As Simple as Snow (30 page)

“Okay.”

“Besides, nothing happens over there, all the bad stuff is on this side of the river.”

At the end of classes, Claire was waiting for me at my locker. “When are you going over there?”

“You’re going with me?”

“It’s a stupid superstition, right?”

“I’m not the best person to say, but I think so. I’m going back, anyway.”

“Then I’ll go with you,” she said. “It’s the least I can do.”

 

 

 

We went the next day, Saturday. The last time I had seen Mumler, the trees were bare and the ground was covered with snow. You could hardly see the “No Trespassing” sign now because of the brush and tall grass, and the trees filling with new leaves. Nothing looked the same. We walked past the sign and deeper into the woods as I tried to locate where Anna and I had been.

There were bugs everywhere, small black flies that flew into my mouth as I breathed hard trudging through the tangled brush. Claire was wearing black jeans and a black long-sleeved shirt, and an old beekeeper’s hat that her father had found on one of his daily searches. (“Maybe we should bring your dad,” I had said. “Even he won’t go into Mumler,” she replied.) I had made fun of the hat before, but I wished I had one now. The bugs were annoying, filling the air at my eyes and nose and ears. Besides, who would see me out here anyway?

“What are we looking for?” Claire asked.

“We were by a chimney,” I said, “but I think we walked along here. I don’t know. It’s hard to tell. We have to do it like this. I saw it in a movie.” I took her hand, and we stretched out and walked together in a line.

“Does it work with only two people?”

“That’s all we’ve got.”

We walked intently, looking for something I could recognize, anything that might announce the place where I’d been with Anna. For a moment I imagined we could have been out on a beautiful day, holding hands and carrying a picnic basket, looking for a nice spot to have lunch and wait for the dark and the ghosts. I wondered . . . If Carl didn’t come back, if Claire and I might . . . and then the thought was gone. I wanted Carl to come back. I wanted Anna to come back. I wanted everything to be covered in snow again, to be the way it was the last time I had been in these woods, not searching for clues and signs and a ghost that might not even be there.

We wandered in the woods for another twenty minutes or so. Claire would look through the trees, trying to find the chimney, and then down at the ground in front of us, her netted head bobbing around like some anxious, exotic hunter’s. Suddenly she stopped and bent at the waist, peering at something on the ground that I couldn’t see because of the tall grass. She pulled me over. Nestled in the grass was a black cell phone. I went to pick it up and she grabbed my arm. “Don’t touch it,” she said.

“We should see if it’s Anna’s.” It looked like her phone. I wanted to pick it up.

Claire shook her head. “Fingerprints. We should leave it right there and go call the police. She was right, but I wanted to know right then. I wanted to know whether it was her phone, and if it was hers, when it was last used and who it was she had called and who had called her. With Claire’s reasoning, I would have to wait.

I stood and stared at the phone in the grass. I was convinced it was Anna’s. I grabbed my phone and dialed her number, looking at the ground to see if anything would happen. I couldn’t get a signal in the middle of the woods.

I continued to stare at the object on the ground. It was an answer, lying a few feet from us, but we shouldn’t pick it up, so it was just another question, another riddle. Finally Claire pulled me away, afraid that I was going to give in and pick up the phone.

“We’ll call them as soon as we get to your house,” she said. “Then we’ll bring the cops right back here. It will only take a little while.”

 

 

 

We were driving back to my house, the warm air blowing in through the open windows of Claire’s car. The sun was bright and fuzzed at the edges, a dandelion floating in a blue pond. For someone else it was probably a perfect day. It should have been. Claire was nothing like Anna, I thought. She was timid and quiet and safe compared with Anna. Whatever feelings I had for Claire—and I did like her—were gone. They had disappeared as quickly and as unexpectedly as they had first struck me. It was just as it had been with Melissa, except those feelings had come and gone faster. There was no reason for it, the attraction simply passed. Did that mean that the feelings I had once had for her weren’t real, or that they weren’t strong enough?

I turned from the window to Claire. I would ask her about something I’d been keeping to myself.

“Did you know that somebody sent me Anna’s obituary in the mail?”

“From the paper?”

“No. It was a personalized one, just for me.”

“I didn’t know that.” Claire’s voice shook. She knew what was coming, and I didn’t want to have the conversation any more than she did, but I kept talking.

“Bryce told me about it. He said I should talk to you.” I looked at her. Her face was red, caught red; she was ready to cry.

“I sent it,” she said.

“Why?”

“Look . . . it wasn’t my idea.” She was crying now. “Anastasia asked me to send it, so I did.”

“When did she ask you?”

“A couple of weeks before she was gone. She said that you’d been helping her with her obituaries and this was the last one and she wanted me to send it to you. She told me when to send it.”

“She wrote it?”

“She wrote it.”

“That’s not what her dad said.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe she didn’t write it. I just sent it like she asked me to.”

“Did you read it?”

“I read it.”

“Is it true?”

“Some of it, maybe. I don’t know, I asked her and she wouldn’t give me a straight answer. I just figured it was another puzzle.”

“And the end? You let her write that about me?”

She looked at me as if I should know better, and I did know better. You weren’t going to stop Anna from doing what she wanted. “You didn’t take that seriously, did you? She said that you would laugh, that you’d know she was joking, teasing you about never calling her Anastasia. You were the only one she ever let get away with that.”

“But why did you send it, even after she was gone?”

“What do you mean, why? She asked me to send it, and I did. Didn’t she have all of us do stuff like that all the time, make stuff and cut up crap and send it around to each other or put things places? I hate all of that now. It’s so stupid.” Claire was yelling. I should have been the one yelling.

Instead, I said quietly, “Let me out here.”

She pulled over to the side of the road and I got out. I walked up ahead and she sat in the car. I wasn’t that far from home, maybe ten minutes. I kept looking back and the car was always there at the side of the road, even when I made the turn onto Brook.

I called the police once I got home. They drove me to Mumler, and I showed them where Claire and I had found the phone. They photographed the area, and retrieved the phone and put it in a clear plastic bag. They weren’t going to touch the phone right now, one officer told me; it had to be checked for fingerprints. He had picked it up with rubber gloves, so I didn’t see why he couldn’t turn it on right then and tell me. The police probably wouldn’t have told me then anyway; they would have had another excuse to keep information from me. I had done the right thing—I could have picked it up and turned it on when I was there with Claire. I didn’t even have to call them. And what did I get for doing the right thing? Nothing. They said they’d let me know as soon as they could. They would let me know anything else they found too. And they did search the area more, but found nothing.

I went home and lay on my bed and called Anna’s cell. I didn’t expect anything, and I got nothing in return. It rang and rang. My mother came to tell me that dinner was ready, and sat beside me on the bed. She turned off the phone and put her arm on my shoulder. I didn’t move. She ran her hand across my back and shoulder. I didn’t move. I didn’t even open my eyes. I didn’t want to cry again. She ran her hand across my back and shoulder, quietly and calmly.

“You should eat something,” she told me.

“I should,” I agreed. I didn’t move and she didn’t leave; she remained beside me on the bed, lightly rubbing my shoulder the way she used to after tucking me in at night when I was little. I wished she would stay there forever, and then I was asleep.

The past is a river. It flows. It winds around, coursing through my memory until it arrives in the present. It looks the same, but everything has changed, different waves making up the same water. At times it is frozen, stagnant and still, and other times it rushes at you with a strong current, washing over everything. It is always moving, changing from second to second, as unstable as those elements at the end of the periodic table that Mr. Devon had talked about. I wanted to have control over it, but things I wanted to forget kept flooding back, and things I wanted to remember, letters and e-mails I threw away, passages from Anna’s notebooks, drifted away.

If I could, I would choose to forget everything, to forget Anna entirely, but that would mean becoming a completely different person. I would gladly do that, don’t get me wrong, but I know it can’t happen. In some ways I am different already, changing into someone I never planned to be, changing and moving downstream, but still remaining.

 

 

 

Billy Godley was waiting for me Monday morning at school. He had news. It wasn’t Anna’s phone after all. It was Mr. Hathorne’s. “And this is the part you should know before everyone starts talking about it,” he said. The last call Mr. Hathorne had made was to my mother. Billy wasn’t going to say anything to anybody about it, but it was only a matter of time before everyone knew. People weren’t going to think anything that wasn’t already racing around in my head about that phone call. I didn’t know whether to run home and confront my mother about it immediately or call my dad at his office and let him know. Maybe he already did know. I prepared myself for the rumors and the questions, but made it through the day without having anyone say anything.

I went straight home after school, and there was a squad car in the driveway, next to my father’s car. I hoped I hadn’t missed anything. When I entered the kitchen I saw the same officers who had talked to me months before, sitting in the same chairs they had sat in months before. My father was sitting at the table, and it was obvious that they had just started talking. My father glanced up at me with a look that said, “Hold it right there,” so I stayed where I was, off to the side, intrigued and taking some satisfaction that my mother was now the one having to explain herself. I never thought that she would be mixed up in anything illegal or wrong; I never thought she’d be mixed up in anything at all. I expected her to collapse or come apart in front of the cops. This wasn’t the smooth, uncomplicated day she always tried to maintain; this was a mess she couldn’t run to the neighbors to solve. Surprisingly, there were no hysterics; she was composed and answered the officers’ questions directly, in a confident, calm voice.

She said that when Mr. Hathorne had called her, he was drunk and wanted her help, wanted her to take him back to rehab. “My wife is responsible for him getting to rehab the first time,” my father explained. “He’s been something of a project of hers.”

“Where was he when he phoned you?” the policeman asked.

“He wouldn’t say,” my mother replied. “I told him that I would come and get him, but he wouldn’t tell me where he was.” He then went and turned himself in to the police and confessed himself a murderer.

The officer closed his notepad and said that he didn’t have any more questions. In my head I kept shouting, “Ask her about coffee, ask her about dinner”—I wanted to show them where Mr. Hathorne had sat and eaten, but they had finished. Maybe my mother
was
just trying to help. Maybe Mr. Hathorne
was
something of a project. She’d never had a project before, as far as I knew. It’s what my father had told the police, and I remembered him lecturing me on telling them the truth. It could have been true. I’d like to think that my mother had more sense than to get mixed up with the town drunk—sexually, I mean. She was already mixed up with him in some way, that’s for sure, but I wasn’t sure she had more sense than that.

waiting for a whale

I felt the way Jonah must have felt right before he got swallowed by the whale. All sorts of bad things were happening on the ship where he was hiding from God, and Jonah knew that he was the cause of the trouble. After the ship was caught in a violent storm, Jonah told the crew to throw him into the sea so the ship could be saved. “I know it is because of me that this great tempest has come upon you,” he said. And once they’d thrown him into the sea, where he was swallowed by a great fish, the storm ended and the ship and the sailors were safe again.

Was I as responsible as Jonah, I wondered. If I left, would Carl come back? If I threw myself into the river, would that bring Anna back? They were the ones who had left, and look what had happened to the rest of us. If I were gone, would everyone else be safe?

flight

The final bell of the year rang, sounding better and brighter than any other bell of the year, and the school was filled with people running as fast as they could to clear out their lockers and start the summer. I took my time. I almost dreaded the vacation. What would I do all day, every day? There were too many days, too many hours to fill. It was like a trap waiting to be sprung, why should I rush into it? I stood in front of my locker, wondering whether the few notebooks and pens were worth taking home. There was a book on Diane Arbus that Mr. Devon had given me to read right after Christmas, shoved way in the back. I grabbed everything from the locker and headed to his room. The halls were quiet, with almost everyone gone. Some teachers remained, cleaning up their classrooms.