For a moment, it was like an ordinary Christmas morning. Eleanor Queen’s face lit up the instant she reached the bottom of the steps and saw the long, flat package leaning against the squat stove.
Now she sat cross-legged in front of her mother, seemingly unaware of Orla braiding her hair, enthralled by the coveted gift. Orla and Shaw had paid a lot for it, certain that Eleanor Queen wouldn’t mind getting fewer presents than her brother. Had things turned out differently, Shaw would’ve retrieved the last secret gifts (which they’d never gotten around to buying): a pair of plastic sleds, one for each child. They hadn’t quite figured out where they’d go sledding; Shaw suggested the road, but that sounded dangerous to Orla (long before she’d experienced anything truly life-threatening). While Eleanor Queen tried out her special present, Orla had planned to pull Tycho around on his sled.
“It’s beautiful.” Eleanor Queen looked truly happy for the first time in recent memory. Her hand followed the bow’s curve, stopped at the wooden grip. As Orla finished the first braid and wrapped the tail in a band, Eleanor Queen held the bow up, testing the elasticity of the string. While her mother worked on the second braid, the girl fit all the fiberglass arrows into her new hip quiver.
“I’m sure you’ll be just as good as Katniss,” Orla said in her ear. Eleanor Queen flashed her a grin. “You’re a warrior now. With a special mission.”
“I am?”
“You are.” Orla hadn’t realized at first how violent a story The Hunger Games was, and after she read it herself, she hadn’t let Eleanor Queen get the sequels. But she’d never objected to her daughter’s interest in a badass girl who saved her sister and fought against a despotic regime. She wanted her timid daughter to be a rebel of some kind; Katniss wasn’t such a bad role model. And for what Orla had in mind, her daughter needed to be brave.
They both got dressed in warm clothes, and Orla laid out a pathetic breakfast of ketchup, mayonnaise, and mustard.
“I was thinking I could give it my new book—that’s something special to me, so it would make a good offering—and then maybe it could learn to read. That would be helpful, if it could write messages!” Eleanor Queen gobbled up her little red and cream mounds. She hated mustard, so Orla ate that, licking it off a spoon.
“That’s a good idea,” Orla said, withholding what had happened and what she’d learned in Shaw’s studio the previous night.
“I’m really, really close now, Mama—I’m going to find out what it wants us to do.” She squeezed out another serving of her preferred condiments.
Orla held the knowledge now and she couldn’t tell her daughter that she already knew. The spirit had appeared as her beloved husband to comfort her, to make her more trusting. But Orla desired Her diametric opposite; Eleanor Queen’s future lay elsewhere, in the human world, where she could grow up and become anything she wanted.
“Bean?” The girl licked ketchup off her finger. “I made a decision last night. I figured out something that will work. And it’s going to take both of us—we each need to do something very important.”
Eleanor Queen looked at her, and not with the wobbly uncertainty she’d once possessed, but genuine interest. “What?”
“It—She likes you.” Her daughter nodded in agreement. “She won’t hurt you.”
“No…I don’t think so.” The brightness of her eyes diminished for a moment, and Orla was certain she saw her remembering her papa, her brother. The thing out there had caused pain around her but not to her.
“You’re going to go to the road,” Orla said. Several inches of new snow had fallen overnight, but she’d already set one of the smaller pairs of snowshoes by the front door. Along with Eleanor Queen’s bow and quiver. She’d zipped Shaw’s driver’s license and her state ID into the pocket of Eleanor Queen’s coat so she could show someone who her parents were. A bottle only partially filled with water so it wouldn’t weigh her down as she walked. Shaw’s charged phone (her own was too waterlogged after her fall into the frozen sea to ever work again). The last stale granola bar she’d found in the pocket of a lighter-weight coat—one of the snacks she always had on hand when she went anywhere with the children.
Eleanor Queen gazed at her with round, curious eyes. “I am?”
“Yes. Down the driveway. Make a right onto the road. Then a right onto the bigger road when you get to it. Cars will go by. Don’t get in any—wave someone down and ask them to call 911.”
The wary girl within Eleanor Queen returned. “What about you?”
“We can’t both go. But She won’t hurt you. And I’ll be at the tree the whole time, talking to Her.” Offering up her own life. “She’s getting better at understanding me. I’ll put my hands on the tree and tell Her more about us, me. I think She’ll understand this time, how I’m going to help Her. And She won’t mind then if you leave—you can find someone…”
Orla stopped speaking as the knot of tears bulged in her throat. She couldn’t let her daughter see any sadness. Couldn’t tell her—even though she wanted to—that her Lola and Lolo would raise her and be wonderful parents. Orla didn’t believe, regardless of how reassuring the entity had tried to be—in the guise of her husband and with the memory of the human girl She had once been—that the offering she was about to make was anything but a death sentence.
She read the hesitation in her daughter’s frozen posture, the returning terror in her unblinking eyes. Eleanor Queen had never been left alone or gone anywhere by herself. Unlike her brother, she was happy enough on her own with family in another room. But what Orla was asking—telling—her to do was far beyond her life experience.
“You’ll have your bow for protection.” Eleanor Queen followed her mother into the living room. “See, everything you need. We’ll leave at the same time, and you should get to the end of the driveway about the same time I get to the tree. You won’t be alone for long.” Though Orla wasn’t sure that was true. How busy would a North Country road be on Christmas morning? “I put Papa’s phone in your coat, and if that doesn’t get a signal or no one comes by, you just keep walking until you reach St. Armand. There will be lots of people there. Okay?”
Orla needed her daughter to have faith in the plan, faith that her mother, without a translator, could help the entity within the tree. She didn’t want Eleanor Queen to turn back and witness her mother’s last living moments. And Eleanor Queen needed to complete her own task and bear the burden of walking alone on unfamiliar roads. She watched the scenario play out across the girl’s face.
Finally, Eleanor Queen nodded. “Okay. But you have to help her—she’s counting on us.”
“I’m going to.”
“And when I find people, we’ll come back for you.”
“Of course you will.” Her child would be brokenhearted, but she would survive. “You’re going to get away this time, Eleanor Queen. She won’t hurt you, and I’ll give Her…what She needs.”
“I wish we could go together.”
“I know.”
They bundled up in their gear and stepped out onto the porch. Eleanor Queen turned her gaze toward the snow-covered driveway.
“You can do this, it’s a safe walk,” Orla said. “I think everyone around here will be friendly—a girl on her own. Christmas. And you ask them to call 911.”
“I have my bow.” In the snowshoes, with the bow worn across her body, her daughter looked every part the warrior, the Arctic survivor.
“Just like Katniss. I’ll stay with the tree until the police come back for me—you tell them where I am.”
Orla wasn’t sure if the police would ever find her or if—like her baby boy—something inexplicable would disappear her from the earth. But she didn’t care. As long as Eleanor Queen lived, got away. Fulfilled her destiny. She didn’t want her daughter to see her cry, didn’t want her to think for a second that this was a final goodbye.
It took the bulk of Orla’s self-discipline not to turn around and watch her go, recede against the white backdrop. But the girl had her own role to play, and Orla willed herself to walk away. She hoped Eleanor Queen didn’t stop and look back, expecting a wave or some last words of encouragement. They needed to go in their opposite directions.
One toward life.
One toward something unfathomable.