As Simple as Snow

by Gregory Galloway

  Mr. and Mrs. Cayne were there. They stood off to the side, and then Mrs. Cayne moved down toward the river and stood in front of the blue barricades. The flames from candles in the crowd threw a tenuous light on her face. She spoke tearfully, thanking everyone for coming and for giving strength to her and her husband. “We still have hope that Anastasia is alive,” she said. “We still have hope that she will be returned to us, safe and sound.”

  Bryce moved to her side and put a reassuring arm around her. He was like a dark tower beside her, with his black stocking cap pulled low over his shaved head, and his long black overcoat. He was smart enough to stand on the other side of her thrashing hair. “I just wanted to assure the Caynes that we’re doing everything we can to help,” he said, but you got the idea that he was talking about himself, not a group. He mentioned his car wreck and how everyone said it was a miracle that he had survived, and he was certain that the same sort of miracle would happen for the Caynes.

  I couldn’t believe that Bryce would speak like that. I was embarrassed by him, embarrassed for him. It wasn’t his place, and then the thought occurred to me that people might expect me to say something. I could feel myself blushing and I moved to the back of the crowd, hoping no one would say anything. No one did, and in fact the crowd slowly dispersed, with some people approaching the Caynes and speaking to them in quiet, somber voices.

  I had reached the road and was heading to a shortcut toward home when I heard Mr. Cayne call out, “Do you need a ride?”

  I looked up to see who it was he was talking to and realized he was looking at me from inside his car. When I didn’t move, he motioned toward me with his gloved hand. I didn’t want to go with him—I thought of him and Mrs. Cayne as somehow responsible for what had happened to Anna. Even if they weren’t directly responsible, they had failed to take better care of her, watch over her, protect her. Isn’t that what they were supposed to do? He motioned to me again, and reluctantly I walked over to his car. Mrs. Cayne was sitting in the passenger seat, looking straight ahead.

  “It’s too cold to walk,” he said. I couldn’t think of any reasonable way out of it, so I got into the backseat. Mrs. Cayne didn’t move. We drove in silence until Mr. Cayne said, “That was nice.”

  “It was nice of Bryce to speak,” Mrs. Cayne said.

  “Have you heard anything more?” I asked. They didn’t have any information that I didn’t already know, or at least they didn’t tell me any. I couldn’t help being suspicious, distrusting everything they told me and the way they acted. I was the one who had lied to them, and now I didn’t trust them. The difference was that I knew I didn’t have anything to do with Anna’s disappearance, but they might have. I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything about them, really.

  Mr. Cayne pulled up in front of my house and I got out. He got out of the driver’s side and came around the front of the car, his body cutting through the beam of the headlights. I waited for him on the sidewalk.

  “Mrs. Cayne is still very upset,” he said, almost apologizing.

  “She has every right to be.”

  He nodded quickly. “I can’t say that I’m not upset. I mean with you. For the other night. It’s just that I also wanted you to know that we are thinking about you, that we know this is hard for you too. Just know that.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did Anna take anything with her that you know of ?”

  “Not that we can tell. Even her backpack is hanging on the back of her chair. We don’t think she ran away. Is that what you’re asking?”

  “No.” I could tell that I shouldn’t have asked in the first place.

  “Well, if we hear anything, we’ll let you know, and we hope that you’ll do the same.”

  “I will,” I said. He reached out and patted me quickly on the shoulder, then hurried back to the car. Mrs. Cayne was still staring straight ahead.

  I realized that there was a connection between my parents and the Caynes: they had now each lost a daughter. Maybe it should have drawn them closer—I wondered if it would. My parents might be able to help them find comfort, but that was probably hoping for too much. I don’t even know if my parents had found comfort. The Caynes were probably better off not knowing them. I could see them using my parents as role models, the Caynes becoming just like them, withdrawn and inactive, quietly removed from the world.

  I went inside and ate dinner, then went to my room. After a while my mother came and told me that Mr. Cayne was on the phone for me. “I just wanted to let you know that I looked all over Anna’s room again,” he said. “She might have taken her purse and her phone. I checked with the police, and they didn’t find them at the river.” He said that he had called her cell and there was no answer, but why would there be, I thought. I spent the night dialing and redialing, just to hear her voice say, “I’m sorry we’re not talking right now, but leave a message and I will get back to you.” It sounded like a promise.

  4 ever,

  There was the problem of her body. They still hadn’t found her, and I wondered how long they would look. If she had gone through the hole in the ice, what would happen to her? Would she be caught in the current and float beneath the ice? How far was the river frozen? I looked at a map and followed the river as it meandered southeast across the state, lazily marking curves across the yellows and greens before widening and spilling into the sea. The river was more than two hundred miles long. Did it all freeze in the winter, the entire length of it? And if it did, could the current carry her all the way to sea underneath the ice? It was like a math problem: If a body weighs 100 pounds and the current of the river moves at 16 miles an hour, how long would it take the body to travel 200 miles? Somebody had to be thinking about this, working through these problems, and once they had been solved, it would be time to work on getting her back.

  I tried not to think about it for too long. It drained me, and I sat in my room and looked at the walls of things she had sent me. She had turned one of my walls into a duplicate of one of hers, each postcard and picture in the same position as on her wall. Our walls were almost identical, a double dactyl. The thought made me smile.

  I looked at a card she had sent me, not on the wall, but taped to the side of my computer. It was blank, except for the sentence, written in her own hand, “The way to solve the problem you see in life is to live in a way that makes the problem disappear.” The words were written in a spiral, in such a way that they got smaller and smaller, circling around the period at the end. The word “disappear” was so small that you needed a magnifying glass to read it.

  I had to wrestle with the options, question which ones I preferred—dead but in love with me, or alive and probably not in love with me? If she were alive, why did she leave? Why did she leave me behind? Had I done something to be left, or to drive her away? But if she left, there was always the chance that she would come back, that she might change her mind, or that she would at least contact me from wherever she was. We had made a code. Why make one if you weren’t ever going to use it?

  Sometimes she closed her notes and letters and postcards with “4 ever,” then signed someone else’s name. She rarely used her own, and she never used mine at first. They were all addressed to me, of course, but she used names that had something to do with what she was writing about. “Dear E.W.,” she started one postcard about Houdini, and closed it with “4 ever, B.,” referring to Houdini’s real name, Ehrich Weiss, and his wife’s name, Bess. Sometimes I had to investigate her references. “Dear Seldon,” a letter began, and ended, “Your friend, Lily Bart.” I often thought that if it hadn’t been for Google our relationship wouldn’t have lasted longer than a week. A few times even the Web couldn’t help. “Dear K.,” she addressed me on 4 January, and started to describe a small Greek island and how we should both go there to look at the moon sometime. “Maybe you will meet me there. Perhaps you will come and look for me, searching frantically, afraid that
I have fallen down a well on the island. There are no wells, teacher. Don’t be afraid. I love you, Sumire.” I thought “K.” might be a reference to Kafka, or to Kerouac. The postcard was a photograph of the Russian Sputnik satellite soaring through a fake blue sky. Sputnik was launched on 4 October 1957 and fell back to earth on 4 January 1958, but I could never find what “Sumire” meant.

  I looked at other cards on the wall, and thought about events that had happened in our months together. The numbers 4 and 14 were recurring details. She had disappeared at 4 in the morning (at least that’s what the police report said) on 2/8 (8 ÷ 2 = 4), not far from Route 521 (5 - 2 + 1 = 4). Our first date had been on 4 October (October is the tenth month, 10 + 4 = 14). We’d gone out for a total of 4 months and 4 days. Her proper first name had 4 letters; the name she preferred to be called, “Anastasia Cayne,” had 14. The significance of the number 4 might be in her initials (A = 1, C = 3). She used “4 ever” 14 times in her writings to me. There were five words in the code she made for us, but only 4 unique ones, and the word “as,” when repeated, had 4 letters total. These were just the 4s I noticed then; there were possibly even more. It was either a maddening coincidence or something planned. I felt that I should know, and that if it was planned it had to mean something. She was trying to say something, and I should be the person to best know what it was. I wanted there to be clues and signposts; I wanted to examine the patterns and find a solution.

  m a p

  Two days after Anna disappeared I received a map. At first I didn’t think it was from her, because there was a real stamp, but after looking at it I had no doubt it was from Anna. It’s funny, the time she used a real stamp, her mail took the longest to get to me. There was nothing in the envelope except the map. She had drawn it herself, and it looked like no other map I’d ever seen; in fact, I didn’t know what it was at first. It was a folded sheet of paper with dots and letters and numbers. The dots were clustered mainly in twos, threes, and fours; there were a few groups of five, and a number of single dots. Near some of the groups were numbers followed by a letter or letters, like 14 EC, or 19 ABH.

  I didn’t want to decipher it; I didn’t think I could stand one of her games, but the more I thought about it, the more important it became. What if it was the last thing she wanted to say to me? What if this was the puzzle that answered what had happened to her, and why—what if this answered everything? I couldn’t ignore it, so I began the unavoidable, painful process of deciphering it.

  I started with the numbers, since only four of them were used on the map: 5, 14, 19, and 23. The clustered dots were arranged in rows, vertically and horizontally, and the numbers were usually at the end of the rows, followed by the letters. There were a greater number of 5s and 23s. They zigzagged through the little rows of clustered dots and into a space marked with an X. Then the idea hit me that it was a map.

  She was giving me directions. The numbers 5, 14, 19, and 23 corresponded respectively with east, north, south, and west. If she used numbers for letters, she must be using letters for numbers, I thought, so EC must mean 53. Did that mean 53 feet? 53 paces? 53 yards? I didn’t know the answer, but I soon solved it by deciding that she had written everything upside down and backward, so you had to read the map opposite to how it appeared. Now I had to figure out where the directions started and ended. That’s where the dots came in. They were the houses in town. Actually, they were the number of people in every house. I began with my street and tried to see whether it was on the map. It wasn’t. That would have been too easy for Anna. It didn’t start at her street either, or Claire’s, or that of anyone else who might be obvious to me. It took me a long time to crack that part of it, but I finally determined that the map started at the first row of houses you could see from the high school library, looking south. Then it was easy.

  I went out and walked off the directions on the map, and went south through town and then into the woods, not far from where we had seen Carl holding his hand over his eye. It was getting dark and I hurriedly paced off my calculations. I got close enough to see her marker. Near one of the trees in the woods, barely sticking out of the snow, was a short stick with her photograph stapled to it. It was just her head, cut out like a mask, wrinkled and wet from the snow. She had pasted pink hearts over her eyes, and across her forehead had written, “Dig here.” I hadn’t brought a shovel or anything to help me get through the dirt. I pushed away the snow and tried to dig at the ground with my gloved hands, but it was too hard and frozen. I put her picture in my backpack and cleared the area of snow so I could find it the next morning. When I got home, I put her picture on the wall, to take its place with all the other faces.

  I couldn’t sleep, thinking about what might be buried underneath that spot. It had to be something important—a key, a solution, an answer to all my questions. Maybe it was the announcement of an elaborate hoax; maybe there was a phone number, and when I called it she would answer and laugh at everyone for believing she was gone, and then she would come back. I fantasized about her return, or even better, that she would invite me to wherever she was and we would be together out of this town. I knew better, but I couldn’t stop myself.

  The next day I ran out first thing in the morning, before school. This time I had a shovel. I consulted the map once I got to the woods, and found the spot. I dug in the ground until I hit a metal container about a foot deep. It was a rusted tackle box. I yanked it out of the ground and opened the lid. Inside were a sealed envelope and a square package wrapped in red paper. I opened the envelope and found a cheesy Valentine’s Day card inside. “What buried box of luck could you not find here? You will find me. You will be mine. Love, Anastasia.” She had drawn an anatomically correct heart with a realistic arrow piercing through it. The arrow had my name on it. The map hadn’t gotten to me too late; it had arrived too early. Or maybe she thought it would take me that long to figure out. In the red paper was another CD she had made for me. The front cover was a black-and-white photograph of a couple buried up to their necks on some sandy beach, straining to kiss each other. The title of the CD was “you stay dug.” The back cover was a photograph of those candy hearts with phrases like “All mine” and “For keeps.” The song titles were printed over that:

  1. Björk—violently happy

  2. The Get Up Kids—valentine

  3. My Bloody Valentine—when you sleep

  4. Cab Calloway—hep cat’s love song

  5. Robert Johnson—from four till late

  6. Matt Suggs—western zephyr

  7. The Byrds—one hundred years from now

  8. Jeff Buckley—i know we could be so happy baby (if we wanted to be)

  9. The Cure—the walk

  10. Felt—all the people i like are those that are dead

  11. Elvis Costello—my funny valentine

  12. Hole—softer, softest

  13. The Band—whispering pines

  14. Bright Eyes—a perfect sonnet

  15. Kate Bush—Houdini

  16. The Sisters of Mercy—valentine

  17. Bob Dylan—blackjack davey

  18. The Stanley Brothers—meet me by the moonlight

  19. The Smiths—asleep

  20. The Flatlanders—keeper of the mountain

  21. The Handsome Family—don’t be scared

  22. The Beach Boys—be still

  I almost put everything back in the hole and covered it back up. I felt cheated. It should have been more. The map and the card and the CD had nothing to do with her leaving; they didn’t answer anything. There wasn’t anything except a joke card that wasn’t funny anymore. If she was still alive I would have been happy about the map and the card and the disc, I would be happy about the mystery and anticipation, and she would be so happy that I had figured everything out, but just then I hated her stupid games and her creepy sense of humor and her music. I didn’t want any of it, or I wanted things the way they used to be, the way they were meant to be, with her standing in the hall at school, and I c
ould go show her the gift she had made for me, and tease her that I had found it a few days earlier than she had expected. She didn’t have everything figured out. I put the stuff in my backpack and headed off to school.

  more mail

  Two days after I received the map, her obituary arrived in the mail. There was nothing unusual about the envelope; it was a plain white business envelope with my name and address typed across the front. There was no return address, and the postmark date was smudged. It looked like double digits, but it was hard to tell. It had come through Hilliker, but that didn’t tell me anything; all the mail in our area came through Hilliker.

  It was an obituary she might have written. It was an infuriating, frustrating, fucked-up document. It was typed, on the kind of notebook paper Anna always wrote on. It was filled with information I never knew about her, which meant either that it was all lies or that I didn’t know her as well as I thought. It also had a number of glaring omissions. It never mentioned that she was dead or how she died; it merely stated that she was “gone,” which could have meant a number of things. It was another puzzle within a puzzle, and I wondered how long the puzzles would continue. I pored over it for more patterns and signs: