Cover of Snow (9 page)

The basement was so dark that I had to stand balanced, still teetering on that first step, as I let my eyes adjust.

Then I heard the sluggish grumble of a car engine igniting outside in the cold, and knew Eileen must be driving her old Ford away. She'd just forgotten something.

It would be best if I went now, too. While I could be sure of leaving unspotted. The photo album was a solid rectangle, distorting the shape of my pocket. I'd gotten what I'd come here for.

But then my eyes picked out something from the darkness. A slit of light below. Was there a sealed-off room in this basement? I couldn't think where a line of light like that, faint and far away, would be coming from except underneath a door.

Eileen might spot my car on her way out, and come back, intent on finding me. I could imagine the exact sequence unraveling, and yet I was drawn like a moth to that light, one of the few turned on in this unwelcoming house.

I made my slow, careful way down the stairs.

The dark got thicker as I descended, as if black sludge had settled toward the bottom. I followed that splinter of light like a beacon. When I reached the last step, I put one foot out in front of me, then swept it all around, in case I was simply standing on a landing, poised to fall as soon as I started walking again.

The blackness was complete, like space, or the bottom of the sea. Stumbling forward in the murk, I kicked out my feet and fanned my hands around to prevent falls and avoid knocking into something. My mind conjured up images of basement things: tearing cobwebs; roosting beetles; hulking, covered objects.

I knew houses with more than my eyes, though, and could sense the size of this space. A long series of steps later, my outstretched palms scraped against the wall.

That line of yellow lay at my feet. I blinked to make out a doorknob, protruding a yard or so above. With no idea what I might find on the other side, I twisted the knob.

It was locked.

A locked, lit room in a basement. Yes, it was like something out of a horror movie—mandating instant flight in the real world—but in the real world there was also a good reason to stay. With no obvious explanation for such a place, I thought its existence might possibly reveal something essential.

My fingers traced the keyhole beneath the knob. Whatever this room withheld, the lock warded off only the least determined of intruders; any rigid object should force the mechanism to unclick.

There were half a dozen tools in my bag that would make short work of this task. Despite the near total lack of light, the correct one all but sprang into my practiced grip. I'd never used a flathead screwdriver to pick a lock before, but it worked as well in the keyhole as it did installing a quarter-inch screw.

The room I entered was so bright that a spear of pain instantly penetrated my head. I shut my eyes, leaving afterflashes of white. When I opened them again, I took in the walls, which were papered, but not with flocking or flowers.

Instead, all of the pictures that didn't adorn the rest of this house had found their way down here. Eileen had made a mosaic on the walls of her hidden room, a mural of all the moments it was a parent's deepest desire to chronicle.

I stepped closer to look.

There were a few shots of Brendan as an infant, Eileen and Bill as brand-new parents. But the bulk of the photographic journey seemed to begin when Brendan was older, and a new baby had been added to the family.

I had to back up a few steps to study a picture of Brendan on a couch—its fabric a stiff, shiny gold—with a telltale white bundle positioned rigidly on his knees. Someone hovered in the foreground, only her arm showing, to keep the baby from rolling off.

The Hamiltons had taken a few vacations that had been immortalized in film. There was Brendan at the beach, digging a sandcastle, with the smaller boy dumping out a pail of sand on top. They'd gone skiing, Brendan waving a pole, his little brother beside him, no poles and concentrating fiercely on staying upright.

But pictures with Brendan in them were relatively rare. By far the lion's share featured the younger brother. Captured in the photos was a side of Eileen I'd never seen before, one that seemed alien to the woman I knew. She wore that universal expression of maternity, the same look exhibited by everyone from celebrity to welfare mom, as she gazed down at her baby. How I'd longed to wear it one day: a certain positioning of the face and crinkling of the eyes, a smile that held something unstoppable.

There were filler shots too, nobody in them, just vistas of sky and leaves and lawns and lakes, the seasons rotating by until the basement lathing had been almost completely covered.

I pivoted at the corner and began on the last wall. Here the time captured by the photos seemed to slow down. No more progression of seasons; all was winter, snow and ice. There was a photo of white fields behind the two foursquares, then a shot of the distant lake, but from up close, its surface ridged and humpy when it froze.

Then came Brendan dressed in winter gear and dragging a sled up a hill, his little brother now capable of holding on, but so padded that he couldn't bend at the middle to sit properly. He was tipping backward on the sled, almost horizontal, and Brendan had twisted around to look, stilled forever in the moment that he laughed.

Then the photographs abruptly ended.

There was a long slice of wall that Eileen had left bare.

A lone picture had been tacked up in the middle of that strip. It was of a man with red hair, taken as he crawled across the ice, his face pressed to its scabby surface. My father-in-law, with his cheek glistening black. Was that blood? I studied the picture, making out other men gathered in the distance. A hockey game Bill had been part of? I knew those could get pretty rough. But why, of all photos, had Eileen chosen to display this one?

Very few shots of Bill were included on this wall. It was as if the elaborate collage represented the standings of each family member.

Eileen, the baby, Brendan, Bill. No. The baby, Eileen, Brendan, Bill. And most of the shots of Brendan also included the baby.

The cessation of photos must mark the time of his death. Brendan's brother had died so terribly young.

Shame engulfed me. I hadn't known
anything
.

He didn't want you to know,
came a voice.

I was carried along on a wave of nausea, staring into space, unseeing, until a few other shapes before me took form. In addition to obscuring the walls, Eileen had also topped a long table, something like a workbench, with an array of objects. A frost of dust lay on every surface.

The fact of the passing time hit me like an electric shock. How many minutes had just been eaten away, looking at those photographs? Eileen could be on her way home by now.

But she got off to a late start, I reassured myself, delayed by whatever she'd come back here for. I'd just take one more quick look. Who knew if I'd ever get the chance to come down here again? And the things in this room held answers—partial answers at least—if I could understand them.

One part of the table was concealed by a large sheet of paper, the kind torn off a roll. Someone—Eileen, of course—had penciled a series of quick sketches along its length. Eileen had been an archeology student once, before coming back to this cold place, which turned out to be filled with so much tragedy. In her studies, she'd probably learned to draw, to document her findings.

Here on the length of paper were captured a small form running, then a shed or little shack, and finally a black oval, violently scribbled in with pencil to provide shading. Arrows had been scrawled between the oval and the shed. Beneath the arrows were numbers. Three, seven, ten, and a question mark. Two, five, eight, and another one.

I had no idea what the numbers meant, nor what I was seeing elsewhere on the table.

Canceled checks in a neat stack. I flipped through them rapidly, then replaced the pile. They were all made out to cash, and appeared to be starter checks, without Eileen's name or address printed on them. On each memo line, the same word had been jotted over and over, in the sharp quills of my mother-in-law's handwriting.
Resurrection
.

A consignment shop, or cutesy antique store was my first guess. Then my thoughts turned wilder. Some kind of service aimed at parents who'd lost children? The worst kind of scam artist targeting desperate people, driven all but insane by grief, with some life-after-death fantasy?

The time
. Great amounts of it being gobbled up in questions and confusion.

I scrabbled at the flaps of two cartons, both of them stuffed with tiny, folded outfits as out-of-date as Eileen's own.

Then I picked up a rag doll that looked as if it might dissolve into dust at my touch. But the thing remained intact, and I raised it, wrinkling my nose against sour smells of age and sorrow. Around the doll's wrist, Eileen had attached a heavy stock card that bristled again with her handwriting.
Pooky.

Nearby, a clump of coarse hairs had been bound together and shellacked. The spiky letters on its label read:
Rascal
.

Dog hair? Was I touching fur from a dead dog? The tuft singed my fingers and I let it plummet, not caring when it missed the desk and fell with a stiff crackle onto the concrete floor.

Here were my mother-in-law's aborted career dreams. Poured into a ghoulish museum exhibit, an archeological dig that chronicled her second son's foreshortened life.

I stared down at my hands, clenched into rocks, then squinted into the main part of the basement. I would have to use the light from this vile shrine to memorize my way back to the stairs before closing the door. Jointed tubes of ductwork hung from the ceiling like some multi-limbed beast, but otherwise my path was clear. Just as I was about to sink into the bath of darkness, one final object lying on the table gripped my gaze.

A splintery snake of rope.

It matched the piece Teggie had dug up. Another tag had been secured to the end. With savage strokes of her pen, the cardstock torn through in places, Eileen had scrawled two words this time.

Brendan's idiocy
.

I stabbed my feet into the boots I'd hidden on the porch, and raced down the steps.

There'd been no need to worry about anybody spotting my car. It was fully covered by snow, indistinguishable from Jean's Buick. She hadn't returned yet, and neither had Eileen.

But there was a gray police car parked several yards away. My heart began to thud.

Dave Weathers got out.

I trudged toward him across the still-unplowed road, stumbling over a drift. Dave thrust one gloved hand out, tripping a bit himself as he tried to steady me. His chest heaved in his police-issue snow gear. He leaned over for balance, breathing hard. “What are you doing here?”

I offered up my first lie stupidly. “I came to see Aunt Jean.”

Dave stared at me. He seemed the bumbling brother—certainly he had none of Vern's paternal strength—but that didn't mean he was dumb. Groping for an explanation that would come closer to the truth, I said, “And I thought Eileen might have something of mine.”

The storm was getting sparser; it would tease us with a brief extraction from its hold. Dave looked up, shielding his eyes against the remaining whirl of flakes. He didn't say a word about my decision to look for this item when Eileen wasn't at home, and when he spoke his voice was kind. “So did she?”

“No,” I said quietly. “I don't think so.” I turned and began sweeping at the accumulation of snow on my car.

“Let me do that.” Dave withdrew a brush from his holster, clearing the glass with waves that scattered snow upon our boots.

I decided to ask a question of my own. “What made you come all the way out here?”

Dave scuffed through the snow to my hood. “Just checking on the state of this road. Chief's worried it don't get plowed out very often.”

Well, that was certainly true. I thanked Dave for doing the clearing. He was looking down, brushing snow off his coat, as I climbed into my car.

Surely a mother who sequestered herself in a dungeon of relics and testimonies, more than twenty-five years after losing her son, was at the very least disturbed. The light was on in the basement; Eileen must've been down there today. And now Eileen's other son had killed himself. Was death the only way to get his mother's attention?

My clumsy attempts at psychoanalyzing made me wince. Brendan and I had been in love. He'd lived only a few miles from his mother for most of his life, and never displayed any particular conflict about it, nor any great longing to see her more often. Brendan hadn't wanted for attention.

As I drove, I became aware again of my booty, poking into my lap.

Teggie's voice, clear as glass in my head.
You're not even going to look at it, are you?

The album belonged in Brendan's box, back amongst his things. After today's immersion in the past, Eileen-style, I had no desire to see the few pictures his dad had been able to put aside.

The answering rebuttal was wordless, but distinct.

I would never become like Eileen, lost in images forever gone, but how could I not at least glance through these shots that Brendan had so loved?

“One quick peek,” I told the silent car. “Okay? And then no more.”

Nobody replied.

I covered the last miles home faster than the newly plowed roads rendered safe, then turned into my drive. Someone had salted it for me. A small-town favor.

Inside, I shed my coat, scarf, and hat, then walked over to the living room couch, where I withdrew the leather album. It felt clammy in my grasp. Maybe I'd only be able to stomach a glance at the first picture. I knew it well: Brendan in a diaper, all but lost in the folds of a garish, vinyl beanbag chair.

Flipping to the first page, I braced myself for a glimpse of the picture Brendan had examined so often. Then I brought my gaze down, the smile of appreciation I'd always worn sitting ghoulishly upon my lips now that Brendan wasn't here to see it.

It didn't matter whether I smiled or not.

Because the book I held wasn't a photo album.