At night she cried herself to sleep.
Later she got down and put her small hands on the dirt floor, feeling the vibrations of the earth. She imagined this was how Mr. B heard her: through vibrations. He would hear how sorry she was and come back.
The trapdoor opened. Light filtered down. He put down the ladder, but stayed upstairs.
After a while, when she was brave enough, the snow girl climbed up.
There was a damp cardboard box on the table. Charity box, it said on the outside.
She stepped forward, feeling woozy. He caught her elbow and made her sit.
He pushed the box towards her, making the sounds he made when he was happy, or anxious, or any other feeling that could so easily turn to anger. Snow girl was glad she had left her own feelings behind.
The clothes in the box smelled damp and musty. She pulled them out: a woman’s nightgown, ten sizes too large; one purple mitten, a doll shoe, boys’ jeans that might fit, and a single rubber sandal. Dust and baby socks.
Mr. B looked at her expectantly.
She suddenly realized: Mr. B couldn’t very well just go find a store and ask for snow girl clothes. It wasn’t like there was such a place in this world. He must have had to travel, and wait patiently for such treasures.
She smiled at him, reassuring. She pulled out a soft pink sweater and gasped: it was pretty! And faded black leggings with glitter unicorns at the hem. It was the most beautiful gift ever. She wanted to give him a big hug, but she stopped and smiled at him instead.
That night he let her sleep in his bed again.
Once upon a time there was a little girl named Madison who hated school.
Madison knew she was supposed to like school. Most kids liked school, her teachers said. But Madison did not like school, and her mommy understood. “Not everyone likes a ceiling,” her mommy said. “Some of us like the sky.”
Madison loved to read, and to write. She just didn’t like school. She liked being home and going outside.
One day Madison’s teacher had held up a globe. “This is the world,” she had said. Madison thought that world looked awfully big and cold. It was surrounded by blue water and was as round and slippery as a ball.
“And this is your land,” the teacher said. This time she held up a map that looked like a mess of lines and color, and this was the United States.
Madison was reassured. If she had to hide, why then it would be easy to do. She would just hide inside the lines.
Later that day the children in the class sang, “This land is your land,” and then they played tetherball outside on a bright sunny day.
It was too bad Madison didn’t like school. If she had, maybe she would have learned more about how to get off the world.
The story finished, the snow girl opened her eyes to see the bent metal spoon on the mud floor, left from eating the peanut butter.
Getting up, she took the spoon into the corner and carefully buried it there.
The Claymore claim was next.
Naomi ate a large breakfast in the diner, where the waitress now no longer called her hon, but nodded indifferently, like she was a local. As usual, no one had asked what she was doing in town. People had a way of appearing and disappearing in one another’s lives nowadays, she had found, so that no one asked, Is it for work? or My God, you look tired or Say, do you have family here? America was an iceberg shattered into a billion fragments, and on each stood a person, rotating like an ice floe in a storm.
This place is getting to me, she thought. Ice and storms.
She scooped up the rest of the soft bacon, finished the last slice of toast with strawberry jelly, and headed out.
On her map there was a tiny faint line that might have been a road where the Claymore claim touched the blacktop, several miles farther up the mountains from where Madison had gone missing.
Naomi drove slowly, snow from the recent storm piled along the road. She found the turnoff, one of the few cut into the forest. It had long since overgrown. The entry was now a wall of packed snow.
She parked her car, grabbed her gear, and took off on foot. Her stride had grown accustomed to the snowshoes, and she enjoyed the pleasant feeling of working her thighs. She pulled her cap closer around her ears, unzipped her parka a bit to allow the heat to escape.
The narrow dirt road had clearly not been used in many years, to look at the small trees that had grown in the path. She wondered at the effort it would have taken to clear this road in such terrain, and probably by hand.
The forest here was higher in elevation, the trees wide and welcoming, but with deep snow wells that promised treachery if you stepped too close—Naomi had heard of hikers who had fallen down those wells and gotten trapped.
The road climbed the side of the jagged mountain, and she climbed with it. It wound higher, until she came out against a sheer wall face that opened to breathtaking vistas on the other side, and a disconcerting wall of snow above her. Naomi walked lightly, breathed lightly. Far below her was a vast crumpled river, still frozen over with snow in spring. She wondered if it ever thawed up here, or if the frozen rivers and glaciers simply fed the rivers and lakes below.
On the other side of the canyon came a distant rumble. Naomi stopped.
On one of the rare times she made the mistake of being interviewed about her work, a reporter had asked her why she took such risks. Naomi didn’t know how to answer the question. “We all die sometime,” she had said, feeling the answer was weak. The real answer was that without the work there would be no Naomi.
She preferred to think of what Jerome had said, when she had been visiting him and Mrs. Cottle right after he returned from the war, freshly discharged from the military hospital. He had been standing in the kitchen doorway, his empty shoulder wrapped in fresh bandages, his shorn head fuzzy with hair. “We all need a sense of purpose,” he had said.
She had been getting ready to leave again—“So soon?” Mrs. Cottle was asking. “You just got here.”
Jerome had added, with his gentle gaze on her, “Be careful the purpose doesn’t destroy you.”
You can’t destroy nothing, Naomi had thought.
The rumbling stopped, and she started walking again, taking deep, cleansing breaths. The air was so clean and cold here it was like a drink of health. She felt the power in her legs, the sure purpose in her walk. Her skin tingled with energy.
The road ended in a small clearing cut into the side of the mountain, where she found a large hole framed with supporting logs. Outside an ancient sluicing box had fallen on its side. There were piles of old dirt, cragged over with snow.
Naomi peered at the framed hole from a distance. The mine looked abandoned, but that didn’t mean much. She slowly stepped closer.
From the hole blew a cold blast of fetid air.
What had the clerk said? Some came for gold, only to be shown for fools.
What had made the original settler decide this was the place to dig a gold mine? Was it magical thinking or wild hope? How hard it must have been, to hew the cold dirt out, melt it over the sluice box, searching with frozen hands for the telltale nuggets, only to find lumps of black soil.
There was no sign of recent human presence, but there could be another entrance to the mine. Madison could be inside.
She dug in her backpack for her flashlight. The cold white light probed into a vast black hole. There was no end in sight.