A gust of wind roars through the upper branches of the trees, loud as a passing train. There was a time when she might have been afraid of that sound, afraid to be out here in the dark alone. She might have jumped at the crack of branches breaking under snow, or the hoots of owls or howls of coyotes or the marble pairs of eyes she sees frozen by the porch light even now on the edge of the woods. None of these things scare her now. There is comfort in her silence, a sort of safety, an invisible wall between her and the world that makes her feel untouchable. That is partly why she chose it, she thinks. Though maybe it has really chosen her; she hadn’t realized she would become trapped, unable to break out. She has lost control of her control. This is why she is sorry; she knows she is causing her parents pain.

She stands and steps out of the glow cast by the porch light and into the darkness beyond it. Placing one foot carefully in front of the next, Isabelle walks slowly in the direction of the apple tree, lifting each foot gingerly so as not to step out of her father’s overlarge boots. It is less dark out here than it looked from the porch. Her breath catches what light there is and glows a gentle bluish white as it curls from her mouth. She wonders what happens to a breath when you can no longer see it, whether it adjusts itself like a chameleon to the cold until it’s out of sight, or whether it spreads too thin to see, or whether it is taken in by unseen things around her in the way she takes in air.

She crosses the last few yards to the apple tree and then stops in the snow to look up at it. It looks thin without its leaves, sickly; it lost a limb to gypsy moths last spring. They’d covered the tree entirely, those parasites. She’d crushed a dozen with her hand trying to climb before she realized they were there. The thought, or maybe the cold, makes Isabelle shudder, and she continues on her missionless mission around the apple tree and back again to the porch. She steps in the footprints she’s already made so as to leave as much of the snow untouched as she can. In the morning, she’ll shovel paths through the yard for her parents and herself to follow if they want to get to the tree, or the swing set, or around the house. She doesn’t like a field of messy snow.

She resumes her seat on the porch steps, where she’ll have to wait for just a little while longer for her initial footprints to fill. She looks over her shoulder to measure the snow’s progress. Her footprints are only shallow indentations now. Soon, she thinks. Soon.

III