The Snow Angel (2 page)

Mitch stretches a little, and as his feet arch toward the end of the bed, he can feel the ache of a long day in the shallow curve of his lower back. He doesn’t mind. The stiffness means that he’s worked hard. That he’s sweated, spent himself, provided. There is a certain pride in that, a sense of accomplishment
that fills him with purpose. I know who I am, Mitch thinks, savoring the hush of dawn, the sound of his own heartbeat in his ears. I am … I am … but try as he might, he can’t finish the thought. It slips away from him and evaporates entirely at the sound of her voice.

“Good morning, Mr. Clark.”

Mitch’s eyes snap open and take in the square-cut lines of her pink scrubs and the dark ponytail that curves over her slender shoulder. Beneath the title Nurse’s Aide, her name tag holds three sparse letters, Kim or Sue or Dee, but he doesn’t pay them any attention. His heart is pounding a furious rhythm, and he feels the peace of only a moment before sliding from his grasp.

“Let’s get you up, shall we?” She says it kindly, gently, even as she wraps her arms around him to ease him up from the confines of an impossibly narrow bed. She’s too small to be lifting him, but all at once he’s sitting, and the body he marveled at only a heartbeat before has betrayed him. He hurts. Everywhere.

The twinge in his back is sharp, and his knees throb. His hip, too, but the pain feels familiar. Mitch settles into it even as his hands bunch the sheets beneath him. They’re white, and stamped in black at the very edge: The Heritage Home. He’s read the words before somewhere, they should mean something to him, but all he can think about is the way his knees poke out from beneath a paper-thin
gown. His legs are foreign, skinny and hairless, smudged with dark spots and an impressive bruise that blooms against the harsh line of his shinbone. Old man legs, he realizes, and it strikes him that he must be ancient. Or, at least, much, much older than he feels.

“How old am I?” The words tumble out unbidden, and the voice that carries them croaks with age and disuse.

“You are seventy-two years young, Mr. Clark.” She smiles as she says it, her voice so matter-of-fact it takes a moment for Mitch to grasp that she’s talking about him.

“Seventy-two?” he repeats, wondering.

“Handsome as ever,” she assures him.

“I need to shave,” Mitch murmurs. It sounds strange, even to his ears. And especially so when he raises a hand to his chin and discovers that the folds of skin there are soft, creased with delicate pleats like a leaf of used crepe. These cheeks haven’t felt the scrape of a razor in a very long time. But the compulsion is so vivid it’s hard to shake. He can still feel his wife’s palm on his cheek, her hand rigid and icy though she cupped his face in a parody of tenderness.

“My wife likes me clean-shaven,” Mitch says, because it’s the truth. Or it was the truth. He’d like to remember, but all he catches is a whiff of her spicy perfume, the hard line of disapproval that arcs around her mouth, and then she’s gone.

The young woman in pink ignores him. “Would you like a bath this morning?”

It’s a confounding question. A bath? Does he like baths? Do men take baths? Does Mitch take baths? He must, because she doesn’t wait for an answer, just eases his hand to the cool railing of the bed where he teeters on the edge of the mattress. The nurse’s aide creeps into the bathroom on silent feet, leaving him alone with the tangle of his thoughts. Soon he hears the sound of running water, the squeak of metal on metal as she adjusts the temperature.

For a second Mitch can almost feel the sting of scalding water on his skin. He’s standing in a shower filled with steam and the bright, sharp scent of Irish Spring. The shower curtain is white, and beyond it he can see the rest of the house. He knows that he can’t possibly be there, his body fit and sturdy instead of palsied and weak like it is now. But this waking dream seems more real to him than the aide and the hard bed with the stamped sheets.

Mitch closes his eyes, and in his mind he floats beyond the shower curtain and the walls of the avocado-colored bathroom where he loosened tight muscles with water so hot it made him look sunburnt, boiled. Through a carpeted hall, past a trio of bedrooms, down the stairs. The house is a split-level, the kitchen–living room combo sprawling across a generous main floor. But in spite of the wide-open space, it feels cramped to him. Tight and tinged
with sorrow like the constricted wheeze of each laborious breath he now takes. It is not a safe place. Or a happy place. But he knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that once it was his home.

The house in his mind is thick with tension that emanates from the woman he called his wife. The memory of her hand still lingers on his face. It makes his skin tingle.

“Not too hot,” the aide calls from the bathroom. Her words echo off the tile in the tiny room and call Mitch back to the present. “I know that you don’t like your baths scalding.”

I don’t? Mitch sighs, extends a foot to the floor, and tests the waxed surface with a toe that looks so bent it must be arthritic. The cold nips his skin, leeches into his bones. A shiver wracks his body and makes him cough. But the tremor also shakes something loose: a heavy stone at the very bottom of his personal history, a place where the rubble of a ruined life has collected after the fallout of an explosion he can’t recall.

Suddenly he remembers.

Everything.

It’s a flash, a split second of technicolor brilliance that leaves him aching, a warm tear already sliding off his quivering jaw. But like smoke that lingers after the burst of fireworks in July, the shadows of his life cling in wisps of mist and memories. It’s beautiful and terrible all at once.

“We’re ready to go, Mr. Clark.” The nurse startles him with her sudden presence, and Mitch gasps as if he has forgotten how to breathe.

“I …” but there is nothing he wants to say.

The aide’s eyes are soft, her hands even more so when she reaches to take his elbow. “It’s a special day,” she tells him. “You don’t want to miss breakfast. We always have pancakes on Christmas Eve.”

Mitch shakes his head as if to rid it of the sights and scents that drift over him at the mention of Christmas. Apple cider, pine from the live tree he used to haul from the grocery store parking lot, the tang of sweat and snow that lingered around a pair of small boots waiting near the door. A child, he thinks, surprised. Something warm fills his chest. A girl, he realizes. A pair of pink boots.

“We’re going to sing carols tonight.” The aide smiles suddenly. “And guess what? It’s snowing.” She leaves him on the bed and goes to throw open the curtains that cover the only window in the small room.

When she slides back the heavy cloth, morning light spills into his bedroom and touches the tips of Mitch’s feet with a cool swath of creamy white. The sky is dove gray, the clouds so high and far away the snowflakes that fill the window frame seem to be falling from heaven itself. And the snow is a blessing, drifting in clusters as big as cotton balls and softening the harsh landscape of a flat, midwestern
field under a blanket so fresh and new Mitch wishes he could crawl beneath it.

“Isn’t it pretty?” The aide sighs a little as she considers the transformation of the world before her, but Mitch can’t bring himself to respond.

He isn’t at The Heritage Home anymore, trapped in a room where he is surely living out the end of his days. Instead, he’s squinting at the silhouette of a memory, watching it bloom with color and burst to life, a gorgeous, stolen moment that he clings to even as it begins to fade at the edges.

Mitch can see her so clearly it’s hard not to believe that the clock has rewound. Her hair is woven in twin braids, a crooked attempt at elegance that is fuzzed with errant curls, pieces that have defied her careful handiwork. Somehow, this only adds to her childish beauty—the understanding that in lieu of a mother’s tender ministrations, her own slender hands struggled to tame her locks. Her cheeks are flushed rose, her lips parted in the laughter of the young, her gaze flecked with the silver of a million stars reflected in her eyes. There are diamonds in her hair, and when she reaches for Mitch, he takes her cold hands in his own. He presses her fingers between his warm palms, wishes that he could hold her tight. For just a moment longer. Forever.

But she’s already gone.

October 1

“
H
e’s going to kill me.”

“Oh, he is not. Don’t be so melodramatic.” Lily gave me a withering look and snapped a tight crease in the towel she was folding.

I watched my daughter add the neat hand towel to the growing pile of clean laundry, and found myself marveling again at the graceful curve of her neck, the spark in her denim-blue eyes. Lily was a wonder: smart and beautiful and spunky. But she was also wrong. If I followed through with our secret plan, Cyrus might very well kill me.

“He’s going to be furious,” I said.

Lily shrugged. “So? Stand up to him, Mom. What’s the worst that could happen?”

I could think of a dozen different scenarios, and none of them were pleasant. But what did my eleven-year-old daughter know about the complexity of a sad and loveless marriage? How could I expect her to understand the give and take of my relationship with her father? I gave. Cyrus took. It was a simple equation. One that I knew by heart.

“It’s complicated, sweetie.” I tucked the final washcloth into a square and began loading the piles of linens into the laundry basket for distribution throughout the four bathrooms in our palatial house. We had more bathrooms than family members, but I considered the sprawl of our ungainly residence a blessing: It gave me many places to hide. Guest rooms and dark hallways. Sometimes closets. But Lily didn’t know about any of that.

Cyrus and I only fought when our daughter was asleep, and though our confrontations usually consisted of nothing more than vicious words and savage insults, I couldn’t stand the thought of her hearing the ugly things her father said to me. I had vowed long ago that Lily would never suffer the truth of my messed-up marriage, and I had kept my promise. I drew Cyrus away, made sure that there was never a reason for his anger to light upon our daughter. It worked. I was an exemplary lightning rod.

“Well,” Lily put her hands on her narrow hips and arched her eyebrows at me, “I think you have to do it. Mr. Wever needs you. How can you say no?”

“I can’t say no,” I sighed. “I’ll do it. But you have to promise me that you won’t let it slip to Dad. It’s our secret, right?”

Lily crossed her heart with a slender finger and fixed me with an impish grin. She was mature for her age, but the glint in her eye reminded me that my daughter was still a little girl—and one who thrilled at the mere thought of a secret. It struck me that her enthusiasm for my short-term assistance in Max Wever’s tailor shop had more to do with the promise of intrigue than a selfless desire to help an elderly man in need. My heart broke a little at her unblemished view of life: Lily still believed in innocent secrets, the heady rush of a good mystery, and happily ever after. I wasn’t about to disabuse her of those sweet notions. Little girls should be allowed to dream.

“You’re going to miss the bus,” I said, hoisting the laundry basket into my arms. I leaned forward and kissed the cheek that Lily proffered. “Remember: I want you to come straight to Eden after school.”

Lily giggled. “That sounds so silly.” She affected what I assumed to be a bad impersonation of my voice: “Come to Paradise after school, Lily.” She dropped the phony inflection. “I can’t believe Mr. Wever named his tailor shop Eden Custom Tailoring.”

“It was my idea,” I said. “A long time ago.” A lifetime ago.

“Subtle,” Lily joked.

“How do you even know what subtle means?” I shook my head at her. “Be serious. I want you to come straight to the shop. But don’t take the bus there, okay? Get off at your regular stop and then walk.”

“Should I duck behind trees?” Lily struck a Charlie’s Angel pose. “Double back to make sure no one is following me?”

“Now you’re being melodramatic.” I pursed my lips and tried not to regret my decision too much. “Just try to keep this under wraps, please? You have to believe me, Lil. Your dad would not be happy if he knew that I was going to help Max. He likes me home, you know that.”

“I know.” Lily grabbed her backpack off the table and slung it over her shoulders. “I’m a good secret keeper.”

You’re not the only one, I thought. And before I could further expound on the covert nature of my temporary appointment at Eden Custom Tailoring, Lily flounced out of the room. I heard the tap of her light footsteps in the entryway, and then the slam of the front door. It seemed symbolic to me, a final drumbeat that echoed through our cavernous house with finality. That signified an end.

But also a beginning. Because even though I was afraid to admit it, I felt like a door had been cracked in my soul.
It was a tiny opening, to be sure, but there was the hint of something new in the air, something unexpected.

I stifled a shiver, and shot up a prayer that Cyrus would never find out.