The Snow Child

by Eowyn Ivey

Then she spotted a few strands of silver in his reddish-brown beard. When had they appeared? So he, too, was graying. Each of them fading away without the other’s notice.

She had tried to keep her tone even, to not let desperation break her voice. Jack was wary of her newfound enthusiasm.

Outside, the air was clean and cool against her face, and she could smell the wood smoke from the chimney. She let the snow float around her, and then Mabel did what she had as a child—turned her face to the sky and stuck out her tongue. The swirl overhead was dizzying, and she began to spin slowly in place.

She seemed to him both powerful and delicate, like a wild thing that thrives in its place but withers when stolen away.

The awful truth of what the child had witnessed would wrench Mabel’s heart, and the last thing on earth he wanted to do was cause her any more sadness. Her capacity for grief frightened him.

Was it as Ada had suggested, that we can choose our own endings, joy over sorrow? Or does the cruel world just give and take, give and take, while we flounder through the wilderness?

I cannot survive this grief, she had thought. “Are you OK?”

She had survived, hadn’t she? Even when she had wanted to lie down in the night orchard and sink into a grave of her own, she had stumbled home in the dark, washed in the basin, and in the morning cooked breakfast for Jack. She had put away the dishes and scrubbed the table and counters. She had baked bread. She had worked and tried to ignore the painful swell of her breasts and the empty cramp of her womb. And then she had done the unthinkable; she had entered the nursery and put her hands on the oak crib, the one Jack had slept in as a child, and his mother before him. She touched the pastel quilt she had sewn, and then sorrow collapsed her into the rocking chair, where she sat with her arms across her sagging belly and remembered how it had been to have another person growing inside her. When she had the strength, she began to fold the tiny clothes and blankets and cloth diapers and put them into plain brown boxes. She didn’t stop working, but the sobs came and distorted her face, bleared her eyes, made her nose run. She didn’t hear Jack come to the door. When she looked up he was watching her silently, and then he turned away, uncomfortable, embarrassed by her unharnessed grief. He didn’t put his hand on her shoulder. Didn’t hold her. Didn’t say a word. Even these many years later, she was unable to forgive him that.

It was as if Mabel had been living in a hole, comfortable and safe as it might have been, and he had merely reached down a hand to help her step up into the sunlight. From there she was free to walk where she would.

She could turn now and follow her tracks back home. She hadn’t gone that far yet. But the rage had not burned itself out.

In my old age, I see that life itself is often more fantastic and terrible than the stories we believed as children, and that perhaps there is no harm in finding magic among the trees.

“Dear, sweet Mabel,” she said. “We never know what is going to happen, do we? Life is always throwing us this way and that. That’s where the adventure is. Not knowing where you’ll end up or how you’ll fare. It’s all a mystery, and when we say any different, we’re just lying to ourselves. Tell me, when have you felt most alive?”

Passing their toddlers in a hall, mothers would tousle their hair or even sweep them up in their arms and kiss them hard along their chins and necks until the children squealed with glee. Where else in life, Mabel wondered, could a woman love so openly and with such abandon?

It wasn’t sorrow or love, disappointment or knowledge; it was everything at once.

She had thought often of Ada’s words about inventing new endings to stories and choosing joy over sorrow. In recent years she had decided her sister had been in part wrong. Suffering and death and loss were inescapable. And yet, what Ada had written about joy was entirely true. When she stands before you with her long, naked limbs and her mysterious smile, you must embrace her while you can.

Grief swept over Mabel with such force that her sobs had no sound or words. It was a shuddering, quaking anguish, and she only knew that she would survive because she had once before. She wept until there was nothing left in her, and she wiped her face with the tips of her fingers and sat in the chair, expecting Jack to go out the door and leave her alone. But he knelt at her feet, put his head in her lap, and they held each other and shared the sorrow of an old man and an old woman who have lost their only child.

It happened like this, the grief. Years wore away the cutting edges, but sometimes it still took him by surprise.