As Simple as Snow (31 page)

I found Mr. Devon busily packing.

“I didn’t steal it,” I said, and handed him the book.

“Did you read it?”

“I think so,” I said. “She lived happily ever after.”

“Do you have a few minutes?”

“Plenty of them.”

“Can you help me with some of these?” Together we carried about a half-dozen boxes out to his truck. “You wouldn’t want to help me with that again, would you?” he asked me back in the classroom. He nodded toward the sculpture in the corner. I shrugged and helped him crate the creepy thing. He got a handtruck and we rolled the crate outside.

“What are you doing this summer?” he said when we walked back into the building.

“I don’t have a clue. How about you?”

“I’m going up to a cabin in Alaska. No TV, no electricity, just me, some books, and a lot of fish, I hope.”

“Where in Alaska?”

“This place called Slocum,” he said. “I’ve been going up there for a couple of years. I’ll be back in time for football, though. I expect you to come out again.”

I nodded. “I always thought about going to Alaska.”

“It’s beautiful up there. You should go sometime. I highly recommend it.”

He directed me to a few boxes in his office. “That’s all trash. Can you put it in the hall? They won’t know it’s trash if I leave it in here.”

I grabbed the first box and was sorry that I’d lifted it. It seemed even heavier than the sculpture. I made it out to the hallway and went back for a second box. This one I just kicked on the floor, getting a good few feet with every push from my leg. As I turned into the hallway, one side of the box gave way and papers spilled onto the floor. I bent down and was throwing them into the box when I noticed an envelope. It looked like Anna’s handwriting on it. It looked like one of her homemade stamps. It was Mr. Devon’s face, smiling from one edge of the tiny square to the other.

Inside the envelope was a piece of notebook paper with some writing—“How do you draw a bunny?”—and a drawing. At the bottom of the page, in small, loopy letters, was written, “the new york correspondence school did not die,” and “June 5, 1973.” That date was crossed out and underneath was “January 13, 1995.” The drawing looked nothing like a bunny. I couldn’t tell what it was. The handwriting looked like Anna’s, but trying to look like someone else’s. It was the same notebook paper she used. There was nothing to tell me when it was written, no date, no postmark, nothing. It seemed that it should mean something, a coded message between the two of them. I thought that maybe it was Mr. Devon she had contacted after all, and not me. I imagined that she was still alive, that the letter had come from Alaska and she was up there waiting for him. He would go there and be with her and they would live happily ever after. I actually thought this.

I went back into Mr. Devon’s office and held the letter out to him, confronting him. “What is this?”

He took it from me and looked at it. He could tell that I was upset, but he was as calm as anything. Smiling, he said, “She slipped a folder under my door one day, early in the year, maybe September. It had a few drawings in it, and a note about what she was trying to do. She wanted my opinion on them, I guess, but she never came by to talk about them, and I forgot about them. Then when she was . . . when she disappeared, I found the black heart and put it in your locker. I found this today, and I put it in the trash. I’m sorry, I should have given it to you.”

That was all he was going to say about it. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. It seemed too simple. I put the letter in my back pocket and carried the last box out to the hallway. I sat on the floor and started going through the boxes, digging through old contact sheets and unclaimed art projects and scraps of paper and magazines and official school stuff, looking for the note Anna had left for Mr. Devon, or the folder she had put it in. I wondered whether the folder was the one I had seen in that book the first time I went to her house, the same book I later saw in his office. I was filled with a nervous anger, and started taking the items out of the boxes one by one and throwing them on the floor. After a while Mr. Devon came out and locked the door to his classroom. He was leaving. He stood near me and casually looked at the mess I had created.

“Can I give you a ride home?” he asked.

“No.” I didn’t bother looking up. He stood there a minute and I imagined that he was thinking about helping me, but he didn’t. Finally he just left.

“Have a good summer,” he said. “And I’ll see you at the first practice. August fifteenth.”

I didn’t respond. You’d think that after all I had done to help him out, he could have helped me this once. Would it have killed him to kneel down and look through a box for a second? He knew how important it was to me, and still he just left.

I finished searching through the boxes and didn’t find anything. Maybe Mr. Devon hadn’t bothered to help me because he knew there was nothing to find. He could have been lying about the whole thing, for all I knew. Anna had never liked him, and now I didn’t either.

There was no one left at school, so I went home. I took the letter out of my pocket as I was walking and looked at it again. It had to mean something. The dates seemed an obvious place to start deciphering, and 4s came up again: June = 6, 6 + 5 = 11, 1 + 9 = 10, 7 + 3 = 10, 11 + 10 + 10 = 31, 3 + 1 = 4; 1995 - 1973 = 22, 2 + 2 = 4. But that didn’t tell me anything, except that I could add and subtract. It answered nothing. If there was a code, I wasn’t going to break it. The letter might have been nothing but a joke or game between the two of them. Or it might have been everything, it might have been their secret, something Anna had never discussed with me. It was the proof of a lie she had told me, or had never told me. She had said that she disliked Mr. Devon, but here was this stupid drawing. I hated the letter. I hated them both.

I imagined following Mr. Devon up to Slocum, Alaska, and finding her there, waiting for him. I looked at a map of Alaska when I got home. There was no Slocum, not even anything that sounded like it. There was a Slana, and a Sleetmute. I tried to remember whether Mr. Devon had said either of those names, but all I could remember was Slocum. Maybe it was too small to be on a map, or maybe I hadn’t heard him right. I thought about calling him and asking, but if he had lied about it the first time he certainly wouldn’t tell the truth now. Maybe he wasn’t even going to Alaska.

I threw the letter on my bed and began taking down everything on the walls of my room. I removed things in large swipes, tearing pictures and postcards, knocking off Post-its I had painstakingly attached not too long before. I should have been more careful. I wanted it all gone in a hurry, and I had a thought to throw everything away, but I went and found a box in the garage and piled everything into it. I went to my closet, retrieved the package Carl had given me, and put the box over the spot where I had hidden the package. I took Carl’s package to my desk and opened it.

I had thought I would find Carl’s ledgers inside, but I didn’t. Under the brown paper was a box with a note from Anna, to Claire.

I lifted the box lid slowly, and there they were, Anna’s notebooks, the complete set, fourteen volumes of her obituaries. They were tied together with black twine, and on the top volume was taped a note with big block letters: I KNEW YOU WOULD READ THIS.

I leafed through two of the volumes, but soon realized that without the master list I wouldn’t be able to find any particular obituary or keep track of the ones I had read. Anna had been right, the notebooks were chaotic without the master list. I decided to start reading from the first volume, all 1,516 obituaries. I stayed up most of the night, reading about the deaths of everyone who had helped the Caynes move in, or seen them move in, then other neighbors, people on her street. Her classmates and teachers started dying next. It seemed that people appeared in the notebooks not long after she came into contact with them. I jumped ahead, and found the obituaries of people I knew she had met after she met me, but my death was not in the spot where it should have been. I went back to where I had left off in the first volume and read until I fell asleep.

I spent the next five days reading Anna’s notebooks at every opportunity. I could hear her voice talking about every person, how each one lived and died. I had read some of the obituaries before, but never so many, and never so many at one time. Her caustic humor was still fresh and funny, but now I noticed another, less satisfying element in her writing. While she dutifully recounted the achievements and highlights of each person’s life, the real achievement was the person’s death. Almost without exception, Anna spent the most space describing the precise details of a person’s demise. The deaths contained more drama and importance than the lives. I could hear Anna defending herself, arguing that the facts of everyone’s life were accurate and well represented, and if the lives seemed inconsequential or diminished, so be it. Besides, she would say, you wrote a few yourself; are they any different from mine? They weren’t, but I found myself, for maybe the first time, wanting to stick up for people and their lives, to defend the whole town. They couldn’t be as pointless and insignificant as they seemed, these small lifetimes one after another.

I was sitting in the backyard with the tenth volume when I heard someone whisper my name. I closed the notebook and turned to see Carl standing at the corner of the house, his blue visor pulled low across his forehead, wearing his usual blazer, looking as he always did. He looked at me with a hint of a grin.

“Are you hiding?” I put the notebook under the lawn chair.

“I didn’t want your mom to see me.”

“She’s out,” I said. “Are you back?”

“I’m back,” he said. “I just got back and wanted to see you.”

“Where were you? The whole town’s gone crazy since you left.”

“I know. I just had some things to take care of. I told you I’d come back. I’ve got something for you,” he said.

“Do you want to go inside? I need to give back your stuff.”

“I’ll get it later. I just wanted to bring you something.” He slipped his backpack off his shoulders and opened it. He took out a manila envelope and handed it to me. “It doesn’t change anything, I know, but I wanted to apologize and try to make things right.”

I opened the envelope. Inside was the photograph of Anna and me, and a negative.

“How did you get this?” I asked.

He shrugged. “It was just business.” I knew better than to ask anything else. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “I don’t want anyone else to see me before my mother does.”

“Hey, Carl, about that package you gave me.”

“It’s Claire’s package,” he said. “She wanted me to give it to you.” My mother’s car pulled into the front driveway and Carl ran across the backyard, toward the woods at the top of Brook Road. It would take him twice as long to go that way, but he probably wouldn’t be seen. Carl knew what he was doing. I was glad he was back, glad he had come to see me, and glad he had done something for me. For a moment I thought that things were going to get better. If Carl could come back, why couldn’t Anna? Why couldn’t everything keep getting better? I returned to my chair, put the envelope in the notebook, and continued reading.

 

 

 

Near the end of the last volume, I saw my own name. I had resigned myself to the idea that she had not written one for me, and was glad for every page where I was absent. I didn’t want to see my own life belittled and demeaned. At the top of the page she had written, “Something as simple as snow,” and then crossed out the first word. I won’t repeat the entire thing here, but most of it: