In a great blizzard, a teenage girl with a backpack was standing outside the passenger-side of an old pickup truck, holding her breath to keep warm as she waited for the door to unlock. The daughter’s face was chapped from the wind, but she was beautiful, and notionally, still young. At this time of year, the smell of ice draped on the dry air like death – from her freezing breaths to her parched pores, a bloody nose was a daily occurrence.
It was difficult for her to do anything, or to make plans, when scarlet could flood from her at any instant. But it was good to know that she still bled, she thought while tapping her numb nose, searching for traces of red; that she was still capable of doing what other people could do.
The storm had gained strength since she looked down from the seventh story hospital window a few hours prior at the yellow-lit parking lot. It was right after the noise – the streamline hum of eternal stillness – filled her and the stepmother’s ears.
Looming snow heaps, sculpted by large plows, now encircled the lone vehicle – her father’s truck – that sat silently in the darkness of the early morning glow. Even though the business of the day would not start swarming for another few hours, the snow flurry was something like a crowded city mixed with a dense forest. She had never traveled to a city, but she tried to determine some way to relate the feeling of being surrounded and at the same time, secluded.
She had grown up in the great outdoors her entire life. Many people had told her that living “out there” was the definition of being surrounded and alone. This always made her laugh because being out there in the forest was the only time she ever felt safe.
She thought to herself, while waiting for warmth, that one reason she felt alone at that moment in the frosted woods of some town with the nearest hospital was the lack of invisible insects, murmuring and swaying on branches and flowers or possibly the shortage of strolling animals searching for their midnight meal. These things had always made the daughter feel that she wasn’t really alone.
But the girl thought that it must be something more than the simple decrease of life that led her to loneliness, to the dejection in her heart. The forest was somehow different today. It was just there, now. And there she was standing amidst it looking in and seeing nothing. They were just trees.
A stinging sensation filled her chest and she realized that she was still holding her breath. She exhaled dry white. Her father would want her to keep breathing, she thought. He had told her the night before to keep breathing.

Sandrock was a winding road that went deep into the forested backcountry of Eden, New York. During autumn, multicolor leaves would loom from raspy branches and enclose the thin grey road. Cora, an eight-year-old girl, would sit on her front lawn, on the edge of the forest, and watch mini leaf tornados whirl behind occasional passing cars and listen to the chainsaw echo in the surrounding woods.
Every autumn on weekends, a man – the girl’s father – went deep into the woods to cut down great trees. Firewood was expensive, he told his daughter, and so was gas. And so, every winter next to the family’s wood-burning fireplace were heaps of wood that Cora prized as being her and her father’s hard-earned source of heat.
Light snowflakes began to fall from the mauve sky and the father soon emerged from the woods. Even from a few feet away, the girl could smell the cigarette smoke mixed with chainsaw grease on him – a smell permanently absorbed into the oak walls of their house every winter.
He walked over to Cora and helped her stand.
“I think that’s enough for today,” he said in great exhales. His chest heaved. The man looked up to the sky, trying not to blink as snowflakes melted in his eyes. “First snow,” he paused for a long moment and looked towards their house.
“I’m having someone over for dinner tonight,” he said casually as the two began to walk up the dirt driveway. He put his hand on her shoulder. All she could smell now was cigarette smoke. “Her name is Amy. You’ll like her.”
Cora looked up into her father’s face – it was bright red beneath his wild grey beard. He looked down at her and saw her distress.
“She’s just a friend Cora belle. A secretary at work from the city,” he said with a timid smile. He paused for a moment and continued. “I talk about you to all my friends there…they all want to meet you. She’s just the only one that had the night off.”
Cora looked down at the dirt beneath her feet and sighed. Confused. She thought about what to say to her father, but her chest was tight and wouldn’t allow any words to form. And so, she remained silent.
“Will you help me clean up the house,” he asked, moving the palm of his hand over her head, making her hair frizz.
She noticed that the dirt got darker the closer they moved towards the house. She counted to thirty and then nodded her head, “yes,” she’d help him clean the house. “But not for Amy,” she thought to herself. “Only because he asked.”
The snow caused tiny pinpricks of sensation to poke the girl’s nose and cheeks, but all she could concentrate on was the warmth of her father’s hand.

The wave-like hum was still rolling in her ears when she buckled the metallic seatbelt with a click. It was then that she realized how rapidly she was chewing the inside of her moist cheek, using her molars to burrow into a pleasuring pain. The distraction momentarily covered the whining in her ear. She yearned for a reprieve that would remain consistent over the inconsistencies that she had just discovered: her life was exhaustible – all life was – and a simple sound had deracinated all that had been stable in her life.
She was ready for the jeep to start, to fill with warmth that would dull the numb and take her deeper into the forested flurry. For a few seconds, she listened intently – as she stared out the frozen windshield – for the melody of the engine, and the sound of the radio. If there was music playing, she would be happy; to just catch the sight of some face or landscape that the region’s unfamiliarity could provide would also be worth being happy about, she thought. Never until this morning could she have appreciated the worth of a car ride’s console.
She waited in silence. The car remained cold and unmoving. She didn’t hear the stepmother speak.
“Cora,” the woman repeated. Her breath was thick and smoky. She coughed and rubbed her gloved hands furiously together. “Cora, honey.”
The girl thought that the stepmother had probably done this before: watched a loved one slowly faded away until they were finally gone for good. Divorce was just another kind of cancer – a disease that people could have probably prevented if they just tried.
The woman probably knew the exact thing to say at the exact time to get a response worth talking about in freezing temperatures; she didn’t know this about the woman, or care. She had never cared to know. But warmth would fill a void greater than words, she thought. So, the daughter said that the car should be started while continuing to look towards the window.
The girl rehearsed in her head, all the things that she would never say that day, or probably ever, to the stepmother, as she drew constellations into the ice-covered window. She knew her silence hurt the woman more this morning, so venting her rage was all the sweeter. She could sense the calamity of her silence seethe within the woman.
“How are you doing,” the woman finally rushed out. The stepmother knew that the question was rhetorical. The pressure, that had become latent in her chest, was greater, she knew, in the girl’s. But, she thought, talking after this kind of loss should be the responsibility of a mother figure in such a situation: to scoop up scattered sensibility. Or at least try to.
Her mutter grew more insistent as she placed her gloved hand on the daughter’s arm and said, “You know you can talk to me.”
The girl knew that she was a difficult young woman, had been willful as a child and still gave way to flashes of fury before thinking through the severity of her words. The stepmother wouldn’t have known this because only a real parent could acknowledge a child’s ill-mannered features – even well into teenage years – and brush them aside as a familial flaw.
Before this morning, still swaddled in limp arms, the girl had believed that only a real loving parent could accept their child and her faults of nature without taking offence, and without leaving.
A lifted shoulder answered the desperate woman’s attempts of a dialogue, and the girl exhaled a white fog filled with a reply that she wished to stay silent. The woman sighed and turned the key.

The damp streaks disappeared on the window as Cora wiped a paper towel over the freshly windexed surface. Outside a mini blizzard was forming – a wall of flurry raged in the dark against the freshly cleaned windows.
The house sparkled. This, Cora knew, made her father happy.
He scurried around, setting the table, checking the lasagna in the oven, and picking up scattered woodchips that the vacuum had missed. When Amy arrived, he took her coat and laid it on his bed. Cora had never seen her father take someone’s coat before; it had always been her mother.
“You must be Cora,” she said, bending down and extending her hand. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.” Her voice was high and shrilled through Cora, giving her goosebumps – it was something in the way she said “finally,” that caused Cora to shudder.
Cora looked at her hand and then up at her father; his eyes widened as he nudged his head as if saying, “shake her hand.”
She did limply, and then they all sat to eat dinner.
The lasagna noodles weren’t cooked completely – her mother usually did the cooking. They made a crunching that didn’t make a sound outside Cora’s mouth, but echoed like a bag of potato chips being stepped on through her head.
“This is some of the best lasagna I think I’ve ever eaten,” Amy said with a smile, followed with a great fork-full of hard slosh scooped into her overly lipsticked mouth. Cora looked toward her father, expecting them to roll their eyes together. But she noticed something that caught her off guard: underneath his weathered grey beard, she saw a shade that only occurred when he was working hard cutting down wood. Her father was blushing.
“Will you excuse me,” Amy said, interrupting Cora’s thoughts. She paused as she moved towards the door to outside, “You don’t mind if I smoke on the porch, do you?”
Cora looked out the window, instinctively hoping for a great gust of snow to blow her away. Above the doorway hung a crochet sign her mother had made when they first moved into the house: THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING.
“Oh, not at all,” her father replied. He dabbed his mouth with his napkin and moved his chair back. “In fact, I’ll join you.”
He patted Cora’s head, “We’ll be right back sweetie.”
Cora sniffed at the air. The heater turned on streaming warm musty air out of the vents, and then she realized that the wood-burning fireplace was not on.
Outside, her father and Amy were amongst the snowflakes, which had let up slightly. She noticed that everything was a grey-white hue on the night backdrop. She squinted and couldn’t figure out if it was snow that swirled around the laughing pair, or if it was the intertwining of their cigarette smoke.

Lime green illuminated 5:36 as tepid air wafted from the vents with a familiar musty odor.
A cell phone rang and she couldn’t help but notice the similarity of another type of hum. She stopped the ringing.
“Hello?”
“Hello sweetheart,” her real mother said. Her voice was strained – sorrowful. She was straining to be sorrowful. She forced tears.
“Hello, mother,” the girl replied dryly. She saw her stepmother turn her head out of the corner of her eye, watching her carefully, as if waiting for her to collapse.
“I’m so sorry Cora belle. Oh, you poor thing. This is just so, so terrible for you,” she paused. “Richard and I are in Mexico right now, and the doctor called us. You poor baby, I told your father he should have stopped smoking. Didn’t I baby? Like a million times. It’s just so horrible for you…”
“What are you doing in Mexico,” Cora disrupted her mother’s rant.
“Oh, well, you know…we just needed a little vay-kay. We’re staying at this great little villa; you would absolutely love it – personal waiters and everything. The weather is about 65. Isn’t that marvelous? 65 degrees in the middle of winter,” she paused, waiting for her daughter to respond.
The girl couldn’t speak. She noticed two damp circles beginning to form on the windshield where the heat was coming out.
The phone was handed to the stepmother.
“Barbra, yes…no, it’s Amy…”
Her stepmother’s voice faded from the girl’s thoughts until she could only hear the white noise outside.

Cora sat in the dark living room on the wooden steps that led up to her bedroom. As she clutched her knees to her chest, she listened to Amy and her father’s conversations – they thought she was upstairs doing homework.
They spoke about work, at first – about the process of welding and making tools and how important their work was for industry and progress. How the machinery her father specifically welded helped build some of the biggest skyscrapers in the city.
Amy took a puff of her cigarette – the storm had gained too much strength outside to smoke there, he had told her.
She mentioned how the managers really needed to start supplying workers with better masks… how “some stuff” can still seep through the current ones.
Her father snorted a laugh and exhaled smoke.
“Anything I can’t see doesn’t harm me, I have always firmly believed,” he jokingly laughed.
This had been the seed of any argument between Cora’s mother and him and Cora was shocked at the lack of hostility in this conversation.
The conversation moved onto Cora and her likes and dislikes – her goals. How she looked so much like her mother, and yet at the same time, acted nothing like her.
“Thankfully, she got the better parts of both of us. Cora is much more levelheaded,” her father said. “Whereas Barbra, she’s so erratic and emotional. Does whatever she likes whenever she likes without any care for others. Not even when it comes to her family.”
The older Cora got, the more she realized this quality about her mother, but she still tried not to hear her father.
His chair slid across the wood floor and he excused himself to use the bathroom.
Peeking from around the corner of the stairs, Cora watched Amy stand up and move around the kitchen. She walked around their kitchen, looking up and down the walls as if studying a work of art. She moved to the refrigerator and looked for long seconds at a photo under a magnet that read, “God Bless Family,” in red, white and blue crocheted lettering – another project of her mother’s.
A three-year-old Cora was in the middle of her mother and father, standing in front of falling water – Niagara Falls. They had gone to ride the “Maid of the Mist” one not-so-important-day and had a complimentary photo of them taken to remind them how happy they would be forever as a family.
Amy plucked the picture down from under the magnet and studied each figure. She ran her thumb across the father’s face and smiled.
The toilet flushed from down the hall.
When she put the photo back on the fridge, she slid the side that Cora’s mother was on under another magnet that held coupons, leaving only Cora and her father visible in the picture.
A wider smile – more of a smirk, Cora considered – sprawled across her face and she moved back to the kitchen table and waited for her father to join her again.

As the girl stared into the white flurry, the began to see a room – her room when she was a child: the thin old-fashioned patchwork quilt on the end of the low pine double bed, the armoire, and the oak desk, bookcase – all objects her father had made out of the surrounding woods.
The daughter even pictured the ivory throw rag rug, which she had spilled grape juice on as a toddler, in the middle of her oak floor.
She thought about the last night both her mother and father tucked her into bed and recited evening prayers. The way they sat on opposite sides of the bed refusing to look at each other; the way they kept beaming at her.
The night played out.
“Who the fuck is she,” her mother screamed from the kitchen.
“Just a friend Barbra. Just a friend.”
“I was on a business trip for one week and you make a new friend,” her mother’s voice got sarcastic when she was angry. The girl knew this made her father feel bad; she could see it in his face on the days following arguments like these.
“Yeah, business trip,” he snapped back at her with more sarcasm. “Just what sorts of business were you doing this time Barbra?”
“You asshole. You know what I do for a living. You knew I’d travel when we were first married. Don’t you dare put this on me,” she paused. “Even if I did want to have an affair, could you blame me? What kind of damn life do I have here with a lumberjack and his prodigy child?”
The girl remembered staring at the purple stain throughout the argument that night. The screaming had continued for hours, and when the girl closed her eyes, all she could see was a great purple dot in front of her lids.
She had been used to scenes like that night. It was only when she heard the sound of the car door slamming and high-pitched screaming of their speeding vehicle screech out of driveway and fade down the street, did she know that it was the last time she’d hear the two fight in their kitchen again.
Still staring out the window into the dark-turning-into-day light, she thought about how she had kept her eyes closed and unmoving that evening, even when the shadow of her father stood in her doorway watching what he thought was his sleeping daughter.
The snow raged against the thawing window outside. Her eyes focused on the snow that slowly formed a flower wallpaper pattern that had covered her bedroom walls – it was a bud that resembled something between a lily of the Nile and a lilac.

Cora stared at the purple wallpaper on the wall next to her bed, thinking about dinner until her father came in to say goodnight. He sat on the corner of her bed.
“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take,” they recited together – their evening routine.
She held her father’s hand and played with a gold ring on his left hand.
“Does mom know about Amy,” she asked. The ring was warm and the skin on his finger prohibited the ring from twisting in her fingers. He inhaled deeply.
“I told you baby, we’re just friends.”
Under her arm was a stuffed rabbit – “bun bun” – and she coiled its ears around her free hand’s fingers. She watched the man look down at the ring.
“Do you think she would care,” she asked.
“Care if Amy and I were friends,” he asked with a laugh.
“Yeah,” Cora paused and looked out the window into the storm. “If you two became friends.”
He pulled the covers up to her chin and leaned down and kissed her on the forehead.
“No I do not,” he paused, “I don’t think she’d notice, let alone care.”
He pulled away his hand and twisted at the ring, which firmly stayed in place.
“Good night Cora belle. I love you,” he said. He went to stand up, but stopped suddenly. “I will always love you, honey. Whatever happens, I’ll always be here.”
She closed her eyes and imagined the blizzard outside spilling into the room – she could feel the icy pin pricks fall from the ceiling, surrounding the two in a forested flurry.
Cora closed her eyes imagined that her father hadn’t stood up and moved away from her bed. That he wasn’t closing the door almost shut, letting a stream of light from the hallway into the dark room. That he didn’t say, “See ya later, alligator,” from down the hallway.
That she would’ve replied, “After awhile, crocodile.”

“Yes Barbra… yes. We’re going home right now…no the weather is clearing up…all right. Ok, I will tell your daughter. Yes. Goodbye.” The stepmother put the phone on the dashboard. “Your mother says she loves you.”
The car moved slowly along the iced pavement and deeper into the blizzard. Great trees lined the road.
“Life isn’t fair, Cora. But we will get through this,” she said. “I know you don’t want to hear it, but I am your family and we’ll get through this.” Her voice was trembling with strain; straining to keep calm and not fall to pieces.
Cora looked out the window, into the storm: maybe she should run away, she thought. Just unsnap her buckle and jump out like that; the snow would break her fall. It would be so easy, she thought, the stepmother wouldn’t have a chance to find the girl because she’d run into the woods and snow, and blend; she’d be buried. Turn into a slab of ice, even.
She’d be there with her father. They’d cut down trees on the cusp of winter again and say bedtime prayers forever. Rings would be removable and cigarette smoke would turn into exhales of cold breath; it would blend into snow.
She considered the idea for a moment, and then realized that her plan was flawed: one day the storm would die down and she’d be seen again; she’d have to eventually thaw.
And there she’d be, alone in the forest.