Cover of Snow

by Jenny Milchman

  Eileen came onto the kitchen stoop, a coat draped over her housedress. She brimmed her eyes with one hand, squinting and wrapping the coat around herself for warmth.

  I called out a hello that got carried away by the wind, then headed across a blown-bare patch of grass. It crunched under my boots like thin bones.

  My mother-in-law stepped back, allowing me inside.

  The avocado appliances and yellow Formica weren’t old enough yet to be fashionable. I used to long to put in a period kitchen here, Shaker cabinetry, a real Hoosier.

  My mother-in-law had been making tea. The electric coil on the stove glowed like an angry wound. Eileen reached up for a second cup, clattering the contents of the cupboard, making even this simple gesture look begrudging.

  When she sat down at the battered tin table, I did, too.

  “You’ll forgive me, Nora,” Eileen said, taking a sip from her mug. “But you’ve never stopped by for tea before.”

  I blew on my drink. This woman and I shared a dreadful loss. Why couldn’t we come together over that? It struck me anew that Eileen had already experienced the death of another child. She was embittered long before I ever came along.

  “I’m just—I’m so sorry, Eileen.”

  Her face changed, drawing into lines.

  I snatched at something to say. “I wanted to talk to you about—about a payment schedule for Jean. Brendan handled the financial stuff, and I’m afraid I’m really at a loss.”

  Eileen inclined her head. “Well, I’m glad you’re asking.”

  “You are?”

  She nodded once, a jerk of her pointy chin. “Brendan wasn’t paying Jean enough, you know.”

  “No. I didn’t know.”

  Eileen lifted her bony cups of shoulders. “I’m not saying he was deliberately taking advantage. But a hundred and fifty more—that’s nine hundred a month—would be what’s fair. Folks coming up from that city of yours would love Jean’s house.”

  Nine hundred was abjectly impossible, but I nodded anyway. “All right.”

  She eyed me over the rim of her mug. “By check, first of every month. Was that all?”

  It wasn’t. I lifted my gaze to hers. “Did Brendan—did he used to skate?”

  I thought I heard Eileen take in a whistling breath before I realized that the kettle had been left on. My mother-in-law got up to fiddle with the stove knob, answering me with her back turned. “Did he what?”

  “I mean, I know he hated skating, I do know that,” I said. “Now. As an adult. But when he was young, did he used to skate?”

  “What could you possibly want to know that for?”

  “I’m not sure,” I muttered. An expression on my mother-in-law’s face made me flinch, and I worked to speak louder. “I met Dugger Mackenzie. Do you know him?” Without waiting for a reply, I rushed on. “He told me about watching Brendan on the ice when they were boys. I just wondered why Brendan developed such a loathing for it later on.”

  Eileen’s gaze darkened. “You don’t know anything, do you?”

  I started to shake my head, but realized it might come across as agreement instead of protest.

  “What did you and my son share?” she asked. “What kind of marriage could you have possibly had?”

  Outrage filled me, hot and lethal as smoke. I rose from the table, careful not to knock over my cup. My vision blurred as I looked around for the door. I had lost my bearings, and made a circuit through the small room adjoining the kitchen.

  There was the door. I bumped against an end table making my way toward it. The table was one of the few pieces of furniture in the room; the other, a stark, unpadded chair. The sole object on the table fell to the floor with a thunk and I stooped to pick it up.

  Brendan’s missing photo album.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Eileen shut me outside without a word of goodbye. I’d wanted to get a look at her face—see what her reaction might be to my learning what she’d done—but she was instantly concealed within her spare and dingy home.

  I hadn’t even had a moment to ask for the album. I would have to come back for it.

  Had she taken the album out of Brendan’s yellow box the day of his funeral? I knew Jean had been upstairs, but hadn’t seen Eileen go up.

  She’d clearly never cared much for pictures of her son; that was why Brendan had only the minimal collection from Bill. Where were all the other shots that parents usually took?

  Suddenly there seemed a whole world of things I had never asked Brendan about, and the weight of them threatened to crush me.

  The snow blowing across the road obscured someone’s form, made even more indistinct by the muffling and padding of a pink coat. I lifted my hand in a wave, and walked over.

  “Nora,” Jean said, taking me into an enveloping hug. “Here to visit Mother?”

  Only Jean would act as if that were a reasonable prospect.

  “I stopped in,” I said.

  “Well, stop in with me right now,” Jean said. “I’ll make you some lunch.”

  The prospect was tempting after the meal I’d scorched before running out of my house. “Thanks. That would be nice.”

  Jean led a slow mount of her porch stairs.

  Her kitchen was warm and steamy; something smelled fragrant on the stove. I took a cushioned seat by a table, and let my eyes wander around the room. There was an old-fashioned pie chest and a china cabinet with glass doors that shone in the muted light. Jean ladled soup into a bowl and served a roll alongside it, placing a butter dish before me.

  “Thanks,” I said again.

  “I’ll just have one more myself. Since you’re eating.”

  She was moving the butter knife in thick strokes across the bread when I burst out, “Oh, Aunt Jean, I don’t know how I’m ever going to pay you!”

  She looked up with as sharp an expression as I’d ever seen on her face. “Pay me? For what?” The skin around her eyes and mouth relaxed into folds. “Lunch comes pretty cheap at this joint.”

  The sound of my own laughter surprised me. “The mortgage, Aunt Jean,” I said. “Or rent, however you think of it. Brendan’s salary was really carrying us—”

  Jean stood up and maneuvered around the table. She leaned down, wrapping both arms around my shoulders. I felt as if I’d been swathed in a luxuriant cloak.

  “I’d better never hear a word about this again, dear heart,” she said. “You pay me what you can, or don’t pay me anything at all. That house will be yours one day, sooner or later.” Jean straightened, using me for support. “I don’t have any children of my own. Brendan was like a son to me.”

  “What about Eileen?” I found myself saying.

  Jean let out an oddly high laugh. “Well, yes, of course. She’s—she was his mother. I didn’t mean otherwise.”

  “I know, but that’s the thing,” I began, trying to fuse words from the jumble of impressions I had. They’d never made sense before, but now they were taking on form. “Eileen doesn’t seem as if she was that much of a mother to him.”

  Jean frowned, her eyes disappearing into wrinkles. “What do you mean?”

  I looked down at the table, then all around the pleasant kitchen. “Why did we see Eileen so rarely? Why did we never go over there?” When Jean didn’t answer, I added almost desperately, “Why doesn’t she have any pictures of Brendan?”

  Jean reached for another roll, holding the basket out to me. I shook my head. My newly returned appetite had disappeared.

  “There may be a few,” I said. “On the end table in her sitting room. I’d like to see them.” It occurred to me that Jean might know if her sister-in-law had taken the album, although she didn’t say anything. “I have a feeling I won’t be welcomed back, though.” I lifted my head, attempting to find Jean’s gaze. “I’m just trying to make sense of what happened, Aunt Jean. Something went horribly wrong.”

  “I know it did.” She pressed her hands together until one was nearly hidden by the cushy flesh of the other. “B
ut you’re talking about things from a long time ago. And Eileen is like my very own sister.”

  “Yes,” I whispered. “But you just told me Brendan was like your son.”

  There was a long silence. Jean tore off a bite-sized piece of roll without getting any butter on her fingers, a swift, competent gesture. At last she said, “Well, you’re welcome back here. Any time for lunch,” and my heart sank. But then she went on. “Sunday might be good. Eileen goes out that day. Every week, she meets Dorothy Weathers at noon.”

  I drove too fast down Patchy Hollow Road, braking abruptly when I hit the one light in town. The road had been recently cleared and I had to mount a hummock of snow as I got out in front of the pharmacy.

  The pharmacist had already left for the day, but a clerk trailed me to the counter.

  “Here you go,” she said, lifting a white paper bag.

  I was considering whether to pop a tablet, noting that my sneezing had already tapered off, when I saw a little red dab on the label.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to the clerk. “Can you tell me what this red mark means?”

  The clerk paused as she stepped out from behind the counter. “Oh, Donny must’ve filled this as a rush job.”

  “That’s what the mark means?”

  The clerk nodded. “We have regular monthly prescriptions we fill on a schedule,” she explained. “Or things to be sent over to the doctor’s office for a patient to pick up. But if something is more urgent, we’re happy to make it up for you right away.” She pointed to a basket. Each of the bottles had a tiny red strike on them.

  Why would the pharmacist, who clearly had a system for his prescriptions, have kept it from me? Donny Brannigan’s words returned, and there wasn’t any doubt. He’d acted as if the red dot on Brendan’s Sonodrine were a mystery to him, maybe just an accident. It was a stupid lie, one bound to unravel sooner or later.

  And what did it matter if the Sonodrine had been rushed? What did that say about whatever had happened on the sixteenth?

  Arriving home in the early-winter dark, I pulled up the calls that had come in while I was gone, and spotted the same number I’d seen on my cell. This time, I had no impulse to ring it back. Some acquaintance who couldn’t bring herself to record her condolences maybe, or else a creditor Brendan once would’ve taken care of. I dialed my sister, hoping to hear how her audition had gone, and feeling disappointed when I had to leave a message on her machine.

  I climbed the stairs to bed, settling in for a night of scattered rest. It was impossible to know how long the hours between bedtime and daylight could be until you’d lost the one you loved. Night noises became entirely different things, not warm or comfortable, the tickings of an old house, but ominous and creaky, signs of decay. Outside, branches banged, and the deep cold of the dark caused things to snap, thunderously loud. If the temperature hadn’t been so deadly, I would’ve thought I was hearing somebody’s unsanctioned arrival, footsteps in the night. Was it any wonder I hardly slept? I was tired these days, exhausted with a solid feel that pulled on me and dragged.

  Tonight there was something else keeping me awake, too. The prospect of what was going to happen when I stole into my mother-in-law’s house three days from now.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Sunday dawned with the promise of more bad weather. The weathergirl trilled that it was thirty-five below with wind chill, and gray cotton batting lined the sky. My stomach seemed to lift and toss with the rising wind. I was hungry, but nervous, unable to get much down.

  By eleven-thirty, needles of snow had begun to fly, and a thought just as sharp pierced my head. What if the weather kept Eileen home?

  I wanted to get Brendan’s photo album back. He’d loved it. And no matter what Jean might say about Eileen’s adequacy as a mother, I didn’t think my husband would choose to leave that cherished gift in her possession.

  Before donning my boots, I put on a pair of rubber-treaded socks for creeping around Eileen’s house. My mother-in-law was a lifelong resident of Wedeskyull. A little snow and ice wouldn’t keep her housebound.

  Securing my outer gear until not an inch was exposed, I opened the front door and ducked beneath the ribbons still dangling limply from my wreath. I prodded huge shards of ice off my car with the pieces of broken scraper. I would have to pick up a new one before too many more storms blew in. Snow scoured my face as I worked, and my fingers were clumsy in the thick gloves I wore.

  Climbing into the frigid vehicle, I swung out onto the icy road, overcorrecting as my tires spun. The metal flank of my car rattled against a wall of frozen grasses.

  When I reached the matching foursquares, both drives were empty. Eileen’s ancient Ford was missing from the long stretch of gravel, a skim of new snow atop the old, packed stuff. Jean’s roomy Buick, a rather ridiculous vehicle for these parts, was also gone from her driveway across the street.

  So Eileen had kept her lunch date with Dorothy Weathers, despite the thickening storm. And Jean, who almost never left her comfy abode, had scurried out into the snow, too. There were forces afoot in this family that didn’t breach the surface.

  At least I was alone for my venture. I parked at Jean’s, figuring that seemed the more likely place for a visit, in case anyone returned. Of course, if anyone came home while I was still at Eileen’s, my intrusion would be immediately discovered. But there was nothing for it. I took the keys from the ignition and got out.

  I kicked my way through the mounting drifts—Patchy Hollow Road wasn’t plowed very often—noting that my tracks would be covered almost instantly.

  I started to sweat inside my coat as I grasped the doorknob. I imagined sidling through the door, and encountering the unforgiving length of my mother-in-law’s body, twig arms folded across her chest. Hearing her desert dry voice, all life sucked out of it.

  Brendan’s dead, Nora. And even if he were alive, how dare you enter my house on your own? I can hardly stand for you to be in it at all.

  Residents of Wedeskyull seldom locked their doors. I paused to stow my snowy boots behind an old receptacle for milk bottles outside, then slipped inside.

  The house had the feel of recently relinquished occupation.

  I was just about to pad over to the end table when something caught my eye. I had thought there were only two pieces of furniture in this room, but I’d been wrong. Back in a shadowy corner resided a small three-tiered stand. Its shelves were covered with closely clustered objects, a strange counterpoint to Eileen’s Spartan approach.

  I crouched before the stand. Each item seemed strange somehow, out of place. Paperback books, wrinkly with wear, pictures of horses on their covers. Some odd-looking stones. A battered but lovely metal dish.

  I glanced over my shoulder, feeling my mother-in-law’s presence, hearing her voice as I picked things up. Oh, and one other thing, Nora. I’m glad Brendan’s dead, did you know that? Glad, I tell you, I’m glad.

  But why? Why would I think something like that? How could such a ghastly thing be true?

  I sat back hard on my haunches, breathing audibly. Eileen wasn’t some cold, merciless demon. She was just a sad, empty woman who’d suffered too many losses. By the time I came into her life, she had little love to spare.

  For me or her surviving son.

  And what I was doing right now shouldn’t faze me so. I was used to poking and prodding around old houses, although I’d always had permission before.

  At Phoenix Home Corp., we do your home, whether you like it or not.

  Giddy laughter blossomed in my throat. I turned back to my task. On the second shelf stood a row of tin soldiers, surrounded by a scatter of playing cards, and then I finally made sense of what hadn’t been right all along.

  My mother-in-law couldn’t abide clutter. Her house was practically bare. This array of objects didn’t belong to her.

  They had been Bill’s.

  Confirmation arrived in the form of a policeman’s badge with the name William Hamilton etched on it. My thro
at closed as I studied the piece of metal, familiar right down to the lettering of the last name. Bill Hamilton seemed to have done so little of note for his son to emulate. My father-in-law had retired by the time I met Brendan, but this badge had influenced my husband’s career choice, once he’d decided against law school and asked if I would accompany him back to Wedeskyull.

  “It’s different in a small town,” Brendan had explained when we discussed it. “Not like where you grew up. Suburbs are dispensable places. Or maybe interchangeable is a better word. But small towns—they call you home.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me to be offended. He was right—I didn’t feel much attachment to the suburban town where I’d been raised. Part of me wondered if Brendan’s home could become my own.

  Perhaps the album did belong here. Bill had made it after all. Maybe Eileen stole it back in her husband’s honor, put it on his stand of shelves, and had been glancing it over the day I arrived. Who had more of a right to the album—Eileen or me?

  I stood up, crossing the room to the end table.

  I was still trying to decide when I heard a scuffing of boots on the sill outside. All thought fled my brain. I lunged forward, snatching up the small album and stuffing it into my coat pocket. Then I backed out of the sitting room, which was clearly visible from the kitchen entry, and flattened myself against a wall.

  I heard the sound of feet upon old boards. Creaks that meant whoever it was no longer stood in the linoleum-floored kitchen. Whoever had arrived—Eileen, it must be Eileen—was walking through the sitting room now and would soon pass right by me.

  I flung one arm out and my hand landed upon a knob. Relief stabbed me. This had to be a closet; there were no rooms with doors on the first floor of a foursquare. And a closet, with its winter layers of outerwear, would be the perfect place to hide.

  I twisted around, praying that the ungainly movement wouldn’t catch Eileen’s eye, and slipped through a narrow crack in the doorway. I wound up at the top of a staircase, nearly toppling down the whole flight before I could catch myself, fingers crooking painfully as I dug them into a wall. Then I eased the door shut behind me.