Maxine, a search and rescue pilot, returns in midwinter to her childhood home in the Adirondacks. There, she conducts a search for a girl who while on a field trip in the mountains, was abducted by a stranger in a black pick-up truck. The search lasts for three days. Each night Maxine must face the girl's distraught mother, Dessa, and her own grandmother, Zofia, a reclusive Polish refugee. In sleep, Maxine is prey to nightmares and fragmented memories of a mother who abandoned her in childhood and was lost to insanity.