I told my father that I would be right back. I rushed up the aisle and out of the stands. I had to make my way around the entire stadium, running through lines of people at the concession stands and bathrooms. I ran as fast as I could, but kept getting slowed down. It took me more than ten minutes to get to the right-field seats. I could hear the game on the field, and from the televisions at the concession stands. Something had happened in the game; a big roar went up from the crowd. Everyone was standing when I came out into the seats. I hurried up the steps—there had to be more than a hundred to the top row—and waited for the crowd to sit down so I could see. I was out of breath. I was still one section away from the Goth group; I would have to go down the steps, across another section, and then up again. I looked frantically for Anna once I got to the right section. The group was sitting at the end of three rows, close to the aisle. I looked for her, right in the spot where I had seen her, but she wasn’t there. The spot was empty.
“What do you want?” one of the Goths asked me.
“Nothing. I was just looking for somebody.”
“She’s not here,” another one said. It was Bryce Druitt.
“Where is she?”
“You should know.”
“Why’s that?”
“Your buddy almost killed her.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“Claire OD’ed on shit she bought from your friend.”
His words barely registered. I must have been talking like a robot or a zombie. “I didn’t know,” I mumbled. I looked around furiously, hoping that Anna would show up and stop everything, that she would show up and say that Bryce was lying and that everything was all right.
“What are you trying to do? Get rid of all the girls in school?” Bryce said.
I had to leave. I couldn’t talk to them anymore. Something on the field made people jump to their feet again. The Goths stayed in their seats; I could feel them looking at me. The crowd was roaring, and the Goths were silent, staring at me. I felt I might pass out or throw up, maybe just fall down the aisle and roll onto the field. My legs ached and were weak. I turned and walked slowly down the stairs. I heard Bryce say to the rest of them: “That’s the boyfriend of that bitch who almost killed me.” I wanted to run back and scream in his face, I wanted to punch his teeth out, but I had nothing. I was suddenly exhausted. I could barely move down the stairs. Adrenaline was coursing through me so strongly I was almost shaking, but I had no energy. I made my way down the stairs and into the walkway that led to the concession stands. I waited there, knowing that Anna would never be returning to where I had seen her, but still I waited.
When I eventually made it back to my seat, my father asked me where I’d gone.
“I just took a walk around.”
“I saw you way over there.” He pointed across the stadium.
“I saw Bryce Druitt.”
“And you had to rush over there?” I didn’t answer. “What did he have to say?”
“Nothing.”
“What’s he doing here?”
“I don’t know.”
“What a coincidence.”
It started to rain, a cold drizzle, and no one moved. Only a few umbrellas opened. The rain felt good at first, but then it started raining harder. People moved out of the lower seats and gathered under the overhangs; some left the stadium. We were stuck in the rain.
“Do you want to go?” my father asked.
“There’s only a couple of innings left.” It was a close game. My father was keeping score. He’d be disappointed if he had to leave with an incomplete scorecard. He seemed more intent in putting all of the plays on paper than relaxing and watching the game. He dutifully filled in all of the boxes with numbers that didn’t mean anything to me; he kept track of everything, the number of pitches each pitcher threw, the time of the game, the temperature, the names of the umpires. The whole story was there in pencil on his program, neatly detailed and accounted for.
I sat through the rest of the game thinking about Claire and Carl, and Bryce, and Anna. I kept looking over at the spot. It was empty. I had imagined her. I knew that I had, but the thought kept creeping into my brain that she had been there, and had left when she noticed me coming over. I fantasized that she was still alive, that she was tormenting me, haunting me, playing with me on purpose. Every time this thought went on, I tried to push it out and consider what Bryce had said. Questions kept piling up, ping-ponging through my head, colliding so quickly and so hard that they became blurred, dented, and damaged. I clutched the binoculars and stared across the field. I’m sure my father had noticed that I wasn’t watching the game, because he asked me what happened on almost every play. “Was that a called third strike, or did he swing?” “Was that a wild pitch or a passed ball? You have to look at the scoreboard—they’ll put the official decision up there.” “What was that? Come on now, help me out.” I was moving the binoculars back and forth from the pitcher to home plate to the upper deck where Bryce was still sitting, until I became dizzy, disoriented. I had to put them down and take a few deep breaths.
My head was aching so badly that I thought it would split open. I wished it would split open and release everything in it, all the thoughts that were boiling and building up steam, and then maybe I could calm down. I looked down again. It was hard not to jump. I just wanted some relief. I thought I was going to cry. I could feel the tears building up in my eyes. I had to close them and lean way back in my seat. The crowd roared again. A walk-off home run. The game was over.
“Are you okay?” my father said.
I opened my eyes. “I got dizzy all of a sudden.”
“Maybe you got up too fast. Just sit there a second and relax.” He sat down and went back to writing on his scorecard. The cool breeze felt good. I sat and let it stream across my face until I didn’t feel so clammy. We stood and joined the crowd making its way down the cramped rampways to the bottom of the stadium. It took us almost an hour to get to the car, and then we sat in traffic for almost another hour. My father didn’t seem to mind. In fact, I think he was enjoying himself.
“We should try to go to more games,” he said. “When it gets warmer.”
“Can we take the train next time?” I said.
“Why? This isn’t so bad.”
As we passed the exit to Ellroy, about an hour and a half from home, the rain turned to snow. Large, wet flakes rushed toward us out of the black night. They were dying stars, or tiny white fists, crashing down on us. My father had to slow to about twenty miles an hour, just to see. “April snows are the worst,” he muttered.
We didn’t get home until almost ten. The ground was covered with snow. There must have been a foot of it. I had to get out and shovel a path for the car. I moved as quickly as I could and then called the hospital.
Claire was there, all right. I thought I should go and check myself in. Maybe they would give me some pills or something to stop me from thinking so much. Maybe they’d drill holes in my brain and steam would come hissing out. Maybe they’d just slice part of it away, scrape away mold and crust, and I could spend the rest of my life sitting in a chair with a stupid smile on my face, happy and oblivious of the world.
The next morning I had my mother drive me to the hospital in Shearing. They wouldn’t let me see Claire. They wouldn’t let my mother see her either. Claire was in the ICU. They would let only immediate family members in there. My mother talked to one of the nurses but no one would even tell her why Claire was in the hospital. We drove back home.
I went over to Carl’s.
“I didn’t sell anything to her,” he said. “I don’t sell that shit.”
“Who did?”
“I don’t know.”
“You know.”
“You don’t even know why she’s in the hospital,” he said.
“All I know is what Bryce told me.”
“That’s right.”
“What do you know?” I said.
/> “The same as you. I don’t know anything.”
Claire was in the hospital for three days. My mother drove me there again after school one day. She stayed in the waiting area while I went to Claire’s room. As I turned the corner toward her room, I thought I saw Carl at the end of the hallway. Whoever it was, he moved quickly; I couldn’t be sure that it was Carl, and I almost followed to see whether it was. I couldn’t think of any reason why he’d be in the hospital; he didn’t know Claire well enough to visit her, unless what Bryce had said was true.
I entered Claire’s room. It had the same sterile smell that I remembered from the train, only with more plastic. Claire was sitting up in bed, but her eyes were shut. The other bed in the room was empty. The dividing curtain was pulled all the way back against the wall, and the bed was precisely made, with sharp creases and perfect pillows. It looked rigid, fake, a little scary, like the inside of a coffin. I had expected to see tubes coming out of Claire’s nose and arms, but there was nothing. She could have been taking a nap in the hospital, perfectly fine and ready to leave when she opened her eyes. Her hair was a mess, tangled at the back of her head, and she didn’t have on any makeup. She was wearing a hospital gown with a robe over it. This was the first time I’d seen her without her Goth gear. She looked healthier. Without makeup, her face had color; it was friendlier without the black circles that usually surrounded her eyes. She appeared too healthy to be in a hospital bed; it didn’t look right. I stood in the doorway, wondering whether I should leave, but she turned, opened her eyes, and smiled. It was a tired, forced smile.
“I won’t stay long,” I said. “I just wanted to see how you’re doing.”
“Stay awhile. It’s so boring in here.”
“When do you get to go home?”
“They said that if I’m not out of here by five tonight, it will be first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Why is that?”
“I don’t know. Paperwork or something. It’s like a restaurant, your meal isn’t over until the check comes.”
“Where are your folks?”
“My mom had to go pick up my sister from school. I don’t know where my dad is. He hasn’t been here that much.”
“I’m sorry.”
“He’s just mad.”
“Your mom’s not mad?”
“That will be later.”
“There’s a rumor around school about the whole thing,” I said. “Well, actually a couple of them.” I waited to see if she wanted to hear them. She gave me another tired smile. “One of them is that this was deliberate, and the other is that my friend Carl is responsible.”
“Responsible how?”
“That he sold you some bad stuff.”
“Who is saying that?”
“A lot of people now, but I heard it from Bryce.” The first part wasn’t true. I had only heard it from Bryce.
“Bryce is an asshole.” She hadn’t really answered the question. I waited, but she didn’t go any further.
“How’d you get here?” she asked.
“My mom. She’s in the waiting room.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. You shouldn’t keep her out there.”
“It’s all right, she’s good at sitting around doing nothing. I don’t think it’s possible for her to get bored. Or else she’s so bored all the time, it seems natural to her.”
We were silent for a little while.
“At least you don’t have a roommate,” I said.
“There was one, but she left.”
“She got better?”
“I don’t know. They just wheeled her out last night and she never came back. I was kind of out of it anyway, but they never tell you anything.”
“It sounds kind of creepy.”
“Hospitals are like that. You should be here at night. You hear all sorts of strange, horrible noises, and people are coming in and looking at you, waking you up and taking your temperature or blood pressure or whatever, and half the time you don’t know what’s going on or why. And then during the day, you don’t see anybody and there doesn’t seem to be anything going on. They’re like vampires, only coming out at night.”
“With any luck you’ll get out of here before it gets dark again, before the vampires come back.”
“I hope so. My mom should be back soon to check on it.”
“I’d better go, then. Or we could wait around to see if you need a ride or something.”
“That’s all right. I’ll be fine.”
“I hope so,” I said, and got up to leave.
“Come here.” Claire held out her arms. I went over and gave her a hug. “Don’t worry about me. It was an accident. Just an accident.”
I had hoped that she would tell me more than that, but she didn’t and I didn’t want to press her. I smiled at her and lightly grabbed the sleeve of her white gown. “It’s too bad they don’t have this stuff in your color,” I said.
She laughed. “Can you imagine, patients dressed all in black? This place would really give you the creeps.” An image of Anna jumped into my head—she was laid out in the other bed. Both she and Claire were dressed in funeral clothes, stretched out in hospital beds, the sheets pulled tightly to their shoulders, their lifeless faces heavy with makeup, but their eyes were wide open, staring straight ahead.
“Call me when you get home,” I told Claire.
“I will.”
As my mother drove us home, I began to think of Anna as a bad force in my life. I had never thought that way before, but nothing seemed to be going right. Instead, the days kept getting stranger and stranger. She was somehow controlling events, tampering with the world in ways that only confused me. I wondered whether she was responsible for Claire. We had kissed, and then something bad had happened. Bryce claimed that Anna had wrecked his car on purpose. I didn’t know whether to completely believe him or not, but if it was true, what did that mean about Anna? If she could drive a car into the steel edge of a bridge, what else was she capable of doing? Even if she wasn’t responsible for all the bad things that were happening, they were still happening. They could be coincidences—that was the word my father had used at the baseball game—but there were an awful lot of them. Here I had been desperately trying to reach Anna, trying every way to receive a message from her, make contact with her, and maybe all this time I should have been trying to get away from her, refusing any contact she tried to make. Isn’t that why we were told to avoid Mumler, because it caused bad things to happen? And now they were happening.
Bryce drove a new black Dodge Ram truck. It replaced the black Intrigue he had driven until the accident. It was said that someone had written, “Bryce Druitt is Ram tough,” in the girls’ bathroom on the first floor at school. It was rumored that Anna had written it. The only thing she ever said about it was, “If I wrote it, it was meant to be sarcastic. The problem is, there are a lot of girls who like Bryce but would never say so because he’s a Goth.” Claire had once said pretty much the same thing, that if he looked like the rest of us, he’d be one of the most popular guys in school. Instead, he was a scary guy. He was the type of guy who could wear black eyeliner and still look like a badass.
A few days after Bryce got his new truck, someone stuck a “Got Jesus?” bumper sticker on the back. He found out who did it and beat the guy up, but left the sticker. He thought it was funny. “I would have put it on myself,” he told the guy, “but don’t fuck with my vehicle.” Bryce always used the word “vehicle” whenever he referred to his own ride, but never when he talked about anyone else’s.
I had been trying to meet Bryce after school ever since I saw him at the baseball game, but he was always gone before I could find him. I would see where he had parked before school, but when I came out at the end of the day, his truck would be gone. I knew that sometimes he would drive away for lunch and park in a different spot when he returned, so after school I would walk around the parking lot down the hill, or down by the football field, where there was more parking, but I would
n’t see it. Finally, near the end of the week, I got to his “vehicle” before he did. It was a cool spring day, but the sun was trying to do its job. I could feel the warmth reflect off the black paint, and every few minutes I got close to the dark metal and tried to warm up, like it was a radiator or the last embers of a fire. A lot of snow had melted, but there were still piles along the street, where it had been plowed repeatedly over the course of the winter and been pushed into larger and larger mounds, and in the shadows of buildings and underneath trees, hiding from the sun.
I’d been waiting more than twenty minutes when I started thinking that maybe Bryce had had to serve detention. I didn’t want to wait another forty minutes.
“You weren’t leaning on my vehicle,” he said. He had come up from behind, and startled me. He wasn’t that much bigger than I was, maybe a few inches all the way around, but he always seemed to tower over me. He had on his usual gear: black stocking cap pulled down over his shaved head, close to his eyes; long black double-breasted coat, something you would imagine Napoleon’s soldiers trudging around in; black jeans; big black army boots. He had snow all over him, as though he’d been rolling in it. Obviously he hadn’t come directly from school; he’d been somewhere else. He might have come out of the woods across the street, then seen me near his truck. I didn’t know.
“You weren’t touching it.” It wasn’t a question.
“No,” I said. “I wasn’t even near touching your truck. I was wondering if I could talk to you.”
“Let’s find out.”
“I overheard you say something at the game.”
He gave me a hard look and seemed to grow in size. I thought about dropping the whole thing, but it was too late.
“I heard you say something about how it was Anna that almost killed you in your accident.”
“She caused the accident,” he said, matter-of-factly.
“You mean like with a spell or a curse?”
As Simple as Snow Page 22
