Snow Angels

by Stewart O'Nan

  Annie can see the steam coming out of their mouths and hear how loud they’re yelling, but the words are lost in Tara’s sobs. She thinks that it won’t do any good to call the police; they won’t get here in time. She carries the struggling Tara into her bedroom and closes the door, goes into her own bedroom and gets the gun.

  It’s unloaded so Tara can’t hurt herself with it, but Glenn won’t know that.

  “It’s okay, honey,” she shouts at Tara through the door, and heads downstairs.

  Outside, the stoop is freezing on her feet. It’s all over. Brock is sitting on Glenn’s chest like in a schoolyard fight and shouting into his face, “Don’t you ever try to pull shit like this with me again.” Bomber has steamed up the cab. Glenn has a cut under his eye and his teeth are rimmed in blood. His upper lip is torn like a thumbed peach. Brock looks fine except his pajama top is ripped. He sees the gun and tells her to put it away. Glenn turns his head and spits out a dark string.

  “I’m going to let you up,” Brock says. “I want you to get in your truck and get out of here, you understand? I don’t want to hurt your dog.”

  Glenn nods, but at the same time looks at Annie, trying for some sympathy. His eyes swim; she’s never seen him so drunk. But his face. It’s his fault, she thinks, and turns away.

  “Move back,” Brock warns her, then says, “Okay, Smokin’ Joe,” and pushes himself off Glenn.

  Glenn rolls over. Wet leaves stick to his back. On his hands and knees he touches his fingers to his mouth and then his cheek. He gets up like an old man, stumbles and makes his way across the yard, not looking back. Annie takes Brock’s arm and they watch him fit himself into the truck. Bomber mobs him. It takes him a minute before he shuts the door. He gets it in gear, but before he crunches across the smashed glass, leans out and spits again.

  “I will not be deceived by this world,” Glenn says in a croak. He’s crying.

  “Take off, you shithead,” Brock says, and gives him the finger.

  As the truck passes under the streetlamp, Brock massages his knuckles and spits, puts a finger to his lips. “I think I chipped one of the ones in front.” He lifts his chin and smiles for her, and while she’s inspecting him, asks through clenched teeth, “Did you call the cops yet?”

  FIVE

  MY MOTHER INSISTS that the snow never left that winter. According to her, the first flurries struck in mid-November and we didn’t see the grass again until spring. I clearly remember a flock of toddlers bulky as astronauts in their snowsuits playing on the moonscape of frozen mud beneath the jungle gym, but the strict truth is unimportant; what my mother is trying to say is that we were cold at Foxwood, which we were.

  Our apartment had no thermostat. We found out when two weeks after we moved in the temperature dropped twenty degrees overnight. My mother went from room to room, expecting a box on the wall.

  “Arthur,” she called, “come help me.”

  When we couldn’t find one, she sagged onto our couch and held her forehead with both hands. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  The super said that our building was on a schedule, which meant we heard a feeble clinking in the electric baseboard as we were waking up. The lower halves of the windows were coated with ice. My mother put on coffee and bought a soft toilet seat. We wore sweaters to bed.

  By then my mother had decided that moving to Foxwood had been a mistake, but she had signed the lease and we were stuck. She was angry she had been fooled by the new paint and wall-to-wall carpeting. Daily she apologized for the lack of hot water as if it were a crime, then ten minutes later shrieked at me for not unplugging the toaster. She needed my help, she said, didn’t I see that?

  Mornings I was careful to agree with her first choice for breakfast. Without my father to serve, we were early. My mother was not used to it. She wandered through the apartment at half speed, trying to find her lighter, her lipstick, her driving gloves. I stuffed the pockets of my jean jacket with matches, Marlboros and whatever I had to share with Warren and buttoned the flaps, hauled on my fat down jacket and gloves and said I was leaving.

  “Christ almighty,” she said from the other room, and cut short her search to look over my clothes and give me a kiss—something she’d stopped when I was in middle school. She saw my trombone case and, regardless of the day, asked if she needed to pick me up. I merely said yes or no. Outside, a cold surge of relief hit me, and at the same time a feeling of shame at having escaped.

  At the bus stop Lila and I talked and shared cigarettes while Lily sniped at us, jealous. “Mom is going to kill you if she finds out.”

  “So what?” Lila said. Since she’d rescued me, I had begun to wonder what she looked like without her glasses, and was working up the courage to ask her if I could try them on. We had turned our clocks back weeks ago, and a gray half light lingered over the tree-tops like fog, softening her face. It was hard to flirt with Lily beside her all the time.

  From our frigid mornings together, I found that both Raybern sisters loathed Foxwood as much as I did, for the same reasons. I dreaded getting on the bus to that laughter I used to be part of. I hated being left off at the gate in the snow like a trio of orphans and having to walk half a mile down the drive to reach the smashed chapel and our barrackslike townhouses. When I groused about the landlord—some corporation from Baltimore—Lila and Lily just nodded. It made me like them. I think now that I mistakenly pitied them because I assumed they would never get out, while I was just there temporarily. At school I acknowledged them in the halls, and people looked at me. In a stall on the third floor by my homeroom, someone wrote, “Arty Party Eats Fox Meat.”

  I only told Warren.

  “Lila Raybern?” he said. “Are you shitting me?”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “I don’t know,” Warren said. “She’s crazy and has a twin sister. Isn’t that enough?”

  “She’s nice,” I said.

  “That and she dresses like Mr. Rogers.”

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ll give you that one.”

  In school I could almost pretend my life hadn’t changed. I skipped gym and study hall with Warren, then wandered back from Marsden’s Pond around lunchtime. It was that in-between season when only the dead trees hold their leaves and the sky threatens constantly. Going inside, stoned, I looked back at the woods as if they were a promise, a haven.

  Tuesdays and Wednesdays I practiced in the music room, and Fridays watched snowflakes dissolve on the plastic-coated music attached to my tarnished, dented bell. For homecoming we were doing an all-Sousa revue. In class Mr. Chervenick praised my embouchure and outside hustled up behind me during the tornado, shouting, “That’s the way, Arthur, lift those knees!”

  My mother was invariably late picking me up. Sometimes I was the last one standing there by the locked doors, and I wondered if she could have forgotten. It was dusk, the dark was falling a little earlier each day; below, in town, the streetlights came on in strings, as if in a humming room somewhere a man was flicking switches. Every few minutes the janitor with his pushbroom and stub of a cigar peered out at me. But no, here she was, just late, apologetic. We rode home past our old house, no longer commenting on it. Instead, she told me about her work and asked after my classes, listed all the tasks she needed to get done. She talked from the time I climbed in until she parked beside the cheesy coachlight in front of our apartment. I liked riding with her even less than the bus. It was here, spinning alongside the cropped fields, that she asked me questions I did not want to answer.

  “Do you want me to call your father?”

  I watched the gray, see-through barns sail by.

  “Do you need to talk to Astrid?”

  Beside the road, green signs the size of playing cards told workmen where the lines changed from solid to dotted.

  “I don’t know what you want me to do.”

  “Nothing,” I said, but she could not accept that this was the truth.
/>   At home, cooking dinner with her shoes off, she badgered me about my unhappiness, my slipping grades, my cigarettes.

  “Next year if I can help it we’ll be out of here,” she said over our Hamburger Helper. She did not know much, she said, about handling money, but she would be careful. We would be all right. While she was used to doing everything for us, I could see it was a strain on her to be so hopeful for me. She did not suddenly become tough and efficient, as I had wished, but put on a false, nearly tireless optimism that I had always associated with my father and that—naturally, as a teenager—I partly believed yet refused to share.

  I helped her with the dishes and retreated to my room to practice and then, when the neighbors complained, to listen to my headphones. My mother smoked and watched TV, sometimes having a glass of my father’s scotch, never more than two. When her show was over—Upstairs, Downstairs, or one of those snooty movies about a weekend-long party at an English country mansion—she would look into my room, carrying an ashtray, and start talking at me as if she’d only been taking a break. Take off the headphones, she gestured, and trapped, I did. We did not discuss what she had done or who my father was seeing; that was in the past. She told me things I didn’t want to know about the relatives of her co-workers; she replayed conversations she’d had in her travels around the county. I knew she was lonely but by that time of night I was tired of her using me as an audience. I wanted to fall asleep to Dark Side of the Moon and forget everything that had happened to us in the last month, and I resented her for reminding me of it, simply by her presence. I sensed, in her flow of words, a desperation I myself was trying to overcome.

  Around the house I tried to fill in for my father where I could. We were still going through boxes from the move, trying out the few different combinations of furniture the tiny living room allowed. I stood around like my father would have, and when my mother pointed, picked up a table or chair or the end of the couch and then stood aside again. It was my job now to take out the trash and lug it to a communal dumpster in the visitors’ lot. When my mother asked which dish I would rather have for dinner, I learned to prefer one firmly over the other, when in truth I did not care. But I could not talk to her the way my father had, I could not argue with her. Even if he did little around the house, when something important came up, we looked to my father to tell us what to do. Right or wrong, in the end he was responsible. When my mother tried to discuss something serious with me—like what we would do about my sister returning from Germany in May, or whether we should break the lease—I had nothing to say to her, gave back only faint echoes. She sighed, letting me know that I was no help, that she would have to decide by herself. And at night I could not replace my father, but lay awake across the hall from her, wishing she wasn’t so alone.

  One snowy morning at the bus stop, I was talking with Lila when we heard a car spinning its tires on the drive. The high-pitched whine of rubber on ice cut through the trees, and furious bursts of the engine. I knew from the roar that it was our Country Squire. My mother had been meaning to pick up a set of chains. I flicked my cigarette into the snow and, like a hero, coolly excused myself.

  I followed our bootprints down the winding drive. It was slippery if you kept to the tracks, but the edges and the hump had a few inches of wet hardpack good for traction. The sound of the engine was coming closer, idling now behind a bend, then suddenly stopped. Beside me in the ditch a trickle made its way downhill. In the woods, snow dropped from the high pines.

  It was her. The rear of our car was in the ditch on the right side, the long hood angled out over the road, only one front tire touching the ground. My mother was still inside, and when I jumped the trickle to make sure she was all right I could see she’d been crying but was done now. Her keys were on the dash. She had her driving gloves off and was smoking a fresh cigarette.

  “You think they’d salt the goddamn thing,” she said.

  “What if I push?”

  “This car?” She got out and pocketed her keys, put on her winter gloves. “What’s the guy’s name with the tow truck—the guy with the beard? I’ll see if he’ll do it for free.”

  “I know him,” I said. “I’ll go.”

  “You’ve got school,” she said, and started walking down the drive. It was a long way but I could not argue, only watch her go. She’d made it twenty feet when she fell, yelping with surprise.

  It would have been funny—it was funny—but my mother had had enough. She thrashed around in the snow, screaming, “You son of a bitch, I hate you,” kicking and flinging her purse about like a mace.

  I scuttled over to her, but by then she had stopped and lay there as if shot, her made-up face in profile against the snow, jaw set.

  “Is anything broken?” I asked.

  She would not look at me, and I knew better than to push it. I looked skyward at the pines, back at the car.

  “Help me up,” she said.

  That night she called Astrid and hung up and waited with her hand on the phone for my sister to call back. The Air Force gave her a certain number of minutes free a month, and special rates after that. They talked for almost an hour before my mother motioned me over.

  “What are you doing?” Astrid demanded.

  “What?” I said.

  “Are you doing anything at all for Mom?”

  “Yes,” I said, reasonably, so my mother wouldn’t know we were fighting.

  “I’m not there, so you’ve got to help her.”

  “I am.”

  “Obviously you’re not because she’s flipping out. Do you know what time it is here?”

  “No,” I said.

  “It’s four in the morning.”

  “It’s been a bad day.”

  “I guess so,” Astrid said. “It’s been a bad day for me and it hasn’t even started yet. Will you do something for me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you please take care of her until I get back there?”

  “I’ll try,” I said, but again with that sick feeling that accompanies a promise you know will be broken.

  Now, more often, I signed up for the last shift at the Burger Hut and after practice walked the exhaust-blackened half mile with my case to punch in and tie on my apron. Weekdays the kitchen closed at nine, and the last hour I was allowed to man the register. It was easy—all the different items were typed right on the buttons and no one talked to me except to ask for ketchup. Closing, I refilled the air deodorizers in the restrooms with pink syrup and dusted the rubber plants. Before punching out, I projected my hours to see how much money I’d keep after giving my mother half. (I was saving for a Stratocaster copy Warren had seen in the pawnshop downtown even though I didn’t know how to play guitar.) Mr. Philbin, the manager, gave me a ride home, and as if he knew what awaited me, tuned in the country-western station and said nothing.

  But the Burger Hut was not half the respite Friday night became when my mother started going out with friends from her work. After dinner she changed out of her uniform and into one of two spangly cocktail dresses. Red and blue, they were both short and—she thought—tended to make her legs look a touch heavy. Lying on my bed with Jimi Hendrix thundering, I pretended not to watch her ritual in the bathroom across the hall. She leaned into the mirror to dab on eye shadow, tilted her head to fasten her earrings. With her face made, she looked much younger. I had never been forced before to consider whether my mother was attractive, and while I was intimidated by this version of her, I was also relieved that she had friends and that she trusted me to stay home alone.

  The minute our car passed the chapel, I went to my room, opened the window and stoked a bowl. I sprayed Ozium just in case, its lemony scent thick as mist. I ransacked the cupboards, then settled for Pepsi and Pop-Tarts and planted myself on the couch to watch TV. Around eleven—as I was worrying when she’d be home—the police from the sheriff’s office would show up, their lights strobing in the trees as they eased down the icy drive. Like the Lawsons downstairs from
us, I’d slip on my coat and go out in the snow to watch them referee our neighbors’ disputes. I don’t remember anyone throwing a punch, only a lot of grappling and cursing, the men from the sheriff’s office talking to people in their warm front seats. At eleven-thirty “Chiller Theatre” began, which I never missed. My mother came in around one, just as John Carradine was being strangled by his latest creation. She drew a tall glass of tap water and sat down beside me, chain-smoking while I told her the plot.

  “Where did you go?” I asked, as if I knew the bars around town. “How was it?”

  All week she had been assaulting me with the most insignificant details of other people’s lives, but now all she said was, “DJ’s. It was okay.”

  If she was drunk, she’d put her arm around me and say, “You’re a good kid, you know that? Jesus, what time is it? I’ve got to go to bed. You should too.” In minutes I’d hear her snoring. I’d look in and make sure the covers were on her, and the next morning let her sleep while I cooked breakfast.

  Saturdays my father was supposed to visit, but he hadn’t yet. Though my mother talked to him over the phone, we had not seen him since the move. My mother had put together a garbage bag full of his stuff she’d dug out of her bureau drawers. It waited for him on the landing outside our door.

  I did want to see him, partly because I missed him and partly because, as I told my mother, he had promised to teach me to drive. I was going to be fifteen in the spring, old enough for my learner’s permit. I was signed up for Driver’s Ed and already had the manual. I thought that once I had access to a car I would be besieged by girls. At the least I could take Lila Raybern to the Sky Vue Drive-In.

  “That’s not what I’m asking,” my mother said. “I can teach you how to drive. Do you want to see your father or not?”