Summer Snow

by Nicole Baart

  “Okay, God,” I whispered in a moment alone by the canned goods, “I give in. I’ll go find Janice.”

  Until

  THE CAR WAS warm and quiet, the radio so low I couldn’t make out the song that was playing. I had practiced what I would say to Grandma, how I would break the news of Janice and Simon’s whereabouts to her, and the words were fresh on my tongue as I swung open the door and clicked my seat belt on. But I didn’t have to say anything. The leaden feeling in the pine-scented interior of Grandma’s car told me that she already knew.

  When she didn’t put the car in drive and didn’t bother to greet me with her usual query—How was work?—I turned to face her. There was a shallow pucker in her cheek where she was biting it, and she looked hesitant, unsure. She was terrified to tell me, and I was about to make it easy for her when she spat out, “I know where they are.”

  “I do too,” I confessed without preamble.

  “You do?” Her eyebrows shot up almost comically.

  “We live in Mason,” I reminded Grandma grimly. “Everyone probably knows by now.”

  She exhaled disapprovingly and rubbed her temples with gloved hands. “Always gossip but rarely good,” she mused. I couldn’t help being cynical and instinctively rephrased her grievance in my mind: Always gossip, never good. “Why don’t people ever do anything when they hear these sorts of rumors?” she wondered sadly.

  I felt like I should respond, or at the very least shrug, but it seemed like altogether too much effort. I was exhausted. Instead, I reached over and turned the heater up. I had shivered all afternoon.

  Grandma sighed and put the car in gear, heading cautiously out of the Value Foods parking lot. She pulled up to the stop sign on Main Street and put her blinker on to turn south. A little wave of apprehension swept over me. The farm was in the opposite direction.

  “Where are we going?” I asked carefully, watching a handful of cars drift past. The roads were just slippery enough that cars appeared to float across them like drops of oil skimming along the surface of water. They were dangerous only if you didn’t know what you were doing—if you accelerated too quickly, stopped too abruptly, switched lanes thoughtlessly. Though she had lived in Iowa nearly her entire life, these kinds of driving conditions always made Grandma nervous. I wished that I had offered to drive. I would point the car toward the farm, where we could talk things out before we did anything rash.

  But Grandma had thought everything through. “We’re going to get them,” she said matter-of-factly.

  I swallowed. “And … ?”

  “And we’re going to take them home,” she finished. “What would you have us do? Rent them a room with all that extra money from my social security check?” Grandma wasn’t being sarcastic; she really saw no other way.

  I had hoped to go home, make myself a good hot cup of Mrs. Walker’s homemade, pregnancy-friendly strawberry tea, and sit down with Grandma to meticulously go over every possible scenario. A wicked little corner of my heart wondered why we couldn’t just leave them to their own devices. Janice had lived without my help—or even my very existence—for ten years. Surely she didn’t need it now. But of course we couldn’t leave them in the cold. And though I knew that with certainty, I had almost desperately schemed all afternoon, waiting for another option to present itself.

  The first feasible one that had crossed my mind was the Walkers. They had an enormous house and hearts to match. … Yet somehow I couldn’t imagine asking them to do something so monumental. Baking cookies together was one thing; taking in my hapless would-be mother and her unknown son was quite another. I couldn’t bring myself to do it even if I thought it was the most viable solution.

  The only other alternative I had come up with was contacting the pastor at Fellowship Community. Reverend Trenton was elderly and unpretentious—boring but docile and utterly harmless in a sweet and grandfatherly way—and I knew that his heart would shatter into a million pieces if he knew such a need existed in his small corner of creation. But what would he be able to do? Drum up enough money to keep them in the Mason Inn for a few more days? Bundle Janice and Simon off to some halfway home or maybe to one of the safe houses for victims of domestic abuse? None of those options felt right.

  I opened my mouth to offer Grandma one of my grand ideas anyway. “What about … ?”

  “You have another idea?”

  “No.”

  We headed south.

  “I fixed up the sewing room for them,” Grandma informed me. “Everything is moved along one wall, and when we get home, you can help me pull the mattress downstairs from the attic. They can sleep on that until …” She broke off, letting the uncertain word hang in the close air of the car. It fluttered against the lids of my closed eyes, demanding consideration that I was unwilling to give. Until. Until when? She didn’t say any more; she didn’t have to.

  I can’t do this, I thought, shoving panic aside with hard, angry sweeps of steely concentration. The sewing room was directly beneath my attic bedroom; Janice would sleep a mere floor away, her body only feet below mine, a shadow of my own twisted limbs and pounding heart as I tried to sleep, tried to forget that she was there.

  “Everything is going to be all right,” Grandma assured me, reading my mind. I wanted to believe her, but her promise felt hollow.

  Everything is going to be all right, I echoed silently, willing myself to have faith in words that sounded so easy, so trite.

  There was no car at the gravel pit. In some preoccupied daydream I had imagined that we would drive up to the little lake and they would be there, needy and vulnerable, simply waiting for us. Like something out of a movie, we would glide onto the snow-packed lane and pull up behind them, reluctant heroes but heroes all the same. Janice would be penitent and tearful and, of course, forever indebted—as if she wasn’t already. But Grandma and I drove around the empty lot a few times and eventually had to admit that our rescue was poorly planned at best and completely unnecessary at worst. Besides the crisscrossing tread marks of a few different vehicles in the snow, there was no sign of life whatsoever in the deserted, modest park. For a moment I imagined that they were already gone, that they had moved on and we had missed our chance. I had missed my chance.

  “Five fifteen,” Grandma observed, glancing at the clock on the dashboard.

  “Maybe they’ve left.” I tried to say it indifferently, but my words came out barely above a whisper.

  “They haven’t left,” Grandma was quick to reassure. “Where would they go?”

  The guilt I felt was immediate and churning. Where could they go? Though we could hardly consider ourselves acquaintances, much less family, Grandma and I were all Janice and Simon had in Mason, maybe in the world.

  Janice’s family—Eli and Margaret Wentwood and their only, very spoiled, daughter—had moved to Mason when Janice was in high school. Eli was the newly acquired philosophy professor at Glendale Hill University, a small liberal arts college a twenty-minute drive from Mason. The formidable Dr. Wentwood had his doctorate from Cambridge, and Glendale hadn’t seen someone with credentials like that in all their fleeting sixty-some years of existence. The Went-woods were practically celebrities in Glendale, though they had moved to Mason instead of settling in the quaint college town.

  Their decision was based primarily on an enormous, turn-of-the-century three-story Victorian that graced the corner of Eleventh Street and Hamilton Road. I had been told that they worked magic on the house, restoring the sagging wraparound porch, stripping and repainting the gorgeous cedar siding, and otherwise breathing life into arguably one of the most beautiful buildings in town. But they’d had a much harder time carving a niche for themselves in the hearts of their neighbors and community.

  Bluntly said, they were total snobs. In a close-knit, hardworking, and no-nonsense town like Mason, Eli and Margaret’s superior attitudes and affectations did not endear them to many people. Maybe they regretted not settling in Glendale, where their welcome would have bee
n much more enthusiastic. Maybe they would have stayed in Iowa if things had been different. But when they left after only three years, no one mourned or missed them. Almost twenty years later, I doubted many people even remembered them—or their lovely daughter. Even when Janice stayed behind to marry my father in complete opposition to her parents’ compellingly voiced wishes, her actions did not assure her any friends. In fact, most lamented the fact that one of their own—the sweet and studious Daniel DeSmit—had fallen prey to her devious charms. Janice had no one in Mason, and while I wished it could remain that way, I couldn’t escape the fact that she should, if nothing else, have us.

  Grandma and I stared at the pond for a few minutes, watching the wind run trembling fingers through the barren branches of the trees along the water’s edge. The shallow lake was nearly frozen solid, covered in peaked, diminutive waves that were whipped up by the wind and frozen in the same icy breath. I tried to picture Janice and Simon spending the night here, overlooking the water and following the moon’s slow progression in flawed reflection across the uneven surface. It was a fate I couldn’t resign even Janice to.

  “Let’s wait,” I said.

  Grandma shook her head. “Let’s go have supper at the truck stop. We’ll come back later.”

  The south edge of Mason boasted a dumpy little truck stop and café that was undoubtedly the very restaurant where Simon had had pancakes for breakfast. Had it been only two days ago? I pictured them sharing a booth in that greasy spoon, a dingy place with perpetually dirty windows and a menu full of fried foods and breakfast items. Even a side salad, the healthiest option available, came disguised beneath a mountain of shredded cheese, buttery homemade croutons, and great dollops of nearly any dressing imaginable. The house special was a local favorite: mayonnaise, sugar, and a little vinegar whisked into a thick and frothy substance that resembled vanilla pudding. It was delicious. In spite of myself, my mouth watered at the thought of the beer-battered onion rings, and I wondered if Simon had experienced the pleasure of tasting them.

  Although I thought of Janice and Simon the entire way there, I wasn’t ready for what we saw when we walked through the door. They were seated in one of the red vinyl booths only feet from where we stood on the soaked and grimy rug immediately inside the grease-scented building. Grandma hummed a little note unconsciously—a distinctive mannerism alerting me that she had half expected this all along. She always hummed a small note when she was right. I felt stupid for not putting two and two together. It made sense; the vagabond pair could hardly sit in their car all evening and all night, and no one would ever dream to kick them out of the truck stop as long as there was a cup of coffee in front of Janice. They had probably half lived here for days.

  Grandma reached for my hand and squeezed it briefly, asking me with her eyes if we could proceed.

  I took a deep breath, nodded.

  When we stepped to the table, Janice slid her coffee cup toward the edge and continued to look at the bifold dessert menu. “Just a warm-up,” she said softly.

  I didn’t know how to respond, but I didn’t have to because Simon looked up from ramming two Hot Wheels into each other and exclaimed, “Mrs. DeSmit! Julia!”

  Janice’s head jerked up. Her eyes were defiant, full of suspicion, and defensive all at once.

  I remembered those eyes, and for a moment everything made sense. This was how I knew Janice; this was what I had daydreamed about before she appeared on our doorstep—melancholy daydreams without closure, simple wonderings of what it would be like to see her again. In my mind, we always circled each other like wary animals, testing and sniffing the air before admitting we would never be able to do more than move around each other. Close enough to touch, forever distant. I could deal with this woman. I did not understand her, but I knew her.

  I began to harden in response to her, but just as my soul shifted to accommodate the inflexible mother I thought I knew, her face fell. Immediately she looked defeated, sad—she was again the woman on the porch. I could see her more clearly after a few days of coming to terms with her return. Janice looked misused to me, her mistakes less her own than the sorry consequences of what had been done to her. But what had been done to her? Surely no hurt, no amount of misunderstanding could exonerate her, magically switch her role from offender to victim. I could not bring myself to pity her.

  “Nellie,” Janice said slowly, blinking as though she had just come in from the dark. “Julia, hi. Please have a seat.” She slid deeper into the booth and motioned for Simon to do the same.

  Grandma shook her head. “No, thank you, Janice. It looks like you two are about done.”

  “I had a glass of chocolate milk,” Simon said proudly, tipping the empty Styrofoam cup toward us as evidence of how much he had enjoyed the treat.

  “Aren’t you lucky?” Grandma smiled. “When Julia was little, we only had chocolate milk on special occasions: birthdays, Christmas. …”

  “Mom says I can have chocolate milk whenever I want,” Simon boasted. “It may be chocolate, but it’s still milk.”

  “I guess calcium is calcium no matter how you get it,” I muttered. Janice had not bothered to buy me chocolate milk when I was five.

  Janice cleared her throat almost as if I had spoken my silent contemplation. “What can I do for you ladies?” she asked politely. “Are you here for supper?”

  Grandma reached out to touch the scruff of Simon’s unkempt hair. She rubbed it absently as she looked meaningfully at Janice and said, “Actually, I wanted to talk to you. I’m glad we found you here.”

  “You want to talk to me?” Janice repeated uncertainly.

  “Alone,” Grandma clarified, turning to smile at Simon. “Can you stay here with Julia? I’d like to talk to your mom alone for a minute.”

  Simon nodded seriously. “Here, Julia,” he said, handing me one of the toy cars. “I’ll use the red one and you take this one. It’s called the Gov’ner. That’s what it says on the bottom.”

  I accepted the car hesitantly. I hadn’t planned on Grandma and Janice working this whole thing out on their own. The conversation should have included me. I should have had the opportunity to speak my mind, to let Janice know that though we were inviting her into our home, she had not been forgiven—all had not been forgotten. But I couldn’t make a scene in front of Simon. Janice crept tentatively out of her seat and I resentfully took her place.

  “We’ll be back in no time,” Grandma assured us. By the slant of her half smile I could almost believe that they were going to speak of pleasant things—surprise parties or occasions for chocolate milk, maybe. But I knew better.

  I watched them walk away and was stunned to see Grandma grip Janice’s elbow as though she were supporting the younger woman. Their heads were almost exactly the same height, and from my angle they could have been any mother and daughter, silver head tilted toward fair. They looked almost comfortable.

  “How are you doing?” Simon said conversationally, jerking my head back to the table and the boy that shared my blood.

  “I’m okay,” I answered, cocking an eyebrow at him. He was unusually mature for his age. It was a little disconcerting. “How are you doing?” It was only polite to return the question, even if he was just a preschooler.

  Simon thought for a minute. “I’m okay too. Mom says I should tell people that I’m good when they ask me how I am. She says that they don’t really want to hear how I’m doing. But you said that you were okay, so I can say that I’m okay too.”

  Part of me wanted to laugh, but another part found his explanation somehow depressing. “I’m sorry that you’re just okay,” I eventually offered. “I hope that next time we see each other you are doing very, very good.”

  “Me too!” Simon chimed brightly. “Wanna see how fast my car can race down the ramp?” The somewhat somber mood instantly forgotten, he propped a laminated menu against the windowsill and perched his car at the top. “You catch it before it falls off the table.”

  We
had only raced the cars down the makeshift slope four or five times when Grandma and Janice returned. I hadn’t expected them to come to a conclusion so quickly. I tried to read either woman, but Grandma’s smile was fixed and Janice refused to look at me.

  “Simon, honey,” Janice said, crouching down, “let’s go, all right? I have something to ask you.”

  “I want to play with Julia,” Simon complained. It was the first time I had heard his voice border on whiny.

  “Later, buddy.” Janice reached for his coat and helped him into it. She stole a glance at me over her shoulder, and in that one look I knew she had accepted Grandma’s offer. I didn’t know whether to be disappointed or happy.

  “I gotta go, Julia,” Simon said. “You can keep the Gov’ner until I see you next time.”

  I was disarmed by his generosity. “No, Simon, you keep it. It wouldn’t be fun to play with it without you.”

  “Okay.” He gave in without much of a fight, accepting the car from my hand. “Next time we’ll make an obstacle course.”

  “Next time,” I agreed.

  When they were gone, Grandma took my hand and led me out to the car. “Janice is going to tell Simon and meet us at home in a half hour or so.”

  “She agreed to stay with us?” I asked pointlessly.

  Grandma didn’t even bother to answer. The same silence accompanied us as we drove the cold highway home.

  I insisted on getting the mattress down from the attic myself. A few minutes alone in the chilly air of the poorly insulated loft sounded like a tropical getaway to me. It would be easy, I convinced Grandma. All I had to do was tilt the monstrosity on its side and push it down the stairs. I could tell she wanted to argue, but there was no disagreeing with the edge in my voice. She let me go.

  The closed-off storage room was just down the hallway from my bedroom. We nailed an ancient quilt across the door in the winter-time and laid old boards against the bottom to stop drafts from seeping into the house. I pulled the quilt aside and set the boards against it to hold it in place. The room was cold and dry and dusty smelling. I sank to the floor in the middle of it, neglecting to even pull the chain on the single-bulb light and dispel the darkness. Though I should have planned or prepared myself or even prayed, I did nothing. I breathed.