White Bird in a Blizzard

by Laura Kasischke

  I’m taking the pink dress, three sizes too large, that I wore to the winter formal with Phil. I’ve been saving it for years, like a memory, and I don’t want to leave it here.

  When the suitcase is full, I get another out of the guest room, then I go to my parents’ room and open my mother’s closet.

  It is entirely empty.

  I look at the emptiness a long time, and try to see into it. I try to see past it. The way Mrs. Hillman looks into the vast whiteness in front of her all day, stepping carefully into the snow on the other side of herself, sniffing the air as she goes.

  But the longer I stare, the more empty the emptiness becomes, and brighter. It’s as if I’ve opened a closet into pure space—flat, but cavernous, and shiny—as if, if I stepped into it, I could fall into the future forever. I stare, and don’t breathe, and step closer, looking harder, until I think I recognize a face in there. A woman emerging. A grown woman with her mouth open, wearing a white scarf, a halo of light in her hair.

  I gasp, leaning in. “Mom?” I say before I realize she is only my reflection. There’s a mirror in the back of my mother’s closet, and nothing else.

  When I hear my father behind me, I turn around—

  I had no idea he was home. He’s wearing a suit. His eyes are dark and narrow. Why isn’t he at work?

  “What are you looking for?” he asks.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  “Well,” he says, “you found it.”

  He goes back down the stairs, and the door closes behind him with a dry, sucking sound.

  WHEN MY FATHER COMES HOME AGAIN, IT’S FIVE P.M. HE doesn’t say hello. I stay upstairs. We don’t have dinner together. May doesn’t come over. My father falls asleep in one of the green chairs in the living room, and I come downstairs to find him in it. He looks as stiff as a crossing guard, snoring. I go back upstairs.

  It was a gray afternoon, but as the sun goes down tonight it lights up the horizon, dipping below the sky’s steel wool in an angry frown. From my bedroom window I watch it sink into the earth, making a black silhouette of Phil and Mrs. Hillman’s house. I think of them inside it, seeing and unseeing, sitting down to dinner.

  A boyfriend. I remember. She told Detective Scieziesciez that my mother had a boyfriend.

  And I remember calling them the Saturday after my mother disappeared, how Mrs. Hillman said, “I’m sorry to hear your mother left, but, no, I didn’t see anything unusual at your house yesterday.”

  She’d been gone only one day. I said to Mrs. Hillman, “I’m sure she’ll be back soon, but we’re going to the police station this afternoon to make a report.”

  There was silence on the other end of the phone.

  Then Mrs. Hillman said, “Did you get the cookies I sent to school yesterday with Phil?”

  I thought: Cookies? There was a paper plate of fuzzy yellow stars covered with plastic wrap on the kitchen counter. I thought they were left over from Christmas. But they did have the look of cookies made by the blind, I realized then. How could Mrs. Hillman know what a star looked like, or what color one was?

  “Yes,” I said. “Thank you. Yes.”

  “Here’s Phil,” Mrs. Hillman said, handing over the phone.

  “Hello?” He sounded strange, and farther away than next door.

  I said, “Why weren’t you in school yesterday?” before I remembered Mrs. Hillman saying she’d sent him to school with the cookies that were in our kitchen now. Apparently, she didn’t know he wasn’t there.

  “I went to the mall,” he said. “I bought you a present.” He was whispering, and he sounded fatigued, maybe a little resentful. “It’s our anniversary,” he said. “Didn’t you remember?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Sure.” But it threw me. Phil and I hadn’t been romantic for quite a while, and I hadn’t remembered our anniversary or bought him a present, and I couldn’t imagine what he could have bought me. A Barbie doll wearing a pink dress like the one I’d worn to the Winter Formal on our first date came to mind. She had synthetic hair and pins stuck into her chest.

  “That’s nice,” I said, trying to sound grateful. “I’d have called sooner, but we were trying not to tie up the phone. My mother’s gone.”

  “She’ll be back,” Phil said flatly, but he was still whispering.

  “How did these cookies get here?” I was looking at them. I’d wandered into the kitchen with the phone receiver at my ear. The cookies were smudged under the plastic wrap. Blurred. Stars. They did not look edible. The one in the center was cracked in half.

  “I brought them over to your mother,” he said. “Yesterday. I brought them over and dropped them off,” he said. “Then I went to the mall to buy your present.”

  I heard my father coming down the stairs. “Kat,” he said, “get off the phone right now. We have to keep the line open.”

  I watch their house from my bedroom window until the sun sets, seeming to breathe fire for a while in the bare January trees before it settles its flaming sword into the west edge of Garden Heights.

  And I remember the present he gave me, the one he said he’d gone to the mall that day to buy. It was a tape. The Top 15 Dance Hits of 1985. At the time, I’d thought it was either the most or least thoughtful present he could have come up with. Either he’d considered long and hard what to buy me, spent all day wandering through the mall, worrying, and then he’d remembered our first date, all that dancing, the disc jockey hired by the high school to play the theme from Miami Vice over and over in the dark—or, it had been the quickest and easiest thing to reach, hundreds of them on display near the cash register, waiting.

  “I hope you like that,” Phil said as I turned it over in my hand. He hadn’t wrapped it. When I looked up at him, he shrugged.

  But I didn’t like it. I started to listen to it one day on the tape player in my mother’s station wagon, but I’d seen the MTV videos for every one of the songs, and those videos were what I saw—models dancing in bikinis, slippery images of thin women moving their hips in nervous splices on the television set in our living room—not Phil. Not me. And the music seemed slippery, celluloid, as well. All the instruments electronic, all the voices filtered through a computer. It made me feel nostalgic already for 1985, which had only been over for a few weeks, listening to Glenn Frey sing “The Heat Is On,” and it made me wonder how simple, how naive, how faded and unrecognizable we’d seem to ourselves in fifty years, looking back at those videos, considering the songs we’d listened to and liked. Our lost, bad taste in clothes and music betraying our innocence. Our celebrities dead in accidents we had no idea they’d have. Our current events turned into trivia questions: What was “New Wave”? What British rock band was “Walking on Sunshine” in the summer of 1985?

  We’d keep looking back at ourselves in those shoes with that hair and shake our heads at how goofy we were, how sure we were of something that turned out to be nothing.

  Then, the sky turns black, but clear, and now the stars blink on, one by one by one, as if God is moving through the halls of heaven flipping the light switches as he goes.

  I stand at the window a long time in a white nightgown, and the night gets blacker, until I can no longer see outside, until the window is just a reflection of my bedroom, of my white gown. The furnace blows warm air into the room, and there is the smell of crayons melting, or the smell of my mother’s perfume in early summer, sun shining on her bare arms as she drove me home from school.

  The smell of hummingbirds and butterflies baking in a dish at a low temperature for a long time.

  Eau-de-Vie.

  The numbers on my clock radio flip themselves forward without hesitation, with the determination of mechanical things.

  When 11:59 flips into 12:00, it’s a new day.

  1:00 A.M.

  2:00 A.M.

  3:00 A.M.

  4:00 A.M.

  5:00 A.M.

  6:00 A.M.

  When I hear the first winter birds of morning start to sing, I start down t
he stairs again.

  “KAT.”

  I hear her.

  I can’t see the sun coming up—my eyes are closed—but I feel it breaking out of the ground, tearing the east edge of the earth to pieces, rising under the suburb, rocking our house—big fists breaking through the basement floor, shuddering through the concrete, a great volcanic eruption through the drain hole, lava and sparks spewing, something giving birth, or being born.

  “Kat.”

  She’s there. I finally know where. I start down the stairs, toward the sound of my name called, called in that familiar voice that has been muffled for so long—as if I’d been hearing it through a wall of flesh and blood, a body separating us, from which I’ve just emerged.

  Now, it’s like radiance calling my name, everywhere at once.

  I follow it through the hallway to the living room, where my father’s still asleep in the green-winged chair. There’s something he’s stayed here all night to guard, but his eyes are shut, head fallen backward, blankly facing heaven, or the ceiling, or the loosening dark above Garden Heights. His face is a mask softened by sleep. Still, out of his mouth there is a roaring, human sound, threatening and deep, as if he’s kept a furnace hidden in his chest for years. I pause there, and the snoring expands.

  It thunders through the living room. It shakes the walls. A hundred hooves. A hundred doves. It’s kettledrums, and chariots, and war, and it blows the curtains open, and through them I can see the way the lawn rolls with whiteness away from the house, rolls toward the street, snow curling back into the sky, the present rushing into the past, and I imagine Phil, barefoot, running across it, running home, running away from my father shouting, “Go. You coward. You boy.”

  And his mother, waiting there for him. She must have known—

  Soft stars exploding behind her eyes.

  She must have called my father at his office.

  “Mr. Connors. This is Mrs. Hillman.”

  “Yes? Mrs. Hillman? What—”

  “Your wife has company this afternoon. I think you should go home, that you should see.”

  It was a Friday. He had nothing else to do.

  I go to the top of the basement stairs, and stand, and listen for a long time. I listen until I hear the whole world down there. The howling dogs, and wings, and the whirring of machines, and wind, and screaming, blunt objects, the buzzing of bees, rifle shots, and a million mothers calling their children with music like rivers on fire.

  I listen to it until my whole body becomes an ear. My hair. My breath. My teeth. And then I follow her voice—her voice, which rises out of all the other noise, the voice that named me, the first voice I ever heard, the voice that called me out of her skin into this world.

  Down the stairs to the basement. Past the pool table. The vinyl couch. The finished part. The canary’s empty cage—just a tuft of pale molt leftover, a fistful of echo, or weather.

  “Kat.”

  And then she’s screaming me past the mute witnesses of washer and dryer, water and fire, past those appliances of silence, of politeness, and convenience, saved time—farther into the unfinished part.

  Open this.

  Open this.

  “What?” I ask her. “What? The freezer’s locked.”

  “But you know the combination,” she says. “You’ve always known.”

  I find my way to the Coldspot and stand barefoot before it. A trunk of infinity. Stuffed with sparks and talismans and dreams. A mind made out of nothing but love, fear, space, saying my name, creating creation.

  Atoms, radio noise, God, and the matter of stars, all waiting to be bathed in brilliance, to reveal their secrets in sudden, stunning light.

  I try to open it. I grip the top of the freezer, lock my knees, hold my breath and strain, but it won’t open.

  So I get down on my knees and feel the half-inch of frost and space where I can slip my fingers into it, until I find what’s holding it closed. There’s a lock snapped through a hole that’s been drilled in the handle, and the lock has been slipped into the freezer.

  I pull it around and out, examine it in my hand—though I don’t need to see it to know it’s the combination lock my father used to keep on his file cabinet, the one in which he kept his magazines. 36–24–35.

  It opens simply in my hand—a needle dropping into a stack of hay.

  I don’t move. I listen.

  And then the gray matter of January begins to melt all around me. “Here’s Mama,” she says, and the vowels rise in two frozen zeroes above the freezer, swallow each other in midair.

  How? For the rest of my life, I’ll be asked how, and this is what I’ll say:

  Like any other daughter, I simply came to this darkness barefoot, and mortal, and just like her, when I heard her call my name to the silence, which wasn’t silent any longer. And then—

  I lifted its lid, looked inside myself, and there my mother was.

  About the Author

  LAURA KASISCHKE is the author of several novels and collections of poetry. Her numerous awards include the Alice Fay DiCastagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Bobst Award for Emerging Writers. She lives in Chelsea, Michigan.