A Lot Like Christmas

by Connie Willis

  “The roads are already starting to get slick,” Jim was saying. “I hope my parents get here okay. They’re driving down from Chicago.”

  They will, Paula thought. Stacey wants them to.

  Jim got Paula’s bags off the carousel and then said, “Hang on, I promised Stacey I’d tell her as soon as you got here.” He flipped open his cell phone and put it to his ear. “Stacey? She’s here. Yeah, I will. Okay, I’ll pick them up on our way. Yeah. Okay.”

  He flipped the phone shut. “She wants us to pick up the evergreen garlands on our way,” he said, “and then I have to come back and get Kindra and David. We need to check on their flights before we leave.”

  He led the way upstairs to ticketing so they could check the arrival board. Outside the terminal windows snow was falling, large, perfect, lacy flakes.

  “Kindra’s on the 2:19 from Houston,” Jim said, scanning the board, “and David’s on the 11:40 from Newark. Oh, good, they’re both on time.”

  Of course they are, Paula thought, looking at the board. The snow in Denver must be getting worse. All the Denver flights had “delayed” next to them, and so did a bunch of others: Cheyenne and Portland and Richmond. As she watched, Boston and then Chicago changed from “on time” to “delayed” and Rapid City went from “delayed” to “canceled.” She looked at Kindra’s and David’s flights again. They were still on time.

  Ski areas in Aspen, Lake Placid, Squaw Valley, Stowe, Lake Tahoe, and Jackson Hole woke to several inches of fresh powder. The snow was greeted with relief by the people who had paid ninety dollars for their lift tickets, with irritation by the ski resort owners, who didn’t see why it couldn’t have come two weeks earlier when people were making their Christmas reservations, and with whoops of delight by snowboarders Kent Slakken and Bodine Cromps. They promptly set out from Breckenridge without maps, matches, helmets, avalanche beacons, avalanche probes, or telling anyone where they were going, for an off-limits backcountry area with “totally extreme slopes.”

  At 7:05, Miguel came in and jumped on Pilar again, this time on her bladder, shouting, “It’s snowing! Now Santa can come! Now Santa can come!”

  “Snowing?” she said blearily. In L.A.? “Snowing? Where?”

  “On TV. Can I make myself some cereal?”

  “No,” she said, remembering the last time. She reached for her robe. “You go watch TV some more and Mommy’ll make pancakes.”

  When she brought the pancakes and syrup in, Miguel was sitting, absorbed, in front of the TV, watching a man in a green parka standing in the snow in front of an ambulance with flashing lights, saying, “—third weather-related fatality in Dodge City so far this morning—”

  “Let’s find some cartoons to watch,” Pilar said, clicking the remote.

  “—outside Knoxville, Tennessee, where snow and icy conditions have caused a multicar accident—”

  She clicked the remote again.

  “—to Columbia, South Carolina, where a surprise snowstorm has shut off power to—”

  Click.

  “—problem seems to be a low-pressure area covering Canada and the northern two thirds of the United States, bringing snow to the entire Midwest and Mid-Atlantic States and—”

  Click.

  “—snowing here in Bozeman—”

  “I told you it was snowing,” Miguel said happily, eating his pancakes, “just like I wanted it to. After breakfast can we make a snowman?”

  “Honey, it isn’t snowing here in California,” Pilar said. “That’s the national weather, it’s not here. That reporter’s in Montana, not California.”

  Miguel grabbed the remote and clicked to a reporter standing in the snow in front of a giant redwood tree. “The snow started about four this morning here in Monterey, California. As you can see,” she said, indicating her raincoat and umbrella, “it caught everybody by surprise.”

  “She’s in California,” Miguel said.

  “She’s in northern California,” Pilar said, “which gets a lot colder than it does here in L.A. L.A.’s too warm for it to snow.”

  “No, it’s not,” Miguel said, and pointed out the window, where big white flakes were drifting down onto the palm trees across the street.

  At 9:40 Central Standard Time the cell phone Nathan Andrews thought he’d turned off rang in the middle of a grant money meeting which was already going badly. Scheduling the meeting in Omaha on the day before Christmas had seemed like a good idea at the time—businessmen had hardly any appointments that day and the spirit of the season was supposed to make them more willing to open their pocketbooks—but instead they were merely distracted, anxious to do their last-minute Mercedes-Benz shopping or get the Christmas office party started or whatever it was businessmen did, and worried about the snow that had started during rush hour this morning.

  Plus, they were morons. “So you’re saying you want a grant to study global warming, but then you talk about wanting to measure snow levels,” one of them had said. “What does snow have to do with global warming?”

  Nathan had tried to explain again how warming could lead to increased amounts of moisture in the atmosphere and thus increased precipitation in the form of rain and snow, and how that increased snowfall could lead to increased albedo and surface cooling.

  “If it’s getting cooler, it’s not getting warmer,” another one of the businessmen had said. “It can’t be both.”

  “As a matter of fact, it can,” he’d said, and launched into his explanation of how polar melting could lead to an increase in freshwater in the North Atlantic, which would float on top of the Gulf Stream, preventing its warm water from sinking and cooling, and effectively shutting the current down. “Europe would freeze,” he’d said.

  “Well, then, global warming would be a good thing, wouldn’t it?” yet another one had said. “Heat the place up.”

  He had patiently tried to explain how the world would grow both hotter and colder, with widespread droughts, flooding, and a sharp increase in severe weather. “And these changes may happen extremely quickly,” he’d said. “Rather than temperatures gradually increasing and sea levels rising, there may be a sudden, unexpected event—a discontinuity. It may take the form of an abrupt, catastrophic temperature increase or a superhurricane or other form of megastorm, occurring without any warning. That’s why this project is so critical. By setting up a comprehensive climate database, we’ll be able to create more accurate computer models, from which we’ll be able to—”

  “Computer models!” one of them had snorted. “They’re wrong more often than they’re right!”

  “Because they don’t include enough factors,” Nathan said. “Climate is an incredibly complicated system, with literally thousands of factors interacting in intricate ways—weather patterns, clouds, precipitation, ocean currents, man-made activities, crops. Thus far, computer models have only been able to chart a handful of factors. This project will chart over two hundred of them and will enable the models to be exponentially more accurate. We’ll be able to predict a discontinuity before it happens—”

  It was at that point that his cell phone rang. It was his graduate assistant Chin Sung, from the lab. “Where are you?” Chin demanded.

  “In a grant meeting,” Nathan whispered. “Can I call you back in a few minutes?”

  “Not if you still want the Nobel Prize,” Chin said. “You know that harebrained theory of yours about global warming producing a sudden discontinuity? Well, I think you’d better get over here. Today may be the day you turn out to be right.”

  “Why?” Nathan asked, gripping the phone excitedly. “What’s happened? Have the Gulf Stream temp readings dropped?”

  “No, it’s not the currents. It’s what’s happening here.”

  “Which is what?”

  Instead of answering, Chin asked, “Is it snowing where you are?”

  Nathan looked out the conference room window. “Yes.”

  “I thought so. It’s snowing here, too.”

 
“And that’s what you called me about?” Nathan whispered. “Because it’s snowing in Nebraska in December? In case you haven’t looked at a calendar lately, winter started three days ago. It’s supposed to be snowing.”

  “You don’t understand,” Chin said. “It isn’t just snowing in Nebraska. It’s snowing everywhere.”

  “What do you mean, everywhere?”

  “I mean everywhere. Seattle, Salt Lake City, Minneapolis, Providence, Chattanooga. All over Canada and the U.S. as far south as”—there was a pause and the sound of computer keys clicking—“Abilene and Shreveport and Savannah. No, wait, Tallahassee’s reporting light snow. As far south as Tallahassee.”

  The jet stream must have dipped radically south. “Where’s the center of the low pressure system?”

  “That’s just it,” Chin said. “There doesn’t seem to be one.”

  “I’ll be right there,” Nathan said.

  A mile from the highway, snowboarders Kent Slakken and Bodine Cromps, unable to see the road in heavily falling snow, drove their car into a ditch. “Shit,” Bodine said, and attempted to get out of it by revving the engine and then flooring it, a technique which only succeeded in digging them in to the point where they couldn’t open either car door.

  It took Jim and Paula nearly two hours to pick up the evergreen garlands and get out to the church. The lacy flakes fell steadily faster and thicker, and it was so slick Jim had to crawl the last few miles. “I hope this doesn’t get any worse,” he said worriedly, “or people are going to have a hard time getting out here.”

  But Stacey wasn’t worried at all. “Isn’t it beautiful? I wanted it to snow for my wedding more than anything,” she said, meeting them at the door of the church. “Come here, Paula, you’ve got to see how the snow looks through the sanctuary windows. It’s going to be perfect.”

  Jim left immediately to go pick up Kindra and David, which Paula was grateful for. Being that close to him in the car had made her start entertaining the ridiculous hopes about him she’d had when they first met. And they were ridiculous. One look at Stacey had shown her that.

  The bride-to-be looked beautiful even in a sweater and jeans, her makeup exquisite, her blond hair upswept into glittery snowflake-sprinkled curls. Every time Paula had had her hair done to be in a wedding, she had come out looking like someone in a bad 1950s movie. How does she do it? Paula wondered. You watch, the snow will stop, and start up again just in time for the ceremony.

  But it didn’t. It continued to come down steadily, and when the minister arrived for the rehearsal, she said, “I don’t know. It took me half an hour to get out of my driveway. You may want to think about canceling.”

  “Don’t be silly. We can’t cancel. It’s a Christmas Eve wedding,” Stacey said, and made Paula start tying the evergreen garlands to the pews with white satin ribbon.

  It was sprinkling in Santa Fe when Bev Carey arrived at her hotel, and by the time she’d checked in and ventured out into the Plaza, it had turned into an icy, driving rain that went right through the light coat and thin gloves she’d brought with her. She had planned to spend the morning shopping, but the shops had signs on them saying “Closed Christmas Eve and Christmas Day,” and the sidewalk in front of the Governor’s Palace, where, according to her guidebook, Zunis and Navajos sat to sell authentic silver-and-turquoise jewelry, was deserted.

  But at least it’s not snowing, she told herself, trudging, shivering, back to the hotel. And the shop windows were decorated with ristras and lights in the shape of chili peppers, and the Christmas tree in the hotel lobby was decorated with kachina dolls.

  Her friend Janice had already called and left a message with the hotel clerk. And if I don’t call her back, she’ll be convinced I’ve taken a bottle of sleeping pills, Bev thought, going up to her room. On the way to the airport, Janice had asked anxiously, “You haven’t been having suicidal thoughts, have you?” and when her friend Louise had found out what Bev was planning, she’d said, “I saw this piece on Dateline the other night about suicides at Christmas, and how people who’ve lost a spouse are especially vulnerable. You wouldn’t do anything like that, would you?”

  They none of them understood that she was doing this to save her life, not end it, that it was Christmas at home, with its lighted trees and evergreen wreaths and candles, that would kill her. And its snow.

  “I know you miss Howard,” Janice had said, “and that with Christmas coming, you’re feeling sad.”

  Sad? She felt flayed, battered, beaten. Every memory, every thought of her husband, every use of the past tense, even—“Howard liked…,” “Howard knew…,” “Howard was…”—was like a deadly blow. The grief-counseling books all talked about “the pain of losing a loved one,” but she had had no idea the pain could be this bad. It was like being stabbed over and over, and her only hope had been to get away. She hadn’t “decided to go to Santa Fe for Christmas.” She had run there like a victim fleeing a murderer.

  She took off her drenched coat and gloves and called Janice. “You promised you’d call as soon as you got there,” Janice said reproachfully. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” Bev said. “I was out walking around the Plaza.” She didn’t say anything about its raining. She didn’t want Janice saying I told you so. “It’s beautiful here.”

  “I should have come with you,” Janice said. “It’s snowing like crazy here. Ten inches so far. I suppose you’re sitting on a patio drinking a margarita right now.”

  “Sangria,” Bev lied. “I’m going sightseeing this afternoon. The houses here are all pink and tan adobe with bright blue and red and yellow doors, and right now the whole town’s decorated with luminarias. You should see them.”

  “I wish I could,” Janice sighed. “All I can see is snow. I have no idea how I’m going to get to the store. Oh, well, at least we’ll have a white Christmas. It’s so sad Howard can’t be here to see this. He always loved white Christmases, didn’t he?”

  Howard, consulting the Farmer’s Almanac, reading the weather forecast out loud to her, calling her over to the picture window to watch the snow beginning to fall, saying, “Looks like we’re going to get a white Christmas this year,” as if it were a present under the tree, putting his arm around her—

  “Yes,” Bev managed to say through the sudden, searing stab of pain. “He did.”

  It was spitting snow when Warren Nesvick checked into the Marriott in Baltimore. As soon as he got Shara up to the suite, he told her he had to make a business call, “and then I’ll be all yours, honey.” He went down to the lobby. The TV in the corner was showing a weather map. He looked at it for a minute and then got out his cell phone.

  “Where are you?” his wife Marjean said when she answered.

  “In St. Louis,” he said. “Our flight got rerouted here because of snow at O’Hare. What’s the weather like there?”

  “It’s snowing,” she said. “When do you think you’ll be able to get a flight out?”

  “I don’t know. Everything’s booked because of it being Christmas Eve. I’m waiting to see if I can get on standby. I’ll call you as soon as I know something,” and hung up before she could ask him which flight.

  It took Nathan an hour and a half to drive the fifteen miles to the lab, during which he considered the likelihood that this was really a discontinuity and not just a major snowstorm. Global warming proponents (and opponents) confused the two all the time. Every hurricane, tornado, heat wave, or dry spell was attributed to global warming, even though nearly all of them fell well within the range of normal weather patterns.

  And there had been big December snowstorms before. The blizzard of 1888, for instance, and the Christmas Eve storm of 2002. And Chin was probably wrong about there being no center to the low pressure system. The likely explanation was that there was more than one system involved—one centered in the Great Lakes and another just east of the Rockies, colliding with warm, moist air from the Gulf Coast to create unusually widespread sno
w.

  And it was widespread. The car radio was reporting snow all across the Midwest and the entire East Coast—Topeka, Tulsa, Peoria, northern Virginia, Hartford, Montpelier, Reno, Spokane. No, Reno and Spokane were west of the Rockies. There must be a third system, coming down from the Northwest. But it was still hardly a discontinuity.

  The lab parking lot hadn’t been plowed. He left the car on the street and struggled through the already knee-deep snow to the door, remembering when he was halfway across the expanse that Nebraska was famous for pioneers who got lost going out to the barn in a blizzard and whose frozen bodies weren’t found till the following spring.

  He reached the door, opened it, and stood there a moment blowing on his frozen hands and looking at the TV Chin had stuck on a cart in the corner of the lab. On it, a pretty reporter in a parka and a Mickey Mouse hat was standing in heavy snow in front of what seemed to be a giant snowman. “The snow has really caused problems here at Disney World,” she said over the sound of a marching band playing “White Christmas.” “Their annual Christmas Eve Parade has—”

  “Well, it’s about time,” Chin said, coming in from the fax room with a handful of printouts. “What took you so long?”

  Nathan ignored that. “Have you got the IPOC data?” he asked.

  Chin nodded. He sat down at his terminal and started typing. The upper left-hand screen lit up with columns of numbers.

  “Let me see the National Weather Service map,” Nathan said, unzipping his coat and sitting down at the main console.

  Chin called up a U.S. map nearly half covered with blue, from western Oregon and Nevada east all the way to the Atlantic and up through New England and south to the Oklahoma panhandle, northern Mississippi, Alabama, and most of Georgia.

  “Good Lord, that’s even bigger than Marina in ’92,” Nathan said. “Have you got a satellite photo?”