I lay on my stomach, I wrote, and pressed my cheek to the floor. It was soothing. I thought of the older kids, too afraid to follow. I had a glimmering sense of my courage.

And that’s when the roof fell in. A heavy rush, all the air clapped out of me, and then only dark, and weight.

Later, Dad’s family rallied around the cousins, protecting their version of events. The igloo simply collapsed, they said. One of my aunts went so far as to suggest I’d compromised the structure from within. But Mom said somebody must’ve gone up on the roof.

“Whitney!”

Very dimly, I remember someone shouting my name, how the sound struck my ears, warped by ice. I made no answer, dirty snow filled my mouth. I can taste the car exhaust, the rocks in my teeth.

“Whitney!”

My tongue went numb. I sucked the snow and swallowed, smothered, and that’s how it started. At the outer edge of perception, aged five, I knew I would die, that death was the name of this coldness and this darkness, and how good it was simply to lie there, let it happen—seep into the snow.

There came the circling sound of sirens. Adults had converged and were digging me out. Soon they uncovered my body and I was hoisted from the snow. It fell from my mouth.

Only when Mom and Dad got home tipsy and asked me what happened did anybody realize I hadn’t uttered a word since the accident. When they couldn’t coax me to speak, they took me to the ER, but there wasn’t any concussion, no problems with my chest or throat—just a blank where all my words had been.

You can see the change in photographs. Before the igloo, I seem energetic, natural. Unlike Mom, who always glanced away from the camera, as if the whites of her eyes were her most alluring feature, my tiny teeth shone, the blood-red orbs of my eyes open wide. But after, I look more like her, elusive, vague, as if the shutter always snapped at the moment I moved, blurring my face.

I stayed mute almost a year. I’ve asked myself a million times and still have no explanation. Or rather, I have too many—a crowd of expert opinions. Mom’s solution was to entrust me to science. She took me to speech therapists, art therapists, play therapists, and surely this was when I acquired the basic skills of my career, as I lay waiting behind the mask of my face, observing each attempt to explain me. It was guilt for having caused so much fear. No, it was a desire to punish my parents for neglect. No again, it was an anxious reaction to my mother’s expectations. No—