In the Quiet of the Snow

He woke up to see the snow swirling from the sky, frozen fingers that stroked the tress and kept them asleep; pummeled the drive way and the path that ran through the trees to the lake; shaped the truck into a giant half made snowman.

It reminded him of his childhood. When he was a kid, all throughout the year he would think about the first snow of the year and the adventures that it would bring. He dreamt about it every night, making balls and men and angels and forts from the frozen crystals. It energized him in Spring, cooled him in Summer and brought him to the unbearable peak of excitement in Autumn. Even when he had no right to have snow as the main attraction of his thoughts and dreams and he should have graduated to other things—girls, cars, money, college, girls, sports, war, term papers, girls—snow stayed central, the Mount Everest of his mind.

“Damn it,” he whispered. 

He pulled himself out of bed in the half light of Nature’s night or Nature’s dream (he could never be sure), dressed in jeans and the old worn blue, cotton button down Jen had given to him three years ago and went down. The stove was turned on, the bacon set sizzling, the coffee started to brew. He opened the back door to pick up the paper. It wasn’t there in the little nest  made specifically for it. His eyes traveled down the slope of the drive peering through the blanket of white. 

Across the narrow strip of road in the talons of the roots and week old litter, the tip of the paper’s pink wrapping stuck up, begging to be rescued from the barrage of white that fell mercilessly from the iron skies.

He slammed the door and the house shivered. 

“Screw it,” he shouted to the emptiness. “If they can’t get one damn thing right because they’re too damn lazy to actually do their jobs and get out of their warm cars, to hell with them!” He cracked the eggs into the pan scrambling them to death, dumped them onto the plate alongside the bacon and toast and the cup of black coffee. He wrenched the chair from underneath the table and sat down in it. “Don’t need it anyway,” he said picking up the knife and fork, “especially when…” With the fork coming to his mouth, he reached down to turn the page and found only empty air. 

It wasn’t right. The paper needed to be here, on his right to fill the space where they all used to be. It was like the moon; it had to be in the sky even if you never looked at it. But that would mean going out into the snow before he was ready…

He got up, pulled on the boots that stood at attention at the door and slipped on the coat that was a shadow glued to the wall more out of habit than anything else. He opened the door to the winter wonderland, sucked in his breath, closed his eyes and stepped out. 

Maybe this time would be different…maybe this time it would be normal and he could forget about his plan…

He opened his eyes and looked back. He was already ten feet away from the door which was going further away even as he looked at it. There was no crunch of snow beneath him. The air was a coffin and the whole world was buried inside of it. There was no sinking into the cold that stabbed the feet with spears of ice. He looked down to see his feet standing firm upon the snow which might as well have been whitewashed concrete. 

He ran to where the last slip of pink stood out of the whiteness and raced back with the prize to the house, slamming the door behind him. Snow fell from the cracks and creases of his coat and from the layer which had accumulated on top of his boots and disappeared into the air. He slowly took off hat and boots; freed the newspaper from its pink flesh, set it at its predestined place at the table and sat down again. 

The food and coffee were still there and still hot but his appetite was an ice block in the Artic Sea. It was still true. He left the table and went to the den, awash in grey light and sat in the rocking chair. He had rescued it from an antique shop like he had rescued all the other ones; this time in Braintree en route to the cabin. It wasn’t his favorite; too geometric and the wood too light. The one that had sat like a churchmouse in the antique mall at Roanoke had been his favorite; it more than any other, before or since, had reminded him of the great cherry rocker his grandfather had carved by hand when he was only twenty years old to impress the girl from the city who had come to the country to study birds for her degree. Every child and grandchild had sat in it; first in the warm lap of one or the other grandparent and then, later, as the years sharpened their features and wore away at their threads, alone, the gleam of the blood wood bathing them in the intricities of the carvings. He remembered his grandfather telling him, “After a dog, Ben, a rocker is a man’s best friend. It will calm you when you’re tense and help you solve all your problems. Just let it work its magic on you and your mind will find the answer.”

“But I don’t have the answer, Grandpa,” he said. “I’ve sat in three different rockers in three different cities and I still don’t have an answer. All I have is…Danno’s theory.”

It hardly even deserved to be called a theory. Danno had been half drunk at the time over half glasses of marguerites and rum. “Ya’ know, Larry,” he had said over the dancing girls and hoops of the crowd, “snow, sand, dust…all these things are like reflections. What’s ‘is name…Emerson said if you do a crime, the world is a like a mirror…or something like that…and if you’ve done what we’ve been doing for the last six weeks or longer…the world would be a damn bright mirror.” He had laughed and drowned the last puddle of a marguerite, lime green and still frost rimed, even in the night heat of Tampa. 

“But my footprints are disappearing,” he had said. “You saw that on the beach this evening. That’s not a reflection.” 

“Sure ain’t.” Another drink and a third of another green marguerite was gone. “Ya know about vampires right? Bela Lugosi, Chris Lee and all that shit? They ain’t got reflections, do they? Ya know why? Because they got no souls. That’s why. They look like they’ve always looked but they ain’t who they were before they turned vampire. They ain’t themselves anymore. They’ve had their reflections scrubbed away.” He smiled through the wildbush of his beard. “Maybe that’s what you’ve done, Larry; maybe you’ve scrubbed yourself out.”

He sat in the rocker. Maybe you scrubbed yourself away.He leaned his head back against the geometric too yellow wood and of the rocker his mind flashing away from Danno’s drunk leer to the cherry wooded rocker. Where had it gone? Grandpa was dead…Crystal had sent him a message but when he’d received it, it had already been five weeks old so there had been no reason to go back. Probably one of his aunts or uncles. Maybe Dad? He didn’t know. How long had it even been since he’d talked to anyone back on the farm? Five years…eight years…?

Scrubbed yourself out. 

He got up, lit a fire in the wood fireplace and then went back to the kitchen, automatically washing the dishes and returning them to their appropriate kingdoms before going back to the spartan bedroom. From the top drawer of the night stand he pulled out the bundle of driver licenses, passports, registration papers, birth certificates, the accumulation of the last fifteen years of work. He went back to the den, the fire a symphony engaged in the story of Winter and Spring. 

When had he first noticed? The Spring had been spent in Sydney so no snow there…but there were beaches…and there had been that girl…what was her name…?

He started feeding the fire from the bundle in his hands. The fire grabbed them greedily, stuffed them one by one into its mouth, swallowed them whole and hissed for more, a gluttonous monkey that threw its anger at him for being too slow. 

Mandi?...Andi?...Natalie! That was it! A good figure on a set of Grecian columns with cropped hair to her shoulders the sunset had run through its hands. They had been walking on the beach, the sun sinking on their left and the moon a Cheshire smile on their right, flirting like people always did on the third date, the kind of flirting that laid a trail to the bedroom—a good Easter present if it was a few days late--and she had turned around to face where they had come to take a picture of their footprints. 

“Ethan,” she had said, the martini still twinging her voice with laughter, “look at that. Have you been trying to lose weight or something?”

“What do you mean, babe?”

“Well look; my footprints are all there—delicate and petit but they’re there, just like me—”she squeezed his hand and moved the back of it on her leg—“but yours are lighter. Like your part ghost or something.”

It was true. His prints only sank half as deep as Nat’s. Phantom footprints. Where’s McGurk and his gang when you needed him to solve a mystery? He had laughed it off, Nat had laughed and the rest of the night had proceeded according to plan.

But when he had gone back to the beach to buy breakfast when the sun was still a promise over the sea and Nat was still asleep, nestled in the sheets, he had turned around, expecting now that with the alcohol burned from his system and his mind sharpened from her body, that the phantom footprints would have disappeared too. He had stared at the sand in the growing light for three minutes until the rim of the sun had shown him footprints that only sank to half of what they should have been. He had repeated the process back to the apartment. The hollow prints stared back at him. 

The fire screeched for more food. Three more papers went into its snapping beak. Jerry Hope, Adam Dyle, Marty McCallister screamed and vanished with their names in its maw. 

Five weeks later he had been in LA, making his way to a group of blondes in red, white, blue and black bikinis playing volleyball; the work was done the items fenced and now it was time for fun. The ball sailed over his head and he followed its trail, his eyes falling to the sand with the ball. His prints were faint the memories of a Christmas from five years ago. 

One of the blondes had run past him and snatched the ball, pivoting to flash him a smile. “Wanna play, mister?” 

“Can’t,” he heard his mouth saying, lips curling into the familiar easy, elven smile, “just came to stretch my legs before having to get back to the office. Next time.”

He had jogged back to the hotel and spent all night on Google and Reddit. 

Then came Tampa and Danno’s theory on his last night before flying to the Riviera…

My footprints are disappearing…

They had been faint memories from childhood in Tampa, so faint and quiet the softest whisper from the sea breeze threatened to wipe them away. At the end of his first week in the Riviera, he had left his last footprint, a bare skeleton, on a French beach. He remembered walking with his contact, a wizened golem named Nikos, trying to pay attention between looks over his shoulder, Nikos’ tracks deep and firm against the water and the sun alongside his paler and paler tracks. One last outline—from his left foot he remembered—and then there was nothing. When Nikos left (after giving him one more look) he had fallen on his knees and pushed his hands into the sand. The sand swallowed his hands so he looked like an amputee, When he pulled them out, the sand sat undisturbed. There wasn’t even a mark from his knees. 

He threw the last few pages into the bottomless pit of the fire. He watched the flames twist and whirl; his eyes twin moths which flapped lethargically in the heat and passion of the fire. 

A log snapped and the spell broke. He stood up and looked around the room stuffed with antiques and hand-me down furniture. It was the third time he had tried recreating the old place and they said the third time was the charm…it hadn’t worked the other two times but he had been holding onto all his names and histories. Maybe now that they were gone…

 He went back to the kitchen’s back door, equipped himself and opened the door again to where Winter sat waiting, the snow now flying down lazily from the sky. Maybe now that they all were gone and he was just Ben again…no more lies, no more scrubbing out of himself his steps would come back because he was back…

He closed his eyes gulped in the air that should have hurt and ran forcing into his head all the memories he could remember of Ben in the winter—Ben sliding down the knoll on the farm, Ben coming in to warm his hands, the snow laughing in droplets as they fell to the ground, Ben being pulled on his sled by his dad on the 450, Ben building a snowman with all four of his siblings, Ben making snow angels with his cousin at Christmastime, Ben building the ice castle with his grandmother after mom died in the carwreck...

No…

His steps lagged. Mom was still alive, wasn’t she? So when had he built the castle…No, Ben had never built it—that was Kyle; Ben only had two sisters, it was Jason who had four; the knoll was at the park—Riley was the one who had done that…

He stopped and turned around. He had run down the drive, across the road and into the front lines of the trees, the path down to the lake to his left. The snow lay immaculate. They were still inside of him, a constant parade of names, histories and quirks on a canvas he had rubbed out years ago. He sank down onto snow that should have been cold and pushed his hands deep, deep, down further down past his wrist until he could feel the contours of dead leaves and grass frozen in its brown hibernation.

He pulled it out. 

The virgin snow remained. 

Scrubbed yourself out. It had been a long shot anyway, if he was honest. 

He stared at the place where his hand print should have been, where the snow should have recorded his presence, his essence, his existence. 

Somewhere on the wind, the siren call of the lake came out from the woods.