“ANETTE!”
Anette started, panicked. She’d almost fallen asleep, even as she was still walking, miraculously; still stumbling in a whirlwind of snow that stung her cheeks. Snow that wasn’t snow, but pebbles. A wind that wasn’t a wind, but a cyclone.
Fredrik held her hand—she saw it but couldn’t feel it. In her other hand was the lunch pail, and she thought the slate was still snug against her chest—frozen to it, she imagined. Somehow, she was being tugged alongside him as he was crying, and calling her name, trying to wake her up out of her stupor.
She was shivering. But she was hot. She was falling. But she was on her feet. She had to go to the bathroom—urgently, she felt her bladder swell, knew it released, knew there must be warmth drizzling down her legs, soaking her underclothes, her petticoat, her stockings, dripping down into her shoes. She longed for that warmth, actually—but it never came, she didn’t feel anything.
Fredrik was suddenly stopping, a strange look on his face, embarrassment; he looked down at his pants. Anette looked, too, and there was a dark stain. The two gazed at each other for a moment; they shared the embarrassment—they’d never done this before, not in front of the other. And they were both crying now, but still bound together, hands entwined. And then they started moving again.
They had to be close to the Pedersen homestead. Didn’t they? They’d been trudging through the snow for hours, it seemed to Anette. And it occurred to her she’d never spent this much time with Fredrik. Their time together, always, was so fleeting: a few minutes before school started, recess, their races home. They were always moving, never sitting still, even when talking—although it was Fredrik who mostly talked. Anette was simply content to listen to someone talking to her, not at her. Anyway, she didn’t have much to share; she couldn’t tell him how it was at the Pedersens’. She was ashamed to reveal that she was just a hired girl, really, but without pay. Unwanted.
Whereas Fredrik had a large, happy family he was always complaining about. Tor teased him mercilessly, put frogs in his boots, dropped snakes down his shirt. Fredrik, in turn, taunted his little brothers and sister, but Fredrik swore he got punished for it in a way Tor never did; his papa would look at him gravely and say he was disappointed in him before giving him a good whipping. And his mother would kiss away all his tears, but still she would deny him dessert that night.
“You have to be an example, Fredrik,” she would say. But she never, ever punished Tor. Both his papa and his mama thought the sun rose and set on him. And what about the time Fredrik brought home the prize for spelling? Did his mama cry with pride over that, the way she did when Tor revealed that Miss Olsen said she couldn’t teach him much more, that he learned too quickly?
No. Mama did make him his favorite dessert that night, Fredrik admitted—stollen with raisins—and excused him from bringing in the water for the dishes. But she didn’t shed shining tears of joy.
Oh, the trials of poor Fredrik! Anette never betrayed to Fredrik how much she envied him, how silly, really, she thought his trials were. How, in sharing these stories, he was reminding Anette of all that was missing in her own life. A happy family, a mother and father who cared for you enough to punish you and then cry over it, a big brother who thought of you enough to play pranks on you. People who saw you as a person, not as a problem or an unasked-for solution, no better than a workhorse in a plow.
People who loved you.
If only Anette had an older sibling who teased her! A papa who punished her in order to make her a better person, because he loved her that much! But she would never, ever let it slip to Fredrik that she felt this way. Because Fredrik Halvorsan, freckled and naughty yet completely innocent of the bad things that could happen to people, had chosen Anette. He was the only person in the world who looked for her, and her alone, in a crowded room. The only person who fought to sit next to her, not to get away from her. The only person who considered her an ally, not an enemy or a stupid little donkey, plodding along doing all the work nobody else wanted to do.
The only person who said her name with happiness, not reluctance or anger.
“Anette!”
He tugged her arm painfully; she rubbed her eyes, which had crusted shut again, opening them with a thumb that didn’t feel. She was shivering so thoroughly she couldn’t remember what it was like not to; her inadequate shawl, her regular cotton petticoat, could not keep her warm. She could not imagine being warm again. But she still kept moving; those strong legs and heart that launched her toward school with joy kept her upright now. Linked with Fredrik, she proceeded, inch by inch. Head bent down, face stinging from the strange, gritty balls of snow. The two of them all alone in the echoing center of the storm, at once muffling all sound—she couldn’t hear their footsteps, it was difficult to talk to each other—and assaulting her ears with the shrieking wind.
Anette took a deep breath, then shouted at Fredrik, “I think we’re going the wrong way!”
She didn’t know if that was true or not, but they’d been walking for hours without coming to anything that looked familiar.
“No, we’re not,” Fredrik shouted. He was so maddening sometimes, just because he was a boy and Anette was not. He wasn’t shy about bossing her around, and most of the time Anette let him.
But now she found herself arguing back—she was not going to let this boy tell her what to do! “Yes, we are—it is my way home, I know it!”
“You stupid, we’re lost right now!” Fredrik cried hoarsely.
And suddenly they were screaming at each other, tears freezing on their faces; she’d never known anyone more stupid than this boy! She was sick of people bullying her, bossing her around. Yes, she was terrified and the vicious winds were trying to pull her off her very feet, but this boy was not going to tell her how to get to her own home! For the moment she forgot that this was Fredrik, her only friend; he represented everyone who had told her what to do, how fast or how slow she should do it, where to live, how to think.
He was everyone. And before she knew what she was doing, she slapped him across the face.
“You stupid girl!” Fredrik clenched his fists but didn’t strike her back. “You—you slavey! No better than a hired girl—worse than a hired girl! You know what everyone says about you at school—your own mother sold you for a pig. You’re so ugly, that’s all you were worth!”
“You take that back!” Anette was crying, but madder than she’d been since—since she could ever remember. She hadn’t allowed herself to be angry at her mother, or at Mother Pedersen; all along, deep down, she’d agreed with Fredrik and all the others. She was stupid, she was ugly—but now, lost in a volcano of ash-like snow, stuck with this idiotic boy, she was also angrier than a hive of bees. She flew at him, shaking him by the shoulders, and he fought back, pushing her to the ground. She picked herself up and screamed at him.
“I am not—I wasn’t sold! I wasn’t, I wasn’t, I wasn’t!”
She flung her arm, the arm still grasping the pail, backward, prepared to strike. Fredrik saw, his eyes widened—then he turned around and ran off in the other direction, disappearing into the cloud of misery.
Leaving her alone once more.
She stood for a moment with her arm still in the air, poised to hit; she wanted something, someone to pummel. She screamed at the top of her lungs, one long, piercing cry that ended in hoarse whimpering. She panted, it was too hard to breathe in this whirlpool of ice and snow, yet she opened her mouth and let loose her fury again, a fury that rose up to meet the fury raining down, yet it hardly made a dent. She was too small, she was too insignificant. No one heard her.
No one cared.
Falling to her knees, she wept great heaving sobs. And she shivered, and she wept, and she burned with anger, and she froze with fear, and she knew she would die right there and no one would care. Would her mama ever know? Would she come claim her body and bury it near the dugout, a cave, really, carved into a riverbank? It must have been carved by the Indians, maybe it was a hiding place during the Indian wars, her stepfather said once. “Jesus, this place stinks of them, don’t it?” And there were arrowheads everywhere, catching the glint of the sun in the summer so they were easy to find.
Even though she’d never known another dwelling until her mother gave her away, she’d understood how miserable the dugout was, and that most people didn’t live that way, no better than gophers in holes. In the spring it flooded and in the summer snakes crawled through the dirt walls and in the autumn the wild pigs came and terrorized everyone and in the winter they all just sat and stared at one another; it was too cold to do anything else, and that was when her stepfather was the worst, in the winter. That was when he would alternate between making fun of Anette and coming too close. “To warm up,” he would say with a sickening smile while her mother looked on with compressed lips and her little brothers laughed.
Her own family thought she wasn’t good enough even for that hole in the ground, and they sent her away.
The Pedersens surely wouldn’t care if she froze to death. They would find her lifeless, but with the slate and the lunch pail, the only two things Mother Pedersen cared about, and she would sigh with relief and let her husband deal with Anette’s body; he’d probably bury it somewhere because he was decent. But then he would forget her as soon as the last spade full of earth covered her up, he wouldn’t put up a marker or anything, and soon the grass would grow over her, and she would lie there in the cold earth alone for all eternity, forgotten.
Not even Fredrik would mourn her now—she’d made sure of that, she’d chased him away, she’d reminded him, the only person who hadn’t yet discovered it on his own, that she wasn’t worthy of love.
“Fredrik!” Seized by panic, she scrambled up, her anger forgotten, and she was herself again. No longer a fury raging at her fate, just a stupid girl unable to do anything on her own, lost. “Fredrik!”
She began to run in the direction she thought he’d gone, she kept screaming his name, and finally she heard something. She stopped, listened with all her might, and it was crying she heard, a boy crying, and her heart beat faster with hope, propelling her legs toward that sound.
“Fredrik!”
She found him seated in a little swallow of the earth, drifted over with snow—she didn’t see him, she tripped over him. His legs were drawn up tightly against his chest and he was crying; he looked up at her—the snow had frosted over his eyebrows, was stuck on his eyelashes, his cheeks were unnaturally red from the biting cold, the burn of the snow. But he was Fredrik, all the same.
“I’m so-so-sorry,” he wheezed, his voice quaking, but he got up and hugged her tightly, and the surprise of this made Anette gasp. He’d never hugged her. No one had—she was so shocked she forgot to hug him back, or maybe she didn’t know how to. But either way, in a moment they were hand in hand again, and he meekly allowed her to pull him back in the direction that, a few moments ago, she had been so certain of that she’d nearly lost the only person in the world who would mourn her if she died.
But now, she wasn’t so certain; in fact, she had no idea which way to go. But Fredrik didn’t seem able to help; he was muttering something to himself and obediently held on to Anette’s hand as she led him forward.
So she pretended that she knew the way home but the only thing she really knew was that they had to keep moving or else. So they continued to stumble on.
Together.