The Snow Queen

The winter before father walked out had been one of the coldest I could recall. He and my mother had made the decision to go up to the mountains for the weekend-- to stay in a cabin that had been in the family for thirty or so years.

It was an eerie, nostalgic place. All rotten wood and tin roofs. Pine and cedar and redwood shot up in dramatic abundance everywhere my childish eyes fell. And in the winter,the ground was stained white with snow, the air laced with frost. The little stream that trickled beside the driveway froze over, and icicles hung menacingly over our heads.

The first night, after we unpacked and made s'mores, the screaming began. Father thrust his fist through a wall, and mother sobbed, and I huddled beneath a quilt beside the fire place. It was a little after one in the morning before father thundered out the front door, slamming it behind him, into the snow.

"Are you and Dad splitting up?" I asked my mother impassively as she bundled me up for bed.

"I don't know," she returned, her face wet with tears. I trembled, mute.

The next morning, he had still not returned.

I decided that perhaps it was time for me to find him. It was freezing out, and he must be cold, with nowhere to go, or so I reckoned.

I put on my mittens and slipped out the front door, making haphazard tracks in the snow as I meandered between the trees.

It did not occur to me that I was lost until some time later, as the sun hung heavily in the sky, white hot against the clouds.

At first, I hardly paid any attention to my surroundings. I felt the wet crunch of fresh snow underfoot, and felt tree branches thick with pungent sap and pine needles slap against my face. It grew darker as the trees grew thicker. I slowed to a walking pace. That was when I first began to feel just how frigid it was, something I had initially disregarded in my fervor to find my father. It seeped through my thick orange jacket.

A slush of mud and ice had filled my shoes while I had been wandering, and my fingers felt numb and clumsy. I tried to calculate how long I had been gone, as I turned around to return. My mind went blank however, when I saw the way I had come was completely unfamiliar.

A feeling that was like cold, but was not settled in me. I knew stories about children who wandered off and lost themselves in the forest. I knew that they became food for mountain lions, or stripped off their clothes in the delerium of hypothermia. How silly I had been.

I stumbled back in the direction of my footprints, only to find after some investigation that I had been walking in circles for a long ways. The trees, which had before delighted me with their strange and often grotesque shapes, suddenly became threatening and I longed to return to the comfort of the cabin, and the warmth of my family. Meanwhile, it seemed to grow dimmer still in the woods.

I trudged blindly through the snows, jumping at every noise, from the wet thump of cascading snow to the harsh caw of a darting jay. I remembered vaguely that I should hug a tree, a loose thought that had seemed insignificant until now. I finally sat down on a plot of wet ground at the base of a towering sequoia and waited for what seemed like hours.

Hug a tree. If you ever find yourself lost and alone in the woods, pick a spot and stick to it. If you're a moving target, it will be infinitely more difficult for any would-be rescuers to find you.

My parents had drilled that advice into me from my earliest memories. In truth, I never imagined myself needing to make use of it. I was a cautious, dilligent child, the kind that never strayed far from home.

Sitting among the dripping bushes and Manzanita plants, I wondered where father had gone off to. Shivering, I considered whether I would ever see him again. Perhaps the cold was not so bad. It could numb you to everything else.

***

They would find me eventually. I can recall, with devestating clarity, how the branches straight ahead of me quivered, and my mother appeared through the dense foliage, my brother at her heels.

By then, father had returned.

The cabin was flushed with warmth from the roaring hearth, and all was well again. My mother craddled my shivering body and father kissed my cheeks.

All that mattered was that I was alive, it seemed. The rest was forgotten.

It did not occur to them that something had transpired out in the forest. That something sharp, and ragged, and freezing had lodged itself in me.

There is something wrong, I whispered to my brother, later in the evening. Something wrong with this family and I never realized it until today.

"Maybe the cold messed with your brain," he suggested, smirking.

"Maybe," I aquiesced.

***

Sometimes, even in the heat of Southern California, the old ache would start up again. The kind that permeates old or once-broken bones when it is about to rain. The kind that warns of approaching tempest.

I felt it while other children shrieked and hollered on the playground, or huddled over books in the library. It sprung up out of me before oral presentations, or during afternoon karate practices. While I tucked into peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or played chess with my friends. I would glance around, unnerved, for the sorce of the cold, and find only sunlight beating down from on high.

And I felt it too, that summer when a pair of officers showed up one afternoon at our front door, after school.

"Are your parents home?" one of them, a woman with carefully slicked back hair and burning eyes asked me, her badge glinting in the dim light of the foyer.

I called for my mother, shivering.

She appeared behind me, her voice suprised as she welcomed them inside.

They wanted to talk about father as it turned out. And so I let them talk, and wandered back to my room, teeth chattering.

***

The first time Father talked about divorce, it was summer. I sat in the cool black leather interior of his truck, staring out of the window at the baking LA asphalt. Waves rose up off the blacktop, and the sounds of the highway roared in my ears.

"I can't forgive your mother for this. Everything else, yes. But never this. You understand that, don't you?" he hummed from behind his sun glasses. I did not bother to answer him.

And so he tried again, turning down the pulsing heavy metal music pouring out of the loud speakers, as though perhaps I had not heard him.

"I got us a hotel room for now. You'll go back to your mom's place on Sunday night, and hopefully by the next time you see me I'll have my own place set up." I swallowed, reticent.

When we arrived at the hotel, a white monochrome Hilton with two queen beds, I hid myself behind the curtains leading out onto a balcony. The sun could find me here, even if father could not. There was something wrong with me, I realized, as I wavered, ensconced under all of that heat. A coldness that seeped outwards from my chest and radiated into my throat. I felt sure that anyone who looked me in the eyes would notice it.

Perhaps, I would die of heatstroke even as I simultaneously froze from the inside out.

***

Father begins dropping in on my therapy sessions. He wants to know why I won't have anything to do with him.

He asks for a hug, but I don't let him touch me. Overhead, the air conditioning hums, spraying icy air over all of us. I lean into the cold, my natural habitat.

He calls me a sociopath, and I smile at him toothily.

What does it matter if he is wrong? If I actually feel too much?

***

A decade or so later, I am out walking with a friend. We have just finished a pleasant meal at a little Italian place, and are headed back in the direction of her appartment.

From over her shoulder comes the usual overture.

"Damn, what a tall glass of water you two are." The man who calls to us is middle aged and bearded, his eyes slightly manic.

My friend laughs, throwing her head back in an attempt to hide her discomfort. I do not bother. I simply glare at him.

His eyes meet mine for a moment and then he ammends his statement.

"A tall glass of ice water, I mean." He raises his eyebrows and backs off.

Now, I allow myself to smile, feeling feral.