“Please,” Lillian said. Just that. Just that word.
“Careful,” said Missus Felder, never looking up, her fingers dusted white to the knuckle as she pinched strawberries out and laid on the confectionery sugar. “You’ll spoil your make-up if you keep up with that. You’ve too pretty a face for tears and if I’m not wrong there’s others around here that’d be willing to hook that husband of yours. A nice man, Joe. A handsome man. He deserves a pretty wife.”
Lillian didn’t say anything. Her lips trembled. They were chapped and unrouged, and maybe she was wondering why she hadn’t put a touch of red on them. Missus Felder plucked up another strawberry and she looked at it carefully.
“You’re a beautiful woman, Lillian, and children wear you out. They trample the roses of youth, leave a woman like some tattered thing hanging out on the clothesline. Let the boy go. He was ungrateful, selfish. Have another one if it’s in your heart to do so, but let that one go.”
“But he’s my son, Cheryl. Please.”
“Son or no son.” Now Missus Felder sighed a worn-out, old sigh as if the weather had gotten into her bones and really, she was just an old woman, why was she being troubled with this? “Do as you like, Lillian. But I’ll tell you for nothing that some children are best let go.”
And that was that.
The last flickers of September’s heat burned out in the flood of a ravenous, wet November that shuttered the windows and played havoc with the shingles; by the time December whispered in, we were all thankful for it. All of us except for Lillian Sandifer.
There were some women who could take a loss and find their own way through, but Lillian, bless her, had had an easy life. Joe was everything you ought to have in a husband. He treated her gently. He brought her back fine cotton sheets from Boston, dresses and trinkets, a music box, a tiny wind-up carousel. Lillian loved all beautiful things. She had come as close to a life without loss as one can. But when December blew in—an easy December, full of light snows and bright silver days—it was like she took all the harshness, the cold, the cutting, fractured freeze into herself, and she let it break her.
And then we all saw the snowman in Missus Felder’s yard.
The snows had been light, as I said, barely enough for a footprint, really, but there it was: round as a turnip at the bottom; a thin, tapering carrot for a nose; two silver dollars for eyes; and a fresh knitted scarf in green and gold hung beneath its hawkish, polar jowls. It was a king snowman, the kind of snowman that children dream about making before their arms give out from pushing the ball around the yard, the kind of snowman that wouldn’t melt until halfway through May.
And on its head was a black chimney-pot hat, creased somewhat at the brim with a red silk ribbon drawn around it to set off its colouring.
A beauty, that hat; gorgeous to the eyes of a child and pure pain to his mother.
I could never do a big thing with magic, and that has always been both a blessing and a curse to me. Oh, there are ways and there are ways, and I know this is true, but the ways have never worked for me. It’s an easy thing to change a boy’s name. It’s a little thing, particularly if it is a thing done kindly, if it is a thing that might be wanted. Then the change comes easily. But I cannot get blood from a stone, nor flesh from bread, nor make healthy a woman who wishes she were sick.
That is the province of my sister. And if it is none of mine to meddle with that greater magic, then it is at least something of mine to meddle with her.
It was a month into the hard end of winter I finally broke my silence.
“You must let the boy go,” I told Cheryl, stepping in out of the cold, stamping my boots off to shed them of the slush that had begun to freeze around the edges. Winter always followed the two of us, winter and spring, summer and autumn, they had their own way about us whether we willed it or no.
“I will not, Minnie…” She paused like the name was bitter to her. “Minnie, they call you. Ha. They have a way with names, don’t they? Marianne. No, Marianne, I cannot.” She closed the door quickly. She hated the cold, kept a thin blanket wrapped around her in the winter. I could see her curved fingers clutching at the edges. Winter turned her into an old woman as surely as summer made her a young one.
I gave her a look. It was not the dark and hooked scowl that came so easily to her face, no, it was a look entirely my own.
“It’s time. It is long past time.”
“Too skinny, and what has that husband of yours got you doing with your hair? I could never abide him, you know.” Her mouth twisted as she looked me up and down
“I know. You could never abide any of them.”
“I abided my own well enough,” she said. “The poor duckling. The little lamb. Let me fetch you some cake.” She did. Tea, as well, the heat of it warming through the bone china cup. Her movements were quick and sharp as a bird’s.
She settled us at the kitchen table. I remembered this house, I knew the ins and outs of it. The gold December light filtered softly through the window, touching a lace cloth, a badly polished silver candle-holder. She never had an eye for the details, no, and this was what came of it.
“Where is the boy, Cheryl?”
She touched her tongue to her lip, scowled something fierce. “You know as well as I do.”
“Let him out.”
“No.”
“They will come to hate us.” I knew she knew this. I could see it in her eyes, in the way she twisted at the lace cloth, but she could be a stubborn old biddy sometimes. “He was a good boy, and it was a small thing,” I said.
“It was not a small thing!” she cried so harshly it took me by surprise, that her voice could go so ugly. So sad. I looked at my sister, and I saw then the thing that they all saw. That missus of nightmares and twisted stories, the hooked woman, the crone; she who devoured baseballs and Frisbees and footballs; she who stole the bright heart of summer and cursed the strawberries to wither on the vine; the son-stealer, the child-killer.
“It was,” I said gently. “You know as well as I do that it was, and it is only spite and pride that keeps you from letting him go.”
“You are a meddler too, Marianne, so mind your tongue,” she muttered but the words stung nonetheless. “No,” Cheryl whispered, chin curved down, and she was retreating, drawing in upon herself. “I know it as well. It was a mistake, all of it, nothing more than that.” She cupped the bone china in her hand and blew on the tea to cool it. “I did not mean for it to happen, you know I did not, I would not do such a thing to a child. To his mother.” She paused, took a sip, eyes hooded, lips twisting. “I know that the woman is dying. I know she will not live through the winter, but I cannot touch her, don’t you see that? Don’t you see, sister? I cannot heal the mother, I cannot summon the child. I cannot force a thing that is not wanted, and the boy will not come out!”
I could see the truth of it written on her face.
She was not a monster, she had never been a monster, and how I wished I could take her in my arms, her frail bones sharp and splintering as a porcupine; how I wished I could whisper the words of comfort to her. But she did not wish to be comforted. Her spine was made of sprung steel. She would not break herself upon this, for she knew what loss was and what mistakes were and the hardness of carrying on anyway. My sister knew this. She had buried a husband she loved. She had cried tears for her own lost boy, and knitted a scarf for him in green and gold, and hung it upon the cold reminder of his body in the yard.
Her fingers twitched, knuckling the bone china cup. I wanted to take her hand, but I knew something of her pride, the pride and the grief and the love of all of us missuses of the Hollow.