Free Mother Box and Other Tales by Sarah Blackman Page A

tired now, and it was only the beginning of what was historically supposed to be a very long day. There would be so many different kinds of emotions to go through. She tried to conjure them up in her head: Pride and Guilt, Strength and Providence, Envy, Greed. Through the French doors and down the long hallway her very small face in the mirror flickered through the emotions. Pride and Greed, Guilt and Providence. She thought she looked strange in her steely gray dress which made her hair take on a sympathetic sheen, her shoulders seem mottled, her mouth like a dent in her face.
    “What are you thinking about?” her husband asked. It had been a long time since he'd asked her this, but it had used to be a kind of code between them. At night he would say it, reaching under the sheets to rest his hand on her stomach, and she would say it back. “I don't know, what are you thinking?”
    “I'm thinking about what you are thinking about. What are you thinking?”
    “I don't know.”
    Eventually, they would just echo each other, their voices so alike, and then they would come together, have sex carefully so the bed would not proclaim itself too loudly, and be surrounded in the house by the sound of their sons sleeping, their seven sons packed into all the corners of the house breathing in tandem through the night.
    Now, however, the context seemed different and when she said, “I don't know,” her husband used her shoulder to steadyhimself as he wiped a fine film of sawdust off the tip of his polished shoe. He said, “Where are the directions? Are they in your purse?” and together they walked out the door of their house and their figures in the mirror behind them also dwindled, smaller and smaller, then gone.
    The night before it had snowed and the world was unmistakably altered as they drove through the town and out of the town, through the countryside and up into the mountains where their son had reserved a mountain lodge for the ceremony. In the town, the snow made her neighbors' houses look like cheerful idiot children. Some of the houses even had hesitant little ribbons of smoke drifting up from their chimneys which made their doors and their windows looked rosy the way an idiot child's cheeks would look rosy if he had stayed out too long in the cold. She wanted to scrub the houses' cheeks, but of course this made no sense and she shifted in the seat so that her dress, uncomfortable beneath her, wouldn't crease.
    In the countryside, the snow fell over the fields and hedges with soothing formlessness, but was already starting to be marked, tracked all over with the markings of animals cutting across the wide, white fields. In the mountains, where the trees grew thicker and thicker and closer to the road, the snow took on a blue tinge. It seemed to be hiding from them, moving through the forest alongside their car so that when she looked she would see snow—gullies of it, blue pockets studded with rocks—but when she turned her head to watch the tightening, climbing road, it would be something else: a pacing, a dark movement between the trees. The snow was in the road as well, fresh and deep. Her husband had to drive slowly, tense with concentration, while she turned the dial on the suddenly squealing radio looking for the latest weather news. As a result they were late getting to the top of the mountain, late pulling into the gravel parking lot of the lodgewhich was already crowded with other guest's cars—parked at desperate, hasty angles as if they had arrived together, all at once, from every imaginable direction—and late climbing the lodge's wide stone steps, the shoulders of her husband's overcoat frosted with a thin layer of snow which was again beginning to fall.
    When she and her husband entered the lodge, they found themselves in the foyer, a narrow room planed in rough pine planks and constricted with the cold that seeped in around the door, through the window panes, up through the cracks in the uneven