Looking back, it began one day as I was driving her home from preschool. I had buckled her into her booster seat, feeling the click of the seatbelt assure me of her safety. It was a typical winter day in the Pacific Northwest and even at noon our car slid through a world made small by the enveloping fog. Trees faded in and out of view as our car hugged the twisting roads, the well-worn path home turned enigmatic. The last leaves rotted on the branches as they clung to the trees, sucking the last little bits of life out of a sun slowly disappearing into the long winter night.
I approached a red light glowering out of the mist like a Victorian gas lamp. As the car stopped, I heard a tiny sob, and my eyes glanced up to the rearview mirror, aimed habitually at the back seat rather than the traffic behind me. Her little hands covered her eyes like a mask.
“What’s wrong, Winter Bird?” I said. I had found over the last few weeks that the drama of girlhood started even in preschool, and I expected another tale of who wouldn’t let whom sit next to them at circle time or who played with someone else today instead of her.
Her pale blue eyes rose from behind her hands followed by two chubby cheeks. “Mom, I’m just tired of being myself.” The waver in her voice was of a teenager beginning to discover the existential angst of adulthood, not of a little girl with brown pigtails.
“Oh, bird,” I said, trying to sound empathetic as I struggled to suppress my laughter at her too-early world-weariness. My hand flipped the rearview mirror up, back to the road so she couldn’t see it in my eyes. It was a cruel reaction to a feeling that was clearly real to her. The light turned green again, and our red van continued its slow glide through the fog. I spoke soothingly to her again, trying to smooth out her crumpled feathers. “Don’t worry; your brothers will be home soon, and we’ll all get a break from school. No more school until after Christmas. Isn’t that exciting?”
“Yeah,” she said, but her voice sounded far away. I flipped my mirror down again and caught her blue eyes staring emptily out the window at the fog, watching it transform the molting trees into elegant skeletal shadows that faded into nothing. That was the problem with Seattle winters, I thought. No snow to cover things up, to pad out their thinness with an insulating layer of merriment. Instead, we had the fog which transformed the most mundane street into a mystery and didn’t melt away until afternoon. Sometimes, though not often, there was frost so thick that it looked like snow had fallen during the night. But it was only an illusion with no substance and vanished quickly, revealing still green lawns in need of mowing all through the winter.
I pushed aside her odd comment. It must just be one of those things. It had been a long year for her, a transition as the last of her older brothers left for school full day, leaving the time after preschool long and lonely until the boys got home. Only later did I remember the comment and the reflection of her blue eyes staring out into the fog.
*
After an uneventful lunch of toddler-friendly sandwiches, I carefully tied on the Christmas apron I had unpacked from storage along with the Christmas decorations. I remembered its green fabric and red ribbon so clearly on my grandmother’s slight frame. She had made Christmas cookies with me every year, always insisting on creaming the butter and sugar by hand with a fork. Making cookies in her tiny kitchen with a worn laminate counter was one of the clearest memories of childhood I had. But with four children and so many activities and friends, we rarely had the time to make cookies at all. Doing things the old-fashioned way was a luxury we couldn’t afford, so I pulled out the old red mixer.
I set ingredients on the counter in a neat row: flour, sugar, vanilla, eggs. As I turned around to place the salt, I found her standing silently at the counter, ready to help. Strange that I hadn’t heard the stool scoot across the old wooden floor. This house had been built in the twenties and almost everything that moved in it made a sound. But she had been particularly quiet, like a little sparrow. She sat there with a blank expression, as though seeing something far away. It was quite unlike her usual joy at having access to the sugar bowl. Maybe just a holdover from her strange mood.
Her stoicism unnerved me, so I put on a superficial cheeriness. “Should we make some cookies?” I began unrolling the cold bricks of butter from their wrappings, dropping them into the mixing bowl. She reached her little hand into the container filled with sugar, white and granular like the pristine snow of my childhood. I watched as she scooped up grains and let them rain down again, slowly, like a wintery hourglass. I put my hand over hers, surprisingly cold, and helped her to level off the scoops of sugar and balance them over to the mixer. I flipped the switch to start the mixer blending sugar with butter.
“I will miss the sugar,” she said, staring down into the mixer as it methodically obliterated the butter, crushing the grains of sugar into it. I nearly laughed, but she had stated it in such a matter of fact way that I was once again baffled.
“Why will you miss the sugar, bird?”
“It’s gone. Like the frost.” She watched intently until the last grains melded into the butter. Then the solemnness vanished again, and she gleefully helped me measure the other ingredients into the bowl, sneaking pinches of dough as I half-jokingly admonished her not to. We rolled out the dough, and the cookiecutters clattered as I dumped them on the counter and began to hunt out the Christmas ones. We laid out trees and stars and gingerbread men on the sheet pan, all darkened and oily from heavy use.
After I put the sheetpan into the oven, I got her settled down for a nap. Maybe some sleep would help. I was surprised that she barely fought me at all as I laid her down, no clamoring for me to stay or to leave another light on. When I turned off the light, the pale foggy glow shown in through the cracks in the blinds. For a second, a similar glow seemed to come from her eyes, the blue-gray misty light illuminating the shadows of the bottom bunk. I glanced away briefly as the timer began going off downstairs, and, when I turned back, the illusion was gone.
Maybe I needed a nap as much as she did, I thought to myself as I carefully shut the door and descended the stairs back to the kitchen. I girded on my oven mitts and retrieved a hot pan of cookies, the sweet scent of baking butter and sugar emanated from the oven with a wave of holiday nostalgia. I placed the sheet on a rack to cool, then went back for the second. As I set the sheet onto the cooling rack, I stared at the cookies with confusion. Had we really left that huge gap in the middle of the cookie sheet? What a waste of space. Only hadn’t we cut out four gingerbread men, not just three? I shook my head and went to lay down myself until it was time to fetch the boys from school.
*
Gone was the quiet of the afternoon as the three noisy boys piled out of the minivan and into the house. The entry was a flurry of backpacks and coats and rainboots, lunches to be unpacked. The noise and chaos continued into the living room as they let off steam from being stuck in desks all day by half-pummeling, half-tickling each other all over the couches. I retreated into the kitchen to avoid shouting at them for an age-appropriate need for physical movement and noise. A bump at my leg turned out to be my daughter, staring up at me again, for once not trying to entangle herself into the roughhousing.
“Do you need a snack?” I said. She nodded, so I pulled out the milk and the cookies from earlier, setting a plate down at the table for each of us. “There you go, little bird.” I watched her as she bit into the cookies, her grayish brown hair falling out of her pigtails and into her eyes. I reached out to tuck it behind her ear.
Her unusual hair was what had earned her the nickname—that, and being born just after Christmas. She was our little winter bird, full of lightness, always looking quizzically at something she didn’t understand. Coming as she had after my grandmother’s death just before Christmas, she had seemed a replacement for the joy Grandma had always brought us at Christmas. Visiting her house at the holidays had been magical. Her house positively frosted with decorations, sparkling absolutely everywhere, making the house look like a fairyland to a little girl. She had always seemed more alive in winter, moving gracefully though family parties like a rolling fog, blessing every conversation with her presence. As my little bird and I dipped our cookies in the milk and watched the boys tussle, I was grateful for her more peaceful presence to balance the physicality of her brothers.
Licking the milk and crumbs from my fingers, I stood up and braced myself to enter again into the fray in the living room, which was beginning to descend into actual fighting. I sent them all to the table and made myself busy, pulling the Christmas ornament boxes out of a small closet under the stairs. My grandmother had always decorated a fresh pine tree on Christmas Eve, so, though we now had a pre-lit fake tree, it sat undecorated in our living room until the day the kids finished school. I could hardly hold them back longer than that, though there were still a few days left until actual Christmas.
As the boys were finishing their snack, I heard the sound of the garage door opening, my husband home for the evening. I handed the boys off to him and began the lengthy process of pulling boxes out of storage, opening each to locate the ornaments. Buried amid the garlands and bobbles in one box, I found a beautiful porcelain doll with an angular face and a slight silver dress. She had belonged to my grandmother, presiding over the Christmas festivities from the top of her tree. We used a star now on ours, but I had kept the doll. Perhaps this was the year to give it to Winter Bird—the doll seemed to share her hair and eyes. I set it aside to wrap up for Christmas morning.
Finally, when he could not hold the boys back any longer, they bounded into the living room to begin ferrying ornaments between the boxes and the tree. A tug on my leg made me look down. “Where are mine?” said my daughter, bouncing up and down to be part of the fun. She had been too young last time to even remember decorating the tree. I showed her where her box of ornaments was, mostly unbreakable things. After showing her how to fiddle the little hook through the fake needles to a secure place, she seemed to get the hang of it and continued to pile ornaments onto the tree one after another. I was soon busy making sure glass balls weren’t smashed by boisterous boys and reattaching new hooks to ornaments which had mysteriously lost theirs while sitting in a box for the past year.
“Mom,” she said, turning to me in a quiet break in the rush, “look, a bird. Just like me.” She held carefully in her hands a little sparrow ornament with a clip on the bottom, one that could be clipped to the branches. I had been happy to find it two years ago amid all the cardinals in a store and had immediately bought it for her. Its false feathers were the same greyish brown as her hair. Together we found a spot for it and she clipped it to the branch then stood back to examine the effect.
“Mommy, next year, you’ll have to put it up for me.”
I was baffled again. “Why, bird?”
“Because I’ll be gone.”
“Where will you be?” I said, a little concerned. Just then, a telltale noise of shattered glass, and I spent the next few minutes picking the larger red and green shards of metallic glass out of the carpet before my husband broke out the vacuum. Winter Bird’s words were lost amid the blaming and the excuses and the complaining of doing anything with four children. I remembered our strange conversation only later, when it was too late.
*
Throughout the next few days, I kept noticing her staring out windows, especially in the late morning when the fog melted away and in the early evening when it rolled back in. There was almost nothing to see outside the glass, just an oppressive sheet of white mist, yet she remained entranced. I felt as though I were encased in a snow globe, and that only Winter Bird could see through to the outside world.
On Christmas Eve, my husband and I bundled the kids into the car for the traditional drive to look for Christmas lights. In their pajamas and coats, they piled into the car with the traditional jockeying between the boys about who would sit where. After the booster seats were resettled and the wounded feelings were nursed, we began our slow roll through the foggy neighborhood.
The fog transformed even the smallest strand of lights into a glowing beacon. Trees wrapped in purple or blue, blinking multicolored strands across roofs and down onto windows, the occasional white wire deer lit up the wet air around them like a neon sign. Everything was bright and surreal against the white curtain of cloud; everything larger than it should be, like a painting with the background removed and all sense of scale lost so you couldn’t tell if you were looking at a cottage, a castle, or a tiny fairy house. None of them seemed to compare to the lights of my grandmother’s house, which in my memories almost seemed to have grown organically from her trees and seeped out from the lines of her house.
The kids shouted and fussed and pointed out their favorite sights to each other. Since becoming a mother, I’d found their reactions to the lights more entertaining than the lights themselves. I turned around to watch them in their vigilance as they all sought to be the first to spot the next best thing. It was then I noticed a strange blue glow coming from her side of the car, bathing my little bird in a glow so cold compared to the blinking strands we drove past. I watched her, fascinated at the play of the light over the soft contours of her face, just beginning to lose its babyish shape.
After passing a sufficient amount of time to ensure that the kids would fall asleep easily, we made our way home and bundled them all into bed. I tucked her in and, as I left the room, she quietly whispered something I couldn’t quite hear.
“What did you say?”
“I said, goodbye, mommy.” It struck me as off—goodbye instead of good night—but I had a lot to prepare for the morning and so I let it be as I fell into the busyness of last minute wrapping and cleaning and preparing for the celebrations the next day.
*
On Christmas morning, I woke up before the rest of the family, turning on the oven to warm cinnamon rolls for breakfast. That was when I looked out the window and I saw her. My heart jumped and it felt like everything had stopped. My little bird was outside in the fog, standing on the front lawn. Her skin was translucent: I couldn’t decide whether it was glowing or made of fog. Next to her stood an older woman, who I didn’t recognize until I saw her gracefully walk over and take my winter bird by the hand. Those hands—the same ones I had seen creaming the butter for Christmas cookies so many times. They were both dressed in long white dresses that moved like the swish of a fog bank.
Winter Bird waved at me with her little hand. Then they turned and started walking out into the road.
Whatever spell had held me frozen cracked like thin ice, and I sprinted toward the door in a panic. I screamed her name as I yanked the door open and ran out into the fog. It blasted against my skin as I ran, like spray from the ocean so fine that it cuts. The ground was cold against my feet and I could hear so clearly the pounding of my own steps, thudding against the ground. I reached the middle of the street but there was no sign of them. My own weight bound me to the earth as I wavered between turning right or left. Which way had they gone? But they hadn’t been running; how could they already be out of sight? The streetlights illuminated the fog at intervals but revealed nothing of my little bird or where she had gone.
I began to shake violently. I wondered if I had imagined it all. I realized that I had not checked her room and ran in a panic back through the wide-open front door. The door to her room was closed, but I flung it open with complete disregard for sleeping children.
In her bed, I found only a child-shaped ring of white frost, slowly melting away.
In the days and years that followed, it seemed that I was the only one who remembered her. Her pictures on the walls were not there, and yet none of the arrangements of frames were disturbed by her absence. Sometimes I find myself doubting whether my little winter bird was real, and it is then that I pull out the doll, still wrapped in silvery paper that I had meant to give her on that Christmas when she became tired of being herself.
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Liz Busby‘s “Blueberry Bushes and the Bare Essentials of Being” appeared in Irreantum 16.1, and her series on Mormon science fiction recently appeared on the Association for Mormon Letters blog. She also finds time to blog and tweet.
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