This time, I just thumbed through the pages for the thousandth time. I saw the place where my name first appears, underlined in red, in the midst of what looks like a street-by-street inventory of every business within a three-mile radius of where we lived. Burger King was there, and Kroger, and Stroh’s, and Mini-Mike’s, and Avri’s. I was listed under Avri’s, though I never went there with her. Next to the name of each business—but not next to my name—Theresa had drawn a tiny face with dot eyes and a jagged jack-o’-lantern mouth in red Magic Marker. Down the right-hand margin of the page is a sketch of what could be a stalactite or a spear dangling upside down, and beside that, written vertically like the solution to a section of an invisible crossword puzzle, are the words missed and home.
I turned more pages and stopped at the one where Theresa had meticulously whited out each of the college-rule lines, creating a sort of relief map of blankness. In the middle of all that nothing, Barbara Fox’s name floats in black-ink block letters. It occurs to me now—and not for the first time—that my one celebrated artistic idea wasn’t even my own. I pretty much got it from this notebook, although God knows what Theresa was trying to communicate. By quarter to five I was still awake, and I couldn’t sit still. I got up, layered every T-shirt I’d brought with me under my sweater and coat, slipped Theresa’s notebook into my backpack, and stepped out into the cauterizing cold. The morning was weirdly bright because of all the snow illuminated by the suburban streetlights. I drove past Phil Hart Elementary and saw that the school looked exactly the same: red brick, long asphalt blacktop, twin soccer fields, century-old maple trees. I sat in the long circular driveway where the buses lined up every afternoon to take the students home and recalled Mrs. Jupp sounding pinched and trapped in the PA system speakers. From there, I circled Shane Park a few times before remembering the library.
For one moment, as I pull open the library’s glass door and the heat spills out, a premonition whistles through me. Theresa could be here. In a way, it’s more likely that I’d find her here than anywhere else, curled up on a beanbag with her legs underneath her, reading a fat hardback nineteenth-century novel. In the early days of 1977, mostly to annoy her father, she read The Shining, which I remember because of the featureless little kid’s face imprinted on the book’s embossed silver cover—a blank white blot with hair on top. I remember starting toward her and then shying away because I didn’t want to go near that face. It looked porous, like a sponge, capable of absorbing me completely. But one look around the library’s original room, and I know my premonition is wrong. At the study tables by the window, three white-haired red-eyed men look up in unison with outrage on their faces, and I almost start to laugh. They look like the neglected husbands of Macbeth’s three hags, deposited next to their Sunday papers so the wives can conjure on the blasted heath. After a few seconds, one of them snaps, “Shut the goddamn door,” and I do, shielding my eyes against the bright fluorescent light.
All my life, even in Louisville, I have loved libraries, though not for the books exactly, and not for the mythical library smell that my father used to rhapsodize about. I prowl libraries the way divers search sunken ships, looking for nothing in particular, something old and algae-covered and meaningful in ways I haven’t yet learned. None of the books I see here have that sort of allure. I suspect they don’t even have the little checkout cards that provided clues about whose lives they had touched last.
The new wing turns out to be a long row of computer work stations with no books in it at all. The drawers of catalog cards that once partitioned off the entranceway and made it a separate space are gone. The slush-gray carpet has been replaced by red shag. Flyers for community theater productions and local right-to-life and AA meetings fill slots in a hanging bin beside the coat rack. Best-sellers fan out on the nearest table under the two-week rental sign. This is nowhere I know.
“Heathcliff?” says a silky voice straight out of Masterpiece Theatre, and I glance toward the circulation desk. Behind it, a thirtyish dark-haired woman with perfect posture stands next to a computer terminal, sipping from a black mug that says GRRR in orange letters on the side. She’s a little taller than I am, and her very slightly red mouth curls upward at the edges like an ember crisped by fire. Her white sweater is loose and soft-looking. Her hair tumbles over itself to her shoulders.
“I’m sorry,” I say, shaking my head. “What?”
“You’ve come from the moors, yes? To sweep me away?” Her smile is quick, friendly, private.
“For your sake, I hope not,” I mumble. The fact that I am immediately attracted to this woman at this particular moment in my life is the most ridiculous thing yet about this weekend.
The woman claps her palms gently. “Oh, good. I do like a doomed man.” It’s her glasses, I think, that make her eyes flash in this lifeless light. “Elizabeth Findlay, senior librarian, and yes, I chose this shift. You may call me Eliza.”
Sensation returns to my numbed limbs, and my lungs adjust to the book-heavy weight of the library air. This woman seems even more exotic and more out of place here than Mr. Borowski did.
“You’re awfully cheerful for East Birmingham, Michigan, at dawn on a Sunday morning,” I say.
“In the middle of a miserable winter,” adds Eliza, “with the coffee machine broken.” She taps once at the computer screen and looks at me with a disconcertingly familiar expression, something related to hunger and hope and hurt but not quite any of those things. I can feel the trademark Mattie Rhodes awkwardness seep into the room. I open my mouth before I know what to say, and she speaks first.
“So just who is it, Eliza wonders, that has wandered into her world, looking as though he’s just returned from an alien abduction?”
I’m trying to remember the last time I flirted with anyone. If I could only slip free of my perpetual mindset, I half believe I could charm this person. I’ve been charming before, once or twice. But what would be the point?
“Can I help?” she says, a little less warmly. It’s apparent that I’ve been standing here too long, saying nothing.
“Not without years of training,” I say, and she smiles again. “I’m looking for someone.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“A dead someone. Do you have the Free Press obituaries on microfilm?”
“On disc. By date. Which year did you want?”
“Oh,” I say, just to slow this down a little, then feel a swell of nausea and lean against the desk.
“Do you want some tea or water?” Eliza asks. “You look awfully pale, my new doomed friend.”
“Nineteen ninety-one,” I say tentatively. “Maybe nineteen ninety-two. I think ‘ninety-one.” She retrieves a disc from the file behind her in a matter of seconds.
“This is the whole Metro section of the paper from that year. Do you need help searching it?”
My gaze hovers around her deep brown eyes, her curled mouth. “No, thanks. I can figure it out.”
Eliza shrugs, and her voice turns professional again. She seems a little disappointed, which amazes me. “Why don’t you tell me who you’re looking for? There may be other sources.”
“I don’t want to bother you.”
“Do I look busy?”
“Colin Daughrety,” I tell her, breaking eye contact. “He died in a car accident.”
“Dr. Colin Daughrety?”
I take one breath to keep my heart from kicking a hole in my chest. “You knew him?” I say.
“Did you?” says Eliza, her expression surprised, curious. “We all knew him here. He was our Sunday morning regular. We even held a memorial service for him in the new tech wing over there.”
“Did he ...” I start, but the words spill out so fast that I feel as if I’m spitting. “Did he bring his daughter with him?”
“Theresa?”
My knees give way and I sit down on the red carpet.
“Oh,” Eliza says. “Sir, are you drunk? You have to leave if you’re drunk.”
�
�You know Theresa Daughrety?” I say from the floor.
Eliza studies me. I wait for her to call the police, or security, or the three old guys at the newspaper table. Instead, she comes around from behind the circulation desk and kneels next to me. Her black skirt rises just above her knees. For all kinds of reasons—this place, the Doctor, my wife, and now this woman—my chest begins to ache.
“I never saw her,” says Eliza. “The Doctor used to check out books for her.” She eyes me warily. Then she says, ‘You know, I think it might be time to try standing up.” She stands first, her skirt falling into place as she offers me her hand. “You grew up here, then?”
Eliza’s hand slides into mine and pulls me to my feet. When I’m up, she lets go but doesn’t turn away.
I nod. “In Troy. My name is Mattie Rhodes.”
To my astonishment, she gasps. Her eyes are bright, and her mouth has slid open. “You’re that kid. Oh, my God, I know you!”
The heater breathes and hums around us. The old men at the newspaper table shift, rustling their papers.
“Apparently, you grew up here, too,” I murmur.
“Sweet Jesus, in West Bloomfield,” she said. “I was twelve years old then. I knew all about you.”
“Don’t say that,” I say, feeling the muscles in my legs start to quiver.
Eliza watches me a few seconds longer and then says, “I think I may be able to help.”
Still shaken, I follow her as she glides down a long row of clear plastic library spines. At the end of the aisle, through a tall narrow window, the rising sun colors the pine trees and snowdrifts red. I look up when she stops. And there it is, staring straight at me with its horrible hollow eyes. Then I’m tipping again, very nearly toppling into a bookcase. I swear I can hear my sense of balance grinding like the gears of a grandfather clock. Tick-tock. Doesn’t life ever, for one second, stop?
Either Dr. Daughrety hung this here himself or he provided instructions, because the teeth mask tilts to the left at exactly the same angle I remember, its ivory fangs flashing, its black throat swallowing the light. I wobble backward a step and remember to close my own mouth. Then, all at once, the old fear recedes, leaving behind a taste like unsweetened cocoa, mostly bitter but tinged with the promise—or memory—of sweetness. This thing hung in Theresa’s house as a guardian, but it protected neither the Doctor nor his daughter from anything, as far as I can tell. And, like me, it has wound up in exile.
“Hello, old friend,” I say. My eyes tear up, and I feel ridiculous.
Eliza is watching me with her head cocked at nearly the same angle as the mask. Her gaze is solicitous, still curious. Laura used to look at me that way, before she got frustrated with waiting for me. “Are you all right?” she asks.
With an effort I muster a smile. “Childhood monster,” I say, nodding toward the mask. “I used to have nightmares about that thing. It once hung in the Daughrety living room.”
Beneath the teeth mask in a gold frame is a plaque that reads, For you, fellow hunters of the Sunday dawn, to keep you safe and well. A photograph of Dr. Daughrety hangs next to it, outlined in black. He’s still bald, and his eyes look just the way I remember them, hard and unforgiving. I almost mistake the dates in the frame for Dewey Decimal: 1942-1990.
In another frame just below it is the obituary I came here to find, dated November 11, 1990. It calls the Doctor a “leading philanthropist,” recalling his establishment of two scholarship funds for inner-city students.
Every weekend for the last eighteen years of his life, he donated fifteen hours of service to a free clinic that he helped to establish in one of the most troubled areas of downtown. Dr. Daughrety is survived by his loving wife Barbara and daughter, Theresa.
“Do you know what caused the accident?” I ask after a while.
“Drinking, I heard,” says Eliza.
“No. I knew him. I can’t picture him drinking.”
“Really? No one here was surprised.”
That is not what I want to hear. The idea that the Doctor was a closet alcoholic is even more upsetting, somehow, than his being dead. I stay where I am just a moment longer, feeling like a mourner in a funeral-parlor viewing room, except that no matter how sorry I am, I know I could never quite grieve for this man, although hating him no longer makes any sense.
“How was Barbara through all this?”
Eliza blinks. “Who?”
“Oh. The Doctor’s wife. Theresa’s...” Step-mom, I guess, but I can’t bring myself to say it.
“Never met her. Never heard him mention her.”
I close my eyes and allow myself the hope that Barbara, at least, is safely away, outside a hut in the sun somewhere, working and singing.
“Is this what you needed, then?” Eliza asks.
I open my eyes. “What I need may not exist in this world.”
Eliza lifts her eyebrows and smiles, carefully, just in case I wasn’t kidding. There is a part of me, abruptly, that wants to go right out back and build an igloo, and ask this woman to bring me coffee and books from time to time.
“Actually,” I say, “what I’m looking for is Theresa.”
“Mmm,” says Eliza, not moving, which unsettles me.
“What does that mean?”
“Just...remembering what I know of your story, that’s all.”
I blush, murmur, “So no igloo for me,” and Eliza stares.
“What?”
“Nothing. I’m sorry.” I start back down the aisle. But as I reach the best-seller table, Eliza calls after me in a stage whisper, and I turn to find her returning to the circulation desk but watching me.
“Mr. Rhodes. You wish to find her, yes?”
I nod.
“I’ll be here a few hours yet. Check back, will you? I’ll do a bit of rooting around. I may have something for you.”
“You sure?”
She grins. “You were easily one of the most memorable stories of the memorable winter of 1977. I always wondered how it turned out.”
“Me too,” I say, and before she can see that I can’t grin back, I turn and push back out the door into the snow.
On Woodward, the International House of Pancakes is open, and cars are slushing through the parking lot. If I can’t have sleep, at least I can have coffee, maybe even a little food. I park my car in the back corner of the IHOP lot and wade through puddles before pushing open the double glass doors and sliding into an orange plastic booth. Within seconds, a face pops up in my line of vision. It is apple-shaped and apple-colored. The mouth forms an oval, open slightly. I remember this sort of slack face on so many high school girls. It always made me sad.
“Take your order?” she says.
“Apple pancakes, sausage, as much coffee as you can bring me.”
“You look like you haven’t slept in a month,” she says, snatching the menu out of my hands. “Maybe you should lay off the coffee.”
“I don’t need sleep,” I announce. “I’m above sleep.”
“Okeydokey,” she says, and pads away.
I’m thinking of the Doctor drinking silently in his car on the way to a death he never would have dreamed for himself. I imagine Theresa floating beside him, discovering a second dead parent, and I’m more desperate to find her than ever. My pancakes come and I close my eyes. Then the waitress is back, shaking me against the booth.
“Sir?” she says, and I open my eyes and squint. The white winter sun is flashing off car hoods and icy streets. “Sir, I’m sorry, but you can’t sleep here. We need the tables. There’s a line.”
“I fell asleep.” My words feel coated in fuzz.
The waitress rolls her eyes. “Sir, really, we—“
“What time is it?” I snap.
“Ten after nine.”
“Jesus Christ,” I say, stripping bills from my wallet and hurtling out of the booth.
“I didn’t mean you couldn’t eat your breakfast,” she calls after me.
It’s not really possible to get from
Birmingham to Metro Airport in fifteen minutes, but I come close, strewing red lights behind me. I have time to think of nothing but the consequences of not being there when Laura gets off the plane. I have my windows open, and the freezing air slides down my cheeks like the edge of a razor, shaving away the exhaustion.
At the airport, I skid into a parking space, race into the terminal, and arrive at the gate in time to see the plane crawl over the tarmac and shut itself down with a sigh. The last time Laura was up at 6:48 A.M. was probably during high school, so I’m not optimistic about her mood. I imagine my weary solitary wife walking down the Jetway.
A middle-aged businessman wanders out first, his gray hair mashed flat from being pressed against a window, his tie loosened but still tucked inside his collar. He’s followed by a glassy-eyed father and son wearing matching Louisville Cardinal basketball sweatshirts. A woman with a ski mask balanced on her forehead steps forward to hug them. Eventually, the flight attendants walk off, clustered around a chirping five-year-old boy in a wheelchair. Apparently, the Sunday morning flight to Detroit isn’t a very popular one. Then it’s just me, leaning against a pillar, my heart racing. Ten minutes go by before I accept that she’s not coming.
I have no idea what to feel about this, even though I should have predicted it. I go to the nearest bank of pay phones and punch in calling-card numbers, but my fingers won’t work properly. It takes me six tries. In my house, the phone rings and rings and rings. Laura doesn’t answer and neither does our machine. Thirty rings later, I hang up and stand there. I feel like an arctic explorer at the moment his supply ship disappears over the horizon.
The Snowman's Children Page 17