GENRE FICTION

By Robert E. Stutts

“How like a winter hath my absence been / From thee…”
~William Shake­speare, Sonnet 97

She will be gone.

The world is white this time of year, every moment of space filled
up with cold and want and waiting. In this white sits a little house on
a modest prop­er­ty, a charm­ing­ly shabby Queen Anne cottage. Through
the window above the kitchen sink, Lora watches her daugh­ter play
air­plane, arms out­stretched, running around in circles near the edge
of the forest of black-trunked trees that enclose the small yard. Amelia
loves to fly, loves to imagine the clouds beneath her as she soars toward
the sun, even though she has flown just the once, when they came here.
Round and round she goes, and Lora knows she is making propeller
noises. The imag­i­na­tion of a five-year-old, Lora thinks, and then she
smiles.

A shadow steps out from the tree line, but at a dis­tance from
Amelia. Lora’s grip tight­ens on the teacup in her hands. Is it a fox?
A dog, perhaps? Lora feels the famil­iar prick­ling of fear beneath her
palms. The dark shape is bigger than either animal, moving closer
towards Amelia, who still flies in rounds with her arms wide. Lora
blinks, and when she opens her eyes, Amelia has disappeared.

Lora drops the teacup and is at the back door before the porcelain
hits the bottom of the copper sink and shat­ters. Years later she will
notice the dark spots of tea on the under­side of the café cur­tains, but
she will not remem­ber how they came to be there. Once the door opens
and Lora launch­es herself unpro­tect­ed into winter, the world slows
down. How long does it take her to reach the spot where Amelia had
been playing? Three minutes? Five?

Without meaning to, her own feet trace Amelia’s foot­prints as she
runs across the yard. The cold is bitter and pinks her face and hands,
the taunt of a supe­ri­or force.

Crying her daughter’s name, Lora scans the tree line frantically,
des­per­ate for a red flash of Amelia’s coat. The snow-blan­ket­ed forest
throws her voice back at her, emptied.

Amelia is gone.

#

Sheriff Baldwin has a long list of ques­tions for Lora while the search
through the forest goes on that after­noon. Mostly he asks her to repeat
parts of her initial state­ment over and over. He is not a cruel man by
nature, but he has read stories about women who snap, who kill their
own chil­dren and then blame it on a tran­sient with a knife or the angels
whose voices grew so loud the mothers couldn’t resist smoth­er­ing their
sleep­ing infants. He knows it happens and tries to ascertain—as gently
as he can—if that is the case here. But Lora has gone into a kind of
shock, her eyes stray­ing to the windows, the doors, waiting. She doesn’t
offer any­thing more than what she told the 911 oper­a­tor: “Help me,
please. My daughter’s dis­ap­peared. I can’t find her any­where. She’s lost.
Please, please help me find her.”

Sitting beside Lora on the sofa is Martha Jen­nings, the nearest
neigh­bor, though she lives over two miles away. Martha holds one of
Lora’s hands in both of hers, some­times stroking Lora’s dark blond hair
that’s gone wild. Lora had been outside for hours looking for Amelia
without wearing a coat or gloves or hat; her foot­prints at the scene were
a riot in the snow, demol­ish­ing any other tracks. Sheriff Baldwin sees
in her red-rimmed eyes and her cold-burned face the fading intensity
of fear and panic. Martha looks at Sheriff Baldwin hes­i­tant­ly, and he
knows they share the same fear about what hap­pened to Amelia: that
Lora is involved. No one knows Lora or Amelia very well; they moved
from the West Coast into this house only a month ago, just before
Hal­loween. The sheriff had first seen Lora in the market a day or two
after her arrival, her arms full of acorn squash, her daugh­ter hiding
play­ful­ly behind her legs. He remem­bers how lovely Lora looked that
morning, how her smile cut at his heart.

“Perhaps you could ask these ques­tions tomor­row, Harris?” Martha
inter­rupts his thoughts. “I don’t think Lora’s in any state to answer them
now.”

“I know, Martha. But we want to find her before night­fall …” He
stops himself; even if Lora has gone into shock, she might still hear him,
and he doesn’t want to bring on another round of hys­ter­ics. Martha
nods briskly. He remem­bers the winter as a young deputy when he
found Martha’s brother dead of hypother­mia, and tonight promis­es to
be colder than the night Fred fell asleep in his car.

Stand­ing up sud­den­ly, Lora runs to the window that looks into the
back­yard. The sun has begun to set, and the shadows across the yard
stretch long, reach­ing their blue fingers toward the tree line. Over Lora’s
head, the sheriff can see move­ment deep into the forest, the many
vol­un­teers who have come to search for Amelia.

“There was some­thing,” Lora says quietly, press­ing her fingertips
to the glass. “There was some­thing before Amelia dis­ap­peared. A …
some­thing came out of the trees.”

Exchang­ing glances with Martha, Sheriff Baldwin asks, “What do
you mean, Lora?”

“I—I’m not sure. I thought maybe it was a dog. And then Amelia
was gone. I blinked and she was gone.”

The sheriff cocks his head to one side. “You think a dog took her?”

“Yes,” Lora says, “no, not a dog. It wasn’t a dog, too big for a dog. I
don’t know what it was, but it came out of the forest and then Amelia
was gone.…”

Another exchange of glances between the sheriff and the neighbor.
Both feel they under­stand what will come next, that an accu­sa­tion or
spec­u­la­tion will fall from Lora’s lips. Neither is ready to hear the casting
of blame, yet.

“Lora, is there someone we can call for you? Someone you want . .
.” Martha inter­jects, and the sheriff wonders if she feels foolish asking
the ques­tion, now of all times, but he sup­pos­es Martha does not want to
stay with Lora, not with that grim pos­si­bil­i­ty hanging over her. To him
the house feels strange sud­den­ly, although he has been coming here for
years, before Tina and Richard moved to Florida and away from the
heavy winters. Sheriff Baldwin wonders if Martha feels that strangeness,
too. The air is too heavy, and the sheriff does not think he will be able
to breathe it much longer without making himself sick.

“No, there’s no one.”

“What about the girl’s father?” the sheriff asks.

“No, not him.” Lora sighs. “He’s married to someone else. We were
… I was his …” She stops herself, but the sheriff under­stands. “He
won’t care. He won’t come.” She rests her fore­head against the window.
The light is fading, day is fading, and Amelia is gone.

Sheriff Baldwin comes up behind Lora and puts one of his large
hands on her shoul­der. He squeezes gently.

“Thank you,” she whispers.

#

Lora dreams that night.

She stands at the kitchen window, teacup in hand, and the smell
of vanilla and honey wafts up to her nose. Through the glass she sees
Amelia playing in the snow, playing air­plane again, running around in
circles, ever-expand­ing circles, until she is running, arms outstretched,
along the tree line. Lora’s vision has become tele­scop­ic in the dream:
she sees Amelia as clearly as if she were only five feet away instead
of a hundred. And again there is that shape, dark against the snow,
step­ping out of the tree line, but Lora sees now that it isn’t a fox or a
dog but a man, tall and dark. He is pale, his skin so like cream that
she can see the tracery of blue veins begin at his temples and stretch
under­neath the skin of his bald head; his brows are heavy and dark, his
chin covered in the same black hair, and his eyes so blue they are almost
translu­cent, and Lora is trans­fixed by those eyes, as if they were candle
flames and she a weary, flut­ter­ing moth. His clothes are black, but the
color is so deep and unre­pen­tant that Lora cannot tell where his arms
cross his chest other than from the flash of his long white hands with
their fine stitch­ery of dark hairs along the backs. Lora feels sud­den­ly as
if one of those hands has reached into her chest and squeezed her heart,
not enough to crush the muscle but enough to bruise it, enough that the
pain makes her breath come out in stac­ca­to gasps, and she wonders if
his hand will always be around her heart, squeez­ing it just the smallest
bit, bring­ing tears to her eyes. The man kneels in the snow and waits,
waits, waits for Amelia, her wings rigid and ready, to fly into his dark
embrace.…

The dream ends.

#

Sheriff Baldwin returns the fol­low­ing morning. Nothing has been
found except for some child-sized foot­prints deeper in the forest,
headed away from Lora’s house, but those prints stop abrupt­ly and raise
more ques­tions. Was Amelia abduct­ed, or did she wander alone into the
woods? If she was abduct­ed, why isn’t there a second set of footprints?
At this point, the search teams aren’t hopeful they’ll find any­thing, not
alive anyways, but the sheriff doesn’t tell Lora that, not yet. She’s not
from here; she doesn’t under­stand that if Amelia were out­doors last
night she’d have died for sure. Instead, he tells her that the search will
con­tin­ue today, that the alerts will con­tin­ue to go out. He gives her hope
because that’s all he has to give.

He talks with Lora in the kitchen, dis­tracts her with platitudes
(which he hopes don’t sound as false to her ears as they do to his),
while the deputies look around the house. Osten­si­bly, they are looking
for clues as to who might have taken Amelia, but in truth they are
looking for Amelia’s body. All the­o­ries of the crime are still valid at this
point, the sheriff told them this morning before they left the station to
come here, and we don’t want to over­look any­thing that might help
us figure out what hap­pened to that little girl. When they arrive at the
house, hats in hands, Lora doesn’t ask ques­tions, not even why they
want to look in the base­ment. Any­thing that isn’t Amelia is irrelevant,
so nothing feels real to her anymore.

Lora doesn’t see the grim, almost-dis­ap­point­ed shake of the head
the deputy gives Sheriff Baldwin when he comes up the steps into the
kitchen. The sheriff nods, almost imper­cep­ti­bly, but his dis­cre­tion is
wasted on Lora, who only stares, hard, at the forest beyond the window.
She’s a beau­ti­ful woman, the sheriff thinks, and it’s a beauty that will
only increase as she ages: hair as thick and sweet as honey, eyes green
as spring leaves, and then he stops himself from writing bad poetry
about her in his head. His own lyrical musings aside, he knows most
women would kill to look as good at twenty-five as Lora does at forty.
He’s staring at her mouth, those lips, think­ing, think­ing, and he curses
himself for letting that hot urgency of desire flood him for a minute.
Christ almighty, man, he thinks, keep your head on the job.
But he con­tin­ues to look at her, the curve of her neck particularly,
where he wants to lay his own mouth. He should treat her as a suspect,
should be sus­pi­cious of every­thing she says or does, but he finds he
can’t. At last, he covers one of her cold hands with his own, squeezes
a little, and he wonders, having no chil­dren of his own, how anyone
sur­vives some­thing like this.

#

Lora dreams that night.

Amelia—never a shy girl, always eager to talk with strangers
despite Lora’s repeat­ed admonitions—laughs at the sur­prise of it all, her
breath trail­ing up into the air in huge white and feath­ery plumes; she
had not seen the pale, dark man there, and then sud­den­ly he was there,
and the whole thing is very amusing to her, and the man does not laugh
although he does allow himself a smile, teeth small and perfect, the
canines sharp and hungry. He speaks to Amelia, but Lora cannot hear
what he says nor read his lips nor see the thin white­ness of his breath
against the black trees, and Amelia laughs again, bring­ing her head
down against her shoul­der in a coquet­tish way that makes Lora sick
and sad. One of his pale hands reaches inside his long coat and pulls
forth a small bouquet of daf­fodils, their deep golden ochre trumpets
sur­round­ed by painful­ly bright yellow petal-leaves; Amelia is charmed
at the illusionist’s trick, the sleight of hand, and claps excit­ed­ly, almost
jumping up and down, until the man arches one brow and she quiets,
waiting for the more that the arched brow promis­es, and he separates
the daf­fodils, weaving their stems togeth­er deftly, lacing the flowers,
until at last he sets upon Amelia’s head a crown of sun­light. “For you,”
he seems to say, “my queen,” and he kisses Amelia’s fore­head, and
Lora feels his dry lips upon her own fore­head, and then he is standing,
holding out one of his hands to Amelia, who places her small hand on
his palm and watches his fingers fold over her hand com­plete­ly, and
then they are walking into the forest, and Amelia never looks back at
her mother, frozen at the kitchen window, her fore­head pressed against
the glass, a hope­less­ness seeping through the glass from the other side
and into her brain, moving slowly, slowly south into her heart, but the
man does look over his shoul­der at Lora as he leads her daugh­ter into
the dark woods, and he smiles.…

The dream ends.

#

Sheriff Baldwin stands on Lora’s porch for a long time, wishing
he didn’t have to be the one to tell Lora what he has to tell her. The
searchers haven’t found Amelia, nor have any wit­ness­es or authorities
respond­ed to the AMBER alert, and now it’s been five days since her
dis­ap­pear­ance. The good news, the sheriff thinks, is that Lora, at least,
has been cleared of any con­nec­tion with Amelia’s disappearance;
nothing unto­ward or suspect was found in the house or the small barn,
no evi­dence that sug­gest­ed foul play or cleanup of the same. The feds
were called in on the second day because the sheriff sus­pect­ed the girl
had been abduct­ed, and agents out in Cal­i­for­nia have been interviewing
the girl’s father and his wife, both of whom claim com­plete innocence.
From what Harris has heard, the wife has some truly deep-seated anger
man­age­ment issues. Even though she has a rock-solid alibi hosting a
party for thirty or so women at the Peacock Garden Club, she might
have hired someone to abduct and murder the girl, just to pay back her
husband for his infi­deli­ty. Of course, the sheriff thinks, revenge only
works if the father gives a damn about Amelia, and the feds’ reports
suggest he doesn’t.

People, he thinks, are so damned crazy.

He rings the door­bell. After a few minutes, Lora opens the door, and
she looks haggard, the skin around her eyes puffy and dark. She’s been
sleep­ing a lot since her Amelia disappeared.

“Oh, Sheriff Baldwin,” she says quietly. “Good morning.”

“Mornin’, Lora. And please, call me Harris.”

“Of course. I’m sorry I keep for­get­ting. Come in,” she says, holding
the door open for him to cross the thresh­old. “Would you like some
coffee?” He nods, and they walk togeth­er to the kitchen. He sits at the
table while she starts going through the process of making the coffee;
he tells her not to bother, if she hasn’t already been drink­ing some
herself, but she ignores him and goes about grind­ing the beans, pouring
them in the machine, pouring in the water, press­ing the button. She sits
in the chair next to him, puts her hands on the table, clutched together
in a tight little fist, and breathes out.

“I have some­thing to tell you, Lora.”

“You haven’t found her.”

He’s silent for a minute. “No, we haven’t. But …”

“But?”

“We’re calling off the search party. She’s not in the woods, Lora. I
don’t know where she is, but she’s not there.”

Her hands grip each other so tightly they tremble. She breathes very
delib­er­ate­ly, in and out, in and out, her eyes focused on her hands. After
a long while, she asks quietly, “Are you sure?”

Harris puts his hat on the table and one of his large hands on her
shoul­der. “We’re sure. We’re inves­ti­gat­ing other angles, though, and we
hope—”

Lora slams her fists on the table, rat­tling the flower vase. Harris
doesn’t flinch, not when she bangs her fists again, and again, not even
when she turns to him and beats his chest with those hands, never
saying a word, not even a keening, offer­ing only fury.

#

Lora dreams that night.

The pale man with the pale eyes walks with Amelia into the forest,
smiling over his shoul­der at Lora, still trapped at the kitchen window.
Once inside the forest, the man speaks in his low voice to the girl, who
listens and nods and touches her daf­fodil crown to make sure it is still
there. Deeper and deeper into the forest they go until they come to a
snow-covered hill, maybe twice the size of the man, who then knocks
on the hill three times, looks down, and smiles at Amelia, and the hill,
with a groan or a sigh, opens before them, a grassy door to roughhewn stone stairs that lead down­ward, and onto the first stair they step
togeth­er, and the door swings closed and so the earth swal­lows them
down, down, down. The way is long, and the only light comes from
Amelia’s daf­fodil crown, which shines bright­ly enough to see each step
ahead of them, although when Amelia looks over her shoul­der at the
way they have come, the crown shows her only black­ness, and so they
move deeper and deeper under the world.…

The dream ends.

#

While he waits for Lora to come down­stairs, Harris looks at the
sky through the kitchen window. White gray. Snowflakes are already
begin­ning to fall. Prob­a­bly a storm coming tonight, he thinks, maybe a
bad one, and he rubs a hand over his chin. He ought to have shaved.

A little over three months have passed since Amelia disappeared,
and she hasn’t been found. Harris doesn’t think she’ll ever be found,
though he keeps hoping, for Lora’s sake. Lora, for her part, has held up,
somehow, even with as much as she sleeps. Some­times he thinks she’s
only awake when he’s with her. Harris likes to think that he’s been of
some help; he couldn’t find her child, but maybe he can help her grieve,
help her come to terms with it. Every day he has stopped by the house
to check on her, have coffee if it’s in the morning, maybe some wine if
it’s in the evening. He shares with her town gossip about people she’s
never met, weather reports, sports scores. She smiles polite­ly, listens
or doesn’t, some­times asks ques­tions, doesn’t ask him to leave. In the
middle of Feb­ru­ary, Lora asked him to stay for dinner and he’s been to
dinner every night since. She’s a fine cook, Lora is. “Wait until spring,”
she says quietly when­ev­er he com­pli­ments her. “You won’t believe what
I can do with veg­eta­bles and fruits when the ground’s not buried in
snow.”

She comes into the kitchen and smiles when she sees him, and, as
rare as it is, it’s that smile that Harris real­izes he doesn’t want to live
without. She goes up on her toes and kisses his cheek—the closest her
mouth has ever come to his—and starts prepar­ing dinner. Harris leans
against the kitchen sink and watches her, hungry.

Dinner tonight is roast chicken and a side medley of pota­toes, baby
carrots, and sweet onions with a spoon­ful of gre­mo­la­ta butter on top.
After they’re fin­ished eating, Harris swears it is the best meal he’s ever
had, to which Lora replies, looking away, “You always say that.” But
there’s the hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth.

Harris takes the plates to the sink and looks out the window.
“Snow’s coming down pretty hard now,” he says. “I’d best get home.
Mind if I catch up on the dishes tomor­row?” Lora goes into the living
room to look out the large bay window; she doesn’t look out the kitchen
window anymore.

“The snow’s covered your tires, Harris,” she says. He comes up
behind her and puts his hands on her upper arms. “You’d better just stay
the night.”

“With you?” he asks.

She leans her head back against his chest and closes her eyes. “With
me.”

#

Lora dreams that night.

As she does every night, she dreams about Amelia, about what
hap­pened to her, about what has become of her, so far from her mother.
When finally and at long last Amelia and the bald man reach the
bottom of the stone stairs, they are greeted by a dog, a giant gray dog
who reaches the chest of the man, a dog with three heads but none of
them bark; one speaks a greet­ing in Greek, the other speaks Latin, and
the third speaks without sound, its jaws opening and closing and its
tongue moving as if it’s making words in some lost lan­guage. Then the
dog growls at Amelia, sud­den­ly aware of her stand­ing beside his master,
and she hides behind the folds of the man’s long jacket, which now Lora
real­izes is a cloak, slick on the outside but with a soft fur lining. The
man pushes Amelia forward, his hand lin­ger­ing on the nape of her neck,
and the dog’s three faces are within inches of hers, the breath from each
muzzle heavy and sour, and she begins to cry and closes her eyes and
so she does not see the dog bow its three great heads to her. The dog
moves aside, and the man pushes Amelia forward again, though she
cries harder, begin­ning to hic­cough in her anxiety, and the man picks
her up and holds her close to his chest, stroking her hair and whispering
endear­ments into her ear, and he looks for a moment as if he wants to
eat the girl in his arms, to see what inno­cence and spring­time and fear
taste like, but he doesn’t eat her, though his mouth is close to Amelia’s
ear and Lora wonders if his breath is warm or cold. He puts Amelia
down and takes her hand and they walk farther into his kingdom,
which is full of wonders and marvels and crea­tures, a museum of
sorts but darker: the skele­tons of kings and emper­ors sit on tarnished
thrones with tat­tered draping across their empty laps; the shorn hair
of beau­ti­ful women, wound onto giant spools made of crystal; piles
and piles of gold coins and nickels, emer­alds and rubies, sap­phires and
amethysts, opals and dia­monds; a wall of keys in every shape and size,
all of which, the man tells Amelia, unlock doors that no longer exist
or are so far hidden that no one could find the lock; urns filled with
the ashes of women immo­lat­ed after the death of their treacherous
hus­bands; and so much more that it all becomes a blur. They stop finally
and at long last in the garden, which has no sun­light and yet is a rage of
flowers: daf­fodils and cro­cus­es, violets and hyacinths, roses and irises,
aspho­dels and poppies, acres and acres of drowsy poppies, and a small
grove of trees filled with heavy round reddish fruits, so ripe and ready
they must surely fall to the ground any moment. What kind of fruit are
those, Amelia asks, and the man tells her, those are pome­gran­ates, and
he plucks one from a tree and holds it out to her and says, Would you
like to try one? She nods her head, hungry as she is, and the man pulls
from his cloak a knife, its blade made of bleached bone, and he slices
the fruit in half, reveal­ing hun­dreds and hun­dreds of its dark red seeds.
You eat the seeds, he says, and Amelia wrin­kles her nose, and Lora feels
the man’s hand around her heart again, squeez­ing ever so slight­ly, just
the tiniest bit tighter, but Amelia does not feel her mother’s heart and
she takes one of the seeds and pops it in her mouth and it is both tart
and sweet and the juice, oh the juice, and she takes another seed and
another and another until the juice has stained her lips red, and just so
is she lost to her mother forever, in the dark, under the world.…

The dream ends.

Lora wakes up, Amelia’s name in her mouth but not past her lips,
a gasp only now, and she clutch­es her chest above her heart. She is
crying, has been crying in her sleep, and the dream stays with her,
which it doesn’t nor­mal­ly do, and she knows what hell is, she knows …

#

Outside the cottage, the storm has filled the world with white, has
drowned cars and trees in it. The snow promis­es nothing under the dark
skies.

Harris sits up; he hasn’t been asleep but rather he’s been watching
Lora while she dreams, willing her to love him, her dark shape barely
dis­cernible against the bed. She gasps again as he touches her hair and
then her head is on his chest and her body wracks with sobs, a low
wrench­ing keening escap­ing at last from her lips. She clutch­es him to
her, as if she’s trying to will herself inside his body, where she might be
safe again, where she might feel the world hasn’t for­sak­en her.

They lie back in the bed and Lora keeps weeping, but she’s in his
arms now, she knows he’s here for her and will be. Doesn’t she? He
wants to say the words aloud, but he can’t find the breath to say them.
He feels a sudden guilt about what he’s done by steal­ing into her grief
with his besot­ted heart, what he’s doing this moment, but he holds her
to him as if he made the right choice. Her body is warm, even as her
tears turn to ice on his skin. The smell of fruit is in her hair, and Harris
hopes for spring.

This story orig­i­nal­ly appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 18.

Photo by Aditya Vyas.