Snow Angels Read Free

their roses and the people who went to her funeral. We had history. Stoned, I tried to picture her life there, and her death, though back then that was impossible for me to see clearly. I tried, I suppose, to say goodbye. The house hasn’t changed much since then. Eventually someone less reverent broke in and set a fire, and the police boarded it up. It’s still there, burnt furniture and all. I’ve been by.
    My mother and I never really talked about what happened. We shared a few words of shocked consolation, and there was an air of mourning about the house, but while the papers were full of accounts, we did not discuss the killing itself, how and why it came about. I now see that she (and myself, though I did not acknowledge it at the time) was going through her own slow tragedy and needed her grief for both herself and me. She still called my father to make sure he would pick me up every other Saturday, but they did not talk beyond money and the logistics of visitation.
    We were all seeing a psychiatrist associated with our church, separately, on different days of the week. I remember that Dr. Brady and I mostly discussedhockey, though every session he would ask bluntly how I was doing at home, in school, with the band, with my mother, my father.
    â€œOkay,” I told him.
    When my mother picked me up, invariably she asked, “Do you think it’s helping?”
    â€œI guess,” I said.
    Astrid, in Tennstaedt, West Germany, with the Air Force, called once a month to see how we were doing and to check up on her bank statement. Her squadron was involved in reconnaissance; “black work,” she called it, though we all knew it was just high-altitude photography of Russia. She was putting aside half her pay, wiring it to the Mellon Bank in Butler, and every time my mother drove me in to see Dr. Brady and we passed the branch, I thought of Astrid’s money inside, warm as a nest and growing. I thought, desperately, that when her tour was up we could live together in town above the Woolworth’s and I could work in the record department. On the phone we talked like hostages. She asked long, impossible questions (“Why do you think they’re not talking if they’re going to the same guy, and why do you go by yourself?”) that under my mother’s watchful smile I could only answer with “I don’t know.” My mother waited until after Christmas to tell her about Annie, and when I got onthe phone, Astrid was crying and angry, as if I should have prevented it.
    â€œIt’s just all going to shit back there, isn’t it?”
    â€œI don’t know,” I said. “I guess.”
    All my father would say about the killing was that it was a bad business all the way around. He had worked—if briefly—alongside Annie’s estranged husband, Glenn. I did not see my father much that winter, and when I did we spoke carefully, like survivors. He would not say a word against or for Glenn Marchand. There was more to it than we had a right to know was my father’s position. It was not our affair. To me this was as good as him admitting that he knew the whole story. I wanted him to tell me everything because my mother hadn’t and I needed to know. I knew only the rumors and what I could infer from the newspaper, while he had known both parties involved. He did not want to talk about it and I am glad he didn’t, for if he had let me know then how he saw the whole thing I probably would not have understood it any more than I understood why he had left my mother.
    Once a year I go back to Western Pennsylvania, for Christmas. This year Astrid and I have booked ourflights into Pittsburgh so we can rent a car and drive up to Butler together, and here we are, cruising through the snowy country in our big Century. I am comfortably divorced; she is still single. Neither of us mentions these facts. We’ll hear them enough when we get home. Over the