As Simple as Snow Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Epigraph

  good-bye to everyone

  spooky girlfriend

  i don’t want to bore you, but . . .

  locker

  1 october

  4 october

  notes

  the house of cayne

  parents, idiots, and incompetents

  school

  carl

  my heart, previously

  halloween

  the basement

  milk shake

  get drunk

  carl is dead

  thanksgiving

  disc one

  christmas

  disc two

  new year’s eve

  january

  journal entry

  mumler

  7 february

  grief can really fuck you up

  4 ever,

  m a p

  more mail

  valentine’s day

  a step away from them

  the channel

  cemetery

  salamanders

  hay in a stack of needles

  schooled

  then carl

  the difficulty of forgetting

  waiting for a whale

  flight

  Acknowledgements

  READERS GUIDE TO as simple as snow

  PRAISE FOR as simple as snow

  “As Simple as Snow is one of the best books I’ve read in a long, long time. Galloway draws you into another world, and you’ll be wholly involved from the opening line, with its blunt force. He awakens all our curiosities and then satisfies them, so that the only question left unanswered is how long it’ll be before he gives us something else to read.”

  —Kaye Gibbons, author of Divining Women

  “There’s no doubt this rich, complex puzzle is the work of a talented author.”—Publishers Weekly

  “An intriguing read.” —Library Journal

  “Fascinating . . . oddly mesmerizing. Its ambiguities and unanswered questions, its teasing foreshadowings and foreboding make it hard to forget.”—Booklist

  “Engagingly written.”—Kirkus Reviews

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, M4P 2Y3 Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr. Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2005 by Gregory Galloway.

  Lines from “A Season in Hell” are reprinted from Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works, translated and copyright © 1967, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1975 by Paul Schmidt. .

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without

  permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of

  the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “B” design is a trademark belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  eISBN : 978-1-440-68469-2

  Galloway, Gregory.

  As simple as snow / Gregory Galloway.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-440-68469-2

  1. High school students—Fiction. 2. Missing persons—Fiction. 3. Teenage boys—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3607.A419A

  813’.6—dc22

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  That, mermaid-like, unto the floor she slid,

  One half appeared, the other half was hid.

  CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, Hero and Leander

  good-bye to everyone

  Anna Cayne had moved here in August, just before our sophomore year in high school, but by February she had, one by one, killed everyone in town. She didn’t do it all by herself—I helped with a few, including my best friend—but still, it was no small accomplishment, even if it was a small town.

  She captured all of these lives and deaths in fourteen black-jacketed composition notebooks. By the time she had finished, there were more than 1,500 obituaries, on just under 2,800 handwritten pages. The lives she wrote about were real, all true, but the deaths were fictions she invented, an average of around eight a day. “I’m not predicting the future,” she said, “but it’s only a matter of time before everyone catches up to me.”

  She had known things about people, or had discovered them—the secrets and private information that showed up in her notebooks were things that people who had spent their entire lives in our town didn’t know. The funny thing is, during the months when the bodies were piling up in the imagination of Anna Cayne, I don’t think a single person actually died in town; it was the longest drought for the funeral home that anyone could remember.

  The obituaries were private; her friends and a few other people knew that Anna was working on them, but besides me, I don’t believe anyone else was allowed to read them. She must have started the project on her very first day in town, the day I saw her sitting on the front lawn of her new home, writing in one of her notebooks as the rest of us stood with her parents, watching their belongings parade from the long yellow truck into the house. And after she had written the last page almost seven months later, she was gone.

  Maybe.

  She left behind little more than suggestions, hints, and suspicions. But there were enough of them to make you go crazy trying to figure out what it all meant. But you have to try.

  I have to change some things—some names, some events—and then there are things that happened that I didn’t see, didn’t experience, and that I’ll never know. There’s stuff I’ve tried to piece together and stuff I’ve tried to leave alone—I had to rely mostly on what I remember and what I could find.

  There are a few newspaper accounts of some of the events, some TV coverage, and there’s the police report (which I wasn’t allowed to see), but none of those is really helpful. They all focus on the superficial details, and miss the real story of what happened. They’ve got their own version of the world to sell. Besides, they only tell what they’ve been told anyway, and very few of them talked to the person who knows the most about it—me.

  This is what I know happened, or think happened. I fell in love with a girl, and then she left, and later she tried to come back, or I thought she did, and I went after her. It should have been simple but in the end it could not
have been more complicated, and maybe that was the whole point to begin with, but if love is true and still leaves you lonely, what good does it do? I started going over everything again, thinking I might find a way to her, wherever she was, or at least figure out what to do with all the things she left behind.

  “You have your whole life ahead of you,” my mother told me, “don’t spend all your time in the past.” It’s good advice, I know it is, but the past has its own ideas. It can follow you around with a life of its own, casting a long shadow.

  spooky girlfriend

  She was born in a thunderstorm. I don’t know if that’s true, but somebody once wrote that about her and it seems to fit. She swirled into and out of my life, quickly changing everything, a dark question mark disappearing into a darker hole. Her name was Anna Cayne. “It’s supposed to be ‘Coyne,’” she told me in maybe the second conversation I had with her, “and there’s a couple of theories of how it got to be spelled with an a. One is that some of the family was involved in some sort of criminal activity a long time ago, hundreds of years—murder, kidnapping, that sort of thing—and that the more respectable relatives changed the spelling of their name to distance themselves from the bad ones. Another version has it that it was the criminals who changed their name to Cayne, so it would be harder to find them once they left their old lives behind.” I told her that I’d heard the same thing about my family, since my last name was also available in an o and an a version.

  “You’d think that if they really wanted to distance themselves from each other, they’d change more than just one letter,” I said.

  “Well, it’s a bit mysterious,” she said, maybe a little put-off by the fact that her story wasn’t as unique as she thought.

  She and her parents had moved into town, which in itself was an odd occurrence, since not too many people moved into town; they almost all moved out. But there were the Caynes, watching the movers unload the truck and put their boxed belongings in the white two-story three-bedroom house on Twixt Road, just before it intersected with Town Street, which ran down by the river. The neighbors watched too, slowly pulled out of their houses and down the street, attracted to the yellow moving truck as if it were a huge magnet. They came by and introduced themselves and stood with the Caynes like spectators at a parade, a ball game, or some great historical event worthy of a rapt, attentive crowd.

  My friend Carl Hathorne and I rode our bikes over and stood with the large group that had formed. We didn’t really care about the truck or what came out of it; we didn’t really care about the parents and what they looked like. We’d already heard that the Caynes had an only child, a girl our age. We wanted to see the girl.

  We were disappointed; she was not what we had expected, and far from what we had hoped for. She came out of the house wearing a pair of headphones over her short, straight blond hair, the cord snaked into the pocket of a short black jacket. It was the kind of jacket someone would pump gas in, worn on a hot, humid day when it was, with complete certainty, the only jacket being worn in town. Under the jacket she had a black shirt, which, I found out later, was long-sleeved. She never wore short sleeves. She was also wearing a pair of jeans and heavy boots—black. She wore thick black eyeliner and a black expression. She sat down in the grass and started writing in a black notebook. I didn’t give her much thought that day, but once I got to know her I often wondered whether she had been completely different the day before we first saw her, whether she had dressed in normal clothes, with a more inviting appearance and expression. Except for two notable exceptions, I never witnessed any other incarnation; she was always in her Goth gear, black and blonde and brooding.

  “It’s a freak show,” Carl said. “Let’s go back to your house.”

  I lived about a mile and a half north of the Caynes, in a house that was very similar to theirs. We lived on Valley View Road, but you couldn’t see a valley from it. We were actually at the bottom of a hill, where we saw only hills, in all directions.

  It was a long walk to the Caynes’, if you stayed on the streets, but you could save some time if you cut through Mrs. Owens’s yard and then across the vacant lot where the Boothe house had burned down two years before. Then, when you got to Talus Road, you cut through the Bordens’. You could get there in about fifteen minutes. I would do it lots of times.

  All of this would become important.

  Her given name was Anna, but she insisted on being called Anastasia. We had that in common. I wanted everyone to use my full first name. It wasn’t out of vanity; I was named after my mother’s brother, who had died young—just thirteen—and I had always been called by the full name because he had been. I never liked my name much, it never really seemed mine, a sort of hand-me-down from someone who never got enough use out of it, but what can you do? Only famous people have had their names changed, or else somebody has to give you a nickname, and no one was going to do that for me. Or you have to be someone like Anna, and just take the name for yourself.

  “I love your name,” Anna said. “It’s almost a perfect double dactyl.”

  “A what?”

  “Higgledy-piggledy. That’s a perfect double dactyl. Two three-syllable words with the stresses on the first syllables. Your first name and your last name have the same number of syllables and almost the same sounds—they mirror each other, or are parallel or parallax or something.”

  “Okay.” I was ready to be done with it. If she hadn’t said “higgledy-piggledy,” I might have told her about my dead uncle and how he had died under strange circumstances and maybe she was on to something, maybe there was a connection between the two of us. Maybe he was the parallel, although we shared only the same first name. We could have gone into all of that, but I didn’t really want to continue with any conversation where “higgledy-piggledy” was used, and especially when I was being compared with it.

  “You should pay attention to things like that. It’s your name—you’ll always have that. It means something. The mirror thing is worth thinking about. Or is it repetition? It’s a double nature, anyway. The first and then the next being similar. Maybe you had a twin you don’t know about. Maybe there’s a ghost following you around. Or maybe it has something to do with parallel lines. You know, they meet at infinity. That’s interesting. But maybe it has nothing to do with you. I don’t know you well enough to figure it out yet.”

  “Okay. How about your name? What does it mean?”

  “You’ll have to figure that out for yourself.”

  She was always spooky. Her friends were worse. They strolled silently through the school in their funeral clothes and black lipstick and eyeliner and gun-black hair. There were seven Marilyn Manson types in school (“One for every day of the week,” Carl had said, “as if one wasn’t enough”), three of them in our sophomore class. There were two seniors and two juniors and no freshmen. We hoped they were a species headed for extinction.

  They stuck out like badly bruised thumbs and we thought they were pretentious and full of shit. They were rarely alone, a traveling convention of mourners, except for her. I would see her sitting off by herself in class, eating alone in the cafeteria, or just standing on her own in the hallway between classes. It’s what I disliked most about her at first, I thought she was even more pretentious and bolder than her friends, and then it became one of the things I liked most about her. Sometimes it works out that way, I guess, and sometimes the other way.

  Our school, good old Hamilton High, was three stories tall, a long rectangle situated east-west on top of a low hill, with an entrance on each of the shorter sides. There is some debate about whom the school was named after. Almost everyone assumed it was after the adulterous Alexander Hamilton (as Anna liked to call him), who was shot dead by Aaron Burr in a duel on the banks of the Hudson River, for spreading lies and rumors about Burr. There had been Hamiltons around town years ago, but no one had ever found anything they had done to be noteworthy or exceptional enough to name a building after any of them, but there w
ere people who still believed the school was named after some of these other Hamiltons. My mother was one of those people, she contended that the town would never name a building, especially a school, after such an immoral man. “He’s on the ten-dollar bill, Mom,” I said.

  “What the federal government decides is suitable has nothing to do with us,” she said. It was the most political statement I ever heard my mother make.

  Everybody stood around in the hallways before class, and every group had its own spot. The bandoids were always in the basement, the arty types hung around Mr. Devon’s classroom, the jocks were on the first floor by the west entrance, down the hall from the 4-H’ers, the geeks hung out at the eastern end of the second floor, the speech and debate team was on the western end (“I don’t do a lot of business on the second floor,” Carl always said). Carl traveled from floor to floor, and it never mattered where I was. Anna and the rest of the ghouls were always on the third floor, a dark cloud hanging there. Sometimes walking to school I would look up and see them, crow-black and still, perched high in the morning sky. And after school they walked together into the nearby woods. They were said to do all sorts of things there: They took drugs and had sex and performed rituals involving animal sacrifices. They cast spells there, placing curses on people in town, and plotted whom to torment and inflict pain and suffering on. Some people in school avoided the woods, but I never had a problem. Carl and I had come across trees with strange markings cut into them, and a circle of upside-down crosses, but we never knew whether these things had been left by the Goths themselves or by somebody else trying to add to their reputation. It all seemed so silly—but what was more idiotic, a group of high schoolers standing around chanting a bunch of mumbo jumbo, or the rest of the school thinking this type of stuff actually happened, and that it might really work?