Cover of Snow

by Jenny Milchman

  I recognized Brendan’s college acceptance letter. There was a Christmas card with a picture of two boys on it, one much younger than the other, almost completely concealed by a snowsuit and hat. Brendan’s little brother, who had died as a child.

  I pushed some other things aside. There was a bumper sticker with a distasteful logo—a meaty, red tongue splayed out against a rock—and the word Stonelickers on it, as well as a slim stack of letters and a bulbous class ring that Brendan never wore.

  Finally, a pair of long strands, which I lifted out, winding them around my finger.

  They were red.

  “What are those?” asked Teggie.

  I held out my finger, cocooned in red cotton. “Remember? My proposal?”

  “Oh, right. Your ring was on them. Like a necklace,” she said.

  I nodded. “But I never told you why Brendan did it that way.”

  “Why?”

  “Why didn’t I tell you? Or why did he?”

  Teggie lifted the twin knobs of her shoulders. “I don’t know,” she said impatiently. “Both. Either.”

  I glanced out the window. The snow had finally stopped and the opaque world was starting to clear. “I learned something today.”

  Teggie propped one foot on a shelf three feet above her waist, nodding that she was listening as she began to stretch.

  I walked closer to the window. The glass gave off a frigid layer of air, but I shucked off my outer gear anyway, feeling stifled by it all of a sudden.

  “I found these laces around the time Brendan and I first met. In his dorm room.”

  Teggie wafted a slim arm down to meet her toes.

  “They were in with a whole bunch of stuff. Brendan always keeps—kept—important things around. Together, in special places. This box mainly. It was his father’s.”

  “So the shoelaces were important somehow?”

  “Not shoelaces,” I corrected. “Skate laces. Although I didn’t know that until today.”

  Scales of shivers ran up and down my back. My husband had lied to me.

  “Brendan said he’d been a clown once for Halloween. His favorite holiday as a child. So he held on to the laces that went in his shoes.” It had sounded plausible at the time, although now I felt silly for believing it.

  Plausible, I heard as a distant echo. Not right for risible, either. That was cheating.

  Teggie, now limber, slid into a split.

  “I didn’t see them—or think about them—again until his proposal.” I held my left hand some distance away. The diamond needed cleaning. I couldn’t imagine going about that small task, which I’d once attended to frequently. Chemicals from renovation work tended to dull the stone. “And then we had a fight.”

  “You fought? The day he proposed?”

  My cheeks heated. Teggie had always coveted a relationship like mine and Brendan’s. Most of the men she came in contact with were gay. She joked sometimes that she was destined to be a maiden auntie to our kids.

  But that hadn’t turned out to be true, had it? Not for either of us.

  Tears crowded my eyes, and I turned blindly away from the window, dropping onto the bed. The quilt still smelled faintly of Brendan, and I started to cry.

  Teggie leapt to her feet, squatting gracefully beside me. “Oh, Nor. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for asking. Who cares if you had a fight? What matters is the marriage that came after, right?”

  I pressed my fingers into both my eyes, hard, forcing the tears back. “It does matter, that fight. It matters now.”

  “Why?”

  I took a deep breath and my sobs shuddered to a stop. “I asked him why he had done such a silly thing. Made a necklace out of laces that once belonged to a costume. For a clown, no less. It felt like he was making a joke of asking me to marry him. I almost said no that day. I wanted him to do it—” A groan escaped me. “Do it over.”

  “Okay,” Teggie said soothingly. “That’s understandable. Every woman dreams about how she’ll get engaged.”

  “But Brendan convinced me that he used them because the laces were special. A memory from childhood.” I looked up at Teggie, my eyes suddenly arid, vision clear. “I think he was telling the truth. These laces did have to do with his childhood. But not with dressing up as a clown.”

  Teggie shrugged, clearly puzzled. “So he swapped stories. The laces are from a childhood memory that had to do with skating. What’s the big deal?”

  The laces, dangling near the edge of Brendan’s desk, suddenly slithered off. I didn’t stoop to pick them up.

  “No, you don’t understand,” I said. “What’s bothering me isn’t that Brendan used to skate as a kid. Everybody skates in the Adirondacks. Or even that he lied about it later. It’s that for some reason he …”

  Teggie’s loosened-up shoulders suddenly tensed. “Stopped.”

  Later that night, after we’d failed to eat much dinner, I crept back upstairs, where I’d abandoned the keepsake box. I’d noticed several items when I looked for the skate laces earlier. Now I was looking for something I hadn’t seen, but knew should’ve been there.

  Bill Hamilton’s wedding present to us had been a small, homemade album. The album itself was pretty, with a hand-tooled leather cover, but what made the gift really special was that it contained the only collection of pictures of Brendan as a little boy. My father-in-law had brought us to his sister’s house for the presentation.

  It was an older home, built around the turn of the last century, and Jean tended this property with care. Unlike the non-attention Eileen had given her twin house across the road, Jean had lavished framed daguerreotypes, antimacassars, and needlepoint benches upon all of the rooms, decorating in a fussier way than suited the house, but still obviously taking pains.

  “Okay,” she had wheezed during that visit. Jean was a heavy woman, for whom just talking sometimes took effort. “If she stops by, you’re not here.”

  It took me a second to realize whom Jean was referring to, and it was then that I began to get a sense of how close the two women were. Linked through Bill, they were the sisters-in-law Sprat: one no fat, the other no lean.

  “Just for this once,” Bill told his sister, leading us into a spare room, and handing Brendan a paper bag.

  The little album that was in the bag contained no more than a dozen pictures, all taken before Brendan was eight. But my husband loved that narrow, almost barren scrapbook, studying the shots far more frequently than twelve photographs required.

  I figured Brendan loved the album especially because it was the last thing his father ever gave him. One Saturday morning, two months after our wedding, Bill went out to the garage for something and never returned. Eileen found him there at the end of the day, dead of a heart attack. Sadder even than my father-in-law’s premature demise was the fact of how long it had gone unnoticed.

  Dropping my gaze back to the yellow box, I attempted to take in each item of my husband’s collection.

  The leather photo album was gone.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Teggie left for her audition the next day. I took her to the bus station amidst the swirl of another winter storm, this one heavier and more lasting. The snow must’ve begun hours ago, for everything was buried by the time we woke up.

  I had to lean close to the dash as I drove, squinting between flakes on the windshield.

  The station appeared behind a curtain of snow, a long, low-lit building, nearly invisible in the blizzard. I rotated the wheel, and my back tires skidded before I gained control.

  The bus was heaving in the lot, billows of exhaust combining with the clouds of snow.

  Teggie got out of the car and went around to the trunk, picking her way carefully over the ice. She didn’t have boots equal to the climate; the ones she wore were fashionable but flimsy.

  “Bus is about to leave,” I murmured, hefting the duffel out for her.

  “Teggie standard time,” she said, and I smiled rotely.

  “Can’t risk a turned ank
le,” she went on. “Here in the great frozen north.”

  I smiled again.

  She peered closely at me, snow flying about her face. Her knit cap was already covered in white. “Hey, Nor, are you going to be all right?”

  I jerked my elbow toward the bus, whose gears I could now hear grinding.

  Teggie stood her ground.

  “Yes.” I heaved a sigh. “I’ll be fine. Reassure Mom and Dad that I’ve gotten on with the business of living.”

  “Whoa, mocking Mom and Dad now, are we,” Teggie said, finally heading toward the bus, duffel bag swinging in her surprisingly strong grip. Her next words were almost lost. “When am I going to talk to Dad?” She turned and began to walk backward.

  “Teggie!” I shouted, not sure what I wanted to say. Goodbye? Come back?

  “Whose life?” she called loudly, over the engine noise and storm. “Yours or Brendan’s?”

  It was a question only an unmarried woman, one who’d never even really been in love, could pose. Brendan’s life wasn’t distinct from mine, not entirely. They were linked. And if I didn’t find out why Brendan had taken his life, then I would never be able to live my own.

  “Go, Teg!” I shouted, and she ran, perfectly graceful, without a hitch, over the covered expanse of pavement.

  I plodded back to my car, scraped off the windshield again, and drove out over the heaps of snow that the salt hadn’t yet attacked, back onto the slippery road.

  I was alone now. Really alone for the first time since Brendan had died.

  I stopped in town at a place called Coffee Rockets. I could sit there until the drugstore opened at nine.

  The café was filled with its usual mix of customers, united by only one thing. Whether they were skiers in brightly colored, outrageously expensive gear, fueling up before their day on the slopes, or professionals whose footwear wasn’t even up for the trek across the parking lot, buying breakfast-to-go before their workday began all of these people were foreigners in Wedeskyull. At the diner across the road, they would’ve received something close to shunning. The ladies behind the counter would’ve eyed them silently, and the customers who idled away most of the morning there would’ve snapped their suspenders or chucked dogs beneath the table, causing the animals to sniff and mutter at the unfamiliar scent in the air. Coffee Rockets had been built to house the encroachers, and that was why, for all its tech lighting and matte chrome finishes, the smells of roasting beans and buttery pastry, it had the feel of a prison camp.

  I could’ve stopped in at the diner and gotten a warm enough welcome. The girls who worked there were good to the cops. But just as I’d never gone to Al’s, I always came to Rockets instead.

  The kid behind the counter started preparing my tall as soon as I appeared. He didn’t live in Wedeskyull—went to college near here and came into town to work—and wouldn’t know my name or anything about me, but he recognized repeat customers. I pointed to a muffin behind the glass case and he handed that over as well. Then I went to sit down in one of the armchairs near the gas fireplace, a choice spot.

  Today the coffee, usually so appealing, turned my stomach; I could barely take a sip. I concentrated on my muffin instead, biting it mindlessly, letting it crumble away in my mouth.

  The clock on the wall, which managed at once to be artsy and not at all unique, finally showed nine o’clock. I shrugged into my coat, and hurried down the street to the pharmacy, pushing in against a warble of bells. An older man, balding and stooped, occupied the high counter at the back.

  It was a dim, dusty place, but the heated air felt good. The aisles were sparsely stocked, a small selection of out-of-date shampoos, only one bottle per brand; a short stack of soap cakes on the shelf. The candy aisle smelled stale, the colors on the bags no longer bright. This place was to the CVS several towns over as Al’s was to the Mobil. But it was the one the police preferred.

  The pharmacist looked up as I approached.

  “Can I help you?”

  I glanced down at the amber bottle. “Are you Donald Brannigan?” I asked, reading the name under the tab for pharmacist.

  “Folks call me Donny,” the man replied in a friendly way. Then he repeated, “Can I help you?”

  Was I really going to tell this stranger that before my husband committed suicide, he’d drugged me so I wouldn’t be able to stop him? How could the pharmacist dispute or confirm that Brendan planned his act a week in advance? I wondered if I would be better off trying to contact Doctor Bradley, although the man had a reputation for distance and remove, answering mainly to the Chief.

  I extended my hand. “What can you tell me about this medicine?”

  The pharmacist reached over the counter and took the bottle. “Sonodrine is a sedative,” he said, before handing it back. “For when someone’s having trouble sleeping. Also dulls aches and pains, although that’s a lesser use. A hospital might administer it that way.”

  He wasn’t telling me anything the computer hadn’t. “Yes,” I replied. “But more specifically?”

  The pharmacist smoothed his strands of hair into place, an unconscious gesture instead of a vain one, which somehow lent it dignity. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  I bit my lip, considering what to say. “I found this with—with my husband’s things. But as far as I knew, he wasn’t taking any medication. Can you tell me why it would’ve been prescribed?”

  “Perhaps your husband was having trouble sleeping,” the pharmacist suggested. “Or had some slightly more than minor ache or pain.”

  Which of course didn’t tell me anything besides the indicated uses.

  I breathed out a sigh of frustration, studying the bottle. And then I saw something on it that I hadn’t noticed before. “Mr. Brannigan? Donny?”

  The man nodded, delivering another finger swipe to his scalp.

  “What does this little red mark mean on the label?”

  The pharmacist reached across the counter again and took the bottle from me.

  “I can’t really say,” he replied. Swipe, swipe. “Could just be a blotch of ink from our printer. Never did get the hang of using that thing. But Medicare says everything has to be electronic.”

  I nodded, though it didn’t really look like a smudge from a printer. The mark wasn’t quite even enough to have been made by a machine.

  “Why don’t you let me hold on to this for you?” said the pharmacist. “Technically, any kind of prescription meds, especially painkillers, are supposed to be turned over as soon as they’re not being used.” He gave me another friendly grin. “There’s even a whole campaign about it. National Hand In Your Medications Month or some such. You have a good day now.”

  Clearly dismissed, I turned and walked out of the store, troubled by the feeling that in addition to being no closer to finding anything out, I had just lost the one clue I’d really had.

  I ran between snowflakes, dwindling now, less driven in their assault. When I reached my car, I blasted the heat, hoping it might melt enough of the snow that I wouldn’t have to get out and scrape. Where could I drive to anyway? Was there anywhere for me to go?

  I had a sudden, compelling need to return to my house, take up some project that would let me dig and scrape and peel at plaster, real things, instead of the unknowables that were seeping in all around me. Maybe call Ned Kramer, get back to the paying kind of work I would have to rely on from now on. I poked around in my bag, pushing stuff around to locate my tools, testing their tips. My phone sat underneath. Until I’d started my business, I’d seldom had need of a cell, and this one had probably gone unanswered in the past week. I figured out how to scroll through the list of calls that had come in, seeing an unfamiliar number repeated. Almost idly I began to press send, wondering who would answer on the other end, when a glimpse through the windshield distracted me. There was a cop strolling around, his uniform a faint gray shadow between the remaining flakes.

  And suddenly I decided.

  The sixteenth. Even without the
amber bottle to look at, that date was stamped in my head. Brendan had been working late all week, shifts running over.

  I would go to the station. To Brendan’s other home and family—Club Mitchell, and the men who might have been with him when this prescription was filled.

  Making a turn onto Water Street, I drove out of town.

  HIDDEN

  Officer Tim Lurcquer looked on while Mitchell dragged the body. No, he didn’t drag it. He lifted it by the armpits, then skated it lightly over the top layer of snow. A hundred and eighty pounds of literal dead weight, give or take, and Mitchell moved it as easily as if he were hoisting a fishing pole. The composite, lightweight kind.

  Tim grimaced.

  He craned his head to look up at the snow sky, a solid fleet of clouds. Mitchell was now circling the enormous, mottled boulder, a stone whose surface resembled faces. The faces changed all the time, depending upon the degree of light, how much lichen grew. In Tim’s younger days, the faces had seemed benign. He and his buddies had broken beer bottles against a grinning lip of stone, made jokes about protruding noses. But for some time now the faces trapped in the rock all seemed to be scowling.

  It was brutally cold out, with occasional harsh blasts of wind that penetrated even the thickest coat, like the hidden, deep cells of a lake you swam out to in summer, sudden reminders that warmth wasn’t ever the true condition of the north woods.

  Tim had been born to it, but he’d never get used to it. He pulled the earflaps on his hat a bit lower. No uniforms today. Chief’s orders.

  No grays today, boys. Street clothes. I don’t want anybody recognizing you.

  No one’s even gonna see us, Chief, Mitchell had said.

  The Chief had also made it clear that Mitchell was in charge, with Tim assisting.