The Children's Blizzard(29)

People who loved you.

If only Anette had an older sibling who teased her! A papa who punished her in order to make her a better person, because he loved her that much! But she would never, ever let it slip to Fredrik that she felt this way. Because Fredrik Halvorsan, freckled and naughty yet completely innocent of the bad things that could happen to people, had chosen Anette. He was the only person in the world who looked for her, and her alone, in a crowded room. The only person who fought to sit next to her, not to get away from her. The only person who considered her an ally, not an enemy or a stupid little donkey, plodding along doing all the work nobody else wanted to do.

The only person who said her name with happiness, not reluctance or anger.

“Anette!”

    He tugged her arm painfully; she rubbed her eyes, which had crusted shut again, opening them with a thumb that didn’t feel. She was shivering so thoroughly she couldn’t remember what it was like not to; her inadequate shawl, her regular cotton petticoat, could not keep her warm. She could not imagine being warm again. But she still kept moving; those strong legs and heart that launched her toward school with joy kept her upright now. Linked with Fredrik, she proceeded, inch by inch. Head bent down, face stinging from the strange, gritty balls of snow. The two of them all alone in the echoing center of the storm, at once muffling all sound—she couldn’t hear their footsteps, it was difficult to talk to each other—and assaulting her ears with the shrieking wind.

Anette took a deep breath, then shouted at Fredrik, “I think we’re going the wrong way!”

She didn’t know if that was true or not, but they’d been walking for hours without coming to anything that looked familiar.

“No, we’re not,” Fredrik shouted. He was so maddening sometimes, just because he was a boy and Anette was not. He wasn’t shy about bossing her around, and most of the time Anette let him.

But now she found herself arguing back—she was not going to let this boy tell her what to do! “Yes, we are—it is my way home, I know it!”

“You stupid, we’re lost right now!” Fredrik cried hoarsely.

And suddenly they were screaming at each other, tears freezing on their faces; she’d never known anyone more stupid than this boy! She was sick of people bullying her, bossing her around. Yes, she was terrified and the vicious winds were trying to pull her off her very feet, but this boy was not going to tell her how to get to her own home! For the moment she forgot that this was Fredrik, her only friend; he represented everyone who had told her what to do, how fast or how slow she should do it, where to live, how to think.

    He was everyone. And before she knew what she was doing, she slapped him across the face.

“You stupid girl!” Fredrik clenched his fists but didn’t strike her back. “You—you slavey! No better than a hired girl—worse than a hired girl! You know what everyone says about you at school—your own mother sold you for a pig. You’re so ugly, that’s all you were worth!”

“You take that back!” Anette was crying, but madder than she’d been since—since she could ever remember. She hadn’t allowed herself to be angry at her mother, or at Mother Pedersen; all along, deep down, she’d agreed with Fredrik and all the others. She was stupid, she was ugly—but now, lost in a volcano of ash-like snow, stuck with this idiotic boy, she was also angrier than a hive of bees. She flew at him, shaking him by the shoulders, and he fought back, pushing her to the ground. She picked herself up and screamed at him.

“I am not—I wasn’t sold! I wasn’t, I wasn’t, I wasn’t!”

She flung her arm, the arm still grasping the pail, backward, prepared to strike. Fredrik saw, his eyes widened—then he turned around and ran off in the other direction, disappearing into the cloud of misery.

Leaving her alone once more.

She stood for a moment with her arm still in the air, poised to hit; she wanted something, someone to pummel. She screamed at the top of her lungs, one long, piercing cry that ended in hoarse whimpering. She panted, it was too hard to breathe in this whirlpool of ice and snow, yet she opened her mouth and let loose her fury again, a fury that rose up to meet the fury raining down, yet it hardly made a dent. She was too small, she was too insignificant. No one heard her.

    No one cared.

Falling to her knees, she wept great heaving sobs. And she shivered, and she wept, and she burned with anger, and she froze with fear, and she knew she would die right there and no one would care. Would her mama ever know? Would she come claim her body and bury it near the dugout, a cave, really, carved into a riverbank? It must have been carved by the Indians, maybe it was a hiding place during the Indian wars, her stepfather said once. “Jesus, this place stinks of them, don’t it?” And there were arrowheads everywhere, catching the glint of the sun in the summer so they were easy to find.

Even though she’d never known another dwelling until her mother gave her away, she’d understood how miserable the dugout was, and that most people didn’t live that way, no better than gophers in holes. In the spring it flooded and in the summer snakes crawled through the dirt walls and in the autumn the wild pigs came and terrorized everyone and in the winter they all just sat and stared at one another; it was too cold to do anything else, and that was when her stepfather was the worst, in the winter. That was when he would alternate between making fun of Anette and coming too close. “To warm up,” he would say with a sickening smile while her mother looked on with compressed lips and her little brothers laughed.