Cold Comfort

This is the third year that she has haunted me. She is pale and slightly shimmery, as if brushed with frost, but her cheeks are stained with the soft pink of little girls her age.

She trails behind the other children as they jam their feet into snow boots and search for missing mittens. She holds her hand out to me, pudgy fingers stuck together inside an abandoned glove she has rescued from the floor, and looks down with greedy eyes at the smallest pair of boots, the ones that no longer fit my real children. I blink, and I see myself there with her, faded like she is, tired and swaying as I force her wriggling feet into them.

I clench my teeth and brush past her, following the children into the snowy yard. I help them roll hundreds of snowballs, teach them to aim at each other’s bodies – not faces – and together, we dig a tight tunnel through the mountain of snow I’ve been shoveling off our driveway for weeks. Sweating from the effort, we curl our bodies into the arching burrow. We’ve judged it perfectly – there is just enough room for us three, and it is snug and warm inside despite the cool trickle of snow from our hats melting down the backs of our necks. Still, I can feel her pale eyes on me. I crane my neck to look out the end of the tunnel and find her standing in the white-flecked wind, shivering, that one thin glove still stretched awkwardly over her left hand.

She never comes too close, never speaks. She used to wake me repeatedly in the night, like a baby, but not by crying. I would sit up in bed to the sensation of her staring. Her eyes are steady, grave, mature. They are not the eyes of a child. They are mine. Exactly mine.

She haunts him, too, but she doesn’t follow him the way she does to me. The way the others used to stalk me if I strayed so far as the toilet, back then. The way they used to watch me through the steamy glass of the shower, and tug at my limp hand in the middle of the night. She comes to him in glimmers: chasing the other children into the surf on unsteady legs, sitting between them in the back of the car, or just staring at the four of us, slotted comfortably together like a jigsaw puzzle on the sofa on Christmas morning.

“I saw her in those places, too,” I told him, when he confessed this to me.

And I did. I saw her screaming, red-faced, as I ran to drag her out of the waves. From the water where I bobbed weightlessly, I watched my other self hold her hands and dip her toes into rock pools while keeping half an eye on the surf, waiting nervously for the sight of two distant bobbing heads. I saw her squished into the middle seat in the back of the car, arms flung out across the faces of her yowling brother and sister. I saw her ripping paper from a third too-large pile of presents under the Christmas tree.

“You know I don’t resent you.”  He says this with a whisper of sweat on his brow and lips pursed in concentration. He says it in a rushed, clipped voice, the exact same inflection every time. He says it like a prayer he learned to recite years ago in Catholic school.

I leave the children behind in the tunnel and go into the house. As I spoon hot cocoa mix into cups, she counts the mugs. Peers into the tin in my hand. There is enough there, her eyes say. Isn’t there enough?

I slam the tin on the countertop and open my mouth. Close it again. Squeeze my eyes shut tightly. Finally, I nod.

There is enough of nearly everything, I want to tell her. There’s enough cocoa. Enough boots. Enough love. Just not enough of me.

But I don’t say any of that. She already knows.

She stares at me openly, now, and I feel something pulling at my chest. Some pulsing, substantial part of myself is being torn away from me, slowly. The pain is eye-watering, but I bite my lip and hold eye contact with her. I stare at her while the slamming door sets the walls to shivering and the thud-thud-thud-thud of heavy boots dropping to the floor echoes in from the hall. My children call to me from a great distance.

“Mom!”

“Mom!”

“Mom!”

 I finally turn away from her and see their damp red faces, staring. I look at them for a long moment without recognising them. Absently, I seat them at the table and give them their cocoa, my hands shaking, slopping the brown liquid on the table.

When I turn back to the kitchen to find her again, she’s not there. She’s not scraping her tiny finger along the rim of the empty tin, smearing chocolate residue across her thirsty lips. She’s not shivering, or dripping melting snow on the kitchen tiles, daring me to help her. She’s gone, and she has taken something with her.

I rush to the window. There, amidst the cloudy white and anemic gray of late afternoon, two people stand facing one another. The other me has bundled her into a red coat and fluffy mittens. She takes the girl’s hand and together, they turn and trudge away, leaving nothing behind, not even footprints in the snow. I stand at the window, watching them walk away, watching it go dark. I stand there until I can’t remember who I was looking for out there in the first place.