Weather Patterns

      She had never biked in a snowstorm. Rain, yes. Blinding sun, yes. Whooshing gusts of wind that nearly blew her into the street – also, yes, on one frightening occasion. But it didn’t snow very often this far south. Besides, whenever they did predict a snowstorm, the office was closed practically before the weather reporter had finished her sentence. In a city with a volunteer-only Snow Team, it only took an inch or two to shut things down.

         Today they’d been promised rain. But when seven o’clock struck, the sky opened not to raindrops but to thick white flakes, touching down lightly at first and then, suddenly, with the ferocity of a thunderstorm. And there was Luisa, helmet straps loosely fastened, already on her way to work.

         Running a daycare center in an office building required an early arrival, as there were snacks to cut into small chewable bites and cots to set up for morning nap and fingerpaintings to hang on the walls. Luisa, as a rule, was never late. She usually locked her apartment door well before the sun was up, and she would bike past houses dark or lit only in one room, their residents curled on couches holding empty cereal bowls. The trash from the night before – empty water bottles, cigarette butts, abandoned takeout spaghetti splashed across the wet pavement like seaweed – rolled in the gutter, starkly visible against the empty sidewalks. The occasional romantic gentleman would walk by carrying two lattes and a paper-bagged pastry to surprise his beloved. And by the time she was halfway to work, the sun would have begun to rise. Dark, almost threatening shades of orange flickered through the tree branches, like each leaf was edged with fire, a natural disaster and a daily miracle, all at once.

Watching all this unspool beneath her bicycle tires, Luisa did not feel the kind of hazy dreaminess that she had once felt. In her twenties and even thirties she had gazed around with a kind of wonder, smiling at the children wearing sparkly backpacks, dodging the long-leashed dogs with a chuckle. Now, fifteen years after beginning this commute, she mostly just marveled at the consistency: the sun rising and rising and rising every single morning, the people rising with it, the creaking of the gears in all those lives as they resumed turning, and Luisa herself – every day the same – jacketed, backpacked, childless, moving by. 

         But today, suddenly, the snow. 

         The sky was a heavy, dark white, the clouds so low to the ground that she wondered if her helmet was shrouded in fog. When she looked for the families on the street corners, listened for the rumble of the #52 bus, she was met with empty air. Had she missed the warnings, then? The first flakes felt like nothing, like something easier than raindrops, melting on first contact with the ground. 

         When Luisa was little, there had been so much snow. Snow on Halloween, sometimes. Snow on Christmas, always. Snow that turned the cars into useless white humps lining the sidewalks, snow that demanded high boots and mittens if you had them, snow that made people grumble and hiss with irritation. Now, at the daycare center, most of the children she cared for had never seen a snowflake in real life. She hoped they were awake now, noses pressed to windows, watching as the air thickened into a wall of white.

         And thicken it did. Within two blocks the familiar shapes of the street were lost behind the whirling snow – or was it sleet or hail? – which pricked her face and neck like needles, began to cover the asphalt like a crumb-coat layer of frosting, and brought the wind to life. Luisa struggled to keep her bike pointing forward against the sudden gusts of wind that roared between the tall buildings and caught her around the waist, an overeager dance partner tugging her into the road. She fought to keep her eyes open as the snow collected along her lash line, melting when she blinked and running down her cheeks like fat, salty tears.  

         But it was no use. Just as she had started wondering whether she should try to pull over and hide out somewhere, it happened: the squeal of her brakes sounding bizarrely far away, the front wheel fishtailing (had she known bikes could fishtail? was that the right word for what was happening?) and tipping, the brief clearing of her mind that allowed her to think, without any particular inflection or feeling, This is really going to happen. 

         Later, Luisa would not remember the moment of the crash. She would only remember lying on the sidewalk, hearing the quiet tick-tick-tick of one wheel still turning, and gazing at the riotous whirl of white in the dark air above her, like waking up inside a snow globe. 

         Wasn’t it Narnia, she thought, where the children had stepped into a closet and found that it had no back, that the coat hangers were edged with ice, that there was a whole different world waiting for them? Had she done the same? Had she been moving so long through the uninterrupted mundanity, the quiet everyday tides of pain and disappointment, that she had frozen over? And now – had she landed somewhere new? Certainly this place was unrecognizable; though she must have biked past this street corner thousands of time, the blotchy paint of the fire hydrant beside her was both unfamiliar and exquisite. She reached out with one gloved fingertip to brush the snow off the cold metal, the way she often brushed the hair off the foreheads of the children, even though none of them were hers.  

Only then did the rest of the sounds begin to trickle into her awareness. The blaring of the car alarm, the harsh edges of her own breathing. Someone calling out, “Christ – Ma’am! Ma’am, are you all right?” Someone else: “Oh my god. Is she okay? Should I call 911?”

Luisa felt the bicycle lifted away and watched as the faces of several strangers drifted into her vision. She felt a sharp ache begin burning through her hips and into her back. Narnia, it seemed, was no freer from pain than the real world. Maybe that had been the point of the story. 

“I’m all right,” she told them, though she wasn’t quite sure if that was the truth. “Really, don’t call an ambulance. I’m fine.”

“Your bike isn’t, I’m afraid,” said a strange man. Not a faun. Probably. “I don’t think you’ll be able to ride this for a while.” He held up the twisted front wheel, the bent handlebars, and looked grim.

         “That’s all right,” Luisa said. A woman was inspecting Luisa’s head, which, still strapped inside her helmet, had not even begun to hurt. “With the snow being this bad, I’m sure things will close, anyway. I’ll just get myself home.” 

         But after they had helped her painfully rise to her feet, after she had waved away their offers of taxis and doctors, after they had settled her on a bench to wait for the #52 bus with her tangle of a bike frame – it was then that she noticed the snow had developed a mysteriously orange cast, like white paint did when the children failed to clean their brushes properly. When she looked to the east, she saw the reason. The sunrise, despite the circumstances, was beginning. The snowflakes were developing the same firey edges that, in warmer weather, lined each of the leaves. 

As quickly as it had begun, the storm lifted. The spaces between flakes grew wider and wider, filled in by the familiar lines and shapes of Luisa’s neighborhood. Gradually the strangeness, the wonder, began to fade. The light grew stronger, the storm weaker. The flame-colored sky burned cracks though the clouds. Luisa’s back hurt, her hips hurt, and she could hear the rumbling engine of the 52 bus as it rounded the corner. She was home.