Part of me wants to say that I was normal. The sort of girl who went to crazy parties and had a million friends, as if I was perfect before it all went wrong. But the truth is that, even back then, I probably hit the books a little too hard and played it a little too safe.
So no, I wasn’t normal, back then. I was a little geeky. But I was happy.
In a lot of ways, I was at a tipping point. I’d just left my teens behind and turned twenty. I was halfway through my languages course at Berkeley. I’d broken up with my high school sweetheart a few months earlier, my last teen-style relationship, where the sex was still furtive and awkward. But I hadn’t yet had what felt like a real adult relationship, where sex would be expected...and, I hoped, awesome. I was just about to move out of dorms and into a shared house with my friends. As I prepared to go back to college that January, I felt as if a whole new section of my life was about to begin.
And then everything changed.
Three Years Earlier
“We’re not lost,” said dad from the driver’s seat.
“Lost,” said mom, next to him.
“Lost,” I said from the backseat, smirking.
“We’re not lost.”
It had been a spur-of-the-moment thing. A drive out in the snow that was one percent about seeing some beautiful scenery, nine percent about spending time together as a family because I was heading back to Berkeley in a few days and ninety percent about dad getting to drive the new SUV away from the highway. It still had that new-car smell and my seat belt lock had been so tight, dad had had to wrestle it in for me.
Now we were deep into the back roads of Wisconsin, surrounded by thick forest, and even the GPS just showed a spider web of faint lines that could be anything from logging roads to footpaths. We’d already had to backtrack twice and the sky outside had turned from dark blue to black. We could see the snow whipping past in the headlights but little else.
Inside the SUV, though, it was warm and snug and we were taking turns to Bluetooth music to the stereo and it would be my turn next so I was going to put something decent on instead of dad’s endless seventies rock.
My mom craned her head to look up at the sky through her window. “The moon’s over there. That means we should be going that way.” She pointed behind us.
“You’re navigating using the stars, now?” My dad was smiling. Being lost was just another adventure, to him.
“Can’t be any worse than relying on the Force, or whatever the hell you’re using,” she told him.
He leaned across to her. “You should show me some more respect. Or I might just—” He whispered in her ear in a way that made her blush and swat at him, and he chuckled.
I groaned and lifted my book in front of my eyes. Gross. Going back to Berkeley couldn’t come soon enough.
I felt the car slow, just a little. “Does it…?” said my mom.
I lowered my book. They were both straining to see the road ahead through the windshield.
“I think it does,” said my dad. “I think we—”
And then he said fuck so loudly it actually hurt my ears, and I jerked forward against my belt as he slammed on the brakes. But the feel of the road beneath us changed from a vibration to a smooth swish as the tires stopped gripping and started gliding. And then, quite suddenly, there was no road feel at all.
We started to fall.
My mom snapped her head around to look at me, her eyes wide and panicked. I saw her terrified realization that she was going to die, and that I might, too.
There wasn’t time to scream. There wasn’t time to do anything. The car started to tilt forward as it fell, the heavy engine making the SUV fall nose-first. Everything was black, outside, so I couldn’t see the ground coming.
The impact was so fast and so sudden that it felt like an explosion, like the front of the car had just been blown apart. One second, we were falling and the car was perfectly normal. The next, the whole front of the car had moved. The front cabin, where my parents were, was squashed down to half its usual size. My mom and dad were resting on fat white airbags that looked like oversized marshmallows and I was hanging in mid-air, supported by my seat belt.
Then the car groaned and tipped and I threw my arms up instinctively to protect my head. There was a huge bang as we fell onto our side, the ground whacking into the door just inches from me.
And then everything went still. And very, very dark.
I only found out later that we’d driven onto an old, rarely used logging road and, disoriented by the snow, we’d been steadily climbing up into the hills. My mom and dad had seen the gap in the trees ahead of them and thought that the road simply dipped down slightly. They hadn’t realized they were driving right off the edge of a sheer drop.
We’d fallen almost eighty feet and now the SUV was lying on its side. The headlights had gone out and there were no streetlamps, out here. Everything was utterly black.
“Mom?” I asked.
No reply.
I hit the button on my seat belt, but the buckle didn’t release. “Dad?”
No reply.
I reached out into the darkness with both arms, trying to find the back of my dad’s seat. Straining forward, I found his headrest and then the softness of his hair. I rubbed it. Tears were forming in my eyes, now. “Dad?”
His head was heavy and didn’t move. He was either unconscious or….
“Mom?!” My voice was cracking, now. I reached out towards her, but she was diagonally across the car from me and I couldn’t reach her. After a moment, though, I heard the most welcome sound in the world: breathing “Mom! Mom, wake up! We crashed! Dad’s hurt! Wake up!”
But she didn’t stir. Unconscious. Maybe dad’s just unconscious, too. Maybe he’s just breathing too quietly for me to hear him. I started to wrestle with my seat belt, but the buckle was firmly jammed in its socket. I seemed to be unhurt, but I couldn’t move. Eventually, I gave a howl of frustration.
And then something dripped onto my leg. Something warm and wet, from up above me and in front, where my mom was sitting. I rubbed it between my fingers. Thick and sticky.
Blood.
“Mom?” Tears were rolling down my cheeks, now, and threatening to choke my voice off completely. “Mom, you have to wake up now!” I banged around in my seat, trying to make a noise, but it made no difference.
I waited for all the things you see on TV: wailing sirens and firefighters cutting us free and wrapping blankets around us, and doctors hurrying to help my parents. But nothing happened. No one came. It hit me that there’d been no one behind us on the road. No one had seen us go off the edge.
Going out for a drive had been a spur of the moment thing. No one knew we were out there.
And it was still snowing. Now that my eyes were adjusting to the darkness, I could just make out the shape of the flakes, softly settling on the side window that was now directly above me. The snow would cover up our tire tracks.
Suddenly, the car lit up with sound and light. My phone. My phone! It had shot off my lap during the crash and was now somewhere in the front of the car. I couldn’t see it, but I could hear the insistent, slightly tinny dance music I’d set as the ring tone and see the glow of its screen. My friend Dana. All I had to do was hit Answer and I could tell her to call for help.
I strained against my seat belt, but it wouldn’t release. I tried to pull it away from me so that I could wriggle out from under it, but something had happened to the reel the belt comes out of. It let me have half an inch of belt and then locked tight, refusing to pay out any more. However much I twisted and struggled, there wasn’t nearly enough room for me to slip out.
Dana gave up, and the music stopped. A few seconds later, the screen powered down and the car was plunged back into blackness. After the glow, it seemed even darker than before.
There was a tiny groan from my mom and I heard her move slightly. I screamed her name as hard as I could, but she didn’t wake. Another drop of blood hit my leg and then another, falling faster, now.
For the next few hours, I tried everything I could think of. I used my feet to try to reach for my phone, but it was too far away. I tried to gnaw through the seat belt with my teeth, but I barely made a dent on the fabric. I knew that no one would be able to see the car in the darkness and I prayed for morning.
But the side window, above me, grew darker and darker, shutting out even the faint light of the stars. The sound of the wind grew muffled and then stopped altogether. There was utter silence, as thick and terrifying as I’d ever known it, and utter darkness. The snow was burying us. By morning, there’d just be a drift.
The temperature started to drop. Without the heater on, the car shed all its heat into the snow. By midnight, I was losing feeling in my hands and feet. Then I started to shake and couldn’t stop. The air in the car started to grow stale and I wondered how tightly we were sealed in.
I screamed my mom and dad’s names more times than I can remember. But neither of them woke and all I could do was fixate on my mom’s ragged breathing, willing her to keep going.
A faint light filled the car, sunlight filtered through a layer of snow. Each time I thought I heard a distant car, I yelled until I was hoarse. But I knew it was useless. I was in a sealed car, under snow, and the other drivers would have their windows shut against the cold.
And then, just as the light outside grew brightest and I figured it was noon, my mom stopped breathing. And the cold in the car crept into me, burrowing down into my heart and my soul and froze me solid.
I was in there for two days. Towards the end of the second day, I passed out. I woke up in the hospital.
The doctors told me that I’d been dehydrated and suffering from hypothermia. They told me that my parents were dead.
A guy walking his dog had found us. He’d leaned against the buried car, thinking it was a rock, and some of the snow had fallen away. The newspapers called it a miracle. It didn’t feel like one. It felt as if the ice that had frozen me inside isolated me from everyone else.
I was twenty, so I was old enough to bury my parents and go back to college. I concentrated on my studies and gradually edged away from my friends. It was easier to be on my own. I couldn’t really connect with them. The ice dulled everything.
I existed like that for over a year. And then, just as I was about to enter my senior year, single and almost friendless, Roberta showed up. She was elegant and professional and yet warm and kind, and the same age as my mother would have been. She asked if I wanted to help my country and I said yes. She bought me hot chocolate and said that she knew a place where she thought I’d be happy, and all I had to do to get there was to make sure I aced all my classes.
So I did. I wanted to make her happy. And a year later, I went to work for the CIA.
I did my basic training and then I started translating phone calls. If anyone noticed that I was a little cold or that I didn’t seem to have a social life, they didn’t say anything. As I said before, a lot of us in the CIA aren’t exactly normal.
I worked. I slept and ate. But the ice inside me never melted. I was twenty-two, but I still felt twenty, unwilling and unable to think about things like relationships and marriage and my career. I did what I was told and I tried to keep Roberta and then Adam happy. I’m not sure why their opinion mattered so much to me, but it did.
And now I was in Moscow, and the ice should have been an advantage. This was the one situation where I couldn’t afford to let myself feel. And yet, for the first time, I’d felt things crack and thaw inside me.