A Year on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [123]
“Oh my God, I was so scared!” Bridget sobbed. “It got dark and I couldn’t see anything. I lost the path—”
“It’s okay, Bridge, we’re here, it’s okay—”
“Thank you, thank you for coming for me—”
“Look Bridget.” Cici had to practically shout in Bridget’s ear over a sudden roaring blast of wind, and she grasped her shoulder and pulled her around. “You’re almost home! We can see the house from here!” Sure enough, winking in and out with the motion of waving tree limbs and driving snow, were the lighted windows of Ladybug Farm. “Just hold on to my coat. The storm is getting worse. We have to get back!”
Lindsay wound her arm through Cici’s, and Bridget twisted her fingers into the belt of Cici’s coat. Their flashlights barely penetrated the tornado of twisting, spinning snow as they plunged forward, heads bent to the wind, eyes narrowed against the stinging snow and the winking, glittering promise that was home.
And suddenly, like a mirage that disappeared just when it was within reach, the house was gone.
They stumbled to a stop, disoriented, three lone figures on an endless plane of floating white, feeling, for a moment, almost weightless in the depth of their isolation. Then the wind roared again, buffeting them against one another, and Lindsay shouted, “The power must be out!”
Cici nodded, trying to shield her eyes from the sting of the snow with her hand. “We’re not that far from home!” she replied. “We just have to keep going straight!”
“How do we know what straight is?” Bridget cried.
But they knew they had to keep moving, and move they did, clinging tightly to each other and fighting the wind step by infinitesimal step. The flashlights were almost useless, unable to penetrate more than a few inches in front of them and revealing nothing but driving sheets of snow, which, in certain terrifying moments and with no other reference points, actually seemed to be falling upside down. They were lost in a valley of white noise and white air, air so thick with snow it was hard to breathe, air that clung to their clothes and their exposed skin and weighed them down, yet they pushed forward, unable to talk, unable even to think, swimming through the thick white night and holding on to each other, just holding on.
Cici swung her flashlight before her like a blind man with a cane, and suddenly something knocked the light from her hand. Her cry was swallowed up by the wind like her light was swallowed up by the snow and she stumbled forward, hitting something solid. Lindsay caught the collar of Cici’s jacket and shouted something Cici couldn’t hear. Bridget wrapped her arm around Cici’s and, flattening herself against the solid plane, began to inch along its surface. Suddenly the plane gave way and they fell, as one, out of the white and roaring vortex into peace.
Cici literally fell to her knees while Lindsay and Bridget struggled to close the door on the violence of the night. When the other two sank to the straw-covered floor beside her, the shaking beam of Lindsay’s flashlight picked out the details of their own barn.
Weathered gray walls and plank floor. A deer munching hay in one of the stalls. A corral of sheep at the far end of the barn and there, just across from them, curled up in a nest of hay, a peacefully sleeping sheepdog.
For a long time, there was nothing but the sound of their ragged breathing, the shuffling and soft baaing of the sheep in their corral, and the whistle of the wind, sounding tame and far away now, outside their walls.
Then Cici gasped, “Is everyone—okay?”
Bridget just nodded, and Lindsay gulped for air. “How about you?”
“I don’t think,” she managed, “I’ve ever been so scared in all my life.”
Bridget grasped a handful of straw and flung it furiously across the room, where it dissipated