They’d both come so far to reach this place. Rafferty had never thought of himself as someone who would end up content, but here it was. He tried to live each day in the present, enjoying their quiet moments together and not thinking too hard about the time they were separated, in an attempt to keep from having his thoughts read by Towner. They had never been as happy as they were lately, and he didn’t want to do anything to mess it up.
Still, now that they were back in town, the nagging and persistent dread that it couldn’t last had returned. Today he’d had to consciously push it away, which was why he’d made sure he got himself to the meeting. He needed to hear the “one day at a time” stuff again. He needed to believe it.
Rose dressed for the cold, layering every warm item of clothing she owned under her big red coat. The boots Callie had given her for Christmas were not quite broken in, so she added extra socks to pad the heels.
The train had stopped running. It was 3:00 A.M., too late to call for Emily’s driver, as she had done a few times in the past weeks. Tonight she would have to walk. Outside, she didn’t see any vehicles save the occasional plow on the main streets. As the plows passed, the force of the wind drove the snow back, filling in the pathways behind almost as quickly as they had been cleared.
The wind stung her face as she walked along the North River on Route 1A. She had to lean into it to keep from being pushed backward. Already, several cars had been abandoned, covered in rising snow until they looked like a tiny mountain range along a vast white plain.
When she got to the Beverly Bridge, the wind force doubled, gusting off the open water, and, for a moment, Rose lost her balance completely. Determined, she righted herself and pressed on, leaning forward until her torso was practically parallel to the ground. As the bridge crested at its highest point, the screaming wind faded to an eerie stillness.
Rose felt suspended in time and space.
Whiteness stretched in every direction.
As she descended the downward slope, the wind picked up again, and the momentary calm gave way to a renewed fury. For just a moment, Rose regretted the journey.
When the bridge ended, she stayed to the right on Cabot Street. By the time she reached Route 127, she could no longer feel her feet. The snow turned to sleet, and the road beneath her was slippery. Her fingers ached, so she balled them into fists in the palm of each glove to warm them.
When she finally reached Pride’s Crossing, the thick stands of trees provided relief from the sting of attacking wind. By the time she found the Whitings’ driveway, the sleet had turned back to snow.
The world was quiet here, insulated, so perfect that it startled her in both its frozen beauty and its white silence. In the glow of solar lights leading to Pride’s Heart, Rose watched the snowflakes dance to the faint music of wind through bare elm branches. The lights were crusted and glowing on their windward sides, luminarias lighting her way.
As she walked past the big house, Rose looked in a window of the library and was surprised to see Emily sitting alone by the fire reading a book by candlelight. Rose walked on toward the orangerie; the glass structure was covered with snow, its spiny frame creating a pattern that mimicked the branches of the trees.
When she arrived at the oak, Rose began to cry, her tears almost freezing as they fell to her cheeks. She put her arms around the tree, and its branches seemed to sway forward, reaching for her, the oak pulling her close under the shelter of its heavy limbs.
Rose sat down, leaning her exhausted body against the trunk, disappearing into its strong embrace. She turned her face to the oak’s dark and rippled skin, her fingers clasping the bark. She could feel the thrum of life in the tree’s scarred beginnings, tracing it back to birth and then to each spring’s rebirth, the unfurling light green of every new leaf.
“Mother Mary, hallow this ground,” she began to recite, remembering that night so long ago on Proctor’s Ledge.
She raised her arms like tree limbs and opened her fingers wide, imagining tiny sprouts of life springing from them: budding, blooming, and greening, then vibrant with color, and finally withering and letting go. She felt her blood-sap cool and slow until she could feel it no longer, and she lay down, resting under the tree, her arms spread wide like the branches of the sacred oak.
From the top of the hill, the Whitings’ groundsman spotted the colors: red, purple, deep green, yellow, bright against the snow.
Rose was an island of color in an ocean of white. Her frozen body floated on top of the snow, her arms spread out like angel’s wings. She captured motion, as if she were a statue carved at the very moment she moved between the realms. She was beautiful in a way she had seldom been in life: her clear blue eyes looking forward, lips turned up in a smile, and cheeks painted the palest pink. Her long white hair, once so wild, now framed her head like a halo.
“A snow angel,” the groundsman told anyone who would listen. “That’s what she looked like. A genuine, honest-to-goodness snow angel.”
Considered sacred in almost every culture, the oak is known as a protector. That it was forced to participate in the killings of 1692 was not only against its nature but an unforgivable sin, and one from which the tree has never been absolved.
—ROSE’S Book of Trees
In February, snow fell from the sky until it insinuated itself into everyone’s consciousness. Piles grew higher and higher on the ground. Ice encased the tree branches, and, on the few days the sun chose to appear, it glared with a light more blinding than summer’s. At night, everything sparkled and strobed. When the short-lived annual thaw finally came, the snow and the ice melted and pooled. Fooled, some of the trees attempted to quench their thirst. When the water froze again, it split the trees in half.
All over town, people deserted their cars, narrowing the historic streets even more; vehicles were plowed in too many times to number. Forced to walk, people slipped on sidewalks, fracturing ankles and cracking ribs. Old people broke their hips and died of the resultant pneumonia. One hand-lettered sign on a Salem street corner advised: PRAY FOR GLOBAL WARMING. That message was crossed out and replaced with scrawling red letters: THIS IS GLOBAL WARMING, ASSHOLE.
“This isn’t depression you’re experiencing, Callie,” Zee Finch said. “This is grief.”
Callie looked out the window at the falling snow. Great, more snow.
It was all so hard to believe. After Christmas, Rose had seemed to be doing so well. She had come to Pride’s Heart to see the tree a few times, and she’d even seemed to make some friends at the shelter, something Callie had never expected. Callie had been able to focus her concern on Emily, and, by the end of January, she, too, had still seemed to be doing fine.
The month with Paul had been a good one as well. They’d started spending more and more time together, settling in for winter as people tended to do in New England, cooking dinners and sitting by the fire. Everything had been wonderful and romantic. Until the night of that first snow.