As Simple as Snow Page 7

  “It is color, isn’t it, Dad?” Anna said. Mr. Cayne laughed, but his soft-boiled features turned menacing, and I could almost see the man who was capable of crushing somebody’s wrist and pulling an arm out of its socket. Anna didn’t say another word until he left us alone.

  “We have six TVs,” I said. “Two for each of us. I don’t think there’s ever a time when one isn’t on somewhere in the house.”

  Mr. Cayne continued toward the end of the room, “This is my workbench.” He pointed to a countertop, maybe eight feet long, with four cabinet doors and a row of four drawers underneath. Another pair of doors were above the counter, and a series of cubbyholes in various sizes beside those. A large pegboard covered the wall to the right of the workbench, where his tools hung in haphazard fashion. The top of the bench was covered with more tools, fishing tackle, and empty shotgun shells, as well as old radios and radio parts. There was also a machine to make shotgun shells, and a shortwave radio, a gray box with a bunch of dials set up on a corner of the workbench. “I’m not allowed to have this upstairs,” he explained, then turned it on and patiently navigated the static until he found a broadcast.

  “This is above the medium-wave band you’re familiar with,” he told me. “It’s a huge space, over twenty times larger than the medium-wave band. There’s everything here, news and music, amateur radio operators, Coast Guard ships, commercial airlines, military communications. You can listen to broadcasts from all over the world.”

  He kept a notebook where he logged the frequency of the stations he liked and what time he listened to them. He consulted his log and tuned to a broadcast from Kuwait and then one from Algeria. I couldn’t understand any of it, but he was clearly enjoying it. He seemed like Anna then, his words spilling out and his enthusiasm infectious. He wasn’t trying to force it on me; he just thought I would like it as much as he did. I didn’t see the attraction at first, but then he tuned to some stations that sounded like the disc Anna had—maybe they were the same ones. It was like voices from outer space, trying to tell us something. Some were happy voices, some sounded like machines, and some appeared to be pleading for someone to understand them.

  “There’s all this stuff floating around out there,” Mr. Cayne said, “and nobody knows what it means.”

  “Do you ever send messages back?” I asked.

  “It’s one-way only. I’ve got a buddy who can broadcast messages, though. I like to listen.”

  “Can we listen to your friend’s broadcast?”

  Mr. Cayne ignored me and went back to searching for stations. Anna had left us at some point in his demonstration and was sitting on the couch. After listening a few more minutes he turned to me. “You should think about getting one of these.”

  “Maybe I will.” I don’t know if I really meant it when I said it. I was trying to be polite. He nodded and went to the stairs, leaving the door open when he reached the top. I joined Anna on the couch. “How much time does he spend down here?”

  “Not as much as he’d like you to believe,” she said. “That’s what’s nice about it. It’s a good place to get away from him, actually.”

  Anna and I spent a lot of time in the basement over the following months. She would turn off the lights and we would lie on the couch and listen to the world woozily making its way across the airwaves to us. It was almost pitch-black in the basement, with only the cool light from the dials of the shortwave and the red glow from the door of the stove. The radio messages would float, hypnotically, rhythmically, monotonously, into the room. I remember especially one broadcast: a woman’s voice slowly, calmly repeating, “Seis, siete, tres, siete, cero . . .”

  Anna moved toward me in the darkness. I could feel her trying to find me, but I didn’t want to help. I waited for her to find me on her own. She brushed her hand against my chest and then slowly pushed it up my neck and chin. She pressed herself against me and held my chin in her hand until her mouth found mine. The woman on the radio was still repeating, “Seis, siete, tres, siete, cero,” again and again.

  “Don’t you want to find out what they mean, or where they come from, why we’re hearing them?”

  “It’s almost more fun not knowing,” she said. “If you knew what it all meant, then it might not be as interesting or compelling. That’s probably half the fun, not knowing. Sometimes there’s more fun in the mystery of things than anything else.” We listened for a while longer, and then she whispered in my ear, “Let’s make a code.”

  milk shake

  If we weren’t in the basement, we were in Anna’s room. We almost never went to my house. My mother was always there, either needing help with some small problem or just hovering nearby. A few days after Halloween, I was sitting on the floor in Anna’s room, looking at album covers, when she said, “What do you want to do when you leave here?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t figured out that far. How about you?”

  “I want to write obituaries.” She rushed on: “Not for the reasons you’re probably thinking.”

  “It sounds like taxidermy, that’s what I was thinking,” I said.

  “They’re not trophies, they’re tributes. You have to capture the most important things in a person’s life in just a few paragraphs.”

  She had a couple of notebooks filled with obituaries she had collected, and five more full of obituaries she had written herself. “I have an obituary for nearly everyone in school,” she said. “All the students, the teachers, the administration, the janitors, the kitchen crew. I have most of the school board in here, the PTA. In fact, I have a lot of entire families in here.”

  “Am I in there?”

  “Of course,” she said, with a finality that told me it was no use to pursue it.

  “Let me read one.”

  She opened a notebook to a page filled with tiny, spidery, almost indecipherable letters. I read:

  Mr. Duncan Carmichael, who collected exotic animals, including tapirs, tarantulas, and a Tasmanian devil, was particularly proud of his four monitor lizards. He was discovered in the basement of his home, half eaten by the large lizards. . . . Spared in the carnage were a number of Madagascar hissing cockroaches, which were meant to be the lizards’ food.

  Of course, Mr. Carmichael was still alive, teaching biology to the freshman class. “Does Mr. Carmichael even have any pets?” I asked.

  “Do you want to go to his house right now?” Anna said.

  “That might be necessary,” I said. “What if Mr. Carmichael doesn’t die like this? Then what? Or worse, what if he does? What if everyone in your book dies exactly the way you’ve described it?”

  “Then I will have saved a lot of time for everyone,” she said. “You might be missing the point.”

  “Show me another one. Show me my mother’s.”

  She consulted a master list, an alphabetical listing of all of the names, with the corresponding notebook and page number next to each. “The whole thing would be a mess without this list,” she said. She picked up a notebook and opened it to a specific page, took a piece of scratch paper and carefully taped it over something near the bottom of the page, and covered the facing page with a book, then handed me the notebook; but she kept one hand on it, ready to grab it from me if I should try to read what was covered. “It’s not yours,” she said, “but I don’t want you to see it. Not yet, anyway.”

  Mrs. Emily G______ was killed on April 27, 2009, in an accident at her home. Her husband, Philip G______, was cutting down a tree in the front yard of their house at 28 Valley View Road when the tree fell and landed on his wife. Mrs. G______ was standing in the street to warn passing cars of her husband’s activity when the tree crushed her.

  Emily Marie Brandt was born on August 19, 1947, in Danbury, Connecticut, where her family had resided for generations. Emily was the first Brandt to leave Danbury and never return, when she left at age 18 to attend Brown University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in 1969. While attending Brown, she met Philip G______, a
nd the two were married by a justice of the peace on June 21, 1969.

  Mrs. Emily G______ was a housewife for nearly the entirety of her adult life, except for two years when she worked in a number of clerical and secretarial positions in various businesses in the community. She spent a lifetime narrowly avoiding accidents and other mishaps, at least until the last.

  She is survived by her husband. Her four children, Denise, Paul (see Volume II, page 68), Joan (see Volume IV, page 107), and [this is where she had taped the scratch paper] preceded her in death.

  The odd thing about the obituary is that, except for the deaths, all of the facts were accurate.

  “How do you know all of this?” I asked.

  “It’s mostly public information,” she said. “You can find out a lot about people just by paying attention. You should try it sometime.”

  “But how did you know other stuff? Like the fact that my mother is accident-prone, or her employment stuff ?”

  “Neither is a well-kept secret,” Anna said. “You just have to pay attention. Be curious. Be quiet. You’d be amazed at what people talk about right next to you in public. They forget that other people are around, I guess, or they don’t care.”

  “And why did you kill me off before my mother?”

  She smiled. “It’s not a rule, but I usually have a parent—sometimes both—outlive the children. I like it that way, having them deal with the loss.”

  I told her that I wanted to be a writer, even though I had never written anything outside school assignments.

  “Write me a ghost story,” she said.

  “I will.”

  “Say it like you mean it.”

  “I’ll write one for you.”

  “Soon,” she said.

  “Soon.”

  “I’ll make sure,” she said. “I’ll supply the ghost.”

  I wanted to read all the obituaries she had written, but she wouldn’t allow it. Instead, she invented a game where I wrote my own. It was a version of Celebrity Death Watch. We would e-mail each other a list of names of celebrities, in the order in which we thought they would die, and then write obituaries for each one. There was no way my obituaries could compare with Anna’s, so I tended to uncover obscure facts or events in a celebrity’s life and dwell on those. If it was a movie star, I would ignore the popular movies and list the TV commercials or bit parts in sitcoms and soap operas, concentrate on the star’s involvement in Scientology or PETA, make mention of stays at a Betty Ford clinic or appearances on the Jerry Lewis Telethon. I would inflate the importance of a minor writer or TV star. Politicians were always good because you could find odd voting habits or expenses. I tried to make the obituaries funny and outlandish, and Anna loved them.

  You could revise your list every two weeks. Anna was of course uncanny in her picks. She had been playing in some online games for a while, she said, but she didn’t really like their versions. “There should be a Celebrity Death Watch site death watch,” she said. “Most of them are deadly boring, and have no activity, no action.”

  Anna and I had been seeing each other for about a month, meeting before school in the morning and leaving together in the afternoon. Her Goth friends were starting to complain, so I started hanging out with them, standing with them before school in their private spot on the third floor. I am convinced that I looked like a bigger idiot than usual, sticking out in a group that already stuck out. I thought that their conversations would be incredibly interesting, that I would have the inside track on all the mysteries and intrigue of that dark group. I imagined that their talk would be filled with arcane knowledge and insight, a secret world revealed only to me, but instead their morning conversations were like most of the other crap that went on in the other crowds gathered in the school. They were dull, actually.

  I also thought that Anna would be the dominant voice among the group, but she was strangely silent every morning. Bryce Druitt did most of the talking. He stood in the hallway with the cast on his leg, his crutches in front of him and his arms crossed casually over the top, going on and on about what he had watched on television or what music he was listening to or what comic books he was reading. Or death. They talked about death a lot. Sometimes they would ask Anna, “Who have you killed lately?” and she would tell them about her most recent obituary. Sometimes they would suggest a gruesome demise—“Why don’t you put a busload of them into the river, or crash them into a semi or a culvert or something,” Bryce would suggest— and Anna would nod in agreement, and then ignore the advice.

  Bryce liked to talk about Yith, a comic-book series he was reading about a time traveler who could take any shape he wanted and enter people’s minds and control them. The name was taken from H. P. Lovecraft, whom I had not read but the rest of them seemed to have. “There are more important things to read,” Anna had told me. She had a list for me, and a timetable, it appeared. Or maybe she was trying to steer me away from anything connected to Bryce. He made the comic sound interesting enough, so I went and bought a few issues. The new one had just come out, and the next day Bryce was talking about it.

  “He’s in complete control,” he said. “Dominating everybody, and they’re all going to end up dead and in hell or somewhere in time with Yith, working for him.”

  “What I liked about it,” I said, “was that at the end you think Yith is going to disappear, or at least can disappear. He’s got everything so well planned that he knows what everyone’s going to do. He can just leave them alone and they’ll still do his bidding. That way, they’ll all think they’ve escaped him, but they haven’t.”

  I thought Bryce was going to hit me. “They’re not all milk shakes like you,” he said.

  He had called me that a couple of times before, maybe trying to hang a nickname on me. Nobody followed his lead, but it still annoyed me. There wasn’t much I could do about it; make no mistake, Bryce Druitt could kick my ass in his sleep. I kept my mouth shut most mornings after that. Maybe because I was seething every morning, standing on the fringes, yet there always seemed to be a tension in the group, a feeling that the whole thing could explode or break apart. Bryce’s mouth would move and move, and everyone’s attention would drift off down the hall. Claire Maenza, one of the other Goths, and Anna would shoot glances at each other, carrying on a secret conversation with their eyes, and Bryce would still go on, unaware that everything had changed. I wanted to go off with Anna, stand alone somewhere with her, but that didn’t seem to be an option.

  I won’t go into detail about each one of them, describing what they were like and what they did. It’s not that important. Besides, if they were telling their own story, they wouldn’t mention me either.

  “I don’t really hang out with any of them outside of school,” Anna said, “except for when we go to dances or games or whatever.” She didn’t hang out at all, actually. She had too many books to read and too much music to listen to, and too many notebooks to fill. In the beginning, I wondered why she wanted to hang out with me. She was close to Claire Maenza. I came to like her too, and she became an important link in all that happened.

  Claire was a junior. She was tall and thin and had dyed black hair that fell straight down below her ears before breaking into waves that reached to her shoulder blades. She had a small silver hoop stuck through her left eyebrow, and she usually wore black lipstick. Sometimes she put on white lipstick, which was even creepier. I wonder why that is. She was nice, once you got to know her. She was quieter than Anna, soft-spoken. Anna said that Claire got all A’s in school. Everyone said she did drugs, and that she got them from her parents.

  She lived on Madder Lane, which was kind of an art community. A lot of people in town still called it Hippie Road (my father was particularly fond of “Deadbeat Drive”), since it had been taken over in the sixties. It was the last officially marked street in town, just off Town Street before it turned into Route 63. There were houses past Madder Lane, but the roads were mostly private, gravel-covered drives that led to ho
uses and were referred to by the names of the families who lived there, or more accurately, by the names of families who had lived there years before. Claire’s father had moved here from Rochester, New York, when he was a teenager, but her mom’s family, the Comptons, had been here for generations. The Compton name was on the church; they had helped build it in 1750, and on the library, which was built in 1861, and all over the cemetery. Claire’s mother was an architect, and her father was a sculptor. He made odd-looking contraptions out of stone and metal. None of his art was realistic, but many of his pieces had animal names. One, a group of large stones connected with rusted pipes, was called Cattle. “‘Bullshit’ is more like it,” my father said. His work sold for a lot of money, and there were large installations by him in some people’s yards. Not too many in town, but you’d see them if you drove into some of the nicer neighborhoods in Hilliker or Joplin. You would often spot Mr. Maenza wandering in the woods on the side of the roads, or wading along the river, hunting for particular rocks or discarded metal objects. He may have appeared like a homeless guy searching for cans, but my father said he was loaded. His grandfather had invented a safety device for slaughterhouses, and that set up the Maenza family for generations. “He can afford to be a bum,” my father said. He was a client of my father’s partner.

  Claire’s family had moved into town about six years before. She was normal then, with wavy brown hair. She rollerbladed all over the place, and chewed gum constantly. She played the flute and sang in the church children’s choir. She had a beautiful voice. I told her that once and she started laughing. I avoided her for a long time after that. Her parents didn’t go to church, so Claire would rollerblade back and forth or, if the weather was bad, her mother would drop her off and pick her up. She was almost always alone in older company as well. You’d see her standing in front of the white church, blowing bubbles with her gum and politely declining rides. Adults seemed to like her—Claire was polite and quiet and respectful. She always made her mother chauffeur her, thinking that she might one day accompany her inside the church.