Snow Angels (13 page)

“Is this her?” Regina says.

Annie climbs in, her face chafed from crying, and for the first time since she called, Clare realizes this is not a mistake, a simple mix-up.

“We'll look at the pond first,” Clare says. She waits for Annie's okay, then drives to the turnaround
and bumps over the crushed curb and onto the dirt road. She follows it down along the treeline, shuddering over the frozen, rutted mud.

Regina holds on to the dashboard. “I don't think the car was built for this.”

“Don't talk,” Clare says, “look.”

The fields are bare, last year's late corn cropped in rows, a few bent and bleached survivors waving limply. The radio is on to get the weather; the real snow is still holding off, it's too cold yet. At the corner of the field a dirt mound sprouting old fenceposts blocks the road.

Clare puts it in park.

“I'll stay here,” her mother says. Annie is already out and headed down toward the pond.

“Give a honk every few minutes,” Clare instructs. “That way we can't get lost.”

“Roger Wilco.”

Clare runs to catch up.

May grabs a Tupperware carton of barley soup from the deep freeze in the basement, two twenties she keeps in her next-best teapot, and her purse, and is out the door and on the road. The Polara wobbles over the snow; there's something wrong with the steering
but she doesn't have time to worry about it. She pictures Tara in her powder blue jacket with the fur-trimmed hood, wandering among the trees—when that is the best thing that can happen. She tries not to think of a van slowing and stopping, a pair of hands. Or Tara on the ground, twigs caught in her white tights.

The Polara is so slow that it must be the engine. She gets caught behind a truck, and then at a railroad crossing, endless black hoppers of coal.

“Goddammit!” she yells at the flashing red lights. “Let's go!”

In her heart she knows it's not Glenn. She is more worried about Brock taking advantage of Annie. It's all of a piece, she thinks. Her daughter's life is in such disorder; it's killing her. A three-year-old and no way to support herself. How she is getting the rent May doesn't know, certainly not from what she makes at the club. Every time she asks Annie they end up fighting. She has always felt—though never said, or only to Charles, softened—that Annie is not a very smart person, that she doesn't look ahead and then is surprised when things go wrong. Raymond did a stint in the Marines, and Dennis paid his way through the community college. Annie still seems to be back in high school, working part-time, picking which boy she will
give herself to. She is their youngest, and according to everything May has read, she should be clinging to Annie for dear life. May just wishes she would settle down, or if that will never happen (and she fears this, her only girl), move away where she won't have to see it. But how she would miss Tara.

The man in the car beside her at the crossing has rolled down his window and is shouting at her.

May fumbles with the crank. The train clanks and thunders, and she can't hear him. “What?”

“You got a flat tire,” he points.

“Thank you,” May nods, then when the gate rises, guns across the tracks.

She swings into the first service station she sees—a Phillips 66—and honks for the attendant to take care of her. As she's waiting, a state trooper shoots by, siren wailing. She pictures Annie slamming Tara against the oven and can't stop her next thought: I hope she hasn't done anything.

It's a busy day at work for Glenn. The last nationwide catalogue of the year went out two weeks ago, and now the orders are pouring in. Most are common, things they have clean pieces for—'57 Chevys and
Shelby Cobras, Goats, Tempests—but four or five times a day some customer wonders if they might have an item he didn't see listed. Since Glenn is new, he's the one that has to buckle the tool belt on over his coat and drive the golf cart through the snow until he finds the car and the part they want.

The wrecks are arranged by make—Fords here, Mercurys next to them, big Lincolns—then broken down in lines by model. Sometimes Glenn dawdles to make the day go faster, lingers over the dead motor or in the bloodied seats, but today it's freezing and he's trying to make up for being late. Last night he and Rafe stayed up until three. He remembers Rafe trying to convince him to stop going to church and that they smashed some glasses, but only part of the ride home. When he woke up, he saw that Bomber had gotten sick on the jeans he'd been saving. Hot dogs. In the mirror his lip was still purple, the cut under his eye crusted.

“Who are you calling a quitter?” he said, but when he opened the medicine cabinet there were no aspirin.

Now he's searching for a taillight and bracket for a '62 Oldsmobile F-85, an ugly little turtle of a car long since discontinued. He drives straight to the GM section along the far fence and makes a right past the Buicks and Cadillacs and Chevys. The faster he goes,
the colder his face gets, even through the itchy ski mask. Beneath him the cart whirs. He reaches the Cutlasses and slows. Delta 88's. The wrecks watch him, some one-eyed, blind, snow caked on their bumpers and hoods and roofs. The F-85's start, a whole row of them. He knows there's a green '62 out here somewhere.

“Yes,” he says, spying it. He takes his foot off the gas and the motor of the golf cart automatically stops. Glenn likes it out here; it's quiet, only the snow sifting into the trees and tangle beyond the fence.

He goes to the rear of the car and brushes snow from the trunk. Both lights are intact. The customer only wanted one, but which one? The right and left assemblies are slightly different. Glenn decides to save himself a trip and remove both.

He's working on a frozen bolt with some WD40 and a hexhead screwdriver when he hears something crunch behind the Ramblers. He straightens up and looks around. It can be spooky out here too, all the splintered windshields and sheared steering columns.

“Nothing,” he says. Wind. He bends to the task again.

“Glenn Marchand,” a stern voice calls, and he thinks, in the time it takes him to locate it, that it might be from the sky.

“Drop the screwdriver,” a trooper behind an Ambassador calls. He has a gun but pointed straight up. “Take off the belt and come out from there now.”

Glenn does, and another man in an expensive trenchcoat spins him around to face the hood and knees him against the fender. He flashes his ID, says his name is Inspector Burns. “Hands on the car,” he says. He yanks Glenn's ski mask off, stubbing his nose. “Now get flat for me. Get flat.”

Glenn doesn't understand, and the inspector takes him by the scruff of the neck and gently bends him over the hood. Glenn lays his cheek against the snow. His lip throbs. The inspector lifts his wallet and keys, pats him down and tells him to get up. A trooper in a marked unit pulls alongside.

“What did I do?” Glenn says.

“Nothing, we hope,” the inspector says. “Your daughter is missing.”

“What?” Glenn says, but a trooper has his arm and is leading him toward the open door, the fenced-off backseat. “What's going on?”

“Is this your most recent picture?” the inspector asks from the front. He's holding the shot of Tara Glenn carries in his wallet.

“It's brand-new,” Glenn says. “I've got tons of them at home.”

Regina looks at the clock on the dash. Clare and Annie have only been gone a few minutes, but she expects them to appear at the end of the trail any second, carrying a tearful Tara. It is amazing to Regina that something like this hasn't happened already, the way the girl lives. Cast the first stone, but in this case the woman is an outright tramp, sleeping around on her husband and then taking up with a no-good. And from a perfectly nice family, that's the terrible thing. What her mother must go through every time she thinks of her. She knows May Van Dorn for a good woman. How her daughter turned out this way is a mystery, an honest-to-goodness shame. Regina hopes it is a black sheep thing, a wild gene, that Annie will turn out a Van Dorn. And who knows, this thing could teach Annie a lesson, turn her around. It is not the just but the sinner God rejoices in saving. The forecast calls for 3 to 6 inches, 6 to 8 in the mountains. Regina checks the clock, reaches over and honks the horn.

On the path above the pond, Annie hears it, distant through the trees. The path is icy, and several times Annie falls hard. She stops and looks back over the pond, the water tower rising above the woods, the
fields to the north. Flakes drift down, drawn sharp by the dark, solid sky. Far off, white ranches shine, barns lean. The tamed fairways of the country club surround the low stone clubhouse, the emptied pool a blue dot. She has never been this far back, though she has known of the shortcut since middle school. The view makes everything seem even stranger. She spots Clare's green-and-black mackinaw in the brush below the spillway, tiny. There is no way Tara could make it up this hill, she thinks, but she keeps climbing, falling and getting up again as the whoosh and rush of the highway nears.

She scissors over the guardrail. The ground is dry up here, and walking's easy. A shred of truck tire lies on the gravel berm. The two sets of lanes are salt-stained, the snow in the dip of the median gray but virgin. She jogs against traffic toward an overpass a half mile away—the footbridge between the two schools. A semi passes in the right lane, and the wind following knocks her back a step; gravel peppers her shins. A bleached beer case wheels in the air above her and lands. She passes a few wrenched and flattened pipes, rusting. Over the guardrail the embankment is sheer now, the treetops at eye level. Holding on to the sooty steel lip, Annie peers down. Twenty feet below her, stuck in a crotch, sags a dead deer.

She puts a hand to her throat to stop the vomit, but
it comes. She goes to her hands and knees and chokes it out, careful of her hair. She doesn't have time for this, she thinks, and gets up before she's done, makes it a few steps and doubles over. Before she tries again she wipes her eyes; she doesn't want to wander onto the road.

By the time she reaches the footbridge she's fine. The fence around the bottom is bent at the top from kids climbing over; it's easily too high for Tara. Annie hears the horn—sounding not once but continuously—and runs back down the berm toward it. They've found her, she thinks, then hopes against hope, not wanting to jinx it.

She vaults the guardrail and starts down the path, taking baby steps, searching for the green dot of Clare below. The horn blares in the woods. On the steep part Annie slips. She's going too fast, and as she's falling tries to slide. She sticks her arms out to grab hold of something or at least slow herself down, but there's nothing but snow. Below, the path turns and there is a sheer drop into trees. She's on her side now, bouncing, picking up speed. Her jacket has hiked up; snow scrapes and burns at her waist. She sees the bend coming and tries to plant her feet, to dig her fingers in, but her elbow catches a rock, and reflexively she curls around the hurt. The path turns, and she shoots off the curve, suddenly airborne.

Miraculously, she misses the trees, lands farther down the slope, rolling over and over in the snow. She's surprised she's all right. The horn is still going. Annie stands and shrugs off the snow, plants a foot, then feels the ankle give. She can walk on it.

“Are you okay?” Clare calls from the bottom of the hill.

“Fine,” Annie waves. No, it's broken. “Why is your mother honking?”

“The police are here.”

“Do they get cable?” Tricia asks, naked, sipping wine from the tiny sanitized glass. They have been making love all afternoon, using both beds, filling the room with sweet smoke. They have the heat blasting and the lights out; the white outside sneaks in around the blinds, and when someone walks by, shadows ripple across the back wall.

“There's never anything on in the day,” Brock says. He tongues her navel, trying to get her to spill. She throws the cupful over him and he yelps, then, laughing, dives across her and grabs the bottle off the nightstand.

“Don't waste it.”

“We've got another.”

“We don't want to make a mess,” she says. “Someone has to clean these rooms.”

“How about the tub?” Brock says.

“That could be fun.” Tricia hops off the bed. He watches her walk into the bathroom, hears the knobs squeak and the water running.

Looking at the whirled stucco of the ceiling, Brock thinks of Tara crying herself to sleep last night because Annie didn't give her a bath.

It all started when they were watching “Let's Make a Deal.” Tara was in the kitchen and asked if she could have an M&M. “A red one?” she said.

“No,” Annie said, “because you didn't finish your dinner.”

“Oh, give her one,” he said. He thought she was being bitchy because she was sick.

“No. She didn't eat her dinner, why should she have candy?” Annie leaned her head back, listening. “You better not be eating M&M's out there.”

“Would she?” Brock asked.

“In a minute. Tara?” she called. “Tara?” They both went into the kitchen and found Tara under the table, her cheeks crammed, a brown string of drool on her chin. “Come out here now,” Annie said. “Now! You come when I say.” She yanked her out by the
arm, and Tara's head hit the bottom of the table. The child began to cry, red-faced and gulping, showing the brown cud. Annie began to spank her hard on the bottom.

“Hold on,” Brock said, “hold on.”

“You stay the fuck out of this,” she said, pointing. Tara's face was ugly with tears. Her lip quivered as she tried to get her breath back. “Go watch your goddamn show,” Annie said, and he did.

And then ten minutes later it was all forgotten, forgiven. Brock can't understand how the two of them do it. Over nothing. Later when they were going up to bed, Annie said, “No bath,” and Tara threw herself to the floor and pitched a fit. “You see?” Annie said, and spanked her again, calmly this time. Downstairs they heard her wailing well into the nine o'clock movie.