A Wicked Snow

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“Come out West and we’ll marry.”

But just how many did she bury?

One, two, three, four…

—A jump-rope verse from the 1970s

Prologue

The girl remembered the snow and the evil that had come with it. She shuddered at the very idea of the velvety white shroud over a mountaintop—the drifts of cream around fence posts on the country lane of a Christmas card. For many, such images brought to mind the beauty of the winter season and the holidays that hang from a frosty bow. But not for her. It wasn’t just the snow, of course. It was what came with it. Whenever she saw or felt the cold heart of winter, she thought of her mother.

A snow scene brought a thumping of her heart and the shadowy image of a woman in wine-colored cover-alls and a navy-blue down-filled vest. Vapors formed a halo around the woman’s head, though the girl knew the irony of the image. She knew it was her mother. And her mother was far from an angel in every way that could be imagined. The face, however, was blank in her memory. The girl was unsure what color eyes her mother had or if her nose was straight or slightly crooked like her own. She knew their coloring was the same, but nothing more. Nothing she could swear to. She had done a good job of trying to forget just what her mother looked like. She stopped wondering if, as she approached her mother’s age, she looked like her. In her mind’s eye, the girl’s mother was bent over doing something in the snowy dark of a nighttime long ago. Pink bloomed on a white blanket. What was it? The girl allowed herself to try to peer into the space just beyond her mother’s shoulder. She strained to see. She wanted to tap her, to get her attention. Why are we doing this? But no action, no words came. And then, the fleeting image evaporated like the smoke from a candle.

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