Snow Angels (2 page)

Since then she had moved out like her brothers and married and had a girl of her own, but things had not gone well for her. That spring, she and her husband had separated. Mrs. Van Dorn, now widowed, lived alone in the family house. My mother looked in on her every day after work, and often that fall Annie was there, in the kitchen, the two of them commiserating bitterly over coffee. The worst, they must have figured, had already happened.

According to my mother, Mrs. Van Dorn wanted
Annie to move back in with her. Annie and her daughter were living alone above town by the high school. Her house was the only one on Turkey Hill Road, a wooded cul-de-sac that ended at the base of the county water tower. The road had once crossed Old Route 2 but when they laid the interstate the government bought up all the houses and blocked it off on both sides. Beyond a caution-striped guardrail the cracked blacktop wandered off into scrub. The other, unluckier houses were still back there, overgrown, shingles mossy; we used to party in them. Mrs. Van Dorn was worried about Annie's safety, but she and Annie—again, according to my mother—didn't get along well enough to live together, and Annie stayed where she was.

At the hearing her nearest neighbor, Clare Hardesty, said she'd heard the shots and gone to her window. The road was empty, the spotlit water tower half lost in the snow. Annie's lights were on; a colored string blinked around a tree. Clare didn't see any cars that didn't belong, meaning, she explained, the boyfriend's. The two had recently broken up; she would have noticed. When she called, no one answered, so she put on her boots and a wrap and walked down the road. The front door was open, the light spilling out onto the snow. (Here she was asked about footprints, a single broken pane, glass on the bathroom carpet;
she didn't know, she didn't know.) Though the house was empty, something had happened inside. She tried the phone, then ran back to her place to call the state police.

And do you remember noticing, the transcript reads, if the back door was open at this time?

I don't remember, Clare Hardesty answers.

I know—and everyone I grew up with knows—that the back door
was
open and that a pair of tracks led across the backyard and into the woods. We followed them at first in our imaginations, those snowy nights alone in bed (their breath, her bare feet sinking in), and then when the brave had made their pilgrimage, at lunch we hauled on our boots and crossed the interstate and slid down the hill to the spot we as a whole had chosen, just to one side of the board bridge over the spillway of Marsden's Pond. Both the pond and the brook were iced over; only the spillway made noise. The more romantic of the tough girls had placed roses in a vase made of snow, every day a fresh one among the dead. Someone had tramped out a cross, which by January was neatly lined with beer cans. To one side sat a pile of lipsticked cigarette butts and burnt matches like an offering. We stood there, alone or in groups, looking back over the tangle of bare trees beyond which rose the water tower, and below it, invisible, her house. We passed a joint or bowl around
and talked about how she was still there in the trees and the creek because the soul never dies. Someone always had gum, and I remember chewing and feeling my jaw harden and thinking that it was true, that I could feel Annie there. But at other times there was nothing, just munchies and a giddiness I would later be ashamed of.

March, cutting class, Warren Hardesty and I walked from the spot all the way to the edge of her backyard, retracing her last steps. It was farther than we thought, and we had to stop to stoke up a roach I'd saved. Warren had some blackberry brandy in a plastic Girl Scout canteen. It was Monday, around third period. The house was for sale but no one was going to buy it. The paint was peeling, the screenporch still full of her junk—lawnchairs, rabbit cages, deflated balls. Warren dared me to cross the lawn and just touch the house.

“You,” I said.

“Shit, I live right up the road.”

“So?” I said.

We did it together, leaving two sets of bootprints in the perfect snow. We each placed a gloved hand on the porch door. Through a casement window I could see a corner of a rug, and a chair, and light coming through the blue curtains of the front.

“Let's go inside,” Warren said.

“Fuck you,” I said.

“Pussy,” he said, as if there were someone else there judging us.

I dropped my glove to the door handle.

“I'll be right behind you,” Warren promised.

The spring protested, rang as if strummed. I stuck my head in. A hose lay coiled beneath a fraying chaise like a snake; above hung a pair of clotheslines, a few grayed pins still clinging. I thought of Annie with a basket of clothes and wondered if she had a dryer or even a washer, because at our old house we—my mother, that is—had always had both, and now we had neither.

Warren pushed me from behind and I fell across a picnic-table bench, knocking over a stack of boxes. One came open and out rolled a yellow mailbox for the
Butler Eagle
. I screamed as if it were a head. Warren was running for the woods, laughing his ass off. I scrambled up and went after him, shouting, “Fucker!”

Later we went back, at first partying at the picnic table and then, when we were more comfortable, in the house itself. We sat on the couch in the chilly living room, passing the canteen, toasting Annie. We never took anyone else and we were careful to clean up after ourselves. We pledged never to take or even move anything. The Prime Directive, Warren called it.

That was me when I was fourteen and I'm not proud of how we treated her place, but now I think I went there because even then I knew I was closer to Annie than all those girls with their roses and the people who went to her funeral. We had history. Stoned, I tried to picture her life there, and her death, though back then that was impossible for me to see clearly. I tried, I suppose, to say goodbye. The house hasn't changed much since then. Eventually someone less reverent broke in and set a fire, and the police boarded it up. It's still there, burnt furniture and all. I've been by.

My mother and I never really talked about what happened. We shared a few words of shocked consolation, and there was an air of mourning about the house, but while the papers were full of accounts, we did not discuss the killing itself, how and why it came about. I now see that she (and myself, though I did not acknowledge it at the time) was going through her own slow tragedy and needed her grief for both herself and me. She still called my father to make sure he would pick me up every other Saturday, but they did not talk beyond money and the logistics of visitation.

We were all seeing a psychiatrist associated with our church, separately, on different days of the week. I remember that Dr. Brady and I mostly discussed
hockey, though every session he would ask bluntly how I was doing at home, in school, with the band, with my mother, my father.

“Okay,” I told him.

When my mother picked me up, invariably she asked, “Do you think it's helping?”

“I guess,” I said.

Astrid, in Tennstaedt, West Germany, with the Air Force, called once a month to see how we were doing and to check up on her bank statement. Her squadron was involved in reconnaissance; “black work,” she called it, though we all knew it was just high-altitude photography of Russia. She was putting aside half her pay, wiring it to the Mellon Bank in Butler, and every time my mother drove me in to see Dr. Brady and we passed the branch, I thought of Astrid's money inside, warm as a nest and growing. I thought, desperately, that when her tour was up we could live together in town above the Woolworth's and I could work in the record department. On the phone we talked like hostages. She asked long, impossible questions (“Why do you think they're not talking if they're going to the same guy, and why do you go by yourself?”) that under my mother's watchful smile I could only answer with “I don't know.” My mother waited until after Christmas to tell her about Annie, and when I got on
the phone, Astrid was crying and angry, as if I should have prevented it.

“It's just all going to shit back there, isn't it?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I guess.”

All my father would say about the killing was that it was a bad business all the way around. He had worked—if briefly—alongside Annie's estranged husband, Glenn. I did not see my father much that winter, and when I did we spoke carefully, like survivors. He would not say a word against or for Glenn Marchand. There was more to it than we had a right to know was my father's position. It was not our affair. To me this was as good as him admitting that he knew the whole story. I wanted him to tell me everything because my mother hadn't and I needed to know. I knew only the rumors and what I could infer from the newspaper, while he had known both parties involved. He did not want to talk about it and I am glad he didn't, for if he had let me know then how he saw the whole thing I probably would not have understood it any more than I understood why he had left my mother.

Once a year I go back to Western Pennsylvania, for Christmas. This year Astrid and I have booked our
flights into Pittsburgh so we can rent a car and drive up to Butler together, and here we are, cruising through the snowy country in our big Century. I am comfortably divorced; she is still single. Neither of us mentions these facts. We'll hear them enough when we get home. Over the years it has become a bit of a ritual for me to drive by our old house and stop to contemplate it. It's a form of stalling, of warming up for the hard part.

“Can we?” I say.

Astrid says nothing, but reluctantly slows and pulls onto the cinder berm. All fall we've talked on the phone, and she knows I need a little indulgence.

We sit in the warmth of the car with the radio off. The shrubs have grown up and filled out around the foundation, but the house itself hasn't changed much. Astrid thinks it's the siding. On the roof stands a faded Santa, waving. The new people are doing all right. In the last year they've added an aboveground pool; it sleeps under a blue tarpaulin. I've seen their boy shooting hoops on the drive, and once a daughter shoveling. But what about the inside, is it any different—the tree, the smell of turkey all afternoon while on TV the football games change? We sit in the car and I imagine our father in the basement rec room, lying on the couch under an afghan, his ashtray on the shag rug.
A razor commercial jangles, the baseboard heaters clink. The Steelers are beating someone but he is asleep, and our mother shoos us upstairs.

“Seen enough?” Astrid asks, and when I don't answer shifts into drive. I will never stop being the baby; all the decisions are hers.

Carlsen's field is mud and stubble. Every Christmas our mother marvels that he is still alive, guiding his glass-cabbed Deere over the furrows. A mile off, the Van Dorns' rises.

It is here, between, as we approach their house, that the past reaches me. On both sides lie nothing but fields, snow in the ditches, telephone poles. A windbreak of old oaks waves around the house. Astrid doesn't slow, though I turn from her. The second son, Dennis, is in it now; the side yard is clogged with his projects. Beside a pair of school district vans a camper sits on cinder blocks, beside it a snowmobile, a fat stack of tractor tires. In back leans a small barn, doorless, a car peeking its nose out like a mouse—Raymond's old Maverick. The house, like ours, betrays little, but the paint is new, and the tin roof and quaint lace curtains. From the porch flies a rainbowed fish windsock, defying the season. I will have to remember that. And then we are past, shooting between the drifted fields. I turn in my harness to watch the house diminish, and Astrid sighs.

“Are we going to go through this again?” she says.

“No,” I say, “I'm all done with that.”

She looks at me as if to say I'm not fooling anyone, then turns back to the road.

“I guess I should just forget it, right?” We've had this argument forever.

“I'm not saying you should forget it,” Astrid says. “Just stop going over it. Let it rest for once. One year.

“Right,” I say. “This'll be the last year. Promise.

She snorts and shakes her head, gives up on me. I say this every year, but what if this year it's true?

Behind us the two houses are blips in the mirror, dots on the horizon, and as we speed along the empty fields they drift with the dwindling perspective and line up like the sights on a rifle, become one.

Today, after we say hello and get settled, our mother will ask one of us to run out to the store, and before giving me the keys, Astrid will look at me as if to say, I know where you're going. I will sit a few minutes under the water tower while the snow falls and later tell my mother I had to go all the way into town.

I don't like coming home. It keeps me from being nostalgic, which by nature I am. Even before the plane begins its descent, I find myself dreading the questions
left unanswered by my childhood. Annie. My parents. My own lost years. I know that once we touch down I will not be able to think clearly, that every remembered Pizza Hut and body shop, every stretch of road I know intimately, will stun me like love.

The plane I take goes right over Butler. Fifty miles out of Pittsburgh, the pilot drops down under the clouds and I can find the city. It is not much, the downtown clumped around the Main Street section of Route 8, then the bridge, the train tracks snaking with the Connoquenessing, the blue blocks of the Armco mill. Cars crawl up the long hill. I am looking for the aqua dot of the water tower, though it is always some other landmark that jumps out. The mall that used to be new. The post office depot with its rows of Jeeps. The Home for Crippled Children—now the Rehabilitation Center—where my mother still works. Roads crisscross and connect; woods neatly part to let the power lines through. This high up, I feel as if the place I was raised is not such a mystery. Looking down at the farms and fields, the two schools separated by the interstate, the black bean of Marsden's Pond, I think that, like my sister putting Russia together piece by piece, if I concentrate on the details I will be able to make sense of the whole, that I will finally understand everything that happened back then, when I know that I can't.