“Ha!”
He chased me and I tripped trying to run away. My chin tingled from the snow.
“Let’s bury someone,” Marlow declared. She stood up with her hands on her hips. A tiny dictator demanding the next event.
“Okay. Who?” asked Sawyer. He sat in the snow with one knee propped up, his arm resting against it.
“Isla!” she said determinedly.
“Oh shoot—” Sawyer began.
“What?” I asked, clapping excess snow off my mittens.
He brought one arm up in the direction of our houses. “I forgot to salt the sidewalk. Grandma Ada said she’d pay me ten bucks if I did it. I have to run. I’ll come straight back!”
“Bring the orange sled when you do,” I told him as he jogged away in the nearly knee-high snow.
Marlow hopped over and started to push me down.
“What are you doing?” I rang with annoyance.
“Burying you,” she announced as if it were obvious.
“We’re still doing that?”
“Yes. Pretend it’s the beach and I’m putting sand on you.”
I lay down and sank halfway in from my weight. She immediately began to pack my arms and legs with snow.
“Lie still.”
I obeyed her instruction. It didn’t even feel that cold—the snow encasing me, a tomb blocking the wind. I stared up at the sky. I could hardly hear anything, my thick wool hat, coat, hood, and the snow blocking my ears.
“Isla,” I thought I heard her say a few times, muffled and low.
The snow continued to pile on. My legs, torso, then my face. I closed my eyes and let the white powder fall on and cover me. I let her do it. I let her keep pressing the snow on top of me. It was starting to get hard to breathe, but I held my breath in. There was something gratifying about being able to hold my breath that long. I was swimming under the snow, and she was there to guide me.
I couldn’t feel my chest.
It was so quiet. I don’t know if I had ever heard such silence.
Marlow . . . can you hear me?
I began to hum.
It was a song I had heard only once in my life. One that had never left my ears, each note burned in the canal, the soot and singes blown into my mind so I could remember how it sounded. The trembling of my vocal cords reached the back of my throat.
The song that told me Marlow’s secret.
She had been kept in her room for two weeks by then. The doctors wanted as little stimulation as possible. Sensory overload. I had overheard our mother say that on the phone.
Yet I would peep in. I would find her sitting up in bed, staring out the window. If she sensed my presence, she made no indication at first. A zombie of a little girl. I wanted to draw fake blood on her face, streams of red coming from her eyes and mouth. I wanted to trace each red river with my finger and then wipe it on my lips, a rosebud for a mouth.
She began to hold her hand out when no one else was in the room. I would take it and she would clutch it, looking out the window again. I never pulled away; I let her take it as long as she needed it. Her hand was sticky and warm, while mine was clammy. Sometimes my palm would have imprints from her fingernails, so long and sharp because no one had taken the time to cut them yet. She would see these marks and then stroke them a few times, looking at me as she did this as if to apologize for any harm she had caused.
Had she? Had she caused me harm?
She had not said a word. Not to Moni. Not to the doctors. Not to me. It was her spell she had cast, her power she wielded. We hung on to her every movement, waiting for the dam to break. The silence had more weight than any words she could scream. She was the girl who uttered not a peep. This was how she was to remain with us. Those were the rules.
But she broke them once for me.
I heard the humming. A gentle buzz and fluttering that hit me before I saw her. I came around the corner of the doorway, her back to me as she sat on the bed. She hummed a sweet line that turned into minor notes ringing dim, and they hit me like pellets. Her head slowly turned as she hummed, her lips a straight line until they suddenly split open, and words came out—the words to a song that only she and I would ever know.
She sang and stared at me, only her mouth moving with each word. Her hands were both on the bed, legs slack, head angled up like a ventriloquist’s doll. She stopped and then tilted her head to the side.
“My mommy sings me that song. Do you know where she is?”
I shook my head.
She continued singing, kicking her legs, and then when it was over, she turned back to the window. She returned to her mute state.
I never told anyone what I had heard.
The snow seemed to harden then as I blinked once, my body growing numb. I felt like I was sinking. Deeper into ice and loss.
Where was she taking me?
A hand grabbed my arm tightly and pulled me up. The cold air was startling. Sawyer jerked me up to a sitting position.
