by Deborah Reed
She has no idea why he has come or what he wants or how long he plans to stay. She knows she’s not thinking as clearly as she normally would first thing in the morning. But last week, in a fleeting attempt at normalcy, she’d pulled a box of ornaments from the garage, only to find that Owen had left behind the flat, wooden ornaments he’d painted as a child. Gingerbread men, sleighs, thorny wreaths, a skinny Santa, all forgotten in a box filled with her mother’s red and golden balls and a white snow angel her father gave her the last Christmas he was alive. She dropped everything back into the box and closed the door and never made it to get a tree because all she could think about was Owen’s innocent boy hands painting so carefully within the lines, his tongue pressed out the corner of his mouth in concentration, and how that blameless little boy with nothing but the best intentions in his heart would grow into the man who’d hurt her in a way no one else ever could.
It seems a reasonable thing to ask, “Are you here for the ornaments?”
“What?”
She doesn’t look up. “It’s almost Christmas.”
“I know. I don’t need the ornaments,” he says.
“You can take them though, when you leave.”
“I just got here.”
She feels him eyeing Detour. She feels him eyeing her.
“Oh, babe,” he says. “I am so, so sorry.”
He coughs long and hard and gets down on his knees and touches Detour’s head. He touches Annie’s face.
His skin is hot. She leans her face into his hand and smells his smell and immediately feels a rhythm that is her, the person she once was, vibrate just beneath her skin. Her chest aches and her throat feels thick and she puts her hand to her cheek and feels the cold band of gold on his finger.
She lifts her face to meet his eyes. From the tan color of his jacket she realizes he was the man sleeping in the car. He looks like a man who’s been losing sleep long before he spent the night in his car. His mouth is gaunt and rimmed in stubble, the same color of his hair in sunlight. Circles ring his eyes, and his cheeks are flushed against his otherwise sallow skin. “What’s happened to you?” she asks. But it doesn’t matter. It’s Owen. He’s here, and it is all she can do not to reach up and brush away the wavy hair that has fallen near his eye. “What’s all over your hair?”
He shakes his hair out and sweeps his shoulders off and dries his hands on the thighs of his jeans. “Snow.”
She waits to hear he’s joking.
“Everything is covered in white.”
This strikes her as funny. Absurd. More ridiculous than anything she’s ever heard. Laughter rises in her throat. It brings tears, so many of them, enough to distort the room. She shakes her head at the floor and rubs her eyes. “You look like hell,” she says.
His eyes are glassy and red. He gives her a weak smile, just enough to show a corner of his sexy-crooked teeth. He scratches his stubble, the only sound in the room, like sandpaper on wood. “Yeah. Well. So do you,” he says, and coughs through his laughter.
She brushes her hair from her face and turns to the window, unable to see the snow from where she sits, only the glare of white light through the condensation. All her life she’s had to imagine what snow looks like and now she’s imagining it still, even as it lies outside her door.
“Yeah. Well. Someday I’ll be the one who does the leaving around here. Then we’ll see who looks like what.”
Owen raises Annie’s worn yellow quilt to his cheek. “I think we should use this. It smells like you.” He begins wrapping Detour inside it. Annie leaves the room.
Outside, the porch has been transported into another time and place. Snow is meant to fall on rolling hills and trees whose spindly branches have no leaves. But here it is, blanketing the flat swamplands like clouds, like heaven resting on earth. Annie’s throat aches at the beauty. Even more at the grace.
Owen comes out with the bundle in his arms. Annie turns away. Together they walk to the side of the house and stand beneath the willow tree with the shade Detour always chose above the others. Annie keeps her head down. They don’t have to say anything. They know this is the place.
It needs to be done and Owen insists on digging, even as his coughs echo across the frozen field. His hands shake as he breaks through the hardened surface to the moist and warmer soil underneath. The lump of quilt lies nearby in the snow. A well-worn paw pokes from the folds, and Annie finds the strength to bend down and tuck it back in. It feels cold and foreign in her hand, nothing more than a rabbit’s foot on a chain. She recalls the footless rabbits in the Pinckney barn. She stands, rubs her eyes, and pushes the image away.
The wind sweeps snowflakes through the branches. Annie blinks them free from her lashes. She brushes off what gathers on the yellow quilt before she realizes there’s no point.
Owen places Detour in the ground and covers him with clumps of soil.
A high-pitched ringing fills Annie’s ears the way it does when she’s trying not to cry. Owen cries freely, wiping his nose on his sleeve. When he’s finished he drops the shovel to the side and reaches for her. She steps forward and he pulls her against him and rocks her gently inside a tight embrace. She lets go a torrent of tears. They remain latched, one onto the other against the cold. She wants to say something, but there are no words she can think of that come close to the way she feels.
They lie on her bed in their coats and talk to the ceiling. “You’re really sick,” Annie says. “When was the last time you ate something?” This conversation is surreal. The flakes floating past the window do nothing to ground her.
He shivers. “The house smells like sawdust.”
“I used your toothbrush on the fireplace.”
He seems to be falling asleep.
“I think in some ways I loved Detour more than I loved you,” she says.
His laugh is muffled and side-mouthed. He coughs. “I don’t blame you.”
“He never made me worry.”
“No.”
“He never left my side. Well. He couldn’t help this time.”
“No.”
“As far as I know he never lied to me.”
“I’m sure that’s true.”
Owen slides his hot hand over, and she doesn’t pull away when he hooks his small finger through hers.
“How is Calder?” he asks. “Is he all right?”
Annie thinks of Sidsel breaking down on the sofa and then of the dinner they shared, which was as good a dinner as any she’s ever eaten, and all the talk about her music and Sidsel’s café as if they’d been friends for some time, and the way they purposely said nothing more about Calder and Magnus because it was a natural fact, as her father used to say, that what they needed was a break.
“I don’t know how to answer that,” Annie says.
“I’m sorry,” Owen says. Annie doesn’t ask what exactly for. She’s close enough to hear a rattle when he coughs.
She squeezes his finger. “You need to see Doctor Collins.”
“It’s the day before Christmas Eve,” he croaks.
“You need to.”
“Christmas Eve, Eve,” he says, and thinks this is funny.
She can feel the heat through his coat. She rises up onto her elbow. It’s obvious how sick he is, but she can’t help but be reminded of the countless times they made love in this exact spot. He’s lying on the same side of the bed he slept on. “Does your wife know you’re here? Does she know you’re sick?”
“How did you know I was married?”
“Calder found out. Besides, you’re wearing a wedding band, stupid.”
“What else did he tell you?”
“What else is there to tell?”
He doesn’t say anything.
“Does she know you’re here and that you’re sick like this?”
He coughs and closes his eyes. “Yes,” he says. “And no.” He’s groggy, on the verge of saying something else but nothing comes.
“I should call her.”
&nb
sp; “No.” He rolls his head side-to-side in a weak protest.
“Give me your phone.”
He seems to be drifting off. After a minute his face is soft and vulnerable, taken over by sleep. She knocks his shoulder, hard. His eyes pop open.
“What are you doing here?” she asks.
He looks around as if he’s not sure where he is. Then he closes his eyes again and sighs and pats her hand. “I just need a minute.” He falls back asleep.
She reaches in his coat pocket and takes out his cell phone. He doesn’t move.
She slips on her rubber boots, grabs a magnifying glass from her desk drawer, and goes outside. The thing she quickly learns about snow is the thing she has known instinctively all along. It has a ruminating, meditative quality that stills her insides. It’s made for daydreaming. For turning things over in one’s mind. She follows a single flake to the ground, then another as they disappear into a blanket of white. Some flow one way while others go another, all in the absence of wind. She could stand here all day, figuring out the mystery of this.
She steps down and moves through the snow with a graceful awareness, savoring the creak beneath her boots. Her father once said snow smelled like new upholstery. He was right, even if he made the whole thing up. She walks all the way out to the edge of the lake and presses her boot tip into the thin layer of ice, which splits and floats apart and reattaches itself in the cold.
Years ago Annie saw a scene in an old film where a circle of children took turns gazing at snowflakes through a magnifying glass. They were thrilled at what they saw, overacting with rounded mouths and bugging eyes, but the idea had stuck with her. Someday she would look at snow through a magnifying glass to see for herself if she really felt like yelling, “Golly, it’s just too much!”
She catches flakes on her sleeve. Magnified, they become sculpted crystals in the shape of Christmas ornaments. Elaborate, six-sided stars. Scandinavian art. Each looks different from the other, and golly, it really is too much. She can’t believe this is how they actually look. She suddenly feels the loss of her brother, the loss of a moment that will never exist of him looking through the magnifying glass with her, the sheer joy spreading across his face.
She drops the magnifying glass into her pocket and takes out Owen’s phone. He needs a doctor. This is what she’ll tell his wife. He’s lying in her bed. No, she won’t say that. He’s inside, asleep. He’s very ill, she’ll say. But then maybe she’ll want to come get him.
The screen on the phone is black. The battery has died. Annie pictures a young wife, shocked and confused, waiting for a call, for an explanation to arrive that will make sense of her world again.
Annie drops the phone into her pocket and it clinks against the magnifying glass. She treks back to the house, and when she reaches the porch she turns and eyes the tracks in her wake. The flakes are even heavier than before. The footprints leading out are already disappearing.
PART THREE
TWENTY
The next time Annie saw Josh Pinckney was three years after he saved her life. He’d run away the summer of her bee sting. It wasn’t the first time he’d taken off, but it was the time he’d made it the farthest. He was picked up in Jacksonville and shipped off to an aunt in Tampa where Annie had heard he’d been living ever since. She was fifteen years old by this time, spending most of her summer days alone and writing songs that hadn’t yet measured up to the way she heard them inside her head. Josh was at least a year older than her. She didn’t even recognize him. It was he who recognized her.
Someone called her name in Lukeman’s Grocery, and she turned to see an attractive teenage boy with short, strawberry-blond hair. His bright green eyes were rimmed with pale lashes. He was freckled and slightly sunburned and could have been a relative of her mother’s, so familiar, yet distant was his face. He held a gallon jug of milk in his arm. She studied his short sleeve shirt and clean jeans and blue boat sneakers, and it slowly dawned on her how he knew her name.
“Joshua,” he said. “I go by Joshua now.”
She dropped the lettuce back onto the pile and instinctively felt for her hand, the one he’d spit on to save her.
“Pinckney?” she said.
“That’s the one.” He shifted the milk jug to his left hand and held out his right for her to shake. It was cold from the milk and the full size of a man’s. He smelled like fabric softener.
“I live in Tampa now. I’m just over visiting my folks for the day with my aunt.” He motioned down the aisle to a woman with a grocery cart and a tiny black handbag on her shoulder. She was as freshly groomed as Joshua, her straight dark hair combed neatly off her face. Her eyebrows were finely drawn, smart looking and smooth. She reminded Annie of the clever, lesser attractive, though still attractive Charlie’s Angel. She must have been listening because she turned when he mentioned her and waved at them both and then kept on with her shopping.
“I have to visit my parents,” he said, as if apologizing. “They’ve got visitation rights and want me to come every other weekend.”
She’d hopped on her bike at the last minute to buy lettuce and ketchup for the burgers Calder was about to grill. She was taking too long. The charcoal would be ready in few minutes and he’d be waiting, flipping the burgers from side to side to keep them from burning.
She hadn’t paid attention to what she looked like when she left the house, having jumped out of bed early that morning and thrown on her clothes from the day before so she could hurry and write down a melody running through her head.
She glanced down to see charcoal smears across her yellow tank top whose hem had come undone at the hip of her cutoffs. She smelled like dust from the road. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and though her breasts were small, they were obvious, given the air-conditioning. Her feet were filthy inside her flip-flops, dusty as a coat of pollen. She realized she looked like this all the time.
“You’ve changed,” she said, putting the focus on him. The bottlenose dolphin look was gone. So were the eyes with too much lid. Maybe his floppy, unkempt hair had caused him to look that way or maybe he’d grown into his features or maybe she’d just hated him so much that she imagined he looked that way. He didn’t look that way now.
“So have you,” he said, and she wondered if they were both thinking, Him for the better, her for the worse: then she saw him glance at her breasts.
The last time she saw him he was wearing his mother’s apron, doing the dishes in the window, and she was laughing at him. She remembered thinking there was something sad about him, something out of place, even as she’d laughed. It seemed impossible now for her to picture him anywhere near that house and those people and the manure and skinned rabbits in the barn. The white trim around his blue boat shoes would get ruined out there, and she imagined his aunt so practical as to bring an old pair he could change into before stepping out of the car.
The white seam of a scar near the corner of his eyebrow crinkled when he smiled, and she was sure she was the one who’d put it there. She wondered to her own embarrassment if he thought of her every time he looked in the mirror. This was the boy who’d made the crude gestures, said the cruel things, the boy who’d deserved a branch upside his head; but all she saw in front of her now was the boy who’d saved her with his spit.
“You staying away from those bees?” he asked, and she felt as if she might faint into the lettuce. She took a breath to prevent the blood from pooling in her face.
“I carry a kit now,” she said, though the truth was most days she forgot it at home; in fact she didn’t have it with her then, only her wallet in her hand and she thought, Wouldn’t it be funny if one of those bees in the supermarket melons decided to sting me right now and Joshua here jumped into action and saved me all over again?
“That’s a good thing,” he said.
“You ready, Joshua?” his aunt called down the aisle. She winked and her sharp eyebrow dipped and there was something in the way she called him Joshua that made Annie t
hink of when she was little and her mother sometimes called her Annie Oakley for fun. She never called her that anymore. It was two in the afternoon and her mother hadn’t gotten up yet, which in its own way was fine because when she was awake a deadening mood stifled the air and Calder ticked himself into a frenzy and her father was still dead and Annie’s life seemed so unbearably ugly now in the face of freshly scrubbed Joshua and his Charlie’s Angel.
She smiled nervously, imagining the two of them agreeing to pick up a gallon of milk on the way to the Pinckneys’ and once they got to the farm the Angel would refuse to take any money and all through the visit she would wink from across the room and smile in secret every time Mr. Pinckney said something mean or stupid and Joshua would feel at ease knowing she wouldn’t let anything bad happen to him, because maybe she really was a graduate of the police academy, and the two of them together, this team of capable people, were clearly nothing like the other Pinckneys. At the end of the day they would laugh all the way home to their tidy house on Tampa Bay, feeling closer and stronger and more accomplished for having proved there was nothing they couldn’t handle together.
“I guess I’ve got to go,” he said.
Annie couldn’t think of what to say, and he didn’t make any motion to leave.
So many things were supposed to be one way but instead were another, and she tried not to think about this and as she tried she felt herself start to get angry. “You take care, Joshua,” she said, and touched the side of his arm like they were friends.
“Will do, Annie Walsh,” he said, like a sweet country boy with a sweet country boy smile. “Will do,” and then he reached out and shook her hand again and this time it was warm and they shook firmly and longer than most people shake hands, like they were sealing some deal that was long in the making. It wasn’t until she returned home and was eating her crispy burger in silence with the secret of Joshua and that handshake, and still that melody from the morning running through her head, that she realized for the first time what was really meant when people said, “Let bygones be bygones.” She rose from the table and closed herself up in her room and wrote her first good song, one that matched pitch perfect with the melody inside her head, and the whole experience made her softer around Calder and even her mother for the rest of the day.
