The Snowman's Children

by Glen Hirshberg

  My parents had come outside by then, their coats flapping around their bathrobes, their eyes black and hollow like real snowmen’s eyes. The sight of them made me turn and run. I raced around the side of the house, bursting through the crusted snow as my jaws snapped down on the ice-laden wind. I drove straight for the towering evergreen at the back of our property, the darkest spot I knew, hurtled around it toward the place where its shadow and the shadow of the maple beside it overlapped, and slammed face first into Mrs. Cory’s dangling legs. I hit them so hard I snapped them out of rigor mortis or deep freeze or whatever had locked them in place. They cracked back on their joints and kicked crazily above me where I fell in a bloodied heap in the snow.

  There are crows that do not migrate away from Detroit in the winter. The strips of flesh they’d left behind on Mrs. Cory’s face glistened with ice and inside color, like petals on a frozen flower. Don’t break, Barbara Fox had told me, and I felt her hand through the creeping wetness in my hair. I sank back against the cold, eyes open but fixed straight up at Mrs. Cory’s shredded cheeks. Suddenly, I felt nothing, the same kind of nothing I’d felt in the first few seconds after being put to sleep before my tonsillectomy. But it did seem better, somehow, to be lying in my own snow grave than the one the turtleneck men had left for me.

  “I killed you,” I said aloud. But I still felt nothing. I decided I should try screaming again, so I forced my mouth open, drew breath past my peach-pit tongue, but no sound came out.

  A new snow began to fall. I felt my own heat melting me a resting place. Mrs. Cory seemed to be not so much dangling as hovering, a skeleton angel watching over me, made not of bone but of moonlight. My father appeared, saw Mrs. Cory, and said “Oh, no” before jerking me out of the snow to my feet. As he led me away, I wondered how on earth she had gotten herself up there.

  Different police came this time. They went out back with tools and returned a half hour later with her body on a stretcher, some inanimate thing, not my angel. Most of the questions were for my parents. Brent was sent back to bed. “Murderer,” he murmured at me on the way to his room. Then Sergeant Ross walked through the door. He looked the way my parents had a few hours earlier, only worse. His skin had lost its elasticity, become hardened like tire rubber. I closed my eyes and saw snow graves, dangling women, and Theresa Daughrety in rapid succession. When I opened them again, Sergeant Ross was standing in front of me.

  “Why would anyone want your job?” I asked.

  He just looked at me for a while—almost affectionately, I thought, though I couldn’t imagine why—and then he brushed his huge hand across my shoulder. “Sit tight, Mattie,” he said. “More bad news coming.”

  My brother was up again, and the sergeant directed everyone to the couch. My father sat like a zombie in his rumpled clothes, his eyes half closed. Behind him, my mother was almost dancing in agitation. She dropped her arm around Brent’s shoulders and pulled him alongside her. When we were all in place, Sergeant Ross rubbed his bloodshot eyes and said, “James Sea.”

  The only reaction came from my mother, who made a heaving sound with each breath, as though she’d suddenly become asthmatic.

  I didn’t realize who James Sea was until the sergeant showed us his school photo. Even then, Brent recognized him first and immediately started crying. I could feel my brother’s trembling all the way up my spine.

  James was the Chippewa third-grader who had come to the Halloween assembly last year dressed as a wolverine. “I’m afraid he’s gone,” Sergeant Ross said.

  “Gone,” my father repeated, sounding as if he was talking in his sleep.

  “He left for his bus stop yesterday, over in the Maple Lane subdivision just north of here, at his usual time,” the sergeant said. “But he didn’t make it there. Two other kids claim to have seen him climbing into some kind of old station wagon. Could be the Snowman, with a new car, or it could be an imitator. Either way, it’s a nightmare.”

  “Do you believe them?” I whispered. The sergeant shrugged.

  “Even more than we believed you,” he said. “The story has more holes in it, but it makes more sense.”

  I started to fidget. Sergeant Ross was still talking, but I couldn’t hear him, and I couldn’t see the room anymore. Images clustered in front of my eyes. I began twisting back and forth against the back of the couch, then swung wildly around and grabbed my father’s arm where it was hanging slack at his side. I could see Mrs. Cory’s dancing legs, Theresa looking blank at the Solitude Desk, Barbara screaming beside her father’s corpse, the Fox house floating like a ghost ship over the horizon with Spencer at the rail, and I felt as though I were locked in a little igloo in the center of a snow globe with white flakes rioting around me and giant shapeless shadows moving just beyond the boundaries of the visible world.

  Even in my horrified state, I could see that this kidnapping broke at least part of the pattern. James Sea was too young. Every other victim had been eleven or twelve. He was nine, and the difference between eleven and nine was enormous. Then I thought: if James Sea was with the Snowman, where was Theresa? And that upset me so much that I staggered to my feet and stood there, swaying.

  Sergeant Ross was watching me. Then he said, “I just thought you’d rather hear it from me first. It’ll be all over the morning news.” He glanced out the window. I’d seen the same sort of resignation in Phil Fox’s face, and now Barbara’s too.

  The sergeant looked at his watch and said, “Fuck,” very quietly. “Four forty-five. Go to bed, people. Nothing you can do. Nothing I can do either.” He got up, and without another word he left the house.

  After a while, I realized my father wasn’t going to move. My mother was stroking Brent’s hair, and he was surprisingly still, crying softly in her lap. I didn’t deserve to be there with them, I thought. So I got up, hoping someone would stop me. I wanted to walk straight across the yard, over the icy surface of Cider Lake, and vanish into the Michigan mist. Instead, I shuffled off to my room, where I bolted the door and began pacing back and forth in jerking steps. At some point, I climbed under the covers and stared at the window as if I were peering into a crystal ball. “Where are you?” I whispered over and over, until I fell asleep. In my dreams, I saw her dancing along a tree branch, dropping gum balls, dressed as a wolverine. The Snowman—black and white, like the newspaper sketch—stood in the shadow of a nearby evergreen. My evergreen. When he spoke, his voice was old, like Mrs. Jupp’s, and almost kind.

  You’ll get hurt, he said. Careful.

  When I opened my eyes, sunlight was streaming through the window, and my father’s face loomed beside my bunk.

  “You were talking,” he said. He was holding an unpeeled orange and an unwrapped slice of American cheese, and I thought of Theresa’s mother on the sled in the Daughretys’ backyard.

  “Sit up, son. Eat something.” He pressed the food into my hands. “Mattie, I want to talk to you about Mrs. Cory.”

  Her frozen legs cracked in my ears, and her ruined face floated in the branches of the birch tree outside my window.

  “I just—that wasn’t your fault, Mattie. I don’t want you blaming yourself for what happened to her.”

  “She came to see me,” I said. “Then she killed herself in our tree.”

  “She lost her children, Mattie,” my father said. “Both of them. Do you understand? Of course you don’t, how could you, but believe me, okay? Please. She barely even noticed you.”

  “Dad,” I said, sounding like a four-year-old. “What about Theresa?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, her mother died. And she’s been crazy. Really crazy. Would she ... do that? I mean, kill herself?”

  “Jesus Christ, Mattie, don’t ever say that. Don’t even think it. Come here.” He drew me into his arms, which didn’t help. It just made me feel more ashamed. “Mrs. McLean’s been by the school. She’s bringing some homework for you. I think you should do it.”

  After that he just held me awhile. Th
en he let me go and evaporated out of the room.

  I laid the cheese and the orange on my windowsill. The best thing I could do, I thought, was sleep some more, without talking or dreaming. But this time, when I closed my eyes, I felt Spencer kneeling on my chest, fists flailing against my ribs. He was my best friend, the first one I’d ever had, the brother who actually liked being around me. I imagined him prowling around his house or slouching on his uncomfortable couch or knocking the air-hockey puck into the goal over and over. And suddenly, it hit me that Spencer had been my friend from that very first sidecarring morning, and I might never see him again.

  Out in the hall, I heard my father’s footsteps moving toward the front of the house. “Come on,” he said. “I’m going to be late for work.”

  “Wait!” I heard Brent snap after him.

  “Just get in the car,” my father said. I’d never heard him sound so impatient. A few minutes later, his Oldsmobile shuddered to life and backed out of our driveway. When he and Brent were gone, I made myself wait a little longer. There was no sound coming from my mother’s bedroom. She was sleeping, I thought. Carefully, I eased the door open and edged down the hall, heading for the kitchen telephone.

  I don’t know why I was surprised when Mrs. Franklin answered, but I was; the sadness in her voice shocked me. I almost hung up. But the thought of that woman holding a dead phone in her hand seemed even worse, somehow, than the idea of her talking to me.

  “Mrs. Franklin,” I said, “it’s Mattie Rhodes, please don’t hang up.”

  There was silence. I jammed the receiver against my ear, listening for breath, crying, anything. Finally, she said, “What the hell do you want, Mattie?”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Franklin.” I felt my lungs crumple like paper bags in a fist, and I couldn’t get any more air in them. Still, I managed to ask, “Is Spencer all right?”

  “Why don’t you ask him?”

  “Can I?”

  Mrs. Franklin let loose a single sob, sharp and hard as cap-gun fire. “Oh, Mattie, of course you can,” she said.

  Our front doorbell rang, but I didn’t answer it. I was listening to Mrs. Franklin calling Spencer. They argued back and forth, and then Spencer came on the line.

  “Hi,” I heard my mother say. I held my breath, tucked out of sight against the kitchen cabinets, while she and whoever had just come in our front door retreated toward her bedroom.

  “Hello?” Spencer said again. “Mattie?”

  “Hey,” I said softly.

  “What do you want?”

  “What do you mean, what do I want?” It felt so good to hear his voice.

  “Did they find Theresa?”

  “No.”

  “Did they find the other kid? James Sea?”

  “You heard about that?”

  “Why are you calling me?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “I’m kind of busy right now, Mattie. I have to say goodbye to my dad. He’s leaving us. For good, this time.”

  “What?” I said. I’d meant to apologize to him, too, and to ask if he’d been to his new school yet. Or his old school, I guessed.

  “I gotta go, Mattie,” he said, and started crying, and before I could say anything at all, he hung up.

  I stayed in the kitchen, holding the phone. There was nothing I could do. I stumbled into the living room, then back toward my room. My mother’s door was open, and through it I saw her sitting on her bed, sobbing quietly on the shoulder of Angie McLean. They had been friends since before I was born. Mrs. McLean was wearing her cream-peach commemorative outfit this time. Neither of them looked up or said anything to me. After a while, they began talking in low tones, but I could hear Mrs. McLean asking my mom about Lake Cleaning Day this Saturday, and my mother sighing. “You’ve got to be kidding, Angie,” she said.

  “’Whatever you’ve got going don’t stop the geese from shittin’ on our beach,’” Mrs. McLean said. “Neighborhood motto, remember.”

  “They’re really still doing it this weekend?”

  “Got my flyer today.”

  “No one wants us there.”

  “Sweep some shit, spread some sand, and they’ll be happy enough to have you. We need to be together. All of us do.”

  Every year, all the families around us, even the ones without children, gathered at dawn on the tiny Cider Lake beach to collect trash, sweep dung, dump new sand in the muck along the shoreline, eat hot dogs with filthy hands, and stare at the sun on the ice, which wouldn’t melt completely for another month yet. I couldn’t believe that Lake Cleaning Day was here already, that anyone would care, that there’d be any kids left to clean the lake for. I scrambled back to my room and resumed pacing, fast and hard.

  That night, my father came home early from work and headed straight for his workshop, as he had almost every night since Spencer’s mock disappearance. But this time my mother grabbed him, shoved him into a chair at the kitchen table, and held him there until dinner. She kept leaping from the stove to him, forcing him to sit back down. My brother came in from school and ignored me, but we all ate together. After dinner, my mother pulled down the Monopoly game from the closet’s top shelf, and all four of us went into the family room and played for an hour or so, collecting, paying, going to jail. I looked at the clock at five minutes to nine and said, “It’s time for the Special Update.”

  No one moved until my father reached across the board and touched both Brent and me on the top of the head. My mother leaned into him, and we held each other that way just long enough for me to glimpse our shadowy reflection on the curve of the television screen.

  Eventually, everyone but me went to bed and left me alone with the game board. I stayed a long time, rolling dice, moving everyone’s pieces around, paying and collecting rent while the wind swept along the windowsills and my house creaked and tilted in the dark. Eventually, I heard Brent traipse to the bathroom, then go into my parents’ room. A little while later, I screwed up my courage and did the same.

  No one looked up or said anything when I came in. My mother was propped on one elbow. My father and Brent were sitting up on the comforter, still as wax figures. I climbed onto the bed beside them, and the world beyond the bedroom curtains seemed to blur. It was as though our mattress had risen, Bedknobs and Broomsticks style, and floated out the window into the starless sky.

  They found James Sea the next afternoon, nestled against the base of a basketball net on a court near his house as if he were waiting for a pickup game. He had an unlit, unsmoked cigarette tucked between his fingers like a stage prop. Like most of the Snowman’s victims, he’d been dead less than twenty minutes when he was discovered. His mother told Coral Clark that he hated basketball, even though he went to the court every day, because he always got picked last. When Mrs. Sea started screaming, the cameras held her face for a second and then flashed away to a picture of her son in his wolverine costume. The picture had been taken in his living room, not at school; he hadn’t put in his needle teeth yet. He was smiling.

  Chapter 24 – 1977

  Lake Cleaning Day dawned clear and cold. I was the first one up, but not by much, and I lay in bed and listened to my neighborhood drag itself into the day. I heard my parents’ alarm go off and they immediately started to argue. My father didn’t want to go to the lake. He said that he’d been out there all goddamn week dealing with the fallout, engaging in a community grief that other people weren’t quite sure he deserved to feel. Every time my mother tried a new tactic, my father would repeat, “All goddamn week.”

  Finally, my mother told him, “Until the day we no longer live here, I plan to be a part of this neighborhood. Even if I’m the scourge of it.”

  “No, no,” said my father. “That would be your elder child.”

  I did not question the burst of energy that sizzled through me right then. It had been so long since I had felt any energy at all. I leapt up, pounded on Brent’s door, and kept doing it until he howled, “Fuck off.” I showered fast,
bundled into two sweatshirts and my Red Wings windbreaker, and threw open the front door to breathe the air. Scrambling back into the kitchen, I grabbed a muffin and stuffed it in my mouth, feeling like a lion about to leap over my own retaining wall. I knew Theresa was still missing. I knew I had wrecked Spencer’s life. I knew James Sea was dead. But I wanted out. My mother came into the kitchen, still in her robe. My father hadn’t even made it to the shower yet. I darted back down the hall and banged on my brother’s door again.

  “Come on,” I urged.

  “No one wants to see you,” shouted Brent as he opened the door and shoved past me into our bathroom, wearing the official Detroit Institute of Arts sweatshirt he’d been given as a prize on a field trip last year. He had never won a school prize before, and my parents kept praising him until he told them to quit it. “Mattie’s won like ten thousand,” he’d said.

  “It’s different now,” I told him.

  “You killed someone else?” He shut the bathroom door in my face.

  I ran back to the living room closet and yanked on my coat, scarf, and boots, which I didn’t bother to buckle before opening the front door again.

  “Will you be warm enough?” my mother asked from the kitchen.

  “I’m fine. Let’s go.”

  She studied me. The circles under her eyes reminded me of Ms. Eyre after one of her surgeries. Eventually, she shrugged and said, “Go on ahead. We’ll come soon.”

  “Is that safe?” I heard my father say.

  My mother gestured at the windows. “The whole neighborhood’s outside, or they will be momentarily.”

  Before she could change her mind, I was off the stoop and running all the way down the drive, though by the time I hit the street, the morning’s stillness had buffeted me down to a walk. Apparently, no one but me was headed for the lake yet. So I walked straight down the center of our street between the shadows of the evergreens, feeling as if I’d just popped up from a crawl space after a tornado. Not until I reached Cider Lake Road did I realize that I hadn’t heard a single human sound since leaving my house. No doors had slammed, no cars had started, no voices announced the presence of other families. I’d heard some birds, the new spring breeze teething on the tree branches, and nothing else. The feeling of freedom had deserted me. I felt like someone suckered out of bed by a doorbell ditcher.