ANETTE WAS DREAMING NOW, AGAIN, always. For a girl who had not been given to dreaming before—how could anyone sleep so lightly as to dream, when she was so exhausted every night her sleep was as heavy as a ton of bricks, blotting out any fancies?—she was currently entangled in so many she couldn’t make sense of them.
There was the dream of being yanked out of an ice house and into someone’s arms, a woman’s arms, not Mama’s, but someone else’s. And when she opened her eyes, just once, she saw that she was in Mother Pedersen’s arms, but that couldn’t be possible, because, well—that just couldn’t be possible. And then Mother Pedersen was crying and saying she was sorry, but that, too, could not be. Then the nightmare of fire licking at her hands, devouring them in its fierce, gaping mouth, and she cried and screamed, and maybe someone held her down because she wanted to get up and stab that flaming monster in the eyes, but she couldn’t because she couldn’t move her arms.
Another bout of dreams and fantasies—past, present, future, she had no idea: Fredrik taunting her, telling her to get up, she was a baby, just a girl, a stupid girl, why didn’t she get up and go with him? A recurring sensation of falling from a ledge up in the sky into the very earth itself, the soil rising up to catch her was soft as a feather bed. She fell deep into it, afraid that it would hurt when she finally landed, but she never did, she just kept tumbling down in its pillowy embrace. Teacher calling her name over and over, sternly, like Anette had done something bad. And her slate! Her pail! Where were they? She patted her chest, felt for the slate—hadn’t she wrapped her shawl over it?
Mrs. Halvorsan, Tor Halvorsan, they knocked at the door of her turbulent mind, they cried Fredrik’s name, they gazed at her and put something in her arms, they cried again, they left, they came back. They were only notions, not real people, of course. Real people did not come to see her, did not treat her kindly. Except for Fredrik, who kept running in and out of her dreams like he did when they played tag together; he’d dart around the corner of the schoolhouse, then reappear behind her like a demon. She’d laugh and dash away from his outstretched hand, and he’d call her name. He called her name now. His was the voice she heard the most, rising above all the others she might have recognized and might not have, but it seemed there was a babbling stew of praying, crying, talking all around her, never letting her sleep as she longed to.
Then they stopped. The dreams. The voices were silenced, too, and that’s when she knew that the voices hadn’t really been in her dreams, they had been real people, talking. But it was quiet now. And she thought that she had died. For wasn’t that what death was, the silencing of all things?
“I don’t know how we’ll tell her,” a voice said. So she wasn’t dead, after all. She tried to open one eye, to see who was talking, but it took too much effort, so she lay quietly, her old trick of not being noticeable so she couldn’t offend.
“Maybe she knows already, somehow,” another voice whispered, and Anette couldn’t help it, her eyes wrenched open—painfully—because the voices belonged to Mother Pedersen and Teacher, and they sounded like they were…well, not exactly friends, but united in something.
The light—feeble as it was in whatever unfamiliar room she was in—stung her eyes. Then she realized she was lying in a brass bed and so, astonishingly, must be in the Pedersens’ bedroom. Her lashes felt heavy, then instant tears obscured her vision. She wondered how long she’d been lying in the Pedersens’ bed, and what had happened to her own. Shouldn’t she be upstairs? She started to shiver, her teeth rattled and she moaned, and that silenced the voices.
“She’s awake!” Mother Pedersen looked at Teacher with what might have been joy, except that Anette had never before seen joy in Mother Pedersen’s eyes. Blinking, trying to clear her vision, she struggled to recall the last thing she had seen before falling asleep.
Fredrik! Where was he? Where—they’d been outside, in the storm, the storm—oh, the storm! The howling and the swirling, gritty ice-snow, the cold—she was shivering more violently, again as if she was outside and not inside. They’d fallen, she remembered that—they’d fallen into the ravine.
But that was all she remembered.
Anette pressed her hands against the mattress to raise herself up to a sitting position, but there was a bolt of pain in her left hand when she did and she fell over on her left side as if her hand had simply given out; she couldn’t get the leverage she needed. So she rolled over on her back, blinked some more, and stared at the ceiling.
“Don’t move, Anette, you’re not strong enough. Stay quiet, kjaereste,” Teacher whispered, and Anette’s head spun again. No one had ever called her that before. She realized she was being talked to in her native tongue, and she relaxed a little.
“But Fredrik…” Anette mumbled. She turned her head to gaze at Teacher, who was right next to the bed. Mother Pedersen was hovering over Teacher, clasping and unclasping her hands. Both of them looked tired—even Mother Pedersen’s lively hair looked limp. Teacher was thinner than before, and paler, and the tip of her nose was blistered, like she’d had a sunburn.
At the mention of Fredrik, both of them looked away.
“I don’t think…” Teacher whispered to Mother Pedersen. But Mother Pedersen shook her head.
“We have to tell the truth, she deserves that.” Then Mother Pedersen came to the other side of the bed, and she knelt down; she took Anette’s right hand in hers, and Anette marveled at how callused Mother Pedersen’s hands were, just like Mama’s hands had been. But Mother Pedersen’s nails were so pretty and pink and buffed; Anette had never suspected the palms were rough from work.
“Where is Fredrik?” Anette whispered; her throat was parched, she longed for water.
“Fredrik died, Anette,” Mother Pedersen said, her voice matter-of-fact but not cruel. “He died, in the storm. I found you both, together, the morning after—over a week ago, now. You were in the ravine. He had—” Mother Pedersen had to look away for a moment, and Anette—despite the deepening misery reaching out to draw her back into the nightmare she’d only just left—was astonished to see that she had tears running down her cheeks.
Mother Pedersen took a breath and forced herself to look at Anette. “He had taken his clothes off, Anette. He covered you with them. He saved your life.”
And Anette, in that moment before she lost consciousness again, was filled with bitter anger; she wanted to slap Fredrik in the face and call him a stupid, careless boy.
Because didn’t he know that hers wasn’t a life worth saving?
THE NEXT TIME Anette opened her eyes, the light was different; it was late afternoon, and there were so many oil lamps lit all around her that she wondered if someone had died, then she remembered someone had, and it was Fredrik, and she turned her face to muffle a moan as the grief hit her anew. Her anger at his self-sacrifice had vanished, replaced by loss. Loss more pure and uncomplicated than any she’d known before. Her loss of her real family, her former life—that had been too diluted, murky as it was with questions that seemingly had no answers, stunned surprise at the rapid change in her environment, the immediate, exhausting work that Mother Pedersen shoveled her way. Her mama was still alive in the world—that, too, made the loss difficult to process. Losing Fredrik was different; she would never see his freckled face again, never make fun of his donkey ears sticking out from his head, never see his eyes light up with happiness.
She’d never have another friend, she thought miserably. From now on, she would truly be alone in the world.
There were hot tears streaming down her face and into her ears and so she raised her left hand to wipe them away—but the tears still remained, nothing touched her cheek at all. It was almost as if she’d missed her own face! Puzzled, she tried again, and again she missed. Then she looked at her hand—
It wasn’t there. Her arm, mostly covered by an unfamiliar nightgown that was soft and scented, ended in a bandaged stump where her hand should have been.
She struggled up, leveraging herself with her right hand, which was also bandaged but still attached, and she held out her left arm, moving it left, then right, up, then down, wriggling her fingers—she felt them! They did wriggle! She felt pain, too, when she moved her wrist.
But there was no hand, there were no fingers.
Where was it? Had someone taken it without her permission—was nothing her very own, not even her flesh? She was jabbering in Norwegian, enraged by everything that had happened, Fredrik gone and now her hand, and this was too much to take. All the months of being treated like an unwanted old dog at best, but overworked and despised at worst—she had had enough. What a stupid turn of events! She must leave this place, go somewhere, to Fredrik’s house; but no, he wasn’t there—her heart seized up in an odd way and then it fluttered. She placed her left hand on her chest. Then she looked down and saw it again—that queer, bandaged end of her arm, as if—as if—someone had sawed off her hand?
She was falling, falling, and with a thud, she hit the floor, heard excited voices, arms lifting her up, cool hands on her hot forehead, and then she was back in the cushioned earth again, dreaming her dreams.
WHEN ANETTE PEDERSEN woke a third time, it was morning, and the oil lamps were extinguished. The usual voices were in the kitchen. They weren’t bothering to whisper. This was a conversation that had been going on a long time, she could tell by the weariness in the voices, the circling back to topics.
There was a grunt at the foot of the bed, and Anette tried to lift her head, then she pushed herself up on her right hand, and she saw once more the absence of her left.
She also saw a man. Seated on a chair that was much too small for him. He was a large person, with a soft, doughy shape she’d never seen before in a man. All the men she knew—and there weren’t that many—were solidly muscular. But this one looked as if he had never handled a shovel or a hoe in his life. He was grunting again, and his breath was labored, as if he’d tired himself out just by sitting.
But he wasn’t only sitting. He was writing something, furiously scribbling with a pencil across a sheet of paper.
Finally, he raised his head and saw her watching him.
He grinned—it was a funny grin, and it tickled something inside Anette, something she had only ever felt with Fredrik. She found herself grinning back. Then he said something in English, and to her astonishment, she understood it.
“Well, here she is, finally, wide awake! The plucky little girl herself!”
And the voices stopped in the kitchen. Anette heard a general stampede of feet, and she was suddenly surrounded—Mother and Father Pedersen, Teacher, Doc Eriksen. They all gaped at her like she was the answer to a question. She blushed at all those eyes, and she turned again to the man. Who beamed at her like she was a prize, someone worth knowing.
Who looked at her the same way Fredrik did, with pure happiness.