In its own way, winter is a season of bounty. Insulated by technology, people of our time usually fail to appreciate that. While I lived with Daniel and his children on their long-ago farm, I would stroke the icicles hanging from the fence rails. At night I would stand outside gazing at the crisp clarity of the stars until my teeth chattered. The harshness of the season was my ally; it brought my dear ones into an even tighter circle around me, the better to savor their company.
Daniel harvested ice the morning of Groundhog Day. He brought the load on the sled to the outside hatch of the cellar. The girls and I came down by way of the pantry stairs. I hung the kerosene lamp from its hook and we gathered in the pool of light to watch him work.
The blocks came sliding down the ramp, each successive one crashing into those below, flinging tiny shards of ice into our faces. Perched in my arms, Marancy giggled at the bracing pinpricks of sensation. To a three-year-old, it was pure entertainment.
“Our mama used to worry we’d get poked in the eyes,” Sarah commented. “She always made us stay upstairs.”
“Now, now. Your mama was only looking out for you.” I tried to sound firm. I was determined that the fondness my step-daughters had for me did not come by diminishing their esteem for their birth mother. But inwardly, I glowed.
When the last of the blocks had made its journey, Daniel slid down the ramp himself. He lifted away the slats that covered the ice bunker and fetched a shovel from the rack. I handed Marancy into the care of her older sister and reached for a second shovel.
“You’ll get your apron dirty. Mind the girls,” Daniel said.
I blinked at the curtness. “Of — of course,” I stammered, and returned to the stairs. Marancy climbed into my lap as Sarah and I sat on the treads.
Daniel worked quickly, mucking out the bottom of the bunker with robust scoops and dumping the sludge into two large buckets.
While I sat there, I fought to keep my expression smooth, even managing to smile indulgently whenever I felt the girls’ attention on me. But I was stung. Daniel might be a 19th Century man, but he had never before used gender roles to shut me out. The Pecatonica River Valley had been newly settled when Daniel’s parents arrived; he’d seen his own mother guide a plow across a muddy field with the rear end of the ox in front of her nose the whole while. Just a week past, he and I had worked elbow to elbow to clear the snow drifts from the barn door after the big storm.
I silently condemned the meddler who had spoiled that harmony.
When the bunker was clean, Daniel exchanged the shovel for a pair of ice hooks and maneuvered the blocks across the floor. One by one they dropped into place. He covered them with an insulating layer of fresh straw, then replaced the slats, hiding the storage cavity away for another year. Done, he smiled at Sarah and Marancy.
“Those’ll keep a good long time,” Daniel announced, slapping the ice-melt from his gloves. He said it as someone who relished a cool serving of canned peaches after a day’s toil under a hot summer sun. We all shared his approving glance at the jars of fruit, jam, and preserves on the shelves, the reward of the hours I had spent over the stove at harvest time.
My spirits were rising until I saw what he was really staring at: the corner containing the remnant left from the previous year, a legacy not of my work, but that of his late wife.
I glanced down, pretending to be absorbed in checking the slats to be sure they were seated evenly over the bunker. When I looked up again, Daniel had climbed the ramp to empty the buckets into the snow beyond the woodpile.
o0o
In the afternoon, I baked bread. The girls kept me company, churning butter and cracking walnuts, their young faces aglow with the anticipation of sampling the first loaf hot from the oven. Their father avoided me, remaining outside to top off feed bins and patch the hen coop.
He came in at suppertime, of course, but he was not his usual ebullient self, brimming with observations about the day. He ate quickly and left early, offering the excuse that he needed to fetch more wood for the stove. He said it as if I’d wasted what was there before, as if my breadmaking were some sort of whim and not a necessary and regular contribution to our lives.
The rift yawned even wider at the end of the evening. I came into the bedroom after settling the girls in the loft and found him already beneath the blankets and the room dark. I had to re-light a candle in order to put away my slippers and let down my hair.
I left the candle burning as I slid, shivering, beneath the many layers of flannel and wool. I wanted to see Daniel while we talked.
I knew he was awake. His muscles hadn’t relaxed nor had his breathing become rhythmic. I waited. Finally he opened his eyes. He stared at the rafters, not at me.
“You didn’t have to store ice in your cellars, where you come from. You had other ways to keep food cold.”
“Yes.”
“You had all kinds of incredible things. More’n I can begin to guess at.”
“Things don’t make a person happy. What I have here is what I find incredible.”
“But it ain’t a true life. Ain’t the one you were born to live.”
“When a parent adopts a child, is the child any less precious because it didn’t arrive the usual way? Just like I adopted Sarah and Marancy, I’ve adopted you and this place.”
“Ain’t no ‘just like’ about it. It’s not the same at all.” His voice went hoarse. “Is Annabeth even your name?”
“I—” I couldn’t answer. The question upset me too much. I knew I was going to break down. I fled for fear my hysterics would awaken the girls.
No place in the house was soundproof enough. I bolted outside and high-stepped, bare feet on packed snow, to the outhouse. I shut myself in and gave up all attempts at self-control. I sobbed so hard I strained an abdominal muscle. The tears poured down until I nearly choked.
“You poor dear.” The voice came from the darkness beside me. I yelped in surprise.
I flung open the dampers of the pot-bellied stove. The glow of the embers through the grill revealed the household’s gray tabby sitting on the bench beside the toilet lid. Or that is to say, it appeared to be the household’s gray tabby, but I had just left the real cat in the bedroom, curled up in its basket on the cedar chest.
I made a guess. “Vivica?”
“Yes.”
My tear ducts snapped shut. I continued to shudder a little, but that was because all I was wearing was a nightgown. I thrust more fuel into the stove. I was tempted to throw the cat in as well. “Were you the asshole who blabbed to Daniel?”
“No, that was Kenneth. I was opposed to the idea, actually. I figured it would just make you dig in your heels.”
“You were right about that much.”
“Terri, Terri, Terri,” the faux-cat said. “So we can’t force you to withdraw, but that doesn’t mean it’s right for you to stay. Come to your senses.”
“You know how judgmental that sounds?”
“It’s called intervention. It’s an act of concern.”
“Yeah, everybody’s willing to butt in now that I’m happy. When I could really have used some cheering up, you all were nowhere to be found.”
“Maybe that’s true,” Vivica suggested, though it didn’t sound like a concession to my ears. “Or maybe you didn’t give us a chance. Tell you what. I’m going to the gymnastics championships on Luna in a couple of weeks. I have a spare ticket. You could tag along. I’ve booked a great suite at the Hilton. Dori and Sam are gonna show up for the finals. Be like old times.”
“Spare me the pity gestures, Viv. I like it just fine where I am.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Terri. Look around. This is so primitive. So . . . filthy.” The cat lowered its nose to the gap between the bench and the closed toilet lid and snorted at the fumes wafting up from the cesspit. “You can’t tell me you like having to put up with this stench every time you go to the bathroom. I have to believe you’d see how much you don’t belong here if you were in a rational frame of mind.”
The fact is, outdoor plumbing was one adjustment to life in the 1880s that I didn’t cope with as gracefully as I accepted others. But I wasn’t about to give Vivica the satisfaction of hearing me say that.
“This isn’t intervention,” I said. “It’s just intrusion. You’ve had your say. I want you to leave.”
“Your money’s almost gone, you know,” Vivica said. “What will you do then?”
“My credit is excellent. Now I believe I asked you to leave?”
The cat rolled its eyes, not at all a feline mannerism. “All right, all right. The timer’s running down anyway. But this isn’t over, Terri.”
“Bye bye,” I said.
I shut the dampers, restoring the darkness. When I opened the outhouse door and the moonlight shone in, the cat was nowhere to be seen.
o0o
In the morning, Daniel came in from milking the cows, ate his breakfast, and headed for the barn again almost before he had finished swallowing the last bite. As he crossed the yard, Sarah’s gaze followed him through the frosted kitchen window. She glanced at me, then down at the floor.
Only after Marancy went down for her nap did Sarah summon the courage to speak. I was at the sink peeling potatoes. She was at the kitchen table, grating cheese.
“It’s been so good since you came,” Sarah said. “Pa was so sad when Mama died.” Once she might have added, “and even before Mama died,” but I had weaned her from such talk. “Did you two have a fight?”
“A fight? Not exactly.”
I put down the peeler and moved to the chair across from her. I reached out and cupped her hands.
“He’s . . . upset with something he learned about me. He’s disappointed in me,” I said.
Sarah’s brows drew together until a pair of vertical wrinkles scored her normally doll-like forehead. “Pa thinks you’re his Helen of Troy. He told me so.”
“He said that before he knew certain sides of me.”
“What’s so awful about you? What didn’t he know?”
To my surprise, the words came easily. “Do you know what an addiction is?”
“No, ma’am.”
“It’s when someone has a craving for something that makes them feel good. They want it all the time, and they do anything to have it. They get so they can’t help themselves.”
“Like Uncle Caleb, and his drinking?”
“Like that.” I had not met Daniel’s brother-in-law. Daniel didn’t allow him to come ’round anymore. Caleb might even be dead; he hadn’t been seen in Stephenson or Green County in quite some time.
“But you don’t drink more than a sip of cordial, now and then,” Sarah protested.
“My problem is not alcohol.”
“Then what do you hanker for?”
“All this.” I waved at the hand-carved dining table, the knothole in the rafters, the rag carpet in the hallway, woven by Daniel’s grandmother when she lived back East. Things unique to this house, and to this particular juncture in time. “I can’t stop wanting to be with your father, wanting to be with you. Wanting to be here.”
“That doesn’t sound so wicked.”
“No. No, it doesn’t,” I answered. “I don’t believe it is.”
“Pa shouldn’t worry about it, then.”
“I agree,” I said. I offered her my lap. She climbed into it and I held her tight. “I promise you everything will be fine soon. One way or another.”
She cuddled, and for a moment I thought things between us would be fine. But she was so quiet, and the frown hadn’t gone away.
o0o
Once again, I found an intruder in the outhouse when I arrived. This time the avatar was a weasel. Weasels were a common enough sight on the farm. After all, we had hen’s eggs to steal. This one, though, didn’t run away upon being discovered.
“A varmint. How appropriate,” I said.
“I don’t think Sarah quite believed your explanation of the difficulties between you and her father,” the weasel said. Small and rodentish as the voice was, I recognized it as belonging to Andrew, from my old therapy group. “She’s a bright child. I imagine she’s going to keep digging until she gets a thorough explanation, don’t you think?”
“And I suppose you plan to help her along with that?” I snapped.
“Oh, no. That would be out of line. I’m not Kenneth, you know.”
“Thank goodness for small favors,” I replied.
“I’ve taken a look at your session logs. You handle your responsibilities so well as Annabeth. You should try that as Terri. You do have responsibilities, you know. People you should be there for.”
“So you say. Right now my responsibility is to empty my bladder. Are you planning on helping me with that, too, or can I have some privacy?”
The weasel hesitated. Andrew had clearly come to say more, but perhaps he had been expecting that I would be more willing to listen. He wasn’t great at being a point man. “As you wish,” he finally said. He hopped off the bench and down the wooden step.
He turned around when he reached the footprint-littered snow. “You know, you were a real help to me when I was in over my head. I wish you could take some of the advice you gave me then.”
I shut the door.
o0o
At lunchtime, I sent the girls out to the barn to fetch their father. He hadn’t come in all morning.
I watched through the window. Daniel met the children at the barn door. But he didn’t accompany them as they set out for the house.
The girls stopped midway back, confused. They waved for him to follow. Still he stood there.
What I saw confirmed my fears. I had lost him. He wasn’t able to be my Daniel anymore. His matrix couldn’t adjust enough to deal with the information Kenneth had given him. He was too aware of the nature of his existence. He couldn’t forgive me.
Sarah was picking up on the dissonance. At any moment, she might begin to ask him questions I couldn’t have her knowing the answers to.
“God damn it,” I murmured.
I had no choice. I went to the kitchen wall and placed my palm against it. “Access,” I said.
The interface appeared. I quickly re-set the Character Parameters to baseline. I’d lose the enrichment incorporated since then, but it couldn’t be helped.
I also authorized Highest Level Security. The modification would ding my account more than I had planned, but my credit was adequate, if not as robust as I’d implied to Vivica.
My “friends” would not be able to hack in again, not even to view the logs as Andrew had. Their measures had inconvenienced me, but I wasn’t done here yet.
I restored the wall to its 1880s look and returned to the window. Out in the yard, Daniel and the girls were now behaving as they should. Daniel was grinning as he swung Marancy in a circle. Sarah was giggling. Soon all three headed for the house, full of good cheer and looking forward to their midday meal.
o0o
I opened the oven. As the aroma of potato and cheese and onion poured out, smiles beamed all around. I put the casserole on the table, served everyone’s portions, and we began to eat.
The cheese contained an authentic pungency that few of my era would know, but that wasn’t what made the meal special. Its value came from the lack of pretension, from the company, from the setting, from the sheer comfort of familiar ingredients prepared in a familiar way. No declaration of approval from some culinary maven was needed to know I had done well. This recipe and way of enjoying it fulfilled the soul.
In this place and time, I knew where I stood.
Not a hint of the recent troubles tainted the scene. Sarah had no questions. Daniel exuded his traditional good humor. When he stood up from the table, he gave me a little kiss that set the girls to grinning behind their hands.
“I’d better get the team hitched up if we’re going to make it to over to Buster Hastings’s place on time,” he said.
Sarah brightened. “We’re going visiting?”
“That’s right,” I said. “Didn’t you notice the extra casserole?”
The children cheered and scampered out to the barn at their father’s heels.
I followed more sedately, filling a wicker basket not only with the second casserole but a loaf of the bread I’d baked the day before. Charity for an old widower who lived nearby.
By the time I came out Daniel was in the midst of positioning the horses in front of the sleigh. The animals tossed their heads and whinnied, eager to be heading out after days of confinement. I helped the children tie bells to Meadow’s tail. The mare tolerated it with only a twitch or two. Dusty, the gelding, snorted his disdain at the prospect. “One of these days,” Sarah promised him, but she wasn’t ready to force the issue this time, nor would I have let her.
The song praises the delights of an open sleigh, but an open sleigh is hardly meant for comfort. Ours was closed, its chassis rounded inward to form a cockpit. Daniel filled the footwarmer with hot charcoal and set it down in the front with a metallic clunk. He draped it with the fitted flannel cover and we climbed in. The heavy sleigh blanket went round us, supplementing the smaller ones around our bodies. I fastened the cover by its hooks and we were cozy in our cocoon, only our muffed heads and Daniel’s gloved hands poking through into the chill air. Daniel flicked the reins and we were off.
Buster lived close by. In a later day and age, the distance between our dwelling places would be inconsequential, but for us it was a shift from the everyday world to the special. The girls shouted hurrahs as we rounded the hillock and saw the old farmhouse, smoke rising from its chimney, golden retriever barking in the yard to announce our arrival.
Buster limped onto his porch. “Jake!” he bellowed at his pet. “Get over here.” Fortunately he was obeyed, or the hairy beast might have licked us to death as we fetched the casserole and bread from the luggage compartment.
As we paraded inside, warmth enveloped our weather-reddened noses and made them glow. Buster had a glow of his own, a bright-eyed energy as his loneliness was broken, at least for the next hour. “You two have growed an inch since Christmas,” he declared with enthusiasm, patting Sarah on the head. He didn’t bend to do the same to Marancy; his stiff spine didn’t allow it.
We continued in to the kitchen to put the food down, and found a ham lying on the table. “That’s for you,” Buster said.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Daniel protested.
“It’s little enough in return,” the old fellow insisted. “I have a little too much of some things, now that Myrna’s gone. No use it going to waste here.” He patted the ham. “I may not be much good in a kitchen, but I do know how to hang a pig in a smokehouse.”
The old farmer sounded pleased with himself, and he had a right to be. “We’re grateful to you,” I said.
“Any word from that son of yours in California?” Daniel asked.
Buster opened a drawer and lifted out an envelope. I made out a San Francisco postmark.
“Still making a good life for himself,” Buster informed us. “Wants me to come and live with him now that his eldest is gettin’ married. I told you about young Will, right?”
“Yes.” Daniel chuckled. Buster had mentioned his grandson’s engagement the last five visits in a row. “So are you going?”
“Shucks no. I’ll stay right where I am, thank you. Couldn’t imagine it any other way.”
Buster had homesteaded this farm. It had never been owned or operated by anyone else. I knew he would stay until the day the dog trundled in and found him laid out stiff and cold in his bed, a tintype cameo of his wife on the nightstand beside him.
“Neither could we, Buster. Neither could we,” I said, squeezing his hand.
He blushed to have a woman touch him. “You’re right good neighbors to me. Keeps a body goin’.”
We stayed as long as Buster remained talkative. He made sure we understood we were welcome to stay longer, but we didn’t want to wear him out.
The old man escorted us out to the sleigh. As we approached, Jake padded up and looked at us with a regard that I found disturbingly human. I studied him to be sure his behavior didn’t resemble that of the cat and the weasel in the outhouse.
The retriever’s tail wagged and the exuberant tongue made its traditional assault on little Marancy’s face, much to her delight. The dog was a dog. The integrity of the milieu was secure. Everyone was behaving according to pattern.
o0o
On the way home, we let Meadow and Dusty set their own pace, the horses’ natural laziness balanced by their desire to get back home to their stalls. Buster’s farm slipped over the horizon, and we cruised along beside sparkling white fields.
Marancy climbed into my lap and leaned back against me. Sarah leaned in from the side, and together we settled against Daniel. My big handsome man wrapped his free arm around my shoulders and braced so that we were all steady and could, if we chose, remain nestled all the way home.
Daniel’s gaze swept over the landscape. He looked at me and smiled. “Ain’t it a wonder, Annabeth? Could it be any better?”
A family outing. A good deed accomplished. Beauty all around. And a simplicity and peace I’d never found in the 22nd Century. No, it couldn’t be any better.
“It’s like a dream,” I replied.
The words carved out a chunk of me below my sternum. It added to the awful, hole-in-the-middle sensation already there. I wanted to blame Kenneth and Vivica and Andrew for creating it, but the truth was, the hollowness had taken root well before the first intervention episode.
A dream. Yes. And only a dream. For months my life as Annabeth had seemed to be the greatest sort of wakefulness. No more. An illusion only has power when one can’t see the man behind the curtain. I could hold firm against my friends’ doubts about the choices I had made, but not against my own.
It was time to do what I’d decided to do when I’d accessed the interface. I’d needed this last sliver of an afternoon to savor, but the clock had run down.
“I love you, Daniel. I love you, Sarah. I love you, Marancy.”
Deep within the compartment of the sleigh, beside the dwindling warmth of the foot warmer, I clicked my heels three times.
The sleigh ceased to move. The moment was as frozen as the ground had been: Clouds of breath — human and equine — hung in the air as if painted. Marancy’s eyelids were poised half down, captured in mid-blink. Sarah was preserved in the midst of lifting the blanket, curious to learn what I was doing with my feet. Now she would never find out.
Daniel’s right hand was forever steady on the reins, keeping our course true.
I closed my eyes. As soon as I opened them, the details of the room around me grew more distinct, became impossible to ignore: The equipment, the blinking indicators, the glow of the clock.
Outside, beyond the smartglass and walls programmed to keep the climate at bay, snow was falling. It was winter, for those who troubled themselves to notice. I could still hear the tinkle of bells on a horse’s tail.