“I still don’t follow.”
“She just said that you’re so angry, you’re like a starfish. You chop off one bit of your anger and then it grows back, twice as big.”
Gina was livid that Greta was talking about her as if she could possibly know what Gina felt. She dropped Poppy’s hands so hard her mittens fell to the ice, leaving the little girl’s fingers exposed and throwing her so off balance that she toppled onto her butt, her bare hands flat against the frozen pond. Poppy started to cry, but Gina skated off toward Alpaca and the sled, leaving Poppy to crawl around on her own to find her mittens.
It was the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, and Gina realized it was already getting dark. Off in the distance, a flash of color glistened across the snow. Alpaca had suddenly pricked up his ears and taken notice. Perhaps it was some kind of hare or ptarmigan; if so, he’d be after it like a shot.
Gina had unhitched him from the sled, which he seemed to have only just realized as he started to run, untethered, toward the shadow that every once in a while glinted against the white backdrop. She tried to untie her skates but her hands were too stiff, giving Alpaca a good head start, and he would not listen when she called. She shoved her feet into her snow boots and chased him, still clutching the snow shovel.
The snow got deeper in a hurry, making her plunge through the top crust, slowing her down, and still all she could hear was Poppy’s ridiculous little voice telling her that she was a starfish. Her anger exploded. It grew a leg, and then another leg, and then a body.
She could feel her angry starfish body growing bigger and bigger, and suddenly she was swinging all her starfish arms and legs, now numbering in the twenties, the thirties, the forties. She was a starfish monster swinging at everything in her path. The whole world seemed to be screaming, egging her on, louder and louder as she swung her pointy arms again and again and again.
And then she was lying on her back—the screaming had morphed into deathly silence—while all around her the snow glistened with color. Shards of red and purple and glassy green were everywhere, as if a rainbow trout had flopped around, scattering its lovely scales. As her eyes adjusted, she realized it was just the aurora reflecting off the white, white snow. She had been the one doing all the screaming.
Gina was so tired. Her shovel lay next to her, still gripped tightly in her otter-skin mitten. She saw it as if from a distance and tried to let go, but her hand had become a claw; she couldn’t flex her fingers. For the first time she thought about how much pain her mother had been in. What a relief it must have been to be free from an earthly body that would not do what it was intended to do.
I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, Gina said to no one and everyone, but mostly to her mother, who was maybe one of those stars blinking overhead, and then finally to Poppy, who had made her way over all on her own, miraculously dragging the sled by Alpaca’s empty tug line.
Frozen snot covered Poppy’s face, and her eyelashes were caked with ice from tears that had frozen before they could fall.
Finally Alpaca came back and curled up on one side of Gina as Poppy curled up on the other, and they huddled there, slowly warming themselves against each other’s frozen bodies.
“Poppy, are your hands okay?”
Above them, the lights changed from the green of a mallard’s head to the soggy gray-green of pea soup.
“They’re cold,” said Poppy.
“Put them under my coat,” said Gina. “I can thaw them out.”
“It’s okay. Elizabeth is holding them.”
Gina rolled over and looked at Poppy’s hands lying at her sides. They were two balled-up fists clenching the empty air.
“Well, Elizabeth can still hold them if you warm them on my belly. She doesn’t have to let go.”
“Okay.” Poppy sniffed. “She’d like that.”
Gina helped Poppy get her frozen hands out of her mittens again. The little girl’s fingers were turning white, and Gina braced herself for the icy touch against her stomach. She carefully covered them with her shirt and then her coat, trying not to press on them too hard with her own mittened hands. Please be okay, please be okay.
“I should have never left you on the ice like that,” Gina whispered. “I’m sorry, Poppy.”
“It’s okay,” said Poppy. “Elizabeth was there.”
PIGEON CREEK
Ruby was no shrinking violet. She knew Jake was sneaking off in the night, but she didn’t know what she could do about it. She knew it, not because he would have otherwise been sneaking into her house—God, her father owned hunting rifles!—but because he was suddenly perpetually yawning. His eyelids were constantly drooping over his sea-foam-green eyes, like two sagging window shades blocking a view of the beach.
She would have been hard-pressed to miss something like that, even from landlocked Colorado.
Ruby loved Jake’s eyes more than anything else about him because they were uncomplicated. Even when she’d been very young, before she’d understood what a crush was, Jake’s eyes had made her giddy, as if she could swan-dive into them.
But they also always gave him away.
“You look beat,” she said, tossing her homemade felted backpack into the backseat of his white VW Bug.
Every other teenage boy in Pigeon Creek owned a pickup truck and used words like “gas guzzler,” “big bed,” “bucket of bolts,” and other manly terms to describe their alter egos. Jake was not like the other boys in Pigeon Creek. He was confident enough to drive around in a car called a Beetle, for starters.
Her father watched from the kitchen window. Ruby said nothing
