Snow Angels (18 page)

Look what we found
In the park
in the dark. We will take him home.
We will call him Clark.
He will live at our house.
He will grow and grow.
Will our mother like this?
We don't know.

May fits it back into the shelf. She doesn't have time for this. The lady from Child Protective Services will be here in twenty minutes. May wouldn't have known if Brock hadn't called her. Annie doesn't seem to care. She sees the visit as an insult and refuses to do anything. All morning May scrubbed the kitchen and the bathrooms while Brock vacuumed. It was a shock; May had never considered him responsible before. He's had his hair cut just for this, and is wearing corduroys and a nice shirt. Together they conspired to send Annie to the store for milk and fresh vegetables to make the refrigerator look full. She seemed glad to go. She's just gotten back and is downstairs, sitting on the couch watching her soap opera. May wishes she would wear something other than her jeans—a pant-suit, anything—and maybe put on some makeup. These people are serious.

“What are they going to do to me?” Annie asked
her earlier, and May couldn't answer. It does seem foolish; Tara is gone. May is angry too, but she can't let anything more happen to Annie.

May hefts the laundry basket and sets it on the floor by Tara's dresser, starts putting away the clothes she washed at her place. Tiny socks and undershirts, frilly panties, tights, overalls, turtlenecks, sweatshirts. Some are presents May herself hunted down at the mall. She recognizes gifts from her birthday, from last Christmas. They'll all end up in Goodwill, she thinks. She lines up the shoes in the closet, straightens the dresses on their hangers. Done, she stands at the door holding the empty basket, looking in. It really is a nice room for a child. She remembers Annie and Glenn painting the walls and laying the carpet. May lent them the crib Charles made for Raymond, in which Dennis and then Annie slept. That was less than four years ago, May thinks. What happened?

“Here she comes,” Brock hollers from downstairs.

“She's early,” May complains, then hustles down with the basket. It's hers and there's nowhere to put it. She thought she'd have time to stick it in her car.

Outside the woman is swinging into the drive. A big, black Galaxie 500 with white, official writing too small to read on the door. Brock takes the basket from May and thunders up the stairs.

Annie grudgingly turns off the TV, as if this has nothing to do with her.

“Try to be polite,” May says.

Annie walks past her to the door and opens it, waits for the woman to cross the lawn. May doesn't know her. She's dark-haired and young, in her early thirties, with a perm, an expensive calf-length wool coat and a massive black handbag. She's carrying a brown accordion folder, and when she reaches the porch May can see her gloves are real leather, creased at the knuckles. When she says hello she holds the
o
too long. Pittsburgh, May thinks, probably went to college.

Her name is Sharon. She takes her gloves off to greet them. A single silver band, elegant. Brock introduces himself without saying what relation he is to Annie. He takes her coat and hangs it in the closet. Underneath she's wearing a mustard top and a black skirt, dark hose and smart kneeboots. Beside her Annie looks terrible.

“For now I'll only need to talk to you,” Sharon says, and Annie leads her into the kitchen. May follows, asking if Sharon wants some coffee. She says yes, that would be wonderful. May thinks that her plan is working. She has baked a plate of cookies, and sets it on the table between them. She waits for the coffee, eavesdropping.

Sharon opens her folder and starts filling out forms, asking Annie simple questions. May has told Annie not to smoke, so immediately she has to light up, waving the cigarette around, dismissing each answer. May knows the tone; Annie's already lost interest. Concentrating on her paperwork, Sharon doesn't seem to notice.

“Officially,” Annie says, “we're still married. Five years in August.”

“And your daughter's name?”

“Tara. Tara Elizabeth.” May detects a change, a hardness in this.

“Date of birth?”

May knows all the answers.

“Okay,” Sharon says, finishing a sheet. “Good.” She tears it along a perforation, sets both pieces aside.

The coffee's ready but May doesn't want to leave. She stands at the counter with her back to the table, waiting for them to go on.

“Mrs. Van Dorn?” Sharon asks. “I'm afraid the rest of the interview is confidential, if you don't mind.”

“No,” May says, “I was just going to pour.”

Annie gets up. “Go ahead, Ma.” She takes the mugs from her, holds the lid down while she tips the pot.

May still hasn't moved.

“I'll be all right,” Annie says, and May can see that it's true, that she's not going to let this woman hurt her.

“I'll be in the living room,” May says, but even as she's leaving, she hesitates, looks back as if Annie might need her.

Annie's first day back at work is Sunday brunch. It's an easy shift, a buffet. All she has to do is keep track of drink orders, take an occasional chafing dish of sausages to the skirted table. Families come in their church clothes, the girls dolled up in gauzy sleeves, boys in velvet breeches. Annie leans down to hear them ask for cranberry juice and Cokes.

“What do you say?” the mothers prompt.

“Please.”

At the bar Annie arranges the glasses around her tray according to the table: mimosa, white wine, screwdriver, mimosa, Coke, beer, mimosa, bloody, bloody. It's been a while, and she makes mistakes, apologizing as she switches drinks. If Barb were here she'd tease Annie, but the other girls ignore it. In the break room they don't know what to say except that
they're sorry, that they're glad she's back. Annie knows they're just worried. They don't mean to hurt her.

Out on the floor she can feel the club members gauging her, wondering why she isn't at home, what they would do if something like this happened to them. One older woman she's served for months at a corner table holds on to her wrist and says, “I wish there was something I could say.”

“Thank you,” Annie says, to get her to let go.

It's not all bad. She's busy. The crowd is constant, another rush around one-thirty. Annie wills herself into the rhythm of prepping, serving, bussing, then prepping again. It's not like the house, where she can't think of anything else. Only once in a while does she stop and—tricked by routine—think of Tara waiting to be picked up at her mother's.

At break she smokes a cigarette by herself on the loading dock, arms folded over her breasts against the cold. The bottom of the parking lot is empty and snow-covered; beyond, a fairway stretches like a white avenue through the trees. A car passes on the road, and she thinks of the Sundays Barb stood here puffing while she and Brock were at Susan's. He's going to leave her as soon as she's strong enough; they both know it. In his eyes, half the battle's over; Child Protective Services has cleared her. He'll never know
what it means to be a parent, she thinks. He's being polite, not fighting with her, trying to be nice. Annie can't remember what she saw in him. A fuck. She smokes the Marlboro down to the writing and flicks it off the dock, watches it poke a hole in the snow. She's not strong enough, Annie thinks, she may never be. He can leave. He will anyway. Inside, in the bathroom, she chews a stick of gum while she fixes her hair and is ready to face her audience again.

She hasn't had time to take the Maverick in. Going home, the plastic bulges in the window, shouldering her. Even with the heat up, the car's freezing. She's got to start worrying about all these little things again. It exhausts her just thinking about it. She imagines letting the car drift into the oncoming bridge abutment. She could fold her hands in her lap, close her eyes and step on the gas pedal. But she doesn't. The bridge with its teenage graffiti—“Joann I love U 4ever Dave”—passes overhead. She's started to think about dinner.

When she gets home, Brock is making barbecued chicken and stuffing from a box. The Steelers have won again. Three empty beer bottles sit on the coffee table—unsubtle proof that he wasn't at Susan's with his Patricia. It's pointless; the inspector says they do it at lunch. He's shown her the girl's picture. She has a double chin and frizzy hair. Annie doesn't understand.

“How was work?” Brock asks.

“Good,” Annie says.

“Are you going in tomorrow?”

“I said I was.”

“I didn't know how you'd feel after today.”

“I feel tired,” Annie says, plopping down on the couch. “I feel like I've done something.”

“Good,” Brock says, overly cheerful. He comes in wearing an oven mitt, clutching a meat fork. “That's great.”

“Please,” Annie says, “will you cut the crap and start acting like a normal human being?”

She can see Brock wants to explode all over her but can't. She doesn't know which is more offensive, him pitying her or pretending nothing has happened.

She works the full week on day shift, getting home in time to make dinner. She reads the mail, writes thank-yous to people who have sent checks. Saturday while the Maverick is being fixed, Brock takes her and her mother Christmas shopping. There are two weeks left and the mall is jammed. She sees children everywhere, hears their squeals coming from the video arcade. She ignores the people pointing. Only the line for Santa Claus bothers her. In it waits a girl wearing Tara's coat. They have to stop and turn around, give Annie a minute in the Potato Patch.

“Maybe we should go,” her mother says to Brock. “Maybe this wasn't such a good idea.”

“I'll be okay,” Annie says, “I just need something to eat.”

Her mother raves over the tacos, but they don't go back past the North Pole. It's good, Annie thinks, that she has limits. In a way, she doesn't want to lose this part of Tara too easily.

On her day off, she visits the cemetery, pulling her car off the road and walking back in through the stones. Her mother owns plots for all of them—herself, Annie, Raymond and Dennis—though she doesn't expect they'll use them. Tara is beside Annie's father. Cemented into the ground in front of his grave is a vase. Annie thought of getting one for Tara until she conferred with her mother.

“A windy day,” her mother said, “forget it,” and it's true, even a breeze plucks the flowers right out, sends the bright heads tumbling. Annie brings them anyway, packing snow around the stems with her fingers. She has seen other people visiting alone talking to their loved ones—old Polish women mostly—but she does not feel close to Tara or her father here, rather the opposite. With her father, she accepts this distance, accepts the fact that time has passed.

Hot August he used to take her fishing out at the
new lake. He had a glazed ceramic jar with a lid she'd made for him in art in which he'd grind out his Lucky Strikes. When the jar was full they'd call it a day. She has pictures stuck in her mirror of herself standing on the concrete launch, holding a stringer of perch, crappie, a lucky trout. Just her—her brothers were too old for that. “The hell with them,” her father used to say, lounging on the cooler, an orange life preserver behind his head. “They wouldn't know a good time if it bit them square in the behind.”

Annie refused to visit him in the hospital; on the phone she said she'd see him when he got home.

“Don't wait for me too long,” he said, his voice rags.

“Do you want me to come in?” she asked.

“I think you'd better.”

“Did you hear that?” her mother said from the kitchen extension.

“I heard it!”

“I don't want you two fighting,” her father said, so they fought in the car.

Squatting there in the cold, Annie misses him only dimly. She misses holding Tara, brushing her hair, feeling for a new tooth pushing through. She doesn't need a stone to remember her.

Her mother comes with her sometimes, and sometimes goes alone. Annie finds her footprints, and a
man's which she assumes are Glenn's. She hasn't run into him since he was arrested the second time. Inwardly, Annie worries that he may try something after Brock leaves. She keeps the gun loaded.

His father has called, saying Glenn's distraught, that he doesn't know what he's doing. Annie has always liked Frank Marchand, but he's wrong; Glenn's sick. Whether it's just depression or a real mental illness, he's sick and possibly dangerous and she's not taking any chances.

“In your position,” Glenn's father concedes, “I suppose you don't have a choice.”

When she's not working and Brock is, she stays out of the house, spends time with her mother. Her mother thinks they should move in with her. It's foolish, two houses. Annie doesn't tell her that any day Brock is going to take off; it would give her more ammunition. They drink coffee and play gin and talk about the Parkinsons filing for divorce.

“Twenty-three years,” her mother says.

“They always seemed happy to me,” Annie says, discarding. Her mother lets her smoke in the house now, as if they've come to an understanding.

“The new people are nice.”

“Where are they from?” Annie asks, to keep the conversation alive. The afternoon deepens, the windows dim. She keeps an eye on the clock above the
fridge, waits until it's safe to go home. Her mother walks her to the door and, in yet another new ritual, gives her a hug. She stands there while Annie backs out, waving in the cold.

The road's empty, the flag of the mailbox up. One from Bradford, Kane, Altoona. Lately the number has been dwindling, and Annie's glad. She has twenty minutes until Brock gets home, and before taking her coat and boots off, sticks a pot of water on. She finds a jar of sauce in the cupboard, a box of spaghetti with the end taped shut. Bread, butter. She turns the early news on to fill the house, then stands at the stove, customizing the sauce with spices. The floor is freezing and she gives the pot a good stir before going upstairs to get her slippers.