“To what?” I said. There was nothing: no sound at all. Even the house was still, wrapped in its drifts like a fat old baby in a blanket.
“The snow,” he said.
I opened my eyes. “You can’t hear snow.”
“You can,” he said. He still had his eyes closed. He looked like a different person when he wasn’t smiling. Older. Tired. A stranger. “Shhh.”
I closed my eyes again, just to humor him.
But the weird thing is after a minute or two, I thought I could hear it. Not sound, but the opposite of sound. It was the slow accumulation of silence, the sticky, heavy drift of nothing, like watching shadows grow and turn to dark, or like this time I was a kid and saw a solar eclipse, watched a black disk float over the sun and saw all the light get swallowed up in an instant. Now I was hearing all the sounds of the world get swallowed up.
When I opened my eyes, Martin was smiling again. “The sound of snow,” he said.
After that, it became like our thing. Even when he wasn’t around, I used to go up there sometimes, because it reminded me of him. I even started to get used to the smell, like an old person’s laundry basket, and the spiders spinning silently in their corners. Cissy would have liked it in the attic.
Alice told me later she used to hang around in the attic, too. She had a whole rig up there, a desk and everything. First she was pretending to write because it gave her an excuse to keep away from her husband, and he was too lazy and usually too drunk, so she says, to climb the stairs. But then, after a while, she started really writing, and she churned out The Raven Heliotrope, three hundred pages in two years.
It was peaceful up there.
Then, a week before the big wham-o blam-o, brains on the wall, the roof collapsed. It had been another frigid turd of a winter, and for months the snow, fine as sifted flour, had been piling up quietly, so I hardly noticed.
I wasn’t home. I’d gone looking for Martin. It had been a rough winter on me. We’d been at it, me and Martin; I got canned from my job for no good reason; and on top of everything else, I got the news from my doctor: cancer. A knot on my lung, tight as a web, lit up like a Christmas tree on the scan.
I needed to tell Martin. I called him at home, which was forbidden, and I’ll never forget what it felt like when she picked up the phone: like standing out in the cold and seeing warm lights off in the distance and knowing you’d never make it.
“Hello?” she said, half laughing; and I heard his voice, too, in the background, like he’d just finished telling a joke. There were other voices too, overlapping, and a song playing in the background. Something with a violin.
I knew where he lived. He was careful but not careful enough, and it was no big secret. He knew I wouldn’t show up there unannounced, but that’s just what I did. I drove all the way to Buffalo through the funnel of snow and parked right in front of his house, which was bigger than I’d imagined and prettier, like a big cupcake covered in white icing. I could see him moving in the living room, passing out drinks to his guests. And I could see her, too: blond and small as an insect, touching his face, his arm; rearranging the chairs, opening the window to let out the smoke; and every time she moved it was like she was saying, I belong here. I belong here.
At the last second I lost my nerve so I just sat there. I had a bottle of Smirnoff to keep me warm, and I sat until it was finished and the guests had all gone home, spilling out into the darkness and cold, still laughing, waving scarves like people in old movies leaving on a ship. Martin and his wife stood waving at the door, transformed by the warm light behind them into a single shape.
Driving home, I lost control on the ice and went headfirst into a fence and some idiot cop barely out of puberty threw me in the tank overnight for being drunk. The cell was white and empty and smelled like piss, but in the morning when the sun came up on the walls, it was almost pretty.
When I got home, my roof was gone. Overnight the weight of the snow became too much to carry. What tipped the scale? Think about it: there must have been a final snowflake that did it, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a milligram that made all the difference.
Don’t think I felt sorry for myself. The way I figure it, life’s the sum total of all our small mistakes, little tragedies, bad choices. Addition on top of addition. They pile up and pile up until the cost of keeping up appearances is too high and the weight is just too much.
Then: collapse.
Alice says we got to let go. Maybe she’s right.
If you want the plain truth, it wasn’t the gun that killed me. What I mean is: it wasn’t the gun that killed me first.
When I was six, I started having a dream about a long white hallway full of closed doors. It looked like a hospital, except there were no doctors and no nurses, no people at all. Just a long stretch of closed locked doors.
Sometimes it was quiet. Sometimes I could hear people talking inside the locked rooms, voices muffled by the walls. Sometimes there was even music playing. And I knew if I could just find the right door, it would open for me, and I’d pass through into my house, into my room, with the big bay windows where a decade later a spider would sit spinning for Cissy, and the view of the front yard and the big sky and the birds pecking worms out of my mom’s garden.
But I never could. Find it, I mean. All the doors stayed locked.
The dreams stopped after a while, when I got a little older and got into boys and dope and music and beer. But I’ll tell you something. For a while, I thought Martin was going to be the door.
When his wife found out and he said he was ending things with me, I think I went a little crazy. After thirty years, the dreams came back. Even when I woke up, the dream was there: a long hallway of locked rooms, and people laughing inside of them.
The gun was just the go-between. It was the loneliness that got me in the end.
AMY
Amy was supposed to be sleeping but she couldn’t sleep and there were noises in the attic besides. She couldn’t sleep because Uncle Trenton was a bad reader and he’d rushed through her favorite part of The Raven Heliotrope and he hadn’t given her a good-night kiss plus he’d tucked her in too tight, which made her feel like a giant burrito.
And he smelled weird. Like the kind of clear juice Nana drank, and also a little bit like the big store where Mommy bought her perfumes.
She knew why Uncle Trenton was in a bad mood. It was because of the body in the ground. She’d heard Nana talking about it with Mommy when they were getting ready to leave. I don’t see what all the fuss is about, Mommy said. She’s six feet under by now and everybody knows it. They should be looking for her with dogs and a shovel. And Nana said, Imagine her poor parents.