by Rene Denfeld
Mick Murphy eagerly offered to take her around to all the abandoned gold mines he knew about, and his older brothers elbowed him in the ribs, joshing him about his shaft until he turned scarlet.
During all the laughter Naomi looked around. The bedrooms all seemed to wander off this uneven main room. She would have to find a way to search the home.
There was a shuffling noise. A woman came out of one of the bedrooms. She was wearing a dirty nightgown, her feet bare. Her russet hair was frowsy, and there was something immediately recognizable in her face.
“This is my daughter Samantha,” the old woman said, beckoning the woman forward. Samantha, far larger than her mother, sat down on her lap and cuddled her face into her mother’s iron-colored hair.
Naomi studied the shapeless woman, who looked at her with shy eyes. The mother answered the question in Naomi’s face.
“Samantha was born with the cord around her neck—she’s afflicted.”
“Kind of our big baby sister, forever,” Patrick Murphy said, with love in his voice.
Samantha smiled. Her face was lined with age, but her eyes on Naomi were as curious as a child’s.
In her hand she clutched a toy—a cheap doll.
I shouldn’t have had that last beer, Naomi thought, weaving a bit out of the house many hours later. She wasn’t accustomed to drinking, especially not while working, and she was always working. She was annoyed at herself—the way the alcohol seemed to pour readily down her throat at this particular address.
She reconstructed the evening in her mind while climbing in the backseat of her car. No way should she drive now. She left a window open a tiny crack—not large enough to thread open but enough for fresh air—and locked all the doors.
The Murphy household seemed to exist in one of those places that floated beyond all else. The family had told wild, arcane, and involved jokes, cracking up long before the punch line (was there a punch line?). The mother had drunk most of a bottle of wine before heaving herself up to cook a scramble, as she called it—and then in the middle of that suddenly opened a window and began shouting raw poetry into the woods.
None of it made any sense.
Finally Naomi had excused herself to use their ancient pull-chain toilet, and found a stuffed skunk on the back. Apparently they had waited in silence to hear her shriek, and were both gratified and disappointed when she didn’t. On her return Patrick told her this was the gift their late father had given their mother for their twentieth anniversary. At this point Naomi didn’t know whom or what to believe—and didn’t much care.
Joining the party again, she had another beer and ate some of the rather tasty scramble, which was made out of ordinary foods like eggs and potato. She tried to find an excuse to search the place, and ended up wandering the bookshelves. She already knew, in her increasingly foggy state, that if the Murphy clan had the child she was not hidden here.
The reason was simple. The home didn’t have a cellar.
Finally she just went and looked in all the rooms, not even asking, and the family didn’t seem to notice, they were carrying on so. In one room she discovered the sleeping Samantha, the doll from the Strikes store tucked at her cheek.
She had called it a night, though they still seemed to be hooting and hollering inside. The thought of Mick’s red cheeks and ready laugh filled her mind.
She fell asleep, her knees pressed against the back of the passenger seat. It was her old habit when sleeping on the road: if anyone disturbed the car it would transmit down the seat, and she would snap to.
In a few hours, she woke up. Under a full moon, the Murphy homestead looked covered in white mist. There had been a quiet closing of a door, a soft cough, which had instantly awakened her. She sat up and looked out her window to see Patrick and Mick Murphy, guns over their shoulders, lights in hand, setting out into the forest.
She sensed the truth: they were poachers, and probably—there was never a way to promise—nothing more.
Naomi knew from experience that much of her work involved false leads and blind alleys. The ball of yarn often took time to unravel, and there were many dead ends. Much of her investigation was just plain diligence. The hard part was in knowing when to give up a lead and try something else.
Like whether she should keep searching the claims.
The Hallsetter claim was high above where Madison went missing, though Naomi noticed it cut a deep swath down the rugged mountains. This time no other road was cut into the forest. Naomi located the spot where the claim touched the blacktop and was greeted by a wall of forbidding trees.
She hiked in and soon stood over the same ravine that wound down to where Madison had become lost. It is in the middle of nowhere where we often find someplace, Naomi thought, looking at a slate blue sky over a shattered landscape: trees poking up hills, crags that plummeted to dizzying drops.
Here and there the mountains smoothed into deceptively sedate-looking valleys. Naomi knew wading in those valleys would mean snow up to her waist. Any treeless area also meant a lack of ground, and a lack of ground meant you could be walking on a snow-hidden glacier. One false step and you could fall into a crevasse. It would be a terrible way to be lost, broken-legged and screaming all the way down.
She thought of Walter Hallsetter, how he had escaped up here fifty years before after molesting boys. She didn’t imagine his desires had abandoned him. He would have been looking for other opportunities. Had he found them?
Naomi often wondered how she had been abducted. Had she been an infant taken from a distracted mother? Or had it been plotted? Had she been born captive, or taken with her mother? The worst fear was something she had witnessed: a girl-child for sale.
Maybe she would never know. All she knew was that evil—like the Devil’s District—was alchemy built on opportunity. Some went searching for it. Others just waited. Either way, it was bound to happen.
She sighed and carefully reviewed the ravine, finding the point below her where she could cross.
Righting her pack, she began. It was snowing lightly.
Far above her, standing on the high ridges, Mr. B watched Naomi.
The girl stood next to him.
A woman was below them, crossing the ravine, a tiny form in a bright parka. The snow girl and Mr. B studied the woman.
Her shape was familiar. She was the woman who had been in the store.
Her pack was high on her back—she moved with purpose. They could tell from the determined nature of her search she was a hunter, too.
But she was not hunting small animals.
Mr. B felt a fear that turned to anger. This woman was inside the land. He had learned long ago from The Man that no others were allowed inside: they were the enemy, to be feared. One time The Man had found some hunters on their land and scared them so badly that B himself was frightened, and he was grown by then.
He knew what the woman was hunting. It was not furs or meat. She was not one of the rare mountain climbers he sometimes saw from a long distance, hanging like foolish bugs off the high crags.
No. She could only be looking for one thing. The girl.
He remembered how he had found the girl—another few minutes in the snow and she would have died. If this hunter wanted the girl, it was too late. The girl was his. He had saved her life. He had seen, after he had found her, how others came to search on the other side of the ravine. That was why he had taken care never to take her out unless the snow would cover her tracks. He had forgotten that over time. He would not forget it again.
Mr. B was suddenly filled with jealousy. No one had come for him. It was not fair they came for the girl.
Next to him the girl cautiously reached for his hand. He looked down. Her blue eyes reflected the sky. No matter what, she would stay his, he told himself—even if she had to die, too.
They hiked home under a slate sky that promised more snow.
“Forgot this?” Ranger Dave was standing near her car, holding the locator. It was beginning
to snow harder, and Naomi had called it a day. She was exhausted and hungry.
Naomi felt irritated: that she had forgotten to lock her car and this ranger kept following her around. Dave stood in front of her, looking both chagrined and defensive, his hand holding the locator as an accusation.
She let the irritation show on her face.
“You’re not ever going to be interested in me, are you?” he asked, his voice soft.
She turned away. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Okay.” There was tremulousness, and then he breathed, letting it go. “You shouldn’t be doing this alone.”
“Why?”
She was expecting to hear the usual chiding about her safety. What he said instead stunned her. “When Sarah and I would rescue people, we liked to share it—to talk about it later. I really miss that. Sharing the experience.”
Naomi stared at him.
“I always wondered what happened later to the people we rescued. What became of their lives? We always think about people in crisis, waiting to be found. But no one talks about what it is like later.”
“For you or them?”
“For all of us.”
She smiled at him. “I’d like to be your friend. I think we have a lot in common.”
“But not your lover?”
“No. Never,” she said, and then, softening it, “There is someone else. He is the only one I have ever imagined that way.”
Ranger Dave suddenly grinned, his face changing into something boyish—something Naomi could see another woman falling for.
“Well, then,” he asked. “What are you waiting for?”
That night B put the girl back in the cellar. He needed to think.
He knew the cellar well from when he was a child. But then it didn’t have many blankets, and The Man terrorized him down there—mocking and making faces when his own mouth made an O. He had tried to escape many times, trying to break open the trapdoor, and each time The Man had beat him so hard he thought he would die. He had no way of knowing whether The Man was upstairs when he tried to break open the trapdoor.
B had tried to be much kinder to the girl. He liked the girl.
There was so much to life he did not understand. He understood the moon and the grass that hid under the snow in the lower reaches. He understood how the clouds skipped over the mountain crags up high, even the stones dusted free of snow. He knew how to trap and how to cure a skin.
All those things he had learned from The Man.
The girl was the first human shape who had taught him anything beyond nature. For that she loomed larger than life in his imagination. And like a bird tied to a golden chain, she was too valuable to be allowed to escape.
He left the warm woodstove and crouched to get the box under the bed. The box had been there as long as he had. It mystified him. It said so much about a past that B was convinced maybe didn’t exist. A part of his bones told him: Oh yes, it does.
The box was old and wood and smelled like pipe smoke—he had smelled that at the store before. The inside was lined with a soft, torn cloth. The cloth was a color outside of nature, except for a bruise.
Inside the box were the mysteries.
There was paper—he knew paper, from the store. There was a tarnished necklace and a small dark bottle of bitter medicine.
The papers were covered with the same odd marks the girl made on the walls of the cellar and looked at on paper—fascinating shapes, a secret language he did not understand. The girl sometimes drew shapes he recognized—an animal like a coyote, a figure like a human—but she liked these shapes, too. They crossed and repeated, dotted and curled.
Under the letters was a photo of The Man. B didn’t like to look at the photo. Even just looking at the picture brought back bad memories. In the photo The Man was tall and big, with a heavy, glowering face. He was standing outside the store, holding up a wolf skin in his gloved hand. B put the picture away and reached into the bottom of the box for the most sacred thing of all.
What sort of creature was he? For the longest howling fear of time he did not know. All the time with The Man, all the hurts and tears and blood on his thighs—all the beatings and the one time he had tried to claw open his own throat just to end the pain—he did not know the answer to this simple question: What sort of creature was he? He knew he had come from someplace, but after enough time in the cellar B had forgotten. It hurt too much to remember.
It wasn’t until he had killed The Man that he found this box. He remembered sitting on the side of the bed and opening it. Musing over the necklace, tasting the medicine on his finger and realizing its purpose. Finding this different kind of paper—it was the same kind of brittle paper he had shown the girl, stuck on the bottom of the shelves—and looking down and seeing a photo on the page. It was a picture of a little boy with a shock of hair and smiling happy eyes.
He had gone and stood next to the wavy glass of the window outside, where he could see his reflection. Yes, that picture of a child had been him, long before the yellow hair thickened, his cheeks roughened with beard.
What did the rest of the paper say? What did the signs mean? B had no idea. But a part of him—as he tucked the box safely away again—knew it had to do with why the hunter was here. It was something about him, and that something had become about the girl.
He knew he could show the girl the paper. She could look at the shapes and see the picture of him as a child. Maybe she could communicate what it meant to him, somehow, with her hands. But he was afraid of that. He was afraid she would look at the shapes on the paper and then look at him differently. Like the times she seemed to look inside him.
He felt his grizzled beard with the side of a hand. Passed fingers over an aging face. There was something he didn’t understand about the passing of life. The fox had the kit and the kit—the kit what? Grew? Yes, and was hunted.
But before then the kit lived with its mother.
The girl had brought him vision and warmth, and she brought something more. For the first time in his life he saw himself—another human being—reflected in her lovely blue eyes.
He could not bear to lose her. Not now. Not when he had finally been reborn.
15
Seeing the woman below them, crossing the ravine, the snow girl had stopped, her heart pounding in shock. Another person was coming into this world.
What was this woman hunter looking for? Would she sing, or play a flute?
The woman was the first person she had ever seen for over three years, outside of Mr. B. She had thought maybe there weren’t any people in this world. Now she knew different, and the reality shook her.
She hid these feelings, carefully, from Mr. B. She took his hand, trying to reassure him.
Back at the cabin Mr. B had gotten angry and put her back in the cave anyhow. She could hear the click of the lock.
She carved on the mud walls: Skeins of ducks crossing the summer lakes, searching in vain for food that was not there. Skinny foxes that died when the summer snow got too soft for hunting, and the fat coyotes that preyed on them. Rows of tiny icicles, like ornaments, that dripped rain from the cedar trees.
She stopped. She went to the faint shape dug into the mud corner that she had thought was the number 8. But it was not an eight. It was a B.
Mr. B had carved it here, once upon a time.
She realized it then. Mr. B had been a snow child, too. He had been locked down here just like her. He was the one who had tried to escape.
Snow girl knew the woman offered a path to another world. Maybe it was an even colder world where there was more pain. Maybe it was a worse world and she would regret going there. She hoped it was a world like the ones in her fairy tales. Maybe that was too much to ask.
In her cave, waiting in the only chill she had learned would ever warm her, snow girl stripped. She took off all her clothes. The filthy pants with the unicorns; the soft, damp parka; the worn pink shirt underneath; the ratted socks and the old broken shoes.
She stood on the cold, wet mud floor, naked, straight as a board. She had no reflection. No way of seeing. But she could anyhow. The insides that had known more than they should. The way that her body was knitting together out of all sorts of parts: the wet muscle taste of meat, the sweet marrow, and the oil that coated the tongue. All of it was like an explosion.
She touched her cleft. At one time she had dreamed she was born anew. Now she realized—one way or another—it was true.
It happened to all adults.
She looked at the raw boards above her. He could keep her down here until she starved, and all that was left was her hide and bones, like the remains of animals they sometimes found in the woods.
She stood there and breathed. The air was sweet. She turned slowly in a circle to see all around her a magnificent portrayal: her life’s work in claw and draw, the images leaping across the dark walls like shadows.
“Would you care to go to church with me?” Violet Danforth asked her. “Tomorrow, in the morning. Or,” she added hopefully, “we could do the afternoon service. If you’re a sleeper like Danita.”
“I’m not a sleeper.” Naomi hesitated. She had often been invited to churches—invited to vigils, séances, prayer gatherings, and one time a Haitian voodoo ceremony—anything families could dream up to connect her, their prayer, with their god, as if connecting the two would increase the chances. Maybe it did.
Usually she avoided the encounters. She didn’t want the families to dream beyond what she could offer.
Violet was looking at her in her silent, still hallway. All around her the old home mourned, as if for ghosts of families past.
“It would mean a lot to me,” Violet said, and Naomi said yes.
