Snow Angels

by Stewart O'Nan

  At home everything goes as planned. His father’s car isn’t in the driveway. Glenn gets out and clips Bomber to his chain. He doesn’t want him to leave tracks in the house. The back door is unlocked and no one’s home, though Glenn calls “Hello?” just to make sure. It’s his mother’s bridge day. Out of habit he peeks into the fridge. The idea of so much bright, cold food makes him sick and he lets the door swing shut. He goes to the gun cabinet in the back parlor where his father keeps his bird guns. Locked. The key should be in his mother’s secretary, in the drawer with the curled strips of stamps, the obsolete denominations. It is.

  Going back through the dining room, he stops to look at the hutch on which, along with his mother’s mother’s hand-painted Japanese dishes, stand pictures of himself in high school, Patty in her Navy blues, Richard and his kids in Tucson. On a shellacked slab of driftwood turned into a numberless clock, his mother and father wave from the seashore. Everyone seems happy. Her collection of souvenir baby spoons hangs in a special holder his father bought for her birthday. NIAGARA FALLS, the shields on the handles say, FORT LIGONIER, ATLANTIC CITY. Coming over, Glenn thought of going up to his room for a last look, but now, paralyzed by these mementos, understands that he can’t and still go through with it.

  He takes a new 12-gauge and a box of shells. More than he needs, he thinks. He relocks the glass door, returns the key. In the kitchen he rips a paper towel from the roll by the sink and, walking backward to the open door, wipes away his bootprints. On the back porch he thinks of leaving a note, but what would he say?

  I’m sorry.

  It didn’t work.

  Thank you.

  It’s not your fault.

  With the shotgun broken over his arm, he unclips Bomber from his chain. Glenn opens the door for him and climbs in the other side. He slides the gun under his seat, fits the shells into the glovebox.

  “Okay,” he says to Bomber, “last chance to bail.”

  “All right,” Glenn says, as if he’s answered.

  He keeps to the back roads, the unplowed county blacktops that cut the fields into squares. Cinders plink in the wheelwells. The richer poor live out here in trailers or rotting farmhouses shored up with plywood and silver panels of Celotex insulation. Smoke pours from their stovepipe chimneys. He passes a few newer cattle businesses; they’re not farms, just long aluminum barns surrounded by cyclone fencing. The cattle are kept in pens, their necks clamped in feeding stanchions, growing fatter and fatter until a truck takes them away. It has begun to snow, the wind pushing it sideways across the road. In minutes he needs his wipers to see. The heater whirs. He sneaks along the back edge of the country club golf course, protected by the treeline, and thinks of her in her uniform. He meant to hit her, and then when she was on the ground, didn’t.

  It’s not supposed to be easy, he thinks, and conjures Tara for support, that last day they spent together at the Aquazoo in Pittsburgh. The building was new, and humid inside. He had to carry their coats. A waterfall dropped from the lobby two stories to a pool glittering with pennies. Tara laughed at the penguins, chilly behind the glass. Shy, the octopus slept behind a rock. They wandered the lower level, bathed in the blue glow of the tanks, watching the light ripple over the dolphins’ skin, holding hands. Glenn bought her an eraser shaped like a whale. Rafe was right; she was all he had. He thinks that he can do it, that he can go through with it. He’s gone this far.

  He turns the music off and they slow for the cemetery entrance. The snow is so new he can’t be sure he’s alone, but once they climb the rise Glenn sees he is. Cheap wreaths sit on wire stands, their ribbons fluttering. Toy flags flap. Bomber wants to come; Glenn lets him. He leaves the truck running, the heater and wipers going. Bomber dashes over the snow, looks back as if they might play a game.

  Someone has been to visit in the last few days. Annie’s father’s vase holds a withered rose, red for love. Glenn takes it and places it at the base of Tara’s stone. He kneels in the snow, bows his head over his folded hands. Several rows beyond, Bomber is turning circles. Behind him, the truck chugs.

  “O Lord my God,” Glenn recites, “if I have done this, if there is wrong in my hands, if I have requited my friend with evil or plundered the enemy without cause, let the enemy pursue me and overtake me, and let him trample my life to the ground, and lay my soul in the dust. Amen.”

  He picks his gloves up and stands there looking at her name, the last name false, not even his. That’s how they’ll bury him. It doesn’t matter, he thinks; the trappings of this world are but clay. I am born of the water. On that last day I shall rise.

  Glenn lies down on his back beside the grave and waves his arms and legs. While he’s making the angel, Bomber walks over and sniffs his face.

  “Go,” Glenn says, and he does.

  As he’s leaving, another truck pulls in, dark green, driven by an older man in a hunting cap. He doesn’t return Glenn’s wave.

  To get to Annie’s he has to either detour way around town or brave the interstate. The lunch rush is over, but he doesn’t want to risk stopping at every red light. He swings onto an entrance ramp, turns the music up to adjust for the noise. Oooh baby baby it’s a wild world, Cat sings. It’s hard to get by just upon a smile. The song’s right, Glenn thinks; he doesn’t see a single policeman.

  He takes the high school exit, cruises past the full parking lot. They made love there for the first time. In the summer in his Impala. He remembers the line of sweat under her bra, how cold it was out of their clothes, how his knees squeaked on the upholstery. Below them, the city shimmered like a dying campfire. Late June, the promise of summer. He felt something give inside her, and she grunted through clenched teeth, her eyes bright with pain. She hadn’t told him she was a virgin; he thought he had hurt her. “I’m okay,” she kept saying, trying to console him. The next day the backseat reeked of blood and he drove with the windows open. He bought two dangling pine trees. Sherwood Forest, Annie called them. Sure would. She used to thrash her head around, chew her lower lip, laugh. The building hasn’t changed, or the view, only the cars and the kids in them. It’s a mystery, Glenn thinks, that he’s on the wrong end of.

  No one’s poking out of the middle school road. He’s paranoid, expecting police everywhere. He’s ready to glide by Turkey Hill without stopping if there are any cars around the house. The snow has slacked off but is still falling, fat sugary flakes that dissolve before the wipers hit them. The trees are starting to turn white. He slows before the road, gets a good look at Clare Hardesty’s, her empty driveway, then continues through the intersection, not stopping.

  “What do you see?” he asks Bomber, who, having recognized where they are, is whimpering and pawing at the door.

  Glenn glances sideways, picking up the blue of the water tower, then back to the road, to the side, the road. He doesn’t see anyone. The fields are bare, the Maverick gone. As far as he can tell, the house is dark. Two-oh-five. It’s gratifying. He’s worked hard for this.

  He turns at the first road and does a three-pointer, comes back the other way. He slows, signals and makes the left onto Turkey Hill.

  Now I’ve been smiling lately, Cat Stevens sings, thinking about the good things to come. Glenn punches it out, clicks it off. Driving along the edge of the woods, he peers back through the trees, looks over his shoulder at the road. Nothing, nobody.

  “You’re going to stay in the truck,” he explains to Bomber.

  He passes the drive and the mailbox. The flag’s down. He was right, the house is dark. In the turnaround he has to get out to move a trash barrel blocking the road, then when he’s past, has to move it back. Bomber’s interested, and both times steals Glenn’s seat. “Scoot over,” Glenn says. He wonders how long it will take for the snow to cover his tracks.

  He parks where the road dead-ends at a snowy mound. Hunching over to get the shotgun from under the seat, he inadvertently hits the horn.

  He pops his head up, breathing hard.

  The wo
ods are still, the snow dropping plumb.

  “Watch what you’re doing.”

  He pulls the gun out and thumbs in a pair of shells. He splits the rest of the box between his pockets.

  “I don’t want you barking,” he warns Bomber, and before leaving him, rubs the plush ridge of fur on his chest. “I’ll be back.”

  Outside it’s surprisingly warm—and quiet, only birds and melt-off dripping, the thrum of distant traffic. The snow is snowball snow and the footing’s good. He can smell the mud underneath. He picks his way through the brush, one hand clutching the stock of the gun, the other out for balance, fingertips braced against tree trunks. As he nears the pond trail, he can hear the spillway. It reminds him of the search, how he was stumbling through the pines when the bullhorn called them all in, his father’s intuition off by miles.

  The trooper with him had a walkie-talkie, and checked in. “I’m with the husband,” he said, and let the button up.

  “Tell him,” a fuzzy voice squelched, “that we’re very sorry.”

  The trooper ran with him to the creek where they said they’d seen her. Annie was there, in her mother’s arms, crushing a Kleenex to her face, angrily keening. Brock stood off to one side, afraid to touch her.

  “Where is she?” Glenn asked the inspector.

  “The boys say they saw your daughter here, moving with the current.” He pointed to the drainpipe running under the hillside.

  Glenn jumped into the water. It wasn’t three feet high. The trooper wrestled him out, held him away from it as if breaking up a fight. His thighs were freezing, his jeans heavy. Even now he thinks they should have let him go. The police had to call in a diver. By the time he was ready it was dark and they had to stand there in the glare of utility lights hung from bushes, waiting for the wet-suited man to pull her out by the ankles. Again, Glenn jumped into the water, soaking a borrowed pair of pants. Annie screamed and screamed.

  He hasn’t been back in these woods since then. He forgets how much they used to love sitting in the backyard on summer nights with a beer, listening to the crickets, in August watching for meteor showers. Annie had wanted a garden, and rabbits for Tara. Glenn promised to build her a clubhouse. That’s all gone, he thinks. It’s dumb to bring it up now.

  But creeping up on the house, he can’t help seeing that the gutters are clogged with leaves, that the lawn furniture on the screenporch is rusting. There must be a year’s worth of Fresca bottles. He’d had hopes for this house, plans. When did everything turn to shit?

  The door to the screenporch is locked. He takes his keys and pokes a hole in the screen, rips it and reaches in, scratching his wrist. A little blood. It heartens him. He leans the shotgun against the back door and checks the bathroom window. He pulls the arm of his jacket over his fist and punches the pane above the lock. It tinkles and falls to the carpet. Somewhere a dog barks—not Bomber. Glenn opens the window and pulls back the curtain, breaks the gun and scissors through. The glass snaps under his boots on the bathmat. He closes the window and draws the curtain again.

  He goes through the house as if it’s on fire, room by room, the way they taught him in rescue. He sits on Annie’s bed and rifles the nightstand. Her father’s revolver is gone.

  “You’re not dumb,” he admits.

  He looks in her top dresser drawer to be sure, stirring her belts and watch straps and pantyhose packages. In the closet sits a shopping bag of gift-wrapped Christmas presents. For who, he wonders. She’s written the initials small on the tape so she’ll remember: MVD, DVD, RVD. Nothing for Tara, nothing for him.

  “Merry Christmas,” he says, and kicks the bag back into the closet.

  Tara’s room is newly vacuumed, the bed made, the bunny he gave her waiting with open arms. A naked Barbie lies in a nest of clothes on Tara’s tiny vanity. Glenn kneels and looks into the oval mirror and is surprised to see the barrel of the shotgun in his hand, the thin coating of oil smudged with his fingerprints. His father used to scold him for holding it wrong. He’d take the gun from him and say Glenn could have it back when he learned to treat his weapon with respect. When they came in from the fields, his father lectured Glenn as he cleaned the guns with a soft cloth at the dinner table. He let Glenn set them back in the cabinet. His mother consoled him with hot chocolate. “Your father wants you to be responsible,” she said.

  He looks out Tara’s window onto the backyard. His footprints seem to be in a hurry, on a beeline from the woods to the porch door. It’s not even two-thirty; by five his tiretracks will be filled in. She’s going to be surprised.

  Downstairs he checks the front windows. From the chair beside the door he can see up the road past the streetlamp. When he leans back he’s invisible. He rests the gun across his lap, folds his arms. He looks at the room as if it’s a doctor’s office, noting everything. Annie’s tennis shoes sit by the front door, waiting for better weather. On the coffee table sprawls a glossy food magazine, open to a lush shot of some chocolate dessert. His stomach hurts and he clears his throat to make it go away. In the dead TV screen his head is just a speck above the curved couch. He waves to see it better. There he is, today’s special guest.

  After twenty minutes he leans the gun against the back of the couch and takes off his jacket. He stretches, rolls his head on his neck, yawns. He didn’t sleep well last night. He doesn’t remember dreaming anything. Since yesterday he’s been bothered by the psalm, the image of a lion standing with his front paws on his chest, shredding Glenn like newspaper.

  He drops to the carpet and bows head over hands. “O let the evil of the wicked come to an end, but establish Thou the righteous, Thou who triest our minds and hearts, Thou righteous God.” He stays there with his eyes closed. “My name is not Glenn,” he says. “I am born of the water. I am one with the spirit of Jesus, who will never let me die. I will not be fooled by this world of shades, but will live in heaven everlasting. Amen.”

  He stands, strong, ready to do this now. Any doubt, any weakness, has left him, and faith fills that emptiness. He is the light and the way. The woman from last night was right, he thinks; loving Jesus is never boring.

  In the refrigerator he finds some lunchmeat. Olive loaf and chipped ham. He doesn’t bother with bread, just rolls the meat into tubes and pops them in his mouth. He stands, holding the door open, digging through the drawer for some cheese, when his throat closes and heaves. He lunges across the drainboard and, sick, braces himself against the counter, his retching echoed and amplified by the sink. After the first jerk he has nothing to throw up, only bitter yellow strings. The effort makes him gasp, raises tears. He runs the tap, swishes a mouthful and spits. When he straightens up, he finds his headache is back.

  He goes to the front window, afraid someone may be coming. The road’s empty. The snow falls. It’s barely past three and he wants to sleep. He sits in his chair and hauls the shotgun onto his lap again, turns toward the road. The afternoon is beginning to fade, the light in the room gray, shadows deepening in the corners. Glenn thinks of her at her mother’s, sitting at the kitchen table, making excuses for losing Tara, for screwing Brock. When he was working at the scrapyard, he used to think of them doing it in the bed he’d paid for and he’d have to drive out in his ridiculous cart to the back fence and smash something. He liked that job. She took that from him too.

  He paces, he sits at the kitchen table. He tromps upstairs and kneels by Tara’s bed, brings the bunny back downstairs with him and props it on the couch. She’ll be home soon, coming in the front door. He’ll have to get her purse away from her, find the gun. The rest he has planned. He needs to be strong, to believe.

  Back in his chair he nods off, wakes with a shock as if stabbed in a nightmare. Four forty-five. The room is dark; outside, the streetlamp is on, the sky a shade lighter than the pines. He thinks of Bomber and hopes he’s asleep. He puts his coat on and pumps the gun, turns to the window and waits.

  He’ll know when it’s her. The Maverick has orange turn signals on the gr
ille, inboard of the headlights.

  The snow drops through the streetlamp. The furnace clicks on, ignites with a whoosh. The sun is down now; Glenn is amazed how much light there still is. The wall along the staircase is striped with the shadow of the banister. He’s marveling at it when he hears a car and turns to see the two dots of its lights in the window.

  It’s too far to see the turn signals, but when it glides beneath the streetlamp, the color gives it away. It’s her.

  He slides out of the chair, crouching, keeping an eye on the lights. As they near the drive he scuttles over to the door and stands, the gun held across his chest. He can feel the weakness descend on him again, and he remembers Elder Francis’s teaching. His mercy is of this world, and worthless. His flesh is grass.

  O let the evil of the wicked come to an end.

  The car door thunks. He’s got to get her purse. He presses his back against the wall beside the light switch.

  But establish Thou the righteous.

  Footsteps on the porch, then jingling, the crunch of the key in the lock. The bolt turns with a click; the door opens, swinging toward him.

  She reaches for the light switch and he grabs her arm, spins her inside before she has time to react, scream, anything. Her purse falls to the floor between them. She sees the gun and tries to back away, but he has a good grip on her wrist.

  “Glenn,” she says, “oh my god, oh my god, Glenn.”

  He’s too close to point the gun at her. He pushes her backwards onto the couch and scoops up her purse. She’s crying. He breaks the gun over his arm and retreats to the corner by the door, bumping it shut.

  “Please,” she says, and stands, her hands out in front of her. “I didn’t do anything. Glenn.”

  “Calm down.” He can’t get the thing open; she’s begging him. “Please,” he says, “just be quiet.”