twenty years of snow

Twenty Years of Snow

I look out of the window over the headboard of the bed. I’m lying down, incapable of moving, and because I’m upside down the grass below becomes invisible and all I see is the smooth white of the sky, backlit by the sun and blinding me with gray. The trees next to my window are all dead and leafless and the sharp branches beat against the roof like a metronome. Were I to turn over I’d see a warm day, grass overgrown on the ground, patches of blue in the distance fighting against the dominating white clouds, cats stalking each other in my back yard, angry honeysuckle threatening to choke the broken boards back by the fence. But from this perspective, everything all blank and white and cut through by sharp tree-lines, I am staring into a blizzard. One of those so powerful that it obliterates all the noise and the color around it. It’s quiet in the house.

My fingers begin to twitch and shake toward the bottle a few inches away from me on the bed. They move forward and take hold of it. They knock away the note from Timothy taped to the bottle that says, “Prescription for your foot. Gone to movies with Jonas.” They twist off the top and take out one of the oblong white pills inside and put it in my mouth. My mouth agrees, and swallows. I count, four, three, two, one, and my fingers are calm in anticipation of peace, and let the bottle slide away.

My eyes swim away from the snowstorm above me and fix on a picture of Tim and I beside the bed. It’s an old photo. So old that he still has all of his hair and I’m still smiling. We’re both looking directly at the camera. No one could ever catch a picture of him looking at me. So now I have a thousand tiny documents of what his young, grinning face looked like, twenty years after the fact because I have no clear proof of its ever being directed right at me. This one was taken at a concert. We both look happy, excited. Timothy’s eyes are gleaming with the same mischievous light that Jonas has. It’s in the brightest spectrum here right before the drummer chops out his beat and the singer shouts one, two, three, four! and the we scream and dance and sing. I like this picture. The light is there. Timothy always looks so happy, even when he’s miserable.

He never laughed at my jokes. His eyebrows would rise in the middle and come together and he’d give me a half-smile and make some comment about how weird I was. I laughed at myself with all my heart because I knew that this trait derived from some kind of natural reserve rather than from indifference to me. I knew this because I was the only girl whose hand he would hold at the movies. I was the only girl who offered to pay for his meals just for the pleasure of knowing what he’d order. I wasn’t a whore and other people liked me. I knew it because when I asked him to marry me he said he would.

Twenty years pass and the momentum of my own tenacity sees me hurtling forward through our half-finished hallway with floorboards pulled out and nails strewn over the cement. Timothy has a friend outside on the porch. They are sitting, smoking cigarettes. I watch from the window as Timothy watches her with the usual light dancing in his eyes. I had stepped out with them a moment before. I introduced myself, and told a funny story. She laughed with her hair thrown back. Tim nodded at me, began a new conversation with her about Jonas. I walked inside the house without saying anything. I keep watching. She says something to him, low but with wild hand gestures almost like mine. He laughs with his head thrown back. My stomach hurts and I dash through the battered hallway. I see the nails point up on the floor, but my legs decide to keep running over them. Tim finds me staring at my foot, curled up on the floor. When he carries me to the car we pass a mirror. My teeth are showing, stretched out mouth. I almost look like I’m laughing.

Twenty years and two days and I am here and my shivering fingers are stretching toward the bottle again. My eyes are dry and staring and don’t want to look at Timothy’s picture any more. They turn to the bottle in my hand, read the label. Do not operate a motor vehicle. Risk of addiction with prolonged use. They watch while my fingers undo the cap, take out another white pill and pop that one into my mouth. My mouth agrees with this again, swallows again. Four, three, two, one. I will be at peace.

My eyes fall back and continue to take in the image of the blizzard over my head. The black branches are stark against the glaring white sky above me. The scene reminds me of one when Jonas was just a little boy. We went on vacation to Maine one Christmas. He had never seen snow, and we only had on rare occasions. While we were there a storm blew in, and even though it was late at night we woke Jonas to go outside and play. We were all still young. Timothy still had quite a lot of hair. I still believed that the brightness of his eyes was all for me. I still thought that knowing what he ordered at every restaurant and giving up all the space on the bed to him and holding his hand at movies had something to do with love. I thought his reticence was somehow proof of feelings that would outgrow their shell in time and bloom under my care. He smiled. He did laugh, but never with his whole body.

We played in the street in the middle of the night. Dangerous, and cold. We didn’t care. We taught Jonas how to make an elementary snowball and he was so excited that he threw all the practice ones we helped him with right back in our faces. We played tag in the storm with him. I was so full of pride in them both just because they were alive. The light in both their eyes shone in the dark and dazzled me completely. We all giggled like children. We threw chunks of snow at each other when we could no longer shape snowballs. Our noses ran and our skin turned pink and raw. Our mouths dried out because we were laughing all our breath into the sharp air. Jonas took his gloves off so Tim could rub life back into his hands, and he tried to jerk them back on and run back into the street. He fell, and skinned both of his hands on the frozen ground. The streaks of red in the snow frightened him and he started to cry. I was the first one to him. I dabbed his hands with the cloth I used to clean my glasses and kissed them both over and over. I told him that I was going to count back from four, and when I was finished his hands weren’t going to hurt anymore. He looked at me, tears turning frozen and shiny on his cheeks. I held his two little hands in mine and asked if he was ready. He said he was.

Four…

Three…

Two…

One…

I tugged his gloves back on him and kissed his forehead. He turned around immediately and ran back to Tim. I looked at my husband and through the haze of the night it almost looked like he was smiling. Laughing. Right at me.

I hear the front door creaking, doorknob turning. Timothy must be home. From the voices I hear it seems Jonas has come with him. My fingers reach again for the bottle, but it is empty. I feel myself begin to sink into the bed, and panic. My bloodshot eyes search for somewhere to run, but I can’t run. Twenty years of snow. Twenty years of strangers looking at each other through a thick mist. No shell, no bloom. He answered only because I asked. But I will do what I have been doing for the last two decades, and I will count backward to a time when I didn’t know any of these things, and I will continue.

Four…

Three…

Two…

One