The Snow Child: A Novel (30 page)

“Of course, Mabel,” he pleaded. “What could you have thought, that when she wasn’t here with us she was some kind of snowflake, a snow child? Is that what you thought?”

She yanked her hands from his and stood with such force she knocked her chair over.

“Damn you! Damn you! How could you?”

Her anger startled him. “Mabel?” He put his hands on her shoulders, thinking to hold her, but he could feel the heat of her fury through the fabric of her dress.

“How could you? Let her live out there, like a starving animal? Motherless. Fatherless. Starving for food and love. How could you?” She shoved her way past to the coat hooks.

“Mabel? What are you doing? Where are you going?” He took her by an arm, but she pushed him away. She wrapped a scarf around her neck, pulled on gloves and a hat, then took the oil lantern down from its hook above the table.

“Mabel? What are you doing?” He stood there in his socked feet as she slammed the door behind her.

She would come back. It was night, and it was snowing. She couldn’t go far. She didn’t know the way, had rarely left the homestead except by a wagon he drove.

But the silence of the cabin unnerved him. He lit another
lantern, paced at the door. The minutes ticked by on the old wooden clock on the shelf. Finally he put on his coat and boots and took the lantern. Outside the snow was thick. It fell so densely that he could see no more than a foot or two in front of him, and Mabel’s tracks had disappeared.

M
abel ran without seeing, her face wet with tears and snow, her feet tripping. The small circle of lantern light swung wildly among the snowy trees. For some time all she did was run toward the mountains, and of that she wasn’t even certain, but she did not stop. Her skirt dragged in the deepening snow, spruce branches raked at her face, and more than once she nearly fell, but she felt neither cold nor pain. All she knew was the rush of blood in her ears and a hot rage that with each step began to cool to a sort of grieving stupor.

She slowed as the land dipped into a ravine and the trees gave way to overgrown bushes, their thick branches lying across the earth like something set to snare her. She climbed under and over them, the lantern swaying in one hand. None of them grew to the size of a tree, but neither were they like the blackberry brambles back home. Some limbs were as thick as her leg, and dry brown leaves clung to many of the branches. Mabel grabbed at one and brought her hand away with a cluster of tiny cones. Scattered amid these bushes were devil’s clubs, bare of their broad green leaves but not of their spines. In places the limbs and shrubs were so entangled that her chest tightened in panic—what if she couldn’t find her way out?

At last the ground climbed slightly, and Mabel again found herself among spruce, birch, and scattered cottonwood. She stopped and looked back the way she had come. There was no sign of the cabin, and beyond the lantern’s small circle of flickering light, blackness closed in from all sides. Her hair was damp against her neck, and her clothes hung heavy and cold. But she would not go back. He could stay in the cabin waiting, not knowing, just as she had spent so many hours. She would find the girl and make this right.

She held the lantern high and peered into the snow-filled darkness. Where the light spilled ahead of her, Mabel saw that the snow was disturbed. She ran to the tracks. She looked up and down the trail, trying to see where they went and where they came from. Could these be the girl’s? But which way? Having run so blindly, she no longer had any sense of home, the river, the mountains. Something seemed wrong about the tracks, the snow too deep for her to make out footprints. Just the same, she followed them.

The tracks led over a fallen birch tree, and she wrestled with her long skirt as she climbed over it. By the time she cleared the log, she was drenched with sweat and snow and her legs trembled with exhaustion. She followed the trail to her left, half running. When her throat burned and her lungs felt as if they would burst, she paused only long enough to take in a few gulps of air. She pictured herself finding the girl huddled against the storm. Mabel would grab hold of her and never let go. She wondered how far she had come. Could she be getting close to the foothills? The land was flat, but it seemed as if she’d been running for hours.

It was only when Mabel came again to the fallen birch and saw where she had already climbed over it that she realized her mistake. She was a mad old woman, running in circles, chasing
herself through the woods at night. She was aware that any living thing in the forest with eyes would be able to see her as clear as day in the lantern light, while she would be blind to it. Then it was as if she were hovering in the treetops, looking down on her own madness. Mabel saw herself, disheveled and desperate, swiveling her head this way and that, twigs clinging to her wet hair, and it was an awful unraveling, as if in this act she had finally come loose and was falling. She thought of Jack in the cabin somewhere behind her, saw him as a steady light in the midst of the wilderness. She could turn now and follow her tracks back home. She hadn’t gone that far yet. But the rage had not burned itself out.

When she began to run again, she no longer searched for trails or the outlines of mountains in the black sky. Everything was strange and unknown, and she could see only a few steps in front of her. Sometimes clumps of frozen cranberries on bare branches or spindly spruce trees or the mottled trunks of paper birch were caught in an instant of light before passing back into blackness. At one point she realized that something was crashing through the trees beside her and she stopped, her heart pounding, her breath ragged.

“Faina? Is that you?” she whispered loudly. But she knew it wasn’t the child. It was something much bigger. There was no answer except the snapping of branches. She strained to see farther than she knew she could, past the steam that rose from her own body. She wasn’t sure at first, but the noise in the forest seemed to move away from her. She wanted to go home, if only she knew the way.

She had no more strength to run, and at first she wasn’t sure if she could even walk. Hot and thirsty, she scooped up snow in her gloved hand and brought it to her mouth, letting it melt down her throat. She was tempted to take off her hat, even
her coat, but she knew she could freeze to death like that. She touched a clump of snow to her forehead, then continued walking. She hoped to find a trail again, any trail, and let it take her where it would, perhaps to the mountains, perhaps to the river, maybe back home. In her fatigue she shuffled, and her boots caught on bushes and roots.

When she fell, it was so hard, so sudden, it was almost as if something had shoved her from behind. She wasn’t even able to bring her arms up in defense as she plummeted to the ground, and the blow forced the air from her lungs. At the same moment, the lantern dropped to the snow in a clatter and hiss, and when she was able to pull her face from the snow she had the fleeting thought that she had been knocked blind. She had dropped the lantern. Mabel blinked again and again, quickly and then more slowly. The blackness was so complete that, except for the touch of cool air, she could not tell whether her eyes were open or closed. She got to her hands and knees and pawed the ground until she found where the lantern had sunk into the fluffy snow. The glass was still hot to the touch, but the flame had been extinguished. Mabel stood and was so disoriented, the same black when she looked up to the sky as down to the earth, that she nearly fell again. She stood swaying.

God help me, what have I done? Tripped on my own clumsy feet. Thrown away my only light. No matches. Not a stitch of dry clothing. No shelter. No sense of direction—perhaps, she found herself thinking, no sense at all.

She wondered if she could find her own tracks. She crouched and patted the snow around her, and thought she found some indication of footprints. She followed, bent over, walking and feeling, until something snagged at her hair. She tried to stand and hit her head on a branch. When she reached out, her hands
brushed something hard. She took off her gloves and felt, the way a blind person might feel a face. It was a tree trunk. She hadn’t found her own trail but had stumbled beneath the branches of a great spruce tree. She felt the ground at her feet and was surprised to find not snow but a bed of dry needles. Perhaps this was all she could ask for, but still, with no source of warmth or dry clothes, she couldn’t possibly survive until daybreak. She sat at the base of the tree and leaned against it.

The chill approached along her hairline, damp with sweat and melted snow. It crept down the nape of her neck and up the backs of her wet legs. As it made its way beneath her clothes, along the skin of her ribs, down the curve of her spine, she knew it for what it was—a death chill, a chill that if allowed to take hold would freeze the life from her. As if to confirm her suspicions, her teeth began to chatter. It started as a small shiver along her jaw as she sucked air between her clenched teeth, but soon her whole body shook and her very bones seemed to clatter.

“Jack.” The name came as a whisper from her cold lips. “Jack?” Only a bit louder. He would never hear her. Who knew how far she was from the cabin? “Jack!” She crawled away from the tree and, when she felt herself free from its branches, stood and yelled as loud as she could.

“Jack! Jack! I’m here! Can you hear me? Jack! Help me! Help! Jack! I’m here! Please. Please.” She stopped yelling and strained to hear, holding her breath for a moment or two, but the only sound was something she didn’t believe she could possibly be hearing—the relentless tiny taps of individual snowflakes landing on her coat, on her hair and lashes, on the branches of the tree. “Oh, Jack! Please! I need you. Please.”

She yelled and cried until she was hoarse and her voice a noiseless screech. Please, Jack. Please. She crawled back beneath
the spruce tree, feeling for its branches, its wide trunk, its bed of needles. There she curled up, her clothes clinging wet and cold, her body racked with tremors, the snow settling on the branches over her head.

She woke to the breaking of twigs and the flash of fire in the darkness, and for a moment she thought she was home and had nodded off in front of the woodstove. That wasn’t right, though. It was too dark, too cold. Her body ached, and she couldn’t move. Something bound her. It was heavy and smelled familiar. Like home. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw movement in front of the fire. A figure bending over, putting something to the flames. Then breaking something over a knee, then more flames. The figure turned toward her, blocking the light.

“Mabel? Are you awake?”

She couldn’t speak. Her jaw seemed sealed, the muscles stiff. She tried to nod, but it hurt. Everything hurt.

“Mabel? It’s me—Jack. Can you hear me?” And he was beside her, kneeling, brushing her hair back from her face.

“Are you warmer? I’ve got the fire going good now. You feel it?”

Jack. She could smell him, the scent of cut wood and wool. He reached around her, pressing at her sides like he was tucking a child into bed, and she knew why she felt bound. She was wrapped in blankets. She was confused again. Was she home, in her own bed? But the air was so cold and stirring slightly, and overhead there were branches and beyond them a sky so black and full of stars. Stars? Where had they all come from, like bits of ice?

“Jack?” It was only a whisper, but he heard. He had turned his back, to go to the fire, but he returned to her side.

“Jack? Where are we?”

She heard him clear his throat, maybe the beginning of a cough, and then, “It’s all right. This is going to be all right. Let me get that fire bigger, and you’ll warm.”

When he stood, hunched beneath the branches, and moved away from her, his body blocked the light and heat of the fire. Mabel closed her eyes. She’d done something wrong. He was angry with her. It came back to her the way grief does, slowly. She remembered the child, the snow, the night.

“How did you find me?”

He was feeding the fire, building it higher and higher until she could see his face and feel its heat. “I don’t know.”

“Where are we? Are we far from home?”

“I don’t precisely know that either.” He must have expected this to frighten her, because then he said, “It’s going to be fine, Mabel. We’re just going to have to rough it here for a few more hours. Then light’ll come, and we’ll find our way.”

His voice faded. Mabel drifted, sank into the warmth, and it was like a childhood fever, dreamlike and nearly comforting.