The Snow Angel (13 page)

“Sarah!” I was shocked to see her so distraught. She was normally so effervescent it was almost maddening. “Is something wrong?”

She stepped outside into the mild fall day and let the screen door slam behind her. “I didn’t sleep at all last night. I just feel so terrible about what happened at the coffee shop! Can you ever forgive me? Sometimes I let my mouth get ahead of me, but I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s okay,” I said, putting my hand on her arm to stop
the barrage of words. “I came over here to apologize to you. I shouldn’t have reacted the way that I did.”

“Oh, you had every right to react that way. I absolutely blitzed you with my half-baked assumptions … and in a public place! What was I thinking? I am without a doubt the world’s worst pastor’s wife.”

I grinned in spite of myself. “Is there a handbook? Do they hand out awards for pastors’ wives?”

“I’m sure they do. Somewhere there’s a committee that’s divided into seventeen subcommittees that undoubtedly monitor our every move. The good pastors’ wives—the ones who play the piano and have perfected the art of baking bread for communion—get a gold star for every good deed. And when they add up all those gold stars …” Sarah twisted her lips and gave a wry shrug as if to say, “You know what happens then.”

“You’ve given this a lot of thought,” I said, laughing.

“You have no idea. When I married David I told him that I would make a terrible pastor’s wife. He didn’t listen to me.”

“He thinks you’re perfect,” I assured her, although that was probably an understatement. Anyone who had ever seen the two of them together knew that David Kempers had eyes only for his remarkable wife. And who could blame him? Even when she came rushing down the center aisle at church, five minutes late for the Sunday morning
service and clutching her ten-year-old twins by the hand, she wore a smile that lit up the room. She was magnetic, a force to be reckoned with. And no one knew that better than her husband.

I was surprised by a twinge of jealousy. Was there ever a time that Cyrus adored me the way David would forever adore Sarah? I doubted it. In fact, I doubted that anyone had ever loved me with that sort of abandon.

“Well,” I said, suppressing a sigh, “I guess we both screwed up. Anyway, I really am sorry. You’re one of …” I was about to say my only friends, but that sounded so pathetic I couldn’t make myself finish. Besides, I had the rest of the women in our Bible study. I had Max. And Lily.

But Sarah finished the sentence for me. Only she tweaked it in the most wonderful way. “You’re one of my best friends,” she said, giving me a quick, fierce hug. “I’m sorry I hurt you.”

“Best friends?” I repeated before I could censor myself.

“Of course.” Sarah backed away and met my eye almost gravely. “You’re not like everyone else, Rachel. Don’t get me wrong, the ladies we hang out with are nice and all, but don’t you sometimes feel like they’re … fake?” A horrified look seized her pretty features. “Did I just say that out loud? I told you I’m a terrible pastor’s wife.”

“I won’t tell a soul,” I reassured her. “But if you want to talk about fake, you’re in the presence of the queen. My
entire life is one big fraud. How can you imply that I’m anything other than the absolute worst kind of liar?”

“That’s different.” Sarah shook her head, her mouth puckered in disapproval. “You don’t try to pretend that everything is perfect, you just keep to yourself. The reason I finally brought up Cyrus is that I thought that’s what you were waiting for: I thought you wanted someone to notice.”

I had to consider that for a moment. Was I really hoping for someone to reach out to me? To look closer and realize that my shiny life had nearly rusted through? “I guess you’re right,” I finally said. “I don’t know why, but I feel like I can’t go on pretending anymore. That’s why I came clean with Lily, and why I’m working for Max …”

Sarah’s eyes went wide at the exact moment that I realized my mistake. No one knew that I was working for Max. No one was supposed to know that I was working at all.

“You can’t tell anyone,” I said desperately. “Cyrus doesn’t know, and if he found out—”

“I promise,” Sarah cut in. “Not even David. But who’s Max?”

The question pulled me up short. “Who’s Max?” I repeated, wondering how in the world I could begin to describe the man who had saved me once and was in the process of doing it again. I couldn’t. It was too hard. “I guess you’re just going to have to meet him,” I said.

Sarah linked her arm with mine. “How’s now for you?”

I looked at the knot of our elbows, the soft pink floral of her sleeve over the clean navy of my sweater. They complemented each other beautifully. I smiled. “Now is perfect.”

Max and Sarah hit it off immediately. Within minutes of walking through the back door, Sarah had Max laughing at one of her jokes. And by the time Lily dropped in after school, Sarah was fully committed to our project and had learned to wield a fabric steamer with admirable flourish.

“I can’t sew to save my life, but I sure know how to blow steam!” she said, laughing at her own terrible pun.

As for Lily, she had always liked Sarah, and she greeted my friend with a warm hug and a barrage of questions about the upcoming Christmas play. Our church was doing a live Nativity with a horse-drawn sleigh and hot cider, and Lily was angling for the part of the angel. Rumor had it David had worked out a way to float an angel from the haymow of the barn where the Nativity would be staged to the double-wide door of the stable. Lily wanted to fly.

“I don’t know,” Sarah teased. “Are you angel material?”

“Definitely not.” I pulled the end of Lily’s ponytail and gave her a wink.

“Oh, I don’t know about that.” Max gave me a knowing look over Lily’s head. “Her mother is pretty good at making angels.”

“Who? Me?” I touched my fingers to my chest. “To the best of my recollection, I’ve never made an angel in my life. Though I will concede that my daughter is angelic.”

“You’re right about Lily,” Max said. “But you’re wrong about making angels. You used to do it all the time. In fact, Elena once snapped a photo of one of your angels. I think I have it around here somewhere …” Max turned from the sewing table and began to search among the papers of the cluttered bulletin board that hung above the desk. There were pages from magazines, pizza coupons, and orders, but in between the bright rectangles of paper there hung a few random photographs. I could make out a black and white copy of the Wevers’ wedding portrait, and another taken on some mountain vacation. Elena looked young and pretty standing in a meadow with her arms stretched toward the horizon.

Max finally found what he was searching for half-hidden behind a restaurant napkin that had been scribbled with a man’s measurements. He took out the thumbtack and studied the photograph for a short time before he
smiled to himself and held it out to me. “See? You used to make angels.”

At first, all I could see was white. It seemed Elena had taken a picture of light itself. But in a second my eyes adjusted, and I realized I was looking at bright whorls of snow. The sun was shining furiously, casting each snowflake into vivid relief so that I could almost see every unique design. And someone had mounded up all that snow with the sweep of arms and legs. It was carefully shaped into the perfect outline of a feather-winged angel.

“A snow angel,” I said, and was surprised to realize that I had spoken aloud.

“You made lovely snow angels,” Max confirmed. All over your front yard, and sometimes over ours, too. Elena took that picture one morning after a particularly big storm. You must have been out there in the middle of the night, because when the sun broke through the clouds the next day there was a company of heavenly hosts all over the neighborhood.”

“What a gorgeous thought!” Sarah came to look over my shoulder. “Oh, I just love it. Lily, I think you have to be the angel. It runs in your family.”

Lily pulled on my forearm and brought the picture down so that she could see it, too. “You made snow angels?” she asked, wonder in her voice.

“Don’t sound so shocked,” I said.

“Well, it’s just that after hearing some of your stories, I didn’t think you …” Lily fished around for just the right wording, then gave up with an apologetic shrug. “I didn’t think you had much fun as a kid. I didn’t think you did stuff like that.”

“Like play in the snow?”

She wrinkled her nose. “I guess not.”

I stalled for a minute, going through a mental list of the childhood memories I had shared with my daughter. Max had told her about the first time we met—when I had hid in the cherry tree for hours to escape my mom. And I had recalled the blue dress incident, my first batch of failed cookies, and a few other doomed affairs that chronicled my mother’s verbal and emotional abuse and my father’s busy schedule that left little time for me. But had I told her about anything positive? Anything that would cause her to believe that my younger years held even a glimmer of grace?

The truth was, there wasn’t much to tell. I had friends, but I could hardly remember their names. And I’m sure that there were times that transcended the stark reality of my days, but they were overshadowed by my own broken heart. What could I say to Lily?

“I thought that night was a dream,” I admitted quietly. “I remember making snow angels, but I thought that I had dreamed it.”

“It wasn’t a dream,” Max said. “I saw you out there. The night you littered the neighborhood with angels.”

“You did?”

Max nodded, and though his mouth held the shape of a little smile, his eyes were sad. “There was a huge snowstorm, and when I heard voices outside I was worried that someone’s car had gotten stuck. But it was just you. You and your dad. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen you look so happy.”

Something vicious ripped through me at the mention of my dad. A desperate longing, a desire to go back to a time when my hand disappeared completely in his. Those days were too short, too fleeting, and the pain that had built up between us seemed insurmountable. And yet, for just a moment all of that fell away. Nothing mattered but the fact that on the very night that I needed him most, he was there.

My mother was unusually harsh that night. I don’t remember what I did or what she said, but I do know that she was angry enough to hit me. I was far too old for spankings, though I had endured the shame of that particular punishment much longer than I should have. But at a willowy eleven years old I already stood as high as my mom’s
shoulder, and no matter how furious she was, spanking was obviously out of the question. So she slapped me.

It was a rather pathetic attempt at discipline, and her open-handed smack across my cheek was weakened by her intoxicated state. But it stung all the same, and tears sprang to my eyes even before she turned away.

“Go to your room,” she barked. But that was the last thing she had to tell me. I couldn’t wait to escape.

The room was cold, and frost formed on the darkened window in patterns that dipped and curled. I shut the door behind me and paused with my hand on the lock. It would feel so good to make the quarter turn that would close me in an impenetrable fortress, but I didn’t dare. Bev hated it when I bolted my door, and I knew that if she came to continue our argument and found herself locked out it would only stoke her fury.

I settled for climbing into my bed fully clothed and pulling the blankets up to the tops of my ears. Only my eyes poked out, and as I lay in the long shadows of a winter night, I watched the world outside my window for some sign that everything would be okay. All I could see was frost.

She had yelled at me before. She had hit me before. But something about the abuse that night burrowed deep inside me and leaked a slow, sad poison. Usually I could close myself off, exist in some quiet, inner place where I
had the strength to breathe in and breathe out—to ignore what she had done. Not that night.

I tried to cry quietly, but each sob was torn from some secret place that held tight to such troublesome emotions. Soon I was burying my face in the pillow, trying to muffle the sound of my heart breaking for what had to be the hundredth time. I don’t know how long I huddled there in the dark, but by the time my tears began to wane it was hours past dark.