Snow Angels

by Stewart O'Nan

  “When?” I asked, completely at her mercy.

  I caught Warren in the parking lot. I wrapped my arms around him from behind and lifted him off the ground.

  “I knew you’d never ask her,” he explained.

  “Not true,” I said, “that is un-fucking-true,” and like a hero told him the whole story.

  “I don’t know her family,” my mother admitted, slightly concerned that Lila was from Foxwood. “I’m sure she’s very nice.” She thought it was wonderful but said until I got my permit I would not be allowed to drive her car. My father agreed.

  “So who do you want to chauffeur you two on Saturday?” she said.

  It was not a hard decision. I could clean our car; my aunt’s old Nova was hopeless. My mother promised not to peek at us in the mirror.

  After the slapping incident we had reached another truce. I knew she was trying to do too much; she knew I did not want to be consoled. She was demanding, while I was ungrateful. We relied on each other without giving much ground. We both wished Astrid were home with us. Both our jaws hardened when my father mentioned his girlfriend’s name.

  My mother saw Dr. Brady late after work on Thursdays. Sometimes I didn’t see her until she picked me up at the Burger Hut, but as Christmas neared, I asked her to take me downtown to do my shopping while above the Hot Dog Shoppe she made sense of our new life. The streets were slushy and festooned with tinsel; in front of the Woolworth’s a part-time Santa rang his bell tirelessly, badgering traffic. Butler had had a large blind school downtown years ago, and when the lights both ways went red and the white WALK sign came on, a steady ringing like a doorbell jimmied with a pin started so no one would get run over. I lingered by the black velvet—backed windows of Milo Williams jewelry, dreaming of what I’d give Lila. I could see myself kneeling on the sticky floor of the Penn, popping the box like an oyster. I had been working a lot this fall, and had more money in my account than ever before. I just did not know what to get everyone.

  Two were easy. My father I would get tools. Exactly what kind would be discussed the next time he called; there was never any surprise involved. Astrid was into photography. I’d bought her film the last few Christmases. The rest was guesswork. I had some ideas for my mother—an electric blanket, a toaster oven—but they seemed dumb, not personal enough. My grandparents and aunt were always hard. And Lila.

  I had my eye on a simple 24-karat chain in Milo Williams, and went so far as to ask the man behind the counter if I could see it. He slid the glass door aside and fished it out, gave it to me daintily, draping it over my hand. It was cold and a little stiff. I thought of the gold warm against Lila’s neck. I pictured her squinting, happy with it.

  “How much?” I asked, and the man told me.

  I handed the chain back, draped it over his hand. If the date went wrong I’d be stuck with it. And if it went well, did I have to get something for Lily too?

  Saturday afternoon my father told me not to worry. We were in the Nova, practicing three-point turns. I’d do one and drive fifty feet and do another and come back.

  “This is her date,” my father said. “Remember that, Arty. Be a gentleman and you’ll both have a fine time. Do not be an octopus. Kiss her goodnight if she wants to be kissed.”

  I did not want any advice beyond “Don’t worry,” and pointedly ignored the rest. We parallel-parked for a while, the rear hubcap scraping the curb.

  “Okay,” he said, signaling that we were done for the day, and I started to undo my belt.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he said. “How would you like to drive back to my place? Carefully.”

  “Yes,” I said, trying not to blow it by being either too anxious or cool.

  “I’ll navigate,” he said.

  I had never driven on a highway before, and now I was getting on the interstate. The speedometer said I was doing 50. The Nova purred under my foot. I felt light, high.

  “Check your mirrors,” my father said. “Line up a point on the hood with the center line and keep it there. Feel how big the lane is.”

  “This is great,” I said.

  “Isn’t it?” my father said. “You’re doing great too.”

  He pointed to an exit just outside town and I steered into the chute.

  “Gently brake,” my father said. “Gently. Gently.”

  His new place was in a small L-shaped complex with wooden siding stained by runoff from the gutters. MARYHAVEN, a carved sign at the entrance said. My father had his own numbered parking space. I stopped the car, put it in park and turned it off.

  “Very nice,” my father said, taking the keys. “Inside I have another surprise for you.”

  I thought it might be the stereo system I had been hoping for, or perhaps just the condition of the apartment itself, which, when he opened the door, pleased me. He had actual furniture, and plants, and a kitchen with a window. A dark-haired woman around my mother’s age rose from a couch where she’d been reading. She had coffee in a mug I didn’t recognize.

  “Arthur, this is Marcia,” my father said, “Marcia, my son Arthur.”

  “Arthur,” she said, taking my hand. One of her front teeth was chipped. She was shorter than my mother and thinner and, unlike her, didn’t wear any rings, no makeup either. The sweater she had on swallowed her.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said.

  “Your father tells me you have a date tonight.”

  “That’s right,” I said, resentful.

  “They’re seeing the new Godfather,” my father put in.

  “It’s very good. Don and I both liked it, which is very rare.”

  She asked if I could stay for a cup of coffee but my father said I’d just come to see his new place. He showed me the bedroom and the bathroom, both full-sized. I remembered our old towels and the wicker peacock throne, but everything else was new to me, and exotic. By the bed he had an aquarium with angelfish, on Astrid’s dresser a tape player bigger than Warren’s. The empty cassette box was for Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.

  “In A major,” I said, astonishing them with Mr. Chervenick’s trivia, “Opus 92.”

  “Yes,” Marcia said, “your father says you’re quite the musician.” She was pretty and, I thought now, younger than my mother. Her jeans were white along the seams, the denim frayed.

  “Not really,” I said. “It’s my first year.”

  “We’d better be heading back,” my father said, “if we’re going to get Cinderella here to the ball.”

  On the way out I tried to memorize the apartment, as if—a spy—I would decode its secrets when I got home.

  “Come back,” Marcia said at the door, still holding on to her coffee. “We’ll have dinner.”

  “I will,” I said.

  In the car, before backing out, my father said, “I guess you were surprised, huh?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I was.”

  “Well, get ready for another, because we’re thinking of getting married.”

  I had nothing to say to this.

  “Not soon but eventually. Maybe sometime next year.”

  “Does Mom know about this?” I asked, as if she still held some authority.

  “She doesn’t like it but she knows about it.”

  “Does Astrid know?”

  This stopped my father. “I don’t know what your mother does and doesn’t tell your sister.”

  “Mom didn’t tell me,” I said.

  “I know. I wanted to tell you myself.”

  I looked out the windshield at the stained siding. Inside, lights were coming on. Every window was another apartment.

  “Everything okay there, Arty?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I just don’t want to be late.”

  When we returned to Foxwood, my mother seemed to know we’d seen Marcia. “We’re going to be late,” she scolded me, but her anger was intended for my father. While I got ready for my date with Lila, they argued in the living room. I didn’t have time for a shower, which worried me. I did not want to
hear what they said, and put on Led Zeppelin III, but even that was not loud enough, and all through “Gallows Pole” I heard my mother shouting, “I will not let you do this to me or to my son,” and my father coming back with, “This is not about you and me anymore. I’m sorry, but that part of it is over.”

  I put on new underwear and my best corduroys, my white shirt with the top two buttons undone. I hauled on my cowboy boots, then thought better of the snow and settled for my everyday hiking boots. We would have to sit up front if we were late. From the living room came a crash.

  “That’s it,” my father yelled. “Arty, I’m leaving.”

  I heard the door open and my mother outside, her voice tiny and stretched, screaming at him as he made for the Nova. I sat on the edge of my bed, calmly parting my hair. Like everything else that had happened that winter, I was not going to let this stop me from being happy.

  TEN

  GLENN’S RUNNING OUT OF GAS AND DOG FOOD. He’s dodging the park police, leapfrogging the Boy Scout sleepover camps out at the lake. The cabins are painted shit brown and carved with initials, wire screens over the windows to keep raccoons from nesting in the mattresses. Two bunks jut from the wall. At first Glenn thought he should have brought more clothes; now he’s glad he didn’t. He’s getting rid of things. He’s even tossed the album with the pictures of Gibbsville. He carries a single wrinkled shot of Tara and Annie over his heart, sleeps with it in his hands.

  He has his sleeping bag and a blanket borrowed from Rafe, but some nights it’s so cold he has to risk starting the truck, and once it’s warm, turns the heat up, leaning into the dash to feel the blast. Bomber lies in the footwell, cocking his head at the night owl radio.

  “We should make that our confession,” the syndicated preacher urges. “When God takes on our sickness, sin has no dominion over us—praise Jesus. When God takes on our disease, Satan has no hold on us. We know this because we’ve read in the Bible that there is no sin without Satan, that sin comes not from God but from the Adversary. God does not forget you; it is when you forget God, when you think God is slipping away from you, that the Adversary is slipping in. But listen to me now. God is still there with you now. He’s never gone anywhere on you. He’s right there with you now—all you’ve got to do this minute is accept Him back into your life.”

  Glenn lies across the seats, looking up at the perforated fabric of the ceiling, the dim bubble light, thinking that what the radio is saying is only partly true. No one is forgiven in advance. This man cannot take on his sin, cannot absolve him; that will only happen after the Rapture, when the dead are either taken up or cast down. It has nothing to do with a radio show or reading the Bible or the police. It has nothing to do with this fallen world.

  He likes the next show better, a younger woman from North Carolina whose voice quivers and breaks like a country singer pleading with a lover, afraid she may be misunderstood. She sounds unsure, as if she’s convincing herself. Glenn knows the feeling.

  “You see, people don’t want to live the life. It’s boring, Rita, they say to me; it’s no fun. But if you’re born of the water then you know that loving God is never boring. ‘And my faith shall slake your thirst like an overbrimming cup.’ I think these people who are dried up and walking around dead are afraid. They don’t know what that water’s gonna do to them, and they’re afraid.”

  The cab is warm. Glenn sees the gas gauge nodding toward EMPTY and turns everything off. Bomber grumps once, then settles in. He’s still waiting to be fed. Glenn’s sorry; there’s only enough for tomorrow morning. He’s hungry himself, his stomach hollow, nagging. Yesterday he had his last can of tuna fish for lunch, and for dinner the rest of the crackers. He ate them on the shore of the lake, watching the snow fall into the black water, thinking of Christmas in Gibbsville, the windows of his father’s house frosted. He dipped the last cracker in the shallows, let it spread and melt soggily on his tongue, promised his father he would never forget him. He spent today in the cabin sketching what he remembered of him, warming his fingers over a candle. After a while he gave up; he saw he was drawing himself. He held the paper over the flame, watched it burn to black filmy ash on the floor.

  Instead of eating he read the Psalms down by the water until it got dark.

  O Lord My God, in thee do I take refuge;

  Save me from all my pursuers, and deliver me,

  Lest like a lion they rend me,

  Dragging me away, with none to rescue.

  He didn’t think he’d be able to sleep tonight, and isn’t surprised when he hears Bomber snoring. The woods are quiet, the wind still. His Bible is too underlined to read by candlelight. He wishes he could listen to the radio but he’s afraid the battery might die. He thinks of North Carolina, the mist in the Blue Ridge Mountains heavy as smoke, the sea crashing in the dark off the Outer Banks. Born of the water, she said. That’s him. His name isn’t even Marchand. He must have known his real name as a child, repeated it the way Tara did when, joking, he pretended not to remember hers: “Tara Elizabeth Marchand.”

  “Glenn Allen Marchand,” he says, only his head poking out of the bag. Bomber snores on. The moon is caught in the steering wheel, the windshield pocked with stars. Jesus is his redeemer, his sword and staff. Jesus would never forget him.

  He clutches the picture under his chin and closes his eyes. “Jesus,” he says, “this is Glenn.”

  He wakes up at two-thirty, a quarter to four, a few minutes after six, then finally at nine, to Bomber licking him. Glenn holds the two white halves of Bomber’s face, looks into his coughdrop-blue eyes. So close, his pupils remind Glenn of working on shock victims, of how he must have looked on the floor of his apartment, drowning in air. Now, just thinking about it, he feels himself floating out of his body, feels taken up. He remembers waking up on the floor, unaware that it was a tube down his throat choking him, that the hand smothering him held an oxygen mask. He hadn’t been able to see straight. A white form glowed over him, and all he knew was that he was tired, that he was ready, even if he didn’t believe, to go with this angel.

  Bomber whines to get his attention back.

  “Yes,” Glenn says, “you’re my big buddy,” and scratches him between the ears.

  He pours the sandy dregs of the bag into Bomber’s dish, takes the other bowl to the shoreline for some water, then sits with the door open watching him eat. It’s warmer this morning, his bootprints dark in the softening snow. The shallows steam; farther out, fog sits on the water. It’s ten and threatening, a tinge of metal in the wind. He’s in no rush; he’s got all day. She’ll be at her mother’s after lunch. He steps out to check his wallet to make sure he’s got enough for gas. Easy. When Bomber’s finished, Glenn takes the dish and wings it like a Frisbee into the lake.

  Bomber watches him pick up his water dish.

  “What?” Glenn says. After he’s thrown it, he takes a ten out, then pitches his wallet in. “Okay?” Glenn says, arms held wide. “Are we even?”

  He polices the cabin, collects the crushed Ritz box, the cans, the beer bottles that aren’t even his. “Give a hoot,” Woodsy Owl warns from a bleached poster, “don’t pollute.” Around eleven he’s ready to leave. On the way out of the campground he stops and tosses it all into a green, echoing trash barrel. He imagines calling Nan, what she’d say to him. He expected to hear from her after Tara died, but never did. He jumps a high curb, drives around the chained gate and exits the park, passing an empty ticket booth. He gets on the interstate and crosses a bridge over an arm of the lake, watches it go, glancing sideways until the trees intervene, then starts looking for cops.

  The radio’s on the same station as last night, playing neutered gospel music. It’s too sweet for Glenn, all sopranos and syrupy strings. He finds his Cat Stevens eight-track and punches it in, right in the middle of “Moonshadow.”

  And if I ever lose my eyes, Cat sings, I won’t have to see no more.

  He stops for gas at a Sinclair along the strip in Prospect, ho
lding the folded ten out between two fingers for the attendant, a skinny kid with a half-cast on his wrist. The kid squeegees the windshield, admiring Bomber, asks if Glenn wants him to check the oil. Glenn wonders what he’ll think later, what he’ll tell the police.

  “Have a good weekend,” the kid says.

  “If I make it that far,” Glenn says.

  Rafe is at work. The windows are dark, icicles dripping from the eaves. Glenn leaves the blanket he borrowed on the porch glider, digs through the glovebox for a piece of paper to leave a note. He can’t find one and rips an endpage out of his Bible.

  “Thanks for the place to stay,” he writes. “Take it easy. Your friend, Glenn-man.”

  It doesn’t seem enough for everything Rafe has done for him, but he doesn’t want to play it up or say the wrong thing. Coming back from the porch, he looks at his two sets of footprints in the snow and stops. He finds an untouched space to one side of the walk and falls backwards into the crust, waves his arms and legs to make an angel. He gets up and shakes the snow out of his coat, then squats and draws an arrow, with a finger writes “ME.”

  On the highway he tosses all his small stuff out the window, watching it scatter and bounce behind him in the mirror. His dirty shirts and pants, his balled socks. He puts his Bible on the dash beside his blue volunteer fire light and empties the rest of the glove compartment. Maps rattle in the wind, tear along their soft folds. He never hears the pennies ring.

  “Quit staring at me,” he tells Bomber.

  He stops in the parking lot of a Foodland to stuff the sleeping bag into a Goodwill box. The bed of the pickup is littered with cans, but he doesn’t have time to screw around with them. Where the carts are, he sees a collie chained to a post, waiting for its master. Bomber’s watching the dog.

  “It’s up to you,” Glenn says. “What do you want to do?”

  On the way home he passes a state trooper going the other way. His heart clenches, throbs with shock. He checks the speedometer, looks in the rearview mirror without turning his head. The cruiser gets smaller and smaller until finally its rack of lights dips below the road’s horizon. “No problem,” he says, speeding up, and the rush begins to leak off. He notices that he has a headache. He hasn’t even gotten to the hard parts yet.