by Rene Denfeld
“I never have,” she admitted.
He rolled over. She could see his face in the triangle of light that came in from the heavy curtains. It was moonshine, lit with atmosphere, laced with white rain.
She paused. “And you?”
“A few lovers, here and there. But that’s not what we’re talking about, is it?”
Her quiet voice: “No.”
“Remember when we used to share our secrets?” he asked. The moon captured a handsome face, full of longing. His dark hair brushed his shoulders.
“The stones,” she laughed.
“I loved you then. I loved you no matter where you came from. No—scratch that.” His voice floated up to her. “I loved you because you came from wherever it was. It must have been a magic place, to produce you.”
Naomi felt something deeper than crying, a flush in her womb.
“Are you trying to talk your way into my bed?” she asked, her voice thick with emotion.
“No.” His voice sounded warm. “I’m trying to talk my way into your heart.”
Running—and running—the dark was a ghost behind her. Feeling her legs churning, the night sky lifting her. Looking down and seeing—
Seeing her calves, flecked with blood.
Naomi knew she was dreaming, could feel her feet paddling in her sleep, but she was inside the big dream and she knew this time the dream would end and give her the final answer she feared.
Feeling the thick mud of the field under her bare heels. Knowing she was ageless but could find a number somewhere, under the sky. Knowing she was without clothes but garments existed, to shelter the naked. Knowing she would take back her name. Knowing—
She was running alone.
She stopped, panicked, in the field. The sliver of moon showed four sides of forest. None offered solace: they might be waiting anywhere. She had been trapped in a terrible place underground. There was no light except when the monsters came, and the monsters pretended to love her but hurt her instead.
She had found escape through the bunker in the woods, pushing the brush aside over the rotting trapdoor. Come, she had whispered to the little girl following her.
Big, the little girl had whispered outside, her face filled with trust.
They began running, her hands open, grasping the air. Feeling the terror around her bigger than life, now that she had a taste of freedom. Running and running, faster in fear, seeing her naked knees lift, feet punching the dirt.
There, in the distance, the light of what might be a campfire. She had done it. She was big sister, and she had saved them both.
She slowed, breathing hard, turning to the little girl by her side. “We’re going to be safe,” she had whispered.
But the little girl was no longer there.
Naomi whipped around, her eyes searching for the woods behind her, knowing she had left the little girl behind, the most terrible panic of all lighting her body like wildfire.
Naomi screamed out loud in her sleep, bolting awake. “Sister!”
They sat together, at the edge of the bed, and she told him what had come to her in the dream. Jerome was bare except for a pair of boxer shorts.
“My little sister. I left her behind,” Naomi said, her voice breaking. “I kept running.”
“You were a child,” Jerome said. His voice was as soft as ashes in the dark.
“I chose to save myself. I was big sister. I didn’t save her.”
“Maybe someday you will,” Jerome said. “Now I know why you keep searching. You want to find her. That’s why you can’t stay in one place. It would mean giving up.”
“But I can’t find her.”
“Why not?”
“What if she is dead? She’s probably dead.” Naomi felt guilt that went to her bones. “I can save the others, but I can’t save the one that matters the most.”
Now she realized that her mind had been protecting her not from what had been done to her, but from her own terrible guilt.
Jerome reached for her hand with his one hand. They looked at their hands, clasped together, in front of them.
“What about your mother?” Jerome asked gently.
Naomi remembered the feeling of finding Baby Danforth on the bus, the same gut memory she had every time the loss was forever. There was a smell embedded in death and that smell said to her, Mother.
“I’ve always known she is dead.”
“But your sister might be alive. You need to know, Naomi.”
“I don’t know why I finally remembered now,” she said.
He kissed her hand. “Because for the first time you are not alone.”
They were silent. The silver light poured in the curtains.
“I think the world is beautiful,” Naomi said, after a while.
He could feel the change in her, like a tide shifting, and what was rising out of it was warm and huge.
Naomi felt it, too. It was want.
“I’m afraid,” she confessed, her voice quiet.
“Of what?”
“That if the box is opened I might want and want and never be filled.” She took a breath. “That you will get tired of filling it.” She paused and spoke her deepest fear, turning to his ear. “That you will use me and throw me away.”
His eyes met hers, and there was only softness in them. “That could never happen.” A smile crossed his lips. “Give your fear to me, Naomi. Say yes.”
She could feel the tears start in her eyes. It felt as though she might start crying and never stop.
Instead she unlaced her hand from his and, very deliberately, put her palm on his bare leg. The feeling that ran through her was like warm electricity. It was like pure animal pleasure. She smiled with delight. She knew in that instant that whatever had happened before, this would be different.
She lifted her face to his. She gave him that huge Naomi smile.
“Yes.”
Jerome left the next morning, having showered, his black hair damp. He picked up his hat from the stand.
Naomi was curled in the bed where they had slept together. The room was full of the warm shadows of what they had done.
He held the hat and leaned down to kiss her. “Don’t run from me anymore,” he said.
Her clear eyes turned up to him. He could see the fear in her. He wanted to stay, but he knew he had to let her make this choice. Otherwise it would never work.
“Come find me, my delight. You know where I am.” He paused. “But . . . I’m not going to wait much longer. This time you have to choose.”
16
Mr. B brought the snow girl food in the cave, watched her eat, watched her every move, inspecting her just as he opened the claws of the animals they killed, as if the inside of their tender paws would inform him. She could tell he was afraid that now she had seen the woman she would try to escape. That was why he was keeping her locked up even as it snowed.
She ate obediently, like a good girl. She smiled at him and there was no trick. He held his lantern up and she showed him her most recent carvings: the fox, the coyote, and the ducks. She led him, her small hand in his large one, to the B he had carved on the wall. She put her hand there, questioning. He smiled. Yes, he nodded. He was B.
Snow girl looked at the hard wood shelf, curled with stale blankets and furs, at the walls that had been blank, and she could see in him the child he had been, how he must have been trapped down here as she was, only he had no way to talk. She felt bad for him then. He was the one who had tried to push against the trapdoor. He had tried to escape. But who had held him?
He left her there, locking the trapdoor above her. She knew what he was doing. He was watching for the woman. He would not let the woman find her. He would kill the woman first.
Snow girl sat on the edge of the shelf. She stroked the rough, splintered wood. She remembered shapes on the ceiling, and the sight of the woman hunter, picking her way steadily to—
Her?
Snow girl saw the ice castle in her mind, the shape
s of curtains, and this cabin in the center of a world full of trees. On the wall she touched the drawing she had made of this world—the trap lines and the soaring mountains. Her finger traced, contemplatively, the line called Road.
The woman had been hiking through the ravine. On the other side lay Road. She thought about it. The woman probably came from Road.
I don’t want to die here, snow girl thought. This is not how I want the story to end.
Once upon a time there was a little girl named Madison.
Madison lived with a mom and a dad in a castle. It was far wider than the cellar, different than the cabin with its comforting rough wood floor. The castle was so clean it sparkled in the morning air.
A dog came running from the door: a dog with soft brown hair exactly the color of hot chocolate, and a wagging flag of a tail. The dog was happy to see—
Her.
Madison didn’t know what it is like to be lost. Madison didn’t know what it is like to wake up in another world. Madison was as dumb as Sylvester the donkey, wishing himself into stone.
Madison didn’t know how to be brave.
But snow girl thought she could.
Naomi lay there after Jerome left, hearing the dull, awful click of the door. Part of her wanted to run after him, screaming, Don’t leave! The other part wanted to hide under the bed. She could smell him on the sheets. She could remember his body on her, inside her. There was something so powerful there, like touching the rim of heaven.
And it spoke to the depths of hell. Could she remake this thing?
She hated to admit it to herself, but his touch had awakened more memory. That was what she had feared all along—that lovemaking would bring the horror, and the sorrow, to surface. Now it had. And she was alone.
She knew from the big dream she had been held underground. There was a smell that brought to mind rivers and forests. They were kept there, in rooms meant to look like real rooms, for purposes that made Naomi’s stomach hurt.
She and her little sister had escaped out of something like a bunker hatch and gone running through the strawberry fields, the soil wet and fertile under their feet. At the edge of a field she realized she had left her sister behind. She had turned and looked but, afraid, kept running. There was the brushy forest, a clearing in the woods, and migrants around the fire.
The migrants drove her for a long time to a sheriff they trusted. They had left in the morning, she remembered, and arrived in Opal in late afternoon. That meant they had driven for nearly a day. There had to be a reason they drove so far away from where she had escaped. Maybe they were afraid of someone close by. The farmer? The law?
It was spring in Oregon when she escaped, she thought. In Oregon there were strawberry fields in every fertile place, but especially the deep river soils that surrounded Willamette. How many strawberry farms had there been, the year she was nine? How many within a day’s drive of the sheriff and Mrs. Cottle in the town of Opal?
Lying in the bed, she imagined looking at a map. There would only be so many towns that fit that description. She could look them up. She could make a list and visit every single one. She could trace it back. She could find out if there were any missing children—or mothers—the years before and during and after when she would have been born. She could explore each and every strawberry field until she stepped in the right one and her body yelled: Here!
She could keep searching the woods around the fields until she found the concrete bunker, overgrown with brush, that led to the place that had held her and others. She could uncover what had happened to her little sister. She could find out who she had been, and how they had been taken.
Maybe then she could forgive herself. Because she could not—did not—want to imagine what had happened to the little sister she had left behind. Whoever the monsters were, they had probably caught her and taken her back underground. Naomi winced inside to think what had happened to her.
But she could not handle doing this all alone. And this wide-open-sky feeling? Could she do that every day? She imagined unraveling a rich ball of yarn of many colors, laughing at the rich shades, at the beautiful tones of forest and sky and ocean, at the very grain of a world that said all are welcome here.
Naomi had been marking her map, covering the areas she had searched in a grid pattern.
But over breakfast she decided to think about it from the perspective of a trapper. Walter Hallsetter had lived in the claim. He would have had to cut the wood for a cabin, perhaps with the help of other old-timers. Or maybe the cabin was already there. In either event it would have been somewhat accessible to the store or the road.
Pushing her oatmeal aside, she drew a circle for the location of the Strikes store, studying the distance between it and the circle where Madison went missing. As the crow flies, she thought. Her pencil moved and drew a line from the Strikes store to the edge of the Hallsetter claim. The cabin was most likely in the thick forests to the north—hiking distance to the store, hidden from all, and yet also, she noticed, hiking distance from where Madison went missing.
She thought of Walter Hallsetter bringing furs to the father of Earl Strikes. They would have had no way of knowing, up in the mountains, who he was or why he was there—no way of knowing of his past arrests. She wondered if he had ever met justice, or if any of us do.
This time she would try something new. She would park at the Strikes store and start from there.
“Miss! Miss!”
Earl Strikes was calling to her as she got out of her car in the early morning cold, preparing to set out on foot.
She turned to the old man, a little impatient. He was on his front porch, checking the buttons of his pants. “Don’t leave, miss!”
“What is it, Earl?” she asked, stepping closer.
“I remembered sumpin’.”
At the porch steps she could see the dew collected on his whiskers.
“You asked about them Murphy brothers, and I could tell you were looking at what might be different, right?” His voice was excited. “Like who might be buying something they hadn’t bought before.”
“Yes,” Naomi said calmly, waiting.
“I got it for you, then! It’s that trapper.”
In a flash Naomi remembered the man in the store, the smell of fresh blood.
“What about him?”
“He’s been buying more food. I hadn’t really noticed, guess I just thought he was hungry. But not long ago he started buying not one but two of them frozen dinners. He ain’t never done that before!”
“A treat,” Naomi said.
“Exactly.” Earl nodded. “That’s why we stock ’em—it’s a real nice treat.”
“You don’t know where his cabin is.”
“No—but you got me thinking on that, too. From what you asked about old Walter. I never thought of it before, but I bet he’s on the same claim.”
“That way.” Naomi turned and pointed.
“Yup, sure enough.”
“Thank you, Earl.”
Naomi felt very small, hiking through this endless dark forest. Fresh snow dusted the ground.
The forest here felt as ancient as the Russian fairy tales Madison loved, dark and mysterious. She was thankful for the ridges and openings where she could see the wide sky. She stopped, high on a ridge, and saw all around her nothing but forest, unfolding for miles and miles.
Her heart twisted. How would she find Madison in all of these woods?
In the afternoon she stopped for a break. It was time to turn around.
She found a black rock under a grove of young cedars, and brushed off the snow to sit down. The rock felt curiously warm.
Sometimes nature makes a miracle. Who had said that? Jerome. About the complex, magical way gems are formed out of rock, water, and pressure. The same was true about evil, she knew. It was more elemental than people like to think.
She opened her backpack and took out a small thermos. The smell of hot coffee filled the air.
It
was then she noticed, right in front of her, a tiny thread tied to a branch.
She became very still. The thread was pink and not more than an inch long. It had been neatly tied around a thin twig.
It was right at the height of a little girl.
Naomi jumped off the rock quickly and began carefully exploring every bush and tree nearby, working in a circle.
She soon found two more threads, hidden in low places, one after the other. Madison’s closet came to mind, with the rows of bright sweaters pulled at the cuffs.
There was no way to know how old the threads were, or when they had been tied. But they told her one important fact: Madison had not died in the woods. This was too far from where she was lost for her to have made it here by herself. Madison had been alive when they were tied, and whether she knew it or not she was trying to be found.
Naomi stopped, thinking hard. The threads had been tied in these spots deliberately. They formed a line leading farther into the dark forest.
Of course. Madison had been tying threads in the forest to create a path, like one littered with crumbs, right out of a fairy tale. They would lead to where she was being held captive.
Naomi felt a rush of excitement. She pulled her pack tighter and filled her lungs. Her face was pure joy, and she prepared to strike on.
But then she paused.
She didn’t know what lay ahead. She might be trapped in the woods after dark, and if she got caught or hurt, she could not help Madison. She would return to the motel and call Ranger Dave. She would ask him to come up with her and follow this magic trail to wherever it led, as soon as dawn cracked the sky.
Mr. B had been watching, and waiting, for the woman hunter. He had spent that morning along the ridge above the ravine where she had crossed before. In the afternoon he had turned back in the direction of the lower elevations towards the store, checking the perimeters of the land.
He saw the woman in a clearing below him. She was moving rapidly near a large black rock, looking through bushes. She looked excited. She appeared ready to run into the forest to him, but then she stopped suddenly, as if caught with an idea.