The Cranberry Hush: A Novel (4 page)

After the teams were the general campus photos: the dining
hall (I could remember the plates clinking, the symphony of conversation, the
routine comfort of soft-serve ice cream eaten at circular tables with friends),
the library where I’d worked a couple semesters, the white-washed marble arches
of my dorm’s ancient lobby. These were places I didn’t have my own photos of. I
hadn’t seen them since graduation. It was almost a surprise to find they
existed outside my own brain.

Stapled to the last page of the book was a manila envelope.
I ripped it free and pried back the brass fastener. The graduation supplement
was inside after all. It was nothing fancy, just a ten-page collage of photos
from graduation. Our class speaker—the CEO of a dot-com that had since
gone under—and our valedictorian; lots of people I didn’t know in blue
and green robes. But then out jumped someone I recognized: Griffin—and
there beside him, me. The photographer was more interested in a mortar board a
girl had decorated with elbow pasta, though, so we weren’t in focus. We were
off to the side. We were blurry.

In my memory time had managed to make the end of our
friendship seem practically romantic, a tragedy out of Shakespeare or Dickens,
a tale of heartbreak and stiff upper lips. But this photo brought that shit
tumbling like a house of cards. There was nothing romantic about this photo at
all. It had no more relationship to romance than a dying soldier has to war
movies. We were standing side by side and there was enough glaring awkwardness
in our eyes to taint even the happiness in those of the main subject.

I remembered seeing him, standing alone in the crowded lobby
of the ritzy theatre we graduated in. I remembered the shock of seeing his face
two years after we roomed together, at once so familiar and so different. I’d
turned away, hoping he wouldn’t see me—I probably thought about ducking
behind something. It wasn’t easy but somehow I made myself walk over to him. He
had on red Converse All-Stars with his navy blue pin-stripe suit. His
graduation gown was tossed over his shoulder like a locker room towel.

“Look at you all dressed up,” I said as I approached, doing
my very best to sound like I’d seen him the day before and every other day
before that, too. But of course the act was useless.

“Hey,” he said softly and almost with suspicion, as though
he wasn’t sure I was really there. His dark eyebrows furrowed but he stepped
forward to hug me. It was a quick clap-on-the-back hug, though, a hug of
strangers. “Hey Vince. How you been?”

“Good. You know. Keeping busy. Looking for a job and stuff.
Big day, huh?” I pulled my hands up into the wide sleeves of my gown.

“I could take it or leave it,” he said. “I feel like I owe
it to my mom to walk across the stage.” His mouth opened to say something more,
but then he rubbed his nose and looked away.

“Hard to believe we’re this old, huh?” I said, looking not
at him but following his gaze to the crowd of our fellow students.

“Hard to believe. Yeah.”

We made small-talk about our job searches, about finally
being adults, stuff like that, but there was no mention of the past. An
onlooker probably would’ve guessed we were just two random students who’d had a
class or two together.

When the doors of a large ballroom opened and an
announcement was made for us to line up outside, we walked quickly to the
entrance, thankful for motion. I expected, because of the spelling of our last
names, to be lined up close together. But when the woman at the door asked not
for our names but for our majors, it felt like an escape.

“Industrial design,” Griff told her, and the woman’s chubby
finger directed him to the left and down the hall.

“Business,” I said, and I was pointed straight ahead. I turned
to Griff. “Well I guess—”

“Remember to smile—”

And we were split up there, in the entry to that ballroom, robed
graduates swarming around us like a school of jellyfish. Cut-off meaningless
sentences were our goodbyes. Before today, the last time I saw Griff was from
my seat in the audience as he walked across the stage to get his diploma. I’d
cheered for him then.

Now, two years later, I closed the fucking yearbook and looked
at the picture window, past the pictures of Griff, out at the snow.

There was a thump at the front door. When I opened
it I found a newspaper on the stoop. A car threw one at the old lady’s house
too and continued down the street. Her door opened and she plucked the paper
off of her freshly-shoveled steps, waved at me.

The snow on the ground was nighttime blue now. I could see
in the car’s headlights and in the glow of the old lady’s driveway floodlight
that the snow was still coming down, but in fine flakes almost like mist. I
picked up the paper, slid it out of the translucent bag. The headline
proclaimed
Blizzard!
in giant text.

“What time is it?” Griff said behind me, startling me. I
shut the door. His t-shirt was wrinkled and one of his pant-legs was rolled up.

I looked into the kitchen at the microwave. “Well the paper
just arrived and you’re just getting out of bed, so it would appear to be 8:30 a.m.
But in this upside-down world it’s actually 8:30
p.m
.”

“Strange times,” he said, wiping his eyes. He still looked
tired.

I tossed the newspaper onto the ottoman. “Paper claims it
snowed.”

“Can’t believe anything you read nowadays.” He grinned,
hopping on one foot to fix his sock.

“There’s pizza on the stove,” I said.

“Cool, thank you.” He went into the kitchen, sliding his
socks on the linoleum. “Oh, homemade, nice!” He took a bite, testing,
approving. “Have any milk?”

“No. There’s juice. Sam Adams in the drawer.” I put my hands
in my pockets and stood in front of the picture window for a moment before
drawing the dark floral curtains across it.

“Sorry I slept so long,” he said. “That was probably kind of
rude.”

“No, it’s fine. I don’t mind.”

“What’d you do all day?” he said. He had the grapefruit
juice container in his hand. “Ah—
Shoveling
the lady nextdoor
,” he read from the note I’d stuck on the fridge. “That
sounds hot. Or— But not as good as
plowing
.”

I smiled.

After finishing his pizza he sat down sideways in
the brown corduroy chair, legs draped over the arm, feet close to the fire. He
watched me flip through records for a moment and then grabbed the remote and
turned on the television. The screen looked like snow, a portal into twenty
hours ago.

“Is it out or do you just not get cable?”

“Cable shmable,” I said. “Use the rabbit ears.”

“Right.” He rolled his eyes and turned off the TV.

I held up two records I’d chosen from the stacker in the
cabinet. “The Cure or T-Rex?”

He pointed to the T-Rex. As I was sliding the record out of
its sleeve he asked, “Do you have snow tires on your Jeep?”

“Yeah.” I lifted the clear plastic cover. The Billie Holiday
was still on the turntable. “Why?”

“Would you want to go for a drive or something?”

“Now?”

“Maybe just a quick spin to get some air? You haven’t been
out all day.”

“I’ve been out most of the day.”

“I mean
out
out.”

I thought for a moment, slid the record back into the sleeve.
Being out was something to do, offered less chance for awkwardness.

“OK,” I said. “Put on your boots.”

The roads were still in pretty rough shape and
there weren’t many cars out other than us. My wipers swooshed back and forth, batting
the stubborn fine flakes that continued to fall. They didn’t seem to be
accumulating much anymore, just added a sugary dusting to the twenty inches
already there.

On Oak Street wide piles lining the shoulders reduced it to
one lane. Ahead of us a plow turned onto the street. It rumbled toward us. Its revolving
orange lights were bright and it shrieked warnings at us to clear the road.

“You need to make room,” Griff said helpfully.

“Where’s he think he’s going?” I looked in the rearview; the
street behind us was clear but there weren’t any easy turnarounds. “One of us
needs to back up.”

“Nah, there’s room,” Griff said. “It’s fine. Just pull over
a bit.”

I turned the wheel and drove the Jeep onto the shoulder,
more hastily than I should’ve. The passenger side scraped against the snow bank
and the Jeep thumped to a spongy halt. Snowballs skittered across the hood. The
plow was in front of us now. I could feel the vibrations.

“Hold your breath, here it comes,” Griff said. I wondered if
he was also one of those people who ducks when driving under a bridge.

The plow passed us slowly. I could see each individual
snowflake clinging to the truck’s yellow paint—could see their fractal
patterns receding to icy infinity.

“Sweatless,” Griff said.

“Sure, you’re on the passenger side. I almost shit my pants.”

I put the Jeep into drive and stepped on the gas, giving it
a little extra to get out of the snow. The rear tires spun and the Jeep didn’t
move. I put it in reverse and tried again, then tried forward again. Rocked
back and forth, no luck. I grumbled and squeezed the wheel.

“I’ll check it out,” Griff said, but his door only opened a
few inches before crunching against the snow bank.

“It’s OK.” I got out and walked around to the front,
steadying myself with a hand on a snow pile. The headlights spotlighted me and
inside the car I could see a wavy image of Griff obscured by the wipers. The
Jeep was half buried in the bank; its passenger-side tires had all but
disappeared. I got back in.

“I should’ve just backed up,” I said, thumping my forehead
against the wheel.

“I could push,” he offered.

“It needs to like come out sideways, not forward.”

“We could use that huge winch you’ve got on the back. Tie it
to a tree or something.”

“What, and then reel it in like a fish?”

“OK, bad idea. What do you have that thing for anyway?”

“Oh, I went through a WWSD phase last winter.
What Would Superman Do.
Like a Good
Samaritan thing. My specialty was towing people out of ditches and snow banks
and stuff.”

“Did you ever?”

“A couple.”

“And now you’re stuck yourself. How ironic.” He breathed
into his gloves and pulled them on—I’d turned off the car to keep the
exhaust from backing up and killing us, and it was cold inside already. “Got a
shovel?”

“Nope.”

“We could knock on one of these houses and borrow one.”

“...”

When I didn’t respond he added, “OK, then we push.”

Blazingly lit by the headlights of my Jeep, with
snowflakes twinkling down around him, he looked like a dream, a figment of my
imagination. This was too real to be a dream, but too surreal to actually be
happening. Griff, who I hadn’t talked to in two years or really in four, was
standing up to his thighs in a snowy backstreet in Harwich, trying to push me
out of a snow bank. He must’ve been an apparition, the Ghost of Christmas Past.

At his command I floored the Jeep in reverse. It came
unstuck easily, much easier than either of us expected, and as the front bumper
whisked out from under his hands he fell forward into the snow. He reappeared
in my headlights a moment later with snow on his chin, laughing.

I got out and stood around while he smacked snow off his
clothes, then we got back in the Jeep.

“That was something,” I said.

“That
was
something.”

“Maybe we should cut our losses and head back?”

“We can’t just go home after that! It won’t have been worth
the trouble. Drive me somewhere. Show me your life or something.”

“My life?”

“Give me a tour. Just watch out for plows.”

The comic shop was on the first floor of a two-story
building. Its upstairs neighbor was a family dentist. Bloody-mouthed boys let
loose on the action figures by their moms as a reward for good behavior were
big customers at Golden Age Comics. (Simon, the owner, was a collector/historian
and had named his store after the oldest and most valuable books.) Beside
Golden Age on the first floor was a Copy Cop, and above that the offices of a
small law firm. Light from a floodlight shined down from the eaves of the
building but all the windows in all the businesses were dark. The sidewalk looked
like it’d been shoveled about halfway into the storm. We trampled through the
snow and up the three buried concrete steps.

“I’m excited,” Griff said.

I was too. It was like we were archaeologists, discovering
this place.

I wiped the gauze of snow from the sign hanging beside the
glass door. The
O
in Golden Age,
yellow, was shaped like a word balloon, its point jutting off the sign and away
from the other black letters in a 3D effect. The tip of the point had once
pricked the finger of a nine-year-old customer,
Sleeping Beauty
–style. Now it was blunted with duct tape.

I unlocked the two locks, pushed open the door. The bell
above the door jingled.

“Hold on a sec,” I said.

I flipped on the fluorescent lights—
tink tink tink
. On the wall beside the
counter where the register sat was a glowing keypad. I mumbled the numbers as I
punched the keys. The alarm chirped and released its grip on the store.

“I like this,” Griff said, smiling. His hands clasped behind
his back, he browsed around with the quiet intrigue of a person touring an
ancient tomb.

It was a cozy store with bright yellow walls that on sunny
days seemed to glow, and that made the superhero costumes in the comics and
posters against them even more vibrant. It wasn’t like all the other comics
shops I’d ever been in, most of which were dark and claustrophobic, almost
ashamed. This store said
Wheee!