As Simple as Snow (26 page)

“None, really,” I said. “We were just trying to get to the bottom of something. Come on, Dad.” We left.

Driving home, my father turned to me and said, “I might have overreacted, but I’m just trying to help. Don’t you want to know who’s responsible?”

“Not really. It’s probably just some asshole at school, trying to be funny.” Even then I was fairly certain who was responsible, and I wasn’t in any hurry to find out for sure.

cemetery

Claire had started driving me home whenever she could use her mother’s car. Sometimes she would drive it to school in the morning and we’d leave from there in the afternoon, and other times we would walk to her house after school and then she would drive. It was almost the same distance from the school to my house as it was to Claire’s, but I didn’t mind. I didn’t even mind when we would get to her house and the car wouldn’t be there. I’d just warm up a bit and then head out.

She invited me into her room once. Everything was black. She had painted the ceiling and walls a deep black. On the floor was a futon, which was covered with a black sheet and a black comforter. The only other things in the room were a black dresser and a TV set on the floor near the futon. There was a Bible on top of the TV. When she closed the door behind us, the room was completely dark.

“How do you see anything?”

She turned on a light. “There’s nothing to see,” she said. “But look how good the TV looks.” She turned the TV on and switched off the light. We both sat on the futon. It was like being in bed in a movie theater.

“You don’t have a computer?”

“There’s one in my father’s office,” she said. “He lets me use it, but I don’t like it that much.”

“How about a stereo?”

“No,” she said. She made it sound like I was crazy even to think it. She had that in common with Anna: she seemed to be able to move the conversation where she wanted, shutting down subjects she didn’t want to discuss and making you feel stupid to continue talking about them.

“I’m hardly ever in this room anyway,” she said. “I use it for sleeping, and that’s about it.”

“You’re taking the word ‘bedroom’ a little literally, aren’t you?”

She laughed. “That’s exactly what Anna said the first time she was here.”

 

 

 

I asked Claire if she would drive me somewhere nearby, and she agreed.

As you come into town from the south, on Route 521, the cemetery is the first thing you see. It’s just on the left, surrounded by an old stone wall. The cemetery covers about five acres, and I always wondered how people knew so long ago how big the cemetery would need to be. I guess they figured that people would be dying forever, so they marked off a big enough area to keep people satisfied for a long time. There were graves that went back to the late 1700s, the first families of the town, their stones almost smooth, their names and dates and inscriptions faded away until you couldn’t tell who was buried there at all. A lot of the stones were broken, or tipping over.

Claire parked the car and I got out. “I think I’ll stay here,” she said. I was approaching the gate when I heard her car door close. I waited for her to catch up. The gate was locked, so we climbed over the stone wall. I walked through the straight rows of graves to a place near the back. There was snow on the front of my coat from the stones, and Claire came over and brushed it off. “You should at least look nice,” she joked.

Claire and I stood over Denise’s grave. There wasn’t a headstone, but a plaque at ground level with her name and the dates of her birth and death. “That’s my sister,” I said. What else was there to say, what else did I know about her? There weren’t photographs or stories. There was no time for that. I wondered what it meant for my mother and father, who had held her and brought her home from the hospital, only to return her to the hospital a week later, and then return her to nothingness.

“I didn’t know,” Claire said.

“We never come here.” There were empty spaces on either side of the plaque, plots for the rest of us, so we could all be in the ground together. It seemed like a bad joke; it seemed like a waste. I turned and looked at the length of the cemetery, the headstones sticking up stiffly in their rigid rows. I wondered how long the Caynes would wait until they decided to mark Anna’s life with a stone.

I imagined a big funeral for her, with the whole town there, everyone dressed in black. I had only one suit, which my parents had bought, for times like this (“weddings and other appropriate occasions,” I think, were their exact words), but I’d never worn it. I could see everyone standing in deep snow, solemnly listening to the preacher as he said some trivial words over her grave and her black coffin, smelling of wax and rosewood, was lowered into the open grave. I had imagined a similar funeral for myself hundreds of times, the whole town wailing and weeping, almost unable to go on without me. I imagined it because I knew it would never happen, but this was nearly real, this was sadness. I could see Mr. and Mrs. Cayne standing in the cemetery snow, quietly crying beside the casket. They probably had buried her hundreds of times in their minds already, trying to prepare themselves for the day when they really would bury her. Or bury something. What would they do if they never found her? Bury an empty box, or just put up a marker? These weren’t questions you could ask out loud.

“Where do you think they’ll put her?”

“What?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was just thinking about if she doesn’t come back, wondering where they might put her grave.”

Claire looked at me like I was crazy. “Would it matter?”

“I’m sure it matters to Mr. and Mrs. Cayne. And it matters to me. I mean, let’s say they never find her. What do they do, just put a marker here somewhere? I don’t want that, but the Caynes may want one spot where they can go and be reminded of her.”

“Like your sister?”

“That’s the idea, but we never come to see her. Never. It might be different for the Caynes, though.”

We walked slowly through the headstones. “What do you know about them, anyway?” I asked Claire.

“The Caynes? Less than you do, I’m sure.”

“I don’t know anything. We never talked about it. Anna never said anything about where they came from. I don’t think I heard her talk about one thing that happened before they got here.”

“She never talked about it with me either. They’re from down south, I think. That’s about all I know.”

“They seem to know everybody in town, but nobody seems to know them,” I said.

“My mother thinks something happened to them that they’re trying to forget. That’s why they don’t say anything.”

“Why does she think that?”

“I don’t know, people talking, I guess. Wondering what their story is, just like us.”

“What could have happened worse than this?”

 

 

 

Claire pulled up in front of my house, as she had a number of times, and I suddenly remembered something. “I completely forgot your birthday,” I said. “I can’t believe that you’ve been driving me around and it didn’t hit me until right now.”

“That’s all right,” she said. “It’s not that important.”

“Thanks for taking me down there. I hope it wasn’t too morbid.”

“We’re the ones who are supposed to be morbid,” she said.

“You’re not, though.”

“Keep it a secret—I’ve got a reputation.”

“Thanks again,” I said, and leaned over and kissed her. It wasn’t a conscious thing. I hadn’t thought of kissing her before I did so; I don’t recall ever thinking about it beforehand. But there we were.

“That was nice,” she said. “But I don’t think it was meant for me.”

She had me at a disadvantage. I didn’t know what I was doing, and I was embarrassed. “I don’t know,” I told her.

“You don’t have to say anything.” She leaned over and kissed me and then returned to her place behind the wheel. I sat and waited for what would happen next, but nothing did, so I got out of the car and went inside.

salamanders

Winter broke off, finally, a long ash crumbling at the end of a cigarette, burned out, weak and emptied. In late March the thermometer jumped almost thirty degrees, launching itself above sixty during the day. I started walking to school along the river. It was out of my way; I had to walk over from our house, then wind north along the banks, then cut along Town Street about half a mile to school. It took me almost an hour, forty minutes if I walked fast and didn’t stop, but I didn’t mind. I liked the walk.

The river sighed and snapped, the ice finally melting. I watched the water splash up from beneath the cracked surface, pushing its way around, trying to wrench itself from its deep sleep. Or maybe the ice was just tired, tired of hanging on all winter long, tired of gripping the same stone, the same spot in the bank, and was just giving up. Across the river I could see large chunks breaking free and disappearing under a shelf of ice, dragged into the water and taken off somewhere before disappearing. If it stayed warm, all the ice would be gone by the end of the week, and the river would move again, the fish could return to the surface, and fishermen would follow and try their best to outsmart them. It would all happen as it always had, as though nothing had changed, or had changed so naturally that you barely noticed.

The grass was almost free of snow, and looked brown and spent and ugly. The snow retreated to its final holdouts, piles on the edges of parking lots, the shadow of the woods. The days were bright and warm, but I found myself following the snow into the woods after school. It was calm and cool and quiet. Once spring came, the place would be filled with people smoking and making out and who knows what else. I wandered through the woods by the school and then walked along the river and into the woods where I had last seen Anna’s face, stuck on a stick in the snow. I wanted to find the spot again, but without using the map, so I ended up wandering through the thick evergreens, wasting time until I had to head home for dinner. One afternoon, just before April, I heard two voices arguing.

“Do you want me to call her?”

“It’s none of your business.”

It was Carl and his father. Carl was not happy. I didn’t move. I stood there in the snow, afraid they might hear my clumsy boots if I moved. I couldn’t see them, but from their voices I assumed they were behind me. I was afraid they might see me and recognize me. If they said something to me, I’d run, but if they couldn’t see me, I would wait until they left, and they would never know that I’d been there. Their voices were raised loud enough to hear clearly.

“You get your nose in enough of my business,” Carl was saying.

“Well, stay out of this.”

“If you do the right thing, I won’t have to get involved.”

Mr. Hathorne didn’t answer.

“Where are you going now?” Carl asked.

“I’m not going over there, don’t worry about it.”

“Just go home.”

“I’ve got things to do.”

“What?”

Again there was no answer.

“Do you have any money?” Carl said.

“No.”

“Good, then you can’t buy anything to drink.”

I could hear someone coming closer, and before I could do anything, he was behind me. Carl didn’t look surprised to see me. “Did you hear?”

“A little. Just the end. I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to do, so I didn’t do anything.”

“That’s all right. He was wandering around in the woods. I don’t know what he was doing.”

“My mother’s name didn’t come up, did it?”

“No,” Carl said. “We were talking about something else. Do you want me to ask about that?”

“No,” I said. “I’d rather not know.”

“Me too.” He flashed a smile. “What are you doing now?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on, then.”

We walked over to his house. Mrs. Hathorne had the kitchen smelling good; a huge pot of stew simmered on the stove, and biscuits were baking in the oven.

“That’s a winter meal, Mom. Winter’s over.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it. You may need this stew after all. The both of you. Do you want to stay for dinner?”

“Sure,” I said.

We went to Carl’s room. I sat at his computer while he unlocked his file cabinet and updated his books. He had just finished locking the cabinet when the doorbell rang. His mother called for him and he left the room. When he came back, Claire was with him. I thought she might have been looking for me. Her black hair was pulled up through a white scrunchie, so it fanned up in the back. From the front, the rising tuft looked ceremonial, like a tribal headdress. She might have been a beautiful Indian woman, a princess from some dark and secret land. I didn’t want to stop looking at her.

“Did you drive over?” I asked.

“I had to walk—my mom’s got the car. I’m thinking about getting my own.”

“Get a BMW,” Carl said.

“If you pay for it.”

“Who’s the first person you’d hit with it?” I said. Claire didn’t say anything. “Put me at the top of the list, would you?”

 

 

 

Carl’s mom drove us home. We were going down McKinley Road, near Glass Pond (Anna always called it “See More Pond,” I guess because there wasn’t much of one, it was more like a swamp or a marsh, except when there was a lot of rain or snowmelt, like now), when we saw some rubbery things glistening on the road in the headlights. They were four or five inches long and their bodies looked wet and silvery, like curious little snakes with their heads raised into the air.

“It’s the salamanders,” Carl yelled. “Be careful, Mom.” Mrs. Hathorne slowed the car to a near-stop and tried to avoid the animals as they worked their way across the warm pavement. Every year, near the end of winter, the salamanders migrated from their winter home in the woods to the swamps and ponds and pools where they could breed. There were hundreds of them on the road, and Mrs. Hathorne was swerving wildly to avoid them. Finally she sped up. “Someone else is going to run over them, anyway,” she said.