Short Summary/Teaser: Re-telling the tale of a young woman's desperate journey to find her sister, Winter's Sister explores Disney's beloved Frozen in a setting closer to ours and with secrets and reveals darker and more sinister from its animated counterpart.
Beautiful, accomplished and above all enigmatic, Elsa Andersen is New York's illustrious sweetheart who suddenly goes missing without a trace the second week her little sister Anna is back from boarding school. As the weather in New York drops to record-breaking, bone-chilling temperatures that shocks the city and the world in summer time, the case for Elsa's whereabouts grown even colder. With New York buried deep in heavy snowfall and with no development in Elsa's missing persons case literally in sight, Anna can only begin to unravel where her sister might be by starting at the secrets her sister fought so desperately to keep and difficult to let go.
Author's Disclaimer: Anything that is remotely recognizable is not of my own creation. This story is based loosely on Disney's animated feature Frozen and is inspired by the characters and themes explored in the movie.
CHAPTER ONE
ANNA
No one knew my sister better than I did.
I could say that then.
Then was two days ago, when my sister and I marched arm in arm across the gleaming floors of Saks Fifth Avenue, its neat, pristine aisles blooming with the season's latest stock of floaty summer dresses in every imaginable print and shorts and skirts barely short enough to leave much to the imagination, cut in every fabric available to the known world. I'd mock her taste in cuts and hemlines: you'd be lucky to see any higher than my sister's knees or elbows, I had advised more than one man. She was a blonde, long-haired Audrey Hepburn, out of time, the lines she hid herself behind crisp and austere, her sexuality barely a whisper compared to the shrill, deafening boom of her peers', even her full, gold spray of hair tamed in large elaborate braids. She'd chide me in turn for choosing more feminine, revealing pieces. It never mattered: the eyes were always on her in the end.
"Don't you hate her?" My wide-eyed roommate at Harrogates Ladies College had wondered often and out loud, the question always rolling off her tongue smooth and slick as oil despite her clipped Londoner's accent as though it was the most natural question to ask, the way you'd ask someone instantly "are you okay?" after you see them get hurt. The most natural question for anyone to ask after they'd seen and examined photographs of my sister in the Times, her at a highly anticipated fashion show, at an exclusive screening of some independent film, at an art gala for a new up and coming artist, a fund raiser for New York's most down trodden and displaced.
The way her ice-blue eyes caught the camera's hungry gaze intimately, feeding it promises, the lights falling on the slopes of her patrician face with the kindness of a mother's hand. It was impossible to take an awful picture of her, no matter what the side or angle. A peek of her mile-long legs through the slit of her dress, a flash of her rare, elusive Mona Lisa smile, often seductively over her shoulder—it never took long for anyone to fall in love with my sister. I should have hated her. Maybe. She would have made anyone invisible next to her, but with my sister next to me, I looked like a practical joke. We could not be more the anti-thesis of each other in image: where my sister was as tall and statuesque as any currently working, sought-after runaway model, I was average in height and build, neither elegantly slender nor adorably petite, simply average. Extraordinary and ordinary; memorable and forgettable, Elsa and Anna.
Then was a night ago, when we paired our matching glasses of sharp merlot with laughter strong enough to almost split our dresses at the seams. She was in a regal long-sleeved Stella McCartney dress the singular shade of blue just before it turned pitch, the hem sweeping the floor flirtatiously every time she stood from the table to catch the attention of the already enamored waiter or to excuse herself momentarily for the girl's room. My sister: so conspicuous even when she wanted to disappear, sink seamlessly into the background, as upright and slender as the walls she wanted to blend into.
I fiddled with the skirt of my bright print Mary Katrantzou dress, skin-tight and squeezing the freckled, sun-spotted thighs of my legs far too close together as I sat. My sister leaned forward in her seat, gently brushed back the wayward tangles of my fiery red hair away from my equally red face and smoothed them over my shoulders, restoring the smile on my lips with that gesture that was so motherly and reassuring, her wordless way of saying: you look beautiful. This was why I could I never hate my sister. In the end, as I stood awkwardly in front of countless mirrors and laid crumpled in many well-made beds contemplating the sheer number of my freckles and the jelly-like softness of my thighs and stomach, she was the only one in the world who could love me as fiercely as I hated myself and even more.
Now was this minute. I was holding a script; it grew softer and more wrinkled in the palms of my hand, what little I had read of it fainter in the hollow of my skull. I was in front of a podium microphone that looked like a punch coming towards me the very first second I saw it, the flash of what seemed like a thousand cameras flooding my view in a white so sharp it scarred my retinas. Next to me was my sister in twenty-two by twenty-eight inches of thick glossy poster board, smiling above a telephone number in large black serif font, her hands cut off from view and nowhere to grasp.
I opened my mouth to speak, expecting nothing but cries stunted with the roof of mouth to tumble out in tangles and pieces down the curve of my neck. I smoothed the sheet of paper with my script on it against the podium with hands I didn't feel but saw shaking. I breathed in air that sliced, air that felt forever to reach and soothe the point in my chest where it felt like a mallet was driving a pike right through.
"It is impossible for you to live in this city without knowing Elsa Andersen," I began miraculously, clouding the microphone with my breath, "A philanthropist first and a businesswoman second, she has been active in her support and participation in the revival and restoration of some of New York's city parks, landmarks and neighborhoods that have slipped through the cracks over the recent years due to inadequate municipal funding. She has been able to do this being at the forefront of Andersen Vista Architects, of which she is the chief executive officer and whose enormous success is credited to her ingenious and keen understanding of the needs of today's practical New Yorker. She is only twenty-years-old. And I cannot be prouder to call this amazing woman my sister."
A beat. I gripped the edges of the podium stand like a lifeline, realizing with a small, panicky swallow that my legs would give away beneath me if I didn't. I discovered too late that I should have read right through the script, no breaks for breath, no pauses for effect, the lump in my throat had doubled in size during the minute I had not spoken and my voice split around it like a fast-threading current around a monstrous rock when I opened my mouth again, "It is with a heavy heart that I announce that my sister is missing. She was last seen on June 12th at our Upper East Side loft at 1:14 a.m. on building cameras when she returned home from a late appointment and was not seen leaving the building or in the building since. She made no calls or left no messages after that time and has been unreachable."
That night, in her floor-length, elegant Stella McCartney dress, my sister with her sensuous sliver of a smile that twisted at the corners with a secret I had spent the whole of my life trying to guess at. "I'll see you in the morning," Elsa wound her arms beneath the gangly weight of mine and held the back of my head fully, guiding my face against her shoulder that was cloaked in the sweet, floral notes of her perfume. "You work too hard," I told her for the thousandth time, turning our night-end hug beyond the doors of the restaurant into a little dance as I swayed her tall, near-Amazonian frame from side to side. "I do it for you," we both said, Elsa warmly, easily, and me, in teasing, mock repetition of the many times she had said it to me before for reassurance.
I was being pulled back, away from then and back to now, back to the podium, then away from the podium, two massive hands, one on each shoulder, holding me up to keep me from falling, guiding me away from the collective fanatic drone of the reporters, film crews, photographers, esteemed well-wishers, their operatic static going toe to toe against the rising white noise in my head. I wanted whoever held me to let me fall, fall fast again into the memory of that night, just outside the restaurant, just at the last second before Elsa allowed her arms to slack and return back to her sides, just before Elsa pulled away. I jerked forward, wanting to keep her there. In my mind she did not leave. In my mind we went back home together, giggling, back to our Lennox Hill loft and slipped into our cozy silk pajamas, sipping on virgin mimosas while we watched Sex and The City turned to mute, fancying ourselves cutting-edge, battle-hardened television writers with our outrageous, outlandish attempts at dialogue and cohesive plot.
I jerked forward in real time, back against the podium and told the world that had not known my sister apparently any more than I did, none of us had any idea, "She is the only family I have, she is all I have. Please, if you know where my sister is, please help me find her," I cried.