by Rene Denfeld
She tossed and turned in endless fever dreams. Her fingers swelled until they looked like funny cartoon hands, only they weren’t funny to her. The blisters opened and splashed on the blankets. She cried with pain and fear.
When the man came back she tried to talk to him, to apologize with her swollen lips. His eyes followed her lips again, and again he was mad.
She kept yelling the words, and those words were Mommy, Daddy.
He turned and left.
B, the man scrawled on a square of chalkboard. He had brought the lamp down, and the light cast shadows everywhere. The cave was bathed in yellow.
She was awake, the furs and blankets around her cradled with sweat. She could feel the snow falling outside. She stared at the man with wide eyes.
The man checked her fingers again. He made a funny clicking sound of approval. She held her fingers up in the light as if she had never seen them before. The swelling was down, but the skin was turning a strange purple and black. It almost looked like the skin would shed off, like a lizard’s.
Maybe she was becoming something new.
The man looked at her toes under the blankets, where he had removed her socks and shoes, and for the first time she saw her toes were also fat and swollen, the skin a ghastly red and purple. The tiny toenails looked like you could just pluck them off.
He held up the chalkboard. B? She nodded weakly, and he looked pleased.
“Is your name B?” she asked, her voice a husky whisper.
He just stared at her lips. He didn’t answer.
“How did I get here? Where are my mommy and daddy?”
Mr. B shook his head.
The snow girl began to panic. Still weak with fever, she tried to rise, to fight her way past this strange man to the parents she knew were waiting just outside the cave. He got angry and pushed her down—hard. Bewildered, she fought back, flailing at him, kicking and hitting.
Again Mr. B hit her, hard, right across her face. He grabbed her arms, pinching them so bad it hurt, and she whimpered. Recoiling in shock and pain, she backed up against the mud wall in the furs and blankets and stared at him with wide eyes.
He stood, big with anger, and then jerked around and left.
The snow girl had no idea how long she spent in that fever time, her body molting a new skin—fingers that turned pink under the black, until finally she could move them again, though the tips stayed silvery with scars. Her toes kept all their nails and shrunk into pretty pink pennies.
Her cheeks stopped feeling rough in her hands, and when she slept it was deeply.
It was dark in the cave, but enough light filtered down through the rough boards above her that she had an awareness of what was day, and what was night.
Mr. B brought food, when she awoke, and an old metal bucket where she did her business. She was afraid of going potty in the bucket, but it didn’t seem to bother Mr. B. He took it matter-of-factly when he left.
Mr. B came and went down a ladder he lowered from a trapdoor. Sometimes he was wearing a vest full of pockets.
He never responded when she talked, or begged, or cried. Her words fell around her, empty and meaningless.
Sometimes she rushed at him, kicking and fussing, thinking whomever it was she wanted was right on the other side of the trapdoor. All she had to do was get up there! But she learned not to try because that was when Mr. B got angry and hurt her.
When he was gone, she yelled and screamed for what seemed like hours, until her voice got hoarse. But nothing happened. Eventually she became convinced that her parents were not just outside these walls. They had gone away. Maybe forever. Maybe they left her here because she had been bad.
She struggled to think of what she had done wrong. Was it the time she had broken the gerbil’s tail in school? She hadn’t meant to, she was just trying to pick Checkers up, and the very tip of his tail broke off in her hand—just like that. She was so scared of what she had done she had hidden that little piece of broken tail in the cage bedding, and when her teacher asked later who had hurt Checkers, she never told. She thought a lot now about that piece of gray tail, buried under the cedar shavings.
After a while she stopped talking. Mr. B, bringing her broth that tasted all greasy and wrong and tucking her in with the blankets, accepted her silence without a word.
When he left he pulled the ladder up, and he always locked the trapdoor.
Ranger Dave was tall and skinny and looked very tired. His ranger station was high on the summit of the Elk River district—nearly forty miles south of where Madison went missing.
On the way up the steep mountain road, sentinels of packed snow on the sides, Naomi passed what looked like a failed effort at a hunting lodge. The lodge roof had collapsed; the windows were empty sores. A large owl was perched on the roof—she had to do a double take to see that it was real.
The ranger station was cool and full of soft light. The clouds reflected off the windows, moving across the floor. It was like being in a cathedral, Naomi thought.
Ranger Dave stood at his windows, looking over a vast empire.
“I got your message,” he said. “Looked you up and made a few calls. Fellow in Salem said you’ve found over thirty kids.”
She nodded.
“Do you think you can find anyone?” he asked.
“Why not?” she asked with a smile.
He pointed out the window. “We’ve got a million acres of forests, glaciers, lakes, and rivers up here. At least twice a year someone gets lost—I was just out rescuing some ill-equipped rock climbers, as a matter of fact.”
Naomi noticed rows of posters near his desk, flapping in the blare of the small electric heater.
“But if I can help, I’m all ears.”
Naomi knew better. It wasn’t that she was opposed to help—it was that you never knew who could be involved. She had learned the hard way. One of her cases had involved a sex-trafficking ring led by corrupt police.
“I’d like your search reports,” she said politely.
“Of course,” he said, turning brisk. He opened a drawer.
He handed her a file. It was neatly labeled: culver, madison. Inside a picture was clipped to the front page: a blond girl with a huge smile, a pretty sweater for her first school picture.
“Tell me if you find any remains,” he said.
She nodded, sudden tears in her eyes. Images flooded her mind. Thirty kids she had found? Yes.
But not all were alive.
She turned to the missing posters on the wall. Madison was at the beginning, grinning gap-toothed. A hiker missing in a blizzard, a group of visiting rock climbers caught in whiteout conditions, a mushroom forager, and numerous other victims of poor judgment and circumstance followed her. Naomi relaxed slightly. There didn’t seem to be a pattern. Sometimes one missing child led to more—in some cases, several more.
There was one poster set in the middle from ten years before: a young woman with flashing eyes and long dark hair. Sarah is an experienced climber. She went missing during a storm.
At the very end was a faded black-and-white poster. It was a little boy lost in the woods over forty years before. Naomi stopped to read it.
Ranger Dave watched her, his eyes following the soft profile of her face.
“I leave the posters up until the bodies are found,” he said.
She turned. “I’m curious about the people who live up here.”
He seemed startled. “Well, we got some grandfathered homesteads from way back, a few hamlets in the lower reaches. It’s too cold and remote for most to stay.” He laughed. “Except for a few old codgers.”
“I met one. He owns a store not far from where Madison went missing.”
“Earl Strikes? He’s harmless.”
She glanced away. Everyone was harmless until you knew better.
She nodded out the window, which was sheeted with the reflection of millions of white-capped trees. “Can you tell me where they all live?”
“All of
them? I don’t know, to tell the truth. There is no census here.”
He was standing too close. She edged away.
Naomi glanced at the ring on his finger, and sent a warning to his face. She never would understand why tragedy brought this out in people. In pain they seemed to want to burrow into each other, completely disregarding the distance that created.
But he was just trying to hand her something from the desk.
It was a locator, strapped on a belt. “I want you to take this if you plan to search.” He gave a wry, pained smile. “I don’t want you getting lost, too.”
She took it from him, examining it suspiciously.
It was the contradiction of her life, Naomi knew, that she was suspicious and trusting, afraid and fearless—and, most importantly, often at the same time.
Ranger Dave sighed. “I won’t know where you are unless you turn it on. And I hope you won’t do that unless you are in an emergency. Because I will come running.”
That evening, comfortably stretched out in her warm motel room, the heater blasting at her side, she read Ranger Dave’s file on Madison. The ranger knew his business. The file was filled with charts and graphs. There was a terrain analysis, field sketching, and more. Naomi had seen such reports dozens of times in her career, usually in the files of detectives and search party leaders. She wondered how much good they did, or if they were just bulwarks against unreason.
She could feel his sadness between the lines:
Madison Culver is a five-year-old girl. Her parents say she likes reading, writing, and going for nature walks. She was excited to get a Christmas tree.
Field Notes: Travel barriers: west crevasse, deep snow, below-freezing temps, dressed poorly (tennis shoes).
Travel Aides: none.
Lost Subject Behavioral Profile: Madison will not wander far. She will become confused and hypothermic, possibly resulting in loss of clothes. She may have engaged in terminal burrowing, and hence is buried under the snow.
In the final stages of hypothermia, Naomi knew, victims often felt blazing hot and shed their clothes, dying naked in the snow or ice. Sometimes, for reasons no one understood—perhaps guided by the last primal part of their brains—they began to dig, and would die tunneled under the snow.
Naomi read to the last page, to the final closing narrative:
Madison most likely perished soon after getting lost last December. We have notified her parents that the cadaver dog search came back empty, but that is to be expected with predation. Sent parents a card. See State Police, Det. Winfield for their investigation.
Naomi turned to look back at the photo: small, neat, precious Madison, with a heart-shaped face, flaxen hair, and, incongruously, adorable long ears that looked stolen off an old man. Her smile beamed from the photo, radiating a sense of magic and joy.
The world could not stand to lose this child.
Naomi was dreaming again, only this time it was the big dream. She called it the big dream because it was a nightmare, actually, about the past—her terrible beginnings. It was like the story in the Bible where God created the earth and what was formless and desolate became green and alive. There was something about the word big that pulled to her with an ache beyond all understanding.
In the dream it was night and she was again a naked child running across a dark field. She was ageless, shedding her name and false self the way she had shed her clothes. The fields were wet and black and sticky. Her feet were churning, her naked knees rising, and she could feel the wind in her hair, on her cheek, and around her helpless, clutching hands.
Terror had bloomed inside her like a night rose, and she was running, running to escape.
Something was wrong. She stopped. The world was born around her, but something was missing.
She turned around and—
Naomi slammed awake, breathing hard. The sheets were tangled around her feet: she had been running again, in her sleep.
Outside a pale dawn threaded the sky with silver.
Naomi lay there, panting, feeling the dream dissipate like the morning mist outside. She had been having the big dream, off and on, ever since she had been found. But in the last few weeks, since she had decided to come back to Oregon for this case, it had been recurring with terrifyingly vivid frequency.
It was as if the closer she returned to her past—and Jerome—the more the dream brought the dark, potentially frightening promise of answers.
She got up to make herself a cup of tea with the motel coffeepot.
She sat by the window, wrapped in the sheets, and watched the sun rise above the mountains. As always, after having the dream, she tried to uncover the truth. What part was reality and what part was fantasy? Are the stories we tell ourselves true or based on what we dream them to be?
In Naomi’s earliest memory she had been running naked across a strawberry field at night towards a fire crackling at the edge of the woods. A group of migrants were in a clearing, a wet baby against a lap. A voice like a ghost came from the smoky campfire:
Dear God, look at that. Come here, honey.
Someone was wrapping her in a soft blanket, wiping her face with a warm, soothing cloth.
What are we gonna do?
They cleaned her and fed her and wrapped her in a well-worn serape that smelled of sweat and comfort, and she crouched, shivering, all eyes, by the side of the fire. There had been fireside talk, low and fretful.
It’s decided then. We’ll take her to that sheriff. Come here, sweetheart, you can lie next to me.
But Naomi was too afraid to sleep. She crouched by the dying fire until her feet grew numb, her eyes tracking the forest.
The next morning, nearly catatonic with shock, she was put in a truck, still wrapped in the serape. The wind coming through the window lifted her hair with the sweet promise of tomorrow. She had escaped. She was free.
Everything after that she remembered. Everything that came before was lost. She had blanked it all out. It was as if she was born at that moment, free of all memory. Perhaps, she thought, what had happened to her was too terrible to remember. All she had were the dreams, and their awful hints of what she had suffered.
Her entire life she had been running from terrifying shadows she could no longer see—and in escape she ran straight into life. In the years since, she had discovered the sacrament of life did not demand memory. Like a leaf that drank from the morning dew, you didn’t question the morning sunrise or the sweet taste on your mouth.
You just drank.
3
One morning the snow girl woke up and the world felt different. The fever was gone. She sat up in her nest of furs and blankets and looked around, clear-eyed. She crawled out of the bed and stood on the dirt floor.
Nothing moved beneath her: the world was placid.
Where was she? What had happened? She began to cry.
That was when she figured it out: she was different now. She felt her ribs, her hips, her legs, all the way down to her still sore feet. She looked at her new hands, all pink and newborn. Just like a storybook girl, she had awakened in a vastly different world.
The snow girl knew about fairy tales. In those tales children ate poison apples and fell asleep for years; they rubbed stones and made wishes and turned into beasts; they drank tea and became small; they fell down tunnels and woke in lands ruled by mad hatters and benevolent kings. There were children who were created from mud, rolled from dough—or born of ice.
Maybe, snow girl thought, she had fallen down a magic tunnel and arrived in this place. Maybe she was freshly created herself, rolled of snow and made of wishes.
On the mud wall in a corner she found a faint outline, as if another child had carved something here before her. The thought sent a chill through her. Her fingers traced the shape. It felt like the number 8.
She felt the shape, puzzling over it. What did it mean?
At night Mr. B brought her food and she ate and fell deeply asleep.
Sometimes, in the middle of
the night, parts of the woods visited her. Twigs entered her body, creeping inside, into the most private places. Her body belonged to the woods, and if at times the woods came and crept inside her—why that was the price you paid.
Paid for what? her heart asked.
Paid for living, her soul answered.
In the mornings she awoke and Mr. B was gone. Closing her eyes, she traced the words she had carved deeply into the walls, stopping and feeling the cleft between her legs. She held it firm and began crying, hard, to herself.
For the longest time the snow girl stayed in the cave. It might have been some kind of cellar at one time, but now it was a cave. It was small and perfect and dark.
She learned there was no such thing as time. There was only snow. It fell silently above her, sometimes lighter with spring rain, sometimes thick and heavy, but sooner or later it was there.
In the filtered dark she touched the mud walls as high as she could reach, feeling the burls of wet roots, smelling their strange, savage scent. She stood on the sleeping shelf and tried to reach the wood slats of the trapdoor above her, the boards hovering just out of reach.
She was often lonely, and cried. She huddled on the shelf, holding her knees, rocking herself—like an infant curled inside its mother. She pulled a piece of wood from the shelf and, feeling the dirt with her hands, carved words along the walls. She carved the letters deep, so she might remember. She drew pictures, too: creatures from another world, including a dog named Susie and a tall, nice man called Father.
On the dirt floor she drew a large shape called MOM. She lay down inside it, pretending it was hers. She cupped her body there, sucking her thumb like a baby.
When Mr. B came back she could hear his footsteps above her, creaking.