As Simple as Snow (28 page)

Claire was there, all right. I thought I should go and check myself in. Maybe they would give me some pills or something to stop me from thinking so much. Maybe they’d drill holes in my brain and steam would come hissing out. Maybe they’d just slice part of it away, scrape away mold and crust, and I could spend the rest of my life sitting in a chair with a stupid smile on my face, happy and oblivious of the world.

The next morning I had my mother drive me to the hospital in Shearing. They wouldn’t let me see Claire. They wouldn’t let my mother see her either. Claire was in the ICU. They would let only immediate family members in there. My mother talked to one of the nurses but no one would even tell her why Claire was in the hospital. We drove back home.

I went over to Carl’s.

“I didn’t sell anything to her,” he said. “I don’t sell that shit.”

“Who did?”

“I don’t know.”

“You know.”

“You don’t even know why she’s in the hospital,” he said.

“All I know is what Bryce told me.”

“That’s right.”

“What do you know?” I said.

“The same as you. I don’t know anything.”

Claire was in the hospital for three days. My mother drove me there again after school one day. She stayed in the waiting area while I went to Claire’s room. As I turned the corner toward her room, I thought I saw Carl at the end of the hallway. Whoever it was, he moved quickly; I couldn’t be sure that it was Carl, and I almost followed to see whether it was. I couldn’t think of any reason why he’d be in the hospital; he didn’t know Claire well enough to visit her, unless what Bryce had said was true.

I entered Claire’s room. It had the same sterile smell that I remembered from the train, only with more plastic. Claire was sitting up in bed, but her eyes were shut. The other bed in the room was empty. The dividing curtain was pulled all the way back against the wall, and the bed was precisely made, with sharp creases and perfect pillows. It looked rigid, fake, a little scary, like the inside of a coffin. I had expected to see tubes coming out of Claire’s nose and arms, but there was nothing. She could have been taking a nap in the hospital, perfectly fine and ready to leave when she opened her eyes. Her hair was a mess, tangled at the back of her head, and she didn’t have on any makeup. She was wearing a hospital gown with a robe over it. This was the first time I’d seen her without her Goth gear. She looked healthier. Without makeup, her face had color; it was friendlier without the black circles that usually surrounded her eyes. She appeared too healthy to be in a hospital bed; it didn’t look right. I stood in the doorway, wondering whether I should leave, but she turned, opened her eyes, and smiled. It was a tired, forced smile.

“I won’t stay long,” I said. “I just wanted to see how you’re doing.”

“Stay awhile. It’s so boring in here.”

“When do you get to go home?”

“They said that if I’m not out of here by five tonight, it will be first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Why is that?”

“I don’t know. Paperwork or something. It’s like a restaurant, your meal isn’t over until the check comes.”

“Where are your folks?”

“My mom had to go pick up my sister from school. I don’t know where my dad is. He hasn’t been here that much.”

“I’m sorry.”

“He’s just mad.”

“Your mom’s not mad?”

“That will be later.”

“There’s a rumor around school about the whole thing,” I said. “Well, actually a couple of them.” I waited to see if she wanted to hear them. She gave me another tired smile. “One of them is that this was deliberate, and the other is that my friend Carl is responsible.”

“Responsible how?”

“That he sold you some bad stuff.”

“Who is saying that?”

“A lot of people now, but I heard it from Bryce.” The first part wasn’t true. I had only heard it from Bryce.

“Bryce is an asshole.” She hadn’t really answered the question. I waited, but she didn’t go any further.

“How’d you get here?” she asked.

“My mom. She’s in the waiting room.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. You shouldn’t keep her out there.”

“It’s all right, she’s good at sitting around doing nothing. I don’t think it’s possible for her to get bored. Or else she’s so bored all the time, it seems natural to her.”

We were silent for a little while.

“At least you don’t have a roommate,” I said.

“There was one, but she left.”

“She got better?”

“I don’t know. They just wheeled her out last night and she never came back. I was kind of out of it anyway, but they never tell you anything.”

“It sounds kind of creepy.”

“Hospitals are like that. You should be here at night. You hear all sorts of strange, horrible noises, and people are coming in and looking at you, waking you up and taking your temperature or blood pressure or whatever, and half the time you don’t know what’s going on or why. And then during the day, you don’t see anybody and there doesn’t seem to be anything going on. They’re like vampires, only coming out at night.”

“With any luck you’ll get out of here before it gets dark again, before the vampires come back.”

“I hope so. My mom should be back soon to check on it.”

“I’d better go, then. Or we could wait around to see if you need a ride or something.”

“That’s all right. I’ll be fine.”

“I hope so,” I said, and got up to leave.

“Come here.” Claire held out her arms. I went over and gave her a hug. “Don’t worry about me. It was an accident. Just an accident.”

I had hoped that she would tell me more than that, but she didn’t and I didn’t want to press her. I smiled at her and lightly grabbed the sleeve of her white gown. “It’s too bad they don’t have this stuff in your color,” I said.

She laughed. “Can you imagine, patients dressed all in black? This place would really give you the creeps.” An image of Anna jumped into my head—she was laid out in the other bed. Both she and Claire were dressed in funeral clothes, stretched out in hospital beds, the sheets pulled tightly to their shoulders, their lifeless faces heavy with makeup, but their eyes were wide open, staring straight ahead.

“Call me when you get home,” I told Claire.

“I will.”

 

 

 

As my mother drove us home, I began to think of Anna as a bad force in my life. I had never thought that way before, but nothing seemed to be going right. Instead, the days kept getting stranger and stranger. She was somehow controlling events, tampering with the world in ways that only confused me. I wondered whether she was responsible for Claire. We had kissed, and then something bad had happened. Bryce claimed that Anna had wrecked his car on purpose. I didn’t know whether to completely believe him or not, but if it was true, what did that mean about Anna? If she could drive a car into the steel edge of a bridge, what else was she capable of doing? Even if she wasn’t responsible for all the bad things that were happening, they were still happening. They could be coincidences—that was the word my father had used at the baseball game—but there were an awful lot of them. Here I had been desperately trying to reach Anna, trying every way to receive a message from her, make contact with her, and maybe all this time I should have been trying to get away from her, refusing any contact she tried to make. Isn’t that why we were told to avoid Mumler, because it caused bad things to happen? And now they were happening.

 

 

 

Bryce drove a new black Dodge Ram truck. It replaced the black Intrigue he had driven until the accident. It was said that someone had written, “Bryce Druitt is Ram tough,” in the girls’ bathroom on the first floor at school. It was rumored that Anna had written it. The only thing she ever said about it was, “If I wrote it, it was meant to be sarcastic. The problem is, there are a lot of girls who like Bryce but would never say so because he’s a Goth.” Claire had once said pretty much the same thing, that if he looked like the rest of us, he’d be one of the most popular guys in school. Instead, he was a scary guy. He was the type of guy who could wear black eyeliner and still look like a badass.

A few days after Bryce got his new truck, someone stuck a “Got Jesus?” bumper sticker on the back. He found out who did it and beat the guy up, but left the sticker. He thought it was funny. “I would have put it on myself,” he told the guy, “but don’t fuck with my vehicle.” Bryce always used the word “vehicle” whenever he referred to his own ride, but never when he talked about anyone else’s.

I had been trying to meet Bryce after school ever since I saw him at the baseball game, but he was always gone before I could find him. I would see where he had parked before school, but when I came out at the end of the day, his truck would be gone. I knew that sometimes he would drive away for lunch and park in a different spot when he returned, so after school I would walk around the parking lot down the hill, or down by the football field, where there was more parking, but I wouldn’t see it. Finally, near the end of the week, I got to his “vehicle” before he did. It was a cool spring day, but the sun was trying to do its job. I could feel the warmth reflect off the black paint, and every few minutes I got close to the dark metal and tried to warm up, like it was a radiator or the last embers of a fire. A lot of snow had melted, but there were still piles along the street, where it had been plowed repeatedly over the course of the winter and been pushed into larger and larger mounds, and in the shadows of buildings and underneath trees, hiding from the sun.

I’d been waiting more than twenty minutes when I started thinking that maybe Bryce had had to serve detention. I didn’t want to wait another forty minutes.

“You weren’t leaning on my vehicle,” he said. He had come up from behind, and startled me. He wasn’t that much bigger than I was, maybe a few inches all the way around, but he always seemed to tower over me. He had on his usual gear: black stocking cap pulled down over his shaved head, close to his eyes; long black double-breasted coat, something you would imagine Napoleon’s soldiers trudging around in; black jeans; big black army boots. He had snow all over him, as though he’d been rolling in it. Obviously he hadn’t come directly from school; he’d been somewhere else. He might have come out of the woods across the street, then seen me near his truck. I didn’t know.

“You weren’t touching it.” It wasn’t a question.

“No,” I said. “I wasn’t even near touching your truck. I was wondering if I could talk to you.”

“Let’s find out.”

“I overheard you say something at the game.”

He gave me a hard look and seemed to grow in size. I thought about dropping the whole thing, but it was too late.

“I heard you say something about how it was Anna that almost killed you in your accident.”

“She caused the accident,” he said, matter-of-factly.

“You mean like with a spell or a curse?”

“No,” he said. “She was driving.”

“I didn’t know that.”

He shrugged.

“She wasn’t hurt.”

“Not a scratch.”

“She didn’t get in trouble with the cops or anything.”

“She wasn’t there when they came. She left the scene, and I told them I was alone in the car.”

I didn’t say anything.

“She did it on purpose, I think. Because of the notes I left in your locker.”

I still didn’t say anything. My mind was trying to catch up with what he was saying.

“I’ve got a box full of letters and art and books, just like you,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“You can have it all if you want.”

I started to leave.

“How about an obituary?” he asked.

“What?”

“You got one in the mail, right?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Ask Claire who sent it to you.”

I should have asked to see the box of things Bryce claimed he had. It was a mistake. I should have looked at them; it might have answered some questions. At the time, I didn’t want to listen to anything he had to say, and I didn’t want anything he had to offer. Preen was right, I wasn’t trying hard enough.

schooled

I tried to forget about what Bryce had told me, but I knew that sooner or later I would have to ask Claire about it. Maybe it was Bryce who had sent the obituary and was trying to blame Claire, or maybe he was trying to drive us apart. I looked at the walls of my room and wondered how many of the postcards and pictures matched those Bryce had received. I wondered whether his walls had once replicated Anna’s. I studied each piece taped to my walls, writing down when it was sent and what information was on the back. I put a Post-it on each item. I had deleted most of her e-mails, but I printed out the ones I had kept, and put them in a notebook. Everything was tagged and put in order; if Anna had left only puzzles, I was determined to solve them. I worked on this at school, writing the connections, references, and allusions in my notebook during class. My grades tanked. I started getting D’s on tests and assignments. The only class I was interested in, the only one where I paid attention, was Mr. Devon’s. And interesting things happened there.

 

 

 

I was sitting in his class, making a collage. There were ten or so of us in the room, and before anyone noticed or said anything, Carl’s dad had walked in, and was sitting at one of the tables, watching us work. Everybody knew right away that he was drunk. His face was slack and flushed, and his eyes struggled to fix on anything and take it in. Mr. Devon watched him for a few minutes and then approached him.

“I can get you some materials if you want to join us,” he said.

Carl’s dad swung his head around and looked up at Mr. Devon with a curious expression. “No, I don’t think so. I’ll just sit here a minute if that’s okay with you.”