What the Snow Takes

She woke with her mother's face on the tip of her tongue and could not say it.

That was how it felt. Not a loss, but a nearness. As if a word she had known all her life had gone round the corner of the house and she could hear its footsteps. She lay on her back in the feather bed, with the gray daylight working its way through the frost-ferns on the window, and said it aloud to the ceiling. "Martha. Mother. Mam." It did not help. She could say the name. She could say the shape of the name. She could say that her mother was a small broad woman with strong hands who smelled of yeast and woodsmoke and made a sound when she was cross like a kettle just short of the boil.

What she could not do was see her.

When she shut her eyes, there was a kitchen. There was a table. There was the blue-checked cloth with the burn in the corner. And standing at the stove, with her back turned, was a woman in an apron who turned her head, and turned it, and turned it, and never once arrived at a face.

Hair, thought Elowen. Dark? Gray? She had always thought of her mother as dark. But she remembered the stray gray at the temples, too, and the kerchief, and now she wasn't sure.

She sat up. She put her face in her hands. She stayed that way for a long time.

Then she got out of bed and went to look for something to write on.

…

"Paper," said Perrin.

"Anything. A ledger. A notebook. A pile of the backs of old maps. I don't mind."

"Miss, if I may be so bold," said the steward, "you do not look well."

"I look fine."

"You look," said Perrin, with immense delicacy, "like a woman who has been trying not to cry for twenty minutes and has nearly succeeded."

She had found him in the little pantry off the kitchen, elbow-deep in a trough of dough, with flour to the glass of his shoulders and the amber buttons of his coat dusted white. She'd come at him sideways, as one approaches a nervous horse, and said her piece with her eyes on the reflection in the copper kettle. Now she looked at him straight, on purpose, for the length of a heartbeat. It made her temples ache. She dropped her gaze.

"I'm forgetting things," said Elowen.

"Yes."

"Faster than I was."

"Yes, miss." He took his hands out of the dough and wiped them on a cloth, slowly. "The storm. It is always worse after a storm. The Land is, if you will forgive an ugly figure, hungry. It tastes a thing. Then it wants more." He did not look at her. "You will find the loss comes on at a faster pace now. Not at once. But the way water comes into a boat when the first plank gives."

"Can it be stopped?"

"It can be slowed. There is the warmth, and the song, and certain practices of the mind. Naming. Reciting. Carrying about one thing, one single thing, that one loves very dearly, and holding it up to the light each day. I have found it a help." He smiled faintly. "Not for myself. I have no memory to speak of. I am a good deal older than I look and rather less than I should like. But I have watched others."

"And can it be undone? What's gone, can I..."

"No."

It came out of him so soft and so final that it was a minute before she understood he had said it. He had said it kindly. That was what made it terrible.

"Not here," said Perrin. "Not by any method I know. What the glass snow takes, it keeps. One may hold the rest more closely. One may leave. But there is no road backward." He folded the cloth over the edge of the trough. "If a guest wished to preserve the life she has, she would walk out at once, miss. I would not blame her. I would carry her pack."

"I'm not going."

"I know."

"I can't."

"I know that, too." He sighed, the sound of a small silver bell being gently put away. "I thought you might say so. I took the liberty."

He went to a shelf in the corner and took down a book.

It was small and square, bound in plain gray cloth, with a pen tied to the spine on a bit of string. The pages were thick and creamy, ruled in pale blue. They were perfectly blank. He held it out in both hands, like a loaf.

"The stores had a dozen," said Perrin. "They were for the use of those who came to... forget more slowly. Hardly any of them ever filled one."

She took it. It was heavier than it looked.

"Thank you," she said.

"Write small, miss," said Perrin. "And write the plain things. People always want to write the grand ones. 'I loved my mother.' It is no use at all. 'My mother cracks her knuckles when she is worried and hums out of tune.' That is the sort of thing that brings it back."

…

She wrote all afternoon.

She wrote sitting at the narrow desk under the window, in the dim cold light, with a wool blanket over her knees and the fire in the grate burning its pale gold, wood-less flame. She wrote the way she had once been taught to say her prayers, kneeling, in a flat even rhythm, without hurry. My name is Elowen. My father is Thomas. He brews plum wine in October. He is bad at lying. He goes pink from the collar up. She wrote down the eleven plum trees, and the crooked fence, and the exact spot on the kitchen floor where the board creaked. She wrote that her mother had a gap in her front teeth, and a laugh like a bucket of nails. She wrote the first line of every song she knew. She wrote the names of the neighbors, in order of their quarrels.

She wrote: I have a dog.

She crossed it out. I had a dog. He had a small white scar on his right ear. He came over walls. She looked at it for a time, and the white space after it, and left it.

She wrote: I lost the color of my father's eyes in the second week.

She wrote: Today I could not see my mother's face.

That one took longer. The pen stuck at the f. She sat with her hand on the page until the ache in her throat had passed and then wrote underneath, in smaller letters, but I remember her hands. And went on.

The hands came easily. That was the odd thing. She shut her eyes to let them, and they were there at once, square and red-knuckled and flecked with flour, one holding a wooden spoon and the other turning down a quilt. She was five years old and had a fever, and her mother was sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark. One broad palm lay flat against her forehead. The other kept time on the blanket, tap, tap, tap, as slow as a clock.

Ember, ember, keep the night.

She had always thought it was her mother's song. She saw now that it was not quite. Her mother sang it the way a person says a grace, without listening to it, the same unhurried tune every night. But there had been a night, a very long time ago, when the wind was loud in the chimney and Elowen could not sleep, and a small cold hand had crept under the quilt to hold hers. Don't be scared, Elodie had whispered, nine years old, fierce and serious. I know the rest of it. Mam doesn't. I'll sing you the rest of it.

And she had. Elowen could not remember the words. She remembered only the feeling, the great warm hush that had come over the room, and the way her sister's voice had gone up at the end, past where the song stopped, higher and sweeter and stranger, into a place that no one had ever shown her.

Elowen opened her eyes and sat very still, with the pen drying in her fingers.

She knew the rest of it.

She wrote it down at once, in letters so hasty they ran off the line. Elodie knew the end of the song. Where did she learn it? And underneath, because it seemed only honest: Who else has she sung it to?

She did not know why it frightened her. She went on writing anyway.

By dusk, she had written eleven pages. Her fingers were cramped and ink-stained and the candle at her elbow had burned to a stub. She closed the book on her thumb and held it a moment against her chest.

It felt, she thought, a little like holding a baby. It felt like something that would need minding.

She was about to rise and stretch when she happened to look up at the mirror above the chest.

It was a habit now to avoid it, as one avoids a sleeping dog. It had a way of showing a room she did not own. But the quilt was gray tonight, the blossom was gone, and the girl in the glass at the little desk was herself, hair coming down from its plait, gown rumpled, a smear of ink on her chin. She was holding a book.

She was writing in it.

Elowen froze with her pen above the page.

The girl in the mirror was not holding the book to her chest. She was bent over it with the pen moving. She wrote quickly, with her free hand curved above the paper, and her face in the glass was tilted a little, as if she were listening to a voice. She turned a page. She wrote. She was perfectly absorbed.

She turned a page.

The page was blank.

Elowen looked down at her own book, open on the desk. Eleven pages, close-written. She looked back up.

In the mirror, the girl was turning a page that held no writing at all, and then another, and another, and then lifting her head. She had Elowen's face, and Elowen's hair, and Elowen's tired mouth. But the eyes were wrong. They were light brown, and smooth, and very polite, like the eyes of someone who is trying with all her might to remember what a person is supposed to feel.

The reflection smiled.

It was a small, careful, apologetic smile, as a child smiles who has dropped a dish. Then it lifted the empty book in both hands and held it out to her, as if offering it for inspection.

Nothing in it, said the smile. Nothing at all. You see?

"Get out," whispered Elowen.

The girl in the glass tilted her head, interested.

"Get out of my mirror."

The smile widened, a little too far.

Elowen seized the shawl from the foot of the bed and flung it over the glass.

She stood with her back to the wall, her heart hammering, the gray book pressed against her ribs like a shield. Nothing moved beneath the shawl. After a minute she heard a very faint tapping, tick, tick, tick, like a fingernail at a window, and then it stopped.

She sank down on the floor and stayed there until her breathing was slow.

It's not you, she told herself. It's not. It's only the glass. It's the Land's trick. It wants you to think you're being copied. It wants you to doubt the book.

But she thought of the smile, and the tilted head, and the two empty pages, and of a half-second delay in a high dark mirror, and a crooked grin that had spread wider than a human face. And she had a cold, clear, certain thought, which she would have given anything to unthink:

It's practicing.

…

When she got up, her legs were steady.

She went back to the desk. She did not look at the shawl. She turned to the first page of the gray book, to the empty line at the top, and picked up the pen. It was still warm from her hand. She wrote the name very slowly, in letters as big and black and plain as she could make them.

ELODIE.

She drew a line beneath it. She drew a second line beneath that.

Beneath the lines, in her small round country hand, she wrote the oath. She had been carrying it in her head since the spring and had not given it words, and now she saw that it was short, and that she'd been ashamed of it, and that there was no reason to be.

I am here to find my sister. I will find her. I will not forget her. Whatever else goes, that stays.

Elowen, of Scenery Chalk. Written this day, in the Glass Castle, with my own hand.

She read it through. She blew on the ink.

The fire hissed gently in the grate. Beyond the frozen window the glass snow went on falling, soft and endless and silver under the pale lamps of the dusk, and somewhere in the house below a very faint sound began, so slow and faint and low that she thought at first it was the wind. It was the sound of a single note, held on a breath, in a man's voice, rising and falling, a long way off.

It was the last note of the song.

She raised her head.

"Who taught you that?" she said softly, to the dark.

No one answered. But the note held on a moment longer, and then, like a man who has been caught at something and cannot decide whether to be ashamed, it stopped.