats to the earth with the flurries. Moffit’s eyes are dispirited, and she leans her weight into Adelaide’s warm palm.

“I know how you feel,” she says.

Moffit offers no response.

Adelaide gives Moffit one last scratch and then stands to watch Henry and Zelda march across the landscape of her property. Zelda is perfectly content with the change of season, preening her feathers and prancing on her tall legs through the snow. She and Henry battle over an unearthed beetle, and Adelaide waits to see who will emerge the victor. Zelda snatches a black, crooked leg and darts into the garden to devour her prize. Henry does not pursue. Adelaide smiles and walks toward her cabin. Back to River and Little Bird. Back to her new life.

The door handle is an ice cube in Adelaide’s hand, but her cabin is pleasant, the embers in the fireplace still soaking her home with radiant warmth.

Something feels different. It’s too quiet. Not a sleeping-child kind of quiet, but a trouble-brewing kind of quiet. Adelaide peeks into the tent. No twitching feet, no snoozing children. The cabinets are open in the kitchen. Drawers ajar. Bowls askew. The children have been busy in her absence.

“River? Little Bird?”

There is no response, not even a grunt or a squeak. Adelaide can see directly into her bedroom from the front door, but the children are not there either.

The floorboards creak beneath her weight as she circles behind the sofa. And then she sees it.

“Oh my god.”

Torn pieces of paper. Handwritten words. Crayon drawings.

“No, no.”

White yarn, arcing in impossible angles from years spent in small, tight loops.

Bent board. Crooked, rusted nails.

Adelaide gasps. The children have discovered the box under the floorboard that pulls away from the nails.

“What have you done!” she hollers.

The children shriek, shuffling away from the sofa.

Adelaide falls to her knees above the mess. Letters, torn and chewed. White and pink yarn disassembled and dispersed. Nine months of knitting, time, promise, love, hope. Gone. A smell of rot and dust hovers like a cloud above the gaping hole in Adelaide’s floor. Things she hasn’t looked at in decades—couldn’t look at for decades—tarnished in the full light of the morning. Adelaide’s hands tremble as she picks up torn pieces of paper from months of journal entries. She reads the writing, not even recognizing it as her own.

—my mind won’t change. You are mine and—

—as safe a place as I can make it. We will be—

—hope you never know the kind of sorrow that—

— bad day, but today you kicked for the first—

The scraps drift from Adelaide’s hands like falling leaves. She lifts the tangled mass of the receiving blanket and holds it to her face, breathing deeply, trying to hold it all within her lungs, as the box beneath the floorboard has held it all these years. There is a scent she recognizes, buried deep beneath the odor of moisture and time. For just a moment she is twenty years old again, eyes bright and expectant, stomach taut and teeming with life. Her young heart holds pain—raw and recent pain—but is still naive enough to be hopeful. A baby girl in her arms. Plump, shiny, pink, and crying. Wonderful delicious crying. Adelaide, a new mother. Tears and laughter. Alone, but also not. A new, small, perfect family.

And then it is gone, the scent dissipating into the air, which is growing colder by the minute. Adelaide lashes out, tugging furiously at the yarn in her hands. It tangles around her fingers, but she does not stop until the remainder of the blanket is fully undone. Only when it resembles nothing more than a pile of pink and white string can she hold back the tears no longer.

Adelaide spends the rest of the afternoon in bed, stomach empty, mind numb. She does not know where the children are, or what they are doing. Today, she does not care. Her mind drifts from memory to memory, thin slices of a life coming and going, lingering for only a moment before they are replaced by another.

Adelaide remembers her orange tent—the one she brought with her to begin her life in the Blue Ridge Mountains. How naive she was. A rip in the upper right corner. The black zipper with the paint chipped, silver flashing from beneath. She remembers the day she found this cabin, abandoned, neglected, and the day she gathered willow branches to build a garden. She remembers her goats, remembers hunting for rabbit and squirrel, her first chickens and that first scrambled egg cooked over the fireplace.

And she remembers the man, though she doesn’t want to, never wants to. His stench, his grip, is never far from recollection, even all these years later. He is the old man from the farm; she knows this now. Adelaide had assumed he was a drifter, or a lost hiker. She believed he went far, far away after leaving her cabin that day. After she invited him in for a glass of water. After he left her bloodied and raw, an empty husk of a woman strewn across her own floor, his refuse taking root in her gut. To think of him this way—so close to her all these years—seems like a betrayal. As if he owed her his absence after what he did. As if he broke an unspoken agreement.

Maybe she is too anchored in her past. She knows her life’s story well, all of its twists and turns as familiar as the scars and age spots on her skin. This new life? She knows nothing. Adelaide doesn’t know what the next hour holds, let alone the next week. This is a foreign country, with its own societal boundaries and exotic languages.

Two pairs of feet pad into her bedroom, and she knows the children are standing beside her. She forces herself to turn toward them.

Little Bird is closest to her. In his arms, the small gray stuffed elephant from the box. He offers the toy to Adelaide. The fur is threadbare, the beaded eyes still black and shiny. She pushes his hand toward his chest, relegating the elephant to where it belongs. It is no longer hers. He hugs the stuffed animal, burying his face within it, rocking from side to side. River holds the small knitted cap, butter-yellow, cradled against her chest like a swaddled baby.

Adelaide sits up in her bed and smooths the covers around her lap. She offers her hand to River.

“Come here, little one,” she says, her voice gentle. “We’re going to be alright. I promise.”

To Adelaide’s astonishment, the girl climbs onto the bed and curls up in her lap.

She strokes River’s hair and River strokes the knitted cap. Little Bird sits on the floor by the bed, content to cuddle his elephant all on his own while Adelaide comforts his sister.

River pokes her fingers in and out of the stitches. A thoughtless motion, but Adelaide smiles to see it treasured once again.

“Here, let me show you,” she says, taking it from the girl’s hands. “It’s a hat. And it goes here.”

Adelaide tugs the knitted cap over River’s thick hair, stretching it until it covers her ears. River laughs, running her hands over her head. The girl looks up and extends a tiny finger to Adelaide’s forehead, tracing the lines that run across.

“What a surprise today has been.”

And though she does not understand the words, River smiles. She brings her other hand to Adelaide’s face and cups her temples. Adelaide isn’t sure what the girl is doing until River pulls herself to her knees and dips her head forward to touch Adelaide’s.

Any remaining words on Adelaide’s tongue fall away. Words are meaningless anyway. She knows that now. And she requires nothing more.

Because Adelaide has just received a wild woman kiss.

The girl holds the woman’s head between her hands. Her fingers shake and she wonders if the woman can feel it. When she touches her head to the woman’s head, the girl feels sad. But she feels other things, too—things she’s felt before, but also things that she hasn’t.

The woman is not mother, but sometimes she feels like a mother, and the girl misses being held and being loved, so she lets go of the woman’s head and curls up in her lap. The woman is warm and soft, not hard like mother. But she is kind like mother, and even though she has strange eyes the color of the sky, the girl is not scared of them anymore.

The woman has given her a name. And brother, too. But she cannot say it. She has tried. They both have, late at night while curled up in their sleep cave, after the woman is asleep. Brother can almost say his name. His mouth makes funny shapes when he tries, but he’s getting better. The girl will keep trying. She thinks maybe that would make the woman happy.

Brother curls up on the floor with the animal that is not real. His breathing slows and the girl thinks that maybe he is asleep now, and she relaxes against the woman’s chest and begins to think.

Mother has not left them—she and brother hear her at night. Mother is still hurt. The girl can tell by her voice, and that makes her hurt, too.

Brother wants to run away when they are outside, but the girl tells him no. There is something in her head that tells her to stay with this woman for a little bit longer. This woman is hurt. She does not bleed, and she is not sick, but she is hurt somewhere deep inside. Mother would take care of someone if they were hurt. Brother doesn’t understand, but he listens.

It is the time of the pale rain. The girl likes this time of year. It is quiet. Mother likes this time of year, too, and that makes the girl happy. They are always a little bit hungry during the time of the pale rain, but mother knows how to find the plants with the dark curly leaves that stick out from the ground. And buried under the plant that no longer has the fuzzy flowers are the fat creamy roots shaped like fingers. But the woman must not know about the fat creamy roots shaped like fingers, because they are still hungry.

Even though the woman doesn’t know about the creamy roots, she keeps animals that are food. Right outside are the round birds that don’t fly. But the woman doesn’t eat the birds and won’t let the girl and brother eat the birds either.

Mother says that if you don’t eat for many days and many nights that you can die. And that means you go away forever. The girl wonders if there are different kinds of dying, because she’s only seen animals die, and it can’t be the same thing.

The girl wonders if she and brother will die. She wonders how many days and nights of being hungry make you go away forever.