Snow Day: a Novella (13 page)

It was Tommy.

I
ONLY SHARE THESE EVENTS
because Dr. Jeffreys suggested it. He gave me some bullshit line about survivor’s guilt and how I never saw Tommy that night – not alive, anyway. He said putting it all on paper might help me sort things out. It hasn’t.

Sally doesn’t know about my weekly lunch-time sessions with the doc. As much as I love her, she wouldn’t understand. What’s worse, if she knew I was seeing a head doctor, she wouldn’t stop digging at me for details and that would only lead to an argument. She’d come at me with a mental crowbar – prying, cajoling, guilting, shaming and withholding in order to get me to open up. She’s the touchy-feely, share-your-emotions type and she can be relentless when I don’t reciprocate. I’ve learned to fake it, and that works for us.

After all, how could I tell her? How could I explain to her that Tommy did visit me that night; that he still visits me and has for many years? He only comes on the eve of a snow day, but he comes without fail. He’s with me now, in fact. He’s sitting right over there, in the corner of my study, in my reading chair. He still wears the same BLACKWATER P.A.L. t-shirt and faded jeans.

When he first came to me after that night, he still looked like the little boy who just wanted to play. But time has eaten away at him. I guess painful, heartfelt secrets that you take to the grave are like a bacteria buried in a deep cut, they fester and swell and destroy the flesh. That’s how it’s been with my vision of Tommy. Time eats away at him, at me. I think that painful decay began the moment I heard the back door of the black Plymouth Valiant slam shut; the same moment I wondered if I should have called him over and offered him the last lozenge in the Sucrets box.

The decades have taken their toll on Tommy. His smell has grown rank, like rotted onions and cabbage. His odor is a herald to his coming and that alone is enough to start my bowels turning and burning. His appearance has grown worse, too. His clothing is loose and ragged now and his red hair is mostly gone, just a few desperate and tangled strands cling to his dead gray wrinkled scalp. His flesh has putrefied and shriveled and begun to lose its hold on his bones. His face is separating from his skull and slipping, just a little. And though he’s still a boy of ten, the sag makes him look like a sad and aged stroke victim. His shrunken ear has twisted some and droops a bit. His eyes are yellow and sunken and seeping a green septic pus. It runs down his face like tears.

And when he speaks; oh, God, help me. His craggy voice gurgles and his mouth is full of swollen, writhing maggots. They roll and squirm on his tongue when he forms the stuttering words. They are words that stab at me.

I’m your pal, B-billy...

I j-just want to p-play, Billy...

Let’s play, B-billy...

I refused to answer his calls to play. I don’t talk to him, haven’t tried for many years. After a while, he stops asking to play, but keeps his vigil. He taps his finger sometimes on the arm of the chair; licks his shredded lips with a black tongue, pushing aside the maggots that sometimes squirm at the corner of his mouth.

He waits; for what I’m not sure, maybe for me. I’ve thought about joining him in the eternal blackness he crawls out of on snow days, about going to play with him there. But I dismissed that idea long ago. No, that would be too easy. Like I said, some punishments are well-earned, and this one’s been bought and paid for; the deluxe package. So now on the eve of each snow day, I just take my bitter medicine, suffering through the dreams that replay that horrible night, and I endure his visits until the dawn comes and the morning light gleams on the fresh snow crystals and he’s gone.

No, I won’t show this confession to Sally; I love her too much for that. I will burn it in the fireplace. Some secrets, like Tommy, are best left buried, even if they won’t stay dead.

At least he only comes on snow days.

I
T IS STILL SNOWING.

I’ve been writing all night and the snow hasn’t let up since I started. My iPhone reads 5:00 AM. I expect it will chime any minute with a text message from Holy Name Elementary to confirm what I already know. My sons will have their snow day.

I will not wake them at six o’clock to shower and eat and catch the school bus. I will let them roll over and continue to dream peacefully – probably of snow. How lucky for them.

In time, they’ll wake on their own, and go to the window, and smile at the virginal blanket of white that makes everything seem new and clean and safe and fun. When they come to me and ask if they can go out to play in the snow, I will tell them yes. But I will give them this one warning:

Don’t go off the block.

Dear Reader:

Snow Day
is a salute to the old campfire stories of our youth, but like the tasty Tootsie Pop that it is, I hope you find a little more to chew on inside. At least, that was my intention when I wrote it.

People will sometimes ask a writer the age-old question
where do your stories come from
? I’ve seen many scribes shuffle uncomfortably and toe the ground in an “aw, shucks” kind of way while trying to answer that question. Whether reluctant to reveal trade secrets, or just at a loss to explain the magical muse that visits them at the keyboard, they struggle to articulate an answer.

Not me; not with
Snow Day
. It has a very clear origin, and while it happened many years ago, I can still put my finger on exactly where, or rather from whom, the idea came. Like a snowball in an old cartoon short that might have played before the feature at the Park Lane Theater, it started small, but it grew as it rolled downhill and blended with other ideas until it became the story I finally wrote.

The inspiration for
Snow Day
was first born from something my childhood friend Michael DiNapoli said to me. It was after we were grown and married and entrenched in the day-to-day responsibilities of adulthood. We hadn’t seen each other for many years and when we reconnected and reminisced he said something that stayed with me.

He said: “We lived an idyllic childhood, didn’t we?”

His words were more statement than question and he smiled broadly when he said it because he truly meant it. At the time, I didn’t think much of it. I politely agreed, of course, and the topic of our conversation moved on to the current whereabouts of old friends and family like Holly, Nicky, Jimmy, Sammy, Peggy and the rest. But while the conversation moved on, his words stuck in my head, like sun-melted gum that sticks to your Keds. It was there and it wasn’t going away. I tried to forget about it, but of course I didn’t. I couldn’t.

When I became the father of a daughter (an honor requiring double the usual dose of parental vigilance), I was constantly reminded of my own childhood and Michael’s words in particular. Over the years, my wife and I were fortunate to raise a beautiful, smart, talented and caring young woman. But the choices we made along the way were different than those our parents made; they had to be. After all, we live in a different, more frightening world today; more care is required. In short, it’s more dangerous today than it was when we were kids... isn’t it?

Really?

I began to wonder, was it truly the way we remember it? Or, to put it another way, is it the lens through which we view our past that makes it seem idyllic and not necessarily the times in which we actually lived? Like Billy Joel says, we didn’t start the fire. So, over the years, Michael’s words became less a statement and more a question that rattled around in my mind.
Did we live an idyllic childhood?
And if we did, what really lay around the corner that we never saw? What might have happened if we went off the block on the wrong day, at the wrong time, and met the wrong person?

And so, the snowball went rolling downhill; slowly at first, then faster and bigger and darker until it became
Snow Day
.

Writing this tale has been a lot of fun. I certainly had plenty of material to inspire me, and sifting through my childhood to find just the right pieces to build a snow castle of fictitious characters and events convinced me of this: we did live a rich and fulfilling childhood. Not perfect – we kids, and our parents, made plenty of mistakes – but it was loving and memorable and safe... mostly.

Michael was right, in the end. Many of our childhood clan did indeed live idyllic childhoods. It was one that Norman Rockwell might have thought worthy to capture on canvas and mythologize for all time, if he’d had a love for wide collars, bell bottom pants and 8-track tapes. God knows my friends and family have done so in our hearts and in our minds. But the other, darker truth is this: despite the warm memories we hold, courtesy of the loving community that bore us, we were never far from danger while we played on or off the block, never far from being the boy in the cellar. No one ever is; not then, not now. In those days we just chose to close our eyes to it. It was easier and more comforting that way. The blindness set us free.

In this story I decided to revisit 1975 and open my eyes, just a bit, to peek beneath the blindfolds we willingly wore as children, to see what might have been if we had made the wrong decision. What I found chilled me. I hope it does the same for you.

Thank you for reading.

P.S.

I’d love to know what you think about the story. Feel free to write a review on Amazon.com, or share your comments through my web site, Facebook page, or Twitter feed. Thanks.

Web:
www.danmaurer.com

Tw:
@danmaurer

Fb:
www.facebook.com/danmaurerauthor

Dan Maurer, a former publishing industry professional and digital marketing strategist, now writes and publishes fiction full-time.
Snow Day
is his first published work.

After graduating from East Carolina University in 1988, Dan spent seven years working in trade book publishing, including stints in the editorial departments of both Doubleday and Houghton Mifflin. While supporting Doubleday’s Editorial Director and Houghton Mifflin’s Editor-in-Chief, Dan helped shepherd many notable book projects through the production process; among them John Grisham’s
The Firm
, Richard Price’s
Clockers
, and Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger’s
Lost Moon
, which became the film
Apollo 13
.

Dan eventually transitioned to a career in digital marketing. He went on to devise and implement digital marketing strategies for brands as varied as Curious George, Peterson Field Guides, and The Polar Express. After leaving trade book publishing, he spent many years working in other industries, leading digital marketing initiatives for companies such as Citizen, Dun & Bradstreet, RCN, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and others.