In Naomi’s earliest memory she had been running naked across a strawberry field at night towards a fire crackling at the edge of the woods. A group of migrants were in a clearing, a wet baby against a lap. A voice like a ghost came from the smoky campfire:
Dear God, look at that. Come here, honey.
Someone was wrapping her in a soft blanket, wiping her face with a warm, soothing cloth.
What are we gonna do?
They cleaned her and fed her and wrapped her in a well-worn serape that smelled of sweat and comfort, and she crouched, shivering, all eyes, by the side of the fire. There had been fireside talk, low and fretful.
It’s decided then. We’ll take her to that sheriff. Come here, sweetheart, you can lie next to me.
But Naomi was too afraid to sleep. She crouched by the dying fire until her feet grew numb, her eyes tracking the forest.
The next morning, nearly catatonic with shock, she was put in a truck, still wrapped in the serape. The wind coming through the window lifted her hair with the sweet promise of tomorrow. She had escaped. She was free.
Everything after that she remembered. Everything that came before was lost. She had blanked it all out. It was as if she was born at that moment, free of all memory. Perhaps, she thought, what had happened to her was too terrible to remember. All she had were the dreams, and their awful hints of what she had suffered.
Her entire life she had been running from terrifying shadows she could no longer see—and in escape she ran straight into life. In the years since, she had discovered the sacrament of life did not demand memory. Like a leaf that drank from the morning dew, you didn’t question the morning sunrise or the sweet taste on your mouth.
You just drank.
3
One morning the snow girl woke up and the world felt different. The fever was gone. She sat up in her nest of furs and blankets and looked around, clear-eyed. She crawled out of the bed and stood on the dirt floor.
Nothing moved beneath her: the world was placid.
Where was she? What had happened? She began to cry.
That was when she figured it out: she was different now. She felt her ribs, her hips, her legs, all the way down to her still sore feet. She looked at her new hands, all pink and newborn. Just like a storybook girl, she had awakened in a vastly different world.
The snow girl knew about fairy tales. In those tales children ate poison apples and fell asleep for years; they rubbed stones and made wishes and turned into beasts; they drank tea and became small; they fell down tunnels and woke in lands ruled by mad hatters and benevolent kings. There were children who were created from mud, rolled from dough—or born of ice.
Maybe, snow girl thought, she had fallen down a magic tunnel and arrived in this place. Maybe she was freshly created herself, rolled of snow and made of wishes.
On the mud wall in a corner she found a faint outline, as if another child had carved something here before her. The thought sent a chill through her. Her fingers traced the shape. It felt like the number 8.
She felt the shape, puzzling over it. What did it mean?
At night Mr. B brought her food and she ate and fell deeply asleep.
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, parts of the woods visited her. Twigs entered her body, creeping inside, into the most private places. Her body belonged to the woods, and if at times the woods came and crept inside her—why that was the price you paid.
Paid for what? her heart asked.
Paid for living, her soul answered.
In the mornings she awoke and Mr. B was gone. Closing her eyes, she traced the words she had carved deeply into the walls, stopping and feeling the cleft between her legs. She held it firm and began crying, hard, to herself.
For the longest time the snow girl stayed in the cave. It might have been some kind of cellar at one time, but now it was a cave. It was small and perfect and dark.
She learned there was no such thing as time. There was only snow. It fell silently above her, sometimes lighter with spring rain, sometimes thick and heavy, but sooner or later it was there.
In the filtered dark she touched the mud walls as high as she could reach, feeling the burls of wet roots, smelling their strange, savage scent. She stood on the sleeping shelf and tried to reach the wood slats of the trapdoor above her, the boards hovering just out of reach.
She was often lonely, and cried. She huddled on the shelf, holding her knees, rocking herself—like an infant curled inside its mother. She pulled a piece of wood from the shelf and, feeling the dirt with her hands, carved words along the walls. She carved the letters deep, so she might remember. She drew pictures, too: creatures from another world, including a dog named Susie and a tall, nice man called Father.
On the dirt floor she drew a large shape called MOM. She lay down inside it, pretending it was hers. She cupped her body there, sucking her thumb like a baby.
When Mr. B came back she could hear his footsteps above her, creaking.
Each time he visited he brought the lantern, and even as the lantern lit the walls—covered over time with hieroglyphs of imagination—he saw nothing amiss in it. He examined the carved walls with his lantern and smiled, as if she had made a gift for him.
Maybe he cannot read, she thought. This thought gave her pleasure. Maybe she knew something he did not.
He still never spoke, and didn’t seem to hear her when she talked. She realized that in this world there was no spoken language. Everything was silent.
She looked forward to the times Mr. B came, bearing the lantern. When she was with him, everything was okay.
Mr. B brought her food in a foil container that had a vague echo to her, something someone once called a TV dinner. Mr. B reused them. She could tell because there was often the same dried rind of gravy in the ridges.
The food in the tray was not what she was used to: it was snow food. There was a greasy stew of some kind, with a pungent, musky taste. The chunks of soft meat tasted like the inside of the earth. She could feel her veins filling with nutrients as she ate, as if she were one of the trees outside, drinking in the milk of the melted snow.
After she ate she slept, deep in the piles of fur. That is when she dreamed—of snow and ice and reaching fingers.
One morning she had woken up and Mr. B was beside her on the bed shelf. He jumped up as if caught. She was enjoying his warmth, his comfort. She had dreamed of a woman called Mom, curling up with a girl on a couch during a long, sleepy afternoon, the television drowsily blaring another episode of Tom and Jerry.
Mr. B stood in the dark. Under the scratchy blanket she was naked. She didn’t remember taking her clothes off. She wanted to find a way to ask Mr. B what had happened. But she was afraid of making him mad. So she hid her face and pretended to be sleeping.
After a while he left. He pulled up the ladder after him. She heard the lock on the trapdoor. He had left the bent foil tray on the ground next to her. She licked it clean, and then flipped it over. In the dim light she could see the letters stamped underneath: hungry-man dinner.
She traced the letters, and then pressed them against her cheek.
In this time of great awakening, the snow girl learned much about herself, and the world. She learned the world was a lonely place, because when you cried no one came. She learned the world was an uncertain place, because one moment you were one person and the next you landed on your head all goofy and woke up in a dream. She learned the world was a wild place, full of imagination, because that was the only possible explanation for what had happened.