Page 24 of A Killing Cold

You may never remember, my therapist told me.Or it may come back to you at odd times. The strangest little details make memories return. A smell, a sound.

I close my eyes, and the image of the woman in the red scarf surfaces. I can never recall what she looked like—even what color her hair was, or if she was old or young. But I remember lying down next to her, our faces nearly touching. Did she smile? Did she say my name, tuck a strand of hair behind my ear?

The answers never come.

I step inside, moving quietly on instinct. I’m not supposed to be here—not that there’s anyone to notice that I’ve intruded.

Pale circles dot the floorboards. Candle wax. I turn slowly, picking out the places where the wax has spattered and dried. A dozen or so candles, arranged in a semicircle. I scratch at the wax with my thumb. It’s not as dusty as the rest of the floor. Someone has been in here.

I shiver. Straighten up. The stairs are before me, leading upward.

I inhale the scent of cedar, and memories eddy at the back of my mind.

Where did I come from?I would ask Beth and Joseph.

God brought you to us, Beth would say and Joseph, occasionally more practical, would explain,You came to us through the church. Some folks who knew we were praying for a child and knew you needed a family.

Years of infertility. Three pregnancies, three miscarriages. After that, nothing, not even the whisper of a positive on a pregnancy test. But then, out of nowhere, their prayers were answered.

Of course, that was before they started thinking I wasn’t so much an answer to their prayers as a trick played by the other side. They might have set out to love me at some point, but it rapidly became clear that I was unlovable by their standards.

Poor lamb, they called me. Abandoned. Voiceless.

Damaged. Demented.

I drift toward the stairs. That other cabin, the one flitting through my memories like a figure at the end of a corridor, always out of reach—I can almost picture it. “Two bedrooms upstairs. One smaller. Flowers on the bed,” I murmur to myself without quite realizing it, seizing on a flicker of memory. I try to fix the image in my head before I reach the top of the stairs and the sight of the real cabin chases it from my mind.

The flowers. They were white, I think. I practiced counting them, but there were too many. I always lost track.

There are two doors off the landing above. The one in front of me is shut. I turn my head. This door yawns open. The room is tiny—not much more than a closet. There’s space for a single bed, sized for a toddler or small child, with a metal frame and a nightstand. The bedspread is faded and dingy, but I can just make out the pattern.

The white daisies, their stems intertwined, spilling across the fabric.

9

I inhale sharply, and it’s like being punched in the gut—the scent of cedar, of pine and dust and something so faint I’m not sure it’s there at all, that my mind isn’t weaving it in all by itself. Lavender.

Daisies. The flowers on the bed were daisies, I think, but that’s impossible. This can’t be the same cabin. That can’t be the same bed.

I walk to the other door. I put my hand against it, not meaning to go in, not yet, but the latch on the door must not work properly because it simply swings open. I brace myself for a rush of recognition—but there’s nothing.

A queen-size bed frame, mattress nowhere in evidence, takes up most of the room. The frame is a heavy wooden thing, handmade, knots giving it character. A wardrobe stands in the corner; to my right, a vanity. The mirror throws back an obscured reflection, speckles of grime blotting out my face.

I let out a long breath as the sense of intense familiarity bleeds away. My shoulders relax, and I realize just how tightly I’ve been clenching my jaw.

Maybe I have been to a place like this one. A place with flowers on my bedspread and a woodstove and the scent of cedar. Common things—all of them pretty much baked into the cabin experience, in fact, and hardly particular to Idlewood.

My eyes fall from my distorted reflection to the surface of the vanity, and the sensible, rational, comforting thought withers up. Because it’s right there.

The dragonfly, cast in dull brass.

It takes three steps and an eternity to cross to the vanity. I touch thething as if it might burn me. An ornament for a door, two spots for the screws at the nose and the tail. It matches the silhouette on the door: a cross, the bar split at the end where the wings diverge.

Red Fox. White Pine. Wildflower.

Dragonfly.

I pick up the ornament, blowing dust from it with a puff of air. The patterns of its wings emerge. There are brass circles behind the dragonfly, an extra bit of decoration. I hold it next to my arm. Not the same, not exactly. The size and position of the circles behind the body are different.

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