The Snowman's Children

by Glen Hirshberg

  I wondered how interesting he’d find me when he learned I was lying, and I bit the inside of my cheek so hard this time that I drew blood.

  Sergeant Ross leaned forward again. “Now. I want you to think hard. Forget this room. Think about the street. Think about this afternoon.” He said this as if it were much longer than half an hour ago. “I want you to tell me about the very last moment that you were sure Spencer Franklin was with you.”

  “In the Daughretys’ backyard,” I said immediately, relieved to have the conversation steer back toward Theresa. “I threw a snowball at him, and he ran, and then I saw Theresa at the window. We have to go there. Let’s go.”

  “We’ll send someone, Mattie. Try to relax.”

  “What about me?” I jerked up my head as though I’d been challenged to a fight, then made myself drop it again. I didn’t like the way this sergeant kept watching me. “It has to be me.” Tears swept down my face.

  “Mattie,” Sergeant Ross said in his slow-syrup voice, “help me understand what you mean.”

  I took a deep breath, then another, and wiped tears from my face, but more appeared. It was like staring through a windshield in a relentless misting rain.

  “Theresa,” I said, as calmly as I could. “She’s...sad right now. She sits at the Solitude Desk. She saw Mr. Fox get run over and sat in his blood.”

  For the first time, Sergeant Ross blinked in surprise. “She what?”

  “She’s been out of school for a long time. She won’t talk to almost anyone. She doesn’t even talk to her dad anymore.”

  Sergeant Ross leaned against the couch. “She doesn’t talk to anyone,” he said. “But you think she’ll talk to you.”

  “I know she’ll talk to me,” I said, trying to control myself. “She has to. There’s no one else.”

  Sergeant Ross made a clicking sound with his tongue. Then he sat forward, pinning me against the armrest. “I want you to think about this very carefully. I want you to think about it, and I want you to answer, do you hear?”

  I didn’t move.

  “What is it, son, that you haven’t told me?”

  Right then, I almost told him all of it. I wanted to, but the words wouldn’t come. And so all I did was look at my hands, cry some more, and say, “We have to go there. Please. Or it’ll be too late.”

  “Bert,” Sergeant Ross said, in a much louder voice, and a second cop detached himself from his post by the door. He was huge too, with blond hair and a too-small head cocked sideways on his lumpy shoulders like seed spilling out of a feed bag. He limped and chewed green gum with a smack.

  “Bert, let’s send detectives to the Daughrety house. Mattie, do you know the address?”

  “You have to take me. It won’t work without me. She won’t talk to you.”

  This time, Sergeant Ross sounded more like my uncle than a policeman. “We’ll send two detectives first. They’re very, very good at their job. Don’t worry, Mattie.”

  Frustration sizzled under my skin like an electrical current. “I have to see her,” I blurted.

  “What’s he babbling about?” said Bert, not unkindly.

  The coolness in Sergeant Ross’s voice was confusing. “He thinks the Daughrety daughter may have seen something. He also thinks she’ll only talk to him.”

  Bert started to laugh. Again, the laugh was gentle, but I didn’t like it. And I didn’t know how much more of this I could stand. “If we sit around talking much longer,” I snapped, “Spencer’s going to be dead.” Bert stopped laughing, and Sergeant Ross stared at me.

  Then he stood up. “Stay here, Mattie.” He stepped through the kitchen doorway, and I saw him talking quietly to my mother and father. Finally, he came back out and told Bert, “We’re going to take Mattie and his father to the Daughretys.”

  My father bundled me into my jacket. The last thing I saw as we left the house was my mom kneeling against the kitchen door frame with her head in her hands. Guilt began massing in my chest as my father shepherded me out the door, through the throng of television reporters, to a waiting squad car. The policemen sat up front and directed us into the back behind the grate that protected them from prisoners.

  “At least tell us where you’re taking him, officers,” said Coral Clark, hustling around the hood of the car with her white jacket open at the throat, her red nails curled around the microphone. Bert answered by gunning the engine, and the car lurched backward down the driveway, skidding halfway into the drainage ditch across the street before its spinning wheels grabbed the icy dirt and we shot down the block. Behind us, reporters scurried over our lawn and climbed into their vans to follow us.

  The Daughrety house hunkered at the back of its cul-de-sac like a stockade. Opaque white drapes had replaced the ones Theresa had slashed to shreds. The driveway had not been plowed, and small drifts dotted it like the dens of snow animals.

  “Are they even home?” Bert said.

  “They never leave,” I answered, and my father looked bewildered.

  Reflected red light from all the police cars in the neighborhood floated in the topmost branches of the maple trees. The houses nearby nestled in the dark like porcelain toys wrapped in black crepe. At the door, Sergeant Ross rapped the brass handle while we stood behind him. There was no response. The drapes didn’t even rustle. He knocked again. This time we heard the Doctor say, “Don’t answer it.”

  “Don’t answer it?” said Bert. He withdrew his nightstick and began to whack rhythmically on the door until chips of white painted wood splintered and flew off. Sergeant Ross winced, let the swinging go on a while longer, and then grabbed Bert’s arm and stopped him.

  “Police,” Sergeant Ross called. “Open up, please, sir. Right now.”

  The door remained closed.

  “Okay,” said Bert.

  He retreated down the driveway to the squad car. Moments later, siren scream pierced the silence. Doors flew open all around us. People peered out, saw the police car, froze. Then the front door of the Daughrety house swung open and Barbara Fox stood facing us.

  “Better,” said Bert, and shut down the siren.

  She was wearing a thick navy-blue sweater that was coming unraveled at the wrists. Her hair hung in a braid down her back and looked uncharacteristically heavy. She blinked against the strobing red light, looked at Sergeant Ross, and saw me peeking from behind him. Behind her, I could see the hall of masks. The tiled entryway sparkled, weirdly sludgeless. No tiles in Detroit houses sparkled that way at the end of March.

  “Ms. Daughrety?” said Sergeant Ross.

  “No,” said Barbara. “What do you need?”

  “M’am, we have a situation here. Can we come in?”

  Barbara’s mouth puckered, as though she’d just bitten into a crab apple. Her eyes watered too, though I couldn’t tell if she was crying or responding to the freezing air.

  My father stepped forward, reached out to touch her arm, and then lowered it again. “It’ll just take a second, Barb,” he said uselessly, though I knew he was trying to calm her.

  Finally, she slid backward in her stocking feet to allow us entry. In the hallway and the living room, the lights were on but dimmed. We wiped our boots on the mats just inside the door, and Dr. Daughrety emerged from the back hall. He had on exactly the same robe that Spencer and I had seen him wearing the last time we’d barged in on him. There were black circles under his eyes, and the skin around them was pale and puffy. It seemed to take him a moment to make sense of our being there.

  “Joe,” he said, with no trace of curiosity in his voice.

  “Colin,” said my father. “Sorry to intrude, but—”

  The Doctor trained his gaze on me, as unforgiving as ever. “Mattie?”

  “Dr. Daughrety?” said Sergeant Ross.

  The Doctor continued to stare at me, ignoring the policemen. Then he inclined his head slightly.

  “Dr. Daughrety,” Sergeant Ross said, “we need to speak to you and your...” He glanced at Barbara.

>   “Fiancée,” Dr. Daughrety said, his shoulders squaring out of their unaccustomed slump. He was beginning to look more like himself.

  “And your daughter.”

  Dr. Daughrety looked at Sergeant Ross. I thought he was going to laugh.

  “No,” he said, and turned toward the living room.

  “I’m not actually asking,” said Sergeant Ross.

  Dr. Daughrety stopped, but he didn’t turn around right away. When he did, he had his head up, his mouth set. “All right,” he said, and proceeded into the living room.

  “Jesus,” I heard my father mutter, and then, with no warning, Theresa glided into the room. She was listing to the left, her long skirt brushing her bare feet. She moved across the hallway, looking neither up nor away but straight ahead, volitionless, like a toy boat dropped into a river. It was Barbara who grabbed her, pulled her tight against her stomach.

  “Gentlemen,” Barbara said, gesturing in the direction the Doctor had wandered.

  Maybe the spell that had transformed Theresa into a sleepwalker was contagious at close range. No one seemed able to speak. We watched her blank stare, her pale neck fading into her pale white sweater.

  Sergeant Ross leaned over and touched my arm. “See what you can do,” he said, with a surprising hint of camaraderie. My knees locked, my teeth clamped together, and I thought I was going to faint.

  The adults filed past Theresa into the living room. Barbara was still holding on to Theresa and watching me. To my astonishment, I saw Barbara’s bottom lip quiver, which made her look like a little girl.

  “Mattie, what the hell is happening?” she said.

  “The Snowman,” I said. “Spencer.” Tears burst out on my cheeks again. I didn’t want to lie to Barbara.

  “Oh, my God,” she whimpered, and bent to grab me. She held both Theresa and me against her. She still smelled of Africa, or at least the way I’d come to imagine Africa smelling from being around her. Theresa smelled like candle wax and soap. I twisted my head and stared straight into her muddy brown eyes.

  “Hi,” Theresa said, and Barbara’s arms slipped apart. I teetered backward as Theresa glided toward her room.

  “She hasn’t said a single word in a week and a half,” Barbara said.

  My heart thundered against my chest, and the reverberations rattled my rib cage. This was going to work after all. It was going to be worth it. Even my parents and Barbara and Ms. Eyre and Mrs. Jupp might think so. I glanced once more at Barbara and then followed Theresa down the hallway and entered her bedroom for the first and only time. The rest of the world and everyone in it evaporated.

  Theresa wasn’t waiting for me, exactly. She was leaning against the drapes that shrouded her porthole window, humming to herself and staring through the slit in the curtains. The Daughretys’ furnace muttered in the vents.

  She had a canopy bed, all white, with a sort of gray mosquito netting wrapped around the wooden posts. On the plain white nightstand stood two pictures in matching wooden frames, one of the Doctor with one arm holding a plaque and the other around his daughter. I could tell the photo had been taken in the Phil Hart Elementary gym. The other picture had been taken in the Daughretys’ backyard. A blond-headed woman in a blue winter coat was sitting on a sled, cradling an unpeeled orange in her mittens. I’d only seen Theresa’s mother a few-times. After the very first Mind War, she’d served us black-bottomed cupcakes. She used to hum under her breath too, I thought, and shuddered. At least she’d been humming that day.

  The rest of the room was lined with books. Two white freestanding bookcases stood on either side of the bed. Another set of shelves hung on the opposite wall, and a long shelf of unpainted wood stretched across the top of the walk-in closet. Almost all the books in the room were hardbacks, their dust jackets wrinkled or ripped, their spines cracked and drooping, which told me that nearly all of them had been read. I watched her profile, her pale skin against the pale curtains, her mouth moving slightly like a dreaming baby’s.

  “Where have you been?” I said.

  Theresa turned from the window, studied me a few seconds, then sat on the floor. I couldn’t tell if she recognized me or not. I’d never seen anyone look that blank.

  “We miss you. Everybody’s talking about you.” That wasn’t exactly true. Given the rest of the year’s events, Theresa’s strangeness and her absence barely qualified as noteworthy for most of the people in my universe.

  “He moves in circles,” she said, and pursed her mouth.

  “What?”

  “Oak Street, Wrigley’s, the mall.”

  I didn’t understand. I recognized the words, but none of them communicated anything to me. As usual when I talked to Theresa, I found myself feeling small, somehow.

  “Oak Park, Pleasant Fields, Covington Junior High, Wrigley’s, the mall,” said Theresa. “Concentric circles.” From under her pillow, she withdrew a blue spiral notebook and thrust it at me.

  “Here,” she said happily, and pushed it against my chest.

  I took it, felt my hand touch hers. I was expecting her skin to be freezing, corpselike. But it was warm. Just plain skin.

  In the other room, voices got louder, and I heard people moving. They’d be coming for me soon, and I wouldn’t get another chance. I tucked the notebook under my jacket, against my sweater. I didn’t want the Doctor to see it and take it from me.

  “Theresa, listen, please,” I said. “Please, are you listening?”

  She didn’t answer, but at least she looked in my direction.

  “It’s a lie,” I said, and realized she didn’t know what I was talking about. “Spencer and I planned it so I could get past your dad and talk to you. It’s okay, all right? Nothing happened. Spencer’s fine. Please come back. You have to come back. Please come to school on Monday.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” Dr. Daughrety said from the doorway, and strode straight past me. He sat next to his daughter, drawing her head to his shoulder. Then he looked at me. For a wild moment, I thought maybe he had heard me say that Spencer and I were faking. I wanted to scream for him to get out. I needed more time, although I didn’t really think that more time would make a difference. I watched Theresa touch her hair with a finger, drop the finger to her lap, and stare at the curtains again.

  “Mattie,” said the Doctor, “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say. I can’t believe it. We’re all very fond of Spencer.”

  Tears slid from my eyes. Dr. Daughrety wouldn’t just be disappointed when he found out the truth, I thought. Dr. Daughrety was going to hate me.

  My father came in and began tugging at my arm. I wanted to throw myself through the porthole window. I’d failed. And I was in huge trouble. I wanted to go where the Snowman was, because right at that moment, disappearing seemed safer. Better.

  “Jesus, Joe,” Dr. Daughrety said. “Tell Alina I’ll come by. I’ll call Susan Franklin, too.” One of his arms had completely encircled his daughter, and he was rocking her back and forth.

  “Susan isn’t in town,” my father said. “Alina’s still trying to reach her.”

  Sergeant Ross appeared in the doorway and trained a slow, steady gaze on me. “Mattie, Dr. Daughrety says Theresa could not possibly have seen anything. She had ... a rough night last night, he says. She was sleeping on the living room couch almost all day.”

  “She woke up about five minutes before you came,” said the Doctor.

  Theresa’s didn’t say anything. Her smile looked carved into her face like a jack-o-lantern’s.

  “Mattie, come on. Let’s go,” my father said, and he guided me past Sergeant Ross, who still hadn’t taken his eyes off me.

  Minutes later, Bert was hustling us through the reporters buzzing in the Daughretys’ yard. As soon as we were in the squad car and moving again, they all shot for their vans. We flew back down my street, past policemen and more reporters huddling under every streetlamp. Once more, the snow had begun falling.

  I’d failed. I’d made it to The
resa’s room, but I hadn’t reached her. Loneliness more profound than any I had known or dreamed crushed down on me like an avalanche, and I was buried beneath it. I couldn’t even imagine how to dig myself out. And I knew no one would ever find me.

  Sergeant Ross ushered me and my father into our house again and talked quietly to my mother, who hadn’t moved from the kitchen doorway. On his way out, he stopped in front of me and said, “We’ll be in touch, Mattie. If you think of anything that might help us, anything at all, I want you to call me. Your parents know how to reach me. Okay?”

  I nodded and felt my heart beat against Theresa’s notebook, which I’d all but forgotten I had clutched to my chest.

  Angie McLean, my mother’s best friend, was hovering above her, trying to give her a glass of water, but my mother kept pushing it away. Mrs. McLean was wearing a somber gray dress I’d never seen before, with a dark gray ribbon pinned to the collar. Every year, she won first prize in the Detroit News Unique Homemade Ice Cream Contest. The prize came with seventy-five dollars and a silk ribbon dyed to suggest the winning flavor. Every year, she took the cash and bought a new dress to match the ribbon, and at every formal occasion for the next twelve months, she would wear that year’s dress and ribbon. She’d won for her Cream Peach, Rose-hip Mint, and Chocolate Baked Apple, and I wondered dully what flavor this year’s dress commemorated. Asphalt Ice? Michigan Yard in Winter?

  The film of tears in my eyes caused everything and everyone to blur, as though I was looking up from under the frozen surface of a lake. I slipped Theresa’s notebook out of my jacket and laid it on my lap, but I couldn’t bring myself to open it. I kept thinking of her mother in the photograph, the unpeeled orange in her hands. I thought about the way Theresa’s eyes had looked, so dark and lifeless, almost plastic. Mr. Potato Head eyes. We were too late. We’d lost her. In a way, the Snowman had come for us after all, or he may as well have.

  I saw Brent emerge from the back hallway with his head down, taking little baby steps. I’d heard my father say that Brent was going to the McLeans’ for the night, but when he glanced up and saw me, he stopped dead and then ran straight at me with tears in his eyes. Horrified, I threw up my hands to ward him off. I’d forgotten, somehow, that Brent would think this was real, too, and would soon know that it wasn’t. He crashed into me, shoved his head into my chest, and hugged me. Stunned stupid, petrified, I hugged him back while he cried. That got my mother distracted, at least. She got up and stood before us, cheeks swollen, irises shot through with little red lines, like the shells of bloody eggs.