A Wicked Snow

With her husband asleep, making the kind of muffled snores that had never irritated her until that night, Hannah grabbed her pillow and dragged her tired body to the sofa. Couldn’t sleep. So tired. It ran around her head like a pinball in one of those old-school arcade machines Amber liked to play. The mantel clock chimed at one. She knew that in an hour the numbers would increase. There would be no sleep, only the wait for the chimes. She took the clock from above the fireplace and carried it to the kitchen, sliding the pocket door as she returned to the couch. There, she thought, at least that will silence the clock. She pulled a knit throw around her shoulders and slumped against the arm of the camel-back. She scrunched up in a ball as the tears began to fall. She remembered the smoke, and like the flash of a camera an image of cedar boughs and piles of gilded pinecones came to her. She pressed her palms into her eyes to stop the images. And for a second, it worked. But when the images resumed, it was the box in the Safeway bag that came to her mind. She remembered unfolding the brown paper and lifting the lid to peer inside. She hadn’t touched the contents, but had stared at two pairs of little shoes that nestled in the folds of tissue and packing peanuts.

She turned on the television. In a half hour she was able, somehow, to escape her memories. She heard the toilet flush and her husband’s footsteps come down the hall. He turned on the light.

“Honey, are you all right?” Ethan stood over her in his Jockey shorts and T-shirt. His whisker-stubbled face was awash with concern.

“Can’t sleep, that’s all,” she said quickly.

“Headache?” Ethan turned on the lamp, running past the brightest wattage back to the lowest light.

“A little,” she said, flinching as the light took over the room. Her face was red and blotchy and her eyes puffy from her tears. She turned her head away, but it was too late.

Ethan moved closer. “Hannah, you’ve been crying.” His words were full of concern. “What is it, honey? Is it Garcia?”

Hannah wanted to speak, but she couldn’t. She felt a strange tightness in her throat that prevented her from saying anything. The thought of her speechlessness nearly caused her to smile, in that odd way people sometimes do when they are frightened or unsure, but her lips did not move. Ethan put his arms around her. He smelled of sleep, and his warm skin was comforting.

“Please talk to me,” he said quietly as he held her.

“I can’t,” she finally answered. “Sometimes I feel as if I’m falling down some dark hole, deeper and deeper. I don’t want to go, but I can feel myself being sucked in. Taken back to Rock Point and my family’s tree farm.” Tears started to fall again and she buried her face in his chest. “I feel so out of it. So alone.”

“But you’re not alone,” he said tenderly. “You have us.”

Her gaze shifted from her hands to her husband’s face. His eyes glistened with emotion. “Sometimes I don’t know what I have, Ethan. Sometimes I don’t know who I am and where I’ve been—” She put her fingertips to his mouth to stifle him from speaking. “Before you say anything,” she said, “I’ll admit it sounds completely crazy and it could be, but it is the truth. So much has been said about my life, or my mother’s, that I don’t know what’s real.”

“None of that matters. You know what does.”

With that, he took her by the hand and led her down the hall to Amber’s room. He said nothing. He didn’t have to. He didn’t even point to emphasize the connection. Hannah knew it. The two slipped back under the covers of their antique pineapple-post bed and held each other close and kissed. As the early-morning sun crawled over the saw tooth of the mountains, Ethan and Hannah made love, and for at least a little while, she set aside what haunted her.

The glow of their closeness, their much-needed love-making, was shattered the next morning at the breakfast table. As Ethan ate a bagel that had seen better days, Hannah poured milk into a cereal bowl as their daughter dropped a bomb.

“I met a lady that knows your mommy,” Amber said.

Hannah felt the blood drain from her face. She steadied herself and looked at Ethan. He, too, sat in stunned silence. Milk splashed on the floor, spraying the dark wood white. Hannah stared at it for a millisecond, then grabbed a paper towel. She thought she was going to vomit.

“You did?” Ethan asked. His tone was calm, but as a cop he was a pretty good actor when he needed to be. “What do you mean? You know that Mommy’s mother is in heaven.” He hated the euphemism, but at Amber’s age it would be harder to explain that Grandma was in hell, or at least he hoped she was.

Hannah set the milk carton on the table, unspooled some paper towels, and spoke. “Tell us what happened. Was it at school?”

Amber knew her parents were upset, and a flicker of fear came over her face. Not because she knew exactly why she should be afraid, but empathy nevertheless set in. Something was wrong and she didn’t know what, exactly, she had done. She didn’t get in a car with some man with a sack of candy.

“We just talked. I didn’t do anything.”

“Honey,” Hannah said. “No one’s mad. Sorry. Just interested in learning more about the lady.”

Amber looked satisfied. “Outside. Yesterday. The lady was walking her dog and came over when I was sidewalk-chalking with Maddie. She came over, we petted her dog, and she said she knew Mommy, and Mommy’s mother. She said, you and Grandma were ‘peas in a pod.’ She was nice.”

Hannah’s stomach turned once more. She leaped to cruel conclusions, none of which she could voice or needed to voice at that moment. Ethan patted her arm and dismissed what Amber had just said.

“Must have been a mistake,” he said. “Mommy never really knew her mother. Aunt Leanna raised her. You know that, Amber. Right?”

“Uh-huh,” she said, clearly confused.

Hannah’s memory loss wasn’t a soap opera case of amnesia, the kind that is brought back with a bump on the head by the evil twin sister. It certainly wasn’t the result of Alzheimer’s or some other disease that steals the mind of the happy and sad times that make memories worth visiting. It had been a studied effort. One that she had accomplished on her own. Hannah never talked about anything from those days, especially once the nightmare became real. She shuttered the pictures in her mind so handily that when she needed to recall the face of her mother there was nothing there. A shadowy form. A face devoid of features. Not even a voice.

And now her little girl had forced her hand. She needed to remember.

“What did the lady look like, honey?”

“Just a lady. She was old, maybe forty or seventy.”

Amber’s ability to pinpoint age needed work.

“That’s a big gap,” Hannah said softly. “Did she have gray hair?”

She shook her head. “It was dark, but it didn’t match her face.”

Hannah looked at Amber quizzically; her daughter was untouched by the past and she wanted it to stay that way.

“Match her face?”

“I don’t know. She had a grandma face, but mom hair.”

Amber slid from the table to scurry for her backpack.

“Don’t even think it,” Ethan said.

Hannah pretended not to be bothered. “She must have heard wrong, because this isn’t happening.”

Chapter Six

Amber had a loose tooth and Hannah was unable to take her eyes off it. She watched her daughter work the tiny tooth with her tongue at the dinner table and wiggle it with her fingertip in the car. It swung like a little white