by Laura Furman
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. T
he 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.
“You’ll help me?”
“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.”