Snow Angels

by Stewart O'Nan

  “It’s cool,” he said, and we sat down on the cage above the drain. I stuck the roach on an alligator clip and handed it and my mother’s green Bic to Warren. He drew deeply on it and handed it back, holding the smoke in, then blew out a cloud.

  “This beats the shit out of practice,” he said.

  I nodded, enjoying the tickle of the first hit, and handed the clip back.

  “I am feeling very positive,” I said. Warren nodded sagely. The rush was instant but slow, a creeping tingle along the jaw, like the surprising late heat of a spicy chili. David Larue, who’d sold me the nickel, said it was Colombian. We suspected it was Mexican. It was a little harsh but gave you a pleasant buzz, nothing too intense for a day at school.

  Warren and I passed it back and forth until it went out, then roasted it over a high flame, sucking the smoke off the blackened nub.

  “You can get another hit out of it,” Warren said.

  “You want another?”

  I knocked it off into the water. We watched the current take it hesitantly into the pipe. The motion of the roach seemed to have its own ineluctable drama and meaning. We were fucked up.

  “Thanks,” Warren said.

  We sat in silence a moment, stoned, looking at our new surroundings.

  “This is some fucked-up shit,” Warren said, and I knew what he meant.

  “You better look and see if any of those cops are hanging around.”

  “Paranoid,” Warren said, but stood and looked. “Nothing.”

  In the water a soaked mitten floated. Pink and white, with some kind of design.

  “Check out this mitten,” I said.

  “Don’t touch it,” Warren said, “you’re not supposed to touch it.”

  Slow as a leaf, the mitten drifted over the brown water toward the pipe. I broke a branch off a bush.

  “Okay,” Warren said, “I guess you have to now.”

  The branch wasn’t long enough, and I had to bend down and lean out over the water. I just touched it and it floated toward the other side. With Warren behind me, I scrambled up the ditch and around and down. I couldn’t quite get it from this side either. Warren went to get a bigger branch while I kept my eye on the mitten. The pipe seemed to be drawing it in the closer it got.

  “Hurry up,” I said. “We’re going to lose it.”

  “I’m hurrying,” Warren said.

  I was kneeling at the edge of the creek, watching, when a second white mitten floated to the surface—except this mitten had fingers and was attached to a puffy blue arm. The girl’s face rolled out of the water, still encased in her hood, its fur muddy, the drawstring knotted under her chin.

  I ran. I ran straight up the ditch to Warren, who was fighting a bush for a green branch. I tried to tell him but nothing would come.

  “There,” I said. “Mud,” I said. “The coat.” It was like the last few seconds of “Password” when you use all the clues.

  Warren took me by the arm and we walked to the top of the ditch and looked down.

  She was on her back, her mouth and eyes open, drifting headfirst toward the pipe. A boot had fallen off.

  We ran.

  “Mister Chervenick!” Warren called.

  “Mister Chervenick!” we called.

  Mr. Chervenick talked with my mother while I waited in our car. As usual, she was late. It was fully night, not quite dinnertime. The snow had not stopped, and the wipers arced in rhythm, the headlights giving the falling flakes a stagey, theatrical quality. I wanted a cigarette but didn’t dare in the car. Finally Mr. Chervenick opened the lobby door for my mother and she crossed in front of the hood. She got in and clicked her belt on but didn’t shift into drive.

  “You didn’t tell me you were the one,” she said.

  “Me and Warren,” I said.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Mr. Chervenick said you were pretty upset.”

  “Right when it happened, yeah. So was Warren. So was everybody. Then they just shoved us on the bus. Some of the girls were crying.”

  “How about you?” my mother said.

  “I was sad, I guess. I don’t know.”

  My mother slid across the seat and held me. I endured it. Mr. Chervenick had left.

  “You’re okay,” she asked. “You’re sure.”

  “I’m hungry,” I said.

  “Do you know whose little girl that was?”

  “I didn’t know her name.”

  “That was Annie Van Dorn’s little girl. You remember Annie.”

  I hadn’t for a long time, and now that I was, the crush I had had on her returned, mixed with the image of the girl floating backwards. “Sure.”

  My mother told me about Annie’s marriage and separation as if they were tragedies linked and equal to this one. As she was speaking, the Annie I had known seemed to vanish, to become so much older that I could not imagine what she might look like. I was still stoned and associating things freely and could not help but compare Annie’s story to my mother’s—the missing husband and lost child.

  “I’m going to have to go see Mrs. Van Dorn,” she said. “It would be nice if you came too.”

  I said I would.

  My mother didn’t tell me about her day. We passed the Van Dorns’—their lights were off—and our old house without comment. I thought of Annie coming over to babysit, jumping from her father’s truck with her books, her long hair swinging.

  Before getting out at Foxwood, my mother said, “You’re sure you’re okay?”

  “I only looked at her a few seconds.”

  “Something like that, that’s enough. I’m going to ask you to do me a favor.”

  “What?” I said. I was tired. I wanted to eat and watch TV.

  “I want you to come with me when I see Dr. Brady next week. You’ll like him, he’s really very nice.” She went off on a long spiel, and I knew she’d made up her mind.

  “I’ll go,” I conceded. She held me again, sitting there in the glare from the coachlight. It seemed she could not touch me enough. When she pulled away, I could see she was crying—just a tear she wiped away with a gloved finger. She tried to smile.

  “What are we having for dinner?” I asked, because I truly wanted to know and not because I thought it would make her laugh.

  The next day my father unexpectedly showed up after lunch in his Nova. While it was a Saturday, we hadn’t made any plans, and after our last disaster, I wasn’t sure if he wanted to see me or vice versa. I was surprised that I was glad he had come. My mother asked him in for a cup of hot chocolate.

  “Maybe later,” he said at the door. “Right now Arthur and I have work to do.”

  I threw on my coat and gloves, not wanting them to argue. As much as I wanted them to get back together, when they were in the same room I felt an impending violence, or more accurate, a fragility or brittleness—even when they were civil, as they were now. Though it did not go away when we were alone, I liked them better by themselves.

  My mother came out on the landing to wave us away. “Have a good time,” she called.

  “Where are we going?” I asked when we were on the interstate.

  “Where do you think?” my father said.

  “Not pizza.”

  My father laughed. “Nope.”

  “Then I don’t know.”

  “What,” my father asked, “do you want to do more than anything else in the world?”

  “Drive,” I said.

  “That is exactly where we’re going—to teach you how to drive.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” my father repeated, all innocence. “Because you don’t know how to.”

  I was not really angry with him, and let it go.

  “Arthur,” my father said with a sigh. “Yes, your mother did call me. I’m glad she did.”

  “I am too,” I said, calling a truce neither of us was foolish enough to trust. We were going up the hill and the Nova was losing speed. My father shifted into low. Be
hind us the city smoked in the bright cold.

  “I’m moving,” my father said. “Did your mother tell you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I am, to a new apartment starting next month. It’s furnished and it has a kitchen.”

  “That’s good,” I said, but I wasn’t thinking that. I did not know what it meant, only that they both should have told me earlier.

  We came to the exit for the high school, and my father took it. We crossed the bridge and turned into the access road and drove until we reached the parking lot. It was empty, covered with a fresh coat of snow. Atop the hooded streetlamps perched gulls from the lake, flying sorties back and forth to the dumpsters. My father rolled to the center of the lot, turned off the car and held his keyring out to me. In his palm it rested like a dangerous insect.

  “Are you ready?” he said, and I knew that for a while I would not be able to escape the girl and the kindness other people believed I needed. That was all right, I thought. Though in a sense both their sympathy and my grief were confused and would never connect, none of it was false. I would try not to question this gift.

  Sunday they had a service for Annie’s girl downtown at United Presbyterian, where the Van Dorns used to go. I had to wear my old suit, whose pants were floods. The church was overflowing. My mother promised we wouldn’t stay long. I didn’t know anyone there besides my father, and Annie, who sat in front where I couldn’t really see her. While the priest talked on and on, I thought about how strange the connection between me and the girl and her mother was—a weird, secret triangle. My father followed us through the receiving line as if we were still a family. People stopped to hold Annie’s and Mrs. Van Dorn’s hands and say a few words. She was almost as I had remembered her—pretty, with her hair straight and bright against the black dress. My old crush on her returned, pumped through me like a drug. Waiting for my mother to get done, I thought of Lila and sobered.

  Annie said she didn’t recognize me. “With all the hair,” she teased.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I wondered if anyone had told her it was me who’d found her, then thought probably not. It wouldn’t make any difference to her.

  “Thank you, Arthur.”

  “And you remember my husband Don,” my mother said, reaching over me to touch his elbow.

  “Of course, I couldn’t forget Mr. Parkinson.”

  “We’re all very sorry,” my father said.

  Outside there were TV cameras. We walked to the parking lot together, my mother and father in front, discussing Thanksgiving. In the car my mother said we were going to Pittsburgh. It did not feel like a victory.

  Monday I met Lily and Lila at the bottom of the drive. I expected them to say something about me finding the girl, but we walked up the crunchy hump in single file, discussing how dumb it was for us to have to go to school on Friday. They were going to York to see their aunt who worked for Harley-Davidson. (No, Lily said, she didn’t ride a bike.) They seemed unaware of the search. Maybe they didn’t have a TV or read the Eagle. Maybe they weren’t interested. I wanted to tell Lila alone to see if she’d console me, but that was impossible with Lily, and as we turned the curve into the woods and lost sight of Foxwood, I thought that it would be classier if she heard it from someone else. I also didn’t tell Lila that I had missed her desperately all weekend or thought of us next summer in the back of the Country Squire at the Sky Vue Drive-In. Instead, we stood outside the gate, passing a cigarette between the three of us, and when the bus came I got on and headed for the rear.

  In the corner Warren had tied his hood as tight as it would go. He rolled his eyes back and stuck out his tongue.

  “You sick fuck,” I said, and slid in and punched him in the arm so he’d stop.

  “Did you have nightmares?”

  “No,” I said truthfully. “You?”

  “One. I dreamed we had practice every day this week.”

  “That wasn’t a dream.”

  “I said it was a nightmare. Hey, how come our names weren’t in the paper? It just said ‘two volunteers.’ ”

  “That’s us,” I said, and sang the tagline of Jefferson Airplane’s “Volunteers of America.”

  “Hey, Arty,” Todd Johnson called from across the aisle. “Warren says you were pissing your pants.”

  “Not quite, Tojo,” I said.

  “Was she all gooped-up and nasty?” he asked, making a face. I noticed everyone around us had stopped talking. I thought I would enjoy this part of my celebrity, the recounting, but suddenly I didn’t want to talk about it.

  “No,” I said, shrugging. “She was just drowned. I knew her mother when I was a little kid.”

  It was like that all day. By lunch I was tired of people coming over to me expecting some emotion. Eating my grilled cheese, I gazed up at the pats of butter stuck to the perforated ceiling. I shrugged and told them I had known Annie. They all seemed disappointed with me, as if I were being a spoilsport. I was glad when the bell rang and I could hide in music class.

  We were bad in practice that week, as if—as Mr. Chervenick insisted—missing Friday had hurt us. We were giving up, he said; we had to question whether we had the desire to be a real band.

  “Yeah,” Warren said beside me, “a real bad one.”

  The snow came down all three days, and keeping my thirty-inch stride, I followed the contours of the tornado, peeking toward the footbridge, sure we would have another chance to find the girl, this time alive.

  Neither Lila or Lily said a word about it. Wednesday when we saw the bus coming and quickly passed the butt around for last hits, I said I hoped they had a good time in York.

  “What are you doing?” Lila asked, and I told her.

  “You have fun too,” she said.

  “I will,” I said, and on the bus scourged myself for saying something so dumb.

  Warren could read me, and shook his head, smirking. He’d taken to calling her Delilah and snipping at my hair with his fingers.

  “Don’t say anything,” I said. “Just shut up.”

  Thanksgiving it sleeted, and Armstrong stomped us, 48—6. Before the end of the first half we gathered in close formation behind the end zone, setting up for our show. If our team won we’d be eligible for the state tournament in Philadelphia, but we were down three TD’s already. The stands were full of disappointed fans throwing small, hard erasers in the shape of the Liberty Bell. The sleet bled down our sheet music.

  “This is it,” Mr. Chervenick rallied us. “This is where you find out if you have what it takes.”

  Our drum major blew his whistle three times and we took the field. The stands were thinning, people going to the restrooms, the makeshift concession stands benefitting the PTA. The field was a mess, the grass between the hashmarks churned to a cold, gluey mud; the turf along the sidelines was untouched but icy. Our first rank of drummers had nearly made mid-field when beside me Warren slipped and fell. In practice they trained us to ignore it when anyone screwed up so as not to draw attention to it, but I couldn’t leave Warren in the mud. I stopped to give him my hand and the trombone following ran me down. I couldn’t hear them through “Proud Mary” but I knew the people in the stands were laughing at us. I imagined Mr. Chervenick on the sidelines shaking his head in dismay, and for an instant couldn’t get up. Warren pushed my hat at me, I grabbed my instrument, and we both ran through the formation to the pair of empty places. When the music allowed us a rest, I snuck a glance down at myself. My horn was smudged, a clump of turf clinging to the spit valve; my uniform was destroyed—and foolishly, for no reason, tears came to my eyes. I wasn’t allowed to move, to break the symmetry of the brass, and by the time the chorus returned I was fine, worried that someone might have seen me. I’d say it was just sleet.

  “That’s all right, Arthur, Warren,” Mr. Chervenick said as we came off. “Tough conditions.”

  “Fucking shit,” Warren said.

  “I know,” Mr. Chervenick said. “Nothing you could do.”

&n
bsp; At home, when my mother pulled my uniform out of my gym bag, she said, “You fell down. Oh honey, are you all right?” She was already in her sleeveless blue dress for dinner but not made up.

  “Why is it when anything happens you think I can’t handle it?” I said. “I’m fine.”

  “Obviously you’re not,” she said, but glancingly, headed for the bathroom. We were not officially late yet, but she had begun to move through the furniture with a recklessness that I knew preceded leaving. “I’m going to have to soak this or it’s not going to come clean. I’m sure no one’s open today.”

  While she ran water in the tub I went to my room and sat on my bed. My clothes for dinner were laid out like armor. Dark slacks, white shirt. A striped tie my father used to help me with, standing behind me. I put on the pants and sat back down.

  “Are you getting dressed?” she called, prodding.

  “Yes,” I said, lying flat on my back.

  She looked in a few minutes later. “I’m going whether you come or not. There’s leftover chicken in the fridge.”

  I pulled on the shirt and tucked it in, yanked the fuzzy gray socks on. My good shoes were too small and bit at my feet. I carried the tie like a snake.

  “You look respectable!” my mother joked. She took the tie from me, made a loop and looked at it. “Okay,” she said, “I think I remember this.” Standing in front of me, she slid it around my neck, crossed it over and through and down. “Lift your chin.” She pulled the knot tight and fixed the wings of my collar. All this time I was looking at her in her blue dress, thinking how beautifully strong her arms were, and how my father would look at her.

  “You look pretty,” I said.

  “Thank you,” she said. “We’re going to be late.”

  We were. My grandparents and my aunt and my father were finishing their first drink in the living room. My father was in his suit, a smaller version of my grandfather, who I had never seen wearing anything else. My grandmother wore pearls, my aunt a cashmere sweater. The house was rich with the smell of gravy, and from the expensive stereo they kept beside the grandfather clock, a string quartet softly flowed. My mother, with her bare arms and blue heels, seemed too bright.