"Is anybody out there?" I yelled at the snow-laden trees and empty houses. "Any neighbor who would like to help us shovel snow?"

No one answered, but the man from next door walked outside to stare at Jessica and me, snow shovels in our wet gloved hands. He stared for a moment, turned around, and walked back into his warm house. He didn't say a word.

"Mom, we'll never get this car shoveled out of the driveway before the store closes," Jessica pointed out the obvious as the light began to dim in the shadow of tall evergreens. She threw her orange shovel to the side of the semi-shovel led driveway, stood dripping with sweat and the flurry of new snow, and looked into my eyes. Her pale face, framed by auburn waves of long, maiden hair, seemed still, silent, resolved. The pink birthmark on her left cheek was hardly visible. Her eyes flashed darker than usual, like the sky above treetops before night drives away the blue.

I expected her to speak, to ask The Question--the one I had heard for months, but she said nothing. And that Nothing held within itself sixteen and a half years of Abuse from a man I called Husband, and she called Father. Not "Daddy" anymore, just Father.

Behind her stood the three-story, half a million-dollar, wood and glass house framed by hundred-feet-high silver fir trees. A castle, a tower, a Beautiful Prison.

I held my blue shovel by its bent and padded handle for easy shoveling--halfway between the three-foot-high berm and the grey sky. The dirty black Subaru station wagon waited behind me in silence, the doors unlocked, the gas tank full, the steering panel ready for a key.

"Say it!" I shouted at Jessica--my Jesse who had changed from a happy toddler with pigtails that bounced when she ran--to this tall, silent teenager with pale skin and piercing blue eyes.

She stood there as the sudden flurry ceased and sunset cast rays upon the virgin snow. She stood like an angel, a Guardian who leads children safely home. She raised one arm and pointed at something behind the car, her red vest covered with white, her brown eyelashes with crystals.

I did not have to turn around to see the Door open in the air, the Door to a new Life, a new dimension. I did not have to open my palm to feel the Key Jesse had just given me, a key more beautiful than the ornate silver one I pinned to capes for dress-up--or the large brass one upon my dresser, which I said would open my castle's door.

"Where is your castle?" Jonathan would ask me.

"In England, where I used to live, by the vast, heather-covered moors," I would reply. "You've seen it, in the photos I snapped and framed upstairs."

I had not been to England for fourteen years. I had changed England to another country much like it but more lovely and uncrowded--in another Hemisphere across another Sea.

My thoughts turned back to where we stood, in the snow, our feet cold in their boots. Jessica continued looking at me as if waiting for directions. Still holding the shovel between sky and snow, I felt a sudden piercing like a sword thrust through me, followed by the stillness before death or birth.

"I will say the Question," I spoke, softly as to a frightened child (was it Jess or me?). "And this time I will answer it."

All the strength and weakness that had kept me in an abusive marriage snapped inside me, like a pine sapling under a blizzard's white burden. I knew I could not step again--meekly, like a slave or a sheep--into that house. Nor could I lead my children in after me. We could not pretend anymore.

"When are you going to draw the line and leave Dad?" I yelled at myself that Question Jess had asked me for months. "I am so tired of seeing him hurt you and us!"

I raised the shovel above my head and plunged it into the snowberm's graceful, untouched surface that glinted like a million crystals in the last light of afternoon.

I pulled the shovel out to reveal a perfect line of white with aquamarine edges. I set the shovel down, walked to the Subaru, opened the front door, pulled out my digital camera, took a photo, and announced,

"Jessica, there is your Line."

Her face came alive with conflicting emotions.

"Are you kidding?" she asked, stepping toward the line in the snow. "Why now? Are you sure? Don't do it just for me!"

For the first time we could remember, Donna was down in the valley, staying in his office so as "not to deal with the snow." Jonathan, almost eleven, was playing up the road at a friend's house. We had Air New Zealand tickets stamped with "June," for our fourth summer/winter there. We could change them to April, ask friends to help us pack, get a ride to the airport, and fly across 10,5000 kilometers (about 8,000 miles) of ocean to beloved islands near Antarctica, where the Silver Fern grows, the people let you into their hearts and homes, and children and wives are better protected from abuse.

We had no American family to turn to, no inherited house for retreating. The land across the sea seemed not just the place of our dreams but a real Door we could enter. A real keyhole in which we could turn a key.

The Southern Alps, with their year-round glaciers and aquamarine rivers and lakes, could hide us.
Jessica and I looked at each other, and two smiles bubbled up from somewhere long covered over by tears.
"See, there's the Door," I gestured behind me. "And you have just handed me the Key."

"And you have just cut a Line in the Snow," Jessica said as we embraced each other.

With help from Tara, Jessica's only and best friend--and Tara's parents--we packed and left that night. We followed their white, overloaded truck (Jonathan wanted to ride with them). In our packed Subaru, Jessica and I watched the nearly full moon shine over the cedar trees covered in snowcrystals, and the fields of smooth snow without a single footprint. The very air glowed with light, and we giggled like prisoners set free.

The forest, the mountains, the whole world lay open and unexplored before us, and we could step into it all if we chose. But we picked New Zealand, twelve-and-a-half hours' flight across the Pacific, in the Southern Hemisphere where the Southern Cross hangs in the sky and the Milky Way looks so close, as if we were in a spaceship exploring it, or as if we could hold up our thumbs and hitch a ride through the Galaxy. New Zealand, where the green hills, dotted with sheep, stretch toward rivers one can drink from, and the buzzy bees hum through flowers, and the Kea parrot calls across the snowy mountain rocks, and the Tui birds sing out their names:

"Tu-ii, Tu-ii!" at midnight, in a Kauri tree, while we fly--free at last--through the night, toward its call.