Snow Angels (15 page)

“Whatever,” I said.

“Whatever,” my mother challenged.

“It's okay, I don't care.”

“I don't know why I try,” she said. “Obviously it means nothing to you that I have to ask these people to do us a favor when I would rather not talk to them at all.”

“It does mean something,” I said, but too late; she had turned away and plopped down on the couch and was lighting a cigarette. “The Horn of Plenty's fine.”

“That's shit,” my mother said, tossing her lighter at the table. It slid across a magazine and dropped to the carpet. My mother turned on the TV and wouldn't look at me.

I'd seen and, more often, heard her fight like this with my father, but I had never been on the receiving end, and felt—rightfully or not—that she was taking advantage of my inexperience. I didn't know how to fight back. The next morning she acted as if nothing had happened. I was still angry. Like the child I was, I was keeping score.

Warren, my only confidant, said mothers get nutty around holidays. We discussed it on the bus on the way over to the site. He was tired of my negativity, he said. We had blown a serious bone in the parking lot after last period, hoping to make practice bearable, and we were pronouncing on the world at large.

“Let's say you're your mother.”

“Let's say,” I said.

“Okay, now I'm you and Thanksgiving is coming up. ‘I hate Thanksgiving, I don't care if we have turkey, I don't give a shit.' I mean, is that what she wants to hear?”

“You mean me.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“I don't say it like that. And that's not the point. She thinks she's doing me this big favor when she's not.”

“Oh, so you want to go to the Horn of Plenty and eat cheese cubes for Thanksgiving.”

“My mother does.”

“You.”

“Me if I'm my mother.”

“Where do you want to eat for Thanksgiving?” Warren asked.

“I don't care,” I said.

“Fuck you.”

“Yeah,” I said, “that's pretty much what she said.”

“She's right. I don't see why you're all pissed off.”

We crossed the interstate. Mr. Eisenstat came down the aisle, passing out flyers with a picture of the little girl. I didn't like her first name and didn't recognize the last. Mr. Eisenstat held up the flyer and spoke so we could all hear, even those of us like Warren and
myself who were not interested. Everything he told us was on the flyer except one.

“She has been missing for between two and three hours.”

Warren looked out at the snow, looked back at me and shook his head. “She's meat.”

“Frozen food,” I said. “Now look who's being negative.”

We didn't know where we were going. We hadn't gotten far when the bus slowed and swung onto a road, trees on one side, an open field on the other. A man wearing irrigators walked the iced-over ditch, stopping to test for soft spots. In the field a brace of dogs pulled a man in a hunter's cap along. People had parked off the road, facing the wrong way. Farther on was a house, but we didn't come close to getting there. The bus stopped and Mr. Millhauser said, “That's it.”

“Buddy up,” Mr. Eisenstat instructed. “Stay in sight of each other. We don't want you getting lost too.”

“What a zeke,” Warren said.

Once we were off, I saw the water tower. Mr. Chervenick marched us down the road six abreast as if we were filing through the stadium tunnel.

“We could have walked here quicker,” I said.

“You still have that roach?” Warren asked.

News crews were filming, and as we passed in back of each neatly dressed reporter, we gave the entire city of Pittsburgh the finger. A Red Cross canteen truck was handing out free coffee and hot chocolate; cups blew around the parked cars' tires. We followed Mr. Chervenick past the house, unconsciously falling into step.

Orange horses blocked off the road just short of the turnaround. Police manned a long folding table with a map taped across the top, behind them a garbage can over which searchers were warming their hands. We waited at parade rest while Mr. Chervenick talked to a trooper with a clipboard. He came back and announced that we would go over an area below the pond which had already been done.

“If you find something you believe is important, do not touch it or move it. Get me or Mr. Eisenstat, and we will get the appropriate person to look at it. Please do not touch or move anything you believe is important; I can't stress that enough.”

“Does everyone have a buddy?” Mr. Eisenstat asked, and when no one said anything, asked, “Who
doesn't
have a buddy?”

The woods above the pond were full of old people in black baseball caps celebrating Pullman-Standard's
70th anniversary. As we walked down the hill, the mixed group that had just searched our area passed us coming up, breathing hard.

The pond was frozen but not solid. In the middle a slick of gray water sat atop the ice. When Mr. Chervenick whistled for us to close ranks and stand at attention, we could hear the spillway.

“Everything from here down to the highway fence is our responsibility,” he said. “I imagine some of you are familiar with the terrain.” It got a small laugh, but not from myself or Warren. “Spread out and be thorough. This is a very small child. I will signal with five short reports for everyone to meet back here.” He blew once to dismiss us.

Warren and I wandered along, careful to stick to existing prints. The snow was too cold to pack and crunched under our boots like someone grinding their teeth. I had only seen one dead person face-to-face, and that in a casket—my grandmother Sellars. My idea of a corpse came from the comic books I grew up reading—
The Witching Hour, Weird War, The House of Mystery
. I imagined finding the girl frozen and blue, one clutching hand sticking through the crust. Her eyes would be a transparent gray, robbed of color like a cooked onion. We inched along, looking in the snowy bushes, hoping to hear a shout from somewhere else. The bootprints stopped and so did we.

“She wouldn't be down there,” Warren reasoned.

“Probably in the pond.”

In the woods above us a bullhorn blurted something. We both froze and waited but there was nothing. We kept going, slower now.

“So,” Warren said, “do you have that roach or what?”

I looked in my box of Marlboros, stirred the cigarettes around with a finger until I spied it. It was good-sized, the paper stained dark with resin. “Where's a good place to do it?”

We both swiveled our heads for cops.

“Let's go to the pipe,” Warren said, meaning where the creek went through the hillside and under the highway. The pipe was corrugated steel, around three feet wide. There was a caged storm drain beside it to draw off any extra water. The whole thing was hidden in a ditch, and when the security guards were coming you'd dive into it as if it were a foxhole and wait. You could pee there in privacy too when there was a kegger.

I hesitated, thinking it was a pretty good place for a little kid to drown.

“They probably looked there first,” Warren assured me. “They've got maps.”

As we made our way through the brush, we commented on the dwindling number of prints.

“At least there are some,” Warren said.

“Not many,” I said.

But when we reached the ditch, the snow on both sides of the creek was trampled and smudged with mud.

“See?” Warren said.

The ice on the creek stopped a few feet before the pipe. The water was high but still, brown as coffee. It poured into the storm drain with a sucking noise. Warren peeked over the rise to see if anyone was near us.

“It's cool,” he said, and we sat down on the cage above the drain. I stuck the roach on an alligator clip and handed it and my mother's green Bic to Warren. He drew deeply on it and handed it back, holding the smoke in, then blew out a cloud.

“This beats the shit out of practice,” he said.

I nodded, enjoying the tickle of the first hit, and handed the clip back.

“I am feeling very positive,” I said. Warren nodded sagely. The rush was instant but slow, a creeping tingle along the jaw, like the surprising late heat of a spicy chili. David Larue, who'd sold me the nickel, said it was Colombian. We suspected it was Mexican. It was a little harsh but gave you a pleasant buzz, nothing too intense for a day at school.

Warren and I passed it back and forth until it went
out, then roasted it over a high flame, sucking the smoke off the blackened nub.

“You can get another hit out of it,” Warren said.

“You want another?”

I knocked it off into the water. We watched the current take it hesitantly into the pipe. The motion of the roach seemed to have its own ineluctable drama and meaning. We were fucked up.

“Thanks,” Warren said.

We sat in silence a moment, stoned, looking at our new surroundings.

“This is some fucked-up shit,” Warren said, and I knew what he meant.

“You better look and see if any of those cops are hanging around.”

“Paranoid,” Warren said, but stood and looked. “Nothing.”

In the water a soaked mitten floated. Pink and white, with some kind of design.

“Check out this mitten,” I said.

“Don't touch it,” Warren said, “you're not supposed to touch it.”

Slow as a leaf, the mitten drifted over the brown water toward the pipe. I broke a branch off a bush.

“Okay,” Warren said, “I guess you have to now.”

The branch wasn't long enough, and I had to bend down and lean out over the water. I just touched it and
it floated toward the other side. With Warren behind me, I scrambled up the ditch and around and down. I couldn't quite get it from this side either. Warren went to get a bigger branch while I kept my eye on the mitten. The pipe seemed to be drawing it in the closer it got.

“Hurry up,” I said. “We're going to lose it.”

“I'm hurrying,” Warren said.

I was kneeling at the edge of the creek, watching, when a second white mitten floated to the surface—except this mitten had fingers and was attached to a puffy blue arm. The girl's face rolled out of the water, still encased in her hood, its fur muddy, the drawstring knotted under her chin.

I ran. I ran straight up the ditch to Warren, who was fighting a bush for a green branch. I tried to tell him but nothing would come.

“There,” I said. “Mud,” I said. “The coat.” It was like the last few seconds of “Password” when you use all the clues.

Warren took me by the arm and we walked to the top of the ditch and looked down.

She was on her back, her mouth and eyes open, drifting headfirst toward the pipe. A boot had fallen off.

We ran.

“Mister Chervenick!” Warren called.

“Mister Chervenick!” we called.

Mr. Chervenick talked with my mother while I waited in our car. As usual, she was late. It was fully night, not quite dinnertime. The snow had not stopped, and the wipers arced in rhythm, the headlights giving the falling flakes a stagey, theatrical quality. I wanted a cigarette but didn't dare in the car. Finally Mr. Chervenick opened the lobby door for my mother and she crossed in front of the hood. She got in and clicked her belt on but didn't shift into drive.

“You didn't tell me you were the one,” she said.

“Me and Warren,” I said.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Mr. Chervenick said you were pretty upset.”

“Right when it happened, yeah. So was Warren. So was everybody. Then they just shoved us on the bus. Some of the girls were crying.”

“How about you?” my mother said.

“I was sad, I guess. I don't know.”

My mother slid across the seat and held me. I endured it. Mr. Chervenick had left.

“You're okay,” she asked. “You're sure.”

“I'm hungry,” I said.

“Do you know whose little girl that was?”

“I didn't know her name.”

“That was Annie Van Dorn's little girl. You remember Annie.”

I hadn't for a long time, and now that I was, the crush I had had on her returned, mixed with the image of the girl floating backwards. “Sure.”

My mother told me about Annie's marriage and separation as if they were tragedies linked and equal to this one. As she was speaking, the Annie I had known seemed to vanish, to become so much older that I could not imagine what she might look like. I was still stoned and associating things freely and could not help but compare Annie's story to my mother's—the missing husband and lost child.

“I'm going to have to go see Mrs. Van Dorn,” she said. “It would be nice if you came too.”

I said I would.

My mother didn't tell me about her day. We passed the Van Dorns'—their lights were off—and our old house without comment. I thought of Annie coming over to babysit, jumping from her father's truck with her books, her long hair swinging.

Before getting out at Foxwood, my mother said, “You're sure you're okay?”

“I only looked at her a few seconds.”

“Something like that, that's enough. I'm going to ask you to do me a favor.”

“What?” I said. I was tired. I wanted to eat and watch TV.

“I want you to come with me when I see Dr. Brady next week. You'll like him, he's really very nice.” She went off on a long spiel, and I knew she'd made up her mind.

“I'll go,” I conceded. She held me again, sitting there in the glare from the coachlight. It seemed she could not touch me enough. When she pulled away, I could see she was crying—just a tear she wiped away with a gloved finger. She tried to smile.

“What are we having for dinner?” I asked, because I truly wanted to know and not because I thought it would make her laugh.

The next day my father unexpectedly showed up after lunch in his Nova. While it was a Saturday, we hadn't made any plans, and after our last disaster, I wasn't sure if he wanted to see me or vice versa. I was surprised that I was glad he had come. My mother asked him in for a cup of hot chocolate.