At first she thought it was a teakettle. Still asleep, her mind registered only a shrill and persistent yowl. But as she returned to consciousness, Orla became aware of the empty space beside her where Eleanor Queen had spent the night. And Shaw was still on her other side, a warm lump. No one was making tea; it was her daughter, screaming an alarm.
She and Shaw both tumbled out of bed. Halfway down the stairs, heading toward the scream, they heard Tycho shouting from his room, “We got ten feet of snow!” Just like last time, he saw it as a cause for excitement. And he came galloping after them.
They found Eleanor Queen in the darkened living room. The girl faced the front of the house. Shaw fell to his knees beside her and made a quick check of her physical well-being. Orla couldn’t fathom the room’s darkness. There’d been daylight in their bedroom, sneaking through the blinds. They rarely remembered to close the curtains they’d put up downstairs, so why was it like night in here? And it was just as dark in the kitchen. The strangeness of it was oppressive and made the shadowy room scary enough that Orla wanted to scream too.
Tycho jumped up and down, pointing at the front window. “Ten feet of snow!”
And then Orla understood. The downstairs was so dark because…“He’s right. Oh my God, we can’t get out of the house!”
As Orla started to panic, Eleanor Queen let out a final squeak, falling silent as she leaned against her father. Orla opened the front door—to a wall of white.
“Close it!” Shaw called.
She closed it without understanding his urgency. The wrongness of everything—her daughter’s premonition, the snow, being trapped—made her skin ripple and she wanted to step out of it, set it aside like a damp leotard and wake up to a different reality.
“Are we asleep?” The words slipped from her mouth, but Orla was relieved that no one seemed to have heard. If only it were that simple.
Eleanor Queen plastered herself to her mother as Shaw abandoned her. He went from one window to the next. In the unlit room, each looked like it had been sprayed over from the outside with grayish concrete.
“They should hold. They’ll be fine. We’ll spend the day upstairs. And no one open the doors!”
“Why, Papa?” Tycho asked.
“Because if the snow starts to spill in, we might not be able to get them closed again. Come on, go upstairs—go on up to our room.”
“We’ll bring you some breakfast,” Orla said, trying to regain her parental composure. “It’s okay.” She rubbed Eleanor Queen’s back with one hand while trying to peel her away with the other.
“My dream’s coming true,” she said, clutching her mother’s shirt.
“No it isn’t. It’s just snow. But we have everything we need inside.” Even their new shovel was in the basement, thank God. Orla didn’t like the way Shaw was pacing around the room like a crazed animal. It gave her further urgency to get the children upstairs, lest Shaw’s unease contaminate their efforts to calm them. “And the house is strong and we’ll all have a slumber party in our room—”
“Can we play outside?” Tycho asked, jumping in place.
“Not today, Tigger.” Orla guided him and half dragged his sister toward the stairs. “Go, we’ll be up in a minute. Please, Eleanor Queen, it’s okay. Keep an eye on your brother?”
“Come see from my room!” Tycho said, grabbing his sister’s hand. Eleanor Queen allowed him to pull her, though the look she gave her parents was one of pure misery.
“We’ll be right up, I promise,” said Orla.
She and Shaw glanced at the ceiling as little footsteps trundled across the floor above, and a moment later Tycho began cataloging for his sister everything he could—and couldn’t—see from his window.
“What’s happening?” Orla no longer tried to keep the composure in her voice. “Were we supposed to get this much snow? Is it even possible to get this much snow?”
Shaw flipped on a lamp and collapsed onto the couch. He kept widening his eyes like he wanted to stretch them into focus or wakefulness. “It wasn’t in the forecast—I don’t know what’s up with these shitty forecasts. But it’s possible. Oswego got ten feet back in 2007, though that storm lasted several days. Some town there got almost twelve feet. And look, they were fine. They dug out—”
“Is someone going to dig us out?”
Shaw rubbed one eye with the heel of his hand. He nodded as if he were trying to convince himself of some internal argument. “I can get out. Through one of the upstairs windows. Make sure the roof is okay, and start shoveling—”
“Can’t we call someone to come help us?” Orla didn’t wait for him to answer. She charged into the kitchen and picked up the phone receiver. She punched buttons. No dial tone. No comforting beeps. “It’s not working.”
“The snow probably buried the dish. Or knocked it off-kilter. We’ll try our cell phones from upstairs—”
“This isn’t normal.” She marched back into the room to confront him. There was an emptiness inside her like she was starving, but the thing that was missing wasn’t food. Nothing felt real. It made her a little light-headed, and the room started to spin and wobble and suddenly it was too easy to imagine Eleanor Queen’s dream coming true, the walls tumbling in. “Can ghosts make—”
She held out her arms as she swayed, trying to save her balance. Shaw jumped up and grabbed her.
“Definitely not normal, but it can happen here. It doesn’t happen often, but Buffalo got four feet in a single afternoon a few years back. Though that was western New York.” He was so certain there was a logical, real-world explanation, but Orla was spiraling in another direction. “They’ve got trucks and plows and snow removal—”
“So we just sit here? And wait?” she asked, gripping his elbow, still a bit unsteady on her feet.
“For now.”
She saw him battling his fear of something very, very real. This amount of snow was catastrophic. Life-threatening. He started pacing again.
The dark shape that had been lurking at the edge of her vision stepped forward into a spotlight—maybe the things that were happening weren’t completely random. Fear shot out from her heart, spreading ice through her limbs. Last night’s theory seemed ridiculous now, child’s play, because what was happening felt ever so much more empowered, more…intentional.
“You wanted to get online today.” She was thinking aloud.
“That’s obviously not happening.”
“It stopped you. And Tycho—how many times since we’ve been here has he asked about getting ten feet of snow?” Suddenly it seemed possible—as possible as anything else—that last night, they’d found the cover picture for the wrong box of puzzle pieces. Maybe it was something else entirely, but she couldn’t quite—
“What are you on about? Surely you don’t think this is Tycho’s fault?”
“No of course not, I’m just…things keep happening!” She knew she wasn’t as affected by their surroundings as her husband and daughter, but she had sensed something too—something larger—and had tried, in her own way, to find reasons. The presence of a tuberculosis-cure cottage in their backyard was certainly interesting, but what if…
She’d expected a winter wonderland with the fantastic sort of imagery she’d seen in films, and she—they—carried a fear of missing their old lives, of struggling in their new ones. And here they were, surrounded by winter and fear.
“Maybe we…asked for this. Somehow. By mistake.”
“What are you talking about? You sound insane. We promised the kids breakfast.” He strode into the kitchen and turned on the overhead light.
Maybe she did sound insane; she felt it too. But this was a whole new level of crisis. She followed him into the kitchen, where he was already putting bread in the toaster.
“Remember that book we read? The Secret? Back when everyone was reading it? About how your thoughts, if you focused on the right things, could conjure your deepest desires?” People got on their knees every day and prayed to a God whom they believed could hear them and satisfy their desires. Maybe she hadn’t prayed on purpose—quite the opposite—but maybe it, the unknown godly forces she’d never seriously contemplated (not while her life and ambitions had gone more or less according to plan), worked regardless. “What if praying isn’t any different than thinking about things too hard? I’ve been afraid, and thinking about snow—”
“That book was ridiculous—didn’t you dismiss it as an offense to all hardworking people?”
Because she knew you couldn’t summon a ballet career with focused imagery, not without endless hours of practice and other fortuitous prerequisites. For better or worse, the natural world clung less rigidly to once-acceptable rules. “I’m just trying to explore all possibilities. Even stupid ones,” she muttered.
“There isn’t an explanation for everything. It’s snow. We’ll find out how widespread it is. They’ll clear the roads. We’ll shovel out.” He grabbed the coffee beans and slammed the cabinet door. “If I’d known you were going to go full X-Files, I’d never have seriously talked to you about…” He swallowed the rest of his sentence.
“About our land being haunted? I think you could be right! And wrong—this is bigger.”
“What does that even mean? We have a serious problem called a shit-ton of snow, and you’re just scaring the kids and acting like a lunatic.”
The kids hadn’t heard her; it was her husband she was scaring. His haunting theory had been a source of comfort because it was familiar, something to grab onto that existed in lore across millennia and, given the local history, a plausible explanation (with a leap of faith). Even without the precise words, she was suggesting something even more inexplicable. Was it the unknown aspect that scared him most?
As if in response, he put the beans in the grinder and jackhammered their peace with the sharp blast of fresh coffee.
“But it is bigger—even if the problem is weather! Hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes!” She spoke into the whirring cacophony and he either didn’t hear her or neglected to answer. “Fine. You pretend we wouldn’t have prepared better if we’d moved somewhere with hurricanes.”
She strode to the front window, turning her back on him in every way as she contemplated the snow. Maybe it would disappear as quickly as it had come. That would be an appropriate thing to get on her knees and pray for. “Oh God!” She gasped and clapped a hand over her mouth.
This place was making them all crazy.
Shaw was right; she’d scoffed at The Secret and the inanity of praying for stuff. And if he hadn’t been so distracted by his “muse,” he might have thought to put a snowblower on their list of necessities. Would they have shown up in hurricane country with nothing but a flimsy umbrella? And their precious daughter was trying to understand the language of trees because her careless father had made up a story. Now that Orla needed to identify the moment when they’d started losing their grasp on reality, she couldn’t. Had the idea of moving been reckless from the get-go?
Or maybe she was just angry. At him. For this. The snow wasn’t his fault, but wasn’t the rest of it?
Orla huddled in a corner where Shaw, in the kitchen, wasn’t likely to see her. She pulled at her hair, swallowed down a scream. These were not helpful thoughts; she was losing her mind. He’d warned them not to open the doors. But the need to, now that she couldn’t, ticked in her like a bomb. She’d explode if she couldn’t get out. She raced upstairs to the bathroom and heaved open the window. Sucked in air. Didn’t come out until the fresh air defused her heart and chilled her tripping brain.