Stealing Snow

since.

1

In the distance I could see a tree that seemed to scrape the sky in every direction, with gnarly branches and the strangest, almost luminescent white wood. The bark was covered from top to bottom in intricate carvings. I had seen this tree before. I felt a pull to walk right over to it and run my fingers along the carvings. But instead I turned away from the tree toward a loud, constant crashing sound: water. It was running fast and deep. I looked down and saw that I was hovering on the edge of a steep, rugged cliff, when something or someone came at me from behind, shoving me hard.

I fell and fell and fell until my body hit the water. It was freezing cold. Cold like none I’d ever felt. The water cut at me like little needles piercing my skin. And then when I could not stand it a second longer, I opened my eyes and saw something in the murky deep: tentacles and gills and gnashing teeth coming at me in the icy blue.

My arms flailed. I needed air. Which was worse? That thing in the water or drowning? I opened my mouth to scream as the thing reached me, wrapping its icy tentacles around my ankle.

When I woke that morning, Vern, one of Whittaker’s orderlies, was standing over me.

Hush, child, she said quietly. She had a syringe in her hand, and she was prepared to use it.

I caught my breath and threw back the covers to check my leg for the mark made by that thing in the water. The sheets were drenched. But it was my sweat. There was no mark and no water creature to blame.

Snow?

The orderlies—or White Coats as we liked to call them—weren’t really our friends even though they were the only people we saw every single day. Some of them spoke to us. Some mocked us. Some laughed and moved us from locked room to locked room like furniture. But Vernaliz O’Hara was different. She treated me like a person even when I was a completely drugged-out vegetable and even when I had the shakes. She didn’t know which person I was at the moment, hence the syringe.

I’d rather not knock you out today. Your mother is coming, Vern said in her maple-syrupy Southern accent. Her low, long brown ponytail swung behind her as she stepped away from my bed and slipped the syringe back into the pocket of her scrubs. Looking up at her, I marveled at how close her head came to the ceiling. At six feet nine, she was an abnormally tall woman. I half expected to feel a breeze from the whiplash of Vern’s hair.

Depending on which patient you asked, Vern was a giantess. Or an Amazon. Or a Jörd, the giant Norse goddess who gave birth to Thor, the god who sometimes shows up in comic book movies. I’d looked up Vern’s condition in Dr. Harris’s collection of old encyclopedias in the library. Vern suffered from acromegaly, a hormonal condition that occurs when too much growth hormone is produced by the pituitary gland, which resulted in a larger-than-everyone-else Vern. But suffered was the wrong word. Vern owned her size, and it made her the perfect muscle for Whittaker. No patient could find his or her way around the wall of woman she was. Not even me.

I held out my hand. Fine, I mumbled.

She speaks, Vern assessed, her oversize green eyes lighting up with surprise.

Vern wasn’t being sarcastic for a change. Because of the meds, I didn’t speak often these days except for swear words. And also because I didn’t have anyone I wanted to talk to. Except my mother when she was visiting … and of course, Bale.

Vern was the only one of the White Coats I could even stand to be around.

I had bitten Vern once—right after Dr. Harris had told me I couldn’t see Bale last year. I had expected Vern to treat me differently after that, but she didn’t. She was the same kind Vern. I always wanted to ask her why. But I never did.

Did you have the dream again? Vern asked with the same level of anticipation she had for the next episode of The End of Almost, one of her stories that we watched during supervised recreation hours.

I shook my head, a lie my body told automatically. They encouraged talking about the subconscious at Whittaker. But I didn’t like to. I was determined to keep my dreams mine and no one else’s. Even though they were often twisty and dark, they were the only place I got to be close to Bale. I had slipped and told Vern once. A fact she would not let me forget.

Last night’s dream had been Bale-free. And a little stranger than usual. The tree was in it again, huge and looming, taking up the whole sky. Then there was that thing … The memory of it flooded in, distracting me, pulling me back into the cold, dark water. Patiently, Vern waited for me to sit up, pulled out a fresh pair of Whittaker gray sweats for me to wear, and sighed a heavy, breezy exhale that denoted her disappointment.

I slipped out of my paper-thin cotton pajamas in front of her and caught a glimpse of my reflection in the plastic mirror on the door of my closet. Since the kiss, I was still searching for whatever it was about me that had spooked Bale.

My face looked the same to me. Brown eyes. Pale skin because of the lack of sun. The trail of white scars tracked down one side of my body, most densely on my left arm. Despite multiple surgeries, my arm and torso would forever bear the weblike tattoo of the day that had brought me here.

The white streaks that wove through my ash-blond hair had grown only more pronounced this year. Vern blamed it on the new drug cocktail, but I didn’t see any other patients going gray, and plenty of us in Ward D were taking the same prescription.

Maybe we should put some new art up. You’re really getting good, said Vern.

I shrugged, but I felt a surge of pride well up underneath the gesture. I had begun drawing as therapy. But I kept doing it for me.

Sometimes I drew the other patients. A lot of my drawings were of Bale. There were dozens of them, in fact. I drew the inmates as they were and as they wanted to be. Wing thought that she was an angel or something, so I gave her wings. Chord believed in time travel, so I’d draw him anywhere or anytime he wanted to be. He once told Bale that he blinked from place to place. That was what he called it: blinking. He could come and go from the signing of the Declaration of Independence in a single blink. Time was infinite and different for him. I envied him that. I would give anything to blink back in time to before the kiss with Bale.

Sometimes I sketched Whittaker. The asylum had a lot of rooms. But there was a dividing line between what the parents saw and what the patients saw. My room was pretty spare: white sheets and walls, a white cabinet, a full-length plastic mirror on my closet door, plus a small white desk. The only decorations at all were the drawings hung everywhere with duct tape. I had Vern to thank for that. The rest of Whittaker looked like an English manor —with high ceilings, fancy furniture, and wrought-iron sconces along the walls. The irony was Whittaker wasn’t that old. It was built sometime last century. And rural New York was a far cry from England.

Sometimes I sketched my dreams, which ranged from stark, blinding-white landscapes to creepy execution scenes that I couldn’t really explain. The worst was the one with me standing on a mountaintop, and below me there were bodies, blue as ice and covered in a blanket of snow. I was smiling in it, like I had a secret.

Or there was the one with the armored executioner who was wielding an ax, about to swing it into something—or someone—off the page. I was proud of how I captured the blowback of blood on his armor.

Dr. Harris thought drawing was a good way to channel my anger and imagination by putting pen to paper and seeing the ridiculous things in my head. By getting them out of my mind, he thought it would help draw a dividing line between what was real and what was just a fantasy.

It worked for a while, but ultimately Dr. Harris wanted the drawing to be a gateway to my talking about my feelings. That rarely happened—or at least not in the way that he liked.

Almost time for visiting hours, Vern pressed. She had turned to her cart and was grabbing the familiar tiny white paper cup that contained today’s pill.

What’ll it be today, Vern. Sleepy or Dopey?

I had affectionately named my myriad pills after some of the seven dwarfs. Each one corresponded to the effect it had on my mood. Sleepy made me sleepy; Grumpy, etc. One by one, they all came to represent—even Sneezy.

Today there was a green pill in the little cup.

Happy. I grimaced. That one didn’t really work anymore.

You are chatty today, Vern half questioned, cocking her head.

I pulled the nondescript hospital uniform shirt over my head, and I pulled on the pants. Vern handed me the paper cup and waited for me to gulp down the pill, which was so big that it scraped down the back of my throat even with a sip of water. Vern took back the cup and waited for me to open my mouth to check that I had actually swallowed the pill.

In that half-a-heartbeat pause, a second of resentment flooded in. It was that moment in our everyday routine that kept us from being friends—that, more than the lock on the door or the syringe in Vern’s pocket. It was her job to check, not to trust. And it reminded me every day that even though she was the only person who really talked to me, she was paid to be here.

2

At Vern’s skyscraper-ish side, I walked down the hall of Ward D, peeking inside the small, square double-paned windows to the other rooms along the way that made up the most secure wing of Whittaker. Through the one to my left I could see Wing perched on the edge of her chair, ready to take flight. She couldn’t really hurt herself from that high up, but her White Coat, Sarah, a birdlike woman with surprising strength, was attempting to coax her down from the chair anyway. Wing didn’t look it, but she was probably the patient the White Coats were most afraid of. One open door, one loose restraint, and Wing would find the highest surface she could and throw herself off it. Wing thought she could fly.

I walked away the second she took off. There was literally nothing sadder than seeing Wing’s face when she landed and realized that her flight was over.

In the next room, Pi was scratching things in his notebook. He thought he was writing an equation that would save the world, or break it. According to Vern, who liked to fill me in on the other patients, he was done with his alien abduction phase and he had moved on to some new kind of government-conspiracy-cloning thing that involved code breaking.

Magpie’s room was empty. But I knew that underneath her mattress there were dozens of tiny things that she’d stolen from all over Whittaker. Magpie was our resident thief and my sometimes nemesis. I had been so distracted with Bale over the years, I hadn’t noticed that for the better part of our lives she had a head start on hating me. But I was playing catch-up now. It was something to fill the time, at least.

Then there was Chord, who was just sitting, staring out the window. Statue still, blinking. Finally, I hesitated by the last cell, Bale’s. Bale was staring with intent at the wall. By the white-knuckled grip he had on the arms of his chair, I knew he was thinking about fire again. He was probably trying to set fire to the drywall with his mind right now.

Bale came to Whittaker like we all did: against his will. But he also came without a name. He was only six, like me. I had spent a whole year at Whittaker without him. An angry year. A sad year. A lonely year that I would never get back. And then there was Bale.

They said he had been left alone, starving and scrounging for food in an old house. His parents had left him there—parents he said he didn’t remember. He was emaciated and dirty when he arrived—and not just from the soot from the flames. They said that he had stood and watched his house burn down after setting it on fire. He didn’t try to run away. He just wanted, maybe needed, to watch it burn down to ashes. He claimed that he didn’t remember anything about his parents even though he was old enough to remember. Dr. Harris said he was choosing subconsciously or unconsciously to forget. And he didn’t know how to read or write, which some of the Whittaker kids made fun of. Just because we all lived in glass houses of insanity didn’t mean that we could not be cruel.

That first day he walked through the Whittaker gates, I thought Bale had been sprung directly from my imagination, his red hair spiked up on his head like a little skeleton devil. He looked like he’d literally walked out of the fire instead of just setting one. One of the other kids ran and hid, but I walked right up to him and touched his face to make sure he was real. I can’t say that I loved him at first sight, but I’ve been walking toward Bale from the second I met him.

Bale was a complete mystery to all of us. He didn’t even know his own story. I had had so much therapy with art and dolls and stories already that I confused it for play.

Why don’t we make your story up? I had suggested.

Why would I want to do that? he’d asked.

For fun, I had countered with six-year-old logic. I do it all the time about other people.

I pulled out my sketch pad and began to write: Once upon a time…

Bale looked at me like I was crazy, but he didn’t retreat. I looked at his profile and drew a quick sketch of him.

That’s me, he’d said, pointing at his own chest. How he found himself in my collection of rudimentary lines made me want to draw him out, make him tell his story even more.

Now you tell me who you are, I’d urged, doing my best Dr. Harris impression. Once upon time, there was a boy named …, I singsonged, and waited.

Bale, he had replied quickly. Once upon a time, there was a boy named Bale who lived in a house made of wood. The monster made him cry like no mother or father should. Then his family went away. But made Bale stay. And Bale burned it all down one day.

To this day, I don’t know if I remember it right or made it up, but the name Bale stuck and so did his story.

We had different monsters. Mine was my icy anger. Who wouldn’t be angry after being locked up all their lives? Bale’s was his love of fire. If fire didn’t exist, I thought Bale would have been a normal boy. But a world without fire didn’t exist any more than a world without air. Would Bale love me, understand me, if fire didn’t consume him like it did?

I knew Bale loved me from the first time he saw me have an episode. He was no stranger to anger. And when I was feeling it, the sensation was so strong, it took over my whole body, making me hot and cold all at once. I was never sure if it was better to hold it in or let it out. Fighting against it felt like holding my breath. There was no way the anger wasn’t coming out eventually, and my head always hurt from the pressure. Most people usually ran in the other direction when I exploded. But not Bale. He stood right next to me. He didn’t touch me. He just stood patiently until I was done. When I stopped seeing red, and the intense, all-consuming wave of anger subsided, and everything in the room finally quieted down, he held my hand. That was when I fell in love with him, too.

I wanted my hand in his from that day to forever. Even if he did break it in two places eventually. Because no one really understood what it was like to live with this kind of rage and pain, like fire and ice, inside you. No one but us. And no matter what ward we were in, we always found our way to each other. Again and again. He made this place a home. Without him, Whittaker was the same thing for me as I’d always thought it was for everyone else: a prison.

I stood in the hallway of Ward D, staring intently at the back of Bale’s head, willing him, begging him, to turn around. To look at me now.

He didn’t.

Vern gently cupped my arm to get me to keep moving.

Please … just a few more seconds, I pleaded.

She shook her head. Child, if we could actually cure things by staring long enough, Whittaker wouldn’t need to exist.

Begrudgingly, I continued down the hall toward the visitors’ lounge.

You know you’re going to have to forgive your mother eventually, Vern said.

I shrugged. Mom had said she loved me. And despite all my problems and her committing me to an insane asylum my whole life, I believed she did, in her way. But after Bale broke my wrist, Dr. Harris had recommended that he and I be separated, and Mom had agreed. She took away the one thing that made Whittaker more than just survivable. He was my only friend. I could not forgive that. I hadn’t even tried to.

Vern was still looking at me for a real answer about my mother, but I just shrugged again. Around me the hallway was growing cloudy, but the colors were more vivid than before. My footsteps felt lighter. My Happy dose was working.

Well, you’ll have to. Maybe not today. But soon, Vern said.

Why? I bit back—unapologetic.

Because you only have about three people in the universe to talk to, Snow. And technically Dr. Harris and I are paid to.

I looked sharply at her. She laughed.

You know you’re my favorite, Hannibal Yardley.

That was my nickname because of the biting. She named me after a character who had a penchant for killing and cannibalism in a violent movie we weren’t allowed to see. Coming from anyone else, the nickname would have elicited a toothier response and a bit of blood. But from Vern, I took it and kept on walking.

3

As we turned the corner to the visitors’ lounge, I could see the tapestries and high-backed, overstuffed armchairs where the asylum patients met with their parents once a month. It looked like a drawing room from one of those public television period dramas that Vern liked to watch. Only at Whittaker, the lamps were nailed down to the floor and tea was served lukewarm in paper cups for safety.

Mom was looking at her phone when the guard buzzed us through the double doors. She put it away quickly as if it were contraband. She didn’t like to remind me of the things I didn’t and couldn’t have. We did not have cell phones at Whittaker. We had an ancient cordless phone in the common room that was monitored by the orderlies. Mom stood up and hugged me when I approached, wrapping me in her arms. She smelled of cinnamon and lemon, probably from her morning tea.

I didn’t hug her back.

Behind me, the door clicked shut. Vern was giving us privacy, although the big mirror on the wall betrayed the fact that we were always being watched.

You look happy today, Snow, Mom said, running her fingers through my hair as we sat down across from each other.

Ora Yardley was perfect and beautiful in every way. So much so that every time I saw her, I wondered how we could be from the same DNA. She had the same blond hair as me, which she inexplicably decided to dye auburn, and she had a perky nose that would make a cartoon princess jealous. Today she wore a sleeveless pale-pink sweater dress that skimmed over her curves and showed off her pale porcelain skin. Still, her eyes were my eyes: brown and deep. Her lips were my lips: full, with a tendency toward pouting. But hers were constantly, politely, upturned at the corners while mine went the other way.

Mom continued to stroke my hair. Like Vern, she said it had gone white from the medication I was given at Whittaker. But the way I remember it, my first streaks showed up the day after I walked through the mirror—before the doctors had figured out what drugs to give me. I remember looking in the mirror when I woke up in my new room and there they were.

Honey, I wish you’d just let me do something about it, Mom tried again.

I pushed her hand away. I like them.

Honey, she began again, but she stopped when I pulled away completely.

I brought you something. She smiled, giggling a little as she reached beneath her chair and pulled out a box. It was plain white and unwrapped, and had likely been searched before I got there. The ribbon was the tiniest bit askew, which was odd, because my mother was all about perfection. But I tore into the bow all the same. Not because the box was pretty, but because it was from my mom. Because it was new. Nothing was new at Whittaker.

Inside the box was a pair of pale-blue mittens. They looked homemade.

Winter is coming soon, Mom said. I wanted you to have something new for your walks with Vern.

Mom’s smile deepened with the apparent hope that she had picked the right gift. Something to make everything better. Something to bridge the gap between us. Some part of me leaned into her at times like this. I was so close to melting. So close to forgiveness. But I thought back to the day when she and Dr. Harris had made the decision that changed my life.

I’ve talked it over with Dr. Harris, and we’re in agreement on this, she had said, sitting across from me in the same chair she was in today. We think that it’s best for you and Bale to be kept separate. She had made the decision so easily, like she was insisting on making me wear a helmet for riding my bike, not taking away the love of my life.

I had gotten angry too many times to count, and I felt it again now, the anger bubbling to the surface, but Happy did its job for once and tamped it down. I focused on the mittens in my lap.

Thanks, I said.

You’re so welcome! Mom clapped her hands. To her, my not throwing the mittens across the room meant that the gift was a success. When she smiled wide enough, I could see the faint white mark on her cheek pinch. It was the only imperfect thing about her, and it was because of me on the day everything changed. She’d been reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and I had taken it literally and tried to walk through the looking glass with my best friend. But I didn’t remember that day at all.

I learned from my dad that Becky, the girl I pulled through the mirror, and her family sued us, and we had settled. I never saw her again. But I still wondered about her. My scars had faded over the years, but they were still there, reminding me of how and why this all began. I wondered if Becky was out in the world with her scars, too.

When I first got to the institute, I thought that it was a punishment, a time-out for bad behavior. I sometimes wondered if my parents had just accepted Dr. Harris’s diagnosis that day or if they knew when they dropped me off at Whittaker that it was forever.

Mom chatted on about Dad and the house, a place I had not seen in eleven years and couldn’t care less about. And a dad who came every other month and on holidays. She must have noticed I was being distant, though, because she suddenly said, Honey, I know you think that you and Bale are Romeo and Juliet, but this will pass.

I felt my anger notch up a bit, but my fingers started tapping against the leg of my pants and I swallowed down the rage. Mom gently removed the box that the mittens were nestled in and put it on the nailed-down coffee table. She studied me as she leaned back into her seat and re-crossed her legs.

You think it’s love, but it’s not. I know what it’s like to feel passion and think that you can change someone.

I perked up despite myself. Mom wasn’t talking about me anymore. She was talking about herself.

You tried to change Dad? I asked. My mom was my mom, but my father was a different story. He was a stranger. Dad could barely handle seeing his crazy daughter on a bimonthly basis. Most of the time I had trouble understanding why they were even together, let alone imagining what Mom had tried to change about him.

Not Dad, she countered, her voice a little faraway as if she were lost in a memory.

I never thought of Mom being with anyone else.

The point is you can’t change Bale. He’s sick, honey. He broke your wrist and that will never be okay.

I closed my eyes, and my fingers tapped against my legs, almost of their own volition. I was getting angrier and itched to sketch something. I needed to calm down, or I would get thrown in solitary.

When they called me to tell me that he had broken your wrist, I was so scared. Bale’s not well. Mom’s eyes filled with tears. She reached out and put her hands over mine, stopping my finger taps entirely.

Does that apply to me, too? I asked pointedly.

What do you mean?

I mean, if Bale can’t get better, that means I can’t, either. Right?

That’s not what I meant, Mom faltered. Her lips formed a thin, tight worry line.

But it’s what you think.

It’s not. I know it’s hard for you to believe, but everything I do is out of love, including protecting you.

Then love me a little less, I said without missing a beat. I didn’t know why I said it.

Impossible, she said automatically.

I crossed my arms and glared at her until