The Snowman's Children

by Glen Hirshberg

  “All right. Okay,” I say to myself.

  In the car on the way back to the motel, the numbness starts to wear off, and tiny needles of terror begin to pulse through my skin. “Okay,” I mutter again. She’ll be at Casey’s, I decide. Casey is a fortyish overweight mandolin player in Laura’s band who wears her hair in a long black braid and sings cheating songs as if they’re hymns. Of all Laura’s friends, Casey likes me the least. A month or so ago, after the last show of Laura’s I attended, Casey and I sat at the velvet-lined bar in the back of the Secretariat Club and watched Laura drink herself down from her performance high. When she stood unsteadily to go to the bathroom, we watched her weave between the tables as if she were staggering down the deck of a rolling ship, her hands grabbing chair backs and random shoulders to make sure she didn’t tumble overboard.

  That’s when Casey turned to me and snapped, “You’re more like her neighbor than her husband.”

  I almost dropped my beer. I considered stalking out. Instead, I asked, “Is that what Laura thinks?”

  “Laura wouldn’t know the difference, Mattie,” Casey said, sounding surprisingly civil.

  My marriage is ending. I should hop the next plane and be at my house by noon—before she and Casey have a chance to load Laura’s stuff into Casey’s pickup. I’ll drag Laura to the couch, sit beside her, and say...what, exactly? That I found an old best friend who wants me around even less than you do? That I dug up my childhood and discovered it was frozen and gray and full of echoes?

  I’ve been sitting in the Moto-Court parking lot for at least five minutes before it occurs to me to shut off the motor. And it’s another two before I open the door and realize that the battered blue Buick next to me has been honking nonstop, and Spencer Franklin is at the wheel.

  Chapter 20 - 1977

  After Mr. Fox’s death, Theresa disappeared altogether. My parents said that the Doctor and Barbara came together to Mr. Fox’s funeral, but Theresa wasn’t with them. Mrs. Fox came too and tried to talk to Barbara before the graveside service, but Barbara just leaned into the Doctor and cried quietly and stared at the bare maple trees. Her mother wound up standing by my mother, and they held hands all through the ceremony.

  ”Cynthia looks the same,” my mother said, that night over dinner. “It’s only been three years,” said my father. “Almost four,” said my mother.

  I couldn’t really remember much about Mrs. Fox except that she made giant macramé baskets for hanging plants and had red hair that plunged down her back in multiple directions like seaweed in a riptide. I knew she had been gone for a long time and that she’d given up on trying to get Mr. Fox to quit drinking. Barbara was already in college by then, but she said her mother had abandoned her family all the same.

  Every day from then on, I would stand at the bus stop and watch the spot between the maple trees where Theresa would appear if she was coming to school. But she never did.

  Twice during that time, Spencer and I tried to see her. One Saturday afternoon, we made my father stop at her house on the way to Mini-Mike’s. We rang the bell, got no answer, and walked around back. The basement window had been replaced. All the curtains were drawn, and the whole place felt like a churchyard cemetery. Spencer had started for the car when I hopped up on the front porch and rang the bell one more time. I almost flew backward when the door swung open. The Doctor was standing before me in a checkered bathrobe. He had stubble on his chin and a coffee cup in his hand, and he looked as if he hadn’t slept in ages.

  “She’s not ready to see you,” he said, without even a hello.

  “You could try asking her,” Spencer said, coming up fast behind me. I tensed. I didn’t think he meant to sound so nasty.

  But the Doctor just gave us his arctic smile and said, “No.”

  On impulse, as the door swung shut, I stuck out my arm and pushed it open again. Then I stared at my hand, not believing what I’d done. But the action had triggered a strangely comforting suction, as if I’d drawn something poisonous to the surface.

  The Doctor’s face reappeared.

  “Can I say hello to Barbara?” I asked.

  Sighing, Dr. Daughrety leaned into the living room and called, “Say hello to Mattie, Barb.”

  “Hello, Mattie,” said Barbara’s voice. She didn’t come to the door. The Doctor nodded, raised a hand to us—or maybe to my father, who was still watching us from the car—and shut us out.

  The second time, we came alone, at night, and we were not going to leave without getting inside. Spencer was sleeping over, and we’d been in my room, taking turns shooting a slot car around my Tyco track’s one working lane. Since Theresa’s absence, Spencer and I had spent more and more time together, but we’d spoken less and less. At recess, we just stood side by side in the patches of filthy snow clinging to the edges of the blacktop, slowly twisting together like the trunks of two birch trees stretching for the same dead light.

  That night was the first of four in a row that Spencer was to spend at my house. When his mother dropped him off, she told my mother she was going on a “save the marriage” retreat with her husband. My mother made the sort of practiced but genuine sympathetic murmur she’d long since mastered, but she looked uncomfortable. I glanced at Spencer, and he shrugged.

  “They go to Lake St. Claire and go dancing. Sometimes they have fun.”

  After a couple of hours passing the slot-car controller back and forth, I got up to go to the bathroom and stopped in the hall. I could hear my parents talking low in the living room. They only did that when there was something they didn’t want me to know, so I crept to the hallway door to listen. Spencer peered out of my room, then tiptoed up beside me.

  “Did Cynthia actually see any of this?” my father asked.

  My mother sighed. “No. Colin won’t let anyone into the house. Barbara had to meet her at Avri’s Deli.”

  “At least they finally talked.”

  “Kind of,” said my mother, and I heard her breathe once, long and hard, and I knew she was crying. “Oh, Joe. Cynthia said Barbara just sat there and wept the whole meal. And smoked. When did you ever see fresh-air-queen Barbara Fox smoke?”

  The muscles around my ribs slithered to life and began to squeeze. Spencer sat down next to me on the hallway carpet and leaned against the wall. Lately, waiting around had become our primary shared activity.

  “When did it happen?” said my father.

  “Two or three days ago, I guess. Theresa just woke up, got out of bed, and slashed every curtain in the house to ribbons with an X-ACTO blade. She draped strips of fabric everywhere as if they were animal skins or something. Barbara says Theresa has been lying under a quilt with her face mashed against her window ever since. She has crying fits in the middle of the night.”

  “Jesus,” said my father.

  “Colin makes her get up once a day and take a bath. Barbara says she spends the whole time singing.”

  “Singing what?”

  “Hell, Joe, I don’t know. Just singing. Staring at the walls. Barbara has to bathe her; she won’t do it herself.”

  “Should we go over there? Maybe there’s something we can do.”

  “Even if we could do something, he wouldn’t let us,” my mother said.

  My head started shaking wildly back and forth. I looked at Spencer. His red sneakers were tucked so tight against his drawn-in legs that they looked manacled to his body. I knew what he was thinking. We were used to Theresa’s monumental silences. But the thought of her slashing curtains or having crying fits caused an all-new sort of anxiety. My parents stopped speaking, and after a while I gestured to Spencer and we slipped back into my room. For a long time, we lay under the covers in our bunks, fully clothed.

  “We have to do something right now,” Spencer said from the lower bunk. I knew he was right. I had ideas, too, but they all seemed babyish, and I didn’t think they would do anything to make Theresa feel better.

  “Her dad can’t help her,” I said.

>   “If we don’t do something now, we might never get another chance,” said Spencer. “She’ll just be gone.”

  I ignored him, continuing my thought. “He doesn’t know how.”

  “She hates Barbara,” Spencer said.

  “Not anymore,” I said. “But Barbara just ran over her father, so she’s no use.”

  “Point,” said Spencer.

  “So what do we do when we get there?”

  If not for the rustling of the sheets, I might have thought Spencer had fallen asleep, because he took such a long time answering. Then he said, “Don’t your parents ever go to bed?”

  My dad was especially restless, roaming back and forth from the hallway to the living room. Twice, he stopped outside my door, but he didn’t come in. Once he went into his bedroom where my mother was, but he came right back out again. The glowing green rocket hands on the solar-system clock on my desk read two in the morning before I heard the familiar sag-and-creak of my parents’ bed and knew he was down at last. Wordlessly, Spencer and I slipped into our jackets and crept straight out the front door, heading for Theresa’s.

  The street was full of mud from a week of rain. In school, we’d been learning about ankle-deep oceans flooding the land during the Cretaceous period and giant creatures splashing through the too-warm world, beginning to die. So for our walk, Spencer and I became brontosaurs, gnawing on last year’s leaves as we puddle-stomped our way to extinction under the stone-gray moon.

  At the bottom of the hill that led to the Daughrety house, Spencer slipped and bellyflopped and came up covered in muck. “I hate the suburbs,” he snapped, scooping palmfuls of mud from his sweatshirt and jeans. He was still doing that when we reached the edge of the Daughrety patio.

  I pointed through the maples to Theresa’s porthole window. “Okay, city boy,” I said, and my fingers began to tingle, but not from the cold. “Let’s wake her up.”

  Spencer stared at me, one hand dripping mud, his face settling into the same determined expression I’d seen the morning I first met him, during our premiere sidecarring run. But it had looked playful then, not sad. He cocked his arm in football-throwing position, and mud traced down the inside of his wrist like iodine revealing a vein. “Ready?” he said.

  I nodded. He threw.

  The mud gob burst on the glass of the porthole window, and we both dropped to our stomachs. I think I actually flung my arms over my head the way we were told to do during tornado drills. I held my breath. But when I looked up, there was neither movement nor light in the house.

  Collecting my own missile, I shoved to my feet. The mud felt slick and weighty in my hands, like a pig heart in formaldehyde. I reared back and threw it as hard as I could. The mud ball smacked into the cedar shingles, and something rustled in the bushes behind us. We whirled together, but no one was there. We turned to the house again, expecting lights, sound, something, but we saw nothing. Theresa was gone, or at least she wasn’t showing herself. Suddenly, I was furious. I was thinking of Mr. Fox’s bleeding face. I wanted to kick through the porthole window, howling, By the hair of my chinny-chin-chin, let me in, let me in!

  “We could light the place on fire,” Spencer said.

  “Got a match?” He’d been kidding, sort of. I was too. Sort of. But I wanted into that house. I had to see Theresa, and the pressure was swelling inside me like helium in a balloon. “Maybe they’re in the basement,” I said. “I bet he’s keeping them all hidden.”

  Spencer studied me, as though he could see the shift in my mood rising off me like steam. “Mattie, I think the Doctor’s as much of a spaz as you do, but he’s not the Snowman. He’s not keeping Barbara and Theresa locked up in the basement. It’s cold down there. Come on, let’s go.”

  “Shut up,” I said, and he stared at me some more.

  Gradually, silence settled over us. That made me madder still. We’d snuck out of my house, stormed the gates of the Daughrety fortress, and we hadn’t even triggered the Doctor’s defenses. It’s like we’re dead, I thought. The Snowman has killed us without our knowing it, and now we’re floating around inside his invisible world, unable to affect it in any way. I missed Theresa. I could hardly remember what it was like to speak to her, or even catch her glance across the room. I’d liked catching her glance. And I think maybe I loved her, without any idea of what that meant except it was different from anything I’d felt for my mother, or Barbara, or anyone else,, and it made me unhappy.

  “Okay, let’s go for now,” I said to Spencer. “We’ll have to come up with something else.” He nodded, and we retreated down the hill.

  The next day was chaos. For the third time in two weeks, Ms. Eyre didn’t show up. This time, she hadn’t even let the school know until seconds before the bell sounded, and Mrs. Jupp had to phone for an emergency sub and then sit with us until the sub arrived.

  “Is Ms. Eyre sick?” I asked Mrs. Jupp. “Did she hurt her jaw again?”

  Behind her perpetual mask of peach makeup, Mrs. Jupp looked as exhausted as every other adult I knew. “I really don’t know, Mattie. I don’t know what’s happening to her, except that this has been an extraordinary year. Extraordinary. We all need some time away.”

  The sub turned out to be a grandmother in her late fifties who spent the first half hour confiscating paper airplanes and the rest of the day dodging them. During English hour, Jamie Kerflack, in perhaps the most inspired act of his vicious elementary-school career, wrote his entire set of homework sentences backward on the board. When the sub balled him out, he announced that he was dyslexic and started to cry while the rest of us roared with laughter. At lunch, Spencer and I slipped on wet linoleum in the middle of what would have been a record-setting sidecarring run down the hallway and slid feet first into Mrs. Jupp’s office door. Furious, she dragged us inside without even letting us untangle the harness.

  “There’s not enough going on in this place? I don’t have enough to do with your suddenly unreliable teacher and child-killers and God knows what else? Now I have to put up with your nonsense too?”

  “Mrs. Jupp, where’s Theresa Daughrety? Why isn’t she coming to school?” I asked abruptly. Mrs. Jupp gurgled to silence as if I’d grabbed her around the throat. Her lips tightened. “Mattie, let’s just see what happens, all right? It has been a monstrous year.”

  “But where is she?” I was very nearly yelling.

  Beside me, Spencer said, “Whoa.”

  “Don’t you use that tone with me, Mattie Rhodes.”

  I lowered my eyes, not from acquiescence or regret but as a ploy. Mrs. Jupp had information, and I wanted it. I was becoming a master of such manipulations.

  “She’s home, Mattie,” Mrs. Jupp said. “At least, that’s what her father tells me. I don’t know when she’ll be back. What I do know is that she’s just too bright a penny to be lost forever. I know you’re worried about her. I know you’re trying to be her friend. But she really will be all right. Now, back to your classroom. Don’t make me have to ask you again.”

  When I left Mrs. Jupp’s office, what I felt, more than anything else, was rage. It had mostly to do with Theresa’s absence, but I also had the sense that time was running out on a game I hadn’t even known I was playing. Back in class, Spencer and I avoided talking about Ms. Eyre or Mrs. Jupp or the empty desk between us. Instead, we talked about slot cars and Mark the Bird Fidyrich, who had ripped up his knee during spring training in Florida. The last paper airplane I built that day was a masterpiece, with landing gear and a paper-clip propeller. Finally, as our classmates began to wind down, Spencer looked out the window and noticed the snow.

  “Snowman weather,” he said.

  It came down singing, the way it always did in Detroit at the end of March. The wind whined and the first returning jays took turns protesting from atop the power lines as the road ice slid down the asphalt into the ditches and the muddy ground succumbed almost gladly to one last whitewash.

  Mrs. Jupp announced over the PA system that the storm was
expected to be severe, so the buses would be arriving soon to take us home early. We all cheered, more from habit than enthusiasm.

  “Your parents have been called,” Mrs. Jupp droned on, “and all of them are making arrangements for you to be met at your bus stops.”

  “You’re sleeping at my house, right?” I said to Spencer as we packed our bags and stepped through the crumpled paper airplanes littering the floor and crunching like dead locusts under our feet.

  Spencer peered into his backpack. “Got toothbrush. Got undies. Looks like it.”

  We filed onto the bus. After the near riot in our classroom, the ride home was strangely silent. I sat next to Spencer and turned in my seat a few times, half expecting Theresa to materialize behind me. Cars passed with their headlights floating in the gloom like giant winter fireflies gorging on snowflakes. By the time Spencer and I jumped off, there was an inch and a half of new snow on the ground, and heavy clouds were ushering in the dark.

  “Your mom isn’t here,” Spencer said.

  “She’s working in Romeo this month,” I said. “It’ll take her a while to get home.”

  Davy McLean, Brent’s best friend from two blocks away, started a halfhearted snowball fight while the shadows of the evergreens rolled toward us like an incoming tide. More quickly than usual, everyone dispersed. Brent went home without acknowledging my presence. That left Spencer and me alone on the street. For a while, we didn’t talk, just drifted along the snow-blurred edges of lawns. I opened my mouth and imagined myself preying on all this snowflake plankton. I didn’t want to go inside until my mother came home, because she’d probably keep us there.

  “Let’s go to the Daughretys’,” I said.

  “What for?” said Spencer, sweeping caked snow from any tree branch he could reach.

  “Maybe he’ll let us in today.”

  We went, but the house looked derelict, its windows blank. We were about to give up when I saw Theresa’s face floating in the blackness of the porthole window like a jack-in-the-box underwater, and I grabbed Spencer’s arm.