To make sound—any sound at all, even if it was mostly an echo—I began stomping my feet on the asphalt as I moved forward again. Still, no cars passed. A crow plunged off the top of a streetlamp and skimmed my hair. Fly, little bird, I thought. Fly as fast as you can. You can’t scare me, I’m the gingerbread boy, I am, I am. And I can wink you off the face of the earth. I sprinted all the way to the hill above the beach, crested it, and saw a cluster of people standing in a circle on the lake.
My first feeling was panic as my boots fought for purchase on the icy slope. I gave up struggling and let myself fall, sliding face first through the snow and skidding to a stop halfway down the hill with snow up my windbreaker, under my sweatshirts, and pressed against my chest like a cold compress. It brought tears to my eyes, but I let myself lie still, suspended, upside down, until I could identify everyone. Then the shivering started, and I couldn’t imagine ever getting it to stop.
Mr. McLean was there, and Mr. and Mrs. Wetzel, and Mrs. Wilkins with two of her dogs, and others I barely knew, all arrayed in a circle on the ice to the right of the pier. Mr. McLean had one hand on his scarf, the other touching the shoulder of his son, Brent’s friend Davy. Mrs. Wilkins was holding a rake against her side and had tucked one booted foot behind the other. Her head swung, too slowly, tracing the path of her third black Lab, who was loping toward the center of the lake. They looked like the people in the Canaletto painting my father always took me to see. At their feet crouched Mrs. McLean, her old gray work coat pooled around her. She was hovering over a still white form with a white pom-pom, half sunk in the ice.
I shoved myself upright, legs slipping spastically beneath me as I slid toward the shore. I could see Mrs. McLean calling Theresa’s name, though I couldn’t hear her; my ears seemed to have switched off completely. Then she twisted in my direction, and the look on her face was terrifying, savage, though I recognized immediately that it wasn’t meant for me. Both Mr. Wetzel and Mr. McLean dropped into the same spot beside Theresa’s body. They bumped each other hard, and Mr. McLean tipped over, and I heard Mr. Wetzel say, “Move over, goddammit,” and then, “Go, Angie.”
Mrs. McLean’s head dove toward Theresa’s, and her mouth opened wide, like a vampire’s, I thought, and I let out a single scream. No one turned around. I watched Mrs. McLean’s cheeks deflate as she pressed air into Theresa’s lungs, skipping the position-the-neck step we’d learned at school. Mr. Wetzel, whom I had once seen fix a tractor lawn mower with a toothbrush, dropped his palms on the center of Theresa’s chest and crushed down.
“Go,” he said, but Mrs. McLean was already forward again, her hair falling over Theresa’s face as her mouth clamped down. By now, I was close enough to hear her breath go down Theresa’s throat. It made a sluicing sound like wind in a gutter.
I watched Theresa’s chest rise and fall with each forced breath. On Mr. Wetzel’s second set of crushes downward, something snapped inside Theresa like an iced-over branch breaking loose, and someone said, “Dean,” and Mr. Wetzel roared, “Shut up!” as he shoved down again. I winced and jammed my fists into my ears against the grinding sound. He was right, I knew, doing exactly what Mr. Lang had told us in gym: “Can’t get the heart going, they won’t need the rib.”
The third time Mrs. McLean dropped over Theresa, it felt almost as if I was doing it. Theresa’s bow mouth was under me, her nostrils between my fingers, her oxygen-starved blood rippling and squishing against my kneading hands.
Quietly, steadily, Mr. Wetzel counted out loud as he continued pressing, one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, like the rusher in a touch-football game. At five, Mrs. McLean blew into Theresa’s mouth and he started again. One-Mississippi. Two-Mississippi.
“Checking her,” said Mrs. McLean as she rocked back, jamming her hand against Theresa’s throat.
“Nothing,” Mr. Wetzel said as he pushed, and Mrs. McLean blew again. “Fucking goddamn.”
Behind us, the roaring began, and I turned and saw Dr. Daughrety flying down the slope. Even Jon Goblin, who must have been sent to retrieve him, couldn’t keep up, though he seemed to glide over the ground with his white Pumas flashing. Mr. Wetzel kept his count, and when the Doctor barreled through us and attempted to hurl him out of the way, Mr. Wetzel said, “Get off, Daughrety. You’ll put your hands right through her.”
I thought the Doctor might bite him, he looked so wild. Instead, he jerked backward as if he’d been punched.
“Don’t you dare stop,” he said.
“Four-Mississippi, five-Mississippi, never did,” said Mr. Wetzel, as Angie McLean breathed into Theresa, rocked back, and all at once Theresa gagged, spat saliva, and convulsed into a wracking cough.
“Oh, my God,” Jon Goblin said.
Everyone erupted into motion. The Doctor lunged at Theresa again, and this time Mr. Wetzel rolled away onto the ice and lay there.
“Oh, wow,” he said. “Wow.” Mrs. McLean had fallen back to avoid getting kicked by the Doctor. She was on her knees, weeping silently.
I couldn’t look at Theresa. The Doctor was in the way, for one thing, surrounding her with his arms. But also, I wasn’t ready to see her face. I’d gotten used to carrying her inside me like a candle, something I could set alight whenever I needed company.
A kiss landed on top of my head, and Barbara Fox stumbled by. “You’re suffocating her,” she murmured in the Doctor’s ear. “Come on.” But he wouldn’t let go.
Jon Goblin grabbed me around the waist from behind and said, “Hoot-hoot.”
“I can’t believe it,” I said, and then he was gone, off to hug someone else.
My mother came hurtling down the hill, her tan winter coat unbelted and flapping around her, mouth uttering long loud heaving sounds, eyes blinking furiously as the wind buffeted them. She looked like some insane squawking winter duck. Mrs. McLean struggled to her feet and rushed to meet her. They fell into each other’s arms on the shore and collapsed together in the unspread pile of new sand that had been trucked in for the cleanup this morning.
This morning, I thought. And the connection stabbed straight through me. It couldn’t be true. But it had to be. Theresa knew what day this was. Knew. Today.
James Sea is wearing his wolverine costume. He is crying, tied to a chair, the plastic kind with the half back that we have at school. There are lake-shaped stains on the cement floor where something has been dripping for years, and a scratched silver chandelier dangling from the ceiling and twitching slightly in the tricky light like a spider flipped upside down. Theresa tiptoes out of the shadows. She unwraps a ball of silver foil to reveal a pickle sandwich, its sides slick with brown mustard. She holds it to James’s mouth, whispering like a friend, like a sister, the way she never did to me or anyone I knew. James continues to cry, but he also eats. Behind them, back in the shadows, the Snowman kneels, watching. Finally, he speaks. He has a next-door neighbor’s voice, plain and tired. He asks James if it would be all right to leave him on the basketball court near his house. James is crying. Theresa is, too, but she has turned around to stare at the monster. She looks like a hand puppet, her eyes squares of felt. After a long time, James says, “I hate basketball,” his voice slurring as the drug in his food takes effect.
Theresa rests her hand on his forehead, just at the hairline, and whispers to him as he slides into sleep. Then the Snowman steps forward and squeezes James’s nostrils together as though pinching out a candle. Theresa says, “Stop,” tries to scratch his arms, and the Snowman holds her back with his free hand. James doesn’t struggle at all.
My eyes leapt to Theresa’s face where she lay in the snow. She was coughing, jiggling in her father’s arms like a rag doll, but her eyes were wide open and blank and locked on me.
I shook my head, closed my eyes, and opened them again, but Theresa’s stare remained fixed, and the images of Theresa and James kept spooling through my head. All year long, she had seemed so far away. Now she didn’t seem to be there at all. Mr. Wetzel had stopped too soon, I though
t. There were parts of her that hadn’t yet come back to life.
“Theresa,” I said pathetically, “where have you been?” I don’t know if she heard me, let alone understood. Nothing changed on her face. Then she gagged again, hard, and lifted one of her hands and opened it. Out fell a tiny rotted chip of wood, which disappeared into a layer of snow on the ice beside her.
All at once, as though rousted from the trees, siren wails screamed over the hill, and four paramedics and a squadron of police charged down the hill through the snow. “Nobody move,” screamed the first policeman on the beach. He was young, with a black beard, and he was waving a nightstick like a drum major’s baton. “The detectives need to see this place just as it is.”
Policemen and paramedics swarmed the lake. Theresa disappeared among them. I was close enough to see the Doctor dragged to a safe distance by three different cops, including the drum major. Questions got fired at Theresa in choruses. “Can you breathe, can you walk, does it hurt, do you know your name, do you know where you are?” Apparently, none of them generated a response, because a second chorus followed. “Can you tell us where you’ve been, what he looked like, was James Sea with you, what did you see, did he hurt you?”
“Get the fuck away!” the Doctor yelled. “She wasn’t even breathing five minutes ago. She’s in shock, she needs help. She sure as hell doesn’t need you.”
He tried to force the cops back. But behind him, I saw the drum-major cop bending low, and then Theresa’s mouth moving a little. The drum major straightened, stared at us all with his eyes wide open, and then hurtled toward the beach.
“Did she actually say something?” Mrs. McLean said as he rocketed by.
“Only his goddamn name,” said the cop. He powered past my mother, grinning wildly, and ran whooping up the hill. I found myself wondering where Sergeant Ross was, wishing that he had been the one kneeling over Theresa. The news might have made him a little less sad. And he would have been gentler with my friend.
“Where’s Sergeant Ross?” I asked one of the policemen standing closest to me.
“You say something, kid?” he said, in a voice I didn’t like. I blushed and shook my head and edged backward.
Moments later, a phalanx of paramedics lifted Theresa onto a stretcher and carried her toward a waiting ambulance. The oldest paramedic had opened his uniform coat to the chill and held a clear IV bag above her. I saw the plastic tube attached to her arm, the liquid sliding into her skin, and wondered whether it was cold. Theresa didn’t seem to notice, and she didn’t even look up when her father attempted to muscle into the group and grab hold of the stretcher.
“I’m a doctor,” I heard him growl.
“Dr. Daughrety, you’re going to make us drop her,” said the paramedic with the IV bag. Then Barbara whispered to the Doctor and eased him slowly backward. With surprising speed, the paramedics bore Theresa into the ambulance; the Doctor and Barbara jumped in behind, and it squealed away toward Maple.
For the rest of the morning, police roamed the lake in teams of two or three. They studied the ice, the new sand, the road, looking for tire tracks, traces, footprints. They didn’t seem to be interested in the wood chip Theresa had dropped, so I picked it up and pocketed it.
Television vans came too, but this time the police threw up a barricade and kept reporters and cameramen away from the lake. Meanwhile, detectives questioned everyone. The Rhodes family received no special handling or attention. We were simply a part of the neighborhood once again, at least as far as the detectives were concerned, a set of potential witnesses and nothing more. By midmorning, the sun had broken completely free of the cloud cover, showering the lake with yellow light and surprising spring warmth, and everyone began shedding mittens and unzipping jackets.
A few of the neighbors wandered the lake in a silent, bewitched calm. My mother and Mrs. McLean held hands. My brother charged way out over the ice, chasing one of Mrs. Wilkins’s dogs. My father never showed up. Mr. Wetzel picked up his rake, and I half expected him to tell us that the geese shit still needed to be swept away. Instead, he just leaned on it like a cane.
I crouched in the imprint of Theresa’s body. She was alive. Spencer was home. James Sea was dead. I should have felt a little better, or I should have broken down. But I felt nothing. I even looked in the lake at one point, right through the surface of the ice. It was clear and empty and did not reflect me.
Finally, my mother tugged me to my feet. “Come on, Mattie,” she said, and I had a brief flash, what felt like a memory, of learning to walk or maybe swim this way, straining toward her voice years before.
“Can we go see Theresa?”
“Later, Mattie. Soon. We’re going home now. Brent!”
In a miniature V—my mother at the front, my brother and I on either side—we started back up the hill toward our house. The sun made the snowy rooftops wink wetly. Somewhere along Cider Lake Road, I realized my mother was singing to herself, that slow Elton John song she always liked, and I thought of Theresa’s mother. Brent picked up a snowball and packed it tight, looked at me, and then pegged a snowman in the McLeans’ yard.
As we turned onto our street, we saw a filthy gray Pontiac parked in the driveway.
My mother stopped singing and said, “What now?”
The driver’s side door was open, and a curl of cigarette smoke drifted from it. A broad-shouldered man in a brown leather jacket and black ski boots with the buckles undone stepped into the snow. Sergeant Ross looked like a completely different human being without his uniform and his hat.
“Mind if I talk to the boy?” he asked as soon as we were near enough.
I edged closer to my mother. I wanted to be near her, even if she was nowhere near forgiving me yet. “I don’t want to,” I whispered.
“You don’t get to choose, I’m afraid,” my mother said, though not harshly. The sergeant’s hand shook as he lifted the cigarette to his lips, and my mother asked, “Are you all right?”
He dropped the cigarette to the ground, stepped on it, and pressed his hand against his pants as if he were rubbing out a stain. “I don’t know, actually. You?”
“Theresa’s alive,” she said.
“Miraculous thing,” said the sergeant, and then he looked at me, and I couldn’t read his expression at all. “Right, Mattie?” He motioned to me with his arm. I hesitated, watching my mother and Brent go in the house, but then I walked with him down the block, until he stopped between two birches leaning out of the snow like the masts of beached sailboats. He didn’t say anything for a long time.
“She said his name,” I said.
“I heard. Richard Grace.” He didn’t sound as enthusiastic as I might have expected, nowhere near as excited as the drum-major cop. Or maybe—like me—he just couldn’t believe it. “That mean anything to you?”
“What do you mean? It’s his name, I guess.”
“She’s a pretty goddamn lucky girl.”
“Sort of,” I murmured, as the image I’d conjured of the dangling chandelier, the windowless room shuddered through me once more. “I never would have remembered.”
Sergeant Ross looked up, and I felt him staring at me. “Remembered what?” He stepped closer, towering over me.
Same room, same light. Theresa is in the chair now, not tied, and the Snowman revolves around her, the newest strangest sun in his nightmare galaxy. Eventually, frustrated, he asks, “Where?”
And she says, “Saturday, please. At Cider Lake.”
“Lake Cleaning Day,” I said. “Theresa comes every year, same as the rest of us.”
The sergeant’s mouth opened, hung that way a few seconds, and then he said, “You think she tricked the Snowman?”
The Snowman glides behind Theresa, over the stains on the floor, hands motionless at his sides, like a dry-cleaned suit on a moving rack. Theresa just sits, stares straight ahead.
“I think she got him to leave her at the lake because she knew what day it is.”
“Jesus g
oddamn fucking Christ.”
By now I was shaking too. Saying this was even worse than thinking it, because it actually sounded possible out loud. Maybe.
“Is she that smart, Mattie?”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s also possible that she never saw the Snowman at all. Faked the whole thing.”
“Except that she wasn’t breathing,” I said. And suddenly, I hated him. Him, the Snowman, the Doctor, Mrs. Jupp, Mr. Fox, my parents, every adult I knew. “This isn’t a Mind War!” I blurted, unsure what I meant, wanting only to wriggle free of this whole stupid place. Spinning, I ran for my house. Sergeant Ross swore and clomped after me, caught me from behind, and held me against him. The smell of licorice and cigarettes poured over me.
“It must be horrible being a cop,” I said, tears spilling down my face.
He nodded. “Sometimes it is. But sometimes you really do get to help people.”
“Not this time,” I said.
The sergeant waved a trembling hand across his eyes. His words came out weighted, sinking. “No. Not this time.” He stepped to his car, reached through the open window, and withdrew Theresa’s blue notebook. “This is gibberish, Mattie,” he said, and handed it to me. “We’ve kept a copy, obviously, but....”
The front cover had come halfway off the spiral rings. I straightened it in its place. Against my eardrums, I felt a crushing pressure, as though I were underwater in the deep end of a pool.
“We’ve had people looking at this thing who worked on the Enigma code during the Second World War. Do you know what that is? It was once the most complex intelligence code in human history. We’ve had child psychologists comb through every word. And every scribble. And the mixed-up letters we thought might be anagrams. Even the doodles. But all our experts agree that whatever this is, it’s not a code because there isn’t any pattern. A lot of it isn’t even readable. Guessing anything from this is like telling futures in bird guts. If it means anything at all, it does so only to her.” He looked down at me, and the pressure increased, as if he were lowering me away from him. Any second now he was going to cut me loose. I didn’t hate him anymore. In fact, I didn’t want him to leave.
The Snowman's Children Page 27
