Late-morning sun speared the living room in window-size shafts. Orla awakened with her head and left leg off the mattress. She rubbed her stiff neck and sat up, alert. And optimistic. Eleanor Queen was already up, off in the kitchen, softly clattering about. Tycho, exhausted from their midnight outing, was still asleep, sprawled out on a disproportionate amount of the bed considering his small size. Orla chuckled. For the first time in a long while, it felt okay—to be awake, to be alive.
For breakfast they ate the last can of food—tuna—and shared a single-portion cup of applesauce. It was to be the last morning—Sshhh—so Orla wasn’t overly concerned about finishing off precious staples; they needed protein to complete their mission. Sshhh.
“Are we going to play outside?” Tycho asked as Orla helped him get dressed.
“Yup, that’s exactly what we’re gonna do.” It wasn’t at all what they were going to do, but she wouldn’t allow herself to think the truth, let alone speak it. Eleanor Queen knew, but Tycho was too young to block his thoughts, and so much the better if She heard only his excitement, saw the images in his mind of playing in the snow.
The night had healed them all in some tangible way. Tycho wasn’t afraid to go outside anymore. Eleanor Queen’s movements were no longer interrupted by periods of lost focus; whatever was out there had stopped demanding her attention. The curtain of fright had lifted from her eyes. Orla hoped—prayed—the entity had died during the night, but she couldn’t risk their escape on some lingering tendril of Her consciousness.
It had snowed a little, a fresh dusting that softened old footprints. Tycho bumbled ahead of her down the stairs in his layers of more or less clean clothes—they still used the upstairs to store their things—but Orla stopped in Eleanor Queen’s room when she saw her daughter sitting on her bed. She was holding one of her favorite books, and Orla was afraid she’d changed her mind. They’d agreed not to bring anything with them so it wouldn’t look as if they were fleeing. In case She’s only sleeping.
“We’ll be back. Again and again and again,” Orla whispered. Don’t let Her know the truth.
“It’s not that. I feel like…last night, I should have given her more. A better offering. Something I love, like this.”
“You don’t owe Her anything. Remember what we said?” She did little more than mouth the words; it barely counted as a whisper. At full volume, she said: “Today we’re full of smiles and love.”
That’s all they would think as they tiptoed away. Happy thoughts. We love you. And she’d get Tycho to sing about the wheels on the bus, a song they’d discouraged him from singing for its annoying repetition. But it would distract him, and maybe, as they mumbled along with him, the soundtrack would provide a more solid barrier against their thoughts—and against the excitement welling up within her.
Orla had already tucked her wallet, phone, and important papers into her coat’s inner pocket. They weren’t carrying anything else. History joggled like an old film across her mind, poorly lit families with the outward appearance of a convivial excursion. Golden Stars of David walked without eye contact past the swastika-clad occupiers. No luggage. The parents afraid their thundering hearts would trip the alarm. Someone somewhere was always trying to slip away unnoticed: To reunite with long-lost family in South Korea, a gun pointed at their back. To cross invisible borders to a less perilous life. Sneak away. She shuttered the words like a guillotine.
Maybe She would let them. Maybe She was traveling at the speed of light toward Her next destiny. Maybe the good morning feelings would last. But Orla wouldn’t tempt fate. Wouldn’t flaunt their escape.
“Are we going home soon, Mama?” Tycho asked as they stepped outside. He asked every couple of days but never did more than grump and slouch when she said no.
“This is home,” Orla said. See, we’re not going anywhere. How soon would she start to see his little ribs protruding through his sweater? Never. Because she was going to get them food. Soon.
“Should we check the mail?” Eleanor Queen asked, just as they’d planned, before Tycho got too involved in renovating his abandoned snow fort.
“Want to take a little walk down to the mailbox?” Orla asked her son. She’d given up her morning walk to collect the mail a while ago, hoping the mail carrier would have some reason to come up to the house or would simply grow concerned if the family’s mail went uncollected.
“Okay!” said Tycho.
It lifted Orla’s heart to see her children return to more normal behavior, even if they were reluctant to tell her how often they were hungry. She let him bound ahead down the driveway, releasing some of his pent-up energy. He walked in the old ruts, though even then, the snow came almost to his thighs, but he pushed on, like he was trudging through deep water.
“The wheels on the bus go round and round,” she sang.
Tycho picked right up where she’d left off and continued through the verses as they strolled down the winding path. Orla didn’t even try to stick to the side with the guideline lest she appear too cautious. The car was buried, its driver dead.
Orla’s heart trilled in quick succession when the mailbox came into view sooner than expected. She distracted herself—and the spirit—by showing a renewed exuberance in her singing. Eleanor Queen must have held similar fears of celebrating too soon and losing control of the words in her mind, the emotions in her body. She hated the song even more than Orla did and had left her mother to accompany her brother, but she jumped in and sang along, loud.
“The doors on the bus go…”
There was the road. Twenty paces ahead. Snow lay piled on the far side, and it looked like it had recently been plowed. As they got closer, the road was even more remarkable for being so utterly just as it had always been. The snow, flattened and gray, was imprinted with tire tracks; ordinary lives had continued on while they were in isolation. To their right, the road descended down a gentle slope, and to their left it continued curving upward, disappearing between two walls of trees. Somewhere off to their left would be a neighbor and perhaps a pull-off where summer tourists parked to hike the designated trails. But if they made a right, their small road would meet a larger one, a more traveled one. They could walk it into town. Maybe cars would even pass them along the way and Orla could flag them down, beg for help, get her children somewhere safe with ample amounts of food. And as they got closer to civilization she could call 911. Report what had happened. Give her husband the proper memorial he deserved.
“The mommies on the bus say, ‘Shush, shush, shush,’” she practically shouted, drowning out her eager thoughts.
“Can I get the mail?” Tycho got to the box first. Orla half expected him to vanish in a whirling dervish of snow. But he didn’t. He grinned, one mittened hand ready to find a prize, and waited for his mother to give him permission to lower the little curved door.
Orla and Eleanor Queen exchanged glances. “I love you and it’s a lovely day.”
Eleanor Queen just nodded in reply, her face expectant. With her cheeks so rosy with cold, she looked happier—and healthier—than she had for weeks.
“Go ahead,” Orla called over to Tycho.
He grinned. Had there been less snow, he might not have been able to so easily reach what was within. He scrabbled with both hands to hold on to everything. Orla and Eleanor Queen hesitated at the boundary where the driveway met the road. Tycho handed off the mail.
“Thank you, what a good mail gatherer you are.”
Ever so casually, Orla meandered onto the road, sorting through the mail, which looked to be mostly holiday cards. Behind her, Eleanor Queen tugged on her brother’s coat so he would follow them.
“Looks like we got…a Christmas card from Lola and Lolo. And another one from Uncle Walker and Aunt Julie. And…” She stopped narrating for a moment when she read the return address on another card—from Lawrence, Shaw’s best friend in the city. But then she continued on. “Pilar and Gwen, Xin and Deshi.”
Looking at her friends’ handwriting threatened to make her wistful, wreck her façade. She flipped through and found the junk mail, such as it was. A local company offering to plow their driveway (if only they’d come up to the house and inquired!). A flyer from the nearest grocery store. No wonder the mail carrier hadn’t been concerned; a handful of cards and a few ads. He probably hadn’t even needed to stop at their box on most days. Orla kept on with her nonchalant stroll, her nose buried in the mail. She bit down on the tips of her glove to free her hand and started tearing open an envelope.
“Let’s see what Lola and Lolo have to say.” She craved her parents in a way she never had. “They’re having a warm December,” she said in a cheery voice, reading the card.
Eight feet down the road. Eleanor Queen and Tycho a step behind her. Ten feet. Twelve.
A shattering sound, like something tearing beneath the earth.
Grinding tectonic plates.
A sharp crack louder than lightning striking at close range.
Tycho shrieked, wide-eyed, and Orla reached back to grab him. Eleanor Queen whimpered, her face stricken as if blood rained in her eyes.
“No, Mama, no no no no!”
Orla clutched her too. She yanked them around and darted back up the road. “We’re going back, see? We didn’t mean—”
The ground rumbled. She stumbled past the edge of the road and collapsed in a heap beside the mailbox. But whatever was happening had only just begun. Orla huddled over her children as everything around them quaked, afraid the trees would shake loose from the earth and bury them beneath the clawing, pointing hands of angry branches.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Orla screamed into the cacophony. “We’re not leaving! We’re right here!”
The entity either didn’t hear them or didn’t care.
“Tell Her, Eleanor Queen—ask Her to stop!”
The trees shook off their snow and the wind blew it in their faces. Everything around them turned white, and still the ground beneath them rocked.
“I can’t!” Eleanor Queen wailed. “She’s angry, Mama! We were her friends! She thought we were friends!”
A ferocious gust of wind roared over them and Orla lay atop her children, hoping her weight was enough to keep them from being lifted and swept away. The children might have screamed beneath her, but she couldn’t hear them. She shut her eyes and prayed the spirit would let them live. If the gale-force blast kept up, it would strip them of their clothing or hurl them against the solid trunks of surrounding trees. Or maybe She planned to bury them, like the ash at Pompeii, and some future day someone would dig them out. Frozen sculptures, just as they’d been in the moment of their deaths, Eleanor Queen’s face scrunched in pain, Tycho’s hands grasping for his mother.
More cracking and rumbling. The ground beneath them shifted, dropped. Rocked.
It started to grow quiet again, a decrescendo of destructive noises. But even in the numbed silence, the blizzard raged on. Orla didn’t like the unabated sense of movement, like they were on the deck of a small ship. Was she just dizzy? If she stood, what would happen? Would she lose her footing and go tumbling into…what? An abyss? She eased off the children a bit, afraid her efforts to protect them would end up smothering them. “Are you all right? Are you okay?”
She could see well enough through the white, snow-infused air to distinguish their nodding heads. She risked the wobbling ground enough to get to her knees. It was no longer snow beneath her, but ice.
“Oh no.”
The slosh of water.
They weren’t on a boat, and they were no longer on land.
The blizzard abruptly lifted like a curtain at the start of a show and confirmed what Orla had only just begun to fear.
The world around them was nothing like it had been. No trees. No mailbox or road. Instead, they were adrift in a sea of ice floes.
“No, no…”
Tycho tried to stand up but Orla grabbed him, dragged him onto her lap. She reached for Eleanor Queen’s snow pants and, with little effort on the icy surface, towed her in closer. The kids gawked at the new world.
“Wow!” Tycho took in the landscape, dazzled. Confused.
“It’s like my dream.” Eleanor Queen wore the hurt face of ruin, of personal failure, of doom. “It didn’t work, Mama.”
Orla held her close. “We made Her happy. We did.”
“But she still didn’t want us to leave—I should’ve known, I messed up everything!” She crumpled into tears.
“It’s not your—”
“We’ll never get home now. Look! It’s not even there anymore!”
She was right, of course. For as far as they could see in all directions, there was nothing but a frozen expanse, the gentle bobbing of a polar ocean. In the distance Orla saw a continent of ice, its edges ragged and vivid green-blue. They were stranded in the middle of it all on a floating chunk of ice. Sometimes it collided with another, and they bobbled in the half-frozen sea. It was an astonishing sight; carved green archways and pillars stood like ice islands in the water. But there was nowhere for them to go. No way to even return to the precarious existence of their humble house. Orla didn’t want her daughter to panic, or blame herself.
“Maybe it’s…” The more she considered what to say, the more reasonable it seemed. “It’s like the aurora borealis—She wanted to show us something amazing, not frighten us. She’s trying to make us understand something about Her power—”
“Yes—her power to stop us from leaving!” Eleanor Queen wailed.
“But that doesn’t mean…this might just be a display, we’re not hurt—”
“But we’ll never get away!” She sprang to her feet, angry. “I don’t understand what she wants, and everything that’s happening is my—”
Orla reached for her, alarmed, as the ice rocked like an unstable canoe. “Be careful!”
Eleanor Queen squirmed away from her reach. “We’re going to die here—”
Orla couldn’t stop it from happening. Eleanor Queen’s feet scrabbled for purchase on the ice; her arms flailed. But she was too unbalanced to right herself. She fell backward with a yelp that was quickly smothered by the water.
It was a matter of seconds. Seconds before her daughter would slip forever beneath the icy surface, in shock from the cold. Seconds before another chunk of ice would strike her, crush her in the congested waterway bobbing with floes.
She lifted Tycho from her lap—“Don’t move!”—and stretched out on her belly to grab at Eleanor Queen’s desperate hand.
The girl’s lips were already turning gray, and her wide eyes blasted panic. She gabbled for breath, half sputtering, half gasping. Orla grabbed the sleeve of her coat, tried to pull her up, but the water weighed it down, made anchors of her snow pants, her boots. The frigid water sought to claim her daughter, drag her into its deadly frozen depths.
“This isn’t what You want!” Orla yelled. Because she knew that whatever the entity wanted, Eleanor Queen’s death wouldn’t help.
She slithered toward the edge of the ice floe, grasping, yanking at her daughter’s sodden sleeve. “I’ve got you! I’ve got you!”
Though her mouth was open, the girl was too terrorized, too cold, to scream or respond. Orla played a tug-of-war with the icy water. But for every inch she gained with Eleanor Queen, Orla slipped farther along the top of the ice. Until—
“Mama!” Tycho called from his perch on the floe.
Orla tumbled into the sea.
She saw Tycho on his knees above her, his tearful face poking over the edge of the ice. His image wavered above the water and he mouthed Mama! over and over, but she couldn’t hear him. The cold deafened her. It struck her with the force of a speeding truck. She expected to surface, to choke back a gulp of desperate, lifesaving air. But Eleanor Queen’s coat was still bunched in her left hand. Though the weight of her dying daughter dragged her downward, Orla couldn’t let go.