The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (16 page)

“What if the weather doesn’t cooperate?” Paula’d asked.

“It will,” Stacey’d said. And here it was, snowing. She wondered if it was snowing in Springfield, too. Of course it is, she thought. Whatever Stacey wants, Stacey gets, Paula thought. Even Jim.

Don’t think about that, she told herself. Don’t
think about anything. Just concentrate on getting through the wedding. With luck, Jim won’t even be there except for the ceremony, and you won’t have to spend any time with him at all.

She picked up the in-flight magazine and tried to read and then plugged in her headphones and listened to Channel 4, “Seasonal Favorites.” The first song was “White Christmas” by the Statler Brothers.

At 3:38
A.M., it
began to snow in Bowling Green, Kentucky. The geese circling the city flew back to the park, landed, and hunkered down to sit it out on their island in the lake. Snow began to collect on their backs, but they didn’t care, protected as they were by down and a thick layer of subcutaneous fat designed to keep them warm even in sub-zero temperatures.

At 3:39 A.M., Luke Lafferty woke up,
convinced he’d forgotten to set the goose his mother had talked him into having for Christmas Eve dinner out to thaw. He went and checked. He
had
set it out. On his way back to bed, he looked out the window and saw it was snowing, which didn’t worry him. The news had said isolated snow showers for Wichita, ending by mid-morning, and none of his relatives lived more than an hour and a half away,
except Aunt Lulla, and if she couldn’t make it, it wouldn’t exactly put a crimp in the conversation. His mom and Aunt Madge talked so much it was hard for anybody else to get a word in edgewise, especially Aunt Lulla. “She was always the shy one,” Luke’s mother said, and it was true, Luke couldn’t remember her saying anything other than “Please pass the potatoes,” at their family get-togethers.

What did worry him was the goose. He should never have let his mother talk him into having one. It was bad enough her having talked him into having the family dinner at his place. He had no idea how to cook a goose.

“What if something goes wrong?” he’d protested. “Butterball doesn’t have a goose hotline.”

“You won’t need a hotline,” his mother had said. “It’s just like cooking a turkey, and
it’s not as if you had to cook it. I’ll be there in time to put it in the oven and everything. All you have to do is set it out to thaw. Do you have a roasting pan?”

“Yes,” Luke had said, but lying there, he couldn’t remember if he did. When he got up at 4:14 A.M. to check—he did—it was still snowing.

At 4:16 Mountain Standard Time, Slade Henry, filling in on WRYT’s late-night talk show out
of Boise, said, “For all you folks who wanted a white Christmas, it looks like you’re going to get your wish. Three to six inches forecast for western Idaho.” He played several bars of Johnny Cash’s “White Christmas,” and then went back to discussing JFK’s assassination with a caller who was convinced Clinton was somehow involved.

“Little
Rock isn’t all that far from Dallas, you know,” the caller
said. “You could drive it in four and a half hours.”

Actually, you couldn’t, because 1-30 was icing up badly, due to freezing rain that had started just after midnight and then turned to snow. The treacherous driving conditions did not slow Monty Luffer down as he had a Ford Explorer. Shortly after five, he reached to change stations on the radio so he didn’t have to listen to “those damn Backstreet
Boys” singing “White Christmas,” and slid out of control just west of Texarkana. He crossed the median, causing the semi in the left-hand east-bound lane to jam on his brakes and jackknife, and resulting in a thirty-seven-car pileup that closed the road for the rest of the night and all the next day.

At 5:21 A.M. Pacific Standard Time, four-year-old Miguel Gutierrez jumped on his mother, shouting,
“Is it Christmas yet?”

“Not on Mommy’s stomach, honey,” Pilar murmured and rolled over.

Miguel crawled over her and repeated his question directly into her ear.
“Is it Christmas yet?”

“No,” she said groggily. “Tomorrow’s Christmas. Go watch cartoons for a few minutes, okay, and then Mommy’ll get up,” and pulled the pillow over her head.

Miguel was back again immediately. He can’t find the
remote, she thought wearily, but that couldn’t be it, because he jabbed her in the ribs with it. “What’s the matter, honey?” she said.

“Santa isn’t gonna come,” he said tearfully, which brought her fully awake.

He thinks Santa won’t be able to find him, she thought. This is all Joe’s fault. According to the original custody agreement, she had Miguel for Christmas and Joe had him for New Year’s,
but he’d gotten the judge to change it so they split Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and then, after she’d told Miguel, Joe had announced he needed to switch.

When Pilar had said no, he’d threatened to take her back to court, so she’d agreed, after which he’d informed her that “Christmas Day” meant her delivering Miguel on Christmas Eve so he could wake up and open his presents at Joe’s.

“He
can open your presents to him before you come,” he’d said, knowing full well Miguel still believed in Santa Claus. So after supper she was delivering both Miguel
and
his presents to Joe’s in Escondido, where she would not get to see Miguel open them.

“I can’t go to Daddy’s,” Miguel had said when she’d explained the arrangements, “Santa’s gonna bring my presents
here.”

“No, he won’t,” she’d said.
“I sent Santa a letter and told him you’d be at your daddy’s on Christmas Eve, and he’s going to take your presents there.”

“You sent it to the North Pole?” he’d demanded.

“To the North Pole. I took it to the post office this morning,” and he’d seemed contented with that answer. Till now.

“Santa’s going to come,” she said, cuddling him to her. “He’s coming to Daddy’s, remember?”

“No, he’s
not,” Miguel sniffled.

Damn Joe. I shouldn’t have given in, she thought, but every time they went back to court, Joe and his snake of a lawyer managed to wangle new concessions out of the judge, even though until the divorce was final, Joe had never paid any attention to Miguel at all. And she just couldn’t afford any more court costs right now.

“Are you worried about Daddy living in Escondido?”
she asked Miguel. “Because Santa’s magic. He can travel all over California in one night. He can travel all over the
world
in one night.”

Miguel, snuggled against her, shook his head violently. “No, he can’t!”

“Why not?”

“Because it isn’t
snowing!
I want it to snow. Santa can’t come in his sleigh if it doesn’t.”

Paula’s flight landed in Springfield at 7:48 A.M. Central Standard Time, twenty
minutes late. Jim met her at the airport. “Stacey’s having her hair done,” he said. “I was afraid I wouldn’t get here in time. It was a good thing your flight was a few minutes late.”

“There was snow in Denver,” Paula said, trying not to look at him. He was as cute as ever, with the same knee-weakening smile.

“It just started to snow here,” he said.

How
does she do it? Paula thought. You had
to admire Stacey. Whatever she wanted, she got. I wouldn’t have had to mess with carrying this stuff on, Paula thought, handing Jim the hanging bag with her dress in it. There’s no way my luggage would have gotten lost. Stacey wanted it here.

“The roads are already starting to get slick,” Jim was saying. “I hope my parents get here okay. They’re driving down from Chicago.”

They will, Paula thought.
Stacey wants them to.

Jim got Paula’s bags off the carousel and then said, “Hang on, I promised Stacey I’d tell her as soon as you got here.” He flipped open his cell phone and put it to his ear. “Stacey? She’s here. Yeah, I will. Okay, I’ll pick them up on our way. Yeah. Okay.”

He flipped the phone shut. “She wants us to pick up the evergreen garlands on our way,” he said, “and then I have
to come back and get Kindra and David. We need to check on their flights before we leave.”

He led the way upstairs to ticketing so they could look at the arrival board. Outside the terminal windows snow was falling, large, perfect, lacy flakes.

“Kindra’s on the two-nineteen from Houston,” Jim said, scanning the board, “and David’s on the eleven-forty from Newark. Oh, good, they’re both on time.”

Of course they are, Paula thought, looking at the board. The snow in Denver must be getting worse. All the Denver flights had “delayed” next to them, and so did a bunch of others: Cheyenne and Portland and Richmond. As she watched, Boston and then Chicago changed from “on time” to “delayed” and Rapid City went from “delayed” to “cancelled.” She looked at Kindra’s and David’s flights again. They
were still on time.

Ski areas in Aspen, Lake Placid, Squaw Valley, Stowe, Lake Tahoe, and Jackson Hole woke to several inches of fresh powder. The snow was greeted with relief by the people who had paid ninety dollars for their lift tickets, with irritation by the ski resort owners, who didn’t see why it couldn’t have come two weeks earlier when people were making their Christmas reservations,
and with whoops of delight by snowboarders Kent Slakken and Bodine Cromps. They promptly set out from Breckenridge without maps, matches, helmets, avalanche beacons, avalanche probes, or telling anyone where they were going, for an off-limits backcountry area with “totally extreme slopes.”

At 7:05, Miguel
came in and jumped on Pilar again, this time on her bladder, shouting, “It’s snowing! Now
Santa can come! Now Santa can come!”

“Snowing?” she said blearily. In L.A.? “Snowing? Where?”

“On TV. Can I make myself some cereal?”

“No,” she said, remembering the last time. She reached for her robe. “You go watch TV some more and Mommy’ll make pancakes.”

When she brought the pancakes and syrup in, Miguel was sitting, absorbed, in front of the TV, watching a man in a green parka standing
in the snow in front of an ambulance with flashing lights, saying, “—third weather-related fatality in Dodge City so far this morning—”

“Let’s find some cartoons to watch,” Pilar said, clicking the remote.

“—outside Knoxville, Tennessee, where snow and icy conditions have caused a multi-car accident—”

She clicked the remote again.

“—to Columbia, South Carolina, where a surprise snowstorm has
shut off power to—”

Click.

“—problem seems to be a low-pressure area covering Canada and the northern two-thirds of the United States, bringing snow to the entire Midwest and Mid-Atlantic States and—”

Click.

“—snowing here in Bozeman—”

“I told you it was snowing,” Miguel said happily, eating his pancakes, “just like I wanted it to. After breakfast can we make a snowman?”

“Honey, it isn’t
snowing here in California,” Pilar said. “That’s the national weather, it’s not here. That reporter’s in Montana, not California.”

Miguel grabbed the remote and clicked to a reporter standing in the snow in front of a giant redwood tree. “The snow started about four this morning here in Monterey, California. As you can see,” she said, indicating her raincoat and umbrella, “it caught everybody
by surprise.” “
She’s
in California,” Miguel said.

“She’s
in northern California,” Pilar said, “which gets a lot colder than it does here in L.A. L.A.’s too warm for it to snow.”

“No, it’s not,” Miguel said and pointed out the window, where big white flakes were drifting down onto the palm trees across the street.

At 9:40 Central Standard Time the cell phone Nathan Andrews thought he’d turned
off rang in the middle of a grant money meeting that was already going badly. Scheduling the meeting in Omaha on the day before Christmas had seemed like a good idea at the time—businessmen had hardly any appointments that day and the spirit of the season was supposed to make them more willing to open their pocketbooks—but instead they were merely distracted, anxious to do their last-minute Mercedes-Benz
shopping or get the Christmas office party started or whatever it was businessmen did, and worried about the snow that had started during rush hour this morning.

Plus, they were morons. “So you’re saying you want a grant to study global warming, but then you talk about wanting to measure snow levels,” one of them had said. “What does snow have to do with global warming?”

Nathan had tried to
explain
again
how warming could lead to increased amounts of moisture in the atmosphere and thus increased precipitation in the form of rain and snow, and how that increased snowfall could lead to increased albedo and surface cooling.

“If it’s getting cooler, it’s not getting warmer,” another one of the businessmen had said. “It can’t be both.”

“As a matter of fact, it can,” he’d said and launched
into his explanation of how polar melting could lead to an increase in freshwater in the North Atlantic, which would float on top of the Gulf Stream, preventing its warm water from sinking and cooling, and effectively shutting the current down. “Europe would freeze,” he’d said.

“Well, then, global warming would be a good thing, wouldn’t it?” yet another one had said. “Heat the place up.”

He
had patiently tried to explain how the world would grow both hotter and colder, with widespread droughts, flooding, and a sharp increase in severe weather. “And these changes may happen extremely quickly,” he’d said. “Rather than temperatures gradually increasing and sea levels rising, there may be a sudden, unexpected event—a discontinuity. It may take the form of an abrupt, catastrophic temperature
increase or a superhurricane or other form of megastorm, occurring without any warning. That’s why this project is so critical. By setting up a comprehensive climate data base, we’ll be able to create more accurate computer models, from which we’ll be able to—”

“Computer models!” one of them had snorted. “They’re wrong more often than they’re right!”

“Because they don’t include enough factors,”
Nathan said. “Climate is an incredibly complicated system, with literally thousands of factors interacting in intricate ways—weather patterns, clouds, precipitation, ocean currents, manmade activities, crops. Thus far computer models have only been able to chart a handful of factors. This project will chart over two hundred of them and will enable the models to be exponentially more accurate.
We’ll be able to predict a discontinuity before it happens—”