The snow had laid down a thick carpet by the time they snaked their way up the driveway. The kids were wide awake, faces pressed to the windows. They’d all been in the house before, of course, but none of them had spent a night there or seen it under such wintry conditions. Shaw turned off the music, and the fog they breathed, the recycled mishmash from all of their lungs, hummed with expectation.
“So pretty!” Tycho said when the farmhouse came into view.
Bless his heart. It must have been the snow, like frosting on the tree limbs with smears of white on the roof. Blue-gray paint, so old it looked mostly washed away, and the windows were trimmed in what might once have been a festive red, now rusty scabs. They’d need to have the exterior painted if they were to keep the wood protected, but next year; they’d already spent so much. It looked fragile to Orla, nothing like the massive steel buildings, the stone and brick and solid permanence of her past life. A gust of wind could blow it down. Two stories of decomposable wood, pitched roof, a porch made of matchsticks, and windows of watchful eyes and open mouths.
“All right, everybody ready?” Shaw pulled into the detached, three-walled garage, its flimsy boards even more weathered than the house’s, its roof equally as steep to prevent it from accumulating too much snow. Along the outside of the near wall, a bank of firewood, half covered by a blue tarp, sat ready for use. And around the back wall, out of view, was their generator. They’d had the electrician reroute the critical circuits in such a way that if they lost power, the generator would automatically kick on and take over.
The kids unbuckled and hopped out, their tongues ready to catch the snowflakes.
“Wish we could’ve left some windows open,” Orla said. Painting the bedrooms had been the last of their home improvements before their furniture was delivered from storage, and she worried about the fumes. She worried about other things too, more nebulous and harder to express.
Shaw grabbed luggage and groceries out of the back of the SUV. “It should be okay, been a few days.”
Eleanor Queen and Tycho spun in circles, enjoying the snow. In a flash of memory, Orla saw herself and her brother, Otto. It happened at rare moments, a ghost image from her past—a flickering film that quickly dissolved—when she saw her children playing together. “Ready to come in and check out your finished rooms? We can get all your stuff unpacked.”
Tycho, incapable of moving in a restrained fashion, ran toward the porch, arms flailing. The porch’s railing dipped slightly in the center where the ground beneath it had settled unevenly. Shaw, bags under each arm, opened the front door with his son hopping at his heels, both a-chatter with shared eagerness. The house swallowed their sounds as they entered.
Abandoned by her playmate, Eleanor Queen lingered in the yard. She looked up at the sky. The woods. Her dark eyes alert and watchful.
“Eleanor Queen?”
Still the little girl assessed her surroundings, with more wariness than she’d shown on previous visits to the house. Orla felt a chill as she watched her. What was she concentrating on with such rapt attention? The girl squinted, cocked her head, like someone trying to make sense of a distant sound. To make sense of something that Orla couldn’t hear, or see.
“Love? What’s wrong?”
“What kind of tree did Papa say that was?” Her mittened hand pointed to the giant that reared up fifty yards behind their house. Its immense boughs frowned down on the munchkin trees that surrounded it. Maybe it was the slate sky, or the other trees without their leaves, but the great pine looked even older than it had in the spring, like an old person drained of color.
Orla tried to recall what the real estate agent had said when he’d shown them the property. He’d boasted of the tree being over five hundred years old, she remembered that. “Eastern white pine, I think? We’ll ask Papa again. It’s so big because it’s five hundred years old.”
Eleanor Queen continued to gaze at it with an intensity that Orla found disconcerting. She didn’t see admiration for the ancient tree on her daughter’s face, or curiosity. But something more troubling.
Trepidation.
“Well, come on, we can get your snow pants and gear if you want to play outside.” Orla really didn’t think that’s what her daughter wanted in that moment, but it’s what Orla had hoped for her when they’d talked about the North Country, that she would like the tranquillity, the slow pace of the wilderness. Eleanor Queen wouldn’t have to worry about getting run over by a taxi or crushed against a pole in a crowded subway car. Perhaps she just wasn’t used to how quiet it was, how different. How the wind, in a silent place, made everything speak.
Eleanor Queen abruptly turned and charged toward the house.
Orla didn’t want to think it was fear she saw on her daughter’s face. But she hesitated in the yard as Eleanor Queen scrambled inside. What had spooked her? Was something out there? She scanned the terrain at the back of their property. The air carried the cozy fragrance of wood smoke—had Shaw lit the stove already? Or was that a plume rising above the trees? Impossible; there were no homes, not even distant ones, visible behind them.
Movement caught her eye and she refocused on the giant pine in time to see a cascade of snow drop from its ragged limbs. The wind had settled and she didn’t think it the source of the snow’s collapse. Could a tree shiver? Shake off the cold and wet like a dog? She heard a sound she couldn’t identify…a soft pfloof. Again, and again.
Her mouth dropped open. Something was moving toward her, something quiet but immense. Her gut said, Run! The nerves in her spine jangled a warning, but she couldn’t turn away.
One by one, the trees shook off their snow. That was the sound: inches of accumulation on hundreds of branches falling in a swoop onto the white, cushioned ground. But it wasn’t all of the trees; that’s what was wrong, that’s what chilled her blood and kept her agog. It was a path of trees, starting with the goliath and moving forward. Orla wanted to think, Chain reaction, but her mind flung aside such logic.
It was coming.
When the snow tumbled from the final tree at the edge of their back clearing, a great gust of wind swept toward her. Finally Orla came back to life and lunged for the porch. She stumbled inside and locked the door behind her.
As she pressed her back against the door, confused by her narrow escape, her eyes met her daughter’s and her blood froze all over again. A cloud of snow battered against the windows. And then all was still once more. But Eleanor Queen huddled in the corner behind the cold stove, wide-eyed. Upstairs, Shaw and Tycho carried on as if all were normal, chatting, making the floorboards creak as they moved stuff around.
Orla hadn’t meant to make it worse, but her daughter looked terrified. What had even happened? She’d never been in a forest after a blizzard. She felt silly now, a lame barricade between Mother Nature and common sense. She stepped away from the door, shrugging it off.
“It was just the wind after the storm,” she said. “Like the way earthquakes have aftershocks.”
“You kept it out.”
“Of course—” But before she could say anything else, Eleanor Queen darted out from behind the squat black stove and raced up the stairs, calling for her papa.
Orla had half a mind to do the same, run up and call for Shaw. Ask for a hug. She heard him, cooing away their daughter’s fright.
“’Tsokay, Ele-Queen.” Tycho, mimicking his father.
That made her smile. Overreacting wasn’t going to help. Orla listened at the front door; it was quiet. She cracked it open and peered out.
Nothing moved. Crystals glittered on the snow. It was pretty, but she didn’t fully trust it. Walls felt more reliable, and more familiar. In her mind, home was the place within the boundary of the walls, not what lay beyond it. She left the door wide open, to facilitate a hasty retreat, and returned to the car to fetch the rest of their things.