Snow Angels (14 page)

He did the right thing staying out of it—she's her mother—but now Brock wishes he had stopped her. Rarely does he have to yell at Tara when they're together; she's a good kid. Annie says he's easy because he's not responsible for her, implying that he never will be, that he is going to leave. While it's true, Brock thinks it's no excuse. Next time he'll step between them and, if necessary, take the punishment himself.

In the bathroom the knobs squeak and the water stops.

“Everything's ready,” Tricia calls. “I'm just waiting for you.”

Brock pushes himself out of bed and turns the TV off, and there he is in the mirror again. The other Brock in the other room looks to him as if waiting for an answer. As if there is one.

Annie wakes up in bed with her clothes on, her boots off, the one ankle wrapped with an Ace bandage. Gray light fights through the plastic; the room seems tired, the clothes in a heap, the scattered toys. Talk seeps up from downstairs. She remembers the man at the ambulance saying her ankle was badly sprained. He was giving her something for the pain when she fainted.

“Brock?” she calls.

There is a knock, and then a policewoman looks in. “Your husband is on the way. Can I get you anything?”

“What husband?” Annie says.

“You're not married?”

“We're separated. He didn't have Tara?”

“Your daughter, no.”

“Then why aren't you looking for her?”

“We have people out and we'll have the Lifeflight helicopter from the hospital if the weather holds off.
We're trying to do everything. Do you want to go out? I'm, supposed to accompany you if you do. My name is Officer Scott.”

“Where's Brock?” Annie asks.

“Who?”

Glenn waits with Inspector Burns in the kitchen while the men go through the house. His father and mother sit at the table; they've given their permission, offered the inspector coffee. The floor is wet with bootprints. Out back Bomber is loud. The inspector has promised they will take Glenn to Annie's to join the search after they're done here. Glenn has told him it's a waste of time; they could be out looking. Though he has no handcuffs on, he feels paralyzed, out of control. He needs to pee.

A uniformed trooper pulls up in Glenn's truck. He walks around the arc of Bomber's chain, carrying a manila envelope. The inspector opens the door for him, takes the envelope. It's stuffed thick as a pillow with plastic bags.

“They're mostly dog hair.”

“Get pictures?” the inspector asks.

Glenn worries that he hasn't washed the seats well enough, that they'll pick up blood in the upholstery.
He's told the inspector about the fight (“Where'd you get the lip?” he asked), but feels it's only put him under deeper suspicion.

And he has been back to the old house, if only to watch the lights from the edge of the field. It's his family; he can't stay away. They'll match his tire tracks, ask his parents where he goes at night.

The troopers' boots rumble upstairs. His bladder stings. Holding it is distracting him, giving him a headache.

“I don't know why you think he has anything to do with this,” his mother says.

“Livvie.”

“No. This is my house. You should be asking her. She won't even let him see his own daughter.”

“It's true,” his father admits, as if it's a secret. “He hasn't been able to see her two straight weeks now.”

“That's what your son told me,” the inspector says.

“Doesn't that tell you something?” his mother says.

A trooper in a bulky flak jacket comes in from the living room with a pair of double-barreled shotguns broken over his shoulders, and Glenn's father gets up.

“Those were my father's,” he says, “and I don't appreciate you or anybody touching them.”

“Ithacas,” the inspector notes, intervening. “They
are
old. Knickerbockers. Beautiful guns.” He sniffs both breeches and, careful of their barrels, hands them gently to Glenn's father. “Very sorry,” he says. “All of this is routine. I promise we will get you to the site as soon as we can.”

“Can I use the bathroom?” Glenn asks.

“Where is it?” the inspector says.

He follows Glenn in and, while Glenn goes, stands facing the other way, watching his eyes.

“You're capable,” the inspector says. “You could do it.”

“Do what?”

“Take her from her mother. Tell me you wouldn't.”

“I would never hurt Tara.” Glenn doesn't like the way he says this—stagey, fake. It's ridiculous to even talk about it.

“That's not what I'm saying,” the inspector says.

“I didn't do anything.”

“I know that. But you've thought of it.”

“No,” Glenn says, “I haven't,” and wonders if he's telling the truth.

In the kitchen his mother is wrapping the hamburg she's been thawing for dinner. She has her coat on. His father's gone out to warm the car. When the troopers come downstairs, the house shakes.

“So?” his mother taunts.

“We've seen everything we need to see for now.”

Glenn rides with the inspector in an unmarked car, his parents following a cruiser in the Fury. The defrost is on; flakes hit the windshield and disappear. On the dash sits a blue bubble like the one in his truck. He thinks of a girl Tara's age he saved when he was working rescue. She'd been swimming in a plastic blow-up pool when her mother had to go answer the phone. Glenn spread her out on the lawn and administered CPR. He remembers feeling contempt for the woman, just as now he feels contempt for himself at not being able to protect Tara. It is, to some extent, his fault.

“Marchand,” the inspector says, “you want to tell me about the picture?”

“What picture?”

“Your drawing, the one over your bed.”

He means a sketch Elder Francis asked him to make during his counseling. How do you envision your personal relationship with Jesus? In it, the world is represented by a city under a sea of blood, the people chained to each other. Glenn shows himself drowning; the bubbles coming out of his mouth join into a blue ghost that floats up to heaven and whispers into the smiling Christ's ear.

“It means I'm saved,” Glenn says.

“From what?”

“The world. Hell. Everything.”

“That's a lot to ask from one guy,” the inspector says.

“It's not like I have a choice,” Glenn says.

Turning into Turkey Hill with the entourage, he sees a line of men slowly combing the fields. The house is surrounded by cars—police, an ambulance, the rescue truck. Closer, he notices Brock's Charger's not there and that the Maverick's window is broken. Immediately he thinks they've had a fight (over him, perhaps, over Tara). The inspector tells Glenn to wait until he comes around and opens the door.

“I don't want you and the missis starting anything,” he warns. “Do and you're gone.”

But inside, with so many people around, Annie is quiet. She sits on the couch with her wrapped foot up on the coffee table, on one side her mother, on the other a policewoman he recognizes from a recent trailer fire. The door's open and it's cold. The squawk and static of walkie-talkies is constant. Inspector Burns stands just in front of him, as if ready to step in.

“You don't have her,” Annie asks, but it's not an accusation. She looks exhausted.

“What happened?” he says.

“She just wandered off,” May explains.

“Swear to me, Glenn. You don't have her.”

“I wouldn't do something like that.”

“We picked him up at his work,” Inspector Burns confirms.

“Where's Brock?” Glenn asks.

May throws her hands up in disgust.

“I don't know. He was supposed to be at the Home but they say he isn't there.”

“We have people en route,” the policewoman says.

The bastard, Glenn thinks, guessing right.

“Go look for her,” Annie says, “you know where she'd go.”

“Can I?” Glenn asks the inspector, who then calls a trooper over to shadow him.

“Find her,” Annie says.

“I will,” Glenn promises.

Barb is finishing her shift at the Rusty Nail when Roy Barnum walks in, takes a stool and orders a decaf, milk and sugar. He's on duty and it's free, house rule. Barb draws it off the urn, clanks it down. Roy slides a flyer across the counter, a grainy photograph in the center, a little girl in overalls, puffy cheeks, devilish smile.

“Put this up in a good spot for me?” Roy asks, but Barb has recognized Tara and, with one hand covering her mouth, stands speechless.

The road is lined with police cars—some state, Brock sees—and quickly weighing turning around, he double-parks in front of the house and hurries over the snow. Glenn. He imagines what he will have to do if Annie is dead. He thinks he will be heartbroken but in time recover. This is insane.

The yard is full of cops, one of them talking to Glenn.

“Brock,” Glenn says as if he's his friend.

“What's going on?” Brock asks the cop.

“Are you the boyfriend?”

“Where's Annie?”

“Tara is missing,” Glenn says, as if it's his fault.

Annie is inside, sitting with her mother. He wants to go to her but her mother won't let him through. He wonders if they can smell the soap on him, the wine through his Juicy Fruit. Tara is missing. Nothing in the world goes right for him.

“Where the fuck were you?” Annie says.

“Work.”

“No you weren't.”

A cop in a trenchcoat comes over and asks if he is Brock.

“Yes,” Brock says, sick of this shit, “I am Brock.”

The snow comes down sideways, blowing, smoothing over footprints in minutes. The Lifeflight is grounded. There is only another hour of light, and already it is poor. The woods crackle with volunteers. The news is on the radio; Rafe comes straight from work. The Friday AA meeting is here, the Women's Methodist Alliance. Clare and Jerrell search the cannibalized pickups and tractors at the north edge of the cornfield; Brock and Glenn are with the inspector down below the pond. May and Regina, Frank and Olive talk in the living room, the public-access channel with its thermometer and clock on silently beside them. Barb has taped Tara's flyer to the mirror of the Rusty Nail and driven out in her uniform, bare legs, heels and all. The hunt has spread across the interstate to the middle school grounds. Trucks file by the flares, the troopers' orange-coned flashlights. The Army Reserve has promised two squads if this should go until tomorrow.

Yet it will not be any of these searchers who finds Tara, but a fourteen-year-old from the high school marching band, small for his size, generally ignored, in
fact, myself, Arthur Parkinson, who, because she is dead, will not be a hero—will not, years from now, even be remembered around town as the one who found her—but who, with Annie and Glenn and Brock and May and Frank and Olive and Clare and Barb, will find Tar a again and again throughout his life and never ever lose her.

I
REMEMBER NOT WANTING TO GO.
It was a Friday and we had just taken the field. Thanksgiving we were playing Armstrong Township; in the cafeteria banners urged us to
JUMP THE BEAVERS.
We were standing around in groups warming up with rock riffs—“Satisfaction,”
“Foxy Lady”—when the vice-principal came running over the footbridge. Mr. Chervenick blew his whistle and climbed the roll-away podium. We would make this up next Monday, he said, regardless of the weather. He stressed that participation in the search was not mandatory.

“Yeah right,” Warren said beside me.

No one in the band was cool or vicious enough to call Mr. Chervenick's bluff. Most of us in the brass were glad; on a day so cold, it took faith to put your lips to the mouthpiece. We snapped our cases shut and marched back over the bridge. Two buses waited for us, chugging out clouds in the snow. We were to leave our instruments and bookbags in the lobby; the janitor would watch them.

The vice-principal, Mr. Eisenstat, rode with us. He brought the lost-and-found box and walked the aisle, asking if anyone needed gloves. We would need them, he said, when we got to the site.

“The site,” Warren gravely mimicked. We sat together in back under the curved sea-green ceiling, burnt from a long day's partying. It was a Friday, which meant a celebration, and next week was Thanksgiving.

Neither fact made me happy. Band days I didn't get to walk home from the bus stop with Lila, and weekends, though we lived in adjacent buildings, I didn't
see her. Schoolnights I lay awake thinking of what I would say to her the next morning, of how I would ask her to a movie. That never happened, of course, but Friday nights that winter seemed to me especially hopeless.

As for Thanksgiving, my mother hinted that this year we might not have dinner with my father's parents in Pittsburgh. Slyly she'd been feeling me out about the Horn of Plenty, a buffet down Route 8 we used to go to for her birthday. It was all-you-can-eat. At the end of the steamtable a cook in a chef's toque sliced a bloody roast beef under a heat lamp. I said it would be okay, but in a grunt, meaning it wasn't.

“Look,” my mother snapped, “maybe you haven't noticed, but things are different now.”

“I've noticed,” I said.

“Then just save your little smart-ass comments. I'm trying to tell you this as nicely as I can. Your father doesn't seem to be showing much interest in doing anything as a family this year. I'd like to because I think it would be nice for you, but when I call your father and try to talk about it, all he does is put me off. I am going to try to set things up the way they've been, but I'm warning you that it might not happen. Now would you like that or should I just not bother?”