I am picturing both my friends lifted off the ground by the swirling snow, gently shaken apart by the relentless wind, and scattered amid the Tonka trucks and frozen dirt of Spencer’s parents’ front yard. I hate that it happened, and I hate that I wasn’t there for it, wasn’t a part of it, which just makes me feel sicker, even more screwed up than I generally do.
The curtain slides back, and Spencer slips into his seat across from me. His eyes are dry, flat, his skin wiped clean of tears. He has left the curtain open, and I can see the red room, the stools stacked upside down on top of tables, the jukebox dark.
“Now, of course, you see, right, Devil?” Spencer says.
I look at him and say nothing.
“You see why we can’t go after her. Why we need to leave her be.”
“I don’t understand this, Spencer,” I tell him. I don’t want to fight or rouse his anger. But his attitude baffles and infuriates me. “Your story only makes me want to find her more. And it doesn’t explain why you don’t.”
“That’s because you’re one dense narcissistic pup.”
“What if she needs us? What if she needs to find us too, but she’s not capable of it? She doesn’t even have the Doctor anymore, and God knows what family she had in Cleveland, or where Barbara Fox went. Jon Goblin said Barbara hasn’t been seen by anyone he knows since the Doctor’s memorial service. He thinks she may have gone back to Africa or something. And that means we could be the last two people in this world who actually know her.”
“Ah. So you feel we know her, Mattie. That all the positive effects we have had on her life give us some sort of propriety, or at least unique insight.”
“We know what happened to her.”
“We do?”
I feel myself flush. Pretty soon, I’m going to start screaming. “We know she was gone. We know she came back. We know that while she was away, she must have...”
“Right,” Spencer says, letting the long silence linger.
My hands clench on the table. “Come on. She had to have been there, right? Probably, she had to have been. You’ve thought about it, don’t tell me you haven’t. She had to have seen. And even if she wasn’t actually with him, didn’t see anything, whatever she went through changed her forever, and it—”
“How do you know?” says Spencer, his voice low, determined, like a motor left running so it won’t freeze. “You haven’t seen her since the day she came back. Am I wrong?”
“Am I wrong?” He doesn’t wait for my answer. “You don’t know what happened, because no one does. You don’t know she’s different, because you don’t even know where she is. And if you remember, neither of us exactly understood what was going on with her even before it happened. Not for lack of trying, I’ll grant you. But we didn’t, Mattie. And it’s too late now.”
“What if she needs us?” I find myself saying again, because I can’t think of anything else, and because I want to stop talking about where Theresa went before she returned, because I’m not ready to face it again. Not while I’m awake. I face it too damn much in my sleep as it is.
“You’re not here for her,” says Spencer. “You’re not doing this for her.”
I put my hand up, nod my acceptance, and then stop with my mouth halfway around the words. I think about it, then say, “I’m here for me. Of course I am. Is that what you’re waiting for me to say? You’re the public servant now, but I’m the same old selfish bastard? Okay. But I’m also here for my wife, my parents, maybe my brother, and the Foxes, Theresa, for sure. You, for sure. Plus Amy Ardell, the Cory twins, and James Sea.”
“Don’t you say that name. I don’t want to hear it from you. As a matter of fact, get up; I want to take you home now.”
Before I can argue, he’s out of the booth, dropping a twenty on the table. The bartender, I sense, has gone. The Marlboro clock above the bar reads two-twenty.
In Spencer’s car, with the heater gushing and the headlights drilling into a city dark more total than any rural emptiness I’ve found in Kentucky, Spencer’s story wriggles around like some hideous new fish in my internal aquarium of horrors. I let it settle, circulate. Spencer says nothing, just shivers a lot, and because he’s so gaunt, I keep expecting him to rattle like a maraca. But he also looks young, despite the thinness and the obvious wear in his face, the surprising gray along his temples.
To my amazement, I realize that not everything I’m feeling at the moment is bad. In my own only slightly mythologized nightmare, it has always been the events of that one Detroit winter that cast me adrift, left me frozen and bewildered in a relentless private snow. But now, I’m not so sure. Maybe the Snowman isn’t what blocked me from life; in a way, he is the force that sucked me into it. He was, along with everything else, the first experience I was ever sure I shared. I shared it with this man, who won’t look at me and who may never want to see me again. We share him still.
“Spencer—” I find myself saying as we turn by the church, and then I stop because I’m not sure what he’s willing to hear. I point to my car, and he brakes beside it but leaves the engine running. We sit, and I stare at the dark houses and make myself wait. The house nearest the car has no windows, just cardboard and black tape in the empty spaces.
“You’re easy to be friends with, Mattie,” Spencer says, and his majestic voice softens. “You’re smart. You’re relatively insightful. You mean well, genuinely seem to mean well, and that turns out to be a rare and extremely seductive quality.”
“Does that mean you’ll come with me tomorrow?”
“It means get out of my car.” He punches a button, and the locks spring open. “Get out, and don’t ever come back. For your own sake, and if that’s not enough inducement, then for mine. I want my life the way it is. I want the people in it, and the community I’ve joined. I want the little bit of God I can taste, because sometimes, Mattie, I really can taste Him. And if that’s still not enough, how about for her sake?”
“What do you mean?” I say steadily. When he doesn’t respond, I feel a rising desperation that should, it seems to me, have more anger in it than it does. “You can’t disconnect from me that easily. And neither one of us is ever going to disconnect from her, and you know it. Maybe, if we help her, you’ll even feel like you deserve what you have. You don’t seem to feel that way now.”
“Get out,” Spencer whispers, and then sits with his mouth gulping at nothing. I don’t move. After a long while, the gulping slows, and his shoulders sag. The tears are back in his eyes, but there’s also a bent little smile on his face. It’s very nearly the sidecarring smile. We really were, for that one year, tremendously good friends. “Mattie. You idiot. You poor misguided soul. Don’t you see? There are two possibilities. Either she’s safe somewhere, and better; her dad and Barbara dried her out, and she spent a few more years listing phyla of extinct fish and candy bars that start with c, and then she got free one day and she’s somewhere else now—Boston, maybe—watching the snow out her window and thinking about cleaning she needs to pick up and living a real live life. Or”—he looks at me, and I can’t bear it, the tears in there, the still-flickering fire of the boy I knew, for not even one year—“or she’s somewhere with no rooms. Either way, Mattie. Either way. Think of what both of us must represent to her.”
Through my own tears, I see him lean his face into the nearest vent, bathing in the dusty horrible heat. I resist the impulse to touch his shoulder or do the same thing, out of solidarity, contrition, something. “The thing is, Spencer,” I say, “I don’t know what I represent to her. I never knew. I admit it. You might be right, completely; we could be the monsters in her memory. But we could also be the only people left on this earth who are still out hunting for her, calling her name.”
“We were never that, Mattie. Don’t you see? We thought we were. We told ourselves we were. That’s how it happened. I will never let it happen again. Never. So the answer is no, my old friend. My most dangerous companion. I will not help you. I will not come wit
h you. I will not even wish you well.”
“Great to see you too,” I say, and kick the passenger door open. The cold is a fanged thing and rips at my face.
“I didn’t say it was bad to see you,” I hear Spencer murmur, and when I turn around, he’s looking at me, mouth pursed, eyes still wet. “Not all bad. God, Mattie, I can see him. I see him floating in his car in that goddamn lake—with his eyes open....”
“Me too,” I say, as gently as I can. “And I imagine Theresa sitting at some window—”
“Stop, okay? Just stop. Please. Let it go.” He squeezes his eyes closed, drawing more tears. When he opens them again, he is looking straight through the windshield.
“You’re sure?”
He shakes his head, holds his breath, and lets it out slow and even. “I’m sure of nothing, Mattie. Except that I’m still here. That some days I do some good for some real live people. As for Theresa Daughrety ... I just can’t afford the risk. Neither of us can.”
Chapter 15 - 1977
He came to us through the air vents in my parents’ home. Between bursts of heat, we could hear my father and mother talking, the TV turned low, the wind whistling through the icicles. All of them were saying his name. At Stroh’s Ice Cream one Saturday night, Brent and my mother and I sat silently over hot-fudge sundaes and listened to two bald men in matching m go blue! jackets arguing.
“He takes them downtown,” the one closer to us said, and sucked up a mouthful of chocolate malt with an audible slurp. “Bet you. There’s so many abandoned buildings down there, he could have his pick. He keeps them there until he’s bored, and then that’s it. He kills them.”
“But what does he do with them for two weeks?” said the other. “Challenge them at checkers? Take them for riverfront strolls?”
They went on like that awhile, but I stopped listening. By now, speculation about the Snowman seemed routine, as familiar a thread in the conversations around me as cursing the Lions or Jimmy Carter peanut jokes.
Amy Ardell, the Snowman’s fourth victim, was found on Cavanaugh Lane near the Oakland Park Cider Mill, ten minutes from where we lived. He’d laid her in the snow on a city councilman’s lawn with her clothes freshly washed and her coat zipped. I used to lie in bed wondering why he took such care and somehow came to the conclusion that he was protecting whatever remained in her body after it died. Keeping it warm.
This was mid-January. The weekend afterward, Spencer came to my house to sleep over. Theresa came too, and she was supposed to stay late, but right after dinner Dr. Daughrety called and demanded that she come home.
“Of course,” my mother kept saying into the phone, her hands in her yellow rubber dishwashing gloves, her hair creeping toward gray as the latest dye treatment faded. Her cocked hip brushed against my father’s where he stood, utterly still, his eyes on his reflection in the window or the dark beyond, one hand wrapping and unwrapping a dish towel around a fistful of forks. By the time my mother hung up, Theresa had already gone into the laundry room for her jacket. She had the back door open before my mother bolted to stop her.
“You can’t walk home alone,” she said sharply. Then she held Theresa tight while my father dressed. Spencer and I dressed too.
“Take the car,” my mother said.
“What’d he say?” my father asked as he pulled on his gloves and the pom-pommed Red Wings hat that made him look like such a dork.
My mother shrugged. “I wouldn’t want my daughter anywhere but home right now, either. Don’t let her wander off, okay? Joe?”
My father was wearing his dazed expression again.
“Joe? Take the car.”
Instead, we walked down the driveway, out of range of our front-porch light into the night. My father and Theresa took the lead while Spencer and I lingered a few steps behind. At the bottom of the drive, Spencer darted into a ditch for a snowball, and my father snapped, “Hey. Get back here.” The snap, coming from him, yanked Spencer right back into line beside me. We did not look at each other. We watched the dark places in the empty yards and listened. Pine trees bobbed on their own shadows like buoys. Snow wraiths rose from the drifts, herding us along the frozen center of the street. The houses seemed oddly unmoored and uninhabited, drifting with their windows lit but no one visible inside.
In the Fox house, a television was playing to an empty room, and the loneliness there started to crawl up my back. I almost yelled for Barbara, but my father glanced hard at me and I stayed quiet.
“Leave them alone,” he said.
“I can go from here,” Theresa announced when we reached the shortcut through her neighbor’s yard.
“Nope,” my father said.
“Dad?” I said. “What, exactly, would you do if the Snowman jumped out at us? Run at him and whoop?”
“Die, probably,” he said. Then he looked at me. Suddenly, there were tears in my eyes, which made me more irritated still. He touched my shoulder with his glove, and I shrugged him off. “Sorry, Mattie.”
Theresa had stepped off the road into the yard, and Spencer had followed. “Hey,” I said, and hurried after them.
“Goddammit,” my father murmured behind me, and trudged after us. Spencer and Theresa were walking side by side, partially hooded in blackness. I stepped up my pace and drew level with them. At the edge of Theresa’s yard, we stopped. Not too far away, someone was calling a cat. I could tell it was a cat by the way the voice trailed off at the end. No answer was expected.
“I don’t want to go in my house,” Theresa said, out of nowhere.
“Let’s go find him instead,” Spencer whispered. He was grinning. We didn’t ask which him he meant. I felt my knees clench. I’d known, of course, that we were all exactly the same age as Amy Ardell, but I hadn’t really thought about it until then.
“Let’s be her,” said Theresa, and she flopped down on her back in the snow.
The thing hurtled across her so fast that she never even saw it, just sucked in her breath and shot upright while my father said, “Jesus!” and stumbled to his knees. I leapt backward and so did Spencer.
“Cat,” Spencer said. “Little gray cat.”
“I hate cats,” said my father, standing up.
But Theresa had laid herself back down, and now she spread her arms, making a snow angel. “See?” she said. I had no idea what she meant. She lay there a little while longer, until my father extended his hand and helped her up.
The Doctor was waiting at the sliding glass door in a red sweater, arms folded.
“Thanks for bringing her, Joe,” he said to my father, but his eyes never left his daughter.
“Not a problem,” my father answered. We were all watching Theresa. After a while, he said, “She all right?”
“I don’t know,” the Doctor said, which scared me badly. Never in my life had I heard him admit confusion about anything, least of all his daughter.
“Jesus Christ, I’m fine,” Theresa whispered, and stomped into the house.
“She’s okay,” I announced.
The dark seemed to thicken around us like stirred paint. Finally, the Doctor retreated inside and we all started back down to the street.
“She’s been weird,” Spencer muttered to me.
I nodded.
“I mean weirder.”
It was true. The week before winter break, she’d announced that Spencer and I were distracting her and demanded that Ms. Eyre give her the Solitude Desk in the front left corner of the room, which was normally reserved for punishments. Spencer and I had been sent there several times already for sidecarring. And at recess, she had taken to whistling for us, then ducking out of sight into the woods. Sometimes she stayed in there until seconds before the final bell. Then we’d see her emerge from the trees to slide across the empty blacktop, head down, white hat bobbing.
My mother was sitting in the dark in the living room when we got home. We didn’t even know she was there until she switched on the table lamp next to the couch. “Thanks for takin
g the car like I asked,” she said, her voice icy flat; she seemed to be talking to all three of us, not just my father. Then she stalked past us into her bedroom.
My father sighed, sounding exhausted. “Try not to make too much noise. Tough night for your mother, Mattie. For me too, actually.”
We went to my room, but we didn’t play much. For a while, we rolled a couple of Hot Wheels cars back and forth across a game box; then I took out my baseball cards and we read the backs of those. It was well past my usual bedtime, almost midnight, when my mother appeared in the doorway to turn out the light.
“Are you scared?” she asked as we climbed into our bunks.
“No,” I said, meaning that I wasn’t only scared. I was also enjoying the tense evening walks, the strange school assemblies, and my friends.
Spencer said, “Yes,” and my mother came all the way into the room, kissed him on the forehead, and told him that he should be. Then she closed the door most of the way but left the bathroom light on without asking.
We couldn’t sleep, though. We got up and took turns racing my new slot car around on the Tyco track’s single working lane. The track was a figure eight with a jump that was never set up because the inside lane had shorted out the same day we fitted all the pieces together. The controllers were plastic, poorly made, but you could feel the power in them when you squeezed the trigger, which transformed your slot car into a living thing.
I forget where Brent had been all night, probably sleeping over someplace. We hadn’t shared a room since I was seven. But I remember feeling a little sad. It had been a long time since I’d played in the dark with my brother.
Eventually, we climbed back into our bunks and I lay still, trying to generate sleepy thoughts. None came.
“Mattie?” Spencer said, and I bent over the edge of my bunk and looked down at him. He was propped on his elbow and seemed to be made more of shadow than skin. He kept patting the sheets with his free hand. “What do you think happens when he’s got you?”
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