It was Father Pedersen. Saying something so low, but so sweet that Anette felt her heart yearn for more. She could make out no words; she only knew that it was a song she would have loved to hear, if only she could.
Then Teacher said something that was interrupted by a creak of the stairs, and Father Pedersen was walking toward the top of the staircase—Anette by this time had pushed herself up on her elbow. She could only see his feet, in his sturdy boots that were dripping melting snow; he must have just come in from seeing to the horses. Although why he would have been doing that in the middle of the night, Anette had no idea. Then she saw Teacher’s bare feet hit the floor, and she had been amazed at seeing the small, bony feet, the little pink toes; it was so cold, why didn’t she sleep with her socks on as Anette did?
This fact—this odd, distracting thought—so puzzled Anette that she almost didn’t hear Father Pedersen say, “Anna.” Just the one word—Mother Pedersen’s name—but the way he said it was terrible. Anette bolted upright, hugging the quilt to her chest for protection. His voice was vibrant with terror and supplication.
Teacher cried out.
There was another creak of the stairs, then something metallic clattered to the floor and Father Pedersen was rushing down, and Teacher must have flung herself back on her bed. She sobbed so piteously, Anette didn’t know what to do. Should she go to her?
From downstairs she could hear the sound of voices being raised, and the littlest Pedersen wailing from his basket, and doors slamming, a sound like a scream cut off before it was uttered. So Anette remained in her own bed. It was as if a line had truly been drawn—a wall, bricked up—between the two beds. They seemed intended for different things, these two bedsteads. And Anette had never known that before, that beds might have purposes other than for sleeping.
The days after that strange night had made Anette want to scream; the house was too small for so many people with so many troubles. As the temperature remained well below zero, they were trapped, and everyone behaved so oddly. Father Pedersen wouldn’t talk to Mother Pedersen, who wouldn’t speak to Teacher, who acted terrified of both of them and suddenly both younger and older than she had been before, and no one thought of Anette at all. She felt like she was a ghost, almost; no one could see her, but she saw everything. More than she wanted to. But she wasn’t invisible, at that; all the things she didn’t want to see made her so confused that Mother Pedersen slapped her for allowing a pan of milk intended for the baby to scald.
Teacher, observing, rushed to Anette’s side; she pulled her into her arms.
“You are a cruel, cruel person,” she scolded Mother Pedersen. It was the first time Anette had ever heard her speak angrily to the older woman, and the pain of the slap was forgotten in her astonishment.
“You know nothing about me,” Mother Pedersen responded coolly. “And despite your silly fantasies, you know nothing about him.”
Teacher had fled upstairs, sobbing. With a strangled cry, Mother Pedersen erupted in fury, becoming a demon before Anette’s very eyes—her face scarlet, the blue eyes blazing while the coils of her hair seemed to dance with electricity. Mother Pedersen snatched the scalded milk off the top of the cookstove and ran to the door to throw it out, only she closed the door on her hand and collapsed in a heap on the floor, pounding her chest with her fists and hissing, “This cursed place, this cursed land,” over and over again. Teacher’s sobs were audible and the baby started to cry and Liane, the oldest Pedersen child, hit Martin, the middle one, and the two started to scream and tear at each other’s clothes. And Anette simply stood where she was, in the middle of hell.
There was no way out, nowhere for her to go; she couldn’t even run away, because she would freeze. She could only shut her eyes and try to summon up something good, and she pictured herself running with Fredrik, the two of them skimming the prairie earth. Running was the most uncomplicated thing in the world; all you had to do was remember to breathe and cherish the ache in your chest that came from the freedom of your body carrying your mind and your thoughts somewhere else, your troubles, too—they were mobile, never burdensome, when you were running.
And Fredrik’s happy face, the sandy hair tickling his arched eyebrows, the freckles on his face even more pronounced when he was running beside her, sometimes reaching out to grab her hand, as if the two of them together could run even faster than each alone—
“Anette! Anette!”
A tug on her sleeve, a hand in hers, and she stopped running, stopped remembering, and tried to breathe—but couldn’t. She tried to inhale but only frigid air, grains of ice, invaded her lungs and she began to wheeze, her chest so tight, her throat stinging, her nostrils stuck together. Gasping for breath, Anette turned, tried to open her eyes wide but they were stuck together; she rubbed her eyes with her sleeve until some of the ice melted and she could see.
The world as she had known it was gone. Everywhere was now white, now grey, now white again. She was in the middle of that furious cloud and could not see anything that looked of this earth. She might have been sucked up in the storm, like a cyclone, were it not for the ground beneath her feet. Ground that was increasingly covered with snow.
“Anette!”
“Fredrik!” She could barely say his name, and the wind howled so that it was a miracle he heard it, but he held tight to her hand, leaned in close to her. His eyes were wide with recognition; recognition that this was not anything he had encountered before, this howling tunnel of wind almost knocking them off their feet, of no visibility, no markers at all. She wanted to scream at him—How did you find me? Are you stupid? Go back!
Please stay, stay with me, I don’t know how to do this.
But she had to go home, she couldn’t dawdle, it was the only consistent thought as her mind started to open up to the realization that it was foolish, what she had done, to try to outrace a blizzard. Only once did she think of going back, but as soon as she turned around to retrace her steps, she saw that they were already swallowed up by the drifting snow, and she couldn’t see anything, anything at all, except for Fredrik’s blue—frightened—eyes.
“We go,” she managed to finally croak, then she shouted the words again, and Fredrik nodded.
We go. Forward, toward home.
We go, Anette said in her heart.
Together.
CHAPTER 6
•••••
GAVIN HAD JUST TURNED THE corner of Farnam, on his way back to the Gilded Lily, when the storm struck Omaha.
The force of it blew him off his feet and pushed him against a hitching post; he clung to it for a moment, stunned. Sure, the sky had grown dark in the northwest while he was out strolling, which was why he turned around in the first place. But weather, even in Godforsaken Nebraska, didn’t move that fast, as fast as a steam engine on a flat track.