The Snow Child: A Novel (47 page)

“But… is it snowing?” and she heard someone laugh beside her.

“Goodness no, dear.” It was Esther. “Just cottonwood seeds. But it does look like snow, doesn’t it?”

The air was filled with the white down. Some floated up and over the trees, while other seeds drifted lazily to the ground. Faina looked at Mabel through the falling white and held up a hand, a little wave, like when she was a child.

“They’re married?” Mabel whispered.

“Yes, they are,” Jack said.

T
he night was cool and pale blue, and Faina lay naked atop the wedding quilt. She was on her side, her long legs askew, one arm beneath her head, the other curved below the slight round of her belly. Garrett took off his suit jacket. His white button-up shirt was clammy with sweat and his feet ached from the dress shoes he had worn all day. He undressed and left his clothes on the rough-cut plank floor. As he walked toward the bed, he let his hand skim across the wedding gown where it had been thrown over a chair, as if a giant wild bird had shrugged off its skin and cast it aside. After the ceremony, as they ate fire-grilled salmon, potato salad, and an extravagant white cake with white frosting and candied rose petals, as the voices ebbed and flowed and the sun danced off glasses of homemade elderflower wine, again and again Garrett let his hands touch the small of Faina’s back where the feathers lay flat against the silk, and he knew they had come from the swan.

Aren’t you cold? Garrett whispered as he lay beside her. She shook her head and slid her arm around his neck to kiss him. Overhead, moths fluttered along the log purlins of the roof
frame and a few scattered stars shone even in the gloaming. It could rain, the bugs could be ferocious, he had told her, but she insisted on sleeping in their unfinished cabin.

It’s our home, she had said. So he hauled their wedding bed to the cabin, along with the quilt his mother had sewed for them and the feather pillows and soft sheets they had been given as wedding gifts.

Faina’s fingertips grazed his bare arm, and she laughed.

But you are cold. Your skin is prickly.

Garrett shrugged.

It’s OK. I won’t freeze.

As they made love beneath the summer night sky, he tried not to think about the child in her womb or their raw gasps and sighs traveling across the land. He wanted only to think of her.

During the next weeks, as Jack and Garrett worked beneath the endless sun to put the roof on the cabin, then add the door and windows and woodstove and cupboards, Faina disappeared into the trees, her dog trotting beside her. She was gone for hours, sometimes the entire day, and Garrett did not know what to make of it. He politely dismissed invitations to Jack and Mabel’s for dinner, not wanting them to know how rarely Faina joined him for meals. He prepared his food alone in the cabin, often nothing more than a can of beans heated atop the woodstove. One night Garrett sat up, waiting for her to return, until it was nearly morning. No longer open to the night sky, the cabin was dim and stifling, but he wouldn’t let himself prowl outside like a restless animal. She would come home.

Where do you go?

When?

Every day. Nights, too. I thought you wanted to be here, with me, in our home.

I do.

So?

But she only blinked her white eyelashes at him and patted the dog. Garrett was reminded of that day at the frozen lake when he had wanted to curse and kick the ground and fight back but instead could only dumbly follow her.

We love each other, don’t we?

He didn’t want his voice to whine.

She came to where he sat, held his face up to her and kissed him hard. That night she stayed.

When harvest came, Garrett spent long days in the fields and could no longer keep track of where she was. After weeks of rain the sky finally cleared, and Jack and Garrett worked several nights straight through to cut the hay. He sat in a stupor at Jack’s table, eating a breakfast of pancakes, bacon, and fried eggs, and wondered if Faina ever slept alone in the cabin as he had.

It was the end of September, and cold. He smelled burning wood one evening as he walked the wagon trail. As he got closer, he saw smoke rising from their chimney, and then Faina was standing in the doorway, her hands on her swollen belly. Garrett had never seen anything so welcoming.

You’re home, he said.

So are you.

Inside, rows of large birch baskets crowded the floor, each filled to overflowing.

What’s all this?

I, too, have been working, she said with a small smile at her lips.

She led him through the rows of baskets and paused to put a leaf to his nose, a berry to his lips. Some he knew—Eskimo potato root, blueberries, tender spruce tips. A few of the plants he had seen before but did not know their names; others, like the mushrooms and lichens, he would have been afraid to eat if he came across them in the woods. He trusted her, though, and carried her baskets up into the tall-legged log cache he had built.

Still she returned to the forest with her canvas pack or her birch baskets. She wore a long wool skirt and full-cut blouse Mabel had sewed for her, and she held the small of her back against the weight of her growing belly. She brought home grayling and salmon, grouse and rabbits, which she skinned and cleaned and dried in strips on racks by the shore of the Wolverine River, where the wind kept away the flies. Sometimes she smoldered a green alder fire beneath the racks to lightly smoke the meat.

Each night, as the windowpanes turned darker with the coming winter, she was home. She served Garrett strange-smelling soups and bowls of nameless mush. It took time to get used to her cooking. Fried wild mushrooms and smoked salmon for breakfast. For dinner, grouse soup with spruce tips and ribbons of wet green that Garrett could not identify; rendered bear fat and crowberries for dessert. His mother noticed he had lost weight and smelled of smoked meat and wild plants. She wanted to know what Faina was feeding him, but he would
pat his stomach and tell her he was faring fine on her meals. Then he would sneak a few of his mother’s buttery biscuits or cookies, and when she forced several jars of sweet jam on him, he did not refuse.

Faina? Faina? Where are you?

Garrett held his lantern against the winter night. He had woken and, alarmed, realized she wasn’t in bed beside him. It was a blustery snowfall, the first of the year, but it looked like it would stick. He stood shivering in his boots, bare legs, and wool coat.

Faina?

Here, Garrett. And he spotted her, down by the river shore.

What are you doing out here? It’s the middle of the night.

It’s snowing.

I know. You’ll catch cold. Come inside.

He turned the lantern in her direction and saw that she was wearing only her cotton slip, which billowed around her in the wind and snow.

Yes. Yes. I’ll come inside for you.

In the cabin, Garrett set the lantern on the table and put another log in the woodstove. Faina remained just outside the doorframe, her head thrown back. Garrett took her by a hand and pulled her inside, closing the door behind them. She grinned at him, her face damp from the snow, and he wiped the wetness from her cheeks with his palm.

Here, she said, and put his hand to her swollen belly. There. Do you feel it?

She pressed his hand more firmly into her, and something pushed back.

Was that…?

She grinned again and nodded. He kept his hand there and
Faina’s belly moved in a swell, as if the unborn baby were turning a somersault.

Garrett wasn’t prepared for the screaming. Faina’s voice had always been clear and serene, like a glacier pond, but now it was ripped from her throat in a beastly, tortured growl. He went again and again to the curtained-off door, but Jack put a hand on his shoulder.

“It’s no place for you.”

“Is she all right? What’s happening in there?”

Jack looked tired and old, older than he ever had, but he was calm.

“It’s never easy.”

“I want to see her.”

Just then Esther pushed aside the curtain, and Garrett could only stare at the blood covering his mother’s hands and arms all the way up to the elbows, like she’d been butchering a moose.

“We need more rags.”

“Is she OK? Is the baby OK?”

“I said more rags,” and she turned back to the room where Faina lay on their bed. Before the curtain fell closed, Garrett caught a glimpse of her legs, her bare feet in the air, and blood, everywhere blood.