her want to drift off to sleep.
She was too tired to cook at night, and she was tempted to leave the metal pots and the Primus stove in the back of the sledge, but she carried them into the tent with her so that she would be able to heat her coffee in the morning. The temperature sometimes dipped to forty or fifty degrees below zero, and she would have to spend a good half hour shivering in her coat and gloves before the tent truly began to warm up. She ate two or three multivitamins and a handful of dehydrated biscuits as she waited, and sometimes also a protein bar, and sometimes also a piece of chocolate, and she allowed a few chips of ice to melt on the surface of her tongue. Then she stripped to her long Johns, tightened the drawstrings of the sleeping bag around her, and listened to the side wall of the tent going taut and slack and taut again, bellying in and out as it took the wind like a sail.
On the eighth day of the storm, she was traveling on a downhill slope when a spur of rock came rearing up out of the snow and filled her windshield. Her heart rose up in her chest. She swerved to avoid the rock, but it was too late.
She rammed into the spur at the rear corner and heard the solid crunch of something breaking. The sledge spun around twice and gradually drifted to a stop. She let go of the steering mechanism. Her skin was covered in sweat, and her stomach had tightened into a knot. The droning sound of the sledge slowly died away, and its runners settled into the snow. She checked herself for wounds. She seemed to be okay – no bleeding, no broken bones – but she wasn't sure about the sledge. She climbed outside onto a half dozen chunks of rock and ice that had been knocked loose by the collision.
She made her way toward the back end of the vehicle, holding on to the upper rail with her gloves, the snow twisting around her in an obscuring shroud. She had heard stories about people who had become so disoriented in snowstorms that they had lost their sense of direction only a few feet from their front doors, people who went stumbling and weaving into the tempest with their arms stretched out in front of them like zombies. She knew better than to let go of the rail. She found the spot where the sledge had run into the spur. A long rent had been torn into the wood and metal, exposing the inside of the storage hutch. Her duffel bag was wedged inside the hole, so that only a thin crack of space remained open to the air, bordered with a row of jagged wooden teeth. She could hear the wind passing through it with a whistling noise.
She sank to her knees, probing at the snow around the runners to make sure nothing had fallen out. She couldn't feel anything – the bulge of the duffel bag seemed to have sealed the breach in the hutch. She risked a short walk uphill, heading directly toward the spur, but all she saw was a tapering strip of wood and a single, palm-sized lump of black rock. When she was satisfied that she wouldn't find anything else, she staggered back downhill. She turned the sledge around and continued along the channel of the ice stream.
It would be more than a month before she discovered exactly what she had left behind on the slope and the full consequences of her accident became clear to her.
That night, after she sealed the hole in the sledge with a strip of plywood, she found herself replaying a certain incident from her childhood. It came to her while she was pitching the tent, whirling and condensing in her memory like a tiny runaway planet, so that by the time she fastened the door it had returned to her in all its particulars. The incident was an inconsequential one – of no importance whatsoever, really. But then most of the things she remembered, most of the things anybody remembered, were of no natural importance – were they? – and that never stopped them from rising into the light.
In her memory she was seven years old, and her mother had just taken her out of school for a dentist's appointment. Only that morning, her mother had said, 'Now don't let me forget, we have to get you to the dentist by two-thirty. What time do we have to get you to the dentist by?' and Laura had answered, 'Two-thirty o'clock,' and her mother had said, 'There's no o'clock to it, hon. It's just two-thirty,' which was why she remembered what time the appointment was supposed to be.
She buckled herself into the car seat and waited for her mother to finish talking to the woman with the orange vest who stood by the front door in the afternoons. Laura and her friends had made an I-Spy game out of the orange vests: whoever could spot the most was the winner. She had noticed that there were always more of them on the days when the sirens went off than on the days when they didn't.
Only recently had she grown tall enough to see out the window of the car without rising onto her knees. As her mother climbed into the driver's seat and the engine made the coughing and shredding noise it always made when it was turning over, she noticed an unusual thing. On the roof of the house across the street was something she had never seen before. It looked like a spinning silver pumpkin trapped inside a metal grate.
'What's that?' she asked her mother. 'What's what?'
'That thing,' she said, pointing. 'The silver ball on that roof.'
'Oh. They have those all over the place. It's a – ' Laura watched the motions of doubt appear in her mother's face as she began to answer the question and then realized she didn't have the words. 'You know, I'm not sure what it's called. It's part of the house's circulation system. I can tell you that.'
Earlier in the week, Laura had watched a TV program about the body's circulation system. She remembered the image of a man whose skin peeled away to show his blood pumping through him, a loose basketry of red and blue vessels surrounding a large, throbbing heart. The connection seemed hazy to her. 'A circulation system like for blood?' she was about to ask, when another car came hurtling around the corner of the parking lot, driving backward, and punched into the edge of their front bumper.
The car scraped along their driver's-side door, not grinding to a stop until it had lined up with them window for window, rearview mirror for rearview mirror, pressed against them as though it were backing into a parking space. Laura saw the driver pause and shake her head before she reached over to apply the emergency brake.
Softly, as though she were simply commenting on the weather, her mother said, 'Well, goddamn it.' Her face usually had a strange, almost strict expression when she was driving, but for the moment, at least, it was completely empty. She was one of those people who truly became beautiful only when they showed no sign of thought or feeling on their faces, like bright, blank flowers unfolding their petals in the sun. Later, after Laura had grown up and moved away, that was how she would remember her mother – as a woman caught in a lovely thoughtlessness.
'Are you okay?' her mother asked her. Laura said that she was fine.
Her mother lowered her window and motioned for the woman in the other car to do the same. The woman's window sank away, taking a dim reflection of them with it. She said, 'I'm having an unbelievably rotten day.'
'So am I,' Laura's mother said. 'At least now I am.'
'Like you wouldn't believe,' the woman said.
Laura's mother began working a muscle in her jaw, but almost immediately she became plain again. 'Listen, maybe you should pull forward and let me open my door.'
'I can't,' the woman said. 'That's one of the problems.'
'What do you mean, that's one of the problems?'
'There's something wrong with my car. It won't pull forward. It will only go in reverse. That and my kid left his books at home, and the stationery store was closed.'
'Then maybe you should back up and let me open my door,' Laura's mother said.
'Oh. Okay.' The woman released her brake and inched backward, scraping along the side panel of the car. She slowly drifted out of contact with them. She switched her motor off and rested her forehead on the padded arch of the steering wheel, lacing her fingers together behind her neck. It was then that Laura heard her moan – a low, soft animal sound that seemed to swell up from somewhere deep inside her.
'The cow goes moo,' Laura said.
'Quiet, honey.'
Her mother unlatched the door. It made a creaking and buckling sound as it swiveled around the crimp, and almost at once, the car's warning bell began to ding. The bell usually came on when the door was opened by even so much as a crack, though sometimes it didn't. It was something that Laura found impossible to predict.
'Wait here,' her mother told her. She shut the door and strode over to the other car. Laura could hear what she was saying through the open window. 'Do you want to call the police, or do you want me to?' After a few seconds she repeated herself. 'Hello? Do you want to call the police, or should I?'
