Page 37 of Snow River

“You’re a normal human size.You’re just on the large end of the scale.”

He glanced over at her, amused by how quickly she jumped to his defense.“When I was a kid, my grandfather used to read me bedtime stories about giants.I wondered if my mother ran into one of those and I was the result.”

Lila’s eyes went wide and she let out an excited gasp.“That’s just like me.”

“Your father’s a giant too?”

“No, I always had this idea that someone—an elf, a fairy—had switched me with the real baby my parents were supposed to have.Like a changeling.You know those stories?”

He did not.“My gramps only read stories about giants.”

She laughed.“It’s a fairy story, but fairies aren’t always good, you know.These fairies steal human babies and leave changelings in their place.Changelings look like real babies but they’re not, they’re supernatural, the offspring of fairies or elves.And in some stories, they’re actually deformed.”

That sounded more like a horror story than a fairy story to him.“What made you think you were something like that?”

“Actually, the idea came from my mother.She called me a changeling because I was so different from other babies.I hardly ever cried and would just stare really hard at everything.Everyone thought I was a very strange child, especially when I started talking.Apparently I would hold whole conversations with dust motes or a bee buzzing at the window.I would talk to people who weren’t there.I was…it was a lot for my mother.She struggled with depression and I’m sure I made it worse.She’d hole up in her room for days.That was super-hard on my father.He’d be so focused on her that he didn’t pay much attention to me.Which was better, in a way, because at least I didn’t freak him out.”

Catching herself, she snapped her mouth shut, then covered it with her hand.“Wait, we were talking about you, not me.”

“No, I like this better.”He grinned at her.“I like hearing you talk.Even if you’re conversing with a dust mote.”

“Well, thanks…” She wrinkled her nose.“But the honest truth is, life got easier for my mother after I left.”

He heard the wistfulness in her voice, and set a hand on her knee as comfort.She covered it with her much smaller, softer hand.

“It’s okay,” she assured him.“You don’t have to worry about me.I came to terms with all of that a long time ago.When I go home, I stay no more than two nights.Less stress for my mom.I know she loves me, but life is hard for her.”Lila gestured at the road up ahead, where a sloping curve revealed a glimpse of Ice Falls looking like a tumble of crystals frozen for eternity.“Did we pass Paulina’s house?”

“Shit.”He’d been so wrapped up in Lila’s story that he’d missed Paulina’s driveway.Pretty impressive, considering it was marked with a metal sculpture of several leaping salmon.

He performed a three-point turn in the middle of the road.

That was when he realized why he’d missed her road.The sculpture was upended, lying on its side, as if the salmon were no longer leaping, but gasping for breath in the alien air.

It would take a lot to knock over something so heavy.Had the wind been that strong out here?Or had something else happened?

Bear jerked the truck to a stop and leaped out.

18

Bear disappeareddown the path to Paulina’s, while Lila scrambled out of the truck.Paulina was such a committed hermit that she refused to put in a driveway.She used a wheelbarrow to carry groceries and supplies down the long winding path to her home, which was also her art studio.

Lila had thought about gently suggesting that Paulina, who was now in her mid-sixties, should go easier on her body and consider a driveway.But Paulina knew her own mind, like most of the rugged and self-sufficient folks out here.

Lila ran down the mossy path after Bear.This area had a rainforest feel; lush ferns and vivid mushrooms popping through rotting logs.Paulina’s paintings often incorporated whimsical elements that seemed unlikely, until you saw them with your own eyes.Like that bright crimson mushroom with the white polka dots.Or the other mushroom that looked like a crinkly penis head.

No Annoying People Allowed, proclaimed a sign tacked to a birch tree at the edge of the clearing where Paulina’s house sat.It wasn’t so much a “house” as a stream-of-consciousness architectural ramble.It rose three stories into the forest canopy, with a ladder clinging to the outside wall.The place had been built one room at a time, depending on when Paulina had the money and if there was a carpenter available to help.As time went on, Paulina herself had learned construction, and the last story—a deck with a railing—had been her own handiwork.

Or so she’d told Lila when she came in for her twice-monthly glass of Harvey’s Bristol Cream Sherry.Bear kept it in stock especially for her.

“Paulina?”Lila heard Bear’s deep voice reverberate through the house.“Paulina, are you here?It’s Bear and Lila.”

Lila stopped abruptly outside the house.Even though she’d been here before, this time she couldn’t go inside.She just couldn’t, the same way that she hadn’t been able to leave the overlook at Snow River.An unexplainable force wouldn’t allow it.

She glanced around the clearing.Pillows of moss cushioned the forest floor.A squirrel scolded her from a nearby spruce tree.The tree’s branches reached gracefully for the open air, like a dancer’s wide skirt.Pieces of Paulina’s sculpture sat here and there, some of them rusty from exposure.A hammered metal wind chime swayed in the wind, which was gentle down here, though still fierce higher in the canopy.

Hiding.And biding.

The words flashed into Lila’s thoughts.Paulina was hiding here from something.What about “biding”?Biding her time?Abiding?Lila searched for more meaning, but the “blip” was gone.

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