from The Georgia Review
THE EVENING my mother left, the newscasters were talking about two high-wire circus performers who had plummeted to their deaths, and the storm. Snow was falling heavily all over the Midwest. Travel advisories were in effect.
My father took his feet off the ottoman and set his drink on the end table beside my grandmothers collection of ceramic frogs. He leaned forward, his arms on his knees as we studied the laced pattern of snowflakes on the television screen decorating our section of the map. He got up, went to the window, and put his hands in his pockets. “What time did she leave?” He checked his watch.
“I don’t know,” I said.
My father was convinced my mother had gone on vacation, to visit “somebody-or-other” Reynolds in Kansas City, one of those panty-raid girls. But just that afternoon I’d found a telephone number with a strange area code tucked in the box beside her engagement ring. I knew my mother had secrets, and one of them was that she didn’t plan on coming back.
My father stared out at Van Dorn as if the hooded glaze of streetlights might tell him something. “Well, they didn’t mention a storm in Missouri,” he sighed.
“But the snowflakes were covering it.” I could tell he was worried, and I wanted to show him I was worried too. I took a ruler off the letter desk, opened the French doors, and stepped into the blue glow of the garden. The patio was covered in snow, the table and chairs draped in sheets like a room closed up to keep out the dust. I turned my face upward, feeling the flakes burn my cheeks. It looked as if the sky ended right there above me, over our house. Perhaps it was only my father and I stuck in this white frozen world while everything else stirred with life.
I pressed the ruler into the snow to test how many inches had fallen. When I was a little girl in Chicago, there had been a blizzard the day after my parents’ annual New Year's party. Some of the guests who had passed out in the spare rooms or on couches were trapped, and my mother was making them mimosas. My father and I had closed ourselves in the library to watch the snow. He had pretended to pull a quarter out of my ear, and I had screamed, thinking everything inside me had turned to silver. “Things could be worse,” he’d said. “Some people only produce pennies,” which had made me even more upset. I remember his face looking worried as he sat me down and showed me how he’d done the trick. Then we put on our boots and ventured outside, and my father had plunged a yardstick into the snow. We walked through the hushed city streets hand in hand, making guesses about how much new snow was falling.
“Three inches, Daddy,” I said, stepping back into the living room and closing the door behind me. “Do you think she's all right?”
“Of course. She's probably already in Kansas City.” My father turned off the television and sat back down. “I’ve been thinking.” He drummed his finger on the side of his head. “About getting a new couch. She’d like that, don’t you think?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Oh, yes,” he said, slapping his hand across his thigh. “She definitely would.” Then my father lay down, put one of the old couch cushions over his face, and sighed into the crease of it.
“What are you doing?” I said.
My father didn’t answer.
I went up to my parents’ bedroom and wandered through the dark, running my fingers over the bedspread, the nightstand, the cool glass surface of my mother's vanity table. In the mirror, my faced glowed blue with snow light. I imagined my blond hair turning into icicles, my lips sickly blue, and my mother floating beneath the surface of a frozen pond in a far-off place. I went over to the jewelry box and took out the number.
I moved the telephone off the nightstand and threaded the cord into my mother's dressing room. I turned on the light, closed the door, and crouched in the plastic curtain of my mother's bagged dresses.
I let it ring for a long time.
“Hello?” he said, finally.
“Hello.” My hands were shaking. “Listen, you don’t know me but— I’m calling to see if my mother's there.”
“Well, that all depends on who your mother is,” he said slowly, and laughed as if it were some sort of joke.
“Ann Peyton Hurst.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line as if the phone had gone dead. I brushed a bit of plastic off my face and cinched forward on my knees. “Hello?” I said.
“How did you get this number?”
“I found it.”
“Who is this?”
“This is her daughter; who's this?”
“Nils Ivers,” he said. “Maybe you haven’t heard of me. Your mother was an Ivers once. For about two weeks.”
“I really need to get in touch with her,” I said. “There's a blizzard.”
“Well, there isn’t any snow here” He paused. “Is she leaving someone else now?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Where are you?” he said.
I didn’t answer for a second. Then I told him.
“Well, you’re on the line with LA, sugar. This is a long-distance call.”
“That doesn’t matter,” I said suddenly. “We’re rolling in money.”
“Sounds nice. How old are you?”
I paused. Fourteen was too young. “Seventeen.”
“I bet you’re beautiful.”
“Everyone says so.” I felt like my mouth was moving without my mind telling it what to say.
“I bet you look just like her.”
“I do,” I lied. “People can’t believe it.” It was the strangest feeling I had, like being a puppet, with someone else pulling the strings.
“You sound like quite a sparkler. A real Roman candle. Have you ever thought about the movies? I always thought your mother should be in the movies.”
“Sometimes,” I said. “But I’m more interested in other things.”
“Like what?”
“Horses and stuff. I can’t talk anymore. I have to go,” I said.
“What's the rush? Is it a betrayal?”
“I’m tying up the line.”
“Ahhh,” he said. “I get it. There's a guy, right? He give you his jacket?”
“He told me he’d call,” I said. “I have to go.”
“Wait,” he said quickly. “People thought I didn’t love her. They were wrong about me. I did love her.”
I hung up the phone.
I leaned my head back against the wall and the beaded hems of dresses stirred inside bags as hangers knocked on the rack. My heart was thumping so hard I thought it might break my chest, and beat its way across the floor. My skin electrified my mind in strange directions, confusing wanting with not wanting. I saw my mother's Studebaker half-buried in a snowdrift on the side of the highway, the paint catching police lights like the gold wings of an angel. I pressed my face into the folds of a long black evening gown, and breathed deeply. I smelled plastic and, beneath it, my mother's spiced perfume.
More than a foot of snow fell during the night, and the following day it kept on coming. Shapes in the garden dulled, then changed, leaving alien imprints on living room walls like the last sigh of a sinking ship.
The morning Star didn’t arrive until evening. The people of Lincoln wondered what was happening, though there wasn’t anything to wonder about. Time had stopped. My father worked in his study with the door shut, and I couldn’t imagine what he was doing. It didn’t seem like anyone could possibly be working anywhere else in the world. I put on my boots and forced my way down the drive. The snow was almost up to my knees. It was hard to find my feet. You couldn’t make out the stumps of the elms anymore. The tops of the rhododendrons swelled like bubbles trapped on a frozen surface. When I opened the mailbox, the metal door creaked with cold. Snow tumbled off the top, a tiny avalanche—nothing inside. I watched the lights of a plow round the corner with the steadiness of a tank coming to rescue Lincoln from an invading army. Bring provisions, the neighbors wanted to scream, but no one had a voice. The world wouldn’t listen. Everyone had lost someone, and they were going to keep on losing for the rest of time.
I imagined my mother to be the stuff of legends, torn from the arms of her true love, keeping Nils s telephone number for years like a secret treasure inside the box of the ring he had once given her. I imagined that my mother's first marriage had never been annulled, that she had never actually been married to my father at all, that I had been born out of wedlock, and it was therefore no wonder I found myself so alone in the world. The planets are not aligned, the fortune-tellers had declared on the day of my birth.
Stories were easier to imagine in a snowstorm. History was that much closer with the present so muffled, and it didn’t really matter what was true and what wasn’t when it was just one mind thinking alone. I wrote this down on a pad of paper and read it over and over to myself. It made me feel brilliant. I became so excited by what I’d written I wanted to scream it from the rooftops. Instead, I lurked outside my father's study door until he finally opened it.
“You startled me!” he said. I shoved the paper at him without explanation. He held it out at a distance and squinted down at my writing because he wasn’t wearing his reading glasses. “It doesn’t really matter… what's true and what isn’t true,” my father read slowly, “when it's just one mind thinking about something alone.” He seemed to consider this for a moment. Then he nodded his head and raised his eyebrows. “Where did you get that idea?”
“From my head,” I said.
“I’m impressed, Susan. That's intelligent.” He handed it back to me. “You’ve got a point. I don’t agree with it though.”
“Why?”
“Because I believe in fact. A fact is a fact. I’m a rational thinker,” he said. “Drives your mother crazy.”
I hoped he wasn’t going to start talking about her.
“So, I’ve got a question for you,” he said instead. “If a tree falls in the woods and there's no one there to hear, does it make a sound?”
I considered this a moment. “No,” I said, finally.
“Whereas, I say yes. Most definitely, yes. A sound makes a sound regard- less. This is a very important point of dissension between us,” he said, holding me away from him. “I hope in spite of all this we can agree on something for lunch.”
I put my arms around his waist and gave him a sideways hug. “There isn’t any choice,” I said. “We’re like people in the war.”
My father ruffled my hair the way he had when I was a little girl. I hoped the snow would go on falling forever.
We ate what we could find in the cupboards, canned foods collecting dust on the shelves left over from the days when my grandfather had been alive. I imagined stories trapped inside cans for years, denting the metal with angry little shouts, and the need to be heard. When the lids were opened, swollen metal sighed with relief.
My father and I ate peaches with forks right out of the can. “It's funny,” he said in between bites. “I was just remembering that time my sister Portia tried to bury herself in the yard, and then yelled for someone to come and dig her out. I’d entirely forgotten until now.”
“Why did she try to bury herself?” I asked.
“It had to do with a story our mother told us about our grandparents,” my father said. “There was a terrible blizzard in McCook. Your great-grandparents Elsa and Hans were recently married and had just come from Sweden. They barely knew anyone in Nebraska, and they barely knew each other.”
“Why did they get married if they barely knew each other?”
“Oh, I don’t know, it was different then.” My father frowned. “Marriage wasn’t always about love.”
“Was it about love with Elsa and Hans?”
“Not at first. Feet and feet of snow fell, trapping them inside with no food for days, and nothing to keep them warm. My mother always said that by being snowbound, they were forced to endure an entire lifetime in one week. And only then did they fall in love. She always said it was love that kept them alive. Neither could bear to watch the other die. So they lived—for a long time, anyway.”
“How did they keep each other alive with love?” I wanted to know.
My father shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know, it's just a story.”
My grandmother liked to tell that story, my father said, in an effort to point out the positive. Though families without heat were freezing, good men who had lost jobs lined up downtown in the hopes of laying their hands on a government shovel. My grandfather had always paid my father to dig out the driveway, but now he hired men, the first three strangers who came to the back door wearing ragged coats and desperate faces.
When Aunt Portia first heard about Elsa and Hans, she went directly to her room and cut the hair off all her dolls. Then she took off the clothes and examined the plastic bodies, turning them over and over in her hands, looking between legs at nothing, tapping hollow chests, pulling arms and legs so the elastic ligaments snapped.
My father found her standing beside a pile of mutilated dolls examining her auburn braids suspiciously in the mirror, as if she meant to cut them next. “What did you do that for?” my father said, picking up a bald glassy-eyed doll, and dropping it back on the pile.
“I cut off the hair,” she said bitterly. “They are what they are now, and they’re not real. I’m done with dolls. I’m done with games. Somebody loves me, and I’m running away with him.”
“Nobody loves ten-year-olds,” my father said.
Aunt Portia marched downstairs and put on her coat and hat and slid the mittens my grandmother had knitted over her freckled little hands. She opened the French doors and stepped out into the snowy garden. My father tracked her around the side of the house, and watched her secretly from the cover of darkness. Portia dug a hole in the snow with her hands, lay down in the shallow grave, and covered herself as best she could. She had positioned herself outside the study, and through the window she could see my grandmother knitting sweaters for the Johannsons who had lost their farm in the dust storms. My grandfather put down his book and lit a cigarette, then went to the window. He couldn’t see Portia because of the reflection, but Portia didn’t understand this, and when she called for help, he couldn’t hear her either. “Save me,” Portia screamed. My grandfather peered out at the darkness for a moment, and then went back to his chair. “Help,” Portia said, and then she started crying. My father paused before making his presence known. He was thirteen. He didn’t want to seem like he cared too much.
“Save me,” she sniffed.
“Stand up,” he said.
“I’m stuck, Thatcher.”
“You’re not stuck, Portia,” my father said, but he crouched down and cleared the snow off her anyway. He offered Portia his hand and pulled her up, and tried to shake the snow out of her coat.
“I killed my dolls,” she said. “I want them back.”
“They’re not real. Remember?”
“I killed a promise.”
“You’re crazy,” my father said, taking her hand in his and dragging her back around the side of the house.
“I promised myself I’d give them to Katharine Johannson,” she said. “Now she won’t even want them.” My aunt's teeth were chattering.
“Come on,” my father said. “Come inside. I’ll make hot chocolate.”
But Aunt Portia sat down in the snow against the French doors and refused to move. I pictured my aunt sitting there crying in the same garden, the same snow into which, years later, I’d press the ruler on the night my mother disappeared.
After that they watched Portia carefully, my father told me. She was too serious for a girl her age, easily excitable. She wrote anonymous love letters addressed to no one and left them in places for people to find: Meet me behind the elm in the garden. I’ll be swinging from the branches. I love you, I love you, I love you. Was there a suggestion of suicide in
those words? Could a ten-year-old even be capable of suicide? My grandparents studied the notes carefully for a clue, but none revealed itself. And then one day, Aunt Portia stopped writing. She got her hair cut short in a bob and waited for love to find her.
“Uncle Freddy was love?” I said.
“There were men before him, but I’m not getting into it,” my father said. “She was older than you though. Keep that in mind. You know, your mother found me. We were at a party. She turned to me and said, ‘Don’t you wish you were black?’” My father laughed. “I should have known what I was getting into.”
“Was she drunk?” I said.
“Of course not, Susan. Why would you say that?”
“Well, it's kind of a stupid question.”
My father shook his head and got up and put the cans in the sink. “It was charming. I thought it was charming.” Peach juice had dripped over the table in sticky little trails. The snow had begun to let up.
“So Daddy, why do you think Aunt Portia buried herself?” I said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe she just wanted to be saved.”
“From what?”
“Well, don’t we all want that in some way?” my father said.
I wanted to know what it was he wanted to be saved from.
“From humanity, Susan. There's too much brutality and unfairness in the world. People do horrible things to hurt each other.”
“Like Starkweather,” I said.
“And Hitler. And all the Communists.” But we both knew what we were really talking about. Loving my mother scratched you raw, and that rawness only made you want to be more tender.
There was no school for two days, but on the second day, my father went to work, and I was left all alone to wander the house. I took an old album off the bookcase and opened it to a photograph of my father and Aunt Portia standing on either side of the elm tree in the garden. My father looked about my age. His face was smooth without the creases of worrying, and one of his arms snaked around the back of the trunk, the hand reaching out to pull my aunt's long auburn braid. My aunt's eyes were piercing. She stared directly at the camera without smiling, unaware of what her brother was about to do. I could see the future in that shot, the tug of hair, the pulling away the very second after the picture was taken, but I could not see any farther, even though I knew all that had come to pass. The elm looked tall and stately, as if it could never die, and there was no hint of my father's coming back to the very same house to fill his father's shoes, or that my mother would leave him just before a crippling blizzard in November of 1962. There was no hint of plumpness in Aunt Portia's features, or Uncle Freddy, or the three unremarkable children she would bear him. Portia and Thatcher were names that held the promise of Victorian love affairs. What had they dreamed of in their beds at night?
The snow had stopped falling, but the world was still hushed under its spell, and it seemed to me like everything would be frozen forever. The sun flitted in and out behind the clouds. The icy voices of wind rustled in the hedges and icicles dripped from the roof with the rhythm of metronomes. You're beautiful, the wind told me. I love you, the drops spelled out. It felt like something was about to happen.
I put on an Everly Brothers record and fluttered around the living room wringing my hands. I confused that sensation of waiting with the prickle of love, the anticipation of a first kiss though none was coming. My mind went to a dark unimaginable place where my mother's first husband took my face in his hands and kissed my lips. I couldn’t see him, but I knew he was there. He spoke sweet words to me. You're a real Roman candle.
I don’t know why I wanted to hear that voice again. It was like, if I heard that voice enough, I could actually become the way I wanted to be, which was beautiful, which was seductive, which was a woman loved and desired.
I went into the foyer and sat down at the telephone table, and dialed the number I had committed to memory.
He answered right away.
“Hello,” I said. “It's me again, Susan.”
“Well, hello, honey,” Nils said. “Find your mother yet?”
“No,” I said. “That's why I’m calling.”
“That hurts. I thought you’d call because you missed me. Do you?”
I wasn’t sure what I felt. “I don’t know. Do you miss her?”
I could hear him fumbling around with something, a pot or a dish. “No,” Nils sighed.
“Is that because she's with you?”
“No,” he said. “You’re sharp. You sound like a jealous lover. I kind of like it.”
“Why are you home in the middle of the day?” I wanted to know. “Don’t you work?”
“What are you, a detective? Why are you home from school?”
“It's a snow day.”
“Hmmm,” he said. “Can your boyfriend make it to come and visit or are you all alone?”
“He isn’t allowed over,” I said. “It's against my father's rules.”
“I bet you break the rules sometimes, though, don’t you? Your mother sure did.” Nils laughed.
“You mean when she ran away with you?”
“And other times. Never mind. What's he like, your boyfriend?”
“Well, he's wonderful and strong. He's faced a lot of tragedy, and that's what I’ve been trying to help him through.”
“How do you do that?”
I paused. “He's tough in front of everyone, but when he's with me he whispers all the things he's secretly scared of. I just let him cry it all out,” I said. “Sometimes he cries so much my hair gets wet with his tears.”
“What color is your hair?”
“Black.”
“Like your mother’s?”
“Yes.”
“What else do you do with your boyfriend to help him through?”
His voice sounded different. Angry somehow, as if he were getting revenge for something, but I was getting revenge for something too. The idea of that revenge made me tingle. “We take walks,” I said.
“That can’t be it,” Nils said. “Boys want more than walks. It's why they waste time taking walks to begin with.”
I didn’t know what to say anymore, so I just sat there with the receiver to my ear, my heart thudding against my ribs. The line was still as a held breath. I imagined Nils reading my silence in ways I was too shy to actually speak of. A line had been crossed. Was it possible to fall in love this way?
“Anybody there?” he said softly, as if he was afraid of waking me up.
I gave him a sign that was more of a sound than a word.
He spoke in that same hushed voice, like he was trying to imagine or remember a particular moment. “Tell me, did he take your virginity, Susan?”
I hung up the phone.
The walls seemed to close in around me and squeeze my lungs like a fist. The curtains rustled, and to me, they were souls of my grandparents who had died in our house whispering, You shook the tree. And for the first time I wasn’t happy to think of people coming back after they were dead, because they probably wouldn’t be happy with what they saw in me.
All at once, Nils was right there inside me, seeing the things I saw, feeling what I felt, twisting it all around. He could move through wires and tangle up my heart. There wasn’t any space between Los Angeles and Lincoln, Nebraska. Distance came together at a broken stoplight, and time, my mother and I, and Nils were all crashing into each other head-on. I had caused the accident, the crossing of paths, and Bang! The Forty-fifth Parallel disappeared.
The ring of the telephone broke the stillness. My heart flipped over. It jangled my nerves. I bit my fist. It rang, and rang. Three, four times. I got up and went into the living room and covered my ears with the couch cushions and mashed my lips up against the arm. It kept on ringing. Nils could do anything. He had lost my mother's money. He had made her crazy. He had done something horrible to her, I knew that now, something unforgivable, and yet she couldn’t let herself forget. What had Nils done to her? The telephone went silent. I needed to know.
I went up to my parents’ bedroom and took it apart. I emptied out drawers and ran my fingers along the cracks looking for false bottoms containing secret stashes of love letters. I poked my fingers into cold dark holes and pried apart hinges. I took out the insoles in heels and dumped the contents of purses on the dressing room floor. I found nothing. I sat on my knees staring in amazement at the mess I had made. The room looked burglarized. I left it that way, and went downstairs and opened the drawers in the letter desk where my mother kept addresses. I sifted through stacks of postcards from people I had never heard of, but none was from Nils. I took the books off the shelves and shook each one by the binding, but there wasn’t any note tucked between the pages, not even in Wuthering Heights.
A shaft of sunlight spilled into the living room, and then disappeared behind a cloud, leaving a shimmer of dust in its wake. And when the telephone rang for the second time, it was a sign. I watch my hand pass over the rotary, my fingers wrap around the receiver. The cold line tickled my arm. It was the only thing I could feel. “Hello?” I said.
“Susan?”
“Yeah?”
“It's Cora. Something happened.”
The cat was frozen solid, stuck on its hind legs, its claws tangled in the mesh of the Lessings’ screen door. A layer of snow had fallen over his black fur, and beneath a white dome piled high like a Klan hood, the green eyes were glassy, opaque with frost.
Cora and I stood on the back steps, staring at the cat in disbelief. “I thought you’d want to see it,” she said, wiping tear streaks off her round cheeks. “Toby boomeranged pop-tops at Cinders, so he didn’t think it was safe to come home until it was too late. You’re the first person I called.”
“Thanks,” I said, which sounded more insincere than I had wanted it to. I watched my breath float up in the sunlight like a cloud of dust, and then returned my eyes to the cat.
“What do I do with him?” Cora said.
“What about your parents?”
“Poppy's away on business. Mummy's working up in the studio. That means she's in an artistic fugue.”
“Is she an artist?”
“Well, Mummy's working in new mediums. She collects feathers and makes sculptures.” Cora looked down at the cat again and sniffled into her glove. “It's not like I can bury him. I can’t even touch him. Toby won’t come out of his room. He's put something against the door so I can’t get in.”
I stole a glance over my shoulder at the Harringtons’ house, where everyone said there had once been a murder. A light was on in an upstairs window, but I couldn’t see anyone inside. I imagined a woman removing her jewels, sitting down on her knees in the very spot where the bodies had been found, putting her face in her hands. The snow reminded her of things she had never experienced. The walls held in memories no one had lived to remember, and it all stayed there, sleeping under snow. For some people, quiet was not a good thing. Quiet meant being alone in the worst kind of way.
“I’ll touch him,” I said. I crouched down on my knees and knocked the dome of snow off the cat's head. I had never touching anything dead before. But I wasn’t really touching death, I assured myself. There were my fingers inside a glove, reaching out for ice and snow. “It almost doesn’t look real,” I said. “It's like wax.”
“He's real to me,” Cora said. “He's Cinders. He sleeps on my pillow. He was waiting all night in a blizzard for me to let him inside, wondering what he’d done to deserve this. I should have left the door open.”
“In a blizzard?” I put my hand on her shoulder because that's what I figured a friend should do. “There wasn’t anything you could do. It's your brother's fault for chasing him off.”
Her pale eyes narrowed bitterly beneath the edge of a striped knit hat. “I guess,” she said.
We decided to build a sepulchre in the snow where the cat could be kept until the earth softened, or until Mr. Lessing came back for his business trip with a better idea. It's what people did in the “hinterland,” Cora said, when the ground was too frozen for burial. We fashioned a hut out of snow in the back of the garden beside the stand of trees, with a mouth just wide enough for the cat's body.
I told her my great-grandparents were snowed in without food, that they had survived on the plains of Nebraska against impossible odds by keeping each other warm with their love.
“That sounds made up,” Cora said, sitting back in the snow to catch her breath. She’d stopped crying. “Nobody can keep each other warm with love. Unless you mean by doing it.”
“That's not what I mean,” I said. “I think people in love can keep each other alive just by the power of feeling.” I remembered sneaking downstairs when I was twelve, watching my parents dance around the living room in the middle of the night, and how in love they had seemed to me then, like they were holding each other up with love, like they’d crumble without it.
“How do you know?” Cora said.
“Trust me. I know.” I pretended to concentrate on fortifying a wall. I thought of Nils in Los Angeles waiting by the telephone. Or maybe he’d get sick of waiting and come after me, drive all the way to Lincoln and do something horrible when he found out I wasn’t like my mother.
“Who is he?” Cora said.
“No one you know.” A wind sent a fresh storm swirling down from tree limbs. Snowflakes shimmered like crystal in the bright sun, beautiful little pinpricks that made you squint your eyes. I imagined someone, the Harringtons’ son maybe, watching me from an upstairs window in the neighboring house. I wondered if it was possible to love someone you had never met.
We got up, and walked back to the house in our own footprints without speaking a word. Together, Cora and I freed the frozen cat from the mesh screen and carried him back through the tunnel of snow to the sepulchre. The legs stuck out like branches. The whiskers were stiff and clear, brittle as burnt sugar. One snapped against my coat when I lifted Cinders. I was afraid of where our hands and breath made prints of warmth. In places we had touched, the layer of ice melted away to reveal wet black fur beneath. We reached the edge of the trees and set the cat down in the snow. “Toby should be doing this,” Cora said. Her voice was breaking again.
“Don’t worry,” I assured her. “We’ll make him pay.” I liked the sound of those words in my mouth. They were powerful, like Dr. No, or John Wayne in The Alamo.
“Sure,” I said. “I’m your friend.” I picked up the cat again to prove my point, guided it into the chamber, and started packing in the hole without a second thought.
The sun was sinking low behind the trees, casting emaciated shadow trunks in the snow.
“Since we’re friends now, I have to tell you something,” Cora said. “I don’t have any other friends.”
“That's okay, I don’t either,” I said. “My mother's gone. She thinks my father fired the housekeeper without telling her, but that was only an excuse. She's always wanted to leave. Mother didn’t even know she was pregnant with me until Daddy saw the bulge when they were jumping through a sprinkler. I think she has a secret lover.”
Cora bit the inside of her cheek. “Your parents jump through sprinklers?”
“Not anymore,” I said.
Cora gathered a bit of snow off the sepulchre and pressed it to her cheek. When she took her hand away, an angry red splotch stayed behind as if the cold had burned her.
“I’m making a wish,” she said. “I wish things were different. I wish I had Cinders—What do you wish?”
“I don’t have any wishes.” I stared up into the frost-covered branches.
“Everyone has wishes.” Cora took off her mitten. She leaned forward and carved Cinders in the side of the sepulchre.
“I want someone to love me,” I said.
“I thought someone did.”
“No. Not really.”
“Me too,” Cora said. “I want that too.”
When I got home, my mother's belongings were still scattered in the foyer. Her brown coat with the fur collar lay draped over the chair, the belt trailing on the rug. Shoes and shirts and wrinkled skirts spilled over the top of the stairs, as if she’d been frantically looking for something when the bomb had struck. One high heel teetered on the edge of a step. Strange shapes fluttered along the walls in spotty sunlight. Everything looked caught, frozen underwater. I was lost, stuck between worlds, diving for treasure in a sunken ship.
“Hello,” I called, “hello?” to see if anyone was there. The house was silent.
I went into the living room. Sharp light cut through the French doors like a thousand diamonds, and feeling the urge to let in some air, I swung them open. An icy wind tore through the garden and into the living room. I stepped back as the cold ripped through me. My mothers note cards blew off the letter desk and circled on a sudden gust, before coming to rest on the Oriental rug in the stillness that followed.
I shut the doors and lay down in the scatter of white cards. I thought I could see them cramped with words: Meet me by the elms—I’ll be swinging from the branches. I closed my eyes. Outside, icicles broke free of gutters, piercing hedges like sparkling arrows. Snow shuddered past living room windows in sudden bursts of flour. Somewhere deep below, the boiler pumped. Knitting needles tapped radiators, and my grandfather's ghost stared out into the night as Hans and Elsa dug through decades of snow.
A terrible blizzard hit McCook, Nebraska, early that first spring. Snow kept on falling for days. Even before kissing like newlyweds were supposed to, Elsa and Hans scurried down the ladder and looked out the window in the hopes that the storm had passed while they’d been asleep. But one day they woke up to find there wasn’t any morning. Snow had covered the windows and buried the house almost entirely. In the barn, a calf had died of cold trying to nurse from its mother's frozen udder. An icicle had formed around her tail. But Hans couldn’t get to the animals. They had nothing left. Their stomachs groaned with hunger. They drank melted snow for water. Hans and Elsa lay in bed under blankets holding each other, but they never slept. They lost track of time, living by the light of candles and lanterns, waiting for the sod roof Hans had just finished to buckle beneath the weight of snow, freezing them on the bed where they lay, clutching each other like twins foot to forehead in a womb.
Each assumed the other asleep, and thought, “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die beside this stranger. I am completely alone.” When Elsa peeked at her husband through half-closed lids, she saw a face that was blank with sleep, and knew Hans was dreaming about her hair. After all, it was the only reason he had married her. And when Hans wrapped his arms around his wife and touched a golden strand with the tip of his finger, he felt as if he were touching an impossible emptiness. He had heard somewhere about woman's intuition and wondered how it was that this girl could spend the last moments of her life asleep, never telling him what would happen. It was selfish.
Somewhere in the middle of a day after what seemed like years, a fierce wind shook the hut and a piece of the roof fell in. Hans grabbed Elsa's hair in his fist. “What's going to happen?” he screamed.
“Let go!” she cried, and pushed him away. “How should I know. You’re the man. You’re supposed to do something.”
Hans stared down at the piece of sod. “But what is a man supposed to do?” he said, reaching out for the beacon of her hair again.
Elsa slapped his hand away and climbed down the ladder. Sweeping her fingers over surfaces, she opened and closed drawers in the dark until she felt the cold metal shears. Anger burned her heart with a fire, and she wasn’t chilled or hungry anymore. Anger filled her up entirely.
“Don’t try to go outside or anything,” Hans said, coming down the ladder. “You’ll only drown in snow.”
“That isn’t possible,” she said, lifting her arms above and behind her. “You can’t drown in snow. You suffocate.” Her nightgown spread out like wings, her golden hair caught for a moment in candlelight. Hans saw how long and beautiful it was, surprised by waves every now and then, like sudden rapids in a river. And then he saw the scissors. “Don’t be stupid,” he said.
“I’m not. I’m being smart.” Elsa held out the curtain of her hair.
Hans tried to imagine what his father would have done. His father had been a sergeant. “I am your husband, Elsa,” he said. “I command you not to cut your hair.”
Elsa brought the shears to her scalp. Golden hair fell in piles. Hans pushed his chest against her nose. Elbows met jaws, met knees, met teeth. Hans grabbed. Elsa bit. Loose hair caught like corn silk in the corners of mouths. Scissors sliced skin. Hans stepped back and pressed the cut with his thumb. Elsa covered her mouth with her hand, and stared at the hair on the floor between them, and a drop of her husband's blood that had fallen. Then Elsa tasted blood in Hans's mouth. The horse bucked, and Hans bit his tongue. She knew what he’d been wondering. How fast had his father ridden, before falling on that field outside Stockholm? Hans's mother claimed he’d gone down fighting, but Hans couldn’t make himself believe. He’d found the box beneath the bed with the uniform, the mus- tard stain, the holes in the back of the coat where the bullets had gone in. Hans was thinking how no one else's father had fallen in battle. It wasn’t fair. And then Hans, too, fell. Elsa could smell it: the leather, the sweat, the dung, as rocks in the road rose up to meet him. She felt the pebble bury in his scalp, and found the jagged white scar with his fingers, only they weren’t just his fingers, they were his father's fingers, and they were her fingers. “Hans,” she said, “I’m sorry I cut you.”
“You didn’t,” Hans said.
“I did.”
“Really,” he said. “I didn’t notice.” There was a bump in Elsa's nose he had never noticed, and a dimple where the right cheek met the smooth rise of lips, and in the premature crease in her forehead from too much frowning, he found the first boy Elsa had kissed. He’d lured her behind the crates in her parents’ storeroom with stories of spiders having babies. But Elsa knew that spiders did not “have” babies. “They’re not babies,” she’d said, bending down. “They’re not even spiders,” and then he’d grabbed her. His lips had been like cardboard: Hans could feel them. His spit like the glue Elsa had used to fix the button eyes on her “Mookey” doll after the dog had bitten them off. Hans could feel that glue, and Elsa's disappointment, the frown when the buttons wouldn’t stick. “You should have sewn them on,” Hans said.
“I suppose.” Elsa pressed a rag to his finger to stop the bleeding. Hans liked the smell of her ear. He liked it so much he couldn’t let his breath go. He kept breathing in and in until his face turned blue. “Stop,” Elsa said quietly. “I’m afraid you’ll die.”
“What are you most afraid of?”
“You, Hans.”
“Don’t be.”
“What makes you feel most alone?”
“You, Elsa.”
“Not anymore though.”
“No. Not anymore.”
Elsa touched Hans's jawbone, and Hans ran his fingers through the scruff on Elsa's scalp. The hair was patchy and ragged, but it felt to Hans like a field of wheat. Hans's jaw was smooth in Elsa's hand, like the graceful bones in a wing. Hans traced the outline of ribs beneath Elsa's nightgown. “This one points out in a funny direction,” he said.
Elsa found the scar on his scalp. She laughed. “You’re losing your hair.”
“Come on, Elsa, let me touch it more.”
“Hands,” Elsa said in English. “I’m going to call you Hands.”
Hans and Elsa lay intertwined on the floor like two figures petrified in lava. Their breathing slowed. Crystals formed in the creases of smiles. A pick scraped wood as snow fell away, and each felt the other's heart stir.
Hans and Elsa blinked in confusion and covered their eyes to keep out the sudden light. The men stood in the doorway, holding shovels and lantern, their mouths hanging open like woodpecker holes. Ice had collected in their beards. To Hans and Elsa, it could have been any moment in history. Their rescuers could have been Vikings on a frozen shore, or explorers discovering a secret cave. It could have been the ice age.
The men put their hands over their hearts and cried for joy. “It's been so hard. So many are dead. But you’re alive. You’re alive!”
“Oh,” Hans said, stretching and yawning and peering at the men through half-closed lids. “I forgot.”
“Yes,” Elsa said, rubbing sleep out of her eyes. “Remember? We were going to die.”