“Peter, I—” Mrs. Halvorsan began to sob as she tended to Tor, who was moaning feverishly in the chair, finally giving in to his exhaustion. “I don’t know, I don’t know. My God, we have the others to think of, if anything happens to— But Fredrik!”
“Don’t go,” Raina pleaded one last time. “And please, don’t blame Tor—blame me!”
Peter Halvorsan paused as he was winding another scarf about his face, leaving room only for his eyes, which somehow looked down at her, kindly.
“I don’t blame anything but this cursed land and my folly in coming here,” he said. Then he was gone, the door slamming behind him.
Raina turned toward the nightmarish scene before her: children still shivering, some sobbing for their parents, as Mrs. Halvorsan was fetching a pan from a shelf near the stove; she dashed outside to fill the pan with snow, and she started bathing Rosa’s feet in it. Arvid was hunched over by the fire, wheezing, his thin shoulders rising up to his ears. Rosa lay still, so still, and Raina glanced at the little girl’s feet; they were purple. Purple as the sky must be outside, obscured by the still-raging storm that shook the little house and pounded the windows.
Tor was deeply asleep—he must have fainted. Raina crept over to him, picking her way among the children lying, like fallen soldiers, in the crowded room, too exhausted to take any of their frozen outer garments off. For a moment Raina allowed herself a morsel of satisfaction; she had gotten them all here anyway. Who knew what lay ahead—frostbite was a concern, of course, and she glanced again over to little Rosa with her tiny, blackening feet; she knew that once the feet thawed the girl would be in a torment of pain. But still, they were all here, and not lost on the prairie.
Except for Fredrik and Anette.
Raina knelt down next to Tor, and put her hand on his forehead, clammy with perspiration.
“I’m so sorry. But I couldn’t have done it without you.”
Then she felt light-headed, a fuzzy blackness clouding the outer corners of her vision. Sitting back on her heels, she took one last glimpse at his troubled young face. Her eyelids fluttered, and she felt herself falling, welcoming the exhaustion that overwhelmed her determination.
Finally, Raina slept.
CHAPTER 19
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THE BLIZZARD, CREATED WHEN AN enormous trough of cold air rushing in from the Arctic had met up with an equally enormous influx of warm, wet air from the gulf, gobbled up everything in its path. The collision generated a force of energy no one could remember seeing in their lifetimes, but that all would talk about with wonder until the day they died. With so much energy, the storm kept on pulsating over the land, eventually reaching down all the way to Texas as it marched eastward.
And as it marched, something took its place: a high-pressure system of air so frigidly punishing, it froze exposed flesh within minutes.
* * *
—
AT SOME POINT, ANETTE SENSED something that brought her out of the deepest sleep she’d ever known. It wasn’t a sound, but an absence of it—the wind had stopped howling. Her ears still rang from the memory of that noise but were trying, desperately, to understand the eerie silence that had replaced it.
She couldn’t move, though, to see what had happened; something heavy was pressing on her chest, keeping her pinned to the ground. Her entire torso was covered, save for her left hand, which she tried to move but couldn’t; she couldn’t feel for what was on top of her.
All she knew was that the storm was over, but it was still very dark. Nighttime.
And it was unbearably cold, but her eyes closed anyway; she was too exhausted, too thoroughly frigid, to register more. She gave up; she wanted to say Fredrik’s name, but then she didn’t care.
She fell back asleep.