To Nowhere

“There’s so much snow, Daddy,” Eloisa marvels, squishing her nose against the car window. A little cloud of fog puffs outward on the glass.

   “Yes, honey,” my dad mumbles. His hands are gripping the steering wheel for dear life. Mine are clenched around the armrests of the passenger seat. Both of us are white-knuckled, and despite the chill in our battered SUV with half-working heat, sweat beads on my dad’s forehead. 

   “It’s pretty,” my little sister says.

   “Yes, honey.” Dad eases us around yet another deathly icy curve of the highway. The windshield wipers are working overtime; as soon as they clear the sheen of snowflakes away, it seems to be replaced with another white blanket. 

Our wheels spin out on the turn. The back of the car wobbles back and forth. My breath sticks in my throat, and I clench the armrests tighter. 

Dad swears under his breath and yanks the wheel sideways. I squeeze my eyes shut tight and pray, pray, pray, brace for impact…

And my dad lets out a sigh of relief. “Oh my God. Okay. We’re fine. We’re alive.”

I exhale and open my eyes. We continue up the pass, slowly but surely. 

The side mirror is exposed just enough for me to check it. There are no headlights behind us. I squint through the windshield—no tail lights in front. 

“Where is everyone?” I murmur. 

“Hm?” Dad asks distractedly. “Where’s who?”

“The line of cars we were in,” I say, a little louder. “There was a whole group coming over the pass when we started. They’re gone now.”

“Huh.” Dad cranks the wheel to the left, teeth digging into his bottom lip. We skid, float, then come to yet another miraculous rest. “I didn’t notice. Maybe we got passed.”

“No. We haven’t turned out at all.”

“The snow reminds me of Frozen,” Eloisa announces. “I wanna be Elsa. Can you call me Elsa now?”

“Sure, honey,” my dad mutters vaguely. His glasses have fogged up, just like the windshield. He wipes them with the arm of his down jacket and squints through the mist. “God, I can’t see a damn thing. What I’d give for good eyesight.”

“Let me drive, Dad,” I urge him. “Pull over. I can get us through.”

“No. You haven’t had enough winter training.” He eases the car around another hairpin. We skid yet again. I hang on for dear life. 

This time, though, we don’t make it.

The back wheels catch on the ice and we start spinning. Like, literally spinning in a circle. My dad swears (loudly this time), and I scream. Eloisa screams. We’re all screaming as the car wobbles in a wild arc, and then careens off the road, and BOOMPH, we’re in a snowbank.

We all sit there in silence for a few moments. 

Then my dad groans and slumps forward. “Jesus. I’m so sorry, girls. We should have stayed one more night in town and waited for the storm to pass through. My God, I’m so stupid.”

“It’s okay, Dad.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “Maybe we can sit here for a little while and wait it out.”

But he’s shaking his head. “The heat’s already bad. If we aren’t moving, it’s going to be even worse, and we don’t want to freeze to death out here. We’ve got to keep moving.”

“Daddy, look,” Eloisa says, pointing out her window.

“Not now, honey.” Dad glances over at me. “Can you help me dig us out?”

I nod. 

“Daddy, look.”

“Not right now. Your sister and I are going to shovel us out. Wait here for a minute.”

“Daddy, look,” says Eloisa. “It’s a road.”

We both turn in our seats. Sure enough, Eloisa is pointing off past the snowdrift, to...a road.

“But…” My dad scratches his head. “Wait. We’re on the pass. There are no roads out here. There’s nothing on the map.”

“Maybe it’s a deer trail or something?” I wonder aloud, but as soon as I say it, I know that’s not true. It’s wide and paved. Definitely a road. And it’s plowed, like the rest of the highway. 

“Look at the sign,” Dad says. “‘Lodging ahead.’”

We exchange a glance. 

The road dead-ends at the ‘lodging,’ which is a tiny cabin. Rustic in a falling-apart kind of way. The front porch sags under the weight of the snow, and huge drifts have piled up on the roof. However, it seems to be still standing, and there’s even a kind of hutch next to it where we can park the car out of the snow.

Dad says, “There’s no one here.”

Yeah, well, it’s not exactly the Ritz, I think. But I stay quiet.

Eloisa says, “It looks creepy.”

Any dead bodies in there are probably frozen, I think. But I don’t say that, either.

My dad parks the SUV under the hutch. We climb out into the howling snow. I tug my beanie further down over my forehead and shove my hands into my pockets, staggering through the knee-high snowdrifts to follow my dad towards the cabin. Eloisa hops out of the car behind us. 

Dad climbs up the stairs to the front porch. It creaks and groans under his boots, but miraculously doesn’t cave in.

I hold my breath as I step up. It holds. 

The front door creaks even louder as my dad pushes it open. The cabin is pitch-dark inside, except for a faint glow coming from the other end of the main room. Is that…

“There’s a fire in the hearth,” Dad says, echoing my thoughts. He scratches his head. “But—but there wasn’t any smoke coming out of the chimney.”

I cautiously make my way to the other end of the porch and peer out at the chimney. A small trickle of smoke spirals out from the bricks. 

“Well, there is now,” I call to him. “Maybe someone just left, and they, like, decided to leave the fire going for the next person.” But I know that I’m floundering. There was no smoke a second ago. And why the hell would anyone leave a fire burning in an entirely wooden cabin?

Eloisa skips across the porch and into the house. I follow her inside. 

The cabin has two main rooms that I can make out, a living room (where the fire is) and a doorway that leads to what looks like a kitchen. Up a rickety staircase is a loft area that must be the bedroom. 

“It’s like Arendale!” Eloisa exclaims, bouncing up and down so that the blue pom-pom on her hat bounces along. “Is Kristoff here? Is Sven outside?”

“No, Lisa,” I say quietly. “There’s no one here.”

She pouts. “Aw. I wanna meet Kristoff and Sven.”

“Maybe another time.”

“It’s too dark,” my sister announces. “Turn on the lights.”

I reach for the light switch, somehow finding it in the dim light from the fire. There’s a hollow click as it flicks up, and then another as I flick it down, and a few more times.

“Yeah, there’s no power,” Dad calls from the other room. “But I’m using my phone flashlight—goddammit!” He comes back into the living room, shaking his phone in frustration. “Just ran out of battery. Must be the cold. Can we use yours?” he asks me.

I pull it out of my pocket. 80 percent battery; that’s good. But as soon as I open the flashlight, my battery starts draining. 70, 65, 60, 50, 30, 10, 1, and dead.

Biting back a curse, I shake my head. “It just died on me.”

Dad scratches his head. “Let me see if I can find some candles upstairs. You girls bring in our stuff. We’ll stay here and wait out the storm.”

Eloisa and I tromp back out into the blizzard. The snow is, if possible, falling even faster and thicker now. I shiver and pull my hat down farther.

We grab the bags from the trunk—well, I handle almost all of them, since Eloisa’s so little. She skips ahead carrying our bag of snacks from the grocery store in town. “Daddy, I brought the food!” she yells as she darts inside the cabin. 

I lug our bedrolls and suitcases up the porch stairs. 

Eloisa calls, “Daddy?”

I stop for a moment to catch my breath, then hoist the bags again and go inside.

“Daddy?” my sister yells. “Where are you?”

I set the bags down. My heart beats faster. The dread that’s been growing in my stomach ever since we got here is becoming a vine, choking me. 

Eloisa appears in front of me. She looks confused. “I can’t find Daddy.”

“He went upstairs,” I say, trying to keep my voice from shaking. 

She darts away and up the stairs. “Daddy? Daddy, are you up here? It’s creepy up here.”

I set to work laying down our bedrolls by the fire. My breath trembles in my throat, every inhale growing shallower and shallower. 

“Lisa?” I call after a minute. “Did you find him?”

There’s no answer. 

“Lisa? Eloisa. This isn’t a time for games.”

No reply. 

“Eloisa! Get down here, now!” My voice cracks on the last word.

She doesn’t answer.

Slowly, I stand up. My feet take me, on autopilot, in slow motion steps towards the staircase. I don’t want to go up there. I have to go up there. I have to find my sister. I have to find my dad. I don’t want to go up there. Something is wrong. There’s too much snow. The road wasn’t there before.

My foot lands on the first step. The creak makes me jump, spiking my heart rate, and I have to pause for a second to catch my breath. 

Slowly but surely, I make my way up, up, up, into the darkness.