It’s a real struggle to keep moving no matter what, and I’m not sure it’s getting me anywhere. There’s moments, out here in the snow, when I could swear I saw something move, but the second I look again, it’s gone. This damn snow won’t just come straight down like nice, normal rain.
So I don’t lose my head, I try to remember California, the beaches our parents took us to every Sunday after church, all four of us by the ocean, having sandwiches and playing cards and the sun making us sleepy.
I can’t make myself feel that heat anymore. Around here, even in the summer, the sun doesn’t even warm your bones. Just makes you think you’re warm, but you’re never actually warm. You never think you’re baking in the sun.
Sometimes I dream about the Pacific: those long rolling waves, the salt on my skin, and the spray in my hair. All there is here is fresh water, gallons and gallons of it, lakes and rivers and streams and brooks and falls. Water, water everywhere, all the time: ice floes, snowmelt, crystal clear or muddy in the spring. And cold, always cold. Nothing you’d ever want to skinny-dip in.
I’d give anything to sunbathe on the beach again, listen to the waves crashing on the sand. It’s funny: I can still remember the coconut smell of the sunscreen Mommy put on when I was little so she could tan and not burn her milky skin. She was so pretty back then, like a movie star. We weren’t all that well-off, but she was always elegant. She was a small woman with the looks and the stomach of a fifties film star. Daddy was so in love with her that he said even Rita Hayworth didn’t have anything on her. I didn’t get what he was saying about some old actress who died the year I was born, but Mommy seemed to really like the sound of that.
Both Cassandra and he were blond, almost white-haired—that was the Scandinavian side showing. And I’d gotten Mommy’s red hair, like a real Irish American. It was a burden, but everyone always knew who we were from a mile off. “Look who it is: that’s Elizabeth Morgensen and her mother.”
When I was a teen, I was so scared I’d end up a bad copy of her. I didn’t have my boobs yet and my hips were as skinny as a boy’s. I wasn’t anything close to a sex symbol, not even an old one. Then her hair went gray overnight. She tied it in a long, faded braid and it was stained yellow at the end from nicotine. She was always dressing to be seen, and then, snap, she let herself go. Why hang on to bits of cloth or tubes of lipstick when what mattered most was gone?
I always did my best to forget the dead, and now I was trying to forget that side of her too. And then I gave up just like her, but in my own way. I guess all we had in common was our looks. But I still can’t shake her.
The kid’s out there, and Lord knows I’ve got to save him. I can’t make the same mistake twice.