Kateri pours me more coffee, and I hear Birdie start on “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” with commentary from the stuffed bear in a different voice. It’s hard not to smile. She seems so resilient now, I think, and I hope she maintains it.

“The court has granted you temporary custody of your sister,” Kateri says.

“Temporary,” I say.

“They’ll reevaluate. There’s no reason for them to revoke it,” she says. “But they have to state it as temporary.”

“Okay,” I say.

“And your mother has offered a full, signed confession,” she says.

“She tried to kill me,” I say. “In the house fire, when I was a kid.”

Kateri nods.

“All this time I thought it was my dad, and he didn’t even do it,” I say. “It was her.”

It feels like ash in my mouth.

Later, I sit on the floor with my back against the couch where Birdie curls up and sleeps, her hair a wild mess and her thumb tight in her mouth. I had started to doze, my head back on the soft cushion, the TV on low, but I felt something near me, a hand on my shoulder. I checked on her, but she was in a ball at the other end, and the hand I’d felt was bigger, warmer, something protective, and there were lips, near my ear.

Get up.

I heard the voice, and then it was gone.

The light is bright outside, and I can hear the loud scrape of snowplows moving along Cemetery Road. I turn the TV to a local channel.

And I lean back on the couch, my shoulders cocooned in a white down comforter, watching the radar of a line of snow moving across the Great Lakes, into the North Country, over to Vermont. A dappled line of white and pink. Twelve, eighteen, twenty-four inches of snow.

Outside, it has started, the sky a swirl of white, the grass blanketed, the roads deep and slick. I hear her stir behind me, her mouth sucking like the baby she still is but her body warm and safe and whole. Both of us, whole. By morning, everything will be covered in white, everything hidden under a deep layer of cold, hard sparkle, everything dormant, everything erased, what is buried waiting to rise again. Clean.

ALSO AVAILABLE BY JENNIFER PASHLEY

The Scamp

The Conjurer

States

Author Biography

Jennifer Pashley is the award-winning author of two short story collections, States, and The Conjurer, and a novel, The Scamp. Her stories have appeared widely in journals like Mississippi Review, PANK, and SmokeLong Quarterly, and she has been awarded the Red Hen Prize for Fiction, the Mississippi Review Prize for fiction, and the Carve Magazine Esoteric Award for LGBT Fiction.

This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, organizations, places and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real or actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.