As Simple as Snow

Table of Contents

 

 

PRAISE FOR
as simple as snow

“
As Simple as Snow
is one of the best books I’ve read in a long, long time. Galloway draws you into another world, and you’ll be wholly involved from the opening line, with its blunt force. He awakens all our curiosities and then satisfies them, so that the only question left unanswered is how long it’ll be before he gives us something else to read.”

—Kaye Gibbons, author of
Divining Women

 

“There’s no doubt this rich, complex puzzle is the work of a talented author.”—
Publishers Weekly

 

“An intriguing read.”
—Library Journal

 

“Fascinating . . . oddly mesmerizing. Its ambiguities and unanswered questions, its teasing foreshadowings and foreboding make it hard to forget.”—
Booklist

 

“Engagingly written.”—
Kirkus Reviews

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Copyright © 2005 by Gregory Galloway.

 

Lines from “A Season in Hell” are reprinted from
Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works
, translated and copyright © 1967, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1975 by Paul Schmidt. .

 

All rights reserved.
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eISBN : 978-1-440-68469-2

 

 

Galloway, Gregory.
As simple as snow / Gregory Galloway.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-440-68469-2

1. High school students—Fiction. 2. Missing persons—Fiction. 3. Teenage boys—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3607.A419A
813’.6—dc22

 

 

That, mermaid-like, unto the floor she slid,
One half appeared, the other half was hid.

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE,
Hero and Leander

good-bye to everyone

Anna Cayne had moved here in August, just before our sophomore year in high school, but by February she had, one by one, killed everyone in town. She didn’t do it all by herself—I helped with a few, including my best friend—but still, it was no small accomplishment, even if it was a small town.

She captured all of these lives and deaths in fourteen black-jacketed composition notebooks. By the time she had finished, there were more than 1,500 obituaries, on just under 2,800 handwritten pages. The lives she wrote about were real, all true, but the deaths were fictions she invented, an average of around eight a day. “I’m not predicting the future,” she said, “but it’s only a matter of time before everyone catches up to me.”

She had known things about people, or had discovered them—the secrets and private information that showed up in her notebooks were things that people who had spent their entire lives in our town didn’t know. The funny thing is, during the months when the bodies were piling up in the imagination of Anna Cayne, I don’t think a single person actually died in town; it was the longest drought for the funeral home that anyone could remember.

The obituaries were private; her friends and a few other people knew that Anna was working on them, but besides me, I don’t believe anyone else was allowed to read them. She must have started the project on her very first day in town, the day I saw her sitting on the front lawn of her new home, writing in one of her notebooks as the rest of us stood with her parents, watching their belongings parade from the long yellow truck into the house. And after she had written the last page almost seven months later, she was gone.

Maybe.

 

 

 

She left behind little more than suggestions, hints, and suspicions. But there were enough of them to make you go crazy trying to figure out what it all meant. But you have to try.

I have to change some things—some names, some events—and then there are things that happened that I didn’t see, didn’t experience, and that I’ll never know. There’s stuff I’ve tried to piece together and stuff I’ve tried to leave alone—I had to rely mostly on what I remember and what I could find.

There are a few newspaper accounts of some of the events, some TV coverage, and there’s the police report (which I wasn’t allowed to see), but none of those is really helpful. They all focus on the superficial details, and miss the real story of what happened. They’ve got their own version of the world to sell. Besides, they only tell what they’ve been told anyway, and very few of them talked to the person who knows the most about it—me.

This is what I know happened, or think happened. I fell in love with a girl, and then she left, and later she tried to come back, or I thought she did, and I went after her. It should have been simple but in the end it could not have been more complicated, and maybe that was the whole point to begin with, but if love is true and still leaves you lonely, what good does it do? I started going over everything again, thinking I might find a way to her, wherever she was, or at least figure out what to do with all the things she left behind.

“You have your whole life ahead of you,” my mother told me, “don’t spend all your time in the past.” It’s good advice, I know it is, but the past has its own ideas. It can follow you around with a life of its own, casting a long shadow.

spooky girlfriend

She was born in a thunderstorm. I don’t know if that’s true, but somebody once wrote that about her and it seems to fit. She swirled into and out of my life, quickly changing everything, a dark question mark disappearing into a darker hole. Her name was Anna Cayne. “It’s supposed to be ‘Coyne,’” she told me in maybe the second conversation I had with her, “and there’s a couple of theories of how it got to be spelled with an
a.
One is that some of the family was involved in some sort of criminal activity a long time ago, hundreds of years—murder, kidnapping, that sort of thing—and that the more respectable relatives changed the spelling of their name to distance themselves from the bad ones. Another version has it that it was the criminals who changed their name to Cayne, so it would be harder to find them once they left their old lives behind.” I told her that I’d heard the same thing about my family, since my last name was also available in an
o
and an
a
version.

“You’d think that if they really wanted to distance themselves from each other, they’d change more than just one letter,” I said.

“Well, it’s a bit mysterious,” she said, maybe a little put-off by the fact that her story wasn’t as unique as she thought.

She and her parents had moved into town, which in itself was an odd occurrence, since not too many people moved into town; they almost all moved out. But there were the Caynes, watching the movers unload the truck and put their boxed belongings in the white two-story three-bedroom house on Twixt Road, just before it intersected with Town Street, which ran down by the river. The neighbors watched too, slowly pulled out of their houses and down the street, attracted to the yellow moving truck as if it were a huge magnet. They came by and introduced themselves and stood with the Caynes like spectators at a parade, a ball game, or some great historical event worthy of a rapt, attentive crowd.

My friend Carl Hathorne and I rode our bikes over and stood with the large group that had formed. We didn’t really care about the truck or what came out of it; we didn’t really care about the parents and what they looked like. We’d already heard that the Caynes had an only child, a girl our age. We wanted to see the girl.

We were disappointed; she was not what we had expected, and far from what we had hoped for. She came out of the house wearing a pair of headphones over her short, straight blond hair, the cord snaked into the pocket of a short black jacket. It was the kind of jacket someone would pump gas in, worn on a hot, humid day when it was, with complete certainty, the only jacket being worn in town. Under the jacket she had a black shirt, which, I found out later, was long-sleeved. She never wore short sleeves. She was also wearing a pair of jeans and heavy boots—black. She wore thick black eyeliner and a black expression. She sat down in the grass and started writing in a black notebook. I didn’t give her much thought that day, but once I got to know her I often wondered whether she had been completely different the day before we first saw her, whether she had dressed in normal clothes, with a more inviting appearance and expression. Except for two notable exceptions, I never witnessed any other incarnation; she was always in her Goth gear, black and blonde and brooding.

“It’s a freak show,” Carl said. “Let’s go back to your house.”

I lived about a mile and a half north of the Caynes, in a house that was very similar to theirs. We lived on Valley View Road, but you couldn’t see a valley from it. We were actually at the bottom of a hill, where we saw only hills, in all directions.