It was the kind of snow that came so fast, it caught you unaware. You hadn't yet taken the shovels down from the attic where you'd put them last May; you didn't get a chance to cover the trembling rhododendrons with their ridiculous wooden tepees. It was the kind of snow, Daniel realized, where you didn't have time to put away the errant rake and the clippers you'd used to trim back the blackberry bushes, so you'd find yourself walking in circles, hoping you might trip over them before the blades rusted for good. But you never did. Instead, you were bound to lose the things you'd
been careless with, and your punishment was not seeing them again until the spring.
* * *
Trixie couldn't remember the last time she went out to play in the snow. When she was a kid, her father used to build a luge in the backyard that she'd slide down on a tube, but at some point it was no longer cool to look like a total spaz when she tipped over, and she'd traded her rubber-tread Sorels for fashionable stacked-heel boots.
She couldn't find her snow boots - they were buried under too much stuff in the closet. Instead, she borrowed her mother's, still drying in the mudroom, now that her mom had canceled her afternoon lecture in the wake of the storm. Trixie wrapped a scarf around her neck and jammed a hat onto her head that said DRAMA QUEEN across the front in red script. She pulled on a pair of her father's ski mittens and headed outside.
It was what her mother used to call snowman snow - the kind damp enough to stick together. Trixie packed it into a ball. She started to roll it across the lawn like a bandage, leaving behind a long brown tongue of matted grass.
After a while, she surveyed the damage. The yard looked like a crazy quilt, white stripes bordering triangles and squares made of lawn. Taking another handful of snow, Trixie began to roll a second snowball, and a third. A few minutes later, she was standing in the middle of them, wondering how they'd gotten so big so fast. There was no way she would be able to lift one onto the other. How had she managed to build a snowman when she was little?
Maybe she hadn't. Maybe someone else had always done it for her. Suddenly the door opened and her mother was standing there, screaming her name and trying to see through the flakes still coming down. She looked frantic, and it took Trixie a moment to understand: Her mother didn't know she'd come outside; her mother was still worried she'd kill herself.
“Over here,” Trixie said.
Not that death-by-blizzard was a bad idea. When Trixie was tiny, she used to dig a hideout in the mountain of snow left behind by the plow. She called it her igloo, even though her father had told her that Eskimos in America did not and never had lived in those. But then
she read a newspaper article about a kid in Charlotte, Vermont, who had done the same exact thing and the roof had collapsed on his head and smothered him before his parents even knew he was missing, and she never did it again.
Her mother walked outside and immediately sank ankle-deep in snow. She was wearing Trixie's boots, which she must have dug out of the closet wreckage after Trixie had commandeered her own Sorels. “You want help?” her mother asked. Trixie didn't. If she'd wanted help, she would have invited someone outside with her in the first place. But she couldn't for the life of her imagine how she was going to get that stupid belly on top of the snowman's base. “All right,” she conceded. Her mother got on one side of the ball and pushed, while Trixie tried to pull it from the front. Even together, they couldn't budge the weight. “Welcome to the Fourth Circle,” her mother said, laughing.
Trixie fell onto her butt on the snow. Leave it to her mother to
turn this into a classics lesson.
“You've got your tightwads on one side and your greedy folks on the other,” her mother said. “They shove boulders at each other for all eternity.”
“I was kind of hoping to finish this up before then.” Her mother turned. “Why, Trixie Stone. Was that a joke?” Since coming home from the hospital, there had been precious few of those in the household. When a television sitcom came on, the channel was immediately changed. When you felt a smile coming on, you squelched it. Feeling happy didn't seem particularly appropriate, not with everything that had gone on lately. It was as if,
Trixie thought, they were all waiting for someone to wave a magic wand and say, It's okay, now. Carry on.
What if she was the one who was supposed to wave that wand?
Her mother began to sculpt a snow ramp. Trixie fell into place beside her, pushing the middle snowball higher and higher until it tipped onto the bigger base. She packed snow between the seams. Then she lifted the head and perched it at the very top. Her mother clapped... just as snowman listed and fell. His head rolled into one of the basement window gutters; his midsection cracked like an egg. Only the massive base sphere remained intact. Frustrated, Trixie slapped a snowball against the side of it. Her mother watched and then packed her own snowball. Within seconds they were both firing shots at the boulder until it cleaved down the center, until it succumbed to the assault and lay between them in fat iceberg chunks.
By then, Trixie was lying on her back, panting. She had not felt .. . . well, this normal . . . in some time. It occurred to her that had things ended differently a week ago, she might not be doing any of this. She'd been so focused on what she had wanted to get away from in this world she forgot to consider what she might miss.
When you die, you don't get to catch snowflakes on your tongue. You don't get to breathe winter in, deep in your lungs. You can't lie in bed and watch for the lights of the passing town plow. You can't suck on an icicle until your forehead hurts.
Trixie stared up at the dizzy flakes. “I'm kind of glad.”
“About what?”
“That it didn't.. . you know ... work out.” She felt her mother's hand reach over to grab her own. Their mittens were both soaked.
They'd go inside, stick their clothes inside the dryer. Ten minutes later, they'd be good as new.
* * *
Because of the storm, hockey practice had been canceled. Jason came home after school, as per the conditions of his bail, and holed himself up in his bedroom listening to the White Stripes on his iPod. He closed his eyes and executed mental passes to Moss, wrist shots and slapshots and pucks that hit the top shelf. One day, people would be talking about him, and not just because of this rape case. They'd say things like, Oh, Jason Underhill, we always knew he'd make it. They'd put up a replica jersey of his over the mirror behind the town bar, with his name facing out, and the Bruins games would take precedence over any other programming on the one TV mounted in the corner. Jason had a lot of work cut out ahead of him, but he could do it. A year or two postgrad, then some college hockey, and maybe he'd even be like Hugh Jessiman at Dartmouth and get signed in the first round of the NHL draft. Coach had told Jason that he'd never seen a forward with as much natural talent as Jason. He'd said that if you wanted something bad enough, all you had to learn was how to go out and take it.