The Children's Blizzard(14)

    There was no way out, nowhere for her to go; she couldn’t even run away, because she would freeze. She could only shut her eyes and try to summon up something good, and she pictured herself running with Fredrik, the two of them skimming the prairie earth. Running was the most uncomplicated thing in the world; all you had to do was remember to breathe and cherish the ache in your chest that came from the freedom of your body carrying your mind and your thoughts somewhere else, your troubles, too—they were mobile, never burdensome, when you were running.

And Fredrik’s happy face, the sandy hair tickling his arched eyebrows, the freckles on his face even more pronounced when he was running beside her, sometimes reaching out to grab her hand, as if the two of them together could run even faster than each alone—

“Anette! Anette!”

A tug on her sleeve, a hand in hers, and she stopped running, stopped remembering, and tried to breathe—but couldn’t. She tried to inhale but only frigid air, grains of ice, invaded her lungs and she began to wheeze, her chest so tight, her throat stinging, her nostrils stuck together. Gasping for breath, Anette turned, tried to open her eyes wide but they were stuck together; she rubbed her eyes with her sleeve until some of the ice melted and she could see.

    The world as she had known it was gone. Everywhere was now white, now grey, now white again. She was in the middle of that furious cloud and could not see anything that looked of this earth. She might have been sucked up in the storm, like a cyclone, were it not for the ground beneath her feet. Ground that was increasingly covered with snow.

“Anette!”

“Fredrik!” She could barely say his name, and the wind howled so that it was a miracle he heard it, but he held tight to her hand, leaned in close to her. His eyes were wide with recognition; recognition that this was not anything he had encountered before, this howling tunnel of wind almost knocking them off their feet, of no visibility, no markers at all. She wanted to scream at him—How did you find me? Are you stupid? Go back!

Please stay, stay with me, I don’t know how to do this.

But she had to go home, she couldn’t dawdle, it was the only consistent thought as her mind started to open up to the realization that it was foolish, what she had done, to try to outrace a blizzard. Only once did she think of going back, but as soon as she turned around to retrace her steps, she saw that they were already swallowed up by the drifting snow, and she couldn’t see anything, anything at all, except for Fredrik’s blue—frightened—eyes.

“We go,” she managed to finally croak, then she shouted the words again, and Fredrik nodded.

We go. Forward, toward home.

We go, Anette said in her heart.

Together.





CHAPTER 6


?????



GAVIN HAD JUST TURNED THE corner of Farnam, on his way back to the Gilded Lily, when the storm struck Omaha.

The force of it blew him off his feet and pushed him against a hitching post; he clung to it for a moment, stunned. Sure, the sky had grown dark in the northwest while he was out strolling, which was why he turned around in the first place. But weather, even in Godforsaken Nebraska, didn’t move that fast, as fast as a steam engine on a flat track.

Grabbing on to the post until he could regain his balance, Gavin felt something like gravel hit the back of his neck. Turning around, ready to yell at some hooligan, he saw no one behind him at all, but when he reached up to touch his neck, he felt hard little pebbles of ice. He gaped in surprise as the buildings he’d just passed were swallowed up by a furious wall of snow, now mixed with the dirt of town so that it was streaked with brown and grey and black.

Gavin swore; he felt fear despite the fact that he was a mere few feet from shelter. And then, all he could think of was her. That young woman, the one he’d just tipped his hat to, what was it—God, only half an hour ago, it must have been. Dear God.

    She’d be back out on the prairie now, she and her family; rubes they were, Swedes probably, maybe Germans; they all had that open, exposed expression of someone new to this land. Like baby chicks, needing to be taught everything. The family must have come into town for supplies; he’d spotted them out near the Catholic cemetery, at a little dry goods store that nobody who lived in town ever went to because the prices were too high. But the place did a splendid business jacking up the prices for homesteaders who were too overwhelmed to venture farther into town.

Hitched to a post in front of the store had been a wagon, the wheels replaced with crude sleigh runners; in the bed of the wagon were two small boys pummeling each other and jabbering in their native tongue. Next to them, sitting so that her back was against the driver seat of the wagon, was their older sister, Gavin supposed.

A young woman, maybe seventeen, who could tell? Gavin certainly couldn’t. But she was wearing long skirts, her reddish blond hair braided into a crown atop her head. She was sitting so still, oblivious to the two hooligans fighting at her feet, her hands folded quietly in her lap, her face turned west, a longing kind of look in her eyes, a half smile playing at her lips. Her clothes were plain, homespun, her cloak a faded dark green. He couldn’t see her feet, but he imagined she was wearing dirty men’s boots, too big for her. Every material thing on her looked made for someone else.

It was her throat that made Gavin stop, look, feel. To his consternation and horror, tears sprang to his eyes. But her throat was so young, unlined, somehow tender and hopeful, if a throat could be that, but here it was, this womanly throat not yet weighed down by care and death and worry and fear. It held her delicate head aloft as she blinked her eyes dreamily, still looking out toward the prairie, like a stem holds a bud; it yearned.