The Snow Child

  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 ba
ck 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.

  “Can you sit up?” Jack held a canteen. She wondered how long she had slept. Beyond the fire it was still dark.

  “I think so.” He grasped her around the shoulders and helped her to sit. When she reached for the canteen, the blanket fell open to reveal her bare arm. She was naked.

  “Careful. Don’t let that loose,” he said.

  “My clothing? Why on earth…”

  He pointed toward the fire where her dress hung from a branch, along with her undergarments. Closer to the fire, her boots were propped open near the flames.

  “There was no other way,” he said, almost as if apologizing.

  She tried not to gulp the water, but to take small sips. “Thank you.”

  “Sometimes I could hear you calling my name,” he said. “I thought I heard you in the brush, but it was just a cow moose and her calf. Then I tripped over the lantern, and I knew you had to be nearby.”

  Jack went to the fire. He took down her dress and shook it out.

  “It stopped snowing,” he said as he crawled under the tree with her. He groaned softly as he leaned against the trunk and put his arm around her. She thought of his barely mended back. “Cleared off and got cold. You were soaked through.”

  Mabel leaned her head against his chest. “How does she do it?”

  He didn’t answer at first, and Mabel wondered if he understood her question.

  “She’s got something different about her,” he said finally. “She might not be a snow fairy, but she knows this land. Knows it better than anyone I’ve ever met.”

  She cringed at the words “snow fairy,” but knew there was no malice in it.

  “I can’t imagine, spending every night out here. How could you let her… I’m not angry anymore. It’s not that. But why didn’t you worry about her? She’s just a little child.”

  He kept his eyes to the campfire. “When she didn’t come back in the spring, I went up to the mountains looking for her. I was sick with worry. I thought I’d made a terrible mistake, and that we’d lost her.”

  “I can’t bear the thought of something happening to her,” Mabel said. “She may be lovely and brave and strong, but she’s just a little girl. And with her father dead… she’s out here all alone. If something were to happen to her, we would be to blame, wouldn’t we?”

  Jack nodded. He put his arms around her again. “It’s true,” he said.

  “I just don’t think I could stand it. Not again. Not after…” She expected Jack to shush her, to pull away, to go back to the fire, but he didn’t.

  “I’ve always regretted that I didn’t do more,” she said. “Not that we could have saved that one. But that I didn’t do more. That I didn’t have courage enough to hold our baby and see it for what it was.”

  She turned to look up into his face.

  “Jack. I know it’s been so long. My God, ten years now. But tell me that you said a proper goodbye. Tell me you said a prayer over its grave. Please tell me that.”

  “His.”

  “What?”

  “His grave. It was a little boy. And before I laid him in the ground, I named him Joseph Maurice.”

  Mabel laughed out loud.

  “Joseph Maurice,” she whispered. It was a name of contention, the two names that would have shocked both their families—two great-grandfathers, one on each side, each a black sheep in his own right. “Joseph Maurice.”

  “Is that all right?”

  She nodded.

  “Did you say a prayer?”

  “Of course,” and he sounded hurt that she had asked.

  “What did you say? Do you remember?”

  “I prayed for God to take our tiny babe into his arms and cradle him as we would have, to rock him and love him and keep him safe.”

  Mabel let out a sob and hugged Jack with her bare arms. He tucked the blanket around her and they held each other.

  “A boy? Are you certain?”

  “I’m pretty sure, Mabel.”

  “Curious, isn’t it? All that time the baby was inside me, tossing and turning, sharing my blood, and I thought it was a girl. But it wasn’t. It was a little boy. Where did you bury him?”

  “In the orchard, down by the creek.”

  She knew exactly where. It was the place they had first kissed, had first held each other as lovers.

  “I should have known. I looked for it because I realized I hadn’t said goodbye.”

  “I would have told you.”

  “I know. We are fools sometimes, aren’t we?”

  Jack got up to feed the fire, and when it was burning well he sat again with Mabel under the tree.

  “Are you warm enough?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But won’t you come in with me?”

  “I’ll only make you cold.”

  She insisted, helping him strip out of his damp clothes and opening her blankets to him. He did bring in cold air, at first, and the coarse wool of his long underwear rubbed against her bare skin, but she burrowed more tightly against him. Up and down her body, she felt his leanness, how age had pared back his muscles and left loosening skin and smooth bone, but his hold was still firm. She rested her head on his chest and watched the fire flare and send sparks up into the cold night sky.

  CHAPTER 30

  Mabel would reduce the child to the shabby clothes and slight frame of a flesh-and-blood orphan, and it pained Jack to watch. Gone was Mabel’s wonder and awe. In her eyes Faina was no longer a snow fairy, but an abandoned little girl with a dead mother and father. A feral child who needed a bath.

  “We should inquire about schooling in town,” she said just days after Jack had told her the truth. “I understand the territorial government has assigned a new teacher to the area. Students meet in the basement of the boardinghouse. We’d have to take her by wagon each morning, or she could stay there for several days at a time.”

  “Mabel?”

  “Don’t look at me like that. She’ll survive. If she can spend months alone in the wilderness, she can certainly stay a few nights in town.”

  “I just don’t know if…”

  “And those clothes. I’ll get some fabric and sew her some new dresses. And some real shoes. She won’t need those moccasins anymore.”

  But the child was not so easily tamed.

  I don’t want to, she said when Mabel showed her to the tub of hot water.

  Look at yourself, child. Your hair is a mess. You’re filthy.

  Mabel pulled at the ragged sleeve of the child’s cotton dress.

  This needs to be washed, maybe just thrown out. I’m making several new dresses for you.

  The child backed toward the door. Mabel grabbed her by the wrist, but Faina yanked it free.

  “Mabel,” Jack said, “let the child go.”

  The girl was gone for days, and when she returned she was skittish, but Mabel took no heed. She pinched at the girl’s clothing and hair, and asked if she had ever gone to school, ever looked at a book. With each prying question, the child took another step back. We’re going to lose her, he wanted to tell Mabel.

  Jack wasn’t one to believe in fairy-tale maidens made of snow. Yet Faina was extraordinary. Vast mountain ranges and unending wilderness, sky and ice. You couldn’t hold her too close or know her mind. Perhaps it was so with all children. Certainly he and Mabel hadn
’t formed into the molds their parents had set for them.

  It was something more, though. Nothing tethered Faina to them. She could vanish, never return, and who was to say she had ever been loved by them?

  No, the child said.

  Faina’s eyes darted from Mabel to Jack, and in the quick blue he saw that she was afraid.

  I will no longer allow you to live like an animal, Mabel said. Her movements were sharp around the kitchen table as she stacked dishes, gathered leftovers. The girl watched, a wild bird with its heart jumping in its chest.

  Starting right now, you will stay here with us. No more running off into the trees, gone for days on end. This will be your home. With us.

  No, the child said again, more forcefully.

  Jack waited for her to fly away.

  “Please, Mabel. Can we talk about this later?”

  “Look at her. Will you just look at her? We’ve neglected her. She needs a clean home, an education.”

  “Not in front of the child.”

  “So we let her go back into the wilderness tonight? And the next, and the next? How will she find her way in this world if all she knows is the woods?”

  As far as Jack could see, the girl found her way fine, but it was senseless to argue.

  “Why?” Mabel pleaded to him. “Why would she want to stay out there, alone and cold? Doesn’t she know we would treat her kindly?”

  So that was it. Beneath her irritation and desire to control was love and hurt.

  “It’s not that,” Jack said. “She belongs out there. Can’t you see that? It’s her home.”

  He reached up to Mabel, kept her from picking up a bowl. He took her hands in his. Her fingers were slender and lovely, and he rubbed his thumbs along them. How well he knew those hands.

  “I’m trying, Jack. I am. But it is simply unfathomable to me. She chooses to live in dirt and blood and freezing cold, tearing apart wild animals to eat. With us she would be warm and safe and loved.”