CHAPTER THREE

ELSA

A Month Before The Disappearance

If you were lucky, the worst thing that happened when you felt scared was that you dropped something by accident, or that you felt the sharp surprise of your heart seizing painfully in your chest for a second like someone had reached in and squeezed it tight, tight with their fingers. Maybe you cried. Maybe you held yourself together literally; your hands gripping the sides of your arms to keep yourself from being undone and collapsing like a house of cards. Maybe you screamed, and maybe people heard, maybe they laughed too. If you were lucky, that was the worst.

I was six-years-old when I realized I was not lucky. You don't normally remember a lot of things from when you were six, the memories are sifted through and stared at with the bottom of a tall glass, everything hazy, a patchwork of color, a distinct emotion or two from when you fell and scraped your knee or when you cried furiously, searching for your parents through the forest of legs at the mall-

But this memory stands tall like the stubborn blade of grass the mower kept missing, poking out, defiant and sharp, prickling you when you walked by it, sometimes sharp enough to cut. This memory towered over all the others and left them in its poisonous, sweeping shade, so that even the happy ones were stained sad and the sad ones deepened to an impossibly impenetrable black.

First, I must say this: no one could say no to Anna. She was fire and wildness and a dare too delicious to pass up made compact and flesh. It's why her hair burst from her scalp in the shade of flames and why she was given the most beautiful smile in the world, so you would say yes every time to whatever cockamamie, hare-brained adventure she would pull from thin air like a magician, an adventure that left you breathless each time. That day four-year-old Anna wanted to fish—at 6 am of course.

"The fish will be sleepier, hungrier!" She reasoned in her most conspiratorial, most diabolical toddler voice, her warm, little fingers already wrapped tight around one of my hands, my own fingers rarely warm anymore. She had managed to find me underneath my heavy confection of blankets, her syrupy, milky scent flooding my nostrils as she crawled onto my bed the way she so often did back in our New York home when our parents were still alive.

The summer that year was surprisingly cooler than I had ever recalled our summers being at our Southampton family lake house. The heat barely rose above my knees and the air was moist, always, with the sweet, slick promise of summer rain. Anna and I had zipped up our tiny windbreakers over our equally thin cotton nightgowns. We muddied the lace-trimmed hems and where the skirt met our knees from digging up snails and earthworms for bait from our mother's then well-tended vegetable garden.

"Anna, don't!" I gasped as she popped one of my mom's prized, unbelievably miniature heirloom tomatoes—a bright, cheerfully yellow one—easy as you please into her little mouth. "Don't worry, mom won't mind," Anna beamed at me and I knew as my little sister waddled past me, her pale pink nightgown weighed down by the soil that she was right. Anna was the relief, the light, sunny intermission in between my saddening, disappointing acts of sickliness, close calls with death, then this monstrosity. Anna could run through fields barefoot and roll down fields with scrapes and cuts she couldn't feel. She would trip and fall and be back up standing on her heels in a second, no kisses or ice cream or over-priced medical treatments to banish the pain away. Anna was my parents' redemption, a smiling, and red-haired reminder than not everything had gone completely wrong. She was the apple of my parents' eyes.

With earth-worms and snails writhing, slimy and earth-stained in our zipped up windbreaker pockets and balls of sewing thread clutched tightly in our soiled fingers, we raced outside of the lake house and made for the property's private deck that stretched out thirty-feet-long, high and sturdy, over the still, quiet waters of the secluded lake. Anna was ahead of me, her tiny feet with their rosy heels rising up fast behind her as she bounded down the deck, giggling uncontrollably, eager to get to the edge.

The distinct sound of a snap cut through Anna's spirited laughter fast and clean like a razor: it was a twig, broken in two underneath the weight of someone's heel. I stopped and turned and saw a man standing just a short distance away, partly concealed by the shade of the trees and the thick, abundant shrubbery that bordered the lake. Our property was a secluded lake house nestled in the heart of the woods and I did not recognize the man in the slightest-

He was tall, reedy, what little hair that remained on his long, stretched-looking head wispy and white. He wore rubber boots far too big for his pole-thin legs. The legs he hid behind baggy black trousers held up with a belt that was cinched way too tightly over an orange polo shirt and a seemingly non-existent waist. He licked his lips at us, a terrible smile blooming where he raised a bony finger as if to say 'Be quiet'. He took a step forward, away from the bushes and out into the clearing, towards the deck, towards me. Towards Anna.

I felt fear bubble up furiously inside me like water boiling over fast. I tried to open my mouth to speak, to tell Anna to stay where she was but my throat suddenly felt too dry and swallowing at that second seemed impossible, my jaws refused to shut close as if a certain gear had jammed. The man was only an alarming ten feet away, his beady eyes looking unnervingly manic in their dark circles and narrowed eyelids.

I took a frightened step back, my hands shaking at my sides and then I slid, swayed backward a little. The deck beneath me instantly froze solid, a sheet of thick, immaculate ice raising me, first starting where my foot landed and then outwards, erratically, all the way to where the man stood where he slipped and fell on his back with a hard crash and a stunned shout that stole Anna's full attention away from the water.

"Elsa?" Anna cried worriedly, as the ice began to dart in her direction within seconds like a jagged serpent, curling right below her bare feet and she began to slip and slide as the ice melted a little with her heat, sending her skating wildly towards the deck's edge.

"No, Anna, wait!" I screamed, instinctively reaching my hand out to her as if she could reach me and a blast of ice flew from my outstretched palm, unbidden, and hit Anna right against one small pigtail, the impact knocking her out and the icy spray freezing the pigtail solid and she fell backwards, right over the deck.

What happened next, I still can't explain. I lunged forward with tears warping my vision, my arms thrown out in front of me as if I could hold her in place from where I stood and that's exactly what happened: ice the shape of giant, misshapen hands crystallized out of nowhere, right beneath where Anna would have fallen straight for the water and caught her small, limp body like catcher's mitts, pitching her back to the deck hard before splashing a second later, one after the other, into the lake.

The ice on the deck didn't melt for days. The man who had trespassed our quaint, little Southampton property was a forty-one-year-old Walter Gitts, one of the hired groundskeepers at the Southampton Golf Range, just over an hour's drive away from the lake house. My mother, Anna, and I had visited to enjoy a lunch or two at the range after my father's many rounds of golf with friends and business associates. The old codger must have been eyeing Anna and I for weeks—they had found items in the woods: a toothbrush, a ratty-old sleeping bag that had been pissed in, empty bags of beef jerky, some crushed cans of beer, that indicated he had been hiding out there for some time—a week at the very least. He was arrested for trespassing the same day he snuck up on me and Anna. My family wrapped up our summer at the Hamptons shortly after that week. Because a child molester, disturbingly enough, was the least of our concerns.

Anna returned to New York with a silly Mia Farrow haircut, playing with my singular blonde braid on the long drive back home petulantly, mourning her strawberry locks. The pigtail I had frozen solid was unsalvageable, it had turned to ice entirely, down to the root. My mother had been horrified realizing she couldn't simply melt it down. She had hacked off much of Anna's beautiful red hair tidily within an hour's time after my parents fetched us from the deck, while Anna had remained fitfully asleep from the shock of what had happened. I was literally a hair away from freezing my little sister's head solid, from watching it crack into pieces as my powers threw her back onto the dock. My father was inconsolable.

"We have to fix this," I could hear him tell my mother despairingly behind their shut bedroom doors, could almost see his hands raking through his thick, sandy hair, anything to occupy them from shaking. I was a problem that had to be fixed. No one had witnessed what had happened thanks to the ungodly hour it had all occurred and the secluded location of our property. No one except for the would-be child molester, hiding out in the woods and his word didn't count for much anymore. And Anna. We had all convinced her it was nothing more than a nasty nightmare when she finally awoke later that morning, a frightening product of her overactive imagination, even as she counted my mother's yellow heirloom tomatoes the day after to still find one missing.

I was a ticking time bomb. I had taught I was getting better that summer. I had taken my pharmaceutical concoctions dutifully, this pill with that pill and that one after noon. I felt submerged once they all went to work underneath my skin like nothing could rise to the surface, not a smile or a scream. I had been on meds since I was four. I had been taught to detach at six-years-old, how to compartmentalize and put the feelings inside of me into tiny labeled boxes titled 'sad' or 'mad' by some of the best psychotherapists money could buy. Emotions were deadly because they fed the beast inside me. I must starve it out patiently in order to kill it. This thing that would react instantly to every goosebump, every tear, every heart murmur or palpitation, every sweat bead that rose out of my pores and turn it all into spears of ice, the coldest sheets, frigid winds. Never be angry, never be scared; never be sad. Conceal don't feel. The little mantra my father gave me.

But it kept growing; it became stronger as my parents struggled to cage it with strong medications and much later, with my carefully constructed isolation. So the dosages became higher, the drugs less FDA approved, the administration more direct. I knew how to properly operate a syringe and how to sterilize a needle when I was fourteen. I could recite the exact dosage and the names of the antidepressants, antipsychotics, beta-blockers and benzodiazepines I had been taking since I was four. I could only expose myself for large durations of time to situations that never yielded any type of emotion, where emotion would be of no use. No boyfriends, no friends. Business, strictly business. Mechanical, formulaic. I was a vessel that was being hollowed out: pill after pill, shot after shot, year after year and soon it became normal to feel vacuous, as empty as a jar. I had become a seasoned actor, knowing my mark and perfecting my timing, smile politely here, express neighborly concern there. If I felt anything, I felt only a tenth of it, like catching the last echo of a distant sound.

But there was always Anna. The one person in the world who reminded me that I could still be scared even for a fraction of the feeling, that I could still feel something in this rubber-tough, drug-addled thing I called a heart.

And she was never going to be safe as long as I was around.