Snow Angels

by Stewart O'Nan

  “It’s just all going to shit back there, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess.”

  All my father would say about the killing was that it was a bad business all the way around. He had worked—if briefly—alongside Annie’s estranged husband, Glenn. I did not see my father much that winter, and when I did we spoke carefully, like survivors. He would not say a word against or for Glenn Marchand. There was more to it than we had a right to know was my father’s position. It was not our affair. To me this was as good as him admitting that he knew the whole story. I wanted him to tell me everything because my mother hadn’t and I needed to know. I knew only the rumors and what I could infer from the newspaper, while he had known both parties involved. He did not want to talk about it and I am glad he didn’t, for if he had let me know then how he saw the whole thing I probably would not have understood it any more than I understood why he had left my mother.

  Once a year I go back to Western Pennsylvania, for Christmas. This year Astrid and I have booked our flights into Pittsburgh so we can rent a car and drive up to Butler together, and here we are, cruising through the snowy country in our big Century. I am comfortably divorced; she is still single. Neither of us mentions these facts. We’ll hear them enough when we get home. Over the years it has become a bit of a ritual for me to drive by our old house and stop to contemplate it. It’s a form of stalling, of warming up for the hard part.

  “Can we?” I say.

  Astrid says nothing, but reluctantly slows and pulls onto the cinder berm. All fall we’ve talked on the phone, and she knows I need a little indulgence.

  We sit in the warmth of the car with the radio off. The shrubs have grown up and filled out around the foundation, but the house itself hasn’t changed much. Astrid thinks it’s the siding. On the roof stands a faded Santa, waving. The new people are doing all right. In the last year they’ve added an aboveground pool; it sleeps under a blue tarpaulin. I’ve seen their boy shooting hoops on the drive, and once a daughter shoveling. But what about the inside, is it any different—the tree, the smell of turkey all afternoon while on TV the football games change? We sit in the car and I imagine our father in the basement rec room, lying on the couch under an afghan, his ashtray on the shag rug. A razor commercial jangles, the baseboard heaters clink. The Steelers are beating someone but he is asleep, and our mother shoos us upstairs.

  “Seen enough?” Astrid asks, and when I don’t answer shifts into drive. I will never stop being the baby; all the decisions are hers.

  Carlsen’s field is mud and stubble. Every Christmas our mother marvels that he is still alive, guiding his glass-cabbed Deere over the furrows. A mile off, the Van Dorns’ rises.

  It is here, between, as we approach their house, that the past reaches me. On both sides lie nothing but fields, snow in the ditches, telephone poles. A windbreak of old oaks waves around the house. Astrid doesn’t slow, though I turn from her. The second son, Dennis, is in it now; the side yard is clogged with his projects. Beside a pair of school district vans a camper sits on cinder blocks, beside it a snowmobile, a fat stack of tractor tires. In back leans a small barn, doorless, a car peeking its nose out like a mouse—Raymond’s old Maverick. The house, like ours, betrays little, but the paint is new, and the tin roof and quaint lace curtains. From the porch flies a rainbowed fish windsock, defying the season. I will have to remember that. And then we are past, shooting between the drifted fields. I turn in my harness to watch the house diminish, and Astrid sighs.

  “Are we going to go through this again?” she says.

  “No,” I say, “I’m all done with that.”

  She looks at me as if to say I’m not fooling anyone, then turns back to the road.

  “I guess I should just forget it, right?” We’ve had this argument forever.

  “I’m not saying you should forget it,” Astrid says. “Just stop going over it. Let it rest for once. One year.

  “Right,” I say. “This’ll be the last year. Promise.

  She snorts and shakes her head, gives up on me. I say this every year, but what if this year it’s true?

  Behind us the two houses are blips in the mirror, dots on the horizon, and as we speed along the empty fields they drift with the dwindling perspective and line up like the sights on a rifle, become one.

  Today, after we say hello and get settled, our mother will ask one of us to run out to the store, and before giving me the keys, Astrid will look at me as if to say, I know where you’re going. I will sit a few minutes under the water tower while the snow falls and later tell my mother I had to go all the way into town.

  I don’t like coming home. It keeps me from being nostalgic, which by nature I am. Even before the plane begins its descent, I find myself dreading the questions left unanswered by my childhood. Annie. My parents. My own lost years. I know that once we touch down I will not be able to think clearly, that every remembered Pizza Hut and body shop, every stretch of road I know intimately, will stun me like love.

  The plane I take goes right over Butler. Fifty miles out of Pittsburgh, the pilot drops down under the clouds and I can find the city. It is not much, the downtown clumped around the Main Street section of Route 8, then the bridge, the train tracks snaking with the Connoquenessing, the blue blocks of the Armco mill. Cars crawl up the long hill. I am looking for the aqua dot of the water tower, though it is always some other landmark that jumps out. The mall that used to be new. The post office depot with its rows of Jeeps. The Home for Crippled Children—now the Rehabilitation Center—where my mother still works. Roads crisscross and connect; woods neatly part to let the power lines through. This high up, I feel as if the place I was raised is not such a mystery. Looking down at the farms and fields, the two schools separated by the interstate, the black bean of Marsden’s Pond, I think that, like my sister putting Russia together piece by piece, if I concentrate on the details I will be able to make sense of the whole, that I will finally understand everything that happened back then, when I know that I can’t.

  TWO

  GLENN MARCHAND SLAPS HIMSELF in the mirror, watches the nick fill with blood. He’s already shaved once today, for church, and still has on his good shoes and best dark slacks. His good white shirt and the maroon paisley tie Annie gave him for Christmas last year hang from the bathroom doorknob, safe from the Barbasol and splashing hot water. The Hai Karate was a gift from her too, a birthday, he can’t remember when, but it’s safe, she likes it. It stings like a bugger in the cut. Trying to be too fine, Glenn thinks. He tears off a corner of toilet paper to stanch the bleeding.

  “Don’t want to be late,” his father calls from the bedroom doorway. Glenn finds him in the mirror and waves over his shoulder.

  Frank Marchand rests against the jamb and watches his son leaning over the sink, mouth open, trying to position the tiny triangle with his fingers. Glenn has been home for three months now, and isn’t working. He goes to the fires but otherwise Frank has no idea what he does with his time. Drives around the county. Drinks with his buddy Rafe. Sleeps. The bedroom is a mess, like a child’s; shirts and shoes and 8-track tapes cover the hardwood floor along with bits of Bomber’s chew toys and rawhide bones, all drifted with clumps of dog hair. The room smells of Bomber, who right now is outside in his new house, banished since this morning, when in a frenzy of gratitude he knocked Olive against the kitchen table and spilled everyone’s juice. Frank goes to the window. Bomber seems comfortable enough, paws crossed, his husky’s face split with a perpetual grin. A cold October rain drips from the trees, the light painting the sheets of the unmade bed gray. A Bible lies open on the night table, passages underlined in red pen. On a chair in a dark corner sits a plush bunny Glenn has bought for Tara, a red ribbon around its neck, its arms open as if ready to hug someone. It is nearly the size of Tara, and Frank does not want to think what it cost.

  Every other Sunday it’s the same thing. Frank is not Glenn’s natural father, but that does not stop this fro
m hurting him. Tara is their only grandchild who lives in the state, and Glenn is their youngest. Our baby, Olive still calls him, and it’s true, Glenn has never taken to the world like Richard and Patty. He has a talent for both finding and, lately, losing jobs. Part of it is his charm, the utter optimism he projects. He has a gift for ingratiating himself—like his natural father, Frank thinks, a pleasant, truly harmless man who the last they knew was doing five-to-fifteen in Minnesota for bilking retired couples out of their pension money. Frank has tried to help, lining Glenn up with people he knows. They all like Glenn at first, and then he starts coming in late and calling in sick and doing a half-assed job when he does come in—Frank’s heard it all. It’s baffling; Frank knows he’s a good worker. The kid’s heartsick, his friends down at the Elks tell him, give him time. Olive thinks Glenn would be a natural for sales; he looks good in clothes, he’s smart and he likes people. He does like people, Frank agrees, but Glenn has always seemed more clever than smart to him, and as for his looks, Frank’s no judge when it comes to men. What he loved about Glenn as a boy he now finds tiresome—his even temper, his unshakable faith that things will turn out fine in the end. It’s all false now, gone sour. It’s not just the separation, but recently Frank has had him anchoring hose instead of on rescue like usual. In the clinch Glenn is tentative, and that can get people killed. Frank doesn’t understand what is happening, why this son of his is falling apart at the first run of bad luck. He is willing to take some of the blame but not all; part of it is the new church Glenn’s been going to since he tried to kill himself—the Lakeview New Life Assembly. It’s in a prefab with a ten-foot wood steeple wired on top, and just a step above snakehandling. Frank doesn’t understand—he and Olive raised them all solid Presbyterian. Olive says it’s all right, it’s the only good thing in his life anymore, the only thing that keeps him going. She blames it all on Annie. Frank is tempted but resists; he’s always liked her. She was the one thing Glenn had going for him.

  Glenn has the blowdryer on high. From downstairs Olive calls up, “One-fifteen!”

  “It’s one-fifteen,” Frank hollers.

  Glenn dries his hair another minute as if he hasn’t heard, then stops and starts working on his shirt.

  Frank picks his way through the mess and leans in the bathroom door. “How are you doing for cash?”

  “I’m all right,” Glenn says, but stops buttoning.

  Frank pulls out his wallet, licks a finger and leafs through his bills. “Why don’t you take her out for a treat on her grandad.” He gives Glenn a twenty, knowing he’ll pocket the change.

  “Thanks,” Glenn says. He checks his watch and turns to the mirror to do his tie. Frank points out a dab of shaving cream in his sideburn and Glenn wipes it away.

  “Where are you taking her today?”

  “The lake. Maybe out to the mall. The picture people are there this weekend.”

  “Well, you have a good time.”

  “We always do,” Glenn says with such spirit that Frank wants to sit him down and tell him it’s all right, nobody blames him for what has happened.

  Glenn can’t get the tie the right length and wishes his father would stop lurking. He understands he’s worried; yesterday Glenn talked with Gary Sullivan over at the salvage yard, and he all but promised him a job. When Glenn first came home his mother and father were on him about not working; now they’ve stopped asking. During the week they hardly pay attention to him, then Sundays treat him like he’s up for some award. At dinner they quiz him, then, disappointed, watch “Columbo” in silence the rest of the night. He’s going to get this job and keep it, he can feel it. He’s better now. He’s ready.

  Finally he gets the knot right and buttons the wings of his collar. He peels the piece of paper off his chin. It’s not good but good enough; he’s already late. His father trails him downstairs like a bodyguard.

  His jacket’s on the back of the kitchen door. Nearly one-thirty. Annie will be pissed; her mother wanted her to do some shopping.

  Glenn’s mother comes in from the football game to see him off. She smooths the arms of his jacket, picks at lint. “Say hello for us.”

  “I will,” Glenn says, jingling his keys.

  “Now you remind Tara that next time she’s seeing her grandma and grandad.”

  “I will,” he says, too hard, and he’s sorry. His father offers him an umbrella, an old Totes Glenn gave them years ago, and Glenn guiltily accepts it. His mother wants a kiss, so he bends down and turns his cheek to her powdery mouth. “I’ve got to go,” he says.

  “Then go,” his father says, opening the back door to a humid gust. “Don’t let us old folks slow you down.”

  They stand in the screenporch, watching him cross the yard to Bomber’s house. Glenn has a new blue bandana for him, and Bomber rattles the chain. The rain has let up some. The yard is heaped with wet leaves. Olive knows Glenn will come home heartbroken, and while it is his own fault for not seeing what his wife is, she can’t help but wish things were different. She thinks of the picture Richard sent of his new house in Tucson, Debbie and Becky beside him in the driveway, smiling and tanned. In back they have a pool. Richard has sent them a pair of tickets to visit at Christmas, and though they’ll go, Olive doesn’t feel right about leaving Glenn home alone.

  “I don’t know what to do for him,” she says, arms crossed to stay warm.

  “Nothing,” Frank says. “He’s not a child.”

  “I know,” she says.

  He puts an arm around her as Bomber, set free, leaps onto the tailgate of Glenn’s truck. The bed is littered with cans, and Bomber kicks them around. Glenn waves as he gets in the cab. They wave back as if he’s leaving for good.

  He revs the engine, and Olive sloughs off Frank’s arm.

  “I’m cold,” she says, and goes inside, leaving Frank to watch him off alone. The exhaust comes out in white clouds. The trees drip, Bomber prances. Just as Glenn slips it in gear, Frank remembers the gift in his room.

  “The rabbit,” Frank calls, trying to flag him, “you forgot the rabbit,” but his son is late and thinks he is waving, wishing him luck.

  Glenn realizes on the interstate, approaching the exit for the high school. He whacks the dashboard and shakes his head. “You idiot.”

  The day is ruined for him. He doesn’t see the point of going through with it. He needs everything to be perfect and he can’t even get the easy things right. Just once, he thinks, please. He dreams—though no longer believes—that at the end of one of these Sunday visits Annie will ask him to stay for dinner and maybe some TV, a few drinks. Things will lead to things and who knows, maybe he’ll stay the night, and the next, and the next, and things will be back to the way they were. They have been separated almost eight months now, and not once has this happened. They have taken Tara on picnics together, and to her swimming clinic at the lake this summer, and Annie in the past few weeks has been relatively pleasant toward him, but Sundays he has become accustomed to driving home alone, angry he could even consider a reconciliation. All week he has been priming himself to accept defeat, but to fail before he has even set foot in her door is crushing.

  He slows coming up the ramp and turns onto Burdon Hollow Road. Bomber smiles in the rearview mirror, his fur blowing. Any other day Glenn would have him in the cab, but he’d ruin his suit. It’s not so cold, just wet underfoot. From the bridge he can see clouds filling the valley, half masking the sprawl of town. When they were going out, he and Annie used to park behind the high school and look down at the lights. Now the cops cruise through there and the kids use the lake.

  “Prettier there anyway,” he admits.

  He makes the turn onto Far Line, automatically checking to see if anyone’s nose is poking out of the middle school drive. It’s strange now how well he knows the roads yet is mystified by his old home, his wife, his child. The trees are black with rain. He checks his chin in the mirror—acceptable. Annie didn’t even come see him in the hospital. The only person
he’s really talked with about the attempt is Elder Francis, who says surrendering to a greater mercy was necessary for Glenn to be truly saved. Eventually he was, but first by the county paramedics. His friends from Engine 3 had to chop down the door to the apartment. His father was there watching them work on him. Glenn could see him above the dipping heads, wanted to talk to him, apologize, but the Seconal had already started to work, and the distance between them ran liquid and oppressively heavy, as if he were looking up from the bottom of a creek. When he opened his mouth fingers gripped his tongue. He doesn’t like to think about it, it was a long time ago, it was stupid.

  As he brakes for Turkey Hill he glances over at Clare Hardesty’s, expecting her at the window, noting his arrival. The curtains are drawn but that’s no guarantee she isn’t peeking out at him. He waves, just to make sure.

  And then he is faced with his old home, the white Cape sitting lonely at the end of the road. The woods are so dark that the single streetlight is on. The water tower looms blue and giant. He pulls into the drive behind Annie’s Maverick and hops out, careful of the puddles. The rain’s barely coming down here. She’s already put up Halloween decorations—cardboard cats and jack-o’-lanterns taped to the windows, a wide-eyed scarecrow for the door. Her family was big on holidays. Again, he thinks of the bunny and shakes his head. In back, Bomber is getting frantic, knocking the cans around.

  “You don’t jump,” Glenn warns, then says, “out,” and Bomber goes over the side and bolts past him for the door, spattering his pants with mud. Glenn wipes at it with a hand, then gives up. Before knocking, he thinks next time he ought to bring flowers. He’ll tell her about the job.

  He has had all week, but as she opens the door to him, Glenn finds he is not prepared to see Annie. Her height is surprising, the color of her hair, as if he has remembered her dimly, like an old photo that doesn’t do its subject justice. She has a faded pair of Levi’s on, and a thermal undershirt, and her new glasses. Her face is a mess of red lines—sleeping on the couch, she confesses; they’ve both been sick—but when she smiles at Bomber, Glenn is defenseless and so touched that he is angry with himself and, for different reasons, her.