and rolled up the sleeves of her snowsuit to do cartwheels in the snow. “Watch me, Mumma!” Click. Aurelia crouches down to inspect something on the ground. A deep, clean imprint in the snow. Click.
“Mumma, you weren’t watching. I did a perfect cartwheel.”
Gaia approaches her and stares at the spot on the ground. Two crescent moon shapes facing each other. “That’s an elk print, sweetheart,” she says, drawing a breath.
Gaia cranes her face up at her mother. “Elk?”
Aurelia feels her heart quicken. “Yes. Remember the pictures we looked at?”
Gaia remembers. “It looks very big, Mumma. Maren said that elk used to drink out of our river.”
“It’s not our river, darling . . .”
“But Daddy said it is. It’s our river.”
A chill runs through Aurelia unexpectedly. She’s vulnerable out here in the woods. The trees provide excellent insulation, muffling shouts. She pats her pocket and finds her mobile phone there. Good.
“Let’s go back inside now,” she says.
“Aren’t you taking pictures?”
“Yes, but I’m almost out of film.”
“Can you take one last one of me? I promise I won’t pose.”
Aurelia grins. “All right. One more.”
Gaia races off—a little too far for Aurelia’s liking—and hides in the forest. With the exception of Coco, Aurelia is completely alone in a grove of towering trees, about forty feet tall and snow-clotted, and creamy clouds overhead make it almost impossible to discern where trees end and sky begins. She is in a womb of white, an impossible room of winter.
She can no longer hear Gaia. She is spellbound. The visual and acoustic qualities of snow remove you entirely from the rest of the world, from time itself. She can hear her own breaths, the crunch of the snow underfoot, the rub of the camera strap against her wrist. She feels watched, a distinct sensation of someone or something observing her carefully. When she looks up she swears the scene has changed. Did . . . did the trees move forward? She stares at the row of trees ahead of her, then behind. She could swear they’ve closed in around her. She tries to laugh off the thought, but it’s creepy here. As though the forest has intentions. The fir trees loom over her like gods.
She shivers, holds her breath, listening hard for the sound of Gaia’s voice singing to herself as she cartwheels through the trees.
“Gaia?” Her voice is thin with fear.
No answer.
“Gaia, where are you?”
She stumbles forward through the heavy branches, her flailing arms knocking clods of snow on top of her and a startled Coco. She is blinded by snow, her mouth full of it, her feet losing purchase on the ground. She swipes at her eyes and coughs hard.
“Gaia!”
“I’m here.”
Aurelia squints ahead. Her vision is still blurry, and for a moment the scene ahead is like something in a snow globe. Silvery sunlight spears through the clearing, illuminating the small figure of Gaia from behind. Relief makes her knees buckle, wrings the air from her lungs.
As she staggers forward and clutches Gaia tightly to her, the feeling of her daughter’s skin against her hands, the knowledge that she is safe, restores the forest from a ghostly, watchful presence to mere woodland. She laughs and cups Gaia’s face.
“I’m sorry, Mumma,” Gaia says, observing the fear in her mother’s face. “I didn’t mean to worry you.”
“It’s OK, darling. We’re together now.”
* * *
—
In the house, Aurelia glances repeatedly at the trees through the window, in case they happen to inch closer again, as they did outside. Satisfied that they’ve stayed put, she feeds a sleepy Coco in the playroom before settling her into the Moses basket. Derry comes downstairs, yawning and rubbing her eyes. She and Clive arrived late last night. They’d spent Christmas in Sydney and are completely jet-lagged.
“Go back to bed,” Aurelia laughs when Derry settles in the chair opposite. Derry is never tired. Aurelia finds it irritating, to be honest. Derry’s one of those people who can function quite happily on four hours’ sleep. Aurelia has never been like that. Even in her pre-baby days she needed a good eight hours to be at her best. Sleep, she’s learning, is both an area of competitiveness and a luxury. She’s learned not to complain about exhaustion in front of Derry, whose utter befuddlement about the concept of being even slightly knackered is tiring in itself.
“I can’t go back to bed,” Derry says through another yawn. “I’ll make it worse if I sleep now. I have to push through until bedtime.”