“The clinic was in one of those row houses not too far from the Arts Institute—the only house on the block that was inhabited, as far as I could tell. During the day, anyway. Plenty of parking in that neighborhood, because the only other cars I saw had no wheels and no engines. We stopped right out front, and I held Analissa while Mariannah climbed out. That baby felt like it was made of meringue, it was so light. She looked too red, feverish, but her arms were waving all around in the blankets, and she wasn’t crying.
“’This girl’s fine,’ I told Mariannah as she took her from me. ‘She’s just deciding whether to dance with me or bop me one.’
“Mariannah nearly smiled. But when we got up the steps, we found a black wreath hanging on the chipped wood door. Inside, the reception area was empty except for one nurse sitting at the desk with the one receptionist. Both of them were sipping hot tea out of paper cups.
“I said, ‘We have an appointment. Analissa Pettibone.’
“The nurse had little round glasses and white curly hair coming out of the sides of her cap. She kind of looked like a poodle. ‘Don’t you people read the papers?’ she said. Then she disappeared through the clinic’s inner door.
“The clinic receptionist stood up, looking apologetic. I remember her skirt because it was black and drooped all the way past her toes. She was in her forties, maybe. Blond, short, kind of stubby. She looked like a little girl who’d been rummaging through her mother’s closet. And she had a real soft, real deep drawl; Texas, Alabama, one of those places.
“’Honey, no one phoned you?’ She was talking to Mariannah, who tensed up next to me, and I realized why. She didn’t have a phone.
“’Look, we’re here,’ I said. ‘Just tell us what’s happening. You closed? Out of business? Can we get this baby her shots or not?’
“The woman sighed and cupped her hands in front of her as if she were about to receive communion. ‘The doctor died,’ she said.
“Analissa began to squeak and cough, and Mariannah sat down to nurse her. The receptionist watched without unfolding her hands.
‘”You only have one doctor?’ I asked.
“The woman still didn’t unfold her hands but she smiled at me, real slow, real soft. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s just a very sad time here. We have three regular doctors, and they’ll be back tomorrow. The lines may be a little long, because we’ve been closed a few days. But if you bring Analissa in then, we’ll be sure to find time for her.’
“I thanked her, and then I waited for Mariannah to finish nursing. We were halfway out the door—I don’t even know what made me ask—when I turned around and said, ‘Which doctor died?’
“The woman’s hands came unclasped. ‘The founder of this place,’ she said, ‘and its inspiration. Dr. Colin Daughrety.’”
I’d already guessed. I just stand beside Spencer while the wind rises, sweeps over us, stills.
“I don’t remember driving Mariannah home,” Spencer says. “I don’t remember anything else about that day except I went to our church and slept all night in a pew. I woke up the next morning with my neck so stiff I could have chopped down a tree with it. But the weird thing was, I felt fine. And that was such a relief, I fell down on my knees and wept. Shepherd Griffith-Rice came in just once and asked if I needed anything. Then he left me alone.”
“Do you believe in fate, Spencer?” I ask. “I mean, it just seems like every step we take, in any direction, leads us back to the same place. Or back to each other.”
“I believe in believing,” he says. “I believe in doing. I believe that owning up to what you’ve done is honesty, but that claiming ownership of what happens next is hubris. I believe that there are moments in our lives when we almost get it right, and that the good we almost do is more painful to the decent-hearted than the bad we do completely.”
“The good we almost do?”
He glances at me, glances away. I cling to the deck railing with my wet gloved hands.
Spencer’s voice drops until he’s almost whispering. “Mariannah and Analissa Pettibone returned to the clinic the next morning. I didn’t go with them; I was way too shaken up about the Doctor’s death—just hearing his name again, really—to Caretake. A couple of hours after they got there, they were still waiting, and Mariannah went to the bathroom. She left her child in the care of the southern receptionist. The receptionist placed the child on the chair next to her desk. The child lay there and coughed, but she didn’t cry. The phone rang, and at the same time another woman who had been waiting around all morning snapped and began screaming to be let in. Meanwhile, back in the clinic, one of the doctors had somehow slipped and broken a glass beaker in his hand, and he was bleeding all over the place. People were running to help him and mop up the blood. Suddenly, everything was chaos. And when the chaos was over, the receptionist looked down at her chair and discovered that Analissa was gone.”
“Gone.”
“Remember, I wasn’t there for this. I’m telling you what I was told. The baby just wasn’t there anymore.” Spencer jams his gloved hands into his coat pockets. “Mariannah dissolved, of course. There wasn’t much left inside her to start with, and within two days she’d taken every pill in her medicine cabinet. She didn’t die, but the pills did horrible things to her stomach and intestines, and now she eats colorless soup, because that’s all her system can handle. Meanwhile, the church did what it does best—it mobilized. We sent people to every home of every person we could find who’d had an appointment at the clinic that morning. Two Shepherds went to the house of the soft-spoken receptionist. She lived in Ferndale, not far from my mother’s place, with two purebred Dalmatians. We even went to the police station and made a major nuisance of ourselves. We went to the mayor, and the mayor agreed to see Shepherd Griffith-Rice. They’re friends from way back.
“At night, we all went to the church and prayed. Hundreds of people, night after night. I remember looking around once, when everyone was humming and the pianos were playing low down and the lights were dim and one of the Shepherds was up there swaying, maybe singing, and I remember thinking, ‘God. There are so many of us.’
“I felt horrible about Mariannah. And I couldn’t get the feel of that kid, that little lump in my arms, out of my mind. But I didn’t feel as bad as I should have. Most days, I had somewhere to go, you know? I had comfort to offer, and sometimes it was taken, and that’s a rare thing.”
“I know,” I say.
“I know you do.”
It takes a faint wet touch on my cheek, like a kiss from a ghost, to make me realize that it’s snowing. I look up, and the sky has no color, not blue or gray or white, and the flakes fall from it in silent slow motion. The wind has gone, and the snow doesn’t dance on its way to the earth; it just falls.
“Two days after Mariannah’s suicide attempt,” says Spencer, “Shepherd Griffith-Rice called my apartment and told me the doctors said she would probably live. I knelt by my window and prayed and cried. It was sleeting outside, and my windows never sealed properly, so you could hear the cold crawling through the wood. I had nowhere left to be. Nothing left to do. I hadn’t been to a movie in years, I hadn’t been reading much except the Bible, I had no one waiting for me, and I was almost okay, except I kept feeling that little squirming weight in my arms every time I bent my elbows. And suddenly I knew that I wanted to see Theresa and tell her how sorry I was to hear about her dad. I didn’t waste time brooding on it. I got up, left my beef stew on the table, and drove straight to Cider Lake.
“The roads were awful, sludgy. It was a Sunday night and there was no one out, I mean no one. A few of the businesses I passed on Woodward had their lights on, just to scare off burglars. I stopped at Kroger—the one by Stroh’s—and bought two white lilies and wrapped them myself in clear plastic with baby’s breath around them. I probably spent twenty minutes standing in that store, listening to the rain, sticking the greens on both sides of the flowers. Needless to say, I was thinking about that last horrib
le time I’d seen her. I wanted to get the flowers right.
“The house...well, it didn’t look the way it does now. The Doctor had only just died, so it was still in pretty decent shape. It occurred to me that Theresa might not even live there anymore. The whole family could have moved, or Theresa might have her very own grownup life somewhere. It seemed possible.
“I don’t know why I assumed no one was home. I think it was just the stillness. I was standing there trying to figure out what to do with my lilies when the door opened and Theresa said, ‘Come in.’ Then she turned and walked straight into the kitchen.
“She didn’t look much different from the last time I saw her. She was wearing this tannish long sweater thing that looked like a burlap bag. Maybe it was a poncho, I don’t know, but it had no shape whatsoever. She was alone in the house. Barbara had been there, I found out later, until the day after the Doctor’s memorial service. She took Theresa to the airport and put her on a plane to Cleveland. Her aunt was supposed to meet her at the other end. But Theresa just waited until right before takeoff and then demanded to be let off the plane. She got herself home somehow and called her aunt and said that she and Barbara had decided to stay home for a while. It wasn’t until later that I found out Barbara had left the country. She went to Southeast Asia somewhere. Thailand, I think. I know she wasn’t planning to come back. She told me once she was thinking she’d escape her own pattern, or at least move it somewhere warm. But she kept brooding on Theresa, and especially on Theresa with the Daughrety aunt.”
“The one I talked to today?” I ask.
Spencer shrugs. “Anyway, within two weeks, Barbara was back. Too late, but back.”
The aching in my joints intensifies, as though simultaneous crushing pressure is being applied to all of them. Sooner or later, it seems, we are all of us, always, too late.
“So there I was,” Spencer says, “stepping into the Daughretys’ hallway for the first time in thirteen years. I closed the door, and boom, there was this dead, frozen silence. Every creak of floorboard was like a seagull cry over the ocean; that’s how deep the silence was. Every now and then I caught a glimpse of Theresa in the kitchen, but none of her movements had any purpose that I could see. She was just picking things up and putting them down. All those masks on the walls kept staring at me, and I wanted to drop my flowers on the welcome mat and go. I reached the kitchen after what felt like ten minutes of wading, and Theresa was sitting at the table, smoking. The smoke was the only thing moving for a while.
“’Theresa, how’ve you been?’ I asked, but she didn’t look at me. Behind her chair was a stack of newspapers in unopened protective bags. There were no dishes in the sink and none on the table, except for a white CORNELL MED SCHOOL mug she was using as an ashtray.”
Spencer sucks in a massive breath, holds it, lets it go. I watch the snow drizzle down in skeins and knit itself together like a burial shawl.
“She didn’t say anything. Well, that’s not true. She said, ‘It’ll be all right.’”
My arms squirm against my chest. Spencer wobbles suddenly and grabs the railing to steady himself.
“Right then, Mattie—I don’t know why, I think I still felt guilty about the last time I’d seen her—I got frustrated. Mad. I’d wasted so much time and thought on this person. I said something like, ‘Me? I’m fine, girl, thanks for asking. The withdrawal fits? Hell, I barely even feel them these days. Can’t really taste my food anymore; it seems I’ve done something to my tongue or my taste buds, and the world looks all washed out when there’s too much sun because my retinas are all fucked up, but yeah, you’re right, it’ll be all right.’ I don’t know how much of that I said. But then I glanced toward the big bay window-she had those curtains drawn, too—and I saw the dining room table, and that shut me up. After a while, I shook my head. And then, I swear to God, I started laughing.
“In a perfect line down the center of the dining room table was a row of open jars of baby food.”
“Oh, no,” I whisper, and tears spring to my eyes. But the only emotion I can detect in Spencer’s voice is resignation.
“Even the labels on the jars were facing the same direction,” he says. “Carrots, green beans, apple-beef and macaroni, wintercorn—whatever the hell that is. Each jar had its own little spoon sticking out of it like a potted sapling. The jars were pretty near full, as far as I could tell, and that struck me as odd, but I was concentrating on the fact that the jars were there, and I said, ‘Theresa Daughrety, gracious God, you’re a mom. I’m so happy for you. I’m so happy for all of us.’ Then I remembered why I was there, and I said, ‘I’m sorry about your dad. But Jesus dog, you’re a mom. Can I see the baby?’
“Then she looked at me, Mattie. And it was the same look, only worse. You saw it this morning; it hasn’t changed.”
“I saw it,” I say, concentrating on staying standing, holding myself together.
“She gave me that look and said, ‘It won’t eat.’ Like she was talking about a car that wouldn’t start or a pen that wouldn’t write. And I got so damn all-over cold that I lurched out of my chair and strode into the living room so I could get a better look at those jars. One lamp was switched on by that big white couch. Same couch, except lumpy and old. On the couch was a little bundle of blankets. And in the blankets, with her eyes wide open, was Analissa Pettibone.”
Spencer looks as if he’s waiting for some kind of reaction. But I can’t even get air into my lungs. The worst thing about Spencer’s story is its inevitable, incontrovertible logic. My eyes feel swollen and sensitive, like twin bruises.
“I made decisions,” says Spencer. “Real fast. On the Last Day, I expect I’ll find out if they were right.” His eyes are teary now too, but his voice is steady.
“I don’t know what she wanted with the child. But I don’t think she meant to hurt it. This wasn’t any now-I’m-the-Snowman horror movie thing. From what I saw at her house, she’d bought maybe a hundred dollars’ worth of baby food and tried it all. Of course, despite all the books she’s read and all that brain she’s got, Theresa knows next to nothing about day-to-day living. I’m pretty sure it never occurred to her that the child wasn’t eating because it couldn’t eat solid food yet. It needed to nurse or it needed a bottle. After a couple of days, Analissa must have gone real quiet, and Theresa just sat at her kitchen table waiting for Christ knows what, and that went on for almost four days before I came in.
“I thought about blowing out of the house to buy infant formula. But that kid was about to die—God knows how it had survived that long. She was taking these tiny breaths, one every few seconds, like a radiator shutting down. Then she gave this little spasm and threw up, and that decided it. I don’t think she had anything left in her stomach but the last of her own body fat, because the vomit was yellow-red and runny. I scooped her up and raced out of the house. Theresa didn’t even get up.
“That child was light before, but now it was like holding a bubble. If I squeezed too tight, I’d pop her, and if I didn’t hold her tightly enough, she’d float away. I laid her across my lap in the car and realized I had no idea where the nearest hospital was, so I drove like a maniac toward Belmont. There was probably a closer hospital, but I could already imagine the kinds of questions they’d fling at me the second I came staggering into a Birmingham hospital with a near-dead black baby that wasn’t mine in my hands. And I’d just started trying to figure out what the hell I was going to say about Theresa.
“Fortunately, Belmont is near my church, near my old house, and I even knew a few of the nurses. Of course, the doctors started grilling me anyway, and then Analissa threw up some more red liquid and they whisked her away. I went straight to a bank of phones and called the police. Somehow, the media got hold of it at the same time, because the reporters showed up before the cops.”
Spencer sags a bit in his coat. I just wait, because I have no choice. He’s right. The movie is over. The damage is done. Around us, the snow continues to fall, and th
e sky dims toward twilight.
“By then, I knew what I would say to the police,” Spencer says. “I told them I found Analissa bundled on my doormat. Everyone in the church knew I’d been Caretaker for her and her mother, and I speculated that maybe whoever had taken her had known that too.
“So the next day, of course, the police came crashing down on our whole congregation, not just yours truly. They had themselves a regular Boston tea party tearing up my apartment looking for evidence that I’d done the kidnapping or masterminded it, although they never proposed any motive. Worse, the tension and suspicion caused all kinds of petty pent-up conflicts and hostilities to surface within the church, and we had a little Salem witch hunt for a while, with good prayerful people betraying their neighbors and finger-pointing at one another. By the time that died down, a lot of congregants were awfully unhappy with me, and at one point, there was a vote on a Writ of Exclusion concerning me. Many times, I’ve agonized over the suffering I caused the people I love and pray with and Caretake for. But giving up Theresa to the police meant sending her to a prison asylum, and I couldn’t bear the thought of that. I just couldn’t bear it. So I didn’t do it, and I can’t say I’m sorry.”
For a long moment, Spencer stops, and the snow wraps around him in long white strands.
“Anyway,” he says, shrugging out of his silence, “when I was done with the police, I returned to the Daughrety house and cleaned up all the baby food while Theresa watched me from the kitchen table, smoking in silence, and then she went to bed. For the next week or so, I slept on that old white couch. I went to the church when I had to, but never for more than a couple of hours. I asked Shepherd Griffith-Rice what he knew about private mental institutions. He asked no questions, just put me in touch with some people who helped me find this place. Theresa barely stirred. She would come out of her bedroom midmorning or so, take the newspaper and smooth the plastic bag it had come in until there were no wrinkles, and then lay it, unread, on the pile in the kitchen.
The Snowman's Children Page 31