Cover of Snow

by Jenny Milchman

  What’s wrong? I suppressed a bolt of laughter. What was right? “I don’t know what to do, Mom,” I said brokenly. “I didn’t know things could get any worse.”

  “What do you mean, sweetheart? How could they be worse?”

  “That’s a good question,” I said.

  “Nora?” my mother said. “You sound funny. What’s going on?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “Do I—” My mother stopped speaking abruptly. “Sweetheart, I’m not sure what you mean by that.”

  Then ask, I thought.

  “I called—I wanted to see how you’re doing for food. Can I send up some more dishes?”

  “Food,” I echoed.

  “You’re eating, aren’t you?”

  I wasn’t sure what to say, how to explain the complicated relationship I had developed with my stomach these days. It never felt steady. Hunger, when it arrived like a straying lover, was savage, impossible to appease.

  “Mom?”

  “Yes, darling?”

  “When you said—remember when you said Dad was better with scrapes than cuts?”

  “I said …” My mother sounded as if she couldn’t follow, had no hopes of following. “What did I say?”

  “You meant—you meant that he liked to skate along the surface of things, didn’t you?”

  “What?” my mother said again, but the word was less of a question now.

  “Because … because, you see, I think I got a little … some of that from him, too—” And then my voice broke, I had to fight to keep control.

  “Nora,” my mother murmured. “Oh, Nora. This is so hard. So …” Her voice trailed off.

  My dad got on the phone. “Baby? How are you doing?”

  A sob lurched inside me, but I quelled it. “Not so good, Dad—”

  “No, well, how could you be?” he replied. “You need any supplies—salt, that kind of thing?”

  I blinked my eyes. They felt dry. “No,” I said. “Thanks. There’re people here—Brendan’s friends—who will take care of that.”

  “Okay then,” my father said. “Your mother and I will plan another trip up. Soon as we get a break in the weather. We go online every night to check.”

  Next he was going to be telling me which Internet weather site they preferred.

  “Okay, Dad,” I said, defeated.

  When I tried to place the phone in the charger, it slipped back out, and I flung it down with an awful thwack. “How could you?” I cried to my absent husband. “How could you have kept this from me—”

  The phone squawked in anger at being kept off its base.

  In a smaller voice I said, “How could I have let you?”

  What had drawn us to each other? Brendan was a man of secrets, and I was a keeper of them. What kind of marriage did we have, Eileen had asked me. Maybe the only one that either of us possibly could.

  Tears filled my mouth with the stinging water of oceans. I was going under, diving, drowning.

  “Who were you, Brendan!” I wailed. “Who were we?”

  After a long while, my sobs turned into hitching breaths. In a fetal position on the floor, I snaked my arm out to the phone. Like me, it had given up in silence. I pressed the button to hang up, then pushed a series of numbers, my fingers weak and trembling.

  “Nora?” Teggie asked when I made an audible croak.

  I pictured my sister sliding gracefully to the floor, the phone cupped between her swan’s neck and the shell of her ear.

  “I should’ve stopped,” I murmured. “You were right. I didn’t find out anything I needed to know.” I was quiet for a second, confused. “No, wait, I did need to know. But not now. I found out too late.” There was a stunned, bewildered edge to my voice; I sounded like someone who’d just survived a shelling, or the fall of tall towers.

  “You don’t sound good, Nor. Want me to come up?” The barest of pauses. “I’m coming up. Tomorrow.”

  “Oh, Teggie, are you sure? Let me know which bus. I’ll be there.”

  “No,” she replied. “I don’t—I won’t need a ride.”

  I didn’t bother to find out why. Tears were seeping out again, silent, but impossible to stem. You could drown by a trickle as well as by a flood.

  “Shhh,” Teggie said, although she couldn’t have heard me crying. “This has got to get better. It will get better, I swear. This will all be over soon.”

  “That’s the problem!” I cried. “It is all over! It’s over, and I can’t stand the ending!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I fell into another one of my heavy, logy sleeps, and when I woke up it was with the awareness that something had changed. It was like finally throwing up when you knew it was coming all day. Or confessing a sin that had been plaguing your soul.

  For some time now, I had been suppressing a dawning understanding, a growing sense of guilt. If I hadn’t been the person I was, someone who squinted and shrank and turned away from hard truths, Brendan might have shared whatever he was going through. And then maybe he wouldn’t have done what he did. But I couldn’t change that now.

  No more crying. No more regrets. All I could do was move forward. Make sure I was the wife now to Brendan that I should’ve been all along.

  I did regular things then. Heated up a lasagna someone had brought by, ate half a helping. Sat down in front of the television with a cup of tea.

  And I thought, or tried to.

  The day passed with little of note to mark it.

  I had never been big on conspiracy stories. They always seemed contrived. Real life was not only more mundane, but also more haphazard. Things happened without any plan or order. But Vern knew why Brendan didn’t skate—he had to know. Ned had said that Red’s death was the worst tragedy this town ever suffered. And Vern’s father had been police chief at the time.

  Suddenly his well-meaning suggestion made at the station, and Club’s seconding of it, took on a darker cast. Not go home, but get out.

  Why would Vern not want me to know about Red’s drowning? Had he been trying to protect Brendan, or if not him, his memory?

  When the front door opened, I jumped.

  “Hello?” I called out, getting up and striding toward the entry. “Ned?”

  “Who’s Ned?” asked the person coming in.

  “Teggie!” I cried, and threw my arms around my sister’s narrow body, which seemed to have taken on substance, become even more of a force to be reckoned with, in the short time she’d been gone.

  Maybe I had strengthened, too. Look what I’d done without her.

  Broken into a home. Stolen property. Learned the secret my husband had kept from me our entire marriage. “How’d you get up here so fast? I didn’t think there was a bus until—”

  Someone else had entered behind her, and was stripping off his coat.

  It was a man, not tall, but powerfully built, with a dozen muscles distinct upon him. He had a swell of blue-black curls, and eyes as dark as coffee beans. The T-shirt he wore, through which all those muscles were visible, read Gabriel Deacon Dance Company.

  “Nora,” Teggie said, one slim arm outstretched. “Meet Gabriel Deacon.”

  I looked from the beautiful man to my sister, and spoke stupidly, trying to resolve it all. “This is why you didn’t need me to meet you at the bus.”

  “We drove,” Gabriel Deacon said. “My car doesn’t get much of a workout in the city.”

  “I’m impressed,” I said, and I was, for more reasons than their confronting the snowy Northway. I had never been given a glimpse of my sister in the company of a man. The ones she had known, briefly, furtively, she’d kept sequestered away, in a late night corner of her life into which our relationship didn’t extend.

  I offered them some lasagna.

  “That’d be great,” Gabriel answered. “Nothing but fast food on the highway.”

  I went and turned off the TV. We sat at the table.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t said …” Gabriel began,
his Adam’s apple gliding up and down in his throat. Even his hesitation looked studied. “That I’m sorry. I never met Brendan, but I wish I had.”

  My God, this guy was smooth.

  “I wanted you two to meet,” Teggie began, digging into her meal, a sight whose shock value I barely had time to register. “Since Gabriel has decided to make me his—”

  Because I knew my sister, I knew that she wasn’t about to make a sappy declaration. I glanced at the words on Gabriel’s T-shirt. “Oh, Teg! Principal? Did you get the part?”

  “No,” my sister said. “Better than that.” She glanced up at Gabriel; they exchanged smiles. “Gabriel thought that I had a real feel for the female roles.” He was nodding along with her. “He’s offered to make me co-choreographer.”

  I stared down at the table. Teggie had been debating—resisting—this change in roles for years, ever since she entered her late twenties and parts started getting harder to come by. If Gabriel Deacon had talked her into it, then he had to be more than the muscled smooth talker for whom I’d taken him. A wave of nausea lifted my stomach. I felt ashamed for underestimating Gabriel; I felt ashamed for wanting to underestimate him.

  I tried to shape a response. “Congratulations, Teg. I know you’ll be great.” I didn’t know, though, not really, not the way Gabriel Deacon must. “And thank you,” I added to him, “for coming.”

  His eyes smiled along with his mouth.

  We went up to bed not long after that.

  “It’s okay that I brought him?” Teggie said, holding both of my hands in hers as we stood in the hall. I extricated myself, pulling down a stack of towels from the closet.

  “Yes,” I murmured, “sure.”

  “Is that a Nora sure?” she asked. “Or a real sure?”

  “It’s a you’ve-met-the-love-of-your-life-and-didn’t-bother-to-call sure,” I replied, and Teggie let out a harsh bray of laughter, covering her mouth before glancing over her shoulder.

  “I did better than call,” she said. “Here I am.”

  We exchanged another quick smile, but even while doing so, I felt as lonely as if my sister had stayed back in the city. I sighed, dreading the open maw of my bed.

  I teetered on the verge of sleep for what felt like a long time, but in reality couldn’t have been more than a few minutes, before I started to hear noises, the rustlings of people moving about in a strange room, their hushed chatter. The prospect of sleep was yanked away like a cloth snatched off the table in one of those parlor tricks.

  A murmur.

  “Nice, right?” Teggie responded audibly.

  I wondered what was nice.

  A thud. One of them had bumped into something. My bedroom and the spare room shared a wall.

  Gabe’s voice, low. “Nice is as nice does.”

  A laugh that Teggie quickly muffled. Some kind of private joke between them.

  There was the sibilant movement of sheets, two people getting settled in bed. Then a couple of murmurs I couldn’t make out, followed by one I could.

  “Good night, sweetheart.”

  My chest hollowed out like a vacuum; for a moment I couldn’t summon breath.

  There came the unprecedented sound of my sister responding in kind, before voices from the other room began to subside, give way to the stirrings of sleep.

  I rolled over on the vast, smooth spread of my own sheets. The down cover settled on me like a deflating balloon. Our bed used to be so rumpled and worn. But there were only so many wrinkles one person could make.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Gabriel appeared while I was making toast the next morning. He was already showered, dressed for the day. I indicated butter and a row of jam jars whose lids were stuck fast from disuse.

  He smiled at me. “Sit down. Let me fix you a piece.”

  Smooth, I thought again through a yawn. But I’ll take it. I sat.

  “Teggie still out?” I asked when the silence slipped from companionable to awkward.

  “Like a light,” he said. “She sleeps heavily, huh?” He set a plate down before me, then lowered himself lightly into a chair.

  “Always has,” I agreed. I let the tea steam my face.

  “Quiet up here,” Gabriel said after a moment. “I keep wondering what’s missing.”

  “Sirens, horns, yelling, curses,” I ticked off.

  He grinned. “You miss them? It?”

  “The city?”

  He nodded, using one finger to lift a blob of butter back onto his bread. Somehow he managed to make even that gesture look appealing, no greasy mess or need of a napkin.

  I glanced away. “No.”

  He looked up, his response unspoken. Not even now?

  I shrugged. “This is home, I guess.” Wake up, Teggie. But my sister didn’t come, there wasn’t a single noise from upstairs, and so almost helplessly, I began to speak. “Although some things are strange, I have to admit.”

  Gabriel flexed his arms. “Like what?”

  I stared out the window. The gray air was motionless; there’d be snow again today. “People in small towns are secretive,” I said at last. “New York’s like this open book. You meet someone on the street and she’s telling you about how she’s trying to get pregnant.”

  Gabriel laughed. “Then the guy behind her offers to help.”

  “Well,” I said, “yeah. It’s crude and it’s loud and it can be mean even, but there’s something less threatening about that. Everything’s on the surface. You know what you’re dealing with.”

  “You feel threatened here?”

  I stared at him. I hadn’t said that, but Gabriel seemed to have a way of cutting to the heart of things, teasing out their guts. He was good for my sister, I realized. He matched her.

  He stood up to refill my cup.

  From behind me, Teggie spoke. “Who’s threatening you?”

  I jumped up from my seat. “No one!”

  I was ready to offer Teggie breakfast, although she rarely ate any, but she pressed me back down as Gabriel took the bread out of my hands. He crossed to the counter, Teggie stepped out of his way, and before long she was sitting with a buttered slice of toast.

  There was nothing sharp or askew or unfitting between them. They anticipated the other’s gestures, knowing when to pause for each other and make room; there was no bristle or resistance, the cautious curbing of anger that comes at the beginning. You looked at the two and expected to see wrinkles forming in response to each other’s laughter, and life. It was as if all the rough surfaces had already been buffed away, leaving only burnished metal behind, and yet, how could that have happened? How had they been together long enough to bypass all the sticky grittiness of newbies? Teggie hadn’t even had time to call Brendan with the news that she’d met someone. He always got her tidbits first, before passing them on to me for deeper excavation.

  I had to make them stop looking at each other. To stop not looking at each other, on my behalf, studying me with generous, understanding eyes.

  I opened my mouth and began to speak.

  I revealed facts to them that Brendan had kept hidden from me, his wife. Everything that had happened since my husband’s final act, linking events like beads on a string. Then I spoke of Red’s death, and the role Eileen felt Brendan played in it. Finally, the miserable story wound down, my words petering out in the chill air of the kitchen.

  “Can we get some heat on in here?” asked Teggie.

  I pointed to the thermostat, and Gabriel went to adjust it.

  Teggie watched him, a smile on her face that slowly faded. “You found all this out just now, Nor? Recently?”

  I studied my empty plate. “You can say it. How did I not know before?”

  Gabriel cleared his throat, elbowing a lock of hair from his eyes. “Don’t we always keep things from the people we love most? Especially from them?”

  His response was like the rush of heat from the furnace, a blanket on my soul, and I suddenly knew why my sister was falling in love with this
man.

  Teggie looked at him—We’ll never keep secrets, her eyes said—and I turned away.

  “And the police chief didn’t want you to find out?” Teggie asked. “He suggested you go home when you asked about it?”

  For once, she wasn’t saying anything I hadn’t thought of already. “Well, it wasn’t quite that linear. But yes. I think he might’ve been trying to protect Brendan. His memory anyway.”

  Teggie was glancing at Gabriel.

  “What?” I said.

  Teggie lifted knobby shoulders. “That’s kind of presumptuous. Even for a police chief.”

  I shook my head. “You don’t understand. Gabriel was just saying how different it is up here.” I looked at him, he nodded support. “Vern loved Brendan.” Teggie raised her eyebrows, and I tried again. “The Chief is like this mother bear, and all Wedeskyull his cubs. He’s—”

  “Protective,” Gabriel said, using my word. Teggie let out a snort.

  “What?” I cried.

  “You’re trying to play along,” Teggie told Gabriel, “like it’s all Little House on the Prairie or something, when you know this place is creepy as hell.”

  “Teggie!” I said, and again Gabriel echoed me.

  “This is your sister’s home,” he added.

  “A mother bear is fierce when it comes to it.” My sister faced me across the table. “She’ll kill on behalf of her cubs.”

  “So?” I replied. “I’m sure the Chief would kill if he had to. That’s kind of what cops do.” I heaved a sigh. “And you know, he also might have thought he was protecting me. It’s not like this was fun to learn. He was wrong, though, I will say that. I needed closure.”

  A terrible smile appeared on Teggie’s face. “I hate that psychobabble crap. Closure.”

  My shrug felt effortful, requiring of muscles. “At least now I know.”

  “Know what?” she asked, as if speaking to a small child.

  I frowned, looking to Gabriel for help. “Well, why Brendan did it.”

  “Why did he do it?” she asked, still in that I’m-sorry-you’re-so-goddamned-slow tone.

  Only it was Teggie who seemed to be the slow one, at least as far as I could tell. “Because of his brother drowning while in his care. I told you. Brendan made it so they both died on the same day of the year. And he used the rope he’d brought to try and save Red.”