ANNA’S NERVES WERE STRUNG SO tightly, she thought she might fly apart if anyone brushed against her. Her household had been disrupted enough by the events of the past weeks, what with Anette taking over the bedroom—she didn’t begrudge her that, no, it was the least she could do for the child she had maimed. But there was also the fact that she and Gunner had to sleep somewhere, and she’d banished him to the parlor while she slept with her children; Raina was still upstairs in the attic. And then the Newspaper Man, always underfoot now, bringing more and more things into the house, things that needed to be stored somewhere—the letters and toys and clothes and odd trinkets like the beads the Catholics used for prayer, someone’s mother’s old Bible, framed needlework samplers spouting prayers. Even a milk cow—well, that was actually useful, and the cow was a welcome addition to the barn. But the house simply couldn’t hold any more of these things, yet they still came, along with him.
The Newspaper Man. He had turned their lives upside down more thoroughly than the blizzard. What would happen to Anette—to them all—after the blizzard, Anna hadn’t had time to imagine, not in all the turbulence of the sickroom. But even if she had, she’d never have been able to imagine this—the sudden, unwanted glare of notoriety.
People—strangers as well as neighbors—came knocking on her very door asking to see Raina or Anette, “the heroines”! As if they could just stare at the two, like animals in the zoo back in Kristiania. As if she, Anna Pedersen, would be happy to let them trample all kinds of slush and snow into her house, would be thrilled to be ignored, treated as a hired girl, in order to satisfy the incomprehensible hunger to behold two ordinary humans who had survived an extraordinary situation.
Yet even as her skin pricked with resentment—no one ever asked about Anna, no one ever complimented her or praised her devotion—she was also consumed by guilt. Every time she remembered the sight of that pail, gleaming in the snow, she had to sit down, press her handkerchief into her mouth to stifle her cry. She had banished the pail to the barn, where Gunner could use it for slop. She would buy Anette a new one—a shinier, bigger one—when she went back to school. And a new slate, too, and new dresses, hair ribbons, stockings—anything, to atone for her sins.
But it wouldn’t suffice; she would still have this gaping, pulsating hole within, a hole where her goodness, her Christian charity—her untouched soul—used to reside. She could never make it up to Anette. She was going to hell, and Anna did believe in hell, the old-fashioned kind she was taught in the Lutheran church. Demons and flames and eternal suffering.
Unless…
She could have another chance.
She’d not told anyone—least of all her husband—but she was determined that Anette remain with them despite the opportunities the Newspaper Man brought with every visit: offers from well-off people to adopt Anette, give her an education, not to mention all the money being set aside for her future. It wasn’t the money that Anna desired, it was the chance for redemption. Fierce was that determination—it propelled her about the sickroom just as her fury at Gunner and the Schoolteacher used to fuel her housekeeping before—to give Anette a good life, the best life possible. She would do what she could to try to make up for the loss of the limb; she would help her with her lessons, provide her with the best food, pretty clothes; she would curl the girl’s hair, massage creams into her rough skin, turn her into a living doll, anything to make up for the fact that she was forever less than whole.
Because what good was a woman if she wasn’t complete? What man would have her? Anna had been brought up to believe that a woman was only as prized as the man who made her his wife. Of course, that belief made her tie herself to a man who was enviable on the surface, but underneath, weak as pudding. Still, she couldn’t shake her upbringing.
In maiming Anette, she had spoiled any chance the girl might have for a good marriage. So it was up to Anna to fix her as best she could—to save her. And in doing so, she would save herself.
The moment she opened the door and beheld Anette’s mother—that horrifying hag, that heartless shrew—Anna’s mind started whirling, trying to stay one step ahead of her. This was danger. This was evil; evil as black as Anna’s own.
Maybe that’s why she recognized it instantly.
“You see my poor, poor child, my daughter? What she has been through?” Mrs. Thorkelsen was saying now as she cuddled Anette—actually putting the girl in a kind of stranglehold. The Newspaper Man looked at her skeptically. “And now, thanks to you and all those kind people, we won’t have to suffer again, will we, min datter?”
“What do you mean, we?” the Newspaper Man replied.
Anna watched as the hag shoved Anette off her lap and rose to glare at the Newspaper Man, who took a step back, unprepared for the look of repulsion in the woman’s eyes.
Fool, Anna thought. What a fool that man was. He was not a worthy opponent for this woman, despite his big city airs and his words in the newspapers that had lured her here in the first place—couldn’t he see how he himself was to blame? No, of course he couldn’t; he was just a man. It would take a woman to save Anette.
“I assume you’re after the money?” Anna asked the woman, ignoring the sputtering Newspaper Man. Raina and Gunner were also in the kitchen now but silent. Witnessing.
“I am only concerned about min datter, who has suffered so in your care, losing her hand! Almost dying! I will take her with me and give her all that she desires, thanks to the kind people. The things only a mama can provide.”
“Oh, Mama!” Anette’s little face radiated joy—Anna had never seen her look this way. The girl had never smiled, she had never laughed before the blizzard. But first the Newspaper Man, and now the arrival of her mother, had done this. Transformed a sullen—no, desperately unhappy—creature into a real child. One who could laugh and smile.
One who knew that she belonged to someone—Anna’s heart pinched with guilt again, remembering how she’d treated the girl from the start.
“You really have come for me then, Mama? You really do want me? And we can go back home?”
“Yes, or maybe even—how would you like to go somewhere else, just you and me? Maybe not back to the old place, not back to that bast—your stepfather? Maybe we start over somewhere nice, just the two of us?”
Anette nodded and buried her face in her mother’s bosom. She began to cry, softly, but they were tears of happiness. Anna couldn’t bear it, she couldn’t look at this heartrending tableau—the mother was now patting Anette on the back, murmuring “Min datter, min datter,” over and over; she even managed to produce touching tears. Crocodile tears, more like it.
Oh, Anna knew this woman. And she could imagine, too well, what would happen if she took Anette away. She’d burn through all the money, she’d drag the girl from flophouse to flophouse, she’d never see that Anette got an education. She would most likely sell her again, but by that time, Anette would be a young woman. And the kind of selling that entailed made Anna shake with fury. It took all her self-control not to tear that hag’s eyes out right now.
Anna glanced at the others—Raina, Gunner, the Newspaper Man. Their faces, too, revealed their fear—but also their helplessness.
“She is her mother.” Raina was the first to break the spell; she spoke in English, so Mrs. Thorkelsen couldn’t understand. But the woman was so busy clucking over her daughter, she didn’t take notice—she was putting on a show, staking her claim—and Anette was loving it, believing every false declaration of endearment and devotion. Ach, that poor child! Another thing she must do—teach Anette not to be so gullible.
“A mother can take her own child,” Raina continued. “What can we do?”
“We signed no papers,” Gunner admitted. “Legally, Anette is not ours. I doubt there are any birth certificates or marriage certificates in that woman’s possession—papers don’t seem to mean much out here, other than land claims—but if this went to any kind of court, no judge would deny that it’s the mother’s right to take Anette back.”
“I’ll be damned if she takes her,” grumbled the Newspaper Man. “She sold her own daughter. She’ll take the money and the girl and run, and we’ll never find Anette again. That is not going to happen, I promise. I can…I can write something up about her in the newspaper, expose her for who she is.” But he, too, looked helpless in spite of his anger, and Anna snorted. A pen, mighty as his appeared to be, was nothing on the prairie. It was no weapon against the basest elements of humankind, and those were what the prairie brought out in people. There was no refinement here. Only the elemental instincts and emotions: greed, evil, might, right. A pen was no weapon against a determined woman.
Pffft!
Anna had no time for these blathering idiots who couldn’t see the danger in front of them, who held on to useless niceties and legalities and idealistic notions of mother love. Turning her back on them—her gaze lingering, just for a moment, on the stove in the kitchen—Anna sighed. She really had enough to do with all these people in the house—cook, clean, sew, nurse—and now this cunning wench disguised as a pitiful mother. Anna thought that Raina, at least, would have had more sense. But no, it would be up to her alone.
“It is time for dinner,” she announced, putting an end to all the babbling. It hurt her ears, it made her skin itch, all these stupid people in her house. “Anette needs to eat so she can go to bed and get her rest.” Anna shooed them all out of her kitchen, grabbed the skillet of cornbread and shoved it into the oven.
The sooner these idiots were fed, the sooner they would go to sleep.
And then she could do what must be done.