The Snowman's Children

by Glen Hirshberg

  I know that knock. But I never told him about it. I never told my wife, or my parents, or the police, or anyone else. In fact, I had blocked it out of my conscious life until now. Spencer drops his fist on the table again, just as lightly, and I rattle in my seat.

  “That tap came six, seven, fifty times, how would I know? I was just sitting there, feeding the need, sucking in the silence. Finally, slowly, because that’s how everything happens when the H is in you, I become aware that I’m annoyed. Another six, seven, fifty knocks and I realize why. I ease the needle out of my arm, so I can see the skin and vein pucker. That pucker’s as pleasurable as breaking the skin on new peanut butter, man; I almost suggest you try it sometime. So I float to the door. I find the doorknob and it feels wrong, too small. I can’t get a grip, and I almost fall over when I turn it. But I do. And the door opens. I see my yard and the new snow. And there she is.”

  He goes quiet, and it seems like the silence of his house has slipped out of the story and into this room.

  “She looks ... a little different.” The words come out in clumps, as though Spencer is having trouble getting them through his teeth. “She’s wearing a shiny skirt. Satin, something, like she’s been to a ball, except she’s also wearing a T-shirt that says Rest and You Shall Receive. She has on sneakers with no socks, and that’s it. No jacket, no gloves, nothing. It’s pouring down snow, and she is completely oblivious. Her hair is long and straight, and there’s a lot of it. Tonic!” he shouts abruptly. “And put some damn gin in it. Matter of fact, hold the tonic.”

  Startled, I watch Spencer stare at the table, his shoulders shaking, his skin soaked. After a long time, so long that I start to wonder if the world might be gone out there, the curtains ripple, then part, and the face of the enormous bartender floats through the opening.

  “You say something, Shep?” he says.

  With an effort, Spencer shakes his head. “Just talking to the Big Bartender in the sky.” After five or six long breaths, he musters a smile.

  “He’s got what you need,” says the frog-shaped man, nodding.

  “Yeah, but He’s stingy with it sometimes. Go on, now.”

  The curtains ripple again as the bartender leaves. For a while, Spencer and I look at each other. What I’m seeing, mostly, is Theresa at his front door, her long hair shrouding her face like fronds from a weeping willow. I see her in her drowned-girl costume. Eventually, I ask, “You don’t drink?”

  Spencer sighs. “I’m not allowed to have any addictions whatsoever. I won’t allow it. And you’re not allowed to talk again until I’m done. No matter what I say, don’t say a word. I’m only doing this once. And it’s the last time, ever, until the Accounting.”

  “The Ac—”

  “Judgment Day. Shut up.”

  Without warning, his whole body jerks, as if he has just been de-fibrillated. But his face stays expressionless, and his eyes stay on me.

  “It’ll be all right,” he says, and I can’t tell if he’s talking to me or himself or just repeating a mantra he has used before.

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to— “

  “Not you. It will never be all right for you, not in the way you want. It’ll be all right is what Theresa said when she walked through the door. And I told you not to talk, by the way.”

  I don’t talk. I barely even breathe.

  “She brushed so close that in the state I was in, I half thought she’d walked through me. One of us, I remember thinking, is a ghost, and I was standing there in the open doorway trying to figure out which one when I noticed her hand grabbing mine around the fingers and pinching like a crab claw.

  “By that time, I was pretty sure she was the ghost, because she was so cold she might as well have walked to my house from Troy. Only it wasn’t a house anymore, it was a cave I’d crawled into to hibernate, and now I was being disturbed. I had this single moment of panic, and I think I even managed to stiffen at least one of my legs and slow our progress away from the open door, but the H won, and I got passive. The H told me this was a vision, maybe even an interesting one. That was comfort enough for me.”

  For the first time, self-reproach has crept into Spencer’s speech cadence. I recognize it instantly—it’s an old friend—but where mine is a steady throb, his comes in quick vicious strokes, leaving bloody welts in his sentences and making him gasp.

  “’I’m cold,’ she tells me. ‘Can you make tea?’”

  “I stand next to her and think about that awhile, and then I say, ‘I can make water hot.’ I remember this so clearly, Mattie. Because I was watching it, see? Like a movie. It wasn’t me in it.

  “We go in the kitchen, me and Theresa Fucking Daughrety, and I’m concentrating on my task, and she’s floating around to the table and the windows, rubbing her arms, looking at the snow. ‘Lions,’ she says, and I nod at her, and she goes on anyway. ‘I remember standing next to you and looking out this window for lions, just like this.’ Then she nods and sits down in one of our kitchen chairs. White plastic, red vinyl seat cushions, a little ripped and moldy. I give her a cup of hot water and she wraps her hands around it, puts her face over it, and I sit down next to her and watch her cheeks turn red. Then the whole kitchen goes a little red, to me, as if I’m looking through a filter, or bloody water, but it’s not scary, just red. And sad.

  “I’ve been gone,’ she says, looking at me through the steam.

  “’Welcome home,’ I say, fascinated by her face and not thinking anything.

  “’I can’t...’ She’s clasping the cup like it’s one of those heart pillows people pass around in high school psych classes that give them permission to talk. The effect is intensified by the fact that she has started crying. ‘I can’t get used..to rooms. Spencer.’

  “The sound of my name is like a punch in the chest. It doesn’t wake me or pull me out of my stupor, it just makes everything ripple. It wrecks the high. The smooth. Whatever you want to call it. The question I should be asking does occur to me—I remember thinking about asking it—but it’s easier to let her lead. If she leaves my name alone, I can just float in her wake.

  “For a while she doesn’t say anything, just sits there red and crying, and now the silence is starting to bug me, because she’s in it, like a faucet-drip. So I ask, That water warm enough?’

  “Theresa looks at me, and then she starts murmuring, real fast, and that’s better, kind of soothing. ‘Sea of Vapors,’ she says. ‘Sea of Serenity. Sea of Cold. Sea of Rains.’ Lots of other seas.

  “It occurs to me, after a while, to interrupt. ‘They don’t have rooms, where you’ve been?’ And that shuts her up for a while. The water, I think, is not going to warm her hands, and she’s not drinking it, so it’s not going to warm her mouth or heart or stomach. I think she should make better use of it.

  “’They had...beds. They had areas. With TVs in them. And Yahtzee. I’m good at Yahtzee.’

  “’What does that mean?’

  “’Choosing well,’ Theresa says. ‘It’s about choices.’ And then she just up and tells me about the years since I’ve seen her. Just lays them in front of me, like a fabric salesman. Cool as you please. For the first few months, I guess, afterward—after you were gone—her father wouldn’t let her go anywhere. She doesn’t remember this, understand; she remembers getting lost in windows and rug patterns, and then becoming aware that she was screaming. She remembers Barbara Fox making her apple tea. She remembers running all the way to Cider Lake one late-summer night and swimming out to the raft in her pajamas and standing there rocking and waving her arms in the air and seeing a catfish in the water. Then she went to the place with no rooms, and she stayed there seven years. Then she came home. Then she came to my house.”

  In the dim bar light, with the curtains drawn, I can’t tell if Spencer’s face is soaked in sweat or tears or both. I only know his hands root furiously in the bowl of walnuts but find only shed skin, and he can’t seem to get his mouth around the air anymore; I can almost see it wh
istling past him, through him, as though he were a cave. I also know my own hands are clenched so hard under my knees that my elbows and shoulders ache, the way they do after a tetanus shot.

  “What was the Seas thing?” I finally ask, when the silence has gone on too long.

  Spencer snatches a breath, closes his mouth and his eyes, and for a second he looks almost grateful, or at least relieved. “She told me that,” he says. “Can’t tell you when. Sometime that afternoon. It’s a technique they gave her: listing things. She said it works like an anchor. You drop a chain of things you know, related things, and it helps keep you where you are.”

  “Spencer, please. I don’t understand. Was she all right? Was she ... herself?” Even as I ask that, I decide it’s a stupid question. How would either of us know?

  His eyes open, and I can’t help it: I jam myself back against the padded wall of the booth. The panic and remorse I see there are no longer familiar, no longer like mine. They drill straight down into him, all the way through him, cold and blue and permanent like a millwell on a glacier. “At some point,” he says, “somehow, don’t ask me how, we wound up in the basement.”

  His voice goes quiet, and there are definitely tears in his eyes now, and he’s bobbing up and down on his seat as if he can’t get warm.

  “What I remember is her sitting on the air-hockey table. At some point one of us must have switched it on, because I could feel the fan underneath us. I imagined it lifting us like a magic carpet. Table, I remember thinking, take us elsewhere. But it stayed in the room. Names of things were spooling out of Theresa: kings of England, tropical fruits. She just kept tossing them overboard, but I don’t think they were catching on anything, because I could feel her going rigid beside me, arms gripping the table, voice turning all breathy. Then she went completely quiet for a while.

  “That quiet, Mattie. Of course, in my then-current state, all I could think was, ‘Thank God. Just stop babbling.’ And for a long time—so long I think I forgot she was there—she did. We just floated, aimless as the snowflakes outside. Nowhere to go but to ground. Nothing to do but land and melt. It was perfect peace, brother. As in perfect emptiness. Then she grabbed me.”

  One more time, Spencer goes quiet, but I don’t interrupt him now. When he starts speaking again, it’s as if he’s talking through a phone with a faulty connection, though I can’t tell if the problem is with his voice or my hearing.

  “The problem is,’ she says, ‘I can’t make it stop.’ She’s holding me tight around the elbow, staring into my ear like it’s a crystal ball or something, and I can’t seem to get my head turned to look at her. But right then—for the first time—the smooth cracks. Like a shell, understand? No choice now but to poke my head out. Because it’s Theresa Daughrety next to me, and I can feel her all over my skin, like frozen sunlight. I know you know what being near her feels like. ‘I can’t,’ she says. ‘It won’t. It’ll be all right, but it won’t. Do you see?’

  “I don’t, obviously. But I tell her I do. That turns out to be a bad move. She starts talking faster, chanting it like a mantra, but even iced up as I am, I know this is no tool they’ve given her in the place without rooms. This is the real bad shit. ‘It doesn’t stop. They say he will, they say he does, they say it’s me, but it can’t stop, it won’t, it can’t, it won’t, it can’t,’ and she goes on like that for God knows how long. Ten minutes? Twenty? Two hours? I can’t feel time, just the heaviness in my veins and Theresa’s hands around my arm and the fan underneath us that won’t lift us up, and finally—’’

  Suddenly, surprisingly, Spencer’s eyes drop directly onto mine, and I see the panic still raging in them, and something new too.

  “Mattie,” he says, “maybe you are the person to tell about this. Maybe you’re the only one who could possibly understand. Because you know what it’s like to want to help that person that badly. Remember?”

  The ferocity of his stare is searing; I can’t quite hold it. But for the first time all night, Spencer is talking to me as if we were friends. As if we still might be, someday. I don’t know whether to be terrified of what’s coming—what’s past—or grateful for what is.

  “What do you think I’m doing here?” I say.

  For a few seconds longer, Spencer holds my gaze. Then he drops his head back against the booth padding, takes a last long breath. “All I was thinking,” he says, “all I could think of to do, was make the chanting stop. Push whatever it was that had surfaced back down where it could be managed or ignored. And I’d found such a grand, gorgeously effective way to do that. Do you understand?”

  “Uh-oh,” I say.

  “We were practically sitting on top of it: my stuff. It was like fate. ‘Just wait there,’ I told her, while she went on chanting about stopping, not stopping, he does, he can’t, it won’t. I dropped under the table, unfixed the fan cover, dragged out my little bag of junk, my spoons and lighter and my nice sort-of-sterile needles I’d gotten from my source—my uncle Monster, my dad’s brother, you ever meet him?—and went to work. Got everything ready. When I was done, I got out my black rubber tubing, and then I stood up, right in front of her, and I grabbed her hands, and she said, ‘It won’t stop,’ one last time and went quiet. I looked into her eyes, and it was the old awful feeling, Mattie. That sixth-grade feeling. Because I couldn’t tell if she was even in there.

  “’It might not,’ I told her, ‘but it might sleep.’ And then—I have never done anything, kissed a cross, cuddled a puppy, anything, as gently as I did this—I slid the tubing around Theresa’s arm. It was so pale, Mattie. So thin. Jesus dog. Like a cricket wing. She was weeping. Her veins came right up. ‘There you are,’ I said. ‘Hello, Theresa. I’ve missed you.’

  “I was even gentler with the needle. I swear to God, I don’t think either one of us even felt it go in. I saw her eyes widen as the H bloomed. Then I was so tired I just sat down on the floor.

  “That blissful silence.... It lasted I don’t know how long. Awhile. I was floating along the walls, man, out into the snow, back again. But

  when I drifted down into myself, plugged in my ears like headphones, I finally began to realize just how wrong I’d been.”

  On the table between us, Spencer’s hands fall open, and his head tilts to the side, as though there’s a weight attached to it. “Oh, Mattie. That sound. Like a kitten, mewling. Like something run over. There weren’t any words in it for a while, or maybe I was too bleary to make them out. Then there were words. It’ll be all right. Over and over, like someone dying, just easing themselves right out of the world. I staggered upright, and the heroin dropped out of me. I felt so naked and cold and terrified. Theresa was bolt upright on the table with her legs kicked straight in front of her, and she just kept saying that. ‘It’ll be all right. It’ll be all right.’ And then...and then, and then, and then....

  “The first seizure hit her like a wave in the air, just slammed into her, and she lifted up on her hands and twisted and her hair flew out, all wild, and then she folded down and started shaking. ‘Jesus Christ, Theresa,’ I said, and I flew up the stairs for blankets and came back down, and she wasn’t speaking anymore, just mewling, and after a while she wasn’t doing that either. She’d go still for a few seconds, as much as a minute, before the next seizure hit her. Her lips kept flapping as if something was strumming them, and her eyes went crazy, spinning all around; it was like a cartoon. I didn’t know what to do, and I couldn’t get it to stop, and this went on forever.

  “It was so bad, Mattie, so terrifying, that I swear to you I don’t even remember my mom coming home. I just noticed, after a while, that she was beside me, crushing Theresa against her and rubbing her up and down and telling me to get hot water and not looking at me. Upstairs, waiting for our dented metal kettle to boil again, I noticed it had gone dark outside. You remembered wrong, Theresa, I was thinking. This is when we looked for lions. In the dark. When they were really there and we couldn’t see them.

  “Then we were at t
he front door. My mother with that stupid gold coat, not even shiny anymore, wrapped around Theresa, who wasn’t really walking. ‘You understand, Spencer,’ my mother told me, ‘you may wind up in jail. He’ll press charges.’

  “I just stared at her. I wasn’t high anymore. I wasn’t anything. ‘The Doctor?’ I finally said. ‘You don’t have to tell him.’

  “My mother stared back, and her mouth opened, and for the first time she was crying. At least, I noticed it for the first time. ‘Yes, I do,’ she said. ‘I can’t stand this right now. Don’t be here when I get home.’

  “They were halfway to her car when it occurred to me to lean out the door and ask, ‘Do you mean ever?’

  “And my mother turned around. The color in her hair was too cranberry once she started dyeing it. She never could get it right. She was shivering in her too-thin sweater as she held Theresa. ‘I don’t know, Spencer. I don’t know.’ And that was the last I saw of her, or anyone else I knew, for roughly six years.”

  With a slap of the tabletop, Spencer flees the booth, and I hear him banging between tables through the bar. I don’t chase him. The blood, it seems, has frozen in my chest. I can see them, Mrs. Franklin and Theresa, pulling out of that yard, through the whistling snow. The black ribbon in Theresa’s hair shakes when she does. I can see Spencer in his socks on his porch, screen door pushed open, freezing air swirling around his feet. It’s like the film’s stuck. That scene just keeps repeating. Spencer and me in doorways, Theresa wrecked and hurtling away.

  A long time goes by, enough for me to wonder if Spencer has left me here, with no way back to my car, no clear idea of where I am. I haven’t heard any noise beyond the curtain in quite some time, so maybe the bartender has gone too. If I’m alone, I am thinking, I might just lie down on this bench booth and spend the night here. The effort of throwing that curtain back, finding a phone, dialing information, calling a cab, describing where my car might be, retreating to the hotel, all the simple actions of coordinate location and signal emission that those of us who don’t rely on banks of memorized names of things use to maintain the illusion of a place in the world, seems too much to manage.