The Snow Keeps Everything

By the time Ava Moriarty crossed the Frosthaven town line, the snow had swallowed the road markers and most of the ditches. The world narrowed to white fields, black pines, and the gray sky pressing down over all of it. Her mother’s town appeared without announcement: a water tower, a shuttered gas station, the brick church steeple, and the old auto-parts plant crouched beyond the railroad tracks like a dead animal.

Fifteen years earlier, Ava had left Frosthaven in the back seat of a bus with one suitcase and a mouth full of things she had not been brave enough to say. She had not returned for Christmas, graduations, or the annual arguments Helen called conversations. Now she was back because Helen had died alone in the library while sorting donated books.

The funeral home smelled of coffee and carnations. People approached Ava with the soft, practiced expressions of mourners who were also curious. They held her hands too long. They told her Helen had been a good woman, a quiet woman, a woman who never asked for anything.

“She asked for plenty,” Ava said, and watched each person decide whether it was a joke.

Lucas Crane came last. He wore his sheriff’s uniform beneath a black overcoat, though there was no reason for him to be in uniform except that it gave his hands somewhere to hide. He had gone silver at the temples. His face seemed familiar in the way a recurring nightmare was familiar.

“I’m sorry, Ava,” he said.

“You came to the visitation.”

“I knew your mother a long time.”

“So did I, apparently.”

His eyes moved over her face, pausing at the mouth. Something passed through them—recognition, guilt, or simple grief. He looked away first.

“She talked about you,” he said.

“That makes one of us.”

Outside, a plow scraped the street. The sound faded beneath the snow.

Ava spent the night in Helen’s house, where the radiators clanged and every room appeared to be holding its breath. Her mother had left dishes in the drainer and a cardigan over the back of a kitchen chair. On the counter sat a bowl containing three bruised apples. Nothing about the scene resembled a sudden death, which made the death feel more sudden.

The coroner had called it heart failure. Helen had been sixty-three, active, and stubborn enough to carry boxes of books up two flights of stairs without asking for help. Ava had accepted the explanation because rejecting it would have required feeling something more complicated than anger.

At six the next morning, unable to sleep, she drove to the library.