by Sally Mandel
“Well, the steak’s right, but I sent you a yellow plate with chickens.”
“We’re out of practice,” Simon said drowsily. The sun was so warm, his belly so full, and the sweet air was intoxicating. He could feel himself drifting off, his thoughts mingling with Jeremy’s, the physical space between them elastic. Maybe his mother was right—she said her boys were Siamese twins, who were joined by their souls.
It was the cold that woke Simon. He had no idea how long he had slept, but the sun had faded, the gray sky crouching over him like a threat. He leapt to his feet at once to shake his brother awake. “Jeremy, get up. We’ve got to go.”
“Need a piss,” Jeremy mumbled.
“Make it quick,” Simon said, gathering up their gear. He considered. There should be another hour of daylight and nearly another one of twilight. They needed to head due west. Even if it got dark, they could just follow the compass reading. Once they got to the river, it would be easy to hug the bank and walk south. He rummaged through his bag, where he kept the compass in an internal pocket. It was empty. He cursed, turned the bag upside down and shook it. The compass was the third item on his mother’s list, the list that wasn’t there that morning. Simon had been certain that he’d remembered everything on it.
“Check your bag,” he said to Jeremy. “The compass. I haven’t got it.”
“But you always have it,” Jeremy said, as if observing that day follows night.
“Not today I haven’t.”
“Well, do we really need it?” Jeremy asked.
“Check your bag,” Simon repeated, though he knew it wouldn’t be there.
They were silent as Jeremy searched in vain.
“Bloody crazy,” Simon muttered, referring to himself and his morning carelessness.
In minutes, they were back on the trail, the grass stubble dragging at their legs, the ground below oozing icy water. Jeremy looked as if he were sleepwalking, clearly stunned by the dramatic change in the day. Simon, on the other hand, was on full alert, realizing that the sky had drained the colors out of the landscape, blurring it to render it almost unrecognizable. He could still make out the dim smudge of Hag’s Tooth, but only just, and set his feet on the course that he guessed would lead them to the river. No compass, dammit, dammit! Simon struggled to find the path, vainly hoping that his feet might somehow remember familiar ground.
“Did Mumma ever bring you out here when it was like this?” Jeremy asked.
“No,” Simon said.
They walked in silence for a half hour, both boys with eyes focused on their feet in order to keep to the path. Finally, Simon looked up and squinted in the direction of Hag’s Tooth. But what he saw instead halted him so abruptly that Jeremy slammed into him. Stretched across the horizon to the north was a massive cloud. It was rolling toward them like some gigantic rogue wave. Simon’s heart leapt into his throat and lodged there, rendering him speechless. If only he had been able to see the path properly, they could have made a run for it. As it was, each footstep was halting, tentative, as he tried to find reliable ground.
“What?” Jeremy asked. Then he looked where Simon was staring. “What the hell is that?” he said.
“Blizzard,” Simon said.
“No,” Jeremy said. Simon was silent. “I thought it wasn’t winter.”
“I was wrong,” Simon said. Neither of them referred to the earlier conversation about Simon’s invincibility.
“Well, it looks like it’s coming toward us.”
“Assume it is,” Simon said. “We have to get to the river before it reaches us.”
“So pick up the pace.” Jeremy gave his brother a little shove.
Simon struck out, hoping for the best. He remembered a story his mother had told him, about a birdwatcher who had gone out alone in May. A freak snowstorm had blown in and she barely got out alive. Simon knew that the weather was changeable out here, but the thought of a blizzard had never occurred to him, not on such a balmy day. And now, the white wall boiled toward them as if seeking them out. In no time at all, it was upon them. They were in the clear, and within seconds they were wrapped inside a nightmare. The wind howled in their ears making conversation virtually impossible. Snow, blowing sideways, tore at their clothes, pelted their faces, sought out every inch of bare flesh to scour with freezing needles. The boys, halted in their tracks, huddled together.
“I can’t see six inches in front of me!” Jeremy shouted.
“Maybe it’ll move through fast,” he said into Jeremy’s ear, which was already red with cold. But in his mind’s eye, Simon saw an aerial view of the moors, blanketed impenetrably all the way to the sea. With the sickening surge of claustrophobia, panic closed around his chest. How was he going to get his brother out of here? The disappearance of Hag’s Tooth and other markers erased his confidence of a safe route through to the river.
But one thing he knew. “We have to keep moving,” he told Jeremy. “We’ll freeze if we don’t.”
“Can’t hear you,” Jeremy said.
“Gotta go! Fast!” He started to take off his lightweight jacket.
“What the hell?” Jeremy shouted.
“Tie ourselves together. So we don’t get separated.”
“Bad idea!” Jeremy took Simon’s jacket and replaced it around his shoulders. “Remember that birder lady Mumma told us about? It was exposure that almost killed her. We’ve got to try to stay warm.”
“How will we keep together in this?” Simon asked.
“Believe me, Si,” Jeremy said, using the childish nickname that popped out now and then. “I’ll be right on your tail.”
“You know I’m just guessing the way!” Simon shouted.
He and Jeremy stared into one another’s faces for a moment, hearing one another’s thoughts: we have no food, no water, no protection.
“Let’s go!” Simon yelled. “Stay close!”
They struck out again, with Jeremy just a footstep behind. It seemed uncanny to Simon that the storm never subsided for even a moment, just continued to batter them without letup. He kept in mind that it had come at them from the north and that the river lay to the west. They would find it eventually if they just kept moving with the wind slamming them from the right. The sound of it was horrendous, like a sky full of banshees, taunting them with their shrieking predictions of death. Simon covered his ears against them, but it was no use.
“Jer, better just hang onto me!” he yelled over his shoulder.
But there was no answer. Simon wheeled around. “Jeremy,” he said into the white curtain. No answer. “Jeremy!” he called out.
He thought he heard a thin cry, off to his right. He started after it, calling. The sound came from behind him now, but further away. It might have been the wind. It probably was the wind. His isolation within the icy gale was total now. He began to sob, calling out for his brother over and over, only to be answered by the cruel howl.
He stumbled along for some time, his tears icing on his cheeks until they smarted. The ground had softened underfoot again, and it was slower going through the mixture of snow and mud. He tried to pick his way carefully, telling himself that if he could only but find Jeremy, he would be of use to him in some way. So, despite his exhaustion and fear, he kept moving. He even tried to be systematic. He could not have strayed far from where he had lost his brother. He would use the wind as a compass. Walking for thirty paces with the wind behind him, he would next turn directly to his left for another fifty paces, then left again, and once more until he had fashioned a rough square. Keeping up a constant barrage of shouts, he would then forge a new square by adding ten more paces to each side. Of course, the wind could be changing directions willy-nilly, and of course his earlier footsteps were immediately obliterated by the blowing snow. Of course a lot of things, but he was desperate for a plan, any plan at all.
He lost track of how many times he performed this futile exercise. His throat was raw with shouting, his leg
s felt like granite, and his feet had lost all sensation whatsoever. It had grown dark, and the only thing that kept him from lying down exhausted against the frozen earth was his belief that Jeremy was out there alone. He could feel his brother’s need. Jeremy was a living presence inside him, but not like always before, when Simon could hear his brother’s thoughts. Simon felt himself losing Jeremy into the cold, bitter night. Jeremy seemed still in his heart, in his mind’s eye, but the image was vague. Simon’s own fear must have been disturbing their communication.
And then, without warning, there was a kind of sigh across the moors and the storm passed off, as does a squall at sea. Just like that. Simon stood in wonder and watched its ghostly tendrils disappear away into the darkness. After the hours of bellowing wind, the quiet seemed supernatural, with a force of its own. Simon looked up. It was perfectly clear, with stars sprinkled by the millions across the sky. On the horizon, the moon was halfway risen, white, enormous. He turned slowly around, taking in the vista. Remarkably, there was very little snow on the ground. The storm had cleared up after itself, sweeping the drifts away as it moved off. Simon blinked, focusing on the silhouette not more than a few hundred yards away. Hag’s Tooth. “Hag’s Tooth!” he laughed bitterly. No more than two miles from The Circle! And then he started shouting: “Jeremy! Jeremy!”
There was an answer, a mere murmur. At least, with the great hulking rock so near, Simon had his internal compass back. He knew these dips and rises, knew them by heart. Jeremy was nearby. Simon knew it, could feel it in his pulse as he closed in on his brother, in the warmth that thawed his half-frozen body. “I’m coming,” he told Jeremy. “Hang on just a little longer.”
Simon found him in a little hollow that boasted one of the few trees in that area of the reserve, an aged cedar whose stunted form seemed almost human. Jeremy was up to his waist in bog. He was barely conscious. Simon approached him, stepping carefully, then lay flat against the ground with his face next to his brother’s. “Jer,” he said. “Wake up. I’m here now.”
Jeremy barely moved his head but opened his eyes a sliver. “Screwed up,” he murmured.
Simon could hardly believe that the ground had thawed enough to haul his brother down so deep. “Can you move your legs?” he asked.
“Stuck. Can’t even feel them, it’s so bloody cold.”
“I’m going to try to pull you out.”
“Won’t work. Go away, Si.”
“I’m not leaving you here,” Simon said.
There was a long pause. Jeremy’s eyes welled up. “Just stay away,” he said finally. “They can’t—look, they can’t lose us both.”
Simon didn’t know what to do. And so he lay there, frozen in place, wishing the situation would undo itself.
“Now, Simon—before you freeze, too.”
Jeremy was not exaggerating; his arms were motionless, his fingers chalky white. Simon picked up his right hand, blew on it and rubbed it, trying in vain to infuse it with even just a little warmth. Jeremy had begun to weep quietly. “Say bye to Mumma,” he said. “Tell her … tell her bye. That’s all, okay? Go, goddammit!”
But Simon could not leave him. Not just yet. He knew about hypothermia, was aware of its stages. The bad news was that Jeremy was no longer shivering. Still, he was lucid and could move his head and neck. There would be lethargy and disorientation, then the final euphoria. If Simon were only able to find help soon … He knew the odds were stacked sky-high against him, but he must not, could not, give Jeremy up to the lonely night.
Simon leaned in to touch his forehead to Jeremy’s. Then, with an anguished cry, he tore himself away and stood up, his legs robbed of their strength, nearly collapsing under him. “Bye, Jer,” he said, then turned and walked as fast as he could in the direction of the river.
After two miles had passed beneath Simon’s feet, an image began to shimmer at the edges of his consciousness. He knew its source and stopped dead, afraid that if he so much as stirred, it might disappear. But it steadied and filled his mind suddenly in an explosion of light: two swans drifting side by side on the river, floating effortlessly in a shimmer of sunshine. And then at the flat rocks they parted, one remaining to watch the other slowly disappear downstream, leaving nothing behind but the jeweled surface.
“Wait,” Simon whispered. “Oh, wait …” But that, he knew, was the end. A postcard from Jeremy. The last one.
October
Amy: 1976
Most people agreed that the nerve center of Indian Wells was William and Lily Adams’ dining room. It wasn’t that there was anything so prepossessing about the space itself, nothing that didn’t apply to hundreds of others within a fifty mile radius: a medium-sized room in a late Victorian stucco house. William’s father, founder of Adams Manufacturing Limited, which supported the better half of the town, occupied a grand manor on eleven acres, but William and Lily were comfortable in their modest home, and saw no need to move even after William had taken over as president of the firm.
Tall windows hung across the south and west walls with window seats running beneath them, serving as both radiator covers and as perches for the friends and neighbors who showed up over the course of an evening. If there was surplus food—an extra breast of chicken, say, or a slice of pie—Lily Adams was quick to offer it. If not, no matter. William Adams’ invitation to all who poked their heads through the door to “come in and watch the animals eat” was accepted without any expectation of handouts.
The multi-leaved mahogany table that dominated the room had been designed by William’s father and built by a firm in Chicago at the turn of the 20th century. When you leaned your elbows on it, which everybody did, it spoke, not with a groan exactly, more like an apologetic protest, and its surface had certainly never seen a coaster in its life. Mrs. Adams didn’t believe in them. Her attitude was that furniture was there for convenience, not tyranny.
Over the course of more than three decades, the following events, among countless others, transpired around that table. Millicent Terhune announced, at the age of forty-five, that she was finally pregnant and furthermore, now that her good-for-nothing husband had at long last performed his single essential obligation, she was divorcing him. Ferguson Dailey stepped gingerly out of the closet. Everyone had always presumed that he was gay, but Ferguson just kept on dating girls and breaking their hearts. Until, sitting at the table one winter’s night, when the wind was howling outside and the radiators were steaming up the windows, he set his fork down beside a slice of half-eaten carrot cake, and declared with head bowed, “I’m going to tell you something. The fact is, I’m a homosexual.” Tears slid down his nose and splashed onto his plate. Stella was off somewhere, so it was only Lily and William, who raised his hands to his wife in a helpless what now? gesture. Mrs. Adams went to Ferguson, put her arms around him and said, “But we know that, dear. And it’s perfectly all right.” His sexual preference having been validated at the hub of Indian Wells, there would be no more dating of girls and no more broken hearts on Ferguson’s account, at least not female ones. Then, just last summer, Bob Withers had brought over his Labrador retriever and his brand new thirty-year-old second wife by way of easing the girl into a town that had closed ranks against him after he divorced poor SueAnn. The list went on and on. Some said that the Adams’ dining room pulsed with some strange sorcery that provoked people to release their secrets, but a few of the wiser ones understood that it was not so much the room as the woman whose quiet presence illuminated it.
Amy Vanderwall’s most memorable Halloween began as usual in her grandparents’ house. Soon after arriving, Amy settled at that same dining room table to finish working on her streetcar. As far as she knew, Indian Wells was the only place in the universe where trick-or-treaters dragged the homemade trolleys behind them, and it was the reason she preferred to celebrate Halloween here instead of at home. She carefully cut out the squares that would serve as windows in the shoebox her father had donated. Next she wo
uld tape brightly colored Christmas wrap against the holes to create the illusion of stained glass. The intense afternoon light warmed the back of her neck as she worked and for a moment, at least, she forgot the ache in her mouth from having her braces tightened the day before. She was daydreaming, thoughts drifting about her head like the dust motes that danced in the sunbeams.
“How are you coming along?” Mrs. Adams asked.
Amy looked up and smiled at her grandmother. The two rarely made physical contact, and yet when Mrs. Adams was around, Amy somehow felt embraced.
“Almost done. I just have to tie the string on the end and put the candle inside.” She held the streetcar up for inspection. “Do you think I’m getting too old for this, Gran?”
“Not on your life,” Mrs. Adams said. “I’d go trick-or-treating myself if I didn’t have dinner to fix.”
“I’d like that,” Amy said. “Who would you be?”
“Oh, someone very wicked. Snow White’s evil stepmother, maybe, or Dracula. Now, would you give me a hand in the kitchen when you’re done?”
“Be right there.”
Now that Amy was almost twelve and plenty old enough to go trick-or-treating unchaperoned, she would sit down for an early dinner with the family before heading out afterwards with her friend, Wayne. She could already smell the roast beef in the oven. As soon as she was able to affix her candle stub into the center of the streetcar and make a hole big enough in the shoebox lid to prevent scorching, she slid off the chair and hurried into the kitchen. Mrs. Adams picked up an apron and tied it around Amy’s waist.
“What are we making?” Amy asked.
“Most everything’s organized, but I could use your help with the Yorkshire pudding batter. Oh yes, and the whipped cream. We’ll just do them up and set them in the fridge for later on.”
Amy liked watching their hands working side by side at the counter. Amy’s were slender, the skin smooth as river stones. Mrs. Adams’ knuckles had begun to swell with arthritis. There were prominent veins, brown spots from the sun, and a deep groove on her ring finger, carved by her wedding band.
