Valley of the Moms

Prologue

A BODY. OR what used to be one. This time of year, winter, is unforgiving—a canvas of white too frigid for humanity.

If a body might become bloated in Massachusetts’ humid summer, the opposite is true in the coldest month of January.

Here is a person that looks more like a porcelain doll, with pale, blue-tinged skin, and the dull, cloudy eyes of a fish you wouldn’t bring home from the market.

The Ipswich River no doubt holds many secrets, and it has held hers for days, until now, when it has released her from its frozen bottom.

The first real hard cold—an eruption—will do that.

The river tracks forty-five miles from Burlington through its namesake’s Great Marsh, meandering through the small towns of Essex County.

It’s mostly shallow, a canoeing spot for locals, certainly not as dangerous as the nearby Merrimack, where the Coast Guard is regularly dispatched to rescue boats that have been caught in the dangerous choppy waters where the river meets the Atlantic.

And yet. A danger, clearly, a pernicious river, a body of water that consumes and conceals.

This frozen relic, she has arrived at the once-muddy banks, herself a new mystery.

In small towns, where the daily drone of life is everyone’s business, a woman does not just show up on a riverbank in the middle of the winter, expelled from the ice and snow and mud.

In a small town, there are no accidents or coincidences, only things that have not yet come to light.

Walking past the canoe launch on a snowy Saturday afternoon, a couple stops to admire the light.

It is yellow, it is orange, it is somehow also almost blue.

They take out phones to capture the flakes dancing off the trees, the once-sunken river that is now almost overflowing with recent rains and snow, so different from a drought the year before, and then they see her, a doll, hair beneath a layer of ice, Ophelia in winter, with the vermilion sun setting, and it is beautiful, and it is criminal, all this loss, all this that goes unanswered.