As Simple as Snow (20 page)

 

 

The last sentence was a knife. Whoever wrote it knew what it would do to me. If Anna wrote it, what did it mean? Was she doubting that I loved her? “Everyone who loved her called her Anastasia. . . . G______ called her Anna.” Why would she even suggest it? But if someone else had written it, it meant nothing. What did anyone else know about us, anyway? Everything in my head was screaming, a constant, torturous metallic collision of everything I thought I knew with everything I didn’t know, everything I thought to be true with every lie, everything I expected with every inconceivable exception, everything I wanted with everything I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, everything I felt with everything I didn’t want to feel.

Comparing the Anna Cayne described in the obituary with the one I knew, she seemed nothing more than an apparition, a haunting presence of veiled secrets, an elusive girl who had disappeared in the night fog. She had always been a ghost.

 

 

I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t concentrate. It was like I had suddenly been struck with ADD, how I used to feel right before football games, excited and nervous, full of adrenaline and anticipation and dread, waiting for something to happen. I would lie in bed at night, completely exhausted, trying to sleep, but I would continue to be wide awake. I would get up and pace in my room or go online and jump from site to site, not able to read even a few sentences but not able to lie still either. I called Anna’s phone and listened to her voice over and over, but then I got worried that the message might somehow go away, so I recorded a version on my computer and began editing different versions, taking the words and trying to make more sentences, more things she could say to me. In the end I always returned to the original message, or just the last part. “I will get back to you.”

After Anna left I was in a numbed daze, living in an aquarium where everything was murky, underwater, in slow motion. Everything inside me seemed tied down with lead weights, or was turning into lead. I had trouble breathing and seeing, and had to go about the easiest of tasks with great effort and deliberation. School was nothing more than a long ringing bell and shapes passing in front of me. I sat in class, but had no idea what anyone was saying. I did all my assignments, but barely remember doing them. I wrote a lot of things down, but little of it had to do with school. I wrote about Anna, and what had happened to her, or what might have happened. Mrs. Wyrick (English) had started a series of free-writing classes every Friday, where we spent the period writing about anything we wanted. I used one of those periods to write about the possibility of Anna’s not coming back, the possibility she had been killed. I developed a list of suspects:

1. Mr. and Mrs. Cayne. They should be at the top of anyone’s list. According to some research I did on the Web, only fourteen percent of all murders are committed by strangers—though that number increases significantly for victims under age eighteen. Still, the Caynes or some other acquaintance of Anna’s is probably responsible, if she was murdered.

2. Bryce Druitt. He’s a jerk, so he goes on the list. Actually, it’s more than that. While it’s true that they were close friends, after his accident I noticed a real tension between Anna and Bryce. They spoke less and less, and he seemed to avoid her. I’m not sure that they even liked each other anymore. Sometimes I thought that if it weren’t for the facts that they dressed a certain way and that there were so few of their clique around, they wouldn’t ever have anything to do with each other. There was never any reason for me to think that Bryce would want to hurt Anna, but he certainly had the ability.

3. A stranger. This seems the least plausible. For one thing, there aren’t any strangers in town, and what are the odds that one would have been passing by the Caynes’ house, and how would the stranger have drawn her out of the house? I suppose the stranger could have come across Anna by the river, but it seems unlikely. It does raise the question of what she was doing after I left her. Did she go to the river by herself, as she often did, or was it something else?

4. Anna Cayne. Suicide. But if she wanted to kill herself, she could have picked a hundred better ways to accomplish it.

5. Nobody. She wasn’t murdered at all. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe she was trying to save someone from drowning and she was reaching for the person and choked on the icy water and drowned. Maybe she was reaching for something else; maybe she had thrown her notebooks into the river and then suddenly wanted to retrieve them. Maybe she was trying to see how long she could last in the frigid water, holding her breath and steeling her body, pushing herself like Houdini. Maybe she was testing death and failed the test.

6. Maybe it was a setup. There was no body falling or slipping through a hole in the ice. She staged the scene and escaped her life. She could be anywhere, someplace better.

 

 

This didn’t help; it only made me more anxious and hyper. I couldn’t sit still, I couldn’t read, listen to music, watch TV. I couldn’t sleep. I would try to do all of those things, but would end up doing them for only five minutes. I felt horrible and looked worse. My eyes were fiery, glassy. My skin was waxen, worse, sweaty wax. And my face was completely broken out. I couldn’t keep my hands away from the line of zits that had spread across my chin. I scratched and poked them without thinking. “Am I going to have to tie your hands behind your back?” my mom asked me at dinner. I wouldn’t have minded.

By the third day without sleep I was desperate. I asked Carl to sell me something. “Never,” he said. He wanted to help, but he told me to go to a doctor. “I don’t need a doctor,” I said. “I just need some sleep.” Finally, on the fifth day, he gave me a single pill, a capsule in a plastic sandwich bag. “Take this about half an hour before you go to bed,” he told me. I didn’t care if I became a burnout, addicted to pills and whatever else. I didn’t care if I became dependent on Carl and the drugs he stole or bought and sold. I just wanted some relief. I didn’t even hesitate; I took the pill.

I slept most of the night, but didn’t feel any better in the morning. “I slept, for a while anyway,” I told him the next day. “What was that pill?”

“Sugar,” he said. “It’s my best seller. The mind just believes it’s a drug, because that’s what you want. People buy the drug they want, but it’s not what I sell them. Most people never notice the difference. I’m out of the drug business, for the most part. I’m in the mind management business.”

“So why’d you tell me?”

“To prove to you that you don’t need it. You’re going to get through this. You’re going to be all right.”

“What do you know about it all? What are people saying about Anna?”

“No one knows anything,” he said. “It’s all rumors, you know that. There’s always been rumors. Just remember that you know Anastasia better than anyone else. Don’t forget that. You know her, they don’t.”

valentine’s day

It was about a week since Anna’s disappearance; I had dreaded every day since then, and I especially dreaded this day. Both my mother and my father told me to stay home from school, but that might have been worse. I needed the distraction. For somebody used to being ignored, I was not prepared to be ignored in the way it was happening now. I was a car wreck on the side of the road; when people saw me they slowed and quietly surveyed me and then sped up again. They didn’t say anything, they looked and moved on. They just wanted to see how bad the damage was. And on Valentine’s Day it was even worse. People were obvious in their avoidance of me, averting their stares in jerks of the head as I walked down the hall. When I got to my locker, just a few minutes before class, it was already filled with cards.

I had never liked the holiday much, had never had a reason to like it. I gave out few cards and received even fewer, but this year was different. I collected the white hill of envelopes at the bottom of the locker (people had stuck them through the vents in the top) and stacked them on the shelf to open later. I was almost afraid of what they might say. But when I opened them later in my room, almost all of them were sympathetic, wishing me well and hoping the best for me. I separated them into stacks. There was the “Hang in there” stack and the “Don’t give up hope” stack, which were about equal in number. These phrases appeared so often that the words lost all meaning and I mindlessly shut the cards and put them in their respective pile once I read them. Most of the cards started, “I don’t know you very well, but . . .” and proceeded to express sincere sympathy and good wishes. Some of them related stories about people who had disappeared for months, had been kidnapped or had run off, and then came back safe and sound. I should have been touched by the fact that so many people had taken time to drop a card in my locker, but I was also reminded that it would end there, all the emotion and concern would stay in the card, no one would approach me in the halls, hardly anyone who had written “I don’t know you very well” would make an attempt to change that.

I almost preferred the handful of asshole cards, from people honest enough to admit that they took pleasure in Anna’s absence. Maybe they didn’t want her dead, but they were happy that she was out of their lives and happy that I was alone, that we both had suffered. A few cards even said it was my own fault, and one quoted the Bible and said that I would one day join Anna in hell. They were honest enough, but only to a point—they were all unsigned.

There was another unsigned card, handmade—a heart cut out of black construction paper, decorated with tiny white flowers in rows and a white clock face in the middle, without hands but with the numbers in white ink. In the middle of the clock face were the words “Love is just an excuse to get hurt. And to hurt.” In the upper right corner of the card was an old three-cent stamp with a bust of Abe Lincoln. You could make out the cancellation across it: “Water is precious, use it wisely.” In the narrowing bottom of the heart were the letters NYCS, written in white ink. Somebody had gone to a lot of trouble to make this card, and it seemed like something Anna would have done. Or maybe it was Claire, but there already was a card from her. She had written a biblical passage I had seen before: “And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly; I perceived that this also is vexation of the spirit.” I couldn’t place the quotation, even though it should have been familiar, and put these two cards in their own pile.

There was a card from Melissa. “I am truly sorry for everything that has happened,” she wrote sympathetically. “I can only imagine what you are going through. If you need anything, please let me know if I can help. I mean it.” It was nice, but the handwriting reminded me of the writing on another card. One of the asshole cards. I spent a long time comparing the two, looking for any exact matches in the way the letters were formed or slanted across the page. Some things were similar, but I concluded that I was just being paranoid. I desperately wanted to find out who had written the asshole cards, and kill them. I wanted to take the cards to the principal or the police and have those responsible kicked out of school or arrested. I wished I hadn’t received any cards. I wanted to leave town. Instead, I went down to the river.

Someone had made a huge, ragged heart in the ice. It must have been twenty feet from the top to the narrow tip. Anna’s name and mine had been written in the middle, the letters scraped with feet or a shovel. I didn’t know whether it was meant as a memorial or a mocking insult. It didn’t matter.

 

 

 

When I got home my dinner was waiting on the stove. I assumed that my father was in his den and that my mother was watching TV or already asleep. But they both joined me in the kitchen before I even had a chance to get my coat off. My mother prepared me a plate, and I sat down to eat. “When you finish up there, why don’t you come see me in the den,” my father said.

When I went in, he was sitting in one of the large leather armchairs, reading the paper. He wore a pair of those half-glasses you can buy in drugstores, and when he saw me he pulled them from his face and put them between the cushion and the arm of the chair. He stood and motioned me to sit in the other chair. “You want something to drink?” he asked as he poured himself a scotch. His words passed between us like clouds, changing shape and meaning, and by the time I realized that he was actually offering me alcohol I had already said no. He put the bottle of scotch back on the bar in the corner and said, “I won’t ask again. Soda?”

The room itself was a foreign country. On the wall were photographs of people I had never met and did not recognize, some of them standing with my father on this or that golf course, their arms around each other as they smiled for the camera. On the shelves, where most of the books were about golf or accounting, I tried to see if there were any that Anna had in her room, or that she might have liked, but I could barely concentrate. I noticed the door on one wall, a door that led to the front of the house. I had never noticed it before. I was in my own house, where I had spent my entire life, and I didn’t know the place. I wanted to leave; I wanted to go someplace that I knew, someplace safe. But I sat quietly, watching my father move around the room.

He went over to a console and opened the front doors to expose a big TV and stereo. He popped a video into the VCR and said, “You might like this.”

It was a series of instructional golf films made with Bobby Jones in the early 1930s. I have no idea why my father thought I would be interested in watching them, but he was mesmerized. He blurted out things as we watched. “That’s James Cagney.” “That’s the Riviera.” “You couldn’t get away with that now.” “He’s completely inside the ball.” I didn’t know what to do with most of the information he tossed at me, but I started to get into it.

Bobby Jones was kind of a stiff—you could see him struggling to read the cue cards in some of the scenes—but his golf swing was beautiful to watch. I don’t even like golf, not in the least, but I began talking to my father about Bobby Jones.