Snow Angels (9 page)

“What do you mean?” Annie says. “You've been lying to her for weeks.”

“She knew,” Brock says. “You were the first name she came up with.”

“And you said yes.”

“What was I supposed to say?”

“That's great,” Annie says. Like a dog on a chain, her mind keeps leaping after possibilities only to choke on the fact that Barb knows. “Well, there's nothing we can do about it now. Listen, Glenn's going to be here in twenty minutes. Why don't you go buy us some dinner and come back around six. I don't want him seeing you here.”

“What kind of food do you want?”

“I don't care,” Annie says. “Something Tara can eat.”

“Like what?”

“Fish, chicken, anything. Just get out of here.”

“Annie,” Brock says.

“Don't start,” Annie says, and then it's her turn to pace.

Friday night when Glenn's mother tells him there's a man living at Annie's he doesn't believe her. He was there Sunday. Annie had to cancel their date yesterday to cover for another girl at work, but she rescheduled it for next week when she'll be on days. His mother says she's just trying to save him trouble later. Clare Hardesty's seen the fellow's car going in and out of there. Glenn doesn't understand why she constantly has to tear his hopes down. They get into it in the kitchen, and Glenn's father comes in rattling the
Eagle
.

“Why don't you give her a call?” he suggests.

“Better,” his mother says, “take a drive over and see for yourself.”

Glenn calls and gets Annie. The girl she spelled last night is trading the favor. Annie laughs at the accusation.

“She's probably seeing my mother's car. I'm trying to get her out of the house more.”

Glenn lets it go, doesn't say that Clare knows the Polara (she has a Dodge herself, an ugly little Dart). He tries to remember when she's lied to him before and can't. Up until this, everything has been his fault.

Annie reminds him of their date Thursday, says she'll see him on Sunday.

“So?” his mother says when he gets off.

“It's her mother's car.”

His mother scoffs, blowing out a mouthful of air.

“Livvie,” his father says.

“I've tried,” she says. “No one can say I haven't tried.”

Glenn wants to hurt her, to say to her face that she doesn't love him, that she's not his real mother, but doesn't. His father gives him a pitying look (he's always sorry, always trying to help him because he's such a fuck-up), and as he has so often since he's been home, Glenn turns and takes his jacket from the back door and leaves them without a word.

Not knowing who it is, Bomber snarls, then recognizes Glenn. The spotlight at the corner of the porch goes on—his father again—and the oak's bare branches throw shadows over his truck. Bomber hears his keys and wants to go with him. Glenn lets him off the chain and the dog goes straight for the driver's-side door.

On the way through town he stops at Keffalas's for a six of Iron City. He needs to talk to Rafe, an old high school buddy he used to work with when he was still with Annie. He lives out past the middle school in the house his parents left him. The furniture is ash and cherry, the rugs frayed bare. When Glenn needed a place, Rafe was willing to give him a room. It didn't
last long, they were both too screwed up and lost their jobs. They would talk, nodding drunk, late at night when they knew they had to get up for work, of how Tara was the only thing Glenn had ever done right in his life. Rafe is sterile. He'd hold Glenn and sob, trying to explain himself. “You've got Tara, man, no matter what happens, you've got her, man.”

“Come on, man,” Glenn said, “don't start this shit again.”

“You're right,” Rafe would say, sniffling, trying to laugh. “You know I can't help it.”

But now when Glenn turns into the muddy drive he sees Rafe's place is dark except for a chore light over the garage. His Bronco's gone. Bomber paws the window, thinking they're going to get out.

“Take it easy,” Glenn scolds him. He cracks an Iron, slaps the magnetized opener back against the dash, but it falls into Bomber's footwell. “My fucking day.”

He drives out to the lake and sits at a picnic table. Across the water the lights of summer cottages describe the shoreline. In the wind the beer feels warm. The swings creak. Bomber runs in and out of the dark, a blur. Glenn wonders what Nan would recommend. It's been too cold, November; he hasn't seen her in weeks. He has her number somewhere, and he can always look in the book.

The stars are up. He leans back against the table to watch them. Sometimes in church he thinks of Jesus stepping down out of the sky, pulling the night aside like a curtain and showing Glenn his blazing flesh, trailing the sword of judgment. Glenn has decided he is not saved yet, that Jesus sees his sin for what it is. When he kneels and closes his eyes for the Confession, he sees his father's watery face, feels the scrape of the hose down his throat, the suction plunging his stomach. None of that has changed, he thinks. He can see himself doing it every day, every time he sees the aspirin hidden away from him in the downstairs bathroom medicine cabinet. “And deliver us,” he prays, “from evil. For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory. Forever and ever. Amen.”

He thinks of his real father's childhood beneath the lake, the dust of a small town summer. “Bullshit,” he says, and sees his mother drunk in the Pittsburgh bus station, asking servicemen for quarters. She was the one who put him up for adoption, not his father, but Glenn never blames her. “At least she tried,” he says, finds his beer's dead and pops another. He closes his eyes, after a minute opens them. These ghosts won't go away that easily.

The stars retreat and surge forth again; the wind rattles the trees. Glenn finishes the six and dunks the empties thunderously in a raccoon-proof trashcan.
Bomber knows it's time to go and waits for him at the door.

“I'm coming,” Glenn says, trudging uphill.

He has no intention of driving by Annie's. Only as the high school exit comes up does he relent, angling the truck up the ramp and braking late for the stop sign. He's not drunk, just buzzed enough to laugh at the giant, spotlit Big Boy in his checked overalls atop the Eat'n'Park. The drive-in bank says it's past midnight and cold enough to snow. He turns left, away from the blue
GAS
and
FOOD
arrows, and the lights of town sparkle in Bomber's window.

“That's not where we're from, buddy,” Glenn says, and pats him on the shoulder.

The streetlamp halfway down Turkey Hill sheds an empty circle over the road, painting its cracks and potholes black. Beyond it, far off as stars, glow the windows of the Cape. Glenn turns his lights and his motor off and coasts down the slope. He can't see anything until he glides beneath the streetlamp, and then it's too late to turn back.

In the drive sits Annie's Maverick.

“Ha,” Glenn says, and shoves Bomber as if they'd bet on it and the dog has lost. He stops and Bomber almost falls into the footwell. They're still a few hundred yards away, out of range in the dark. Above the house the water tower rises swimming pool blue, the
tank patched with painted-over names. The woods are dark, the night above them searchlit by the passing traffic on the interstate. Last summer he and Annie took their sleeping bags into the field and with Tara between them watched the stars until the bugs got bad. He thinks he should show up Halloween night in disguise, maybe pin a cape on Bomber.

“What do you think?” he asks. “Superdog, Scooby Doo?”

Bomber cocks his head.

“You pick something then.”

Bomber paws his leg. He doesn't know what's going on, why they're stopped so close to home.

“Okay, bud,” Glenn says, and starts the truck up. He's hoping Annie's either asleep or watching TV. With his lights off he does a three-point turn that becomes a five-pointer and sneaks up Turkey Hill in first.

At the T across from the Hardestys (asleep, the downstairs dark), Glenn flips on his lights. He has to wait for a car to pass, but the car slows—suddenly, as if the driver thinks Glenn is a cop—and then turns into Turkey Hill, its lights raking the truck, tossing up dust from the berm.

The car passes Glenn, then stops. He recognizes the taillights from work—a '72 Charger—and makes the connection. It's Barb and her boyfriend. The
kitchen's closed and they're looking for a party. Glenn doesn't know how he's going to explain his being here and thinks the best way might be to confess right now, to back up and talk to them, say he knocked but no one was home.

He shifts into reverse and looks over his shoulder to see where he's going. The Charger's taillights flare, then return to normal, pulling away.

They've seen him, he thinks. He can't leave.

He does a better three-pointer and heads back toward the house, already testing excuses. The Charger is passing under the streetlamp, moving pretty good. He knows Brock likes to drive.

But it's not Brock, Glenn sees, because the Charger doesn't cut into the drive. It reaches the turnaround, lights shining on the guardrail, and slowly swings onto the dirt road that leads back to Marsden's Pond. It's a make-out place. In the summer they'd hear cars all night, glass smashing, whoops and howls. Every so often the cops would come. Since Glenn's left, Annie has mentioned she has one of her father's old guns if there's any trouble, but there hasn't been. He still worries about her. It's his best and maybe his only reason for being here and, off the hook now and chivalrous with drink, he suddenly believes it's true. He is her protector, whether she appreciates it or not.

He stops before the streetlamp and turns around
again, this time keeping his lights on. If she hasn't seen him yet she's not going to.

At the intersection Glenn takes a left, then makes a U-turn and pulls the truck off to the side, kills the lights. He's hidden by the trees but poking out enough so he can see the turnaround and the house. He wants to see the Charger come out again; he wants to be sure before he tells his mother. Bomber's confused.

It's foolish, he thinks after a few minutes. He has to get up for work tomorrow and he already has a headache from the beers. He's about to give up when he sees a light moving through the woods.

It's the Charger, backing up the dirt road. It comes out under the tower, swings its lights toward Glenn.

“That was fast,” he says.

He waits for it to come up Turkey Hill, but it doesn't. It turns into the drive behind the Maverick and someone gets out. Glenn wipes his breath from the glass, and when that doesn't work, jumps out of the truck and runs closer in the cold, shielding his eyes to see better as if it's sunny. At this distance, in the glow from the windows, it could be Barb or Brock or anyone. The driver walks across the lawn. The door opens, and this new light is enough for Glenn to see that the driver is in fact Annie, her hair blazing, so that the taller person beside her, the one taking the bag from her and kissing her, is logically Brock.

Annie hates day shift, especially in winter, but it's the only way she can keep her job. Barb has turned the other girls on nights against her; it's impossible to work. Her time card keeps disappearing, and on the roster someone writes “Sleaze” by every mention of her name. Infuriatingly, Clare Hardesty has said that despite what everyone thinks, she will still sit for her, and when her mother spends the day visiting friends at the Overlook Home (where, ironically, Brock works), Annie reluctantly leaves Tara with Clare, whom she neither likes or can afford. Annie tends the few lunching couples in the main dining room, takes a tray of Manhattans to a table in the bar. By three it's empty. On break she drinks her free Tab and watches the leaves stampede over the deserted golf course. The gay festoons of crepe paper strung for the upcoming Turkey Trot mock her. She ends up prepping for supper, chopping lettuce and decorating relish trays with the dropouts in the kitchen. All they play is classical because Michael the cook likes it, and driving to pick up Tara, she lets WDVE wail—Aerosmith, “Dream On.”

“Listen,” Glenn says over the phone, “I forgive you.”

She hangs up and the phone rings under her hand.

“We are all forgiven. I believe that. I have to believe that.”

“Please,” she says, “I don't want to have to call the police.”

“You're fucking him,” Glenn says, “right in our bed. How can you do that?”

Barb calls her once to make it clear that she doesn't mind losing Brock. It's Annie that's hurt her, and she doesn't know why.

“Why did you do it?” Barb asks, after bitching her out, telling her tearfully that she can never be her friend again. Annie can't answer. She thinks of when Barb split with Mark, how she consoled her, the two of them sitting on Barb's fire escape, drinking peppermint schnapps and listening to the PBA teams in the churchyard making the chain nets ring. When they had drained the pint she wrote Mark's name on the foil and made Barb kiss it and throw it into the dumpster below. It smashed and the boys playing ball all looked.

“I don't know. You know how sometimes you do crazy things.”

“No,” Barb accuses, in one word refuting her argument. “You do what you choose to do.”

“Then I don't know,” Annie says. “It wasn't him, or if it was it's not anymore. And it wasn't you, I swear to God I didn't want to hurt you.”

“But you did.”

“I did,” Annie says. She's tired of apologizing, and listens to the silence. She can't go any lower.

“Was it worth it?” Barb asks. “Did you get what you wanted?”

“No.”

“Glenn called me. He sounded even more fucked-up than usual.”

“I know,” Annie says. “He's been calling me every day. He's been calling me at work.”