House Under Snow

by Jill Bialosky

  It was only later, when I began to put the pieces together, that I realized how much Austin needed me, how he couldn’t stand my pushing him away, and how he felt abandoned again. I could not have imagined, that first day I saw him walking down the halls of our school, that he was capable of cruelty.

  For years I hated my mother for betraying me, but she was so lost that continuing to think ill of her would be like hating a small, helpless child. Even when you think you’ve stopped loving someone, one day, watching rain fall against a window, or catching the whiff of the approaching autumn air, it seizes you, the remembered touch of a mother’s hand on your cheek, or the look of adoration in her eye. Maybe you never stop longing for the love of a parent. But I couldn’t forgive my mother then. I couldn’t even look at her. It took years before I would even talk to her on the phone.

  I still remember. Because once you know something, it can never be forgotten. His body against hers; pounding into her is how I imagine it. It cannot be gentle. In my mind it has to be cruel.

  She would have gone to the kitchen and taken out the bottle of whiskey she used to keep underneath the sink and offered him a drink. Austin was good at making a woman feel special. She would have sat down at the kitchen table with him. Maybe ran her fingers through her hair, perhaps bent down so that her robe would have opened slightly, so that he could see the top of her breasts, the space between them. Suddenly her entire body would have come alive and dangerous as a bare electrical wire. I’ve seen it happen. She would have said something about how tired she was, how she was getting old. And Austin would have reassured her.

  “You don’t look a day older than twenty, Mrs. Crane,” I can hear him say. “You and Anna could be sisters.” He would have been touching the stubble on his cheeks, running his fingers along his chin, staring her down in that sexy way he had when he was studying every inch of my body.

  “Oh come on, Austin. You don’t have to flatter me,” she would have flirted, and laughed, and moistened her lips.

  Maybe my mother would have gotten him to talk. She could do that sometimes. Find a way to enter a man through a soft spot, as if she had found the room in the heart that had been empty and vacant. I had learned from her. I used her method, later, on many other boys. She would walk, at first cautiously, lovingly into that complicated place. And then she would find a way to make it hers, as if she had sensed there was something incomplete, something still childlike she could make dependent upon her. It seems wrong to know this about your mother.

  She would have gotten him to talk about his mother. She told me that once. About getting a boy. “Find where he hurts, honey. That will make him yours.”

  A strange feeling would have come out of him, colored his eyes. I saw it every time his mother’s name was mentioned in conversation. A wave of loss or loneliness washed over his face—perhaps they are the same feeling—the way the willow tree in the yard sometimes looked so vulnerable covered with frost that it would send a chill down your spine. And then his body tensed. He chewed the inside of his jaw like a cow working at his cud. He picked at the dried skin around his fingers. When he did that I always wanted to take his hands in my own and quiet them. Kiss each long finger. And she might have consoled him. Told him how she knew what it’s like to be abandoned, to lose a mother. My mother was good at that kind of talk.

  I have spent too many years turning it over the way you might worry a stone in your hand, sitting by the river on a winter’s day, watching a sheet of ice float with the current, the trees bare and vulnerable, while above you the sky is a sly white light, stealing the truth from you. I have spent all this time, so many hours, so many days, bargaining with my soul, trying to forgive. What is lust? I’ve wondered. Can it be forgiven?

  A girl never marries the boy who makes her heart ache, the one she might have risked her life for. She always marries the Edgar Lintons of the world. I have read Wuthering Heights on many occasions, and each time I see things differently. It’s the age-old question of passion versus tranquillity. I see the sky turn dark, blue and then bluer, the most insanely exquisite color I have ever seen. I want to look at it forever. I don’t want to take my eyes away for fear the sky will break or disappear. But if I look so intensely, I can’t see or feel anything else, not the swaying of the branches of the willow or the pinpricks of wildflowers or the singular sight of a tall white pine, or the sound inside the body listening to a calm wind. In a softer light I can see further into the horizon.

  I only saw Austin again once after that night. He came to Dink’s looking for me, plunked down on a stool, and ordered a cup of coffee from Clara. I can still remember her full girth in her starched white uniform, the smell of her hair spray, her hair pulled back in a hair net. She came into the kitchen to tell me Austin was at the counter. Everyone at Dink’s knew I was crazy about him.

  Austin tried to catch my eye when I went to the window to grab an order, but I wouldn’t look back. I don’t think I was capable of ever looking at him closely again. I was such a fool to have romanticized him, to see him as my Heathcliff.

  Austin sat at the counter while I did the closedown. I refilled the ketchups, finished the setup on the tables, wiped down the sugar bowls and salt and pepper shakers. I felt Austin’s eyes burning on my back. When Toby, our overweight manager, saw that I didn’t want to see Austin, he asked him to leave. He pointed to the sign next to the clock that said NO LOITERING ALLOWED. I felt pain in my chest watching him go.

  I wished I could turn back the clock and still lie beside Austin on the grass, and read each pore and blemish on his face, but I knew it was impossible. I would never smooth the veins on the insides of his arms with my fingers, or let my hair fall over his chest when we made love.

  That night Austin waited for me in the parking lot of the diner. Hearing the stamp of his Mustang’s engine sent fear through my body.

  He pulled out of the parking lot and drove beside me as I began walking home.

  “Come on, Anna, just get in. I have to talk to you.”

  “Go away,” I said. “I don’t want anything to do with you. I saw you last night in the gazebo.” I looked at his face, at the color rushing out of it.

  “Just give me five minutes. You owe me that.”

  “I don’t owe you a thing.”

  “Anna, if you don’t get in this car, I’m going to drive into that wall.” He started to pump the gas.

  “Five minutes,” I said, because looking into his eyes, I knew he had the guts to do it.

  He reached over and opened the passenger door.

  “I’ll give you five minutes.”

  “You don’t understand.” He grabbed me by the shoulders once I had gotten in the car and he had pulled back into the parking lot and parked. “I can’t live without you, Anna. What I did was wrong. I thought I was losing you. Beep said if I didn’t get him the money I owed, they were going to kill me. I borrowed money to place on a horse Beep was sure was going to win. I racked up twenty thousand dollars’ worth of debt. I was coming to find you. To take you away with me.

  “And then your mother said you weren’t coming home after school. I pictured you with Brian. It was stupid. I just did.”

  “That’s bullshit. Nothing is going on between Brian and me. You’re crazy. And how could you let yourself get in that kind of debt? What’s wrong with you?” I stared at him with contempt. “Did you think she was going to help you?”

  “I don’t know what I wanted,” Austin said. He looked down and cracked the knuckles on each one of his fingers.

  “It looks like you got the money somewhere,” I said. “You’re still here, aren’t you? You’re still alive.” His fingers were white from where he’d been squeezing the steering wheel. I watched as he loosened his grip and opened his fingers. I looked at the thick calluses and his hard nails. I continued to stare at his hands, which I could feel, even when he wasn’t touching me, reading my body.

  “You don’t believe me, do you?” he said. “You’re not goin
g to come to Kentucky or anywhere with me, are you?”

  “Does it matter if I believe you? It’s been done.”

  “Anna.” He gripped my wrists as he said it. “Come with me. We’ll get married.”

  “You’re out of your mind,” I told him. “There’s no reason for us to get married now.” I thought about our baby and the future that was never to be. It was wrong and I knew it, but I blamed Austin, because I couldn’t forgive myself.

  “My father said he would pay off my debts if I moved out of the track and agreed to go to college next fall. My father likes you. He’ll help us out.”

  I would be lying if I said I didn’t consider it. But I knew that I was too young to be married, and if I married Austin it would only be because I wanted escape and not because I’d chosen to. I wasn’t sure Austin and I could ever be together anymore, even if nothing had happened with my mother. It hadn’t bothered me before that Austin and I rarely talked about anything that mattered. That we lived in a kind of dark hinterland beneath words. But I wasn’t sure that the silences, in the end, would be enough. As the summer had disappeared, not emotion, but concrete words and ideas seemed the only source of sustenance.

  When I’d first read Wuthering Heights, as a child, I was devastated when Cathy marries Edgar. Her betrayal of Heathcliff was unfathomable. But reading it again, I saw what comfort she found in Edgar. Cathy and Edgar are counterparts. Cathy finds security in that which is solely different from her own nature. And Edgar finds temporary bliss in the presence of someone capable of such passion. Austin and I were too much alike. I knew that what was between Austin and me could only exist in brief flashes, like the flame of a match before it is extinguished.

  He reached over and took me in his arms, and I was pulled again, into his aura. I smelled the horses in his hair and on his clothes, a smell that to this day makes me ache. I allowed him to hold my face, and he pressed it into his chest, where the wool from his sweater burned me. I felt his lips on the back of my neck and in my ear.

  “Don’t you understand?” I said. I shrugged him off and pulled away. “Every time I look at you, I see my mother. How could you?” I slugged his chest with my fists.

  I gathered my shoulder bag, opened the door, and took off. In the parking lot of the diner, I felt his steps coming after me. He was practically nipping my heels. I heard the busboy open the back door to the diner to throw out the trash in the bin. And then I heard the sound of the door as it slammed shut.

  “Please come back to the car,” Austin said. “Please let me explain.”

  I followed him, more because I was afraid the people I worked with would overhear us. Once we were back in the car he tried to hold me again. He pressed his face into my neck. “You’re still mine,” he said in my hair. “You’ll always be mine, Anna.” I was despondent. I let him turn my face to his so he could kiss me. I heard nothing, only the sound of his breath. And then I snapped. I hit him until I had no strength left. I was out of control. “Get away from me,” I told him.

  “Anna, listen. I’m trying to tell you something,” he said. He grabbed my arms like you would a crazy person to calm me. “I’m asking you to forgive me.” He was crying.

  I was listening with my body, the way you listen for the sound of the river, or the swish of the wind through the trees, but I couldn’t hear my heart anymore, it was no longer reliable. I looked at him. “You know I have to leave,” I said.

  As I walked home that night I felt the last hint of the summer in the autumn air.

  There is little redemption in Emily Brontë’s world. Evil and goodness exist simultaneously within her characters. They do not apologize for what damage they’ve done or what heartbreak they’ve caused. They are flawed, imperfect.

  Though I once drew comfort from the parallels I saw between Heathcliff and Austin, I did not allow my mother the same kind of indulgence. I could not understand her.

  “My nerves were frayed,” Lilly said when I told her I knew.

  I was in my bedroom packing.

  “I was working day and night on the house. I hadn’t slept in weeks.”

  I didn’t say a word. I had no mother.

  “I hadn’t realized how much Joe was beginning to mean to me,” Lilly continued. She paced the room. She walked to the window and raised the curtain. “Anna, you know I would never deliberately hurt you.”

  I couldn’t bear to look at her. I stared inside the open dresser drawer. When I said nothing, Lilly waited a few moments, then in a huff walked out of the room and shut the door behind her.

  Outside, the snow had begun to fall. It was early November by now, and had grown colder as the day went on. In Cleveland the weather was always drastic. It could be a sunny autumn day, and then out of nowhere the snow would begin to fall. I used to love being inside our house most when it snowed. You could feel the snow falling on the boughs of the pines, on the roof, covering the house in a protective blanket, falling on the windowsills, the ledges. They say that each snowflake is a different shape, that not one crystal is exactly like another.

  The wind picked up. A gust whipped leaves across the yard. A sound fierce enough to send tremors down your spine. The wind took a branch off a tree. Whirled it back. It was beautiful, the way the snow began to fill the backyard. How light slipped carelessly into dusk. And then the smell of wetness, loss in the cold air; the weight of another history sealed in the frost settling on the earth’s floor. A promise of a new future when all the ice and snow thawed.

  “Anna,” Louise said. She dumped her books on her bed. She had just come back from school. “Do you think Aunt Rose has talked to Mom yet?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t you think we should tell her?” Louise said.

  I had told Louise what Lilly had done the morning after, when I ran into her at school. We sat on the school green and smoked a cigarette. No more needed to be said. Louise must have weighed ninety pounds. Finally I saw what I should have seen long ago—my sister needed help. When you love someone, see her so closely every day, it’s so easy to delude yourself, not to see what’s staring you in the face. It was clear to both of us what had to be done. From the pay phone at school, we called Aunt Rose and arranged it.

  “I’ll tell her,” I said.

  “What will happen to her?” Louise asked.

  Neither of us had an answer.

  I went downstairs to find my mother. Lilly was outside, wearing an old coat and a scarf around her head, sipping a cup of tea. She watched the snow begin to fall over her lawn of autumn-flowering crocuses. In her face was that look of wanting to become one with the landscape, to dissolve. The air carried the smell of someone burning logs in a fireplace, of burned wood and ash.

  “I’m over here, Anna.” Lilly threw up her arms. Dusk was just beginning to steal the light from the sky, and Lilly looked almost consumed by it. She breathed deeply, inhaling the smell of wet leaves, grass, trees. “It’s so magnificent. The first snowfall,” she said. “Come sit with me.”

  “I can’t now, Mom. I want to tell you something.”

  “Hear that?” Lilly said. “It’s a nightingale. It’s such a sad cry. I heard it all day. It was as if she were speaking to me.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said, because, whatever my mother felt, I was going to feel the opposite. She yawned long and languidly, still as if she were entitled, as if no one else had felt anything or mattered.

  “I have to tell you something,” I repeated again. “And then I’m not going to talk to you anymore. I’m not going to talk to you for a long time.”

  “I spoke to Aunt Rose this afternoon. She told me you and Louise are going to live with her. I know you’re both leaving me,” she said. “All my children. Gone.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. I just wanted you to know.”

  “I warned you, darling,” Lilly said. “I told you Austin needed you.”

  “You don’t know anything about what he needs. You don’t know anything about me
and Austin.”

  “It was a mistake,” Lilly said.

  “No, Mom.” This time I didn’t turn my eyes away. I wasn’t going to forgive her. “It was more than a mistake.”

  “How can you and Louise leave me now?” she demanded.

  It was so twisted. In my mother’s eyes, I was at fault for wanting to leave her.

  My rage against her was useless. No matter what I felt she wasn’t going to be accountable. It gives you a particular strength, a coldness, having to bear another person’s weakness. It is amazing to me, the burden of love, the weight it must bear.

  That day, I took a walk around the house. I wanted to make sure it was planted deep in my memory. For months my mother’s purpose had been to repair and salvage, to clean the house of everything that lay dormant all those years with fresh coats of paint. The house sparkled with her efforts, but underneath the layers of paint I could still make out the outlines of each painted-over shadow.

  She had carefully taken up the canvas from the living room, den, and dining room. Each room had been painstakingly planned, one an extension of the other. Each stroke of paint allowed her spirit to come alive inside her house, until she owned it completely, until there wasn’t a trace of our childhood fingerprints on the walls. Our childhood pictures, paintings—all those she had stuffed in drawers, tucked away.

  The walls in the living room were painted a forest green, giving an eerie texture to the room. My eyes followed the walls into the dining room, painted in burgundy. The mauve alcoves, low ceilings, and her carefully tended plants at the windows made the house look as austere as a dense wood.

  I felt the trees outside beating their leaves against the roof. The wind, still in full force, whipped and whirled the falling snow in gusts.