As Simple as Snow (18 page)

 

 

 

I told them about her notebooks, about the fact that she was constantly writing obituaries. The officers seemed interested in this. They asked what the notebooks looked like, how many of them there were, all that stuff. They hadn’t found them. I wondered if she had taken them with her. Maybe she had destroyed them or hidden them.

I told them about the strange marks I’d seen on Anna’s body, the bruises and scratches. I didn’t tell them about the cuts on her arms. Maybe they knew about those already, maybe they had seen them on her dead body. They probably thought it meant that she was suicidal. I didn’t want to support that. It didn’t make sense. Anna was ravenously curious. She read all the time, she listened to music, she watched movies, she was always online reading about more things to read, and more things to listen to, and more things to look at. There didn’t seem to be anything she didn’t want to know. I can’t imagine a person with that much interest in the world wanting to leave it. It didn’t fit.

My mother looked at the officers. “What do you think about that?” They didn’t respond. “Maybe you should be over at the Caynes’ asking them about this?”

“We’re talking to everyone,” one of the officers said. My mother was about to continue, but my father’s hand on her shoulder stopped her.

“What can you tell me about what happened?” I said.

The officer was writing in a small spiral notebook. He had his head down and kept writing. He clicked his pen and pushed it through the spiral and then put the notebook into the pocket of his leather jacket. I realized that I hadn’t taken my jacket off either. I wasn’t hot; in fact, I was still cold. I wanted some coffee, I guess, even though I’d never had any before and couldn’t bring myself to ask. I had to wait for the officer. He put his right hand on the table and leaned on it. He looked at the hand as if studying how it supported the weight of his body. He looked at his partner, and then at my parents.

“This is not official,” he said, “but we believe that Anna Cayne drowned in the river. We’ve started a search for her body.”

“What? I thought you found her body.”

“No. We haven’t recovered the body.”

“Then what was out there on the ice?”

They hadn’t found her body after all. They’d found only her dress, arranged neatly beside a hole in the ice, like someone lying facedown, looking into the water. “That’s bizarre,” my mother blurted. The officer didn’t say anything, but only shifted his eyes from my mother to me.

“So she killed herself,” my father said.

“We’re not speculating at this point,” the other policeman said. “We need to locate the body and then go from there.”

The officers left, and my mother took the coffee cups to the kitchen. My father sat at the table, his hands pressed together in front of him. “You don’t know anything more about this?”

“Somebody told me they found her body,” I said.

“Did you think they would?”

“I didn’t think anything. I don’t know anything. I wish I did.”

“Is that your story?”

“It’s not a story,” I said.

“I saw you lie to the Caynes this morning,” he said. “I hope I didn’t see you lie to the police tonight.”

“It was the truth,” I said. “Everything I know about it, and what happened.”

“Let’s hope so.”

I had a dream about Anna. Or about a book. Or both. There was a book in the dream, and her name kept appearing in odd places on the page and then disappearing. I turned a page and her name jumped around, like a floater in your eye that moves every time you try to look at it, always remaining just a bit ahead of you, elusive and fleeting. The book didn’t make any sense, the chapters and pages were all out of place, but I kept riffling through them, hoping they would provide some meaning, some sense. Carl and Claire were in the dream too, suddenly asking me what I was doing. I tried to tell them about Anna, but they didn’t know what I was talking about. “You don’t read,” Claire said. “You can’t read,” Carl told me.

“That’s not true,” I said to Carl. “We read Sherlock Holmes together.”

“I remember that. Who do you think is smarter, Sherlock Holmes or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?”

“You can’t imagine someone smarter than yourself, can you?” Claire asked.

“No,” I said, and when I looked down, the pages of the book were empty.

 

 

 

When I woke up the next morning, I was surprised. I was shocked that the world could continue, that I could wake up as I did every morning. I didn’t wake up and think that the day before was a dream, or any of that crap; I was too acutely aware of what had happened. She left. She was taken. She was gone. She was dead, or she wasn’t, but she was still gone. That’s what made everything so shocking. There was a disturbing ordinariness about everything. How could such a terrible thing happen and the world just go on? Everything should stop and wait until it had everything figured out before everything started up again. Everyone should be at the river, searching, smashing every last piece of ice and straining through every drop of water until she was found. But it wasn’t like that at all. My father was finishing up in the bathroom, as he did every morning, combing his remaining strands of hair in the proper place, adjusting his tie, brushing a spot out of his suit. My mother was in the kitchen, drinking coffee from the pot my father had programmed the night before to start brewing at seven-thirty sharp. Everything seemed programmed. My father showered and shaved and left for work as he usually did, my mother appeared to do or not do the things she usually did or didn’t do every morning, and I had to go to school. The world had a hole torn in it yesterday, but today it would go on as normal. Maybe it was too used to these sorts of things. To me, the world wasn’t unhappy enough. I was afraid that I wasn’t unhappy enough.

 

 

 

Before that day I had always imagined that it took strength to continue after a tragedy, but I now realized that it was really weakness. I didn’t want to face directly what had happened, or imagine what might have happened, so I tried to ignore it from one moment to the next. I didn’t go up to the third floor before school; I didn’t want to hear what Bryce had to say. Instead, I searched the first floor for Billy Godley. He was on his way to homeroom, and I stopped him and asked him what he knew. “I don’t really know that much,” he said. He knew more than anyone else, though. He said people were down working at the river, cops and the volunteer fire department and a couple of rescue teams from nearby towns, all looking for her. He said his father had mentioned that it was strange that all they found was a dress. “No coat, no shoes,” Billy said. “No body, though that could be good.”

grief can really fuck you up

I wasn’t even there and I can’t get the image out of my head. If this were a movie or a graphic novel, there would be an overhead view of the snow-covered river, with her black dress laid perfectly on the ice, the hem curving in a dramatic arc, the arms stretched straight out on each side. It would look like a black snow angel, with the neck stopping just at the edge of the jagged hole in the ice, exposing the churning water below. It’s a great image—and I can say that only after knowing Anna—she would have appreciated it, and I have thought about how well the scene was set, how perfectly the image was composed, and I wonder if maybe she didn’t appreciate it too. I was still confused by it, though. Why weren’t her coat and shoes there? She wouldn’t walk all the way from her house through the snow and then across the frozen river without a coat, and without shoes. “Maybe they went with her,” Billy had said. He meant that maybe she had run off, sure, but I couldn’t help thinking of her going through that hole, like Alice through the looking glass, slowly drifting through the cold water, her boots weighing her down.

 

 

 

After school I walked along the river. Carl had said that he would come with me, but he had some business to take care of at the last minute, and Bryce was driving Claire and the other Goths. I didn’t want to go with Bryce. You could see cars streaming in the same direction, seniors and parents and everyone else who shouldn’t have come. They were all coming to gawk, but there was little to see. Her clothes were gone, the ice was gone, and the hole she had gone through was gone. The only thing that was still there was the yellow caution tape. The police had to put up barricades to keep the crowds back. The rescue-and-recovery team had brought in an excavator to claw through the ice and break it up so they could get boats into the river and start searching. The boats were in the water when I got there, men in red jackets dragging poles through the river and peering over the side. Somebody said they had been there all day. Somebody else said they wouldn’t be coming back to look tomorrow. Another person said the river would be frozen again by morning. This proved to be wrong, but it was frozen again in the next few days. Just walking by after those few days, you’d never have known that anything had happened: the crowds were gone, the barriers were gone, the yellow tape was gone, the water was gone. There was nothing but ice and snow and cold; everything looked the way it had before, as if the clock had been turned back, before everything changed.

 

 

 

Anna’s locker became a memorial. People taped poems and prayers on it, and it was covered with yellow ribbons. There were flowers and unlit candles on the floor in front of it. The pile grew and spread throughout until finally an announcement was made, telling everyone to stop blocking the hallway. A designated area in front of the principal’s office was now the official receptacle of the school’s anguish. There was a large cardboard box with a handwritten sign above it: “A. Cayne.” You had to laugh. Carl told me that he saw the janitor shoveling the pile that was in front of the locker into the box. “He was using the same shovel he uses to clear the sidewalks,” Carl said.

“Anna’s just going to throw it all away when she comes back anyway,” I replied.

People held a vigil down at the river. It was bitterly cold, well below zero, but about a hundred showed up and threw bouquets of flowers onto the ice or piled them on the snowy shore. I don’t know who organized the thing or how people knew to show up, but they did. Police tried to keep them away from the river, but Bryce pushed his way through and placed a lit candle on the ice. A number of people followed, until there were a dozen or so candles flickering in the darkness not far from where she had disappeared. Finally one of the police officers spoke. “Please stay back, just stay back, away from the river. We don’t want another person falling through the ice.” That seemed to get people’s attention.

Mr. and Mrs. Cayne were there. They stood off to the side, and then Mrs. Cayne moved down toward the river and stood in front of the blue barricades. The flames from candles in the crowd threw a tenuous light on her face. She spoke tearfully, thanking everyone for coming and for giving strength to her and her husband. “We still have hope that Anastasia is alive,” she said. “We still have hope that she will be returned to us, safe and sound.”

Bryce moved to her side and put a reassuring arm around her. He was like a dark tower beside her, with his black stocking cap pulled low over his shaved head, and his long black overcoat. He was smart enough to stand on the other side of her thrashing hair. “I just wanted to assure the Caynes that we’re doing everything we can to help,” he said, but you got the idea that he was talking about himself, not a group. He mentioned his car wreck and how everyone said it was a miracle that he had survived, and he was certain that the same sort of miracle would happen for the Caynes.

I couldn’t believe that Bryce would speak like that. I was embarrassed by him, embarrassed for him. It wasn’t his place, and then the thought occurred to me that people might expect me to say something. I could feel myself blushing and I moved to the back of the crowd, hoping no one would say anything. No one did, and in fact the crowd slowly dispersed, with some people approaching the Caynes and speaking to them in quiet, somber voices.

I had reached the road and was heading to a shortcut toward home when I heard Mr. Cayne call out, “Do you need a ride?”

I looked up to see who it was he was talking to and realized he was looking at me from inside his car. When I didn’t move, he motioned toward me with his gloved hand. I didn’t want to go with him—I thought of him and Mrs. Cayne as somehow responsible for what had happened to Anna. Even if they weren’t directly responsible, they had failed to take better care of her, watch over her, protect her. Isn’t that what they were supposed to do? He motioned to me again, and reluctantly I walked over to his car. Mrs. Cayne was sitting in the passenger seat, looking straight ahead.

“It’s too cold to walk,” he said. I couldn’t think of any reasonable way out of it, so I got into the backseat. Mrs. Cayne didn’t move. We drove in silence until Mr. Cayne said, “That was nice.”

“It was nice of Bryce to speak,” Mrs. Cayne said.

“Have you heard anything more?” I asked. They didn’t have any information that I didn’t already know, or at least they didn’t tell me any. I couldn’t help being suspicious, distrusting everything they told me and the way they acted. I was the one who had lied to them, and now I didn’t trust them. The difference was that I knew I didn’t have anything to do with Anna’s disappearance, but they might have. I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything about them, really.

Mr. Cayne pulled up in front of my house and I got out. He got out of the driver’s side and came around the front of the car, his body cutting through the beam of the headlights. I waited for him on the sidewalk.

“Mrs. Cayne is still very upset,” he said, almost apologizing.

“She has every right to be.”

He nodded quickly. “I can’t say that I’m not upset. I mean with you. For the other night. It’s just that I also wanted you to know that we are thinking about you, that we know this is hard for you too. Just know that.”