8. Blizzard
The first few months are the hardest.
Leaves shrivel and drop and Melena's poise ebbs with the heat, dissipating as she struggles to reckon with the reality of the Wicked Witch of the West on her own – and with winter setting in, no less. South, she tells herself, she's gone south, but she is fraught with visions of Elphaba in the thick of it, in the Emerald City and Gillikin, where the Wizard's goons are conducting the brunt of the brutality and Animals are being displaced in droves.
She can concentrate on little else, but cannot let on to her distraction, not with Frex alive and sainted in his own eyes for sparing Nessa the taint of collusion. Somewhere between coming upon Melena on the floor of his demolished study and pulling her to her feet, saying, "There's no need to concern yourself with that any longer," in a way that was quasi-soothing, quasi-threatening, he resolved upon his crusade to wipe Colwen Grounds of Elphaba's lingering presence. He counters every allusion to the friendship that was on full display the previous summer – yes, my daughter is quite close with Glinda the Good, he replies tersely – and goes deaf to any further insinuations, channelling the whole of his spite into severing the few ties that still hang, limp and fraying, between the girls.
Melena is evidently one of these ties, for he goes as far as withholding Nessa's infrequent updates, receiving all letters in his study and massively underestimating the force of her desperation. She is not a fortnight in circumventing this measure.
The cook is enlisted in her scheme, for he has served at Colwen Grounds even longer than she and knows the way of things. He knows Frex, he knows Nessa, he knows them at the dinner table and behind closed doors, and has a special sympathy for Melena on account of it. Consequently, he doesn't hazard a second thought when she entreats him to place a subscription to the Munchkin Mirror in his name and convey the daily issues to her privately. Her husband has been refusing her access to her daughter's letters, you see, and she is all but mad with worry.
(She is not being entirely dishonest.)
At any rate, he deposits the sheaves in the second drawer of her writing desk, where she greets them with trepidation, then a tiny shot of relief, then more trepidation. It is not enough, she finds, to know that Elphaba is alive, because all she accomplishes with her ploy is to enter a new phase of destitution. She has information; now it is a matter of extracting truth – a hell of a task when her only source is a column called "Witch Watch," a recent staple of the Mirror, which documents sightings of Elphaba both locally and abroad.
Melena swallows the headlines with a grain of salt. The blurred figures undulating amongst the clouds are birds. The green face floating in every crowd is a trick of the mind, she knows this, and likewise she knows that it would take a spectacular miscalculation for Elphaba to land herself in "Witch Watch." But she archives the clips anyway, as if she will make sense of them later; fit the pieces just so and discern the clues that Elphaba is leaving by omission. She seizes anything that is something. Anything that isn't whereabouts unknown.
Because the shadows and the tricks are inventions; whereabouts unknown is real. It means that Elphaba is unaware that there is a special regiment of the Gale Force trained to track her over every terrain. She does not know which areas are patrolled the heaviest. Where the traps are laid. The rumours that spread like disease; the hate that catches like fire. That Oz, all of Oz, the people who once exalted her as the daughter of a deity, are happily demonizing her name, constructing an entire history from wild scraps of fiction until there can be no doubt in anyone's mind that Elphaba was a bad seed waiting to take root.
She is vicious. She is feral. She is terrifying.
She is freezing, Melena thinks. She is starving. She is terrified.
And yet, underneath the distress, Melena can barely skim the tendril of pride that keeps her hoping – pride in Elphaba for holding her own, and in herself for seeing the shadows behind the curtain. The masses snag on the headlines, dazzled by Glinda the Good, shocked by stories of rabid Animals, and they never think to tear past and trudge on. Melena, however, learns to string the first page to the last, gathering the fractured version into her hands and recovering the story scattered throughout the fine print. The results are alarming.
Gillikin borrows extensively from the Wizard and lives in the shadow of a city a twelfth of its size. The King of the Vinkus accedes his hold on the land, along with his son, and remains royalty only in name. Quadling Country is subdued – not without carnage. The campaign against Animals is at its height and the Wizard's power is absolute, but for one hurdle. Melena can practically hear Elphaba in her head: The next logical move is against Munchkinland.
Frex does not take this well, but he does not make it obvious, not until their usual cadre of guests begins declining his invitations, retreating into their homes to wait out the threats that stride a few golden bricks closer each day. These are trying times, they write in their replies, which are shown to Melena, as if she has personally incited the drought and the deficits and the unrest.
Melena clamps down on her tongue and does not gratify him with a response. She wants to, but she does not, and Frex begins emerging from his fortress of denial in spurts, deliberately dropping newspapers where convenience will tempt her into a peripheral glance. It is petty, but not dastardly. That is, until she comes across a special edition of the Emerald Times on the armrest of her favourite chair in the library. Its headline advertises an interview with the Wizard of Oz – the first in years – and the dread that gnaws through her insides is not enough to dissuade her from rifling to the third page.
…the words of our noble Wizard, it reads, who bears the tragedy of his daughter's sedition with poise, vowing that he will do right by Oz no matter the cost, but admitting with a sigh that the father in him hopes to see his daughter rehabilitated and returned to society.
Melena has to remind herself to breathe.
Words are only words, she thinks, and these are probably not even his, but the tragedy of his daughter's sedition, but do right by Oz, but the father in him. The father in him. Does the father in him do his penance in the form of sleepless nights? Is the father in him tormented by the uncertainty? Does the father in him see a daughter or a distraction in these headlines?
She does not want to know.
(But she does.)
It does not leave her, that interview. She cannot keep her hands still, they tremble so violently, and she feels the anger and the guilt and the desperation so acutely that it overtakes her rationality. She thinks, wrongly, that Frex will see her misery and react, that as she sits with him that night and watches him pore over a different paper, hmming and harrumphing, she can appeal to a generosity that isn't there.
"Anything of interest?" she asks.
He peers at her from behind his glasses and makes a noise in his throat that musters all the eloquence of a shrug.
Melena fidgets. She digs her nails into her palm. She runs her gaze around the perimeter of the room and swallows and finally says, "Perhaps I could see it when you're done?"
"Of course."
And then he rises, bidding her goodnight, and flings it into the fire. Three days later he has his first stroke.
It is stress, Melena supposes, and age, for he is an old man. She doesn't see it until he is supine on the mattress, pounds of useless flesh with a face that is waxy and pale as the sheets, the veins in his hands swollen, eyes screwed up and sealed against the pain. Melena stands over his paralyzed form and fights the feeling that an entire chunk of her history is corroding, and she resents the pity that pierces her heart when his eyelids lift and unveil the naked fear behind them. The outlook is grim, the doctor tells her, and by the second stroke it is clear that he will not be leaving his bed again.
The weeks feel longer than they are as Melena tends to him, contriving excuses to linger by his side, to get him alone during his periods of lucid nostalgia, waiting for an apology, for a sign of remorse, for something. But he holds out with such obstinacy that her compassion wears to dust and she begins to imagine what life will be like without the pillar of disapproval towering over her, without the words carelessness and indiscretion ledged against her like crimes.
He will die, she reflects, studying the star-speckled night sky that lies beyond her window. He will die and she will don her grieving clothes and play the distraught wife for a time, but she will explain everything to Nessa. She will explain everything and bring Elphaba home and feel the sun on her skin for the first time in ages.
It does not happen this way.
The foundation gives and the pillar crumbles and before Melena can blink she is buried in the wreckage, provoking a landslide every time she dares to shift a pebble. She is rid of a tyrant, yes, but her daughter has lost a father, and the loss strikes Nessa so grievously that it is still Melena's to shoulder.
Frex believed that to keep Nessa ignorant was to keep her a child and to keep her a child was to keep her safe, so he requested that she not be told of his deteriorating condition until it was necessary. Melena complied, if only out of respect for the dying, and didn't contact Nessa until the second stroke, which she portrayed as the first. By the time the letter reached Gillikin, Frex was dead and the vultures circling. Nessa was none-the-wiser.
Melena can't regret this more when she arrives at Shiz University and is told that the governor is in a private audience with the Wizard's Press Secretary. The latter title does not bear a face in her memory, so she is doubly surprised when she shoves past the guards and beholds a crestfallen Nessa in the clutches of Madame Morrible. Nessa is not crying, but her face is pale and sunken, and Melena feels ice slide through her veins.
Morrible swivels towards the door, which rebounds dully off the wall. "Ah, a visitor," she says cheerfully. Over her shoulder, Nessa's eyes send Melena a frantic plea.
"Condolences, my dear lady, sincerest condolences," Morrible says, rising and enfolding Melena's hand in her cold, iron grip. "I was merely offering my expertise to our new governor in these trying times." What period of history wasn't trying? "It seems I was the first to do so."
"How thoughtful of you," Melena says tightly.
Morrible draws her aside with an intangible force that seems to shift the very tiles beneath their feet. The old woman's face looms inches away, long and pallid, and she pares her voice to a murmur. "I always considered your daughter to be one of my best pupils. She's clever, yes, and capable, but such power is so daunting for one so young." She pats Melena's captive wrist. "Fortunately, the Wizard has offered to put a representative on her council, if she so wishes – to ease her into her office."
Melena can hardly loosen her jaw for the indignation. She chokes out, "Nessarose wishes no such thing."
"Is that so?"
"Her father has provided her with ample preparation," Melena says, wrenching herself free. "She will do well on her own."
A lie, and they both know it. Morrible's black eyes rake Melena's face, narrowing, and Melena is suddenly alert to every feature there that has manifested in Elphaba. Submitting to the scrutiny crawls over her body like a betrayal.
Morrible's stiff skin cracks into a knowing smile. "I do hope that's true – for Munchkinland's sake."
"Your patronizing is not appreciated."
"Oh?" Morrible turns. "My dear girl, you mistake our intentions. We're simply looking to do right by Oz."
Do right by Oz. "I am not your dear girl." The father in him. "I was married to the governor for twenty-two years. The games you play are no mystery to me. You will not have purchase in Munchkinland while Nessarose governs."
Morrible pauses, and then that sneer splits and she says, "And how long will that be?" Sidestepping Melena, she takes her leave, voice restored to its patent theatricality. "Farewell, my girls, and brace yourselves for the months to come. History is begging to be written."
The door has not bumped into its socket before Melena collides with Nessa, whose brave face is slipping, and holds her as it crumples completely. She smooths Nessa's hair and clasps her hands, as if Morrible doesn't exist, as if no one exists but them, a population of two, and all the while she cannot wipe the image of Morrible's terrible grin from her mind's eye.
"I wish I could run," is all Nessa will say of the interaction. Melena does not prod the wound; she understands – she wonders and she worries, but she understands.
The past year seized Nessa by the hair and dragged her through her worst nightmare. She was abandoned by Elphaba – or at least interpreted it that way – and by Glinda, who procured her degree early and paid no mind to her shadow. Her parents consigned her to Shiz despite Melena's promised intercession. The interrogations did not cease. Her classmates actively fled her vicinity. The world, it seemed, forgot about her, and when she was finally revived by the prospect of home, it was with the burden of the state on her back and a marked distrust for everyone who wasn't Boq.
Melena does not realize this at first, for she is the one who Nessa clings to. She installs Nessa under all the blankets she can find and talks and talks and talks in a voice so low it is almost a croon, then relinquishes herself to a somnolent daze, with Nessa beside her and snow swirling outside the window and thoughts of a baby no longer than her forearm. She feels strangely content, but she wakes with an empty embrace and finds Nessa breakfasting with Boq, who is casting dejected looks at the door and smearing oats across his plate. He accompanies them home.
Nessa does well. Initially.
Frex is interred; an induction dinner follows within the month and Nessa presides at the head of the table, gripping Melena's hand with enough force to carve angry red crescents into the skin. She smiles when cued and laughs at the inane jokes of the various mayors and ministers who drop in to offer condolences and commiseration, but Melena sees how the charm that one circulated through her as naturally as oxygen now leaves her in a state of total depletion. But for the red slippers that she was given on her sixteenth birthday, Nessa continues to dress sombrely, and Melena suspects that it is not the loss of her father – though a terrible blow – that saps her strength before she can think of putting it to use.
Melena, for her part, does what she can to keep her daughter upright. She ensures that Nessa has sufficient time to sleep off the weight of each day and takes breakfast to her late in the morning. She sorts the missives based on urgency and arranges the appointments so that the schedule is never too tolling. Before meetings, she brushes out Nessa's hair and gives her scathing accounts of the politicians she is set to be dealing with: their tics, their motives, their open secrets and closed deals. ("Father told you that?" Nessa asks. After this, Melena filters her gossip with greater discretion.)
Most importantly, however, Melena cautions Nessa against drastic action. "People don't cope well with change," she says, "and Munchkins especially."
Nessa does not listen.
When Boq clears his throat and declares his intention of returning to Shiz to finish his education, Nessa goes white. Her eyes dart up at him and she sits down with her council the next day. Within the week, the trains stop running and every person attempting to cross the border is vetted and, more likely than not, denied. The reason given: to protect against the threat of the Wicked Witch of the West, against Animal terrorists looking to base themselves in Munchkinland with inside help. Not long after that Boq applies for his papers and the borders close altogether.
There is talk of savage beatings. Animals taking their chances anyway. Tradesmen smuggling themselves into Gillikin to maintain their livelihoods and support their families. Munchkinland is frozen; its people baffled and fearful, eating through their preserves and praying for reprieve though the sun beats down on the fields in full force. Melena, in response, does the unthinkable – she thinks: if only Frex were here.
Lax as he was with Nessa, he had a way of wrangling her into reason that Melena never mastered. She can only meet impatience with impatience and the result is the screech of wheels and a slammed door, if Nessa is feeling charitable, or else days of crackling silence. Nessa begins to take her meals alone and speaks little of her plans, but every time her lackeys convene the borders wrap a little tighter around her citizens. Around Boq. Around Melena. Against Elphaba.
I'm losing her, Melena thinks of her daughter, the little girl whose smile could have powered a whole city. Now commonly referred to as the Wicked Witch of the East. (And Melena has a sickening hunch that the title was coined within their household.)
Melena is fraught, mulling the worst and sleepless for it, witnessing the escalating reforms and thinking of Elphaba on the run, always of Elphaba on the run, and resenting the council for yielding before Nessa's persuasion. She collects her newspapers – often delayed due to interceptions along the routes – and reluctantly concedes that stitching up the rift will not be without its seams. Not when encouraging Nessa will strand Elphaba. Not when sheltering Elphaba will condemn Nessa. Not when Nessa is cloistered behind walls too thick to puncture and too high to scale and Elphaba is nowhere to be found.
So Melena waits.
For a sign. For advice. For a hand to find hers and squeeze.
She does not know precisely what it is that she is anticipating, only that she waits and she worries and she watches the clouds gather, disperse, and gather again, preparing to spill innumerable flakes onto the heads of desperate wanderers. One of these heads will belong to Elphaba, trudging through her third winter at large, roaming silent streets with snow stinging her face and shivers wracking her body and footprints broadcasting her trajectory like so many informants. Melena surrenders before this vision as it clarifies – there is nothing else for her to do. She is desolate. Biding time. Fearing always the day when she will have to look back on this period of her life and remember that the last few months were the hardest.
Hypothermia. Pneumonia. Starvation. Frostbite. The impotency of a broom against the unbridled might of a blizzard.
It is less than a week before Melena barrels through her breaking point and refuses to wait any longer.
