Snow Angel

            Sun-faded, with rusty wheel wells, the old Volvo seems almost a natural part of the landscape. Her BMW, parked next to it in the driveway with its paint reflecting the fir branches above, does not. It was a long drive here, all endless roads through endless ranks of evergreens. Along the way, she saw reindeer for the first time in her life.

            Like her car, she is very much out of her element. She’s wearing a sweater underneath a fleece-lined jacket, and still she’s shivering. Janne wears only jeans and a flannel shirt, but the November chill does not seem to bother him at all.

            They stand on the little sloping lawn. The unmown grass is defiantly green, like it’s determined to hold out as long as possible against the coming winter. At the slope’s lower end, the firs part like curtains for the rocky lakeshore, but everywhere else they press close. The silence is primordial. She pretends she and Janne are the last two people on the planet, and it scarcely takes any effort.

            It’s perfect.

            They’ve just finished the grand tour. It didn’t take long. Kitchen, living room, bedroom. The fireplace, the toilet. Firewood’s in the shed. The toilet is the composting kind, the kind you sprinkle with sawdust after use, but at least it’s indoors. That’s a big part of why she chose this particular cabin to rent.

            “The winters up here can get rough,” Janne says, in his Torne-Valley lilt. He’s two decades older than her and a dozen centimeters shorter, with the tangled beard and burst blood vessels of a lifelong drinker, and he’s eyeing her as if he doesn’t know what to make of her. “If it snows a lot, you might get snowed in.”

            He’s already cautioned her once, twice—about the snow, about the cold, about carbon monoxide poisoning if the chimney should get blocked. It’s gone beyond simple concern. He thinks she doesn’t know what she’s doing.

            “I know,” she tells him.

            He gives her another look, and she knows what he’s seeing. Eyeshadow and earrings; long hair framing a square jaw; her gut, wider across than her hips. She does her best to meet his gaze levelly.

            At last he sniffs. “Well,” he says, briskly. “I’m off.”

            “Goodbye,” she says. “And thanks again.”

            As he turns around on the drive, the fir needles of yesteryear crunching beneath the Volvo’s wheels, she raises a hand in farewell, and he pretends not to see.

            “Shitheel,” she mutters, when the noise of his engine has faded. She wonders what he is muttering to himself as he steers out onto Riksväg 98. How do you say “tranny” in Meänkieli?

***

            It’s a touch irrational, her coming here, but at least she knows it: she’s isolating herself, hiding away from the wreck of her life. At the same time, it doesn’t feel unhealthy. It’s a new beginning, an opportunity to rest and regroup, to build herself back up. Besides, she’ll be cutting down on screen time and getting plenty of fresh air.

            She spends the first couple of days unpacking and settling in. Whatever Janne might think, she’s come prepared. She’s brought plenty of nonperishable foods; matches, accelerant, and a bale of old newspapers for the fireplace; two dozen books and approximately a million rolls of toilet paper. Before she started north, she called ahead—over the phone, before he saw her face, Janne was perfectly civil, even friendly—to make sure she’d have firewood and first aid supplies. If she does get snowed in, she doesn’t intend for it to be the end of her. She’s not that far gone.

            Of course, try as she might for self-sufficiency, there’s always going to be stuff she needs: groceries, her prescriptions, the occasional can of snus. Her third day at the cabin, she decides it’s time to hop in her car and scout out the nearby town.

            Up here, she’s noticed, with so much available space, the towns tend to sprawl. It’s tough to say where this one begins or ends; along the road, she sees a house here, a house there, set back among the evergreens at the ends of long driveways, falu-red houses with snowmobiles estivating in their yards—and then suddenly she has reached what must pass for the center of town. She parks outside the Ica, next to the gasoline pumps under their corrugated canopy. The day is drab. A handful of teenagers are riding bikes in the parking lot. As she enters the store, she pulls her coat tight against the chill and the teenagers’ stares.

            I know, she thinks at them. I know what I look like. Take a fucking picture, it’ll last longer.

            It’s always like this. Old people side-eye her, kids whisper about her to their mothers. The worst part is, she’s ashamed of her shame. It’s as if, by feeling it, she’s betraying some ideal. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. She was supposed to finally feel like herself.

            She picks up a loaf of bread, two liters of milk, butter and cheese and ham. As she’s paying, she glances past the cashier, through the window that looks out on the parking lot. To her relief, the teens are gone. Then she spots the long, aluminum-colored scratch in the driver-side door of her car, and she barks a curse, entirely forgetting to adjust her voice.

            She’ll never know if they did it because they clocked her, or because they resented her expensive foreign car, or just out of the boredom of growing up in a godforsaken little shithole like this. All of the above, maybe. It doesn’t really matter. Seething behind the wheel on the way back to the cabin, she resolves not to go into town anymore unless she absolutely must.

            But over the following days, little by little, her anger fades. In her woodsmoke-scented solitude, all of it—the looks, the car, Malin and the divorce—begins to seem unimportant. The winter stretches out before her, all snowbound, meditative silence. The cabin’s old kitchen clock has stopped, and she does not wind it.

***

            The nights are long, this far north and this late in the year. She takes dietary supplements every day with her breakfast, magnesium and vitamin D, and spends as many as possible of the scant few daylight hours outdoors. She goes for walks along the lake, though there isn’t much to look at down there, just water and trees and a smattering of cabins as secluded as her own. A couple of times, on clear and windless days, it gets warm enough that she’s able to sit in a plastic lawn chair and soak up some sun without her teeth chattering. The rest of her time she spends in the cabin. It has no heater, so she keeps a fire burning at all hours and eats filling, fatty meals—lasagna, falukorv with creamy macaroni. She carries on long conversations with herself and reads the paperback detective novels she’s brought.

            And she paints.

            She’s brought everything she might need. Sketchbooks and pencils, watercolors and oil paints, an easel and a stack of blank canvases, textbooks on the history and practice of art—frankly, she’s gone a little overboard. She’s always wanted to try her hand at painting, and this winter seemed like the perfect time. With all the changes she’s been going through, what’s one more?

            At first, she performs the exercises suggested by her books, with mixed results. Pretty soon, this begins to bore her, and instead she lets her whim steer her work. Mostly, this means landscapes; the majority of her early offerings are ham-handed representations of the lake. On other days, bad days when peace eludes her and she’s full of angry resentment, she ends up with abstract scrawls like cartoon fistfights, with torn paper and broken pencil leads.

            As divorces go, hers was amicable; neither of them screamed or threw things or punched holes in the walls, and in the end, she agreed to Malin’s demand for sole custody. Partly because she didn’t want to put the kids through some lumbering, years-long monstrosity of a court case, but mostly she was just tired. If it had to be over, she wanted it to be over.

            Still—call her cynical, but she believes in no such animal as an “amicable divorce.” They’ve both said things, nasty things that are going to hang between them forever. She said many of them herself. Most, probably. In her defense, the divorce was not the only sea change she was going through, and besides, a bitter part of her still feels she was justified. When Malin told her she wanted to separate, it felt like a betrayal. They’d both sworn to stick together, she replied, and did those promises now suddenly mean nothing?

            Well, Malin said, I didn’t have all the information at the time. You’re not exactly who you told me you were.

            Not untrue.

            It still stung like hell.

***

            The first snow falls in mid-November, clotting the defiant lawn with slush. The sun is a muted bright smudge in the marmoreal sky. She spends the whole day at the window, working with pencils and watercolors. The resulting painting is the first she’s really pleased with. It’s not a representation of the waltzing snow so much as its ghost: a suggestion of motion and pale light, and beyond it the merest iron-gray hint of the lake.

            Winter arrives all at once. The lake freezes overnight, and by December, the snow on the ground is a good meter deep. And the overcast settles in to stay. The cabin is just shy of the Arctic Circle, so even around the solstice, the darkest part of the year, the sun does drag itself above the horizon for an hour or two, but it might as well not have bothered.

            Sunday by Sunday, Advent slips by. She lights no candles. When she planned this trip, she imagined that spending Christmas up here would be a complete relief. The new awkwardness between her and her parents, her own children’s absence—she’d sidestep it all. It would be a day like any other. She wouldn’t think about it.

            It doesn’t turn out that way. On Christmas Eve, she calls Malin twice and asks to speak to the kids, once to make sure Malin has given them the gifts she bought ahead of time, the second time just because she needs to hear their voices. She spends the rest of the day crying or staring at the walls, while outside the window, the polar night reigns.

            The last week of December lasts forever. She spends most of it drunk in bed or slouched before the fire, feeling like she’s slipped into some awful, wintry otherworld where there’s no true light, only glacier-blue shadows amid the greater darkness. The old year meets the new like an elbow hitting asphalt, and she considers running crying to her mother, the way she did when she fell off her bike as a boy, but the car’s been hidden under a blanket of snow for days now, and anyway, she can’t stay sober long enough to drive.

            And then the sun returns.

***

            One morning she wakes up, and the sky is clear. Towards noon the sun makes its appearance, hanging just above the horizon on the far side of the lake, its slanting rays reflecting off the snowfield. The sight fills her with such unexpected joy that she leaves the cabin, nude but for her boots, and stands on the doorstep with her arms outstretched, basking, heliolatrous, in spite of her hangover and the biting January cold.

            In one of her art books, a glossy picture of J. M. W. Turner’s Regulus takes up half a page. She doesn’t know the first thing about the man beyond his dates of birth and death, but the painting captivates her. In it, the sun is rising over a harbor, filling all the sky with incandescent gold, setting the water aflame. Boats and buildings, unreal by comparison, cluster at the shadowy edges of the canvas as though the light is physically shoving them aside. It’s Regulus she thinks of now, as she stares out across the molten lake, into the snow blind heart of radiance.

            She has to go down there. She has to capture the light.

            Soon—having stopped just long enough to throw on some clothes and collect her supplies—she’s slogging down the lawn and setting up her easel on the frozen lake. Squinting into the glare, she paints until the sun sets and the long blue shadow of twilight falls across the land like a sudden shower of rain.

            The light revives her. That’s how it feels: like she’s been dead and she just didn’t notice. In retrospect, waking up in a bed whose sheets she has changed for the first time in a month and a half, it’s painfully clear. She puts away her half-drunk bottles of whiskey and gin, bags up the empties and lugs them to the trash cans by the road. Returning, she sees the cabin’s windows turn to fire in the sun, and for a moment she’s so happy she could weep.

            She keeps painting. Every couple days at first, then with increasing frequency, until she’s going down to the lake every day at sunrise and working until evening brings her back to herself. The first few times, she wears sunglasses; pretty soon, she stops. The dark hours she spends in a pleasant fog of expectation. She longs like a flower on a windowsill for morning, for another day’s communion with the sun.

            And it is a kind of communion. She spends hours down there, in the January cold, and doesn’t feel so much as a chill. She is warmed through by the light.

            She was pleased with her picture of the first snowfall, but the paintings she’s producing now blow that one out of the water. They’re works of genius. Thinking so doesn’t feel like conceit; it’s a sober acknowledgment of fact. She feels as if something is working through her. Call it inspiration, maybe. Call it her muse.

            Or call it something else. In her most intense moments of focus, she feels she can almost glimpse the shape of something, something vast and numinous, outlined in the light.

            On the morning after she finishes the third painting in her new series, she steps out of the cabin to find a squirrel on her doorstep. It lies there in pieces, its winter coat matted with frozen blood, the snow around it stained the color of cherry sorbet. She stands there for a moment, frowning—then looks across the lake to where the sun is just clearing the horizon. As the light hits her eyes, she feels something at the edge of her mind, a secret touch, a lover’s whisper, and she smiles. It’s nice to know someone’s still looking out for her.

            “Thank you,” she whispers back. “Thank you.”

            When she’s done working for the day, she brings the mutilated squirrel inside and sets its pieces on the hearth until they’re thawed enough to eat.

***

            The days grow longer. Brushstroke by brushstroke, she feels herself growing closer to the presence, or it to her. She thinks she will soon be able to make out its whispers. She thinks it will come out of the unearthly light and embrace her.

            She hasn’t heard from the kids since Christmas, hasn’t heard from anyone. That’s fine. She doesn’t want any distractions. One morning, on a whim, she throws her phone as far as she can in the direction of the rising sun, watches it disappear into the dazzling snow.

            She hasn’t been into town in weeks. Why would she? The presence feeds her.

            Its gifts are getting more lavish. A pair of disassembled magpies; a cat still in its collar. One morning, as she heads out to continue work on painting number seven, there’s half a reindeer outside her door. The front half, lying in a dark soak of blood, cut aslant at the shoulder so that one foreleg remains attached to the otherwise curiously shapeless trunk. The animal’s pale tongue hangs out of one corner of its mouth. Its bulging eyes sparkle with frost. The white-painted door has been daubed with its blood, a semirandom pattern like a child’s attempt at art.

            That day, sometime after noon, Janne comes striding down the slope from the cabin. She’s in such a state of flow that she doesn’t notice him until he’s almost upon her, even though he’s been shouting the whole way down. With unexpected strength for such a scrawny man, he grabs her by the arm and spins her roughly around. She blinks like a waking somnambulist. The sun has burned her vision to a kaleidoscope void, and for a time, she can see nothing.

            She can hear him well enough, though. He is shouting, “What in hell have you been doing here?”

            She’s in a T-shirt, and his callused fingers dig painfully into the naked flesh of her arm. All at once, her heart is racing. His voice echoes in the great wintry silence, breaking with fury, and between her blindness and her disorientation, she doubts she could defend herself if she tried.

            “I—I don’t—what do you mean?”

            “My cabin! You’ve vandalized my goddamn cabin, you freak!”

            “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please—if there’s something I’ve been doing wrong, I—”

            “Wrong? There’s a dead reindeer on the fucking stoop! What are you, some kind of psycho?”

            “No, but… that wasn’t me.”

            “There’s nobody else here! I should’ve known not to trust you when you first showed up, you fucking pervert.” Abruptly, with a noise of disgust, he lets go of her arm, like he’s only just realized he’s touching her, like he might catch what she’s got. When he speaks again, his voice comes out flat. “I want you out. Today.”

            By now, her vision has cleared enough to make him out: a small man in a down jacket and snowmobile pants, his drunkard’s face inflamed with anger, his tobacco-brown teeth bared. She stares down at him, aghast. The lake, the light—she needs to stay. “No,” she whispers. “No, you can’t—you can’t do that.”

            “I can. I am! You’re lucky I’m not calling the fucking cops, you psycho!”

            “I’m not finished. My paintings—they’re not finished.”

            "Fuck your paintings,” Janne snarls, and moves crabwise past her to aim a kick at the easel’s legs. The easel clatters backwards and falls over in the snow, canvas and all.

            Without thinking, she punches him in the face. She has no prior fighting experience; he jerks his head out of the way of her clumsy blow, and her knuckles only graze his stubbled jaw. She suspects it hurts her hand worse than it does his face. Mainly it seems to make him angrier.

            He rears back for a counter-punch, and she surges forward, terrified, grappling him to restrain his arms. He struggles, pushes back, and her foot slips on the snow and she almost goes to her knees before she regains her footing. He’s grunting, deep in his throat, a guttural, rhythmic sound he seems unaware of making. She can smell his sour breath despite the cold. There is murder in his eyes, and she thinks if she lets go of him there’s a very real risk she’ll end up dead.

            They wheel around like a dancing couple, a graceless half-turn that puts her back to the cabin and the lakelight in her eyes once more. The glare washes Janne out, reduces him to a rough doll-shape, a sun-eaten silhouette. And there, behind him, is the whispering presence. It has been watching this whole altercation, watching, waiting, and now—

            It reaches out and plucks Janne like a piece of fruit. For an instant, his death grip pulls her along, and then he’s gone. She gets a split-second glimpse of the presence, at once a scant few meters and the span of a galaxy away, as it snatches him across the irreconcilable distance and into the light.

            He is gone from sight in an instant. His screams go on for a long time.

            She sinks to her knees after all, blocks her ears with her palms like a child. By the time the screaming stops, the sun has all but set, and the snow is violet in the winter twilight. She staggers to her feet. Her teeth are chattering with the cold. Leaving her things where they’ve fallen, she trudges numbly up the slope to the cabin, where she crawls into bed without undressing and falls into a deep and dreamless sleep.

***

            She wakes up in the dark. There’s no moon; the glow coming through the windows is pure snowshine, shadowy-blue and all but impossible to see by. The walls of the bedroom are acrawl with dark striations.

            She’s got a murderous headache. She sits on the edge of the bed, paralyzed. The pain is like a freight train, en route from temple to temple. Has she been drinking again? No—it’s a migraine, she decides. The patterns on the walls are a trick of her throbbing eyes. She doesn’t usually get migraines, but then again, she’s spent a lot of time lately staring into the sun—

            She stiffens. The sun. The light. Her stomach roils. Janne—he came to her on the ice. He was angry about something. They fought, and then…

            She can’t remember exactly what happened, but she knows it was bad. Has she hurt him somehow?

            Did she kill him? Is his frozen body out there on the ice right now, just waiting for the police to find it?

            She staggers to her feet, steadies herself against the wall, accidentally hits the light switch. As the light of the ceiling lamp fills the room, she realizes those patterns are neither shadows nor hallucinations. They’re all over the walls: hand prints, half-finished drawings, snatches of word salad, all in the same brown hue. She throws open the bedroom door to find the living room similarly defaced. There’s barely a surface in the cabin free of paint.

            No—not paint. The butcher shop reek of blood hangs in the air.

            That’s what Janne was shouting about. He said she had vandalized his cabin. Memory hits like a wall of water: she did this, all in a daze, in the sunless evenings in between communing with the thing, the thing in the light, the thing that took Janne. She did it with the dead animals on her doorstep, with whatever was left of them after she—

            She doubles over and pukes on the floor. Half-digested pieces of somebody’s family dog splatter on the floorboards.

            When she’s finally stopped retching, she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, shaky, sobbing, and her gaze settles on the row of canvases leaning against the living room wall. The paintings from the lake, all six finished pieces. At first glance, they’re all more or less identical, each depicting the lake and the light falling across it from the same angle—only now she sees the thing she’s painted into them. She might still have missed it, had she not known to look for it: the suggestion of a silhouette, backlit by the blinding sun, indistinct but growing clearer. In the sixth painting, she can almost, almost make out its shape.

            Number seven is still out there in the snow. She pulls on her boots and her fleece-lined jacket and digs the flashlight out of the bureau by the front door. The thought of going down there again horrifies her, but she has to know. Besides, it should be safe. Shouldn’t it? The thing always comes to her during daylight hours. It’s the middle of the night.

            When she tries to leave, the door sticks. She has to throw the weight of her body against it to get it open. Something tumbles from the snow-crusted stoop. Lumps of ice, she thinks, but then she notices one looking back at her.

            There, next to the reindeer’s mangled carcass, trailing guts and cross-sectioned organs in the bloody snow, lie Janne’s remains. That’s what was blocking the door: the pieces of her landlord, neatly stacked and frozen to the stoop. She pulls the door shut, gagging, her already-emptied stomach clenching around nothing.

            It takes her half an hour to work up the resolve to step over the staring, frostbitten remains. Unwilling to so much as set foot in the stained snow, she all but leaps from the doorway, and as she touches down, she slips and falls on her ass. She turns onto her hands and knees and moves further down the lawn at a terrified backward scramble, as if Janne’s mutilated corpse might come after her—but he just lies there, his face blue and twisted.

            When she turns to face the lake, the far horizon is faintly blue, too. She doesn’t know the time—the clock’s stopped, her phone’s gone—but it appears she’s slept almost to the next dawn. Eighteen hours? Twenty? No wonder, really—the thing in the light has been driving her hard.

            It’s freezing. She isn’t wearing a hat or gloves, and as she steps out onto the lake she’s near convulsions. It’s unbelievable, the way she has stood out here, day in and day out, without so much as a jacket. She should be dead.

            She’s not. Whatever the thing in the light is, it has protected her. Why?

            The snowfield is dark and silent. She’s alone. The painting lies where it fell, still affixed to the easel. She squats down, brushes the snow from the canvas, studies it in the flashlight’s beam.

            This piece is only half-finished. Even so, what little she can make out of the thing is horribly distinct. She stares down at it, hanging there in the light, her skin crawling—then shoots to her feet, wiping her palm convulsively on her jacket as if the painting itself is somehow dangerous, somehow unclean.

            The stripe of blue at the horizon is thickening, brightening. She turns and stumbles up the slope towards her car.

***

            There’s no traffic on the road into town. No people, either—not a single living thing. The windows of the houses are dark. The land is still under an inviolate blanket of snow. She doesn’t know what she’ll do if she spins out and gets her car stuck in a snowdrift, but all the same, she steps on the gas. There’s no time to drive safely.

            She has no plan. She just needs to find someone, anyone, just needs to borrow a phone and call somebody. Malin, maybe—god, she’d give anything to hear Malin’s voice. If she can just link a single, trembling finger with the world she comes from, the world of sanity and normalcy, everything will be alright. She’ll figure all this out. She’ll make her way back from there.

            By the time she screeches to a stop in the Ica parking lot, there’s a golden halo around the roofs and treetops across the street. Sunrise is seconds away. She tumbles out of the car and sprints for the automatic doors.

            They don’t open.

            The store’s opening hours are printed on the wall: 8:00 to 19:00, every day. There’s no way it’s earlier than eight, yet nothing’s moving in there. The lights are off. She’s hammering on the glass, just starting to wonder if she could break it, when the sun clears the treetops.

            The light paints her shadow on the floor beyond the doors, the ghost of a nuclear detonation, and all at once, she feels the presence of the thing, like a warm hand at her back.

            She turns, and there, on the far side of the street, she sees them: the inhabitants of the town, all hundred-odd of them, or what’s left of them. They lie in piles, stacked like bags of planter soil. Gaping mouths, protruding eyes. Eyelashes glittering with frost in the first light. She sees faces she recognizes: the staff of the Ica, the teens who keyed her car.

And there, beyond them, beyond the houses and the trees and the sky, yet still somehow close enough to touch…

            She smiles. Her misgivings are melting away, like snow in a hot pan. With the blinding brilliance of morning in her eyes, she sees the presence clearly. It means her no harm. It wants to help her. All the ugly looks, all her shame and grief and fear—the light can wash it all away. She will never have to doubt again, never wonder if she has made the wrong decision. She has given the presence form, and it can return the favor.

            There is a price. She’ll be as much a stranger to this world as it is. She’ll never see Malin or her children again. But isn’t it worth it, if it means she can be herself, entirely and truly herself?

            The presence extends a fractal hand across all the strange gulfs of distance between them, and all she has to do is reach out into the light and take it.