Cover of Snow (4 page)

By six the next morning, I was no longer able to keep my eyes shut. My mind and guts were one roiling mass.

For five terrible days now, a belief had gripped me, unquestioned. That belief was in jeopardy, and I had to restore it. Period.

Except the questions were coming at me, like a river overflowing its banks, unstoppable.

To do what he did, my husband must have been clamped by a spasm of unanticipated pain. Whatever caused him to be in such agony, I was sure that it had caught him completely and totally unaware.

Otherwise I would have known. Brendan would've shared with me, or if not that—for even I had understood that there were things my husband didn't say, dark reaches of himself he kept concealed beneath the surface fun and humor—then I would've intuited it. Something huge and catastrophic enough to end Brendan's life could not have gone unnoticed, unremarked.

If my husband had been wounded on January sixteenth, severely enough to hang himself on the twenty-third, I would have heard something about it. Seen it.
Smelled
it on him.

Except I hadn't.

Not if he'd decided on his course of action, gone so far as to procure some drug to grant him isolation, a full week before.

Was Teggie right? Did I turn away from the hard things, or had there simply been no real hard things in our life? We'd had enough money—Jean was generous about the rent, and the cost of living wasn't high up here—to enjoy an occasional vacation, plus the everyday recreation and sport of the region. Even in this small house, there sometimes seemed too much space, but I'd held out hope that might change one day. It was easy not to think about, because time spent just the two of us went down so easily, filled with laughter and distracting details from our days. Details that now threatened to seem catastrophically superficial, compared to whatever had been really going on.

I sat up in bed, pushing the covers down from my waist. I was cold every time I slept now, no longer able to bear a blanket being drawn all the way up to my neck. Even shirt collars brought back intolerable visions of rope drawn tight around someone else's throat, but I was paying for this new phobia, my upper body stiff as I walked to the bathroom. In the shower, though, I didn't allow myself the luxury of a soak.

Because if Brendan got that prescription on January sixteenth, that meant we went about our light, normal daily lives for seven whole days beforehand.

Lived together. Slept together. Ate together. Showered together, at least once. Talked, made love, shared drinks. All while he was preparing to drug me and leave me alone forever? Planning to kill himself? It was impossible.

But the date on the prescription said otherwise.

I grabbed a sliver of soap, swiping opaque streaks across my goose-bumped skin.

Unless Brendan got the medication for another purpose, then used it in my drink on the spur of the moment.

That could be it,
I went on, piecing together hopeful thoughts.

Amazing, the things you began to hope for.

Brendan could've had the prescription here in the house, filled on the sixteenth for some minor ailment I was guilty of overlooking, then been struck down on January twenty-third by an unbearable shock, some piece of news I had yet to uncover.

I kept going, trying to unravel my dead husband's last hours.

He decided to use the medicine to knock me out. Maybe he wasn't even sure it would do the trick, but once it did, as soon as I slipped into a weirdly solid sleep, there was nothing to keep Brendan from that hideous hank of rope and the light fixture on our back stairs.

What kind of medication was it? Why had the doctor prescribed it?

Shivering, I stepped beneath the blast of water, taking only a second or two under the stream before fumbling for a towel. Then I padded down the icy floorboards toward Brendan's study, taking care not to wake my sister.

I didn't bother sitting down. The chair in here was Brendan's, and I couldn't stand to be in that right now. In fact, almost everything here belonged to Brendan. Until recently, when I'd created a few files, I'd seldom had any need for a computer. And I wasn't one for lounging about reading, preferring instead to be out working with my hands.

I stared at the laptop on the desk, then identified a button that seemed to take a great deal of effort to depress. The machine came sluggishly to life, a series of bleeps and grindings that sounded very loud in the still morning. I glanced around, but my sister slept on securely, two rooms away.

Sonodrine
, it said on the bottle she had found.

My right hand shook as I typed the word. I clutched at the towel with my left, clenched into a quaking fist. My shoulders were pebbly with gooseflesh and if I didn't get into some clothes quickly, I was going to start to cry with sheer discomfort and cold. I clicked on the first page that came up, then the next, and another, going back to read them all in quick succession, as fast as I could mouse between tabs. My gaze flicked left to right, but I took in hardly any words.

It didn't matter what the Internet came up with. The vast, infinitely tangled Web didn't know Brendan, and it certainly didn't know me. I hated technology, so cold and heartless compared to the warm, beating pulse I felt when I laid my hands upon plaster or wood. I needed a real, breathing human being who wouldn't offer me manufacturer warnings, chemical composites, or frequencies of use, but would instead tell me why Brendan might've taken this particular drug on that fateful night.

“Nora?”

Teggie, huddled in a robe, was standing in the doorway, blinking, her curls stuck up at odd angles.

“It's early, go back to sleep,” I said, pushing past her to my room.

Teggie followed, yawning.

I yanked out clothes from a drawer, then dressed, leaving my top buttons undone. It was an insane way to dress in Wedeskyull in winter. From the time I'd arrived in this new, strange climate, a compressed fall succumbing to six or seven months of winter's biting cold, I had adapted to extra layers and multiple kinds of outerwear. But I could no longer bear the feeling of being bundled up to my neck.

My sister trailed me into the hall.

“Where are we going?” She sounded awake.

I hesitated. “I think I have to do this myself, Teg.”

She eyed me, a look of understanding passing over her face.

I used to disbelieve the way people got used to devastating events. Circumstances they once thought they could never bear: a terminal diagnosis, or losses so grievous that just the mention of them before they occurred required tapping on wood and begging God to forbid.

Now I knew how they did it.

Your definition of what was bad changed. The unthinkable turned into the familiar, and other, more dire things became what you needed at all costs to prevent.

Brendan had hung himself from the top of the odd, crooked back staircase I had been laboring to restore. He did it after making sure I would sleep through his monstrous machinations, after muffling my ears and brain against the dry, reedy jolt of rope giving up its final slack.

Nothing could change that. The worst had happened.

Unless he planned it in advance. That would be even worse.

The prescription must have been purchased for some other purpose. But what? Brendan never took medicine, never had a single complaint beyond the muscle aches that he called the tenor of a cop's existence. The holster was weighty when worn continually, and hours at the shooting range always tended to stiffen up his arms.

Sonodrine was a sleep aid primarily. That's what the first Web page had told me. But it could be used to dull pain as well. Had Brendan suffered some injury too mild to tell me about?

My sister stepped close, trying to hold me in her thin, reedy grasp. I pulled free.

Teggie frowned. “Let me fix breakfast,” she said. “First.”

How tempted I was, how much I wanted to give in, go back to how things once had been.

Although this wasn't really how things had been, was it, me setting off on a search for answers, Teggie suggesting we stick to the mundanities of routine?

I grabbed my bag, kept stocked for small, impromptu jobs or on-site meetings, turning around for one last look before leaving.

“Not hungry,” I said. “You eat.”

“I never eat before an audition,” she replied. Her narrow shoulders seemed to settle. “Forget it then. Just come back quickly.”

My response sounded bleak as I took the stairs at a reckless pace. “I don't know if this will be quick.”

When I got out to the driveway, my car, unused now for the better part of a week, was frozen solid, its cherry color bled pink by layers and layers of ice. Every surface—windshield, windows, both side mirrors, and all four metal flanks—had turned into opaque, mottled sheets. The tires were stiff and glassy. My key wouldn't slide into the lock.

Once it became clear just how impenetrable the car was, I began to stamp around, boots slipping and catching on ice-coated lumps of gravel.

How did I not anticipate this? It was January in Wedeskyull, New York. I'd lived in the upper Adirondack Mountains for nearly six years now; I knew what it was like to have to keep a snow shovel inside so you could start carving out your path from the front door. If you didn't dig things out every day—porch, driveway, car—you'd find them entombed the next.

Entombed. My mind revolted against the word, and I paused in my frantic sliding and tripping, breath emerging in furious white huffs.

I couldn't keep avoiding all the words that clanged like a church bell, all the things that threatened to suffocate me. So long as I was doing that, I'd never discover why Brendan had done what he did.

Hanged himself.

Don't just think it, say it aloud.

No more lying, blinking, turning away.

“Hung himself,” I whispered into the frozen air. “My husband hung himself.”

I glanced up at the bedroom window—my window now, just mine—looking to see if Teggie would be occupying the room, her figure etched against the glass.

“He's dead!” I cried out. “Brendan killed himself!”

I hurled my oversized bag onto a solid hump of snow. It could've broken my camera, but I didn't care. Then I stomped over to the garage and ripped the door open, fighting a low drift that broke into solid pieces at my assault. Once I had succeeded, I plunged my fist into a bucket and yanked out a scraper.

I flung myself against the brittle car, tearing at its armor so that first hard chunks, then a fine spray, flew off the glass.

Words as splintery as the ice emerged from me.

“You used to do this for me, Brendan, but you'll never do it again!”

Only the grinding scrape of serrated plastic against lifeless things—metal, glass, and ice—answered back.

“I'll never wait for you to come inside, breath clouding your face. You'll never say, ‘All done, Chestnut.' Never! Never! Never!”

I tore at the ice with the scraper until the green plastic began to whiten with wear. I realized that for the first time in days I wasn't chilled to the bone. My body was heated through, back clammy with sweat underneath my thick coat.

“I'll do it myself, like I'll be doing everything myself!”

Bangs and rips to the ice-choked car.

“But it's not about what I'll be doing, Brendan—”

The scraper snapped in half in my fist and I started to use my hands, snatching up broken slices of ice, and swiping at the leftover film until the car was finally clear enough to see.

“It's about what I'll miss,” I said hoarsely. My throat was raw.

But not thick, threatening to cut off breath.

My chest heaved in my down jacket. I had torn the tips off six fingers on my gloves.

I tossed the broken pieces of scraper onto the lawn and dashed back to the garage for a canister of de-icer. Then I swept my bag up from the ground. As a glow of yellow lights began to light the houses of my neighbors, I threw myself onto the front seat, ground the clutch into reverse, and fishtailed out toward the highway.

I didn't see the whipping red lights, carnival-bright against all the whiteness around me, or hear a wail until the police car was beside me. Then I jerked the steering wheel to the right, and skidded onto the shoulder of the Northway.

I'd been married to a policeman; I knew that if a police car drove up next to you, the cop had been trying to pull you over for a while. I put my head down on the steering wheel, letting the window down blindly. A flurry blew across my bare face. It had started to snow without my realizing it.

“Want to look up at me, ma'am?”

I tilted my head to one side.

“Oh, Nora. Honey, I didn't see it was you. Your license plates are covered with snow.”

“Sorry about that, Vern,” I said. “Chief.”

A big, meaty arm penetrated the window and the police chief lifted my face. His own was covered by a gray ski mask, which produced a particularly alien effect. “Fact is, you were driving mighty fast. Sliding a bit, too.”

“Was I?”

“Didn't you hear me behind you?”

“No. I'm sorry. My head was … somewhere else.”

The Chief peeled off his mask and peered in at me. “That wasn't why I pulled you over.”

I was staring at Vern's gray-swathed chest, the familiar row of silver buttons, a sheen on his badge that I knew took work to maintain.

The Chief rested both hammy fists on my window bed, where a lip of snow had already gathered. “One of your taillights is out. Can't afford that in this weather.”

“Oh, right,” I replied. “I'll have to replace the bulb.”

“Where you headed now? Away from Jean's house, I can see.”

The desolate thought that it would never be my house washed over me. It wasn't even Brendan's. “To the pharmacy,” I said.

“You having some kind of medical problem?”

“No,” I said, a small smile creeping up on me. I could refer to something goopy, female, and the Chief would surely back off. Then I wondered why I wanted him to. Vern stood there, his breath emerging in steady, white plumes.

“I found some medication,” I went on after a moment. “It's—it was—Brendan's, but I don't recognize the prescription.”

I left out the fact that Brendan had drugged me with this particular pill.

“You're looking for ‘how comes' and there aren't any here,” the police chief told me gruffly. “Brendan died and I'm mad as hell, like you, but no good comes from wondering why.”

I squinted through the snow-strewn air at the Chief's fleshy face. Died. Not killed himself. Was the Chief trying to tell me something? Or did he just want to spare me?

“I need to know as much as I can about how Brendan was doing. This medication is something he didn't tell me about. And I can't stand that right now.”

Vern's face became even softer. “Okay. All right. But I'm gonna have to insist you take care of that taillight first.”

A sudden swirl of snow momentarily blocked out sight of the Chief.

I glanced at the clock on my dashboard. “My taillight? Now?”

Vern Weathers was smiling, jowls lifted so they wrinkled his eyes. “Now, honey, there's already been one tragedy for the Hamilton family this year, and it's just a baby year yet. No more, all right?”

I nodded in resignation.

“In this weather it's not safe for you to be driving around one backlight down. You go on over to Al's, and he'll fix you up. When he's done you can play yourself a little detective. Heck, if you do a good job, maybe we'll hire you on.” The Chief went silent for a second. “Don't mean to make jokes. The wife would have my head.”

I had trouble picturing tiny Mrs. Weathers even reaching the top of her tree trunk husband, let alone doing anything to his head. Vern must've seen it on my face, for he chuckled in agreement.

I raised my window, pushed down to trigger the blinker, and reentered the Northway, scattering snow in front of my tires. Behind me, Vern pulled out too, red lights twirling in an onslaught of flakes.