Mercy Snow

by Tiffany Baker

  June snapped on the light. The obligatory shower of sparks shot out of the fixture and electrified the room. Cal blinked, putting a hand up to shield his eyes. “I was avoiding that.”

  June’s voice came out sharper than she intended. “Nate, why don’t you go upstairs?” She expected him to argue or protest, at the very least to want his father to gather him close and squeeze his thickening shoulders, but Nate didn’t even make eye contact with his father.

  “Okay,” he mumbled, and slipped past his parents to the sleeping loft like a shadow trying to escape the sun.

  Now June had Cal’s full attention. They’d been married long enough that he could sense her moods the way old sailors could feel drops in barometric pressure without instruments. He put his sweating tumbler on the table and waited. For a moment June held her breath, hoping he would call Nate back and ask what was wrong, but he didn’t. An unfamiliar wave of rage washed through her then, leaving her gummy in the knees, brittle in her bones, feeling older than her years.

  A marriage doesn’t run like the lousy mill! she had the urge to shout at Cal. It wasn’t a whirring room of cogs and wheels, or like the pulping machines he switched on and off at his will. Nothing was so simple. But of course these thoughts were unfair. June was simply angry that Cal didn’t know anything about the night’s incidents yet, and he didn’t know because she hadn’t told him. She almost didn’t want to. It was terrible, but as long as she held the knowledge of the accident bundled tight to her chest, it could be as if it hadn’t happened at all. The moment she spoke of it, though, that spell would be broken. Time would race to catch up with itself and leave her stuck here, standing in the living room of the cabin, her son’s best friend dead, her husband a mystery. She blinked away tears and cleared her throat. “There’s been an accident.”

  Cal furrowed his brow, confused. “What?”

  “Fergus went off Devil’s Slide Road. He was unresponsive when they found him, but alive. Abel told me he thinks it was that Snow boy. They found his truck crashed a little way from the scene.” June paused. There was no good way to say the next part, about Suzie. She licked her dry lips. “There’s something else you should know. Suzie Flyte. She’s… passed.”

  Cal froze. In spite of all his bad qualities—the ones June had only seemed to be focusing on lately—she could always count on him to act calm and supremely competent in any crisis. But not tonight. He seemed genuinely rattled, sweat beading along his hairline, his eyes shifty. He picked up his glass in distress, but it was empty. “Oh, my God. Are you sure?”

  How very like Cal, June thought, to demand certitude, even in—maybe especially in—the face of a tragedy, as if bad things could happen only with his permission. She frowned. The yellow mud on Cal’s car was bothering her. He shifted, and his face sank into shadow. More than anything, June wished to see his expression at that moment. Lately he never seemed to face her.

  “Were you at the mill for the whole day today?”

  Cal remained in the shadow. “Jesus, June. What has that got to do with anything?”

  Before, when he’d cheated and she’d caught him, he’d at least admitted it. Looking at the bearish hang of his shoulders, June wondered if Cal’s current posture denoted grief, or guilt, or, more likely, a mixture of both. Inside, she knew she was still the same scholarship girl she’d been in college—a faithful reader at heart. She believed in providence and in denouements, though maybe no longer in happy endings.

  Lately she had been plagued with dreams about her Florida youth, floating in her sleep in a palette of moss greens and scrubbed pinks, her throat closing in the sticky air. She always woke violently after these incidents, jerked back to the straight lines of her brass bed, the sky outside her window a rebuke in iron gray or antiseptic blue, depending on the season. She’d been rerooted entirely by free will, she reminded herself. She’d chosen to pace her life by the rush of the Androscoggin and the noise of the mill. Instead of her now-deceased mother, she had Nate and Cal to look after, and without them she would have nothing. She blinked back tears. “I can’t get it out of my head. What if Nate had been the one? What would we ever do?”

  Cal’s gaze drifted out the darkened window. He looked as if he’d seen something he couldn’t explain, though the only thing reflected was his own image. “I don’t know,” he confessed.

  June waited for him to say something—anything—else, but he didn’t. “Let’s just stay here tonight. I don’t want to go back to town yet.” Usually Cal made these kinds of decisions, but he remained silent. June pictured all the food she’d left sitting on the counter—the plugs of yams, the cake batter dripping out of its bowl in viscous streaks. Not that any of them would feel like eating tomorrow. Mourning and feasting didn’t go hand in hand.

  Cal had risen. June knew he was going to see Nate, to reassure himself that he was safe. He paused at the foot of the worn wooden stairs, the banister perennially cockeyed. “Did you say they caught that Snow boy?”

  How very like Cal to want justice at the earliest opportunity. But then June supposed you had to be that way when you had a whole town of men depending on you. Sometimes she thought Cal would make the better sheriff. Abel always saw too many sides of the equation, but maybe that, too, was an asset in a lawman. Maybe you had to think like a criminal in order to outsmart one. “Abel sent Johnny Stenton out to the Snow place, but no one was there. They’re looking for the boy.” She stretched out a hand in the room’s darkness. She ought to tell Cal about the discovery of Gert’s bones, she knew, the same way Abel had told her—as an aside, almost as an afterthought. There was something unsettling about the unearthing of those remains. Gert hadn’t been good news during her lifetime, and June suspected she’d be even less so now. She took a quick breath. “On top of everything, Abel and his men found the bones of Gert Snow tonight. By accident. After all this time, she was buried right there on the edge of the ravine.”

  Cal looked grim at this additional information, but he didn’t remark on it. Years of juggling accidents and near accidents, booms and busts and equipment failures at the mill had made him circumspect in the face of disasters large and small. He was not a man to let emotion rule or distract him. Rather he tended to hoard the measures of his sentiments, clutching them tight to his belly the way a hungry man guarded two fistfuls of food. “Are you coming up?”

  June considered. The bedroom would be cold, the sheets stiff and dry. Cal’s body would be reassuring ballast under the covers, a counterweight to keep her tethered. But she wasn’t ready for sleep. Not yet. “Soon.”

  “Spread the ashes out before coming up.” Cal’s feet were heavy on the stairs.

  “Of course.” She always did. She always would. But fire wasn’t the real danger, June thought, not compared to the filaments of a life—her life—a little too loosely woven, its threads starting to show the kinds of holes she was worried she’d never be able to mend.

  Nestled in the loft of the cabin, where he’d been sleeping since he was a toddler, Nate lay inert and fully clothed under a pile of scratchy wool blankets. Downstairs he could hear his parents’ low murmuring back and forth—his mother’s voice a quiver of contralto, his father’s the rumbling, steady bass that vibrated through every memory Nate possessed.

  He reached up and ran his fingers over the bandaged gash on his forehead, pressing until he felt the ache deep down in his skull. If he could just keep the pain present, he thought, if he could stay in the chaotic moment of free fall, the bus tipping into darkness and then bumping down the ravine, he might figure out what had happened. He didn’t mean the actual accident itself. There was no explaining that. All Nate could remember was a bright set of headlights filling the bus from behind, then a vicious swerving, and finally the terrible and elongated sensation of teetering on the edge of a precipice. It was the events before that, all the way back to the movie theater in Berlin, that Nate couldn’t square.

  On the way to Berlin, Suzie had sat with him the way she always
did, her long, jean-encased thigh pressed against his, her bony shoulder poking his bicep. It was nice. They hadn’t sat that way for a while. They were too old for the youth group, but Fergus had let them come along tonight anyway, just so they could get out of Titan Falls for a spell. The movie even seemed like it might be good. But Suzie had been preoccupied and quiet. She didn’t nudge Nate with the point of her elbow and ask if he’d heard any filthy jokes lately. She didn’t roll her eyes and snort when he described the touchdown he’d thrown in the last football game. She didn’t even snap her gum.

  Maybe, Nate thought, she’s worried about her dad. His own father had fired Mr. Flyte, Nate knew. One day, he was all too aware, he would also be expected to make decisions like that, potentially dismissing and bossing boys he’d known all his life, boys he’d bled for on the athletic field, boys he wanted to be like but wasn’t quite, not with a mill to his name. And every day he would work surrounded by thousands of pieces of blank paper, each one a small fate he could choose to blacken if he wanted or keep pure, sending it out into the wider world like an unfinished prayer for someone else to complete. It was a freedom Nate envied. All the pages of his life were already thoroughly inked with the soot and grease of the mill, his future written for him.

  His breath had fogged the bus window, muddling his thoughts. The bus lurched over a pothole, and Suzie fell against him, her body a familiar and comforting weight but with curves now instead of little-girl angles. An electric jolt buzzed along Nate’s ribs and spine, but if Suzie felt it, too, she didn’t show it. Instead she squeezed the red mittens she was holding and straightened herself back up, making herself separate again. A lump formed in Nate’s throat. Maybe, he thought, she’s in love with someone I don’t know about.

  She was antsy during the movie, sighing a lot and jiggling her legs, crossing and uncrossing her ankles. Finally she stood up and threw her coat around her shoulders. “I’m going outside for a smoke,” she whispered.

  Nate sat alone in the dark, missing her. The fact of her empty seat bothered him, as did Suzie’s newish habit of cigarettes and her apparent amnesia when it came to any of their old jokes. He glanced behind him, willing her to come drifting back down the aisle, but she didn’t. He waited another heartbeat, then another, and then at last stumbled over legs and knees in the dark, apologizing as he passed. If Suzie wasn’t going to come to him, he’d go to her. He wasn’t a smoker, but he was willing to start if it meant he could share something with her again.

  In the lobby he blinked from the sudden light, even though the overheads were dim. Through the glass panels of the building’s front doors, he saw the blur of Suzie’s brown plaid coat coming back inside, the sweep of her yellow hair. As if pulled by a beacon, he sailed toward her.

  “What are you doing?” She scowled when she spotted him and glanced quickly over her shoulder. The sky outside had darkened, and the street had dimmed into a palette of industrial uncertainties, the many boarded-up buildings question marks. Once a city in these parts decided to die, you simply had to let it.

  “I just came to find you.” Nate began to step across the lobby toward her, but she quickly closed the space between them. Through the cloudy doors, Nate saw a figure who reminded him of his father. A man in a camel-hair coat, about the same height, and walking with a matching impatient hitch in his step. Nate watched as he bent down to the pavement, then straightened and disappeared from view. Nate squinted, but whoever it was had gone, leaving Nate to doubt he’d seen anyone at all. Once again he wondered if Suzie had a secret boyfriend. “Who was that?”

  Her blue eyes darkened. “Who was who?” Too late, Nate remembered that she’d never been the kind of girl who required rescuing. He blushed, and Suzie jumped on his discomfort. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Nate. Go sit back down in the theater. I have to go to the bathroom. I’ll be there in a minute.” Nate wanted to prove his fidelity by waiting, but he didn’t want to seem like a creep, so he’d skulked back into the dark theater, bumped over knees again, and settled himself in his seat, trying to slow his breathing, trying to pretend that his heart didn’t feel as big and bruised as an old banana.

  He waited, but she didn’t sit with him—not for the rest of the film and not on the bus either. She let him board first, and then she took a seat right behind Fergus up in the front, leaving Nate to stew alone in a backseat, occasionally catching glimpses of her hair as she flicked stray pieces over her shoulders. What could she be thinking about alone up there? he wondered. She was clutching only one of her red mittens, he noticed, and he wished he’d noticed earlier when she’d dropped its mate so he could play the hero and return it now. She was fond of them, he knew. Her mother almost never gave her anything special. And her father… well, he was a worse story altogether. From years of childhood escapades over at the Flyte house, Nate knew that Fred kept a bottle of rye in the broken freezer in his garage. He knew that dinner conversation around the Flyte table often consisted of Fred’s fists pounding the wood in a drunken rage, and he knew that the bruises Suzie said she got from clambering through the woods sometimes came from much closer to home.

  Up ahead of him, Suzie’s profile was hidden by rows of children’s and teenagers’ heads, their hair electrified with the cold air or covered by hats decorated with pom-poms and tassels. Half of those hats were probably made under the hawkish gaze of his mother, Nate reflected, the yarn looped right under her eye during her sewing circle. Nothing in Titan Falls happened without his parents knowing about it, and this, he felt, was both a blessing and a curse.

  Only with Suzie had he ever felt a kind of parity. He knew everything about her: her shoe size, her favorite flavor of ice cream, what she had nightmares about. Surely he would sense if she was in love with someone. He would guess with whom. The bus wobbled over yet another pothole, and Nate jerked sideways, but this time all that his shoulder and ribs met with was empty air. No Suzie to crash into. He stared out the window at the black swath of trees that straggled along the lip of Devil’s Slide Road, their outlines barely visible. One day they might be turned to paper.

  Just then a blinding set of headlights filled the bus from the rear. He turned to face the source of the light, but the other vehicle—a dark blur—was trying to pass them now, plunging the end of the bus into blackness. Nate held his breath, waiting to see if the light would catch Suzie’s face and reveal whatever she was hiding, but before it could reach her, there was a violent jerking, then an ominous wobble, and then just falling. A drop that he survived but Suzie didn’t.

  Nate rolled onto his back and blinked at the knotty-pine ceiling, worlds colliding in his mind. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep, but it was useless. Suzie was everywhere and nowhere at once, like the imprint of a president’s head on a coin. Nate could flip it a hundred times, he knew, and there she’d be, a memory he would never be able to ignore.

  On the stairs he heard a volley of heavy approaching footsteps. His father, coming to check on him, to breathe the mill’s grease-laden air straight back into his only child’s lungs if that’s what it was going to take. He would be allowed to grieve only so long, Nate knew, before he would be told to lift his chin and chest, to brace himself and walk like a real man.

  The door opened, letting in a single slant of light, pointed as a saber. Nate suffered it, lying as still as he could, his eyes closed, his breath stilled. Then the door closed and the light disappeared. Nate waited for his father’s footsteps to ebb before he crept back down to look for his mother.

  Alone in the cabin’s living room, June pulled out her knitting—a baby blanket she was working on for Stella Farnsworth—before she remembered that she’d left the pattern for the project in Cal’s car after church last Sunday. She’d been sharing it with Alice during the church coffee hour, the two of them cooing over the promise of a new infant in town. She hesitated, reluctant to go back out into the cold night when, really, all this could wait until morning.

  It took her a moment to find Cal’s jacket in the
mudroom. It wasn’t on the peg where he normally left it but thrown crosswise over a heap of unused rubber boots in the opposite corner of the room. June let out a wifely tsk of annoyance and fished in the closest pocket for the car keys. She shoved her feet into the closest pair of black rubber boots, threw Cal’s coat around her shoulders, and flung open the door to the howling misery of the weather.

  Shivering, she darted out into the dark where Cal’s car sat still streaked with that unsettling mud. She unlocked the passenger-side door and fumbled around in the pocket for the pattern, illuminated by the weak interior bulb. Just as her fingers touched paper, however, she froze, for the mud she’d spotted on the outside of the car was definitely yellow up close, and it was fresh. June blew out a punch of air and considered what she was seeing. She pulled herself out of the car and shut the door, returning the scene to darkness.

  That might have been the end of it, but once inside again, June stamped her feet to get the snow off and stuck her hand in Cal’s coat pocket to return the keys. This time, however, her fingers encountered something soft, what felt like a length of crumpled yarn. Puzzled, she pulled whatever it was out into the light and then froze, her vision narrowed to a single point as she saw that she was holding Suzie Flyte’s other mitten.

  June would have known it anywhere, not just from the color—the insolent red of chokecherries—but also from the diamonds of cable knitted into the fabric, a pattern her own fingers had demonstrated to Dena. She extended a hand to steady herself and then, just as she’d done a hundred times before, she stepped out of her boots, shrugged off Cal’s coat, and walked into the kitchen with the mitten, trying to think. There had been so many people milling around at the accident scene—police and rescue workers, distraught parents—but certainly not Cal, for how would that even have been possible? He was waiting in the cabin when she and Nate had arrived. And yet here was Suzie’s mitten laid out on the scratched kitchen counter, the wool puckered from where it had gotten wet, the shape of Suzie’s graceful fingers still crimped into the yarn.