Cover of Snow Read online

  “No, don’t—”

  Our wretched leanings toward politeness subsided when Weekend trotted into the room. I beckoned him over.

  “Since when are you my dog’s biggest fan?”

  I rubbed my suddenly itchy nose and Weekend’s flank simultaneously. The dog turned a few times, before lying down on my feet.

  “I guess sneezing and sniffling used to bother me more.”

  Club eyed me. His hand made a habitual gesture, a sort of unconscious reaching for the gun he always carried, off duty or on.

  He’d been a linebacker and a right wing at Wedeskyull High. Fifteen years from now he might be slightly soft, with that padded look muscular men get as they age. But for now Club was in top shape, face always reddened by the wind or sun, with big balls of muscle along his arms, a wide wall of a chest, and a tight, square jaw.

  Brendan had described the way Club snapped handcuffs on as soon as they began questioning someone, the hours he spent at the shooting range.

  I’d always been glad he and Brendan were partners. I saw it simply, in black-and-white terms. If you were a cop it was better to have someone by your side who might occasionally jump the gun than a man who would hesitate. In exchange for that sense of security, I was willing to ignore the sense I got from Brendan that there was a darker side to Club—not just a readiness or willingness, but an eagerness.

  Of course, in the end, even Club wasn’t able to protect Brendan. Not from himself.

  My eyes burned as if suddenly exposed to smoke. I wanted to see my husband then, with a pull so intense I didn’t think I would survive it. Weekend jumped up on the sofa, draping his body over my form, which had begun to slump.

  “Thinks he’s a lapdog,” Club said.

  Why did Brendan do it, I thought to ask. Do you know? Would you tell me if you did? But before I could speak, two solid thumps sounded on the front door. Chief Weathers pushed it open as I struggled to get the dog off of me.

  “What’s up, Chief?” Club asked, already on his feet.

  The Chief scowled, and I realized something must be wrong. Club had known instantly, but my instincts were off, dull now that I no longer heard Brendan taking the stairs at a run, slipping into his uniform jacket as he called out for me not to wait up. Already I was losing the rhythms of a cop’s life, Brendan’s readiness for action, the notion that off-duty spells—few and far between with such a small-town force—had to be borne until real time could begin again. I had the sudden, mad impulse to reach out and stop both men from going to whatever it was.

  I settled for taking a step forward, and the police chief’s face finally unfurled.

  “Nothing at the moment,” he said, and Club’s broad shoulders relaxed.

  “Will you stay for a sandwich?” I asked, remembering belatedly how distant the Chief had been the day of Brendan’s funeral.

  But that earlier distance had vanished—maybe it hadn’t been coldness at all, only sorrow and grief—and the Chief scuffed his boots before stepping forward into the house and placing a pale-fleshed hand underneath my chin.

  “I haven’t told you yet how sorry I am,” he said, voice a low rumble. “This is more sadness than most folks have to bear in a lifetime.”

  I felt tears crowd my throat. “Thank you, Vern.”

  He looked across the room to Club. “She calls me Vern,” he said, and I quickly realized my mistake. The truth was, before this, I hadn’t had cause to address Brendan’s boss very often.

  “My mama called me Vern,” the Chief went on. “My kindeygarten teacher maybe. Everyone else calls me Chief. It was my name long before I ever came to be one. Isn’t that right, Mitchell?”

  Club nodded.

  “ ’Course, that was crazy.”

  “What was, Chief?” Club asked.

  My lips raised in a smile, for I could tell where this was going, the two men launching into some oft-repeated routine. Maybe it was paranoid of me, but I also heard another note below the humorous one, in Club’s voice a sort of dutiful drone.

  “Mama and my teacher calling me by my Christian name.” The Chief let out a laugh, genuine and broad. Rather than sounding ugly in this grief-stripped room, it brought back a little of its life. “They should’ve known I was gonna be Chief.” He raised my chin with his hand then, gaze probing. “You call me Chief. Okay?”

  My throat was still thick. “Yes,” I said, low. “Okay.” The Chief’s presence was like a soft, enveloping blanket. I felt myself begin to unfreeze, just a little. I leaned into his pat, the way a cat will do as it sidles past your leg.

  “Next time,” he said, “I’ll stay for a meal.”

  The Chief turned and ambled out before either of us could say goodbye.

  Late that afternoon, the phone rang. “Hello?” I said into it, but received no reply. I uttered the next inquiry more impatiently before tossing the cordless aside on the bed. Both Club and Teggie had urged me to rest. And for some reason, I had agreed, even though I didn’t want to rest, had the feeling I’d already spent too much of my life resting.

  My sister entered the room. “I found it.”

  I was still focused on the phone. “Found what?”

  “What Brendan used. In his desk drawer. Club was getting a book out of the study,” she added quickly.

  I patted the bed, indicating that my sister should sit down, but she ignored me.

  “Don’t you want to see?”

  A pause. “Yes, of course.”

  She laughed, brief and bitter. “Really? Of course?”

  Before I could answer, she held out her hand, palm up.

  I lifted an amber plastic bottle. “Prescription pills?”

  “Read the label.”

  I glanced at the white sticker. The type was dark and clear, but for a moment I couldn’t make out what it said at all.

  “They’re for Brendan,” I said at last. “You already said that.”

  “Name isn’t all that’s on a prescription label,” Teggie said.

  “Why do you sound that way?” I cried. “Why are you being so harsh?”

  “Harsh?” Teggie echoed strangely. “You don’t know what harsh is. You don’t know what harshness you’re letting yourself in for. I may not, either, but I have some sense of what happens when you try and face up to the truth.” She hesitated. “I have a short lifetime’s worth of cred on that subject.”

  I glanced down at the label again. “The physician is Doctor Bradley. He works with the police when they need medical help.”

  Teggie paused, then said, “Okay.”

  “He must’ve been on duty when these were prescribed.”

  “Keep reading.”

  “The date …”

  “Right,” said Teggie, her voice an ache, hardly confirmation at all.

  “… was January sixteenth.” I tried to swallow past a sudden blooming in my throat. “January sixteenth?”

  “Yes.”

  “No,” I said stupidly.

  Even Teggie had stopped speaking for the moment.

  “If he got these on January sixteenth,” I said, letting the words come slowly so they didn’t choke me all at once, “then it means that Brendan planned this—that he knew what he was going to do—a week before he did it.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  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 ben
eath 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 hanged 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.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  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 eight 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.

  “Hanged himself,” I whispered into the frozen air. “My husband hanged 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.