The Snowman's Children

by Glen Hirshberg

  “He loves you,” she said, and touched me on the cheek. She was choking back sobs. It was the first time she’d touched me since I came home. I clung to my brother. The weight of what I’d done almost drove me through the floor.

  Say it now, I thought. Right now.

  But at that moment, Mrs. McLean stuck her head out of the kitchen and said, “Susan Franklin’s on the phone,” and my mother gave a little cry, drove her face into her palms, and I shut down completely. I couldn’t face this. In my mind, Mrs. Franklin was calling from a pay phone somewhere, her red hair and shiny gold coat billowing around her.

  I heard my mother say, “Oh, Jesus, Susan” as she grabbed the phone, and then she wept for a while and leaned into the kitchen door with her head down. Mrs. McLean rubbed her back and shook her head over and over.

  “I was on my way home. The school sent the kids home early because of the snow. They were right down the street. In full view. I don’t know. We’ll find him, Susan. We’ll—“

  She stopped talking but didn’t move otherwise, and I knew Mrs. Franklin was gone.

  In the living room, my father had switched on the television. I turned to the window and watched the snow float down like a net in water and listened to my city go wild. The black-turtleneck men had returned to the streets. Mayor Young and Detective Frederic Verani, head of the Snowman Task Force, had held a phone conference to discuss possible tactics, and, according to Larry Loreno, both men had broken down crying. On Gratiot Avenue, a used car dealer had lined up three blue Gremlins in front of his lot, doused them with gasoline, and lit them on fire.

  I felt like I was living in my own dream cocoon, engulfed in a slow-building silence. I believed that silence had come to insulate me, to help me detach from everything around me so I could do what needed to be done. I didn’t know it could get inside you. So I gave in to it, and fatigue seized me like a fever. After a while, my mother drew me up by the arm and led me to bed. Spencer was probably asleep, I decided. Theresa was doomed, or at least gone from me. I would be despised no matter what I did. For one more night, at least, a few final hours, I wanted my mother to love me.

  My mother eased Theresa’s notebook from between my locked fingers and laid it on my desk. Then she undressed me, kissed my forehead, and stayed while I struggled to get under the blankets. She stared at me awhile, new tears squeezing out from her swollen eyes, blew me one last kiss, and closed the door.

  To this day, I don’t understand how the night lasted as long as it did. There should not have been enough time. The morning should have come. But the world had spun to a stop, and the night lay like a tarp over Detroit and smothered it. It was already well after midnight when my mother settled me down. After she’d gone, I lay for what felt like hours, willing my skin to stop itching. Everywhere I touched the sheet, I felt prickly. I scratched the inside of one knee so hard that I bled into the mattress. I thought about the black-turtleneck men lurking by the evergreens, and the Snowman with his long hair blowing in the wind and his head tossed back, his mouth open to catch the snow. I thought about my brother weeping against me. I was face down in my pillow, itching, clicking my back teeth together, when the first tap rattled my window. The sound shot straight down my spine. I couldn’t move. Tree branch, I told myself. With a twist of the blinds lever, I would know for sure. I’d see the birch branch, laden with new snow, and maybe there’d be pink streaks in the sky like scratches down a cheek, and I’d know I’d made it to morning.

  Then came the second tap.

  The third tap was more of a punch, and the pane rattled in its frame. The next one, I thought, would smash the window. Scrambling to my knees, I opened the blinds and saw Theresa Daughrety pressed up against the glass. I gagged back a scream.

  She was wearing her white hat with the pom-pom. Her cheeks and mouth glowed red, and in her eyes was the same blankness I had seen earlier that night, like the charcoal Snowman sketches in the newspaper. It seemed impossible that those eyes could blink or see or weep. I pressed my face right up to hers, almost touching it. My face, glass, her face. One mittened hand, clutched into a fist, uncurled at the sight of me and flattened against the pane. Several seconds passed before I realized she was waving.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Come on,” said Theresa, in her best Murder-in-the-Dark whisper. “Hurry.” She took a single step back from the window, and snowflakes obscured her face until she seemed utterly insubstantial, no skin, no bone, just whiteness and night.

  I had done it, after all. I very nearly whooped. Theresa had come for me. She had chosen this impossible hour to appear at my window and invite me back into her life. It had all been worth it. Tomorrow I would present a talking, smiling, alert Theresa to her father and Barbara and my parents, and maybe they’d be furious, but they would understand. I grabbed my sweatshirt and jeans out of my half-closed dresser drawer and pulled on yesterday’s socks. I paused long enough to listen for sounds from the hallway. There was a rustling in my parents’ room, but no talking or footsteps. Edging down the hall, I waited a few seconds by the front door before opening it. My house groaned and creaked like a houseboat rocking in the dark, the way it always did when I got up in the middle of the night. In the living room, everything was out of place. The chairs and lamps were crooked, the throw rug bunched up. Three red plastic cups lay on their sides on the floor, and one of my father’s speakers teetered on the edge of its stand. The room looked like a shoebox diorama of our living room that someone had given a single sharp shake. Blinking against the cold, I stepped out.

  The wind whistled relentlessly, with occasional crescendos as if airplanes were taking off over our heads. Theresa was standing by the tall pine in the front yard. In her white hat, with her pale skin, she was all but invisible in the blowing snow. Pulling the front door closed, I walked to her with my head down, watching my feet bite marks in the new soft ice. The trees I knew so well seemed pressed flat at this hour. Suddenly, Theresa spun on her heels and headed for Cider Lake Road. I rushed to catch her. My half-buckled boot tops flapped against my legs.

  “Hey,” I said when I caught up to her. I had to grab her by both arms to stop her from moving, but once she stopped, she stayed rooted, utterly still. All I could think was, Here we are at last. Theresa Daughrety and me, alone in the world. It was what I had always wanted.

  “How’d you get out?” I said.

  Vaguely but unmistakably, she smiled. Then she stopped smiling. I watched breath stream from her mouth. Then words spurted from me like blood from an opened artery.

  “We kept trying to see you. Your dad wouldn’t let us in. School’s weird. It seems empty, even when we’re there. It’s like we’re all gone. Ms. Eyre doesn’t even come half the time. Where have you been?”

  I glanced toward the Fox house, which was dark and silent. Theresa was here. Spencer was here. For the first time in my life, I felt powerful. I had applied pressure to the world, and the world had responded.

  Theresa continued staring past me.

  “Spencer’s right here,” I said. “He’s fine. He’s in the Fox house waiting for us.”

  Realizing that I still had hold of her arms, I let go, then watched them flutter in the air before falling to her sides. Nothing I’d said seemed to have made an impression. She looked as if she had no idea where she was.

  “Theresa, we were scared.” I was agitated, exhilarated, speaking way too fast. “And it kind of worked, see? You’re here. Theresa? See? Oh, just come on.” I took her right hand, gently this time, and led her toward the Foxes’. She did not acknowledge me, but when I pulled she slid along behind me like a wagon.

  The street felt like an empty puppet stage. Another few hours of wind, I thought, and the houses would tumble away into Cider Lake. I pulled Theresa into the Foxes’ yard, and she made a moaning sound but continued to follow. I scanned the windows to see if Spencer was watching but saw neither light nor movement.

  No moon or stars lit the path as we made our way through
the latticed shadows of hedge branches and overhanging birch trees. Down the street, a dog growled low and long, then went still. I found the key under the picnic table bench where I’d left it, unlatched the door, and pushed it open. Theresa’s hand melted out of my grasp, and when I turned, I found her staring and shaking her head. And singing.

  “Frère Jacques. Frère Jacques. Dormez-vous?”

  “Come on,” I said, but she didn’t follow. Her voice dwindled away, but her mouth continued to trace words in the air. “Theresa, come see Spencer. He’s right here. This is where Barbara used to live before she lived with you, remember?”

  She didn’t respond, just kept singing.

  In exasperation, I grabbed her arm once more. “Let’s go find Spencer.” I dragged her into the house and shut the door.

  “Spencer?” I called. I waited for the lights to flash on, for Spencer to jump out and yell “Surprise!” in his giddy Spencer way. Then we’d all sit down on the floor together. I wasn’t sure what would happen next, only that it would be good, because something, at least, would have gotten better, and the improvement would be permanent. No one knows where we are, I thought, and I bounced up and down on the balls of my feet.

  But the lights stayed off, and nothing moved. In the pit of my stomach, new fears squirmed to life. My hands twitched. Theresa drifted deeper into the house, past the wall of photographs where I’d spotted myself just a few hours earlier. He’s sleeping, I thought, and my hands stopped twitching. Spencer must be sleeping.

  “Stay here,” I said to Theresa’s back, and she stopped like a trained dog and stared at the photographs on the wall. She started singing “Frère Jacques” again, too.

  “Spencer,” I called, “where are you? We’re here.”

  The door to the back bathroom was open, and a halo of weak white light glowed inside. A nightlight, I realized. I covered the hallway in three quick steps, threw open the first bedroom door, and Spencer slammed his fist into my cheekbone, which drove me to my knees.

  “What—” I started, and he was on me, fists flying. I threw my hands over my head. Spencer’s knees locked around my waist as he pummeled my ribs and my upper arms. The beating was bad, but the silence was worse. He didn’t speak or grunt or scream, he just flailed away. The pounding lasted so long that I stopped being able to focus on it. I thought about the soft spots in the center of bruises, the way color and pain seemed to fold inward rather than radiate outward, like light from an imploding star. I wondered which photograph Theresa was staring at now, and why. Several seconds went by before I noticed that Spencer was no longer hitting me.

  He hadn’t loosened his legs, though. He still wasn’t making any sound. I stayed in my protective curl but slowly uncrossed my wrists from in front of my face. When I breathed, my lungs grated against my swollen rib cage, and I wanted to cry out. I didn’t feel any grinding, though. Nothing broken.

  Cautiously, I glanced up at Spencer, recognized the look on his face, and knew the beating was over. He wasn’t angry anymore. He was scared to death.

  “I’ve been watching TV, Mattie,” he said. “I’ve seen the mayor. I’ve seen—oh, a few thousand policemen. I’ve seen myself, too: our fucking class picture, right there on Channel Four. The cops were here. They banged on the door and rang the doorbell. I thought I was going to jail. Then I thought maybe I’d hitchhike to Ferndale and never come back here, ever. Mattie, you asshole, what have you done?” He threw a last punch at me, but he put nothing behind it, and his fist bounced off my chest, then lay against it.

  “Spencer, it worked,” I said, wincing, as I tried to roll away from him.

  “Your mom will never even know,” he sneered. “Has anyone even tried to find my mom and tell her the truth, maybe, before she sees it on TV?”

  “She’s on her way home,” I said. “She doesn’t know it’s a lie.”

  “Jesus Christ. She probably thinks I’m dead. I’m going to be, when she’s through with me.”

  “Spencer, you’re not listening.”

  “They’re going to kill us. We deserve to be killed. I hate you. I hate you so much.”

  I knew it was dumb, but I felt myself getting angry.

  “This is all your fault, Mattie. This whole year has been your fault. You come up with these plans, and for some stupid reason I listen to you, and we keep getting in trouble, and my mom thinks there’s something wrong with me—“

  “Because you yell at her all the time—“

  “Did you see the guy who lit the cars on fire?”

  I thought about my mother crouched and sobbing in the kitchen doorway and Spencer’s mother standing alone on a street corner with her gold coat blowing. “Theresa’s in the living room,” I said.

  Spencer’s lips bubbled and he sat there and blinked. “What?”

  “Get off me.”

  Sliding to one side, Spencer let me roll to a sitting position. As soon as I stood up, the shooting pains in my ribs subsided into small dull aches. I probed a few of them with unsteady fingers.

  “She’s really here?” he whispered.

  As the pain receded, the tingling returned to my skin. I looked at Spencer, saw disbelief, then hope flicker across his face. I almost grabbed him and hugged him. “Spencer, we did it.”

  Without warning, he began to laugh. The laugh sounded horrible in that house, a desecration of the gloom. I kicked him hard.

  “Shut up. You’ll scare her away.”

  Spencer kept grinning. Suddenly, I grinned too. Everything he said was true. We were in trouble. We’d done a terrible thing, betrayed everyone we knew. It was mostly my fault. But she was here. Nothing else made any difference.

  “What about the police?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “They’ll be back.”

  Spencer bounded past me out the bedroom door. I raced after him. We reached the living room in a dead heat, Spencer already sliding to his knees next to Theresa. And then I saw her face.

  It was as if she had been frozen in mid-scream, her lips a huge red O, her skin so white I could see her veins, her eyes too wide, the lids rolled farther into her sockets than they should have been able to go. From deep in her throat came a low steady gurgle, like trickling water in the back of a cave.

  “It was Mattie’s idea. We were—“ As if someone had sucked the words from his mouth, Spencer stopped talking. Time, speech, everything froze.

  Theresa had removed a photograph from the wall, and now she laid it on the coffee table. It showed the birch trees ringing Cider Lake in autumn. Fallen red-brown leaves floated on the surface of the water like a fleet of tiny paper boats. I could almost imagine them floating out of the frame and swirling around us.

  “Pretty trees,” she said. “Pretty dead leaves to lie on.”

  Neither Spencer nor I had any reply to that, so we stood still. And there we stayed, the group of friends I’d always dreamed of having—an equilateral triangle, as Ms. Eyre had taught us—not moving, not touching, but locked together, sidecarring through the world. For long stretches of time, nothing fired in my brain. Then quick crazy thoughts lit up inside me like signal flares. I thought maybe we could all just stay here, for good. Theresa could look at photographs and read. Spencer and I would dust, make the beds, draw the curtains to shut out the light, and every day we’d bring her food and water, tend her like a plant.

  “Mattie,” Spencer said, his voice scratched and cracking, as if he hadn’t used it for days. “Do something.”

  I looked out the window and saw the white dawn pouring through the trees like lava and petrifying everything. I knew, now, that we had done the worst thing, the most hurtful thing possible. If anything, we had driven Theresa deeper into the crawl space she had dug inside herself, and we couldn’t reach her, and we couldn’t lure her out.

  “I did do something,” I said, hoping that Theresa could hear me, at least, and would understand what I’d intended. “Remember?”

  Slowly, like an astronaut rising off the surface of the moon, Th
eresa floated to her feet. Either Spencer or I could have reached out and caught her, but neither of us did. For a moment, she swayed between us, and when she looked up, something seemed to have kindled behind her eyes.

  Still swaying back and forth, she drew her hands together at the waist. And then she looked at me. And it was Theresa, or a collage of Theresa’s, the one who grinned at me in the middle of the Mind War and the one who ignored me as she squashed me in class and the one who wasn’t there and the one I kept dreaming. “Hello, my dwarves,” she said. And she broke into a giggle.

  I stared. “Theresa?” I said, very slowly. I wasn’t sure. And I didn’t want to scare her away. But it seemed, just maybe....

  “Dwarves?” said Spencer, and he leaned forward, all but grabbing for her hand.

  “It’s perfect,” she said. “It’s amazing. This house in the woods. All of us in hiding.”

  I wasn’t positive, but it seemed as though Theresa was just plain speaking to us, the way she used to. Before. I didn’t understand, but I felt like I should. I watched her lift her hand toward Spencer’s face, and I thought I saw tears in her eyes.

  “You were gone,” Theresa said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I just wanted—“

  “The white half for you,” Theresa whispered, and smiled. A sad, scared smile. “The red half for me. To make a wish on.”

  “Theresa,” Spencer and I blurted, almost together, and she shuddered and went still. “Theresa,” I tried again, much more gently.

  But Theresa stopped smiling, stopped looking at us, and started to sway again. “Courtney Grieve. Amy Ardell. Shane Park. See?”