The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (17 page)

It was at that point that his cell phone rang. It was his graduate assistant Chin Sung, from the lab. “Where
are
you?” Chin demanded.

“In a grant meeting,” Nathan whispered. “Can I call you back in a few minutes?”

“Not if you still want the Nobel Prize,” Chin said. “You know that hare-brained theory of yours about global warming producing
a sudden discontinuity? Well, I think you’d better get over here. Today may be the day you turn out to be right.”

“Why?” Nathan asked, gripping the phone excitedly. “What’s happened? Have the Gulf Stream temp readings dropped?”

“No, it’s not the currents. It’s what’s happening here.”

“Which is what?”

Instead of answering, Chin asked, “Is it snowing where you are?” Nathan looked out the conference
room window. “Yes.”

“I thought so. It’s snowing here, too.”

“And that’s what you called me about?” Nathan whispered. “Because it’s snowing in Nebraska in December? In case you haven’t looked at a calendar lately, winter started three
days ago. It’s
supposed
to be snowing.”

“You don’t understand,” Chin said. “It isn’t just snowing in Nebraska. It’s snowing everywhere.”

“What
do you mean, everywhere?”

“I mean everywhere. Seattle, Salt Lake City, Minneapolis, Providence, Chattanooga. All over Canada and the U.S. as far south as—” there was a pause and the sound of computer keys clicking “—Abilene and Shreve-port and Savannah. No, wait, Tallahassee’s reporting light snow. As far south as Tallahassee.”

The jet stream must have dipped radically south. “Where’s the center of the low pressure system?”

“That’s just it,” Chin said. “There doesn’t seem to be one.”

“I’ll be right there,” Nathan said.

A mile from the highway snowboarders Kent Slakken and Bodine Cromps, unable to see the road in heavily falling snow, drove their car into a ditch. “Shit,” Bodine said, and attempted to get out of it by revving the engine and then flooring it, a technique that only succeeded in digging them in to
the point where they couldn’t open either car door.

It took Jim and Paula nearly two hours to pick up the evergreen garlands and get out to the church. The lacy flakes fell steadily faster and thicker, and it was so slick Jim had to crawl the last few miles. “I hope this doesn’t get any worse,” he said worriedly, “or people are going to have a hard time getting out here.”

But Stacey wasn’t worried
at all. “Isn’t it beautiful? I wanted it to snow for my wedding more than anything,” she said, meeting them at the door of the church. “Come here, Paula, you’ve got to see how the snow looks through the sanctuary windows. It’s going to be perfect.”

Jim left immediately to go pick up Kindra and David, which Paula was grateful for. Being that close to him in the car had made her start entertaining
the ridiculous hopes about him she’d had when they first met. And they were ridiculous. One look at Stacey had shown her that.

The bride-to-be looked beautiful even in a sweater and jeans, her makeup exquisite, her blonde hair upswept into glittery snowflake-sprinkled curls. Every time Paula had had her hair done to be in a wedding, she had come out looking like someone in a bad 1950s movie.
How does she do it? Paula wondered. You watch, the snow will stop and start up again just in time for the ceremony.

But it
didn’t. It continued to come down steadily, and when the minister arrived for the rehearsal, she said, “I don’t know. It took me half an hour to get out of my driveway. You may want to think about canceling.”

“Don’t be silly. We can’t cancel. It’s a Christmas Eve wedding,”
Stacey said, and made Paula start tying the evergreen garlands to the pews with white satin ribbon.

It was sprinkling in Santa Fe when Bev Carey arrived at her hotel, and by the time she’d checked in and ventured out into the plaza, it had turned into an icy, driving rain that went right through the light coat and thin gloves she’d brought with her. She had planned to spend the morning shopping,
but the shops had signs on them saying “Closed Christmas Eve and Christmas Day,” and the sidewalk in front of the Governor’s Palace, where, according to her guidebook, Zunis and Navajos sat to sell authentic silver-and-turquoise jewelry, was deserted.

But at least it’s not snowing, she told herself, trudging, shivering, back to the hotel. And the shop windows were decorated with
ristras
and lights
in the shape of chili peppers, and the Christmas tree in the hotel lobby was decorated with kachina dolls.

Her friend Janice had already called and left a message with the hotel clerk. And if I don’t call her back, she’ll be convinced I’ve taken a bottle of sleeping pills, Bev thought, going up to her room. On the way to the airport, Janice had asked anxiously, “You haven’t been having suicidal
thoughts, have you?” and when her friend Louise had found out what Bev was planning, she’d said, “I saw this piece on
Dateline
the other night about suicides at Christmas, and how people who’ve lost a spouse are especially vulnerable. You wouldn’t do anything like that, would you?”

They none of them understood that she was doing this to save her life, not end it, that it was Christmas at home,
with its lighted trees and evergreen wreaths and candles, that would kill her. And its snow.

“I know you miss Howard,” Janice had said, “and that with Christmas coming, you’re feeling sad.”

Sad? She felt flayed, battered, beaten. Every memory, every thought of her husband, every use of the past tense, even “Howard liked…,” “Howard knew…,” “Howard was…,”was like a deadly blow. The grief-counseling
books all talked about “the pain of losing a loved one,” but she had had no idea the pain could be this bad. It was like being stabbed over and over, and her only hope had been to get away. She hadn’t “decided to go to Santa Fe for Christmas.” She had run there like a victim fleeing a murderer.

She
took off her drenched coat and gloves and called Janice. “You promised you’d call as soon as you
got there,” Janice said reproachfully. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Bev said. “I was out walking around the Plaza.” She didn’t say anything about its raining. She didn’t want Janice saying I told you so. “It’s beautiful here.”

“I should have come with you,” Janice said. “It’s snowing like crazy here. Ten inches so far. I suppose you’re sitting on a patio drinking a margarita right now.”

“Sangria,” Bev lied. “I’m going sightseeing this afternoon. The houses here are all pink and tan adobe with bright blue and red and yellow doors. And right now the whole town’s decorated with
luminarias.
You should see them.”

“I wish I could,” Janice sighed. “All I can see is snow. I have no idea how I’m going to get to the store. Oh, well, at least we’ll have a white Christmas. It’s so sad Howard
can’t be here to see this. He always loved white Christmases, didn’t he?”

Howard, consulting the
Farmer’s Almanac
, reading the weather forecast out loud to her, calling her over to the picture window to watch the snow beginning to fall, saying, “Looks like we’re going to get a white Christmas this year,” as if it were a present under the tree, putting his arm around her—

“Yes,” Bev managed to
say through the sudden, searing stab of pain. “He did.”

It was spitting snow when Warren Nesvick checked into the Marriott in Baltimore. As soon as he got Shara up to the suite, he told her he had to make a business call, “and then I’ll be all yours, honey.” He went down to the lobby. The TV in the corner was showing a weather map. He looked at it for a minute and then got out his cell phone.

“Where
are
you?” his wife Marjean said when she answered.

“In
St. Louis,” he said. “Our flight got rerouted here because of snow at O’Hare. What’s the weather like there?”

“It’s snowing,” she said. “When do you think you’ll be able to get a flight out?”

“I don’t know. Everything’s booked because of it being Christmas Eve. I’m waiting to see if I can get on standby. I’ll call you as soon as I
know something,” and hung up before she could ask him which flight.

It took Nathan an hour and a half to drive the fifteen miles to the lab. During the ride he considered the likelihood that this was really a discontinuity and not just a major snowstorm. Global warming proponents (and opponents) confused the two all the time. Every hurricane, tornado, heat wave, or dry spell was attributed to
global warming, even though nearly all of them fell well within the range of normal weather patterns.

And there had been big December snowstorms before. The blizzard of 1888, for instance, and the Christmas Eve storm of 2002. And Chin was probably wrong about there being no center to the low pressure system. The likely explanation was that there was more than one system involved—one centered
in the Great Lakes and another just east of the Rockies, colliding with warm, moist air from the Gulf Coast to create unusually widespread snow.

And it
was
widespread. The car radio was reporting snow all across the Midwest and the entire East Coast—Topeka, Tulsa, Peoria, northern Virginia, Hartford, Montpelier, Reno, Spokane. No, Reno and Spokane were west of the Rockies. There must be a third
system, coming down from the Northwest. But it was still hardly a discontinuity.

The lab parking lot hadn’t been plowed. He left the car on the street and struggled through the already knee-deep snow to the door, remembering when he was halfway across the expanse that Nebraska was famous for pioneers who got lost going out to the barn in a blizzard and whose frozen bodies weren’t found till the
following spring.

He reached the door, opened it, and stood there a moment blowing on his frozen hands and looking at the TV Chin had stuck on a cart in the corner of the lab. On it, a pretty reporter in a parka and a Mickey Mouse hat was standing in heavy snow in front of what seemed’ to be a giant snowman. “The snow has really caused problems here at Disney World,” she said over the sound of
a marching band playing “White Christmas.” “Their annual Christmas Eve Parade has—”

“Well, it’s about
time,” Chin said, coming in from the fax room with a handful of printouts. “What took you so long?” Nathan ignored that. “Have you got the IPOC data?” he asked.

Chin nodded. He sat down at his terminal and started typing. The upper left-hand screen lit up with columns of numbers.

“Let me see
the National Weather Service map,” Nathan said, unzipping his coat and sitting down at the main console.

Chin called up a U.S. map nearly half-covered with blue, from western Oregon and Nevada east all the way to the Atlantic and up through New England and south to the Oklahoma panhandle, northern Mississippi, Alabama, and most of Georgia.

“Good Lord, that’s even bigger than Marina in ’92,”
Nathan said. “Have you got a satellite photo?”

Chin nodded and called it up. “And this is a real-time composite of all the data coming in, including weather stations, towns, and spotters reporting in. The white’s snow,” he added unnecessarily.

The white covered even more territory than the blue on the NWS map, with jagged fingers stretching down into Arizona and Louisiana and west into Oregon
and California. Surrounding them were wide uneven pink bands. “Is the pink rain?” Nathan asked.

“Sleet,” Chin said. “So what do you think? It’s a discontinuity, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” Nathan said, calling up the barometric readings and starting through them.

“What else could it be? It’s snowing in Orlando. And San Diego.”

“It’s snowed both of those places before,” Nathan said. “It’s even
snowed in Death Valley. The only place in the U.S. where it’s never snowed is the Florida Keys. And Hawaii, of course. Everything on this map right now is within the range of normal weather events. You don’t have to start worrying till it starts snowing in the Florida Keys.”

“What about other places?” Chin asked, looking at the center right-hand screen.

“What do you mean, other places?”

“I
mean, it isn’t just snowing in the U.S. I’m getting reports from Cancun. And Jerusalem.”

At eleven-thirty Pilar
gave up trying to explain that there wasn’t enough snow to make a snowman and took Miguel outside, bundled up in a sweatshirt, a sweater, and his warm jacket, with a pair of Pilar’s tube socks for mittens. He lasted about five minutes.

When they came back in, Pilar settled him at the
kitchen table with crayons and paper so he could draw a picture of a snowman and went into the living room to check the weather forecast. It was really snowing hard out there, and she was getting a little worried about taking Miguel down to Escondido. Los Angelenos didn’t know how to drive in snow, and Pilar’s tires weren’t that good.

“—snowing here in Hollywood,” said a reporter standing in
front of the nearly invisible Hollywood sign, “and this isn’t soapflakes, folks, it’s the real thing.”

She switched channels. “—snowing in Santa Monica,” a reporter standing on the beach was saying, “but that isn’t stopping the surfers. …”

Click. “—
para la primera vez en ciencuenta años en
Marina del Rey—”

Click. “—snowing here in L.A. for the first time in nearly fifty years. We’re here on
the set of
XXX II
with Vin Diesel. What do you think of the snow, Vin?”

She gave up and went back in the kitchen where Miguel announced he was ready to go outside again. She talked him into listening to Alvin and the Chipmunks instead. “Okay,” he said, and she left him warbling “White Christmas” along with Alvin and went in to check the weather again. The Santa Monica reporter briefly mentioned
the roads were wet before moving on to interview a psychic who claimed to have predicted the snowstorm, and on a Spanish-language channel she caught a glimpse of the 405 moving along at its usual congested pace.

The roads must not be too bad, she thought, or they’d all be talking about it, but she still wondered if she hadn’t better take Miguel down to Escondido early. She hated to give up her
day with him, but his safety was the important thing, and the snow wasn’t letting up at all.

When Miguel came into the living room and asked when they could go outside, she said, “After we pack your suitcase, okay? Do you want to take your Pokemon jammies or your Spidermans?” and began gathering up his things.