Page 73 of A Killing Cold

The silence is a long one. I wait. “You didn’t talk much, back then,” he begins at last. “For the longest time, you’d say only that one word.Teddy. Bought you a million teddy bears, too, but you always just shoved them away, shook your head like they were wrong.”

Because the right one was here all the while, with its soft brown fur and red ribbon. I shut my eyes.

“But then you started talking, little by little. Just at night, when I would read you stories. You’d snuggle up in the crook of my arm. It was the one time you were ever calm. And one night out of nowhere you told me a story. You said that you used to live in a castle on a mountain. I asked if that made you a princess, and you said no, the princess was dead. You said that a terrible ogre had come to the mountain. You told me…” He takes a deep breath. “You told me that you knew what it felt like to be dead. That it was very, very cold. But you weren’t alone, because the princess was there with you. You woke up. She didn’t. And then the fairies took you away to find a new family.”

“Where did I come from, Joseph?” I ask. “You always said someone in the church…”

“That was a lie,” Joseph tells me, and I wish I was surprised. “Or, not entirely. Someone in the church did approach us. They knew we’d been trying, and we were getting desperate. He said that there was a kid who needed a family, but it wasn’t… official. He said we’d have to do it quietly. And there’d be some money. We didn’t ask questions. We were just grateful to have you. But I always knew there was something wrong about it.”

“Wrong about me, you mean.”

“It was never anything wrong with you. You were traumatized. I know that now. Hell, I knew it then, but I thought that loving you would be enough.”

“Maybe it would have been, if you were better at it,” I say, and the bitterness oozes through my words.

“Theo, I—” Joseph begins.

I end the call. And then I block his number. Tears drag tracks down my cheeks. I don’t want his apology. It won’t do any good, not now.

A princess in a castle. An ogre. It makes as much sense as the rest.

I can almost see it. I can almost hear her voice. I sink down into the snow, wrapping my arms around my knees. I stare out down the silvery road as snow falls. It is eerily silent. I cannot even hear myself.

Mallory Cahill. No,Mama. I picture the woman in the photos, the bruises on her body, and for an instant she’s there.

Mama. Her back bare. Her head turned to look over her shoulder. I can just see her through the crack in the door.

I’m not supposed to go in.

The numbing cold bites through my clothes. I should be shivering, but I’m not. My body is gone; all sound is gone, and there is only the eerie pale unlight of the snow and the night, and in this space I don’t exist;heredoesn’t exist. The warmth and the light are all gone, and I follow it back, and there she is.

The girl watches her mother piling clothes in a suitcase. “Are we going on a trip?”

“For a little while.”

The girl traces shapes in the condensation of the car window. Her mother adjusts the rearview mirror to look at her, smiles. The girl smiles, too, but she feels like crying. Outside the window, snow begins to fall.

The girl spins and laughs, topples into the snow. She pops back up again, eager for the approval of her audience. The boy rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling. She’s pleased. She wants to impress him. She thinks they’ll always be friends.

She looks up into the face of the antlered man, and she screams, but she’s frozen in place, and he grabs her by the arm—

The snow is still falling. It comes thick and fast and it covers her. She burrows beneath it like a blanket. She was so cold before, but now she’s beginning to feel warm again. She thinks she would like to sleep now.

The sun has vanished. She can’t feel her feet or her right hand, though she knows it’s there because it’s resting on top of the snow right in front of her nose.

Clouds cover the sky. Occlude the moon. But there’s one star still shining in the night. Sometimes it’s amber, and sometimes it glows a duller red. It moves from time to time. She thought at first it was a wishing star, but she has been wishing for one thing and it hasn’t come.

Help.

She tries to say it, but her voice doesn’t work. The star flares. It illuminates a face, the dark shine of eyes that watch her with patient disinterest.

She’s not so cold anymore, she thinks. She feels very warm now. She shuts her eyes. Maybe help came after all, and her mother has bundled her up in a blanket in front of the fire, and soon she will tell her a story about the princesses in the forest and all the places that they will go next.

The memories shiver. In the dark they are almost physical things. I could reach out and touch them.

“You look so cold,” my mother says. She crouches down in front of me, wraps a red scarf around my neck. Her smile is warm and unafraid. “What are you doing out here, Teddy?”

“Looking for you,” I whisper. I blink my eyes. They feel gummy. My limbs are heavy. “Mama?”

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