The Empty World Beneath Her Hand
By Robert E. Stutts
“How like a winter hath my absence been / From thee…”
~William Shakespeare, Sonnet 97
She will be gone.
The world is white this time of year, every moment of space filled up with cold and want and waiting. In this white sits a little house on a modest property, a charmingly shabby Queen Anne cottage. Through the window above the kitchen sink, Lora watches her daughter play airplane, arms outstretched, running around in circles near the edge of the forest of black-trunked trees that enclose the small yard. Amelia loves to fly, loves to imagine the clouds beneath her as she soars toward the sun, even though she has flown just the once, when they came here. Round and round she goes, and Lora knows she is making propeller noises. The imagination of a five-year-old, Lora thinks, and then she smiles.
A shadow steps out from the tree line, but at a distance from Amelia. Lora’s grip tightens on the teacup in her hands. Is it a fox? A dog, perhaps? Lora feels the familiar prickling of fear beneath her palms. The dark shape is bigger than either animal, moving closer towards Amelia, who still flies in rounds with her arms wide. Lora blinks, and when she opens her eyes, Amelia has disappeared.
Lora drops the teacup and is at the back door before the porcelain hits the bottom of the copper sink and shatters. Years later she will notice the dark spots of tea on the underside of the café curtains, but she will not remember how they came to be there. Once the door opens and Lora launches herself unprotected into winter, the world slows down. How long does it take her to reach the spot where Amelia had been playing? Three minutes? Five?
Without meaning to, her own feet trace Amelia’s footprints as she runs across the yard. The cold is bitter and pinks her face and hands, the taunt of a superior force.
Crying her daughter’s name, Lora scans the tree line frantically, desperate for a red flash of Amelia’s coat. The snow-blanketed forest throws her voice back at her, emptied.
Amelia is gone.
Sheriff Baldwin has a long list of questions for Lora while the search through the forest goes on that afternoon. Mostly he asks her to repeat parts of her initial statement over and over. He is not a cruel man by nature, but he has read stories about women who snap, who kill their own children and then blame it on a transient with a knife or the angels whose voices grew so loud the mothers couldn’t resist smothering their sleeping infants. He knows it happens and tries to ascertain—as gently as he can—if that is the case here. But Lora has gone into a kind of shock, her eyes straying to the windows, the doors, waiting. She doesn’t offer anything more than what she told the 911 operator: “Help me, please. My daughter’s disappeared. I can’t find her anywhere. She’s lost. Please, please help me find her.”
Sitting beside Lora on the sofa is Martha Jennings, the nearest neighbor, though she lives over two miles away. Martha holds one of Lora’s hands in both of hers, sometimes stroking Lora’s dark blond hair that’s gone wild. Lora had been outside for hours looking for Amelia without wearing a coat or gloves or hat; her footprints at the scene were a riot in the snow, demolishing any other tracks. Sheriff Baldwin sees in her red-rimmed eyes and her cold-burned face the fading intensity of fear and panic. Martha looks at Sheriff Baldwin hesitantly, and he knows they share the same fear about what happened to Amelia: that Lora is involved. No one knows Lora or Amelia very well; they moved from the West Coast into this house only a month ago, just before Halloween. The sheriff had first seen Lora in the market a day or two after her arrival, her arms full of acorn squash, her daughter hiding playfully behind her legs. He remembers how lovely Lora looked that morning, how her smile cut at his heart.
“Perhaps you could ask these questions tomorrow, Harris?” Martha interrupts his thoughts. “I don’t think Lora’s in any state to answer them now.”
“I know, Martha. But we want to find her before nightfall …” He stops himself; even if Lora has gone into shock, she might still hear him, and he doesn’t want to bring on another round of hysterics. Martha nods briskly. He remembers the winter as a young deputy when he found Martha’s brother dead of hypothermia, and tonight promises to be colder than the night Fred fell asleep in his car.
Standing up suddenly, Lora runs to the window that looks into the backyard. The sun has begun to set, and the shadows across the yard stretch long, reaching their blue fingers toward the tree line. Over Lora’s head, the sheriff can see movement deep into the forest, the many volunteers who have come to search for Amelia.
“There was something,” Lora says quietly, pressing her fingertips to the glass. “There was something before Amelia disappeared. A … something came out of the trees.”
Exchanging glances with Martha, Sheriff Baldwin asks, “What do you mean, Lora?”
“I—I’m not sure. I thought maybe it was a dog. And then Amelia was gone. I blinked and she was gone.”
The sheriff cocks his head to one side. “You think a dog took her?”
“Yes,” Lora says, “no, not a dog. It wasn’t a dog, too big for a dog. I don’t know what it was, but it came out of the forest and then Amelia was gone.…”
Another exchange of glances between the sheriff and the neighbor. Both feel they understand what will come next, that an accusation or speculation will fall from Lora’s lips. Neither is ready to hear the casting of blame, yet.
“Lora, is there someone we can call for you? Someone you want . . .” Martha interjects, and the sheriff wonders if she feels foolish asking the question, now of all times, but he supposes Martha does not want to stay with Lora, not with that grim possibility hanging over her. To him the house feels strange suddenly, although he has been coming here for years, before Tina and Richard moved to Florida and away from the heavy winters. Sheriff Baldwin wonders if Martha feels that strangeness, too. The air is too heavy, and the sheriff does not think he will be able to breathe it much longer without making himself sick.
“No, there’s no one.”
“What about the girl’s father?” the sheriff asks.
“No, not him.” Lora sighs. “He’s married to someone else. We were… I was his …” She stops herself, but the sheriff understands. “He won’t care. He won’t come.” She rests her forehead against the window. The light is fading, day is fading, and Amelia is gone.
Sheriff Baldwin comes up behind Lora and puts one of his large hands on her shoulder. He squeezes gently.
“Thank you,” she whispers.
Lora dreams that night.
She stands at the kitchen window, teacup in hand, and the smell of vanilla and honey wafts up to her nose. Through the glass she sees Amelia playing in the snow, playing airplane again, running around in circles, ever-expanding circles, until she is running, arms outstretched, along the tree line. Lora’s vision has become telescopic in the dream: she sees Amelia as clearly as if she were only five feet away instead of a hundred. And again there is that shape, dark against the snow, stepping out of the tree line, but Lora sees now that it isn’t a fox or a dog but a man, tall and dark. He is pale, his skin so like cream that she can see the tracery of blue veins begin at his temples and stretch underneath the skin of his bald head; his brows are heavy and dark, his chin covered in the same black hair, and his eyes so blue they are almost translucent, and Lora is transfixed by those eyes, as if they were candle flames and she a weary, fluttering moth. His clothes are black, but the color is so deep and unrepentant that Lora cannot tell where his arms cross his chest other than from the flash of his long white hands with their fine stitchery of dark hairs along the backs. Lora feels suddenly as if one of those hands has reached into her chest and squeezed her heart, not enough to crush the muscle but enough to bruise it, enough that the pain makes her breath come out in staccato gasps, and she wonders if his hand will always be around her heart, squeezing it just the smallest bit, bringing tears to her eyes. The man kneels in the snow and waits, waits, waits for Amelia, her wings rigid and ready, to fly into his dark embrace.…
The dream ends.
Sheriff Baldwin returns the following morning. Nothing has been found except for some child-sized footprints deeper in the forest, headed away from Lora’s house, but those prints stop abruptly and raise more questions. Was Amelia abducted, or did she wander alone into the woods? If she was abducted, why isn’t there a second set of footprints? At this point, the search teams aren’t hopeful they’ll find anything, not alive anyways, but the sheriff doesn’t tell Lora that, not yet. She’s not from here; she doesn’t understand that if Amelia were outdoors last night she’d have died for sure. Instead, he tells her that the search will continue today, that the alerts will continue to go out. He gives her hope because that’s all he has to give.
He talks with Lora in the kitchen, distracts her with platitudes (which he hopes don’t sound as false to her ears as they do to his), while the deputies look around the house. Ostensibly, they are looking for clues as to who might have taken Amelia, but in truth they are looking for Amelia’s body. All theories of the crime are still valid at this point, the sheriff told them this morning before they left the station to come here, and we don’t want to overlook anything that might help us figure out what happened to that little girl. When they arrive at the house, hats in hands, Lora doesn’t ask questions, not even why they want to look in the basement. Anything that isn’t Amelia is irrelevant, so nothing feels real to her anymore.
Lora doesn’t see the grim, almost-disappointed shake of the head the deputy gives Sheriff Baldwin when he comes up the steps into the kitchen. The sheriff nods, almost imperceptibly, but his discretion is wasted on Lora, who only stares, hard, at the forest beyond the window. She’s a beautiful woman, the sheriff thinks, and it’s a beauty that will only increase as she ages: hair as thick and sweet as honey, eyes green as spring leaves, and then he stops himself from writing bad poetry about her in his head. His own lyrical musings aside, he knows most women would kill to look as good at twenty-five as Lora does at forty. He’s staring at her mouth, those lips, thinking, thinking, and he curses himself for letting that hot urgency of desire flood him for a minute. Christ almighty, man, he thinks, keep your head on the job. But he continues to look at her, the curve of her neck particularly, where he wants to lay his own mouth. He should treat her as a suspect, should be suspicious of everything she says or does, but he finds he can’t. At last, he covers one of her cold hands with his own, squeezes a little, and he wonders, having no children of his own, how anyone survives something like this.
Lora dreams that night.
Amelia—never a shy girl, always eager to talk with strangers despite Lora’s repeated admonitions—laughs at the surprise of it all, her breath trailing up into the air in huge white and feathery plumes; she had not seen the pale, dark man there, and then suddenly he was there, and the whole thing is very amusing to her, and the man does not laugh although he does allow himself a smile, teeth small and perfect, the canines sharp and hungry. He speaks to Amelia, but Lora cannot hear what he says nor read his lips nor see the thin whiteness of his breath against the black trees, and Amelia laughs again, bringing her head down against her shoulder in a coquettish way that makes Lora sick and sad. One of his pale hands reaches inside his long coat and pulls forth a small bouquet of daffodils, their deep golden ochre trumpets surrounded by painfully bright yellow petal-leaves; Amelia is charmed at the illusionist’s trick, the sleight of hand, and claps excitedly, almost jumping up and down, until the man arches one brow and she quiets, waiting for the more that the arched brow promises, and he separates the daffodils, weaving their stems together deftly, lacing the flowers, until at last he sets upon Amelia’s head a crown of sunlight. “For you,” he seems to say, “my queen,” and he kisses Amelia’s forehead, and Lora feels his dry lips upon her own forehead, and then he is standing, holding out one of his hands to Amelia, who places her small hand on his palm and watches his fingers fold over her hand completely, and then they are walking into the forest, and Amelia never looks back at her mother, frozen at the kitchen window, her forehead pressed against the glass, a hopelessness seeping through the glass from the other side and into her brain, moving slowly, slowly south into her heart, but the man does look over his shoulder at Lora as he leads her daughter into the dark woods, and he smiles.…
The dream ends.
Sheriff Baldwin stands on Lora’s porch for a long time, wishing he didn’t have to be the one to tell Lora what he has to tell her. The searchers haven’t found Amelia, nor have any witnesses or authorities responded to the AMBER alert, and now it’s been five days since her disappearance. The good news, the sheriff thinks, is that Lora, at least, has been cleared of any connection with Amelia’s disappearance; nothing untoward or suspect was found in the house or the small barn, no evidence that suggested foul play or cleanup of the same. The feds were called in on the second day because the sheriff suspected the girl had been abducted, and agents out in California have been interviewing the girl’s father and his wife, both of whom claim complete innocence. From what Harris has heard, the wife has some truly deep-seated anger management issues. Even though she has a rock-solid alibi hosting a party for thirty or so women at the Peacock Garden Club, she might have hired someone to abduct and murder the girl, just to pay back her husband for his infidelity. Of course, the sheriff thinks, revenge only works if the father gives a damn about Amelia, and the feds’ reports suggest he doesn’t.
People, he thinks, are so damned crazy.
He rings the doorbell. After a few minutes, Lora opens the door, and she looks haggard, the skin around her eyes puffy and dark. She’s been sleeping a lot since her Amelia disappeared.
“Oh, Sheriff Baldwin,” she says quietly. “Good morning.”
“Mornin’, Lora. And please, call me Harris.”
“Of course. I’m sorry I keep forgetting. Come in,” she says, holding the door open for him to cross the threshold. “Would you like some coffee?” He nods, and they walk together to the kitchen. He sits at the table while she starts going through the process of making the coffee; he tells her not to bother, if she hasn’t already been drinking some herself, but she ignores him and goes about grinding the beans, pouring them in the machine, pouring in the water, pressing the button. She sits in the chair next to him, puts her hands on the table, clutched together in a tight little fist, and breathes out.
“I have something to tell you, Lora.”
“You haven’t found her.”
He’s silent for a minute. “No, we haven’t. But …”
“But?”
“We’re calling off the search party. She’s not in the woods, Lora. I don’t know where she is, but she’s not there.”
Her hands grip each other so tightly they tremble. She breathes very deliberately, in and out, in and out, her eyes focused on her hands. After a long while, she asks quietly, “Are you sure?”
Harris puts his hat on the table and one of his large hands on her shoulder. “We’re sure. We’re investigating other angles, though, and we hope—”
Lora slams her fists on the table, rattling the flower vase. Harris doesn’t flinch, not when she bangs her fists again, and again, not even when she turns to him and beats his chest with those hands, never saying a word, not even a keening, offering only fury.
Lora dreams that night.
The pale man with the pale eyes walks with Amelia into the forest, smiling over his shoulder at Lora, still trapped at the kitchen window. Once inside the forest, the man speaks in his low voice to the girl, who listens and nods and touches her daffodil crown to make sure it is still there. Deeper and deeper into the forest they go until they come to a snow-covered hill, maybe twice the size of the man, who then knocks on the hill three times, looks down, and smiles at Amelia, and the hill, with a groan or a sigh, opens before them, a grassy door to rough-hewn stone stairs that lead downward, and onto the first stair they step together, and the door swings closed and so the earth swallows them down, down, down. The way is long, and the only light comes from Amelia’s daffodil crown, which shines brightly enough to see each step ahead of them, although when Amelia looks over her shoulder at the way they have come, the crown shows her only blackness, and so they move deeper and deeper under the world.…
The dream ends.
While he waits for Lora to come downstairs, Harris looks at the sky through the kitchen window. White gray. Snowflakes are already beginning to fall. Probably a storm coming tonight, he thinks, maybe a bad one, and he rubs a hand over his chin. He ought to have shaved.
A little over three months have passed since Amelia disappeared, and she hasn’t been found. Harris doesn’t think she’ll ever be found, though he keeps hoping, for Lora’s sake. Lora, for her part, has held up, somehow, even with as much as she sleeps. Sometimes he thinks she’s only awake when he’s with her. Harris likes to think that he’s been of some help; he couldn’t find her child, but maybe he can help her grieve, help her come to terms with it. Every day he has stopped by the house to check on her, have coffee if it’s in the morning, maybe some wine if it’s in the evening. He shares with her town gossip about people she’s never met, weather reports, sports scores. She smiles politely, listens or doesn’t, sometimes asks questions, doesn’t ask him to leave. In the middle of February, Lora asked him to stay for dinner and he’s been to dinner every night since. She’s a fine cook, Lora is. “Wait until spring,” she says quietly whenever he compliments her. “You won’t believe what I can do with vegetables and fruits when the ground’s not buried in snow.”
She comes into the kitchen and smiles when she sees him, and, as rare as it is, it’s that smile that Harris realizes he doesn’t want to live without. She goes up on her toes and kisses his cheek—the closest her mouth has ever come to his—and starts preparing dinner. Harris leans against the kitchen sink and watches her, hungry.
Dinner tonight is roast chicken and a side medley of potatoes, baby carrots, and sweet onions with a spoonful of gremolata butter on top. After they’re finished eating, Harris swears it is the best meal he’s ever had, to which Lora replies, looking away, “You always say that.” But there’s the hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth.
Harris takes the plates to the sink and looks out the window. “Snow’s coming down pretty hard now,” he says. “I’d best get home. Mind if I catch up on the dishes tomorrow?” Lora goes into the living room to look out the large bay window; she doesn’t look out the kitchen window anymore.
“The snow’s covered your tires, Harris,” she says. He comes up behind her and puts his hands on her upper arms. “You’d better just stay the night.”
“With you?” he asks.
She leans her head back against his chest and closes her eyes. “With me.”
Lora dreams that night.
As she does every night, she dreams about Amelia, about what happened to her, about what has become of her, so far from her mother. When finally and at long last Amelia and the bald man reach the bottom of the stone stairs, they are greeted by a dog, a giant gray dog who reaches the chest of the man, a dog with three heads but none of them bark; one speaks a greeting in Greek, the other speaks Latin, and the third speaks without sound, its jaws opening and closing and its tongue moving as if it’s making words in some lost language. Then the dog growls at Amelia, suddenly aware of her standing beside his master, and she hides behind the folds of the man’s long jacket, which now Lora realizes is a cloak, slick on the outside but with a soft fur lining. The man pushes Amelia forward, his hand lingering on the nape of her neck, and the dog’s three faces are within inches of hers, the breath from each muzzle heavy and sour, and she begins to cry and closes her eyes and so she does not see the dog bow its three great heads to her. The dog moves aside, and the man pushes Amelia forward again, though she cries harder, beginning to hiccough in her anxiety, and the man picks her up and holds her close to his chest, stroking her hair and whispering endearments into her ear, and he looks for a moment as if he wants to eat the girl in his arms, to see what innocence and springtime and fear taste like, but he doesn’t eat her, though his mouth is close to Amelia’s ear and Lora wonders if his breath is warm or cold. He puts Amelia down and takes her hand and they walk farther into his kingdom, which is full of wonders and marvels and creatures, a museum of sorts but darker: the skeletons of kings and emperors sit on tarnished thrones with tattered draping across their empty laps; the shorn hair of beautiful women, wound onto giant spools made of crystal; piles and piles of gold coins and nickels, emeralds and rubies, sapphires and amethysts, opals and diamonds; a wall of keys in every shape and size, all of which, the man tells Amelia, unlock doors that no longer exist or are so far hidden that no one could find the lock; urns filled with the ashes of women immolated after the death of their treacherous husbands; and so much more that it all becomes a blur. They stop finally and at long last in the garden, which has no sunlight and yet is a rage of flowers: daffodils and crocuses, violets and hyacinths, roses and irises, asphodels and poppies, acres and acres of drowsy poppies, and a small grove of trees filled with heavy round reddish fruits, so ripe and ready they must surely fall to the ground any moment. What kind of fruit are those, Amelia asks, and the man tells her, those are pomegranates, and he plucks one from a tree and holds it out to her and says, Would you like to try one? She nods her head, hungry as she is, and the man pulls from his cloak a knife, its blade made of bleached bone, and he slices the fruit in half, revealing hundreds and hundreds of its dark red seeds. You eat the seeds, he says, and Amelia wrinkles her nose, and Lora feels the man’s hand around her heart again, squeezing ever so slightly, just the tiniest bit tighter, but Amelia does not feel her mother’s heart and she takes one of the seeds and pops it in her mouth and it is both tart and sweet and the juice, oh the juice, and she takes another seed and another and another until the juice has stained her lips red, and just so is she lost to her mother forever, in the dark, under the world.…
The dream ends.
Lora wakes up, Amelia’s name in her mouth but not past her lips, a gasp only now, and she clutches her chest above her heart. She is crying, has been crying in her sleep, and the dream stays with her, which it doesn’t normally do, and she knows what hell is, she knows …
Outside the cottage, the storm has filled the world with white, has drowned cars and trees in it. The snow promises nothing under the dark skies.
Harris sits up; he hasn’t been asleep but rather he’s been watching Lora while she dreams, willing her to love him, her dark shape barely discernible against the bed. She gasps again as he touches her hair and then her head is on his chest and her body wracks with sobs, a low wrenching keening escaping at last from her lips. She clutches him to her, as if she’s trying to will herself inside his body, where she might be safe again, where she might feel the world hasn’t forsaken her.
They lie back in the bed and Lora keeps weeping, but she’s in his arms now, she knows he’s here for her and will be. Doesn’t she? He wants to say the words aloud, but he can’t find the breath to say them. He feels a sudden guilt about what he’s done by stealing into her grief with his besotted heart, what he’s doing this moment, but he holds her to him as if he made the right choice. Her body is warm, even as her tears turn to ice on his skin. The smell of fruit is in her hair, and Harris hopes for spring.
This story originally appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 18.
Photo by Aditya Vyas.