White Vida
By Natalie Mills · Estimated Reading Time: 20 Minutes
Every step up the mountain got harder. At first she couldn’t feel her hands or her legs as she moved, and eventually she couldn’t even see them. She was operating her body blindly, with the hope that it would continue working the way it always had.
But the worst part of the storm was that she couldn’t see her friend’s face anymore. Early in the journey, they had exchanged glances when things were hard, looked at each other when they needed a break, sighed in unison and then laughed when they made it over a precarious cliff to see a beautiful sunset. But none of this was the way she thought it would be anymore.
She thought she was seeing the top of the world, but instead it felt like the surface of a moon, removed and far away from light and life, just rock and snow and a blinding swirl of dust that would never settle, never comfort.
Now, the closer they got to their destination, the further they became from each other. She could not make out features on her friend anymore—no eyes, no nose, no mouth—just the round arc of her red hat and the place below it where she trusted her friend’s face to be. And she hoped that she would see her again.
When they started this journey, she prayed that they would make it, that they would see everything they wanted in life, that they would be connected to the deep things. But now, she prayed that she could be connected to her friend again, that she wouldn’t be lost in this white void as they climbed, that they would find refuge and light, that she would see her friend’s eyes relax at the sight of a sunset again, or that she would see her friend’s smile begin as they rounded a corner to a new part of the path. But instead she saw nothing, just a blinding, white snow covering their faces on this mountain.
✷
Abby and Lola had been friends for two years, since starting upper school. They moved from their smaller schoolhouses in their separate parts of the valley to the single upper schoolhouse that sat in the center of it, pleasantly surrounded by a flock of cottages. The families in those homes chose them in order to be close to the school. Abby had grown up in one of those houses. It was a home with books on shelves, chalkboards with colored chalk, and ink and paper waiting for her on the desk for the day that she would need to write letters to her friends.
Lola grew up far from the school on the outskirts of the valley where the mountains began to lift off the ground and rocks began to dot the wild grass. Her house had one book and no chalkboard and certainly no paper or ink for writing. But she never felt it missing. Her parents were great storytellers, starting a tale at dinner and trading what happened next between the two of them as they passed the dinner plates back and forth, Lola and her brothers enraptured to learn how their father had wrestled a goose as a child or how their mother and her sisters would travel from town to town to play music at weddings. They weren’t stories from books, but they were family lore, preciously passed between the siblings until the story took on new layers, extra instruments, satisfying endings where the goose became either a new family pet or Christmas dinner, depending on who was telling it.
Abby’s house, even though it had books and ink and paper, didn’t have the deep stories shared over family dinner. Her mother and her father were quiet, and they preferred to recount to her the news exactly as it had happened. If they weren’t certain about something, her father would walk to the bookshelf and run his finger along the spines, selecting the right book and opening it to the page where the answer lived. There were things other than answers in these books too—stories and monsters and swashbucklers—but mainly, there were answers, arranged alphabetically so you always knew where to look.
Abby and Lola started school together, a blonde and a brunette destined to be friends. They tied together their lunch pails in the morning, and they walked home together at the end of the day. Abby would walk past her house by more than a mile so that Lola could walk most of the way home with company.
They were friends in a very comfortable and warm sort of way, the way that you trust a blanket as a child, even though you don’t know where it came from. It was here before you and it will probably remain in this home after you, but for now, you are wrapped up in its warmth without thinking of how it got in your parents’ cedar chest.
In their second year of school together, their friendship changed. Lola got sick, but she didn’t know it at first. The hard thing about getting sick without knowing it is that it makes you bad at all sorts of things, but you don’t know why they are so difficult for you all of a sudden. She was bad at reading again, just like she was in lower school, because her vision would spin on the page. She was bad at math again because she couldn’t follow the teacher’s notes across the board. She was even bad at recess because her nose would bleed when she ran after the other kids. Worst of all, she was bad at being a friend because she was tired and crabby and didn’t know why. She yelled at Abby one day to leave her alone after her nose started bleeding during tag. Abby listened and stayed away from her the rest of the day, even though they shared a desk. She moved all of her pencils to the far away side of the desk, to stay away from Lola, like she had asked. She went straight home at the end of the day, letting Lola walk twice as long by herself.
Abby thought things might be normal again the next day, except that it was Saturday and they didn’t have school. You might remember from when you were in school that the order of days matters quite a lot. A fight that starts on a Friday might grow and grow over the weekend to be a monster by Monday, or it might shrink away into nothing. Abby didn’t know if this fight was a monster or if it was a mouse that they could chase together into the corner and then out of the room. She would need to wait until Monday to find out.
But she didn’t have to wait until Monday. On Saturday night, Abby’s father came home worried. He had been out all day. Normally he came home much earlier on Saturday, but today he came home late and went straight to his bookshelves, opening up one book and then another, not replacing them when he was done which was their family’s number one rule for reading from the shelves.
Finally, he found something that seemed right and ran off into the night, taking the “D” book with him. Abby’s mom told her the news after her father left. Lola was sick, she hadn’t made it home on Friday, and they had had to go out and look for her on the road. Her parents had taken her home, but she was cold and wet from the night and the rain, and now she seemed very sick indeed.
The next day, Abby went to see Lola.
She had only been all the way to Lola’s house a few times before, climbing up higher than she would ever go walking Lola home. She saw the house, a flat roof with a blue painted door, propped open so that anyone could walk in. In the house, Lola’s parents made everyone feel better by having lots of food on the long table, brought by friends and neighbors: brown bread and honey butter and sliced cheese and snapping green apples.
Abby went to Lola’s room and saw her, laying in bed, sighing softly in her sleep, her nose still a little red from bleeding earlier in the day. Seeing her on the bed, Abby saw Lola not as her friend, matching her age and her height and her year in school, but as a person, a young woman, lying on the bed breathing in and out, the blue patterned sheet rising with work and lowering with a rattle. She wasn’t intrepid Lola with her hair spun in braids; she was Lola, with small hands and a big face, who was just her age but also seemed older, with two more years of school left and plans for the summer, and a little crush on the boy in the third row of class that she might someday kiss. Abby was the only one that knew the last part and suddenly she felt the weight of Lola on her shoulders, not the weight of a secret, but of a friend.
Lola woke up as Abby sat down by the bed. She moaned a little bit. Abby had been hoping for a smile.
“Are you okay?” Abby asked but, realizing that the answer was clearly no, she kept talking right past it, “My dad looked through so many books before coming here, you have no idea, he finally brought ‘D’ with him, but I’m not sure what he was looking for.”
Now Lola smiled at her, “Probably for ‘dum dum.’ I fell down at that stupid turn in the path.” Abby knew the turn that Lola was talking about. It was the place on the walk home where they would run, jumping up onto the big rock with two feet together and jumping down on the other side. Lola had fallen there, and she had stayed there by herself almost all night.
Now Abby cried.
Lola cried too. She was worried, and she knew this was bad, and she didn’t like hearing her mother cry from the other room, but she also cried because she wanted to go back to the big rock, to jump it again without falling, without staying there through the night, without letting it win.
“Do they know when you’ll be better?” Abby asked.
Lola shook her head. “It’s not just that I fell. The nosebleeds and my legs hurting. There’s something else wrong, and they don’t know what it is.”
Abby leaned over to hug Lola. Thinking of all of her father’s books, and all the letters beyond D, she said, “Don’t worry. I’m sure they’ll figure it out.”
✷
They didn’t figure it out. Or rather, they did, but there was nothing they could do. Lola’s sickness wasn’t just an out-in-the-rain cold, but a deep sick that stays in your bones and pokes you until you fall. Word went around the valley about the poor sick girl with nosebleeds who couldn’t look at homework for too long. Parents were sympathetic, and kids were confused. Their parents’ sympathy brought fear into them they hadn’t known before. What was this, where something bad could happen to someone so young?
For Abby and Lola, they were closer than ever. Abby brought Lola her homework, Lola gave Abby drawings that she did during the school hours. Finally, the doctors said that Lola could go back to school, but that she would never be the same again. No one knew quite what that meant, and that made everyone cry.
To Abby and Lola, however, it was a challenge. Between the two of them, Abby and Lola had very different fathers. They had very different mothers. And they had very different siblings. But they had a very similar interest in the questions that you ask softly at night and never get answers to in school. They didn’t need a single solution. This disease had too many facets, a many-armed spider growing long legs into each area of Lola as they worked. They needed something that could kill the disease at its heart without killing Lola.
✷
Abby started looking for answers. She picked up where her dad had left off. Reading all of the D book and on through E, F, G, and up until almost the very end. Nothing seemed right. No sickness seemed bad enough, no doctor seemed famous enough, and no cure seemed real enough to do what they needed it to do. She would bring the books to Lola’s, sitting on her bed and reading her all the interesting things she found even as she looked for answers. She was reading the W book when they found it.
The picture on the page was so lovely that Abby turned the book for Lola to have a look. In the top drawing, a little boy stood next to a dying tree. Its branches drooped, its leaves were brown, and the inside of the tree was rotting through. In the bottom drawing, the little boy looked up in wonder at the tree. It was alive now, laced through with gold from the trunk to leaf tips, branches reaching up toward the sky. Abby turned the book for Lola to see.
“Now that is what we need, something that fills your veins with gold,” Abby commented.
Lola examined the picture with interest. The entry beside it said:
White vida: mythological creature, often depicted as a white stag or silver reindeer, that is said to have healing properties, both restoring what is broken and making what existed before better than it ever could be.
“That’s it!” Lola exclaimed, pointing at the picture. Abby turned the book back to look again.
“But it doesn’t even exist, the entry is marked mythology. There’s not even a picture of what a white vida is supposed to look like.”
“No, I’ve heard of it, in my father’s stories.” Lola seemed to jump under her blankets. “I know someone who has seen one, and she could tell us more.”
Abby was unlikely to believe in a magical creature, but she did believe in Lola, and she had learned on her trips out here to the mountainside that the valley she thought she knew held things she wasn’t prepared for.
“Who is this person? How do we find her?” Abby asked.
Lola had already begun kicking off her blankets and rummaging for shoes. Abby watched her, wishing she would slow down. They didn’t even know if the white vida really existed, but Lola looked so hopeful for the first time in months that Abby didn’t say a word. Instead, she helped Lola find her shoes and together they grabbed what they would need for a long walk.
✷
The peddler circled the valley every summer, peddling goods from her cart between one town and the next, slowly rotating possessions between the many villages of the valley. If you waited a few years, the ceramic pot you sold for a pitcher might come back to you, a little chipped but cheaper than before. Lola knew that in the winter months, the peddler lived up the mountain behind their house.
That day, Lola left her house for the first time in weeks, determined to find a future for herself. Abby let her friend go ahead of her on the trail, watching her red hat bounce up and down, knowing it would be hopeless to tell her to slow down now, not while she was hopeful that she might find an answer.
The trail behind Lola’s house went back in a straight line and then up through the trees. Midway through the walk, Lola slowed down and Abby thought maybe this was the moment the sickness was coming back into her bones, reminding her that she wasn’t supposed to be doing this kind of thing. But instead, Lola paused just long enough to sheepishly ask for a handkerchief. Abby handed hers over, and they continued on, Lola once again bounding ahead through the evergreen trees as a light snow began dusting the path. Abby wondered if she would get her handkerchief back, then watched as Lola lifted it to her nose, the fabric turning red. Abby didn’t need her handkerchief back. She needed Lola to be better, to be with her and happy, not hiding a nosebleed as they chased a rumor halfway up an unfamiliar mountain.
The peddler’s house was among some pine trees and was shaped like one, a tall triangle with a dark sloping roof on either side. Beside the front door there was a single window, as wide as the kitchen table at Lola’s house and as high as the bookshelves at Abby’s. Through the window, the girls saw a roaring fire and an armchair facing it, the birds nest of gray hair that they recognized as the peddler’s poking out over the top.
When she opened the door, she seemed skeptical. She looked between Lola and Abby, wary of letting them beyond her door.
“What do you need?” she asked.
Lola responded without hesitating. “Do you know about the white vida?”
The peddler looked surprised, glancing around them as if to check for other visitors in the woods.
“Yes,” she responded, “I’ve seen it.”
Lola’s eyes lit up. “Please, will you tell us where we can find it? It’s very important.”
The peddler considered them for a moment, then she slid the door open the rest of the way, and Abby and Lola stepped inside. She hurried them onto a small mat beside the door where the snow fell off of their coats and hoods, melting as the fire reached their faces. The peddler poured tea for each of them and pulled an extra chair up for herself.
“You want to know about the white vida?” she asked. They nodded. She looked between the two of them, right on the cusp of adulthood when she could share freely, still young enough that she might get in trouble for telling these children what she knew.
“As a grown-up I should tell you to give up, to go home to your parents, and to not ask about this again. But as a person who knows what it’s like to need help, I will tell you whatever I can.”
The peddler told her story. She was young and newly married. Her husband had built this house to match the trees around it, to give them a place to live in the woods, just as she had always wanted. When she was pregnant with their first child, he had left for a trip and never come back. She heard about it later; there was a rockslide on the mountain. He died saving the youngest man on the team, a teenager of barely seventeen who was working to feed his siblings. It was a noble death, but the nobility of it only helped a little when her baby came and they didn’t have enough to eat or a way to live. Finally, the baby was sick with a sickness that rich babies had medicine for and poor babies died from. Her son didn’t know it because he was so young, but he was a poor baby and there didn’t seem to be any hope. So when she read the story of the white vida, she knew she had to find it, even if there was only the slimmest chance. She had climbed the mountain right behind her house, up as high as she could over rocks and dangerous icy ledges, holding her infant son.
“I ran out of food. I ran out of water. There was nothing for him to eat or drink, and the only thing I had left was holding him as close as I could, wrapped as tight as he could be, to try to keep him warm.”
She thought that maybe this was the end for them, freezing to death on the rocks high above where anyone else would go.
“We were in the middle of a snowstorm...not even a snowstorm, just a white snow swirling around all the time, never resting. Always white snow on a gray sky. I sat down to rest when it came up to me out of the storm. I knew what it was right away. It was unmistakable. It nudged my son in his blankets. Then it flicked its tail and was gone. But it left behind a single hair and that was enough.”
She tied the hair around her wrist and around her son’s, and she turned back down the mountain. Sure enough, things changed, her baby crying healthy cries before falling into a happy sleep, her own body renewed after the hard birth, her heart a little more hopeful, even her memories of her husband touched with a color that they hadn’t had in her despair since he had been gone.
“I think I could have gone further, gone up and over, over and in,” she said, glancing down at her hands, “But my son was safe and I knew we would make it, and that was all that I needed right then.”
She stared into the fire and waited for these two young faces to ask her something, to move the conversation somewhere else. They both watched her intently. Finally Lola, feeling the weight of the woman’s son just as she felt the slight taste of blood in her mouth from the wounds that would not heal, leaned forward. “Thank you for telling us,” she said, her eyes shining by the fire. “My next question is: how do we get up the mountain?”
✷
They didn’t go back to Lola’s house. Instead, they stayed the night with the peddler. In the morning, the peddler gave them supplies: food to keep them going, water to keep them alive, and dark coats to keep them warm. Lola looked over their haul with glee before they left. She was still buoyant, the Lola who jumped at the turn of the rock and who won all the races at the summer fair.
Before they went up the mountain, Abby tried to convince Lola to go back home one last time. “Let me go up the mountain,” she said, “I’ll bring you back what you need. Or let someone else go who knows the way.”
“I know it will be hard, but it’s not like we can get lost,” Lola responded, motioning to the top of the mountain. “All we have to do is keep going up.”
Abby was skeptical. She felt the coat, heavy over her shoulders. She felt the backpack with food and water, heavy in her arms. And she looked at Lola, wanting to make another plea to go back, to do this the right way, to let someone else take this step. Before she could say anything, Lola winced and shut her eyes.
“I just can’t go back, okay?” She said. “Every step we’ve taken feels closer to the truth. If I go back now, I don’t think I’ll make it this far again. And I don’t think that anyone will believe us enough to go on my behalf, no matter how much they may love me.”
Abby knew she was right. They were chasing a dream when all the adults and all the books in her parents’ library said it couldn’t be done. Not even the doctors thought there was hope. But here they were, looking up a mountain, with one person telling them that hope could be found at the top. Abby looked at Lola’s red-rimmed nose, the aftermath of her hidden nosebleed, her freckles standing out on her pale cheeks.
“Okay,” said Abby, “Let’s do it. But I’m carrying the backpack.”
Lola nodded, grateful, and Abby pulled the pack around her shoulders, tightening the straps. Lola pulled her red hat over her hair, and together, they started up the mountain, looking not at the top but at the trail, the beginning steps they had to take to find the white vida.
✷
The first day was easy enough. The path to the top seemed to be a straight line, pulling them upward. As they went, they could feel the top of the mountain coming closer to them, getting bigger, blocking out more of their view. They walked toward the sun as it rose in the morning and kept it behind them as it sank at night. It was just a few days of walking, the peddler had said, and that is what they hoped for.
Lola felt the coat around her, still hugging her as well as her blankets did at home, still energized by the possibility of getting better. Ever since seeing the entry on the white vida in Abby’s book, Lola had held the picture in the book like a secret hope. She could feel the rot in that tree as she felt the splinters of pain up her shins with each step. She could taste the decay of the bark as her tongue ran across the open wound on top of her mouth. When Abby wasn’t looking, she would open her mouth wide and inhale, a cold breath tracing over the wound providing a moment of relief.
Eventually they left the trees behind, rising above them so that when the day was clear they could see them at their backs. They left behind the frozen grasses and the sound of owls and even the comforting sound of twigs breaking under their feet as they walked.
On the second day, the scenery changed. They couldn’t see the trees behind them or the long dip into the valley, just the stone mountain rising in front of them and the white of snow and fog behind them.
For the first time, unable to see the trees and home that she was used to, Lola began to worry.
✷
Abby watched as Lola climbed ahead of her, her red hat popping up from among the boulders as Abby caught up. Lola had slowed down a lot in the past day. They had been walking for three days, and the top of the mountain seemed as far away as ever. Now they were walking on frozen snow and ice topping slabs of rock, each step at risk of slipping backward. Abby worried Lola would fall and she wouldn’t be able to catch her. But even more she worried that she herself would fall and that Lola, up ahead, would turn around at the sound of her tumbling down and be left on the mountain all alone, unable to make it further up or safely down on her own. That Lola would perish up there and it would be all Abby’s fault.
The day was ending now, and Abby caught up to Lola, sitting on a slab of stone that jutted up against a sheer face of the mountain, bending together in a wide bench for them to sit on, the two of them bringing warmth to the crevice against the cold. There were a few scruffy bushes on either side of the rock, providing a barricade against the wind, and Lola looked as Abby came upon her.
“I thought this might be a good place to spend the night,” Lola told her. Lola hadn’t stopped yet on this path up the mountain. Abby had always had to call ahead, telling her it was time to slow down, time to sleep. And here was Lola, looking up, her red hat making her face underneath look paler than ever, volunteering to stop before the sunlight was gone. Abby tried not to show her concern.
“Sure,” she said cheerfully, “This seems like a great place.” Abby set the bag down, and they moved a little closer together on their perch.
Lola giggled. “This is just like lunch at school,” she said, pointing out the food that Abby was laying before them, their hips side by side on the slab, sharing the food across each other’s laps.
“It is,” Abby agreed, “except here we can eat without being worried about homework.” They laughed, and together they watched as the sun began to set before them. The sky deepened to orange then red then finally back to the deepest blue, almost as if it had fallen away completely, and the light sheet that had covered the world during the day was pulled off to expose the world to the black beyond it, a sprinkle of stars and nothing else.
Lola laid her head in Abby’s lap, her eyes closed. Abby felt her soft breathing rise and fall across her legs, her hair twisting out from under her red hat. Abby pulled the hat tighter on Lola’s head, tucking her hair back under in the exact place it always fell out, not needing to see it in the light to know where that was. She felt her friend’s weight on her, and she thought that it would all be okay, that they would be back at school someday soon, sharing a desk and taking out their lunches together to the back part of the yard to eat under the shade of their favorite tree.
✷
The next day, Abby tried to hold onto the hope she had the night before, when the sun was setting and the wind was still and the endless sky had felt like a hopeful future instead of a hopeless void. But it didn’t last long. Lola woke up coughing up hard. Abby could see wounds on her lips, and she suspected that they started inside her mouth, sores filling it with blood each moment. Lola put on a good face but Abby knew she was hurting and tired.
They started up the mountain again. At every step, Abby felt the rock beneath her feet slip, seeming to push her back. Ahead, she kept an eye on Lola’s hat, a dot of red amid the white of the snow and the gray of the rock and the sky. Abby couldn’t even see where the top of the mountain was anymore. She was just following Lola upward, hoping they would find it.
Soon, they reached a new level of the mountain’s cruelty. Here, the snow stuck, piling up below their feet. The wind whipped around them, pulling snow off the ground and into a constant swirl of white. The flurries never settled but grew thicker in the air with each passing minute, each flake stabbing Abby’s skin like the prick of a dozen burrs across her exposed cheeks. Abby was no longer afraid of slipping, but she felt her eyelashes crisping with white flakes. She blinked furiously. Her eyes watered at the cold and the wind. She looked ahead for Lola’s red hat.
It wasn’t there.
Abby couldn’t see anything but gray shapes amid the swirling white. She cried out, but she could not hear her friend: she could only hear the wind. For a terrible moment, she was utterly alone. All around her was the white snow; she could not tell which way was up or down or front or back. She tried to call Lola’s name but the wind drowned out her shout. Pushing through the snow, she ran forward, and then she spotted a flash of red: Lola was there, just a few feet ahead, but invisible in the storm. Abby reached out and caught Lola’s hand holding it tight in her own. Anything to keep from losing her.
But then, Lola pulled her hand away and dropped onto her knees in a drift of snow. Abby knelt too.
Pulling her face close to Lola’s, she could just make out Lola’s eyes, dark on her white face, her mouth, red like her cap. She could feel Lola shaking, long tremors that seemed to ripple from her center up through her mouth. Abby tugged Lola’s face into the folds of her coat, holding one cheek close against her chest as her arms wrapped around Lola’s shaking body.
This was it. They had come all this way to have a sad cold death, Lola shivering the life out of her, freezing from the bottom up, and Abby soon to follow, icing over from the top down, like the creek in the winter, starting with a thin layer of ice as she watched Lola die, slowly freezing deeper and deeper until nothing could live in her depths.
She felt Lola convulse and looked up into the white, not wanting to watch the top of Lola’s head thrash like that again. She and Lola were looking together into the white, waiting to be frozen over, when they saw it: the white vida.
It was just a hint, a creature frozen in the swirls of white, looking their way, as if it had been out looking for food and stumbled upon these two girls in the snow. Abby cried, a little breath that caught in her throat, no words, just a wince as she leaned forward. Lola saw it too. The girls knelt, staring at it through the storm, and it stared back with its black eyes. Then it turned and disappeared.
Lola pulled herself forward onto her knees, then up onto her feet. She reached out and grabbed Abby’s hand. They began to walk forward again together.
Suddenly, the wind began to die down, as if the valley was a soup bowl and they had reached the upper edge, beyond the steam and out onto the rest of the dinner table. There, just as the steam and flurry began to subside, they saw a yellow sun, bathing everything in warmth, turning the gray skies white. As they climbed forward into the light, their frozen clothes softened, their stiff hair loosened, and they blinked the frost off of their lashes so that they could see each other again. Abby looked over to Lola. Lola was smiling at the light.
✷
Their steps moved downward through cushioning snow, not the harsh flakes that they just fought through, but a soft carpet leading them into a dip at the top of the mountain. The sun was bright, warming them as they went. They made their way over rocks and around ledges until they turned and finally saw it spread out before them, a small valley unlike their own, a nick in the side of the mountain range, a chip in the edge of the bowl. Pine trees dotted through the valley making a smear of dark green across the white landscape. Somewhere in the distance a river rumbled.
Turning to look at Lola, Abby saw her as she had never seen her before: each freckle gleamed, like a scattering of stars across her face. Her hair was brighter and each eye lash seemed to stand out against the white of her skin.
But she also saw for the first time just how sick Lola really was. Around Lola’s lips, she saw the cracking and bleeding that Lola had felt for weeks now. Lola’s nose was caked with the dried blood from her nosebleeds on the way up. Even Lola’s eyes, normally the brightest part of her, held a murkiness in them that shouldn’t have been there. Abby saw her friend completely, the beauty of the person that she was and the horror of the disease that had been working its way inside her for so long.
“Abby,” Lola whispered, “It’s you. We’re here. This is it.”
And Abby knew in that look that just as she was seeing Lola face to face truly for the first time, Lola was seeing her the same way. Abby smiled and knew that Lola was feeling each hope that she had carried for the past few months. Relief spread through her body, and she knew that Lola could see it—the worry she had held deep inside, the questions she had left unanswered to make this climb together, the anticipation they shared now looking down into this small valley, this respite of life battling out storms.
Together they walked onward, hand in hand, not for fear of losing each other, but with the delight of finding each other again.
As they got closer, Lola ran ahead, her hat falling back and her hair flying out behind her. Abby ran after her.
“It must be somewhere close,” Lola cried out as she ran, “We’ll find it soon, I know it!”
Following the open spaces among the rocks, every tree seemed to be pointing them the same way, deeper into the woods, toward the bustle of the water they could hear in the distance. They reached the water and found it running, with slats of ice gliding past like ink over paper. They began walking beside the river upstream toward its source.
They went as far as they could. Before them was a waterfall, half frozen in the winter chill, with long fingers reaching down and rushing water behind it sheathing the rock like a curtain. Abby and Lola turned to each other. This was it. They knew it as children who go to the beach every day know how to recognize when the waves will crest and break over them. They knew it as a child knows it is her birthday before she even opens her eyes that morning, a small fluttering bird of excitement waiting to take flight in her chest. All around them, the trees, thick with green needles and frosted with sap sang it; the water running past them in great waves and tumbles clapped along; the snow that radiated the sun back to itself, each flake seeming to offer up its own harmony reminded them: this is it.
They were standing together, waiting and expectant, when the white vida arrived.
It wasn’t a deer like they had at home; it wasn’t a stag the way they had pictured it. Its head was higher, its neck longer, and two sharp ears matched curving silver antlers shimmering with the same ferocity as the snow. The white vida looked at them, black eyes, nostrils flaring, hooves pawing the ground. It had emerged from the trees and now it stood before them, as if it were coming to them for life and not the other way around.
With a snap, the white vida flicked its long tail. The hooves stomped the ground again, and it took off at a leap, over the river, past the waterfall to the ground on the other side, and away through the trees. On the ground where it had been standing, one silver thread, a hair from the tail, curled on a rock, as carefully as if it had been removed and placed there, waiting for them.
Abby picked it up carefully as Lola tugged off her glove. The skin on her hands was translucent, and Abby saw that each of her knuckles were black and bruised. Holding out her wrist, Lola closed her eyes. Abby tied the hair around it, the slender thread becoming a silver cord, solidifying and drawing close to Lola’s skin.
Abby looked at Lola’s face. “Well?” she asked.
Since coming into this valley, Lola hadn’t been able to think of anything except the complete knowledge that she was going to be healed. She ran forward without noticing anything but the thing she was running toward.
Now, she finally paused to feel. The ground was firm beneath her feet, but her feet no longer hurt. Her joints that had been screaming at each step had felt nothing—moving strong and bold as if they were never sick, but also in a way that they never had been before. It wasn’t youth regained; it was life found for the first time.
She ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth. The sores were gone, the wounds healed, and her tongue passed over smooth unbroken skin.
She smiled at Abby. “It worked.”
They stood side by side in the snow, in this place where life was given once and given again, hearing the stream beside them rush by and feeling the trees hug in around them. There were two healings here. Together, they had emerged over the mountain unable to see or speak only to find that they were seeing each other clearly for the first time. Then the white vida had come and delivered beyond what they had already been given. Here, in this forest of pine trees, in a place of cold snow and slippery ice, they had found wrapped up in the woods a gift of new life.
Abby and Lola watched the sun set over the valley that night, snuggled close by a fire as the river in the distance hummed by. The stars rose up above them, a hundred times closer and brighter than they did at home. The sun set and the stars rose and together they watched it happen. Lola felt the gentle pulsing of the white vida’s hair tied around her wrist, promising a future when they returned home. They both felt something more than they had expected—alive for the first time, blood racing through them like water over the falls, their hearts pounding like the opening drum beats of a beautiful song, and their shoulders pressed close, side by side under the blinking stars, the two of them together, each of them alive.
✷
Story by Natalie Mills · Photo by Atle Mo
