The Ice Sings Back, page 28
But May was not stuck in that world. She was in the real world.
May gently folded the picture in two, tucked it into her pocket.
She turned, walked out of the bay, across the gravel parking lot, unlocked her car. She felt aged. Her hands shook. She opened her car door.
May heard the sound of crunching gravel behind her and her heart jumped to her throat. She knew instantly that the chief was coming after her, that he’d realized his error and what incredible value she brought to the team.
He was going to apologize.
Perhaps life was like television.
May took a breath, fleetingly closed her eyes, then turned.
But it wasn’t the chief standing behind her.
May looked down at the dog sitting quietly in the gravel.
The stray eyed her, tail thumping, ears partially raised.
“Okay,” she said, opened her car door wider.
The dog pawed forward.
“Get in, Foxface,” May said. “We’re getting out of here.”
16
THE
MOTHER
Leonie moved slowly up the trail, lava rocks and scree scrambling underfoot. She felt thin, like she was about to wash away. She ignored the wet gravel squishing, the damp foliage leaving elegant streaks across the tips of her boots. A spring shower had unloaded rain the day before, chased away the snow patches. But her only thought was Amelia.
She stopped, drank from her water bottle, looked around at the Three Sisters rising before her, the blue skies and racing clouds. It was a day a lot like the two hundred and eighty-four days previous.
Airborne spiders appeared in front of her, flapped, then vanished, blown by the steady wind.
The only thing she wanted was for her daughter to reappear.
Amelia.
She swallowed thickly, tried to push through her lightheadedness, forced her feet forward.
Every weekend since Amelia vanished, she’d driven up, twisting along the narrow McKenzie Highway, parked at Scott Trailhead, walked the trail to the Collier Cone and called for her daughter.
Thirty-six weekends.
Arturo accompanied her for the first few trips, but eventually he stopped, saying it was too hard to keep returning.
But still, Leonie went, every weekend. It both took every bit of strength she had and gave her strength to get out of bed each day.
When winter came and smothered the region with snow, she still drove up, go as far as the snowline allowed, park her car, and call for Amelia until her throat bled.
Leonie knew Amelia was gone. But it wasn’t possible that her daughter was dead. Amelia, instead, was just away temporarily. She’d vanished. And that meant she could still be found.
No funeral, no memorial. She couldn’t. Arturo had held a service, but Leonie would not attend, could not acknowledge what Arturo said was true.
She did not want to learn to live in a world where Amelia did not exist. To her, there was no firm evidence that Amelia had left the planet. Leonie knew Amelia could come back. Amelia could live.
In spring, the snow had lifted in the high elevations. The second weekend in May, she drove up and was surprised to find the snow gate just past Camp White Branch open. Driving further, she found all the gates on the 242 open. Leonie wound up the tortuous road, clutched the wheel through hairpin turns that stacked, one-two-three, right on top of one another. She was impervious to the majestic views, the long sight lines of rippling mountain ridges still swathed in snow. Her body crawled with a single desire.
Pulling into the Scott Trailhead lot, she parked her car where she and Amelia had parked nine months earlier. She saw the place as it was last fall. How Amelia was impatient, eager to go, but she’d wanted to make sure they’d grabbed everything. How when they had hit the trail, the girl was going so fast that she’d struggled to keep up. How Amelia made that strange humming noise, how they climbed up the Collier Cone, how Amelia talked about the glacier wanting a companion. Then, the picture they’d taken at the bottom of the cone.
That picture of the two of them. She cherished it, looked at it relentlessly on her phone. She examined her daughter’s face for evidence of distress, painstakingly poured over the background to see if someone was lurking, waiting. She looked for what she’d missed.
At the trailhead, Leonie got out of her car, stretched her legs. No other cars in the lot. It was still early spring. Not a lot of hikers wanted to argue with a snow- and lava-covered trail. But Leonie had snowshoes.
Leonie stepped into them, clipped the straps into place, and took off. She walked through the snow-covered meadow, sloshed through the stands of lodgepole pines and hemlocks. Knew the remote ache in her calves as the trail started to ascend, gradually, and then, there she was, out onto the first lava flow. The trail was bare for a while and she stowed the snowshoes and hiked along, looking to either side of the trail, willing Amelia to appear.
Every few minutes she stopped. Called to her daughter.
No response. Not even a bird call. It was silent.
Leonie let her mind wander down the worn grooves of what had happened after Amelia disappeared. How it had taken a full hour for her to realize the situation was real. How Amelia wasn’t hiding. How, eventually, she’d decided to hike back to the carpark, had expected to find her there. How cold she’d been that night, sitting in the car as the first round of search and rescuers hit the trail, yelling, blasting emergency whistles. How, the next morning, so many vehicles poured into the trailhead parking lot and she’d felt a surge of confidence. So many people. She’d known they would find her.
But they hadn’t, and in the days and weeks that followed, nothing made sense. The compassionate faces of searchers had transformed, into the hard faces of police, men in crisp blue polyester shirts, belts of hard equipment strapped close, hairlines razored sharp. They’d crowded in around her, offered names that she couldn’t remember, made her repeat over and over what had happened, asked if Leonie had life insurance for her child.
They said they’d found something else where Leonie and Amelia had hiked.
They said they’d found bodies shattered on the glacier like punched teeth.
They said the bodies had necks broken and limbs crushed.
They said the bodies were undressed, missing shoes, shirts, pants.
They said the bodies were once women.
They fed Leonie details one at a time, and she felt them scrutinizing her as she pulled her frayed jacket tighter, as if each word was measured against some guilt they found perceptible in her face, the length of her tears, the authenticity of her bewilderment. She watched them stare at her bare hands.
She was horrified, had dutifully answered questions about her whereabouts years and years ago, had supplied the DNA swabs they’d asked for, and looked at crime scene images so traumatizing she’d screamed her way through nightmares.
She did everything they asked but even then, Amelia had not been found.
And now, she was crippled under the weight of unknowing, unable to live without answers, unable to make sense of the immeasurable dearth of information. She wanted everything in the world to stop until Amelia returned.
But the world did not stop, did not pause. Weeks bled into weeks and people came by less. She had to buy herself groceries and make dinner and pay her bills and avoid people who looked at her with eyes suspicious and accusing and reflective of every way Leonie had failed her daughter.
When her bereavement leave ended, her employer tactfully told her to return to work or they’d need a replacement. And so then she found herself again most days walking into the Market of Choice on Willamette, stocking brightly lit wine racks and answering customer questions about tannins and new Argentinian blends and thinking about her daughter.
And on her lunch breaks Leonie would walk to the little café inside the market and buy a coffee with her employee discount and read the local newspaper and hope there was news about Amelia. But most days The Register-Guard ran stories instead focused on the Three Sisters Killer, how the police announced they were reopening cold cases of local women reported missing over the last thirty years, how they cited lack of resources for the large number of previously uninvestigated cases. How they had asked the public for any leads and acknowledged their process was flawed and intended to establish a full public inquiry. How so far they’d identified Brie Anitala, Dee Mercier, Aiyana Kim, Becky Obidiah, Xochitl Martinez, and Hannah Froyn, and would release more names after the next of kin had been notified.
Each time Leonie read the paper, her stomach clenched and her muscles contracted until she’d gone through all the columns of text. She knew in people’s minds her daughter was forever connected to the horror unfolding up in the ice.
But to her, Amelia was completely separate. To her, those women were dead, but her daughter was not. Her daughter was missing, and Leonie knew she could still be found.
Arturo did not agree. He told her that, likely, Amelia had succumbed to the elements, had fallen into a lava crack, had drowned in a river, had died somewhere somehow in the wilderness. He told her it was unfair, a tragedy, but nature was never concerned with wrong or right. He told her he did not blame her, but he could not look for their daughter anymore. That he’d have to instead just remember his daughter in his heart. She refused to listen. She’d quietly hung up the phone, had screamed into her linoleum floor, and on the weekends continued to search.
Her daughter was still out there.
Leonie scanned the deep, velvet lava, noticed how the snow softened the stone margins. She slowed her feet, squinted her eyes east at the undulating landscape. She was grateful there was still snow. She’d be able to spot footprints if Amelia had intersected with the trail recently.
She pictured Amelia’s purple shirt, her tiny, army green pants, her smile. Piercing green eyes. She inhaled sharply. She’d been on her daughter’s case from day one about looking people in the eyes. Why hadn’t she just let Amelia be Amelia? Did eye contact matter all that much?
Tears came to Leonie’s eyes and she looked up. The sky felt enormous, like it could fall down at any moment and crush her. She kept moving.
Her feet were on autopilot as she searched, called.
Before she fully realized it, she found herself standing at the base of the Collier Cone. She looked up the gray slope that was patched sloppily with snow and red minerals. Remembered. Her daughter had called her a racist for liking the Oregon Trail computer game. Her mouth twitched. Amelia was so blunt, truthful.
Leonie called again.
No response.
She contemplated going up the crater. But then the wind picked up, carried a soft chiming-humming that pulled at her feet, moved her away from the cinder cone, brought her west instead. The sound was welcoming and joyous and she followed it without thinking.
She moved mechanically up switchbacks—sharp jagged twists in the trail—and then she was hiking parallel to the Collier Glacier. She came to a stop on the flank of Little Brother, in the shadow of the Three Sisters, with the ice gouged out between them.
She stared across at the Collier Cone, looked at the place where she and Amelia had stopped on the trail and marveled at the glacier. Where Amelia told her the glacier wanted a companion. She could see the entirety of the it from her vantage point, even into the side of the ice where the search and rescue team had pulled out all those bodies. Over twelve now, all in appalling states.
She shivered, eased herself down to sit on the rocky ridge, stretched her legs. The wind was strong, insistent. It flowed like a river, wrapped her in a whooshing icy bubble that felt electric, amplified. She listened to the faint thrumming in the background, a pulsing that made her feel as if the mountains were alive.
She stared down, looked blankly at the ice. Sun cups on the surface glistened between snow patches. So many shades of white.
She wondered if more bodies were under the ice.
It felt incomprehensible.
She struggled to understand how right below her, the bodies of so many women had been thrown into the gutter between the glacier and the mountain. How, while the police hadn’t said definitely what had happened, they did say they were pursuing the Three Sisters Killer theory. And how they had not identified the killer.
Tears gathered cold in the corners of Leonie’s eyes. She pushed them away, looked up at the mountainous spine of North Sister. Gazed around. The surrounding lava flows and high peaks of the Cascade volcanoes contrasted with the low altitude forests and grasslands. It was, she could see, beautiful. She bowed her head under the immense weight of her missing daughter, of the countless years that had passed in a single moment.
She lost track of time, sitting on the ridge’s edge above the glacier, staring at the mountain, the sky, the clouds. Her eyes were open, but she didn’t register. She needed relief, an answer to the untenability of living without Amelia.
Gradually, through her dry, deadened exhaustion, she heard it.
A different type of humming. Not what she’d heard earlier, the cheerful background thrumming. This new sound was peculiar, reedy. High pitched. Growing louder.
It reminded her of the song Amelia had hummed their last day together.
Leonie’s throat constricted; joy surged up from her heart. She blinked her eyes, twisted her head, and then, her eyes flared raw as she saw a figure walking up the ridge behind her. Wearing a pink sweater. Holding a stick.
She jerked up onto her feet, ungainly, and, for a single breath, knew it was Amelia. Frenetic exhilaration flashed as her heart leapt into her burning mouth and she choked and her legs liquified.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” the person called.
Her bones shredded.
It wasn’t Amelia.
Just an old woman, whistling a reedy tune. Leonie clamped her teeth, tried to hold back a hysterical sob. She fought the wave threatening to overwhelm her, stared at the woman. Took in the silver-white hair, the hands gripping the stick like claws, the huge purple birthmark on her face, the bright steady eyes. Opened her mouth, asked: “What are you singing? I’ve heard it before.”
The woman moved parallel to Leonie, looked out over the glacier, the volcanoes, the snow, the stands of burned dead forests. She twisted, looked behind them at the ridges rolling away west.
Something clicked inside Leonie, and she gasped. “I’ve seen you before.”
The woman tilted her head, looked directly at her. “Of course you have.”
Wild delirium started to boom somewhere inside Leonie’s head. She tried to shake it away, knew she was a hair’s breadth from losing control of herself. “You were on the trail the day I lost my daughter,” she said, shakily, pulse hammering. The backs of her eyes ached. “What happened to Amelia?”
“Well,” the old woman replied conversationally, “The Brother used to be bigger. I know. But he was worn down by the weight of the world. The Sisters, they’re worn too. But those women haven’t lost as much of themselves.” She laughed lightly. It sounded like stones grating.
Leonie gaped at the woman. Took a breath, exhaled, saw waves of desperation encircling her. “I’ve lost my daughter.”
The old woman was silent, her white bob waving in the wind. Then she turned to Leonie. “Loss is not the end,” she answered. “We disappear, we return, we disappear again.”
Leonie’s shoulders collapsed; she let her head droop. Lumps choked her throat, tears blurred her eyes. Every muscle in her body crawled with nerves and exhaustion. “You think I’ll find my daughter?” she whispered.
The woman shrugged her shoulders, cavalier. “Does something have to be in front of you to be found?”
Leonie’s gut wrenched. “Yes,” she whimpered. “I want to hold my daughter again.” She looked away, down towards the ice, felt desperation in her stomach and teeth and eyes and hairline. She felt consumed by a piercing, keening impulse to wrap her arms around Amelia, breathe the sweet scent of her daughter. “I’m afraid she’s gone.”
The woman made a tsking sound. “Just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it’s gone.”
Leonie reached out, tried to grab the woman’s wrist. Her fingers clawed air, and the woman was suddenly deftly two feet away, unperturbed. Leonie hadn’t seen her move. She blinked, worried she was imagining things, felt hot pain pounding in her throat.
She looked down into her hands, her fingernails digging into her own flesh. Beaded up blood flared from her broken skin.
Rocks crunched, and Leonie looked up, saw the old woman walking away.
“Wait,” she called.
The woman stopped, turned, seemed to appraise her. Leonie felt stuck in place, balanced precariously. The woman smiled softly, and Leonie felt the rigidity inside herself thaw, loosen. She stood straighter, relaxed her fingers from their tight fists, felt unaccountable adrenaline and pleasure surge over her.
“Don’t give up on Amelia.” The woman’s eyes brightened. “Everyone thinks the future is set. But it’s just unknown.”
Leonie shook herself, tried to get control. “Are you real?” she whispered.
“Everyone thinks I’m already gone,” the woman replied. “But I’m here.”
The woman stamped her stick into the ground. Then, quicker than Leonie thought possible, she turned, strode back down along the ridgeline, whistling her reedy melody, a strange song that reached back and wrapped itself around Leonie’s core.
Leonie’s muscles contracted and she bent at the waist, gasped for air. She stayed bent over for minutes, wheezing. Then, she pushed up with her hands on her knees, straightened, looked around.
She stared at the cliff, down at the ice. The slope cut sharply away. She toed her right foot into the dirt’s edge, sent a slab of scree racing over the drop. She felt the wind at her back, the precariousness of her balance.
