The Snowman's Children

by Glen Hirshberg

  “Avri’s Deli,” I said, fast. “The swimming pool at Covington Junior High.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. She was saying something about those places the last time I saw her. When we were in the Fox house.”

  “So-”

  “Some of those places are in the notebook too, right? Maybe she worked out a formula. Places kids go. Maybe— “

  “Maybe,” Sergeant Ross interrupted, softly but firmly. “But whatever she worked out, it isn’t in this. And she’s back now. Whatever she knows, she can explain to us. So what I say is maybe, in a completely different way, this notebook will be important to you or her one day. So I suggest you take careful care of it. You’re a good kid, Mattie. Sharp kid. I know you meant well, although that doesn’t make you any less responsible for what you did. Keep your head down, help your family, and you just might get through this.”

  He clambered into his front seat and sat staring out the windshield over the trees. Finally he turned the ignition, pulled out of the driveway, and disappeared down the street.

  I went back inside where my parents were waiting. I knew my mother had been crying because her face was all red. She was sitting on the couch, huddled against my father. I could hear Brent stomping around in his room.

  “Mattie, get your brother and come out here,” my father said, and I did as I was told. When I opened Brent’s door, I found him throwing a tennis ball at his closet door. He didn’t say anything to me, but when I pointed toward the living room, he followed.

  My father turned from the window and directed us to sit down beside my mother. “Boys,” he said, his voice even flatter than usual, “Mr. Fenwick thinks it would no longer be productive for me to continue at the research lab. They’re sending me to another plant to supervise assembly-line design. I chose Lexington, so we could move near your cousins. We’re going to start over. And we’re going to do it right now.”

  Brent began shaking his head back and forth, as if his ears were ringing. I just looked at my father. “So you’re fired?” I asked.

  “Relocated.”

  “Because of me?”

  “Oh, Mattie, come off it,” he snapped. “What difference does it make? It just didn’t happen for me here. I can live with it. So can you. Let’s go be with our family.” He started to stalk away, stopped, and let himself fall into the low green armchair.

  “Okay, boys,” my mother said softly, one hand on each of our shoulders. “Go pack up the things you need most.”

  “We’re leaving all our stuff?” said Brent, his voice going screechy. He sounded maybe five.

  “Our stuff will come later, honey. Just pick out what you want for the car trip.”

  “We’re leaving today?”

  “Oh, yes,” said my mother, and she looked at my father, and for one fleeting second, I thought she almost smiled.

  Brent stomped his feet on the floor. “Fuck that!” he screamed, and then he ran to his room and slammed the door.

  I couldn’t get myself to stand. Lexington, Kentucky, had about as much meaning to me as my father’s work. I had been to both places a few times. I didn’t exist in either. I thought about Theresa gagging to life, and Spencer sidecarring with someone else, and never seeing them again.

  “We can’t go,” I said.

  “Come on, Mattie,” my mother whispered. “Hurry up.”

  She eased me off the couch, and I found myself walking toward my room. But instead of packing, I lay down on my bed and closed my eyes, and I must have slept, because when I opened them it was twilight and Brent was lying on the bottom bunk.

  “Hey,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything. I peered over the edge and saw him lying on his back with one palm pressed against the board above him as if he were supporting me.

  “Why are they doing this?” Brent sputtered.

  “Because of me,” I told him.

  “Mattie, I don’t want to go.”

  I couldn’t remember the last time he’d addressed me by name. In other brothers, I thought, that might have been natural. But with Brent and me, names had peeled away from neglect like wallpaper in an empty room.

  “Brent,” I made myself say, but I took too long.

  “You wrecked my life,” he said. “My whole life.”

  “I wrecked everyone’s life,” I said.

  The next morning’s paper trumpeted the search for Richard Grace. His name was stretched diagonally across it like a beauty-pageant sash. Beneath the sash was the familiar Snowman sketch, blown up to cover the entire front page. Snapping the newspaper shut, I hurled it across the kitchen table and went to my room.

  All day, my father played his newly functional stereo and packed records in boxes. My mother stayed in her bedroom moving things around, but I never went in there. We didn’t eat until after the Special Update and only then because Brent stomped into my parents’ room and dragged my mother out to make us dinner. No Richard Grace had been found, but the massive manhunt continued.

  I’d been waiting to be taken to see Theresa and for permission to call Spencer again, but whenever I asked, my parents refused without explanation, and late that night, I felt the reality of leaving Detroit close around me. I couldn’t leave. I was tied to this place. The thought of living somewhere other than this neighborhood, away from all these people I had hurt, felt like more of a betrayal than anything I had done until now. Leaping from my bed, I ran in my underwear into my parents’ room. They weren’t sleeping. My mother was reading a paperback, or at least holding it to her face. My father was staring at the wall.

  “We can’t go,” I said.

  “We can,” my father whispered fiercely. My mother grabbed his wrist, and they held on to each other.

  “None of us want to leave, Mattie,” my mother said, though I was no longer sure that was true. “But it’s best. It’s time. You’ll like Kentucky. You’ll get to be near your cousins.”

  “I have to call Spencer. Mom, please. Does he even know Theresa’s alive?”

  Against my father, her rigid body relaxed. Her head sank to his chest, but her eyes stayed on me. “Susan took him away somewhere. I don’t know where or if they’re even coming back. I’m sure he’s heard about Theresa. It’s all over the news.” Her voice sounded wrung out.

  My eyes filmed over. “Liar,” I said.

  The slap wasn’t hard, but it caught me by surprise, with my mouth half open, and I felt my mother’s wedding ring click against my teeth, and my cheek was stinging, and I started to scream. “Take me to see Theresa! Take me to see Theresa!”

  “Oh, Lord,” my father said.

  Yanking me down on the bed, my mother crushed me against her and said, “Shut up, now.” But she said it gently, stroking my hair, and I knew she wasn’t angry anymore.

  “Theresa’s in intensive care. She’s in some kind of waking coma. They can’t get her to respond to anything.”

  “But she said the Snowman’s name.”

  “I don’t know why everyone assumes that’s what she meant,” my mother said. “All I know is that she hasn’t said anything or even moved since then.”

  “Mom...can I sleep here? With you?”

  “Can I, too?” said my brother, falling into the bed beside me, his elbow brushing mine.

  My mother drooped against her pillow and began to cry. My father sighed. “Boys. Give your mother a rest. Give us both a little time.”

  “Please,” said Brent.

  “Tomorrow. If you still need to.” He switched off his bedside lamp and turned us all into shadows. “Good night, boys,” he said, and I thought of Mrs. Cory, shivered, and fled to my room.

  The next morning, my mother woke us early and helped us finish packing our travel bags. In the front hall we found all four of the battered white suitcases my parents always used for car trips. On top of the suitcases, rubber-banded together, were two of my mother’s Isaac Asimov novels and a stack of tapes.

  Brent jammed his fists into his eyes. “W
e’re not leaving yet, are we?” he said.

  “Shhh,” said my father.

  “I won’t,” Brent said. I put my hand on his back and felt his shoulder blades squeeze like an accordion.

  When my mother came out, her hair was dyed a richer, darker brown. She had deep circles under her eyes. “Say goodbye,” she said.

  “To you?”

  Her shoulders dropped, and her lips went flat. “I do love you, Mattie Rhodes,” she said, softly if not quite lovingly. “Now say goodbye to your father.”

  “’Bye, Dad,” I said. “I’m sorry. For everything”

  “I know you are. I’ll come as soon as I can.” He bent down and took Brent’s face in his hand. “You hear that, Big B? Don’t worry about a thing.”

  “I hate him,” said Brent.

  “You won’t always.”

  “Yes, I will.”

  “He’ll grow on you. He does that.” My father looked my way, though he didn’t let go of Brent.

  “Why aren’t you coming with us?” Brent asked.

  “I have to sell the house,” he said. That stung. The thought of some other family living here hurt me more than the idea of leaving it. But my father sounded surprisingly relaxed, even for him. “We’ve had enough of this place,” he continued. “You’ll see.” With one hand, he reached out and touched my shoulder. He let go of Brent and held my mother with the other. Rarely had he seemed like such a strong, steady TV kind of father as he did then.

  My family still loved me, I thought. But that wasn’t helping. “Can I call Barbara?”

  My mother looked at me, then my father. In the end, she shook her head. “You know what, Mattie? Barbara has more trouble to deal with than we do right now. I called her last night. She knows we’re leaving, and she said she’d write. Let’s leave her be.”

  “I hate you,” Brent said to me.

  “I don’t hate you,” I told him. “I never have.”

  Ice choked the roads, and my mother’s car fishtailed a little every time she turned. Brent flopped down in the back and kicked my seat repeatedly, but I didn’t respond, and after a few minutes, he stopped doing it and lay there and sniffled, and then he went silent. I asked my mother if we could listen to the radio, and when she didn’t respond, I switched on WJR, just in time to hear a newscaster say, “Doctors and police admit to being baffled today by more curious developments surrounding the disappearance and rescue of Theresa Daughrety. Medical examiners report that toxicology reports on the little girl, who just may be the only survivor of an encounter with the Snowman, reveal no trace of the sedative found in the blood of each previous victim. Police department spokesmen remain noncommittal about the significance of this discovery.”

  “Shut it off,” my mother commanded flatly, and I did, staring straight ahead through the windshield, bleary with half-melted ice, at the gray light leaking through the leaden trees. I didn’t want to think, and couldn’t help it, so I thought of Theresa’s mother on the sled in the photograph, because that’s what came to mind. Theresa’s mother alive on her sled in the snow.

  Absently, my hand slipped to my pocket, began to play with the wood chip I’d stored there—since Lake Cleaning Day, I realized, when Theresa dropped it—and finally I drew it out and looked at it. I’d forgotten I had it. The wood felt soft between my fingers, except for two little slivers poking out of one end like bee stingers. With my thumb, then each of my fingers in turn, I brushed the top of the slivers, felt their points. No trace of the sedative. But he brought her home. He brought her back. No trace. Which meant she’d let him suffocate her while she was awake—maybe staring right at him? Or she hadn’t been with him after all? I touched the chip to my cheek, and the smell crept into my nose and mouth like poison gas. Sweet poison.

  “What?” said my mother, still flat, glaring sidelong at me.

  “Mom,” I said, my voice and hands trembling, the air rotten-sweet, but I didn’t lower the chip. I couldn’t. I was too busy remembering. Understanding. Trying to. “Mom. Please.”

  “Mattie, it’s icy, and I’m tired, and I’m concentrating, okay? So whatever you have to say, spit it out.”

  “Can we go by the mill?”

  My mother didn’t answer until we crawled to a stop at the Orchard Lake light, and by then the smell seemed to have seeped all the way down my skin into my boots. Why couldn’t she smell it, I wondered? Why wasn’t she asking what that odor was?

  “The Cider Mill? They’re not open in winter. What are you talking about?”

  I couldn’t answer. I didn’t dare take the chip from in front of my mouth, for fear that the smell, and the faint imprint of Theresa’s fingers I was all but certain I could feel, would fade. The last traces of Theresa I would ever hold. “Please, Mom. I just want to see it one more time.”

  “Me too,” Brent said, without sitting up.

  “You do?” my mother said, shooting a surprised look into the rearview mirror, though I don’t think she could see him.

  “I want to see everywhere,” Brent said, and he burst out crying, and my mom’s hands twitched on the wheel and her eyes squeezed shut. “I want to stay home.”

  “Oh, baby,” she said.

  “Please,” I whispered. “Please, please, please, please.”

  Behind us, a car honked, and my mother started, jerked our car forward, and lifted one hand off the steering wheel to brush quickly at her eyes. “All right, boys,” she said. “But we’re not stopping again until lunch, do you hear? Not even to go to the bathroom. Not until we’re long, long gone. It’s time we were gone.”

  All the way there, I pictured Theresa, almost smiling, holding a lopsided candy apple on a stick while fat yellow jackets buzzed around the mill’s dirt yard, which was never dry even in dead summer. This must have been in third or fourth grade. A school trip, right at the beginning of the year. Theresa’s dress had purple polka dots on it. She was doing the Daphne voice from Scooby Doo for Jon Goblin and a couple of girls standing nearby. I remembered being stunned at how good she was at it, and that she even knew who Daphne was.

  Turning onto the dirt road, my mother took us bumping between the trees up to the wooden gate that fronted the Cider Mill parking lot. The gate was closed.

  “Can we get out?” I said. “Just for a second?”

  “Me too,” said Brent, and he was gone, not even shutting the door behind him as he staggered off through the drifts, around the gate into the lot.

  “Five minutes,” my mother said, and dropped the car into neutral. “And this is it, Mattie. Your last goodbye. I don’t want to drag this out anymore, it’s too hard on your brother. And you. Five minutes. Don’t make me come out in the cold and get you.”

  I stepped out, shut Brent’s and my doors, and turned to face the mill, which was mostly a giant decomposing cedar barn. The shingles had long since split and swollen. As soon as I was close enough to the building, far enough from the car, I heard the familiar high whine of the engine that runs the mill wheel. The shed that housed the wheel ballooned off the side of the main building and rose above it.

  “Hear that?” Brent said.

  “It’s just to keep the wheel turning,” I told him. “So it doesn’t freeze.”

  “Duh.”

  For one moment, standing with the drifts over our ankles and the snow clouds stacking up over our heads, I thought he was going to take my hand, the way he had years ago at the Birmingham Fair. Instead, he said, “Want to go in?”

  “It’s closed.”

  Instead of answering he stomped around back, and when I followed I found him beside two shingles bent upward at the bottom, hovering off the earth like the hem of a skirt.

  “Did you know those were there?” I asked. Brent shrugged. “McLeans come here all the time to sled. We sneak in here to get warm sometimes. Used to.”

  He glared at me, then dropped to his stomach and wriggled under the shingles. His red down coat caught, nearly ripped, but slid free, and he was through. I could hear him tromping
around on the wooden viewing bridge that stuck out from the wall in there, always slippery with water spray and apple bits. Every kid I knew spent most of their time here on that bridge, watching the paddles of the giant wooden wheel plunge down.

  Kneeling, I took a deep breath, and my lungs filled with that crab-apple reek, more tangy than sweet. Every backyard in my neighborhood smelled like that, I realized. And none of them would in Kentucky. Snow and, under that, wet mud seeped through my open coat, through my sweater into my chest. I dropped my head to avoid getting splinters in my eyes, pushed myself through, and stood up.

  The wheel looked like a riverboat paddle wheel, and it didn’t so much spin as jerk. In the summer, with apples under it, the wheel’s paddles made a squishing sound when they pressed down, like footsteps in wet leaves. The wood in the wheelhouse looked even older than the rest of the mill. Probably, I thought, because it never dried. The wheel filled its surrounding well, red-stained and cracked and knotted. When I stepped forward on the bridge, the wood sank under my feet in a familiar, almost comforting way.

  Except that every previous time I’d been here, there were other kids crowded around me, elbowing each other to get close enough to see the apples loaded into the slot in the floor and smashed flat, the juice squirting everywhere. Brent had always loved this place, I realized. Much more than I had. I remembered positioning him in front of me and then plowing us forward to the rail so he could see, when he was much younger.

  We had a minute, maybe less, before my mother started howling for us, but the outside world seemed a million miles away. The barn surrounded us with its scent and chill and oldness like an attic.