2
The snow girl could remember the day she was born.
In brilliant snow she had been created—two tired arms out, like an angel—and her creator was there. His face was a halo of light.
He had lifted her, easily, over his shoulder. He had an intense, warm, comforting smell, like the inside of the earth. She could see her hands, curiously blue at the tips, as immobile as stone. Her hair swung around her face, the ends tipped with ice.
From the man’s belt slapped long fur creatures. She watched their tiny claws clutch at the empty air above the swinging white snow.
Her eyes closed as she drifted back to sleep.
When she woke it was dark, like the inside of a cave. Snow was falling outside. She couldn’t see it, but she could feel it. It’s funny how you can hear something as soft as falling snow.
The man was sitting in front of her. It took a moment for her feverish eyes to adjust to the dim light. There was a lamp, after all, but something was wrong with her eyes that made them see everything in a reddish blur.
She was lying in a small bed—a shelf, really, mantled with furs and blankets. The walls around her were made of mud. Branches poked out of them. The man was sitting on a wood chair woven of branches, like the kind you see in books. Like the ones a kindly grandfather might sit in, or Father Time.
She was aware that she was very sick. Her body was alive with pain, and she could feel her cheeks, hot and slippery. Spasms of fever shook her. Her toes hurt. Her fingers hurt. Her cheeks hurt. Her nose hurt.
The man piled furs on her, looking fretful and worried. He made her drink cold water. He checked her fingers. They looked all wrong, as if they had grown fat skins. He put them into his mouth to warm them.
She wanted to throw up, but even the cavern of her belly felt as cold as ice. She faded in and out, in and out.
When she awoke again the man was making her drink more water. The water tasted icy. She fell back asleep.
There was someone she needed, and in her fever she cried for her, over and over again, but the words that came from her mouth didn’t seem to excite the man. He watched her lips and got angry. He clapped his hand over her mouth. She bit him in terror. He pulled back the hand and smacked her, hard, sending her reeling. Then he left.
She tossed and turned in endless fever dreams. Her fingers swelled until they looked like funny cartoon hands, only they weren’t funny to her. The blisters opened and splashed on the blankets. She cried with pain and fear.
When the man came back she tried to talk to him, to apologize with her swollen lips. His eyes followed her lips again, and again he was mad.
She kept yelling the words, and those words were Mommy, Daddy.
He turned and left.
B, the man scrawled on a square of chalkboard. He had brought the lamp down, and the light cast shadows everywhere. The cave was bathed in yellow.
She was awake, the furs and blankets around her cradled with sweat. She could feel the snow falling outside. She stared at the man with wide eyes.
The man checked her fingers again. He made a funny clicking sound of approval. She held her fingers up in the light as if she had never seen them before. The swelling was down, but the skin was turning a strange purple and black. It almost looked like the skin would shed off, like a lizard’s.
Maybe she was becoming something new.
The man looked at her toes under the blankets, where he had removed her socks and shoes, and for the first time she saw her toes were also fat and swollen, the skin a ghastly red and purple. The tiny toenails looked like you could just pluck them off.
He held up the chalkboard. B? She nodded weakly, and he looked pleased.
“Is your name B?” she asked, her voice a husky whisper.
He just stared at her lips. He didn’t answer.
“How did I get here? Where are my mommy and daddy?”
Mr. B shook his head.
The snow girl began to panic. Still weak with fever, she tried to rise, to fight her way past this strange man to the parents she knew were waiting just outside the cave. He got angry and pushed her down—hard. Bewildered, she fought back, flailing at him, kicking and hitting.
Again Mr. B hit her, hard, right across her face. He grabbed her arms, pinching them so bad it hurt, and she whimpered. Recoiling in shock and pain, she backed up against the mud wall in the furs and blankets and stared at him with wide eyes.
He stood, big with anger, and then jerked around and left.
The snow girl had no idea how long she spent in that fever time, her body molting a new skin—fingers that turned pink under the black, until finally she could move them again, though the tips stayed silvery with scars. Her toes kept all their nails and shrunk into pretty pink pennies.
Her cheeks stopped feeling rough in her hands, and when she slept it was deeply.
It was dark in the cave, but enough light filtered down through the rough boards above her that she had an awareness of what was day, and what was night.
Mr. B brought food, when she awoke, and an old metal bucket where she did her business. She was afraid of going potty in the bucket, but it didn’t seem to bother Mr. B. He took it matter-of-factly when he left.
Mr. B came and went down a ladder he lowered from a trapdoor. Sometimes he was wearing a vest full of pockets.
He never responded when she talked, or begged, or cried. Her words fell around her, empty and meaningless.
Sometimes she rushed at him, kicking and fussing, thinking whomever it was she wanted was right on the other side of the trapdoor. All she had to do was get up there! But she learned not to try because that was when Mr. B got angry and hurt her.
When he was gone, she yelled and screamed for what seemed like hours, until her voice got hoarse. But nothing happened. Eventually she became convinced that her parents were not just outside these walls. They had gone away. Maybe forever. Maybe they left her here because she had been bad.
She struggled to think of what she had done wrong. Was it the time she had broken the gerbil’s tail in school? She hadn’t meant to, she was just trying to pick Checkers up, and the very tip of his tail broke off in her hand—just like that. She was so scared of what she had done she had hidden that little piece of broken tail in the cage bedding, and when her teacher asked later who had hurt Checkers, she never told. She thought a lot now about that piece of gray tail, buried under the cedar shavings.
After a while she stopped talking. Mr. B, bringing her broth that tasted all greasy and wrong and tucking her in with the blankets, accepted her silence without a word.
When he left he pulled the ladder up, and he always locked the trapdoor.
Ranger Dave was tall and skinny and looked very tired. His ranger station was high on the summit of the Elk River district—nearly forty miles south of where Madison went missing.
On the way up the steep mountain road, sentinels of packed snow on the sides, Naomi passed what looked like a failed effort at a hunting lodge. The lodge roof had collapsed; the windows were empty sores. A large owl was perched on the roof—she had to do a double take to see that it was real.
The ranger station was cool and full of soft light. The clouds reflected off the windows, moving across the floor. It was like being in a cathedral, Naomi thought.
Ranger Dave stood at his windows, looking over a vast empire.
“I got your message,” he said. “Looked you up and made a few calls. Fellow in Salem said you’ve found over thirty kids.”