13

“My favorite book,” Anna said, “is The Summer Troll. I like the way Troll changes, becomes a better person.”

“You just like it because you’re in it,” I said.

Anna frowned at me, then her features brightened. “I’m Gloria!”

I nodded my head. “You are Gloria, the Princess of Upover and True Dreamer.”

Anna beamed. Her eyes widened. “And you are Troll. Poor David. Always changing because Gloria dreams you different every summer.”

“Hey, wait a minute. I’m not Troll at all. I don’t write autobiographical stuff. You are Gloria, and that’s it.”

Anna laughed. “Okay. You aren’t Troll.”

I got up and poked the fire. It coughed sparks, blazed. I looked back at Anna, whose deep eyes celebrated the firelight. I had never seen her so beautiful.

We were sitting by the fire in Walker’s study. Anna had decided that she was going to write a children’s book of her own—which she would let me illustrate—and she had written portions of plot and odd bits of poetry on sheets of lined paper that were scattered around the room.

Anna’s book was going to be about a house in the mountains. The house is filled with laughing, loving people. Something happens, and the people move to the city and abandon the house. The house becomes very lonely and kidnaps a kid who has gotten lost while hiking with his Boy Scout troop. Something like that. It wasn’t entirely clear. Anna admitted it needed work.

“Will you marry me?” I asked.

Anna frowned. “Stop it. It isn’t funny.”

“I wasn’t trying to be funny.”

Anna glared at the fire. “I could marry you. I could say ‘sure’ and you’d do it, because you are crazy.”

“I love you.”

“You don’t even know who I am.” Anna rolled over on her back and blinked at the ceiling. “My brain feels like someone ran it through a blender. Behave for awhile, okay?”

“Okay.” I logged “awhile” in the wide territory of hope.

Anna reached up and drew me to her. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said, running her fingers through my hair.

“Me, too. I’m glad I’m here.”

One day, when I went to the infirmary to visit Anna, I found her in the television room with young Dr. Simms. Anna was laughing and Dr. Simms looked flushed and somewhat confused, like a puppy who has been praised without knowing exactly why.

“We are talking about medicine,” Anna told me. “Dr. Simms knows everything.”

Dr. Simms, flustered, stood up and locked the medicine cabinet. He was wearing the same smile, but he seemed to be shaking himself out of a daze. Anna did have a mesmerizing quality. I pointed that out to Walker later on, when Walker had occasion to be less than delighted with young Simms.

Anna’s recovery was miraculous. She had cast off the terrified, leaden-eyed husk of her hospital stay and emerged with a fierce, butterfly brightness that eclipsed even my nostalgia-powered dreams of her. Walker explained it in spiritual terms that eluded me. Anna’s solemn Dr. Simms may have been the victim of infatuation, but who could blame him?

Anna moved out of the infirmary and back into the main house. I waited. Anna was glad I was there. That was as good a reason as any for remaining. I could work on the book here, in the cottage. Christmas was edging toward us; I intended to celebrate it with Anna.

“You are a patient son of a bitch,” Diane told me, sitting on the floor drinking coffee.

“Huh? No one has ever accused me of being patient,” I said.

“But you are. You are waiting for Anna to leave with you, and you are willing to wait until she comes around.”

“Once again, you are making me out to be far more calculating than I am.”

Diane put the coffee cup down and stood up. She walked to the window and looked out. “And once again you are trying to appear more innocent than your years warrant. It’s snowing.”

I joined her at the window and watched the first large, wet flakes float down, slowly, dreamily, barely licked by gravity. The afternoon dimmed. The windowpane caught the first flakes, which instantly melted, running in crooked silver streams.

“I better get back,” Diane said. “I hate driving in snow.”

I walked her to her car and kissed her goodby. “It probably won’t amount to anything,” I said.

The snow began to hurtle down. Darkness came, and the snow rushed through the black air with a heavy, purposeful silence.

It had been snowing the last time I saw my mother. That was my freshman year in college, and I was home for the holidays. It had been a meaner snow, with ice in the heart of each flake, and it rattled on the car, clicked against the windshield, clung in glittering chunks to the wipers.

I had come up on the train, spent the day with my father, brother, my brother’s several children, in-laws, aunts. The house was festive: a turkey cooking, Christmas carols chiming, toys clacking, football booming on the TV.

The next morning, I borrowed my brother’s car and drove out to see my mother alone, not telling anyone where I was going.

Calvert Hospital was celebrating its own Christmas. There was a large Christmas tree in the dayroom.

“That’s a beautiful tree, ain’t it?” a thin, uniformed woman with a round face said.

I agreed that it was.

“Course, we don’t have no glass ornaments on it, as you will observe. We learned our lesson there. You would be amazed the damage an ordinary Christmas ornament can make on mortal flesh if a poor soul takes a notion.”

It was a sobering thought.

My mother was in her room, propped up in bed, reading Pride and Prejudice. She smiled when I came in. “David, I’m glad you could come,” she said. My mother was an extremely formal woman, not because she lacked warmth, but because she loved the ritual of things.

I kissed her on the cheek. “How are you doing?” I asked.

“I am weathering these unfortunate circumstances.” She sighed. “Holmes”—my mother persisted in polling her doctor Holmes in wry homage to his deductive powers—“says I can leave in a few weeks, as soon as the medication makes me totally innocuous to all and sundry, I suppose. And how are you getting on?”

I told her that college was just fine, Father seemed just fine, et cetera. Hospital conversations always run down quickly, and this one was no exception. We talked about books, a favorite subject for both of us and one that kept us occupied until a nurse came in to tell me it was time for me to leave.

“Here, I’ll walk you to the door,” my mother said, and she got out of bed and walked down the hall, an arm on my shoulder.

“Buck doesn’t like to come,” she said. “I know that. He has always been a robust man, your father, and he has a mortal fear of frailty. I understand. It isn’t his fault at all. You do him an injustice—no, you do, I know you do. And you shouldn’t. You shouldn’t think ill of your father.”

I meant to say something, make some denial, perhaps even explain the exact and subtle nature of my dissatisfaction with Buck Livingston, but my mother’s face suddenly altered, her eyes narrowed and she leaned forward and said, “Take me with you. Quickly. We’ll leave here. Just walk out. They don’t have any cameras here, not in the hall. In the rooms, they have hidden cameras, but not here. Now’s our chance.”

Her hand was clutching my shoulder, squeezing, and her head shook.

“I can’t, Mother. You know that.”

She didn’t say anything, just shook me with her hand on my shoulder. There was an odd swollen cast to her features, a determination that made her seem a stranger. I was frightened.

Then her grip relaxed. Her features shifted to resignation. I saw my mother as I knew and loved her. “No,” she said, patting my shoulder. “Of course you can’t. I don’t know what came over me. Well, off with you.” She kissed me on the cheek, turned, and walked quickly back down the hall.

I drove back to the aunts and uncles, back to the festivities. I never saw my mother again. One of Calvert’s cleaning staff left a can of drain cleaner in the bathroom. My mother availed herself of the opportunity. She killed herself on the third day of the new year, leaving no note.

The symmetry of my life is great shrink fodder, I suppose. Long ago, Ray had accused me of falling instantly in love with Anna because she was a suicide. If I could save Anna, I might win this time, at least wrestle the ghost of loss to a draw. That had been Ray’s theory, wilder than Freud at his woolgathering best (and Freud was no slouch).

If there was any truth in Ray’s theory, Anna seemed to be surviving in spite of me. My redemptive efforts stank.

I jerked awake in the coffin darkness of the storm, my heart racing. A sense of impending doom haunted me, made me get up and turn on the light and study the progress of the storm.

I looked out at the main house, through the blur of still-falling snow. I was reassured by the warm light that burned in the second-story window, Anna’s room. As I watched, the light went out.

“Good night, Anna,” I said.

I looked at my watch and noticed that it was only a little after ten. I put some coffee on and prepared to reread Titus Groan, one of the world’s great oddball books in that wonderful Mervyn Peake trilogy of the castle Gormenghast.

I heard the truck’s engine heave into life, roar as the accelerator was revved. I looked out the window as the truck’s lights went on, blazing in a swirl of fine snow. The truck shook as it backed up, snow falling from its sides. The wipers cut small, myopic arcs, and the truck lurched forward again, its tires spewing snow. Sliding faintly to the left, it turned under the porch light.

Anna was at the wheel. I knew it was her without seeing into the frosted cab. A shadow was all I needed. The truck swung down the driveway, fishtailing, picking up speed. I watched the taillights dwindle and suddenly jump into empty night.

I didn’t panic. I poured coffee into a thermos, dressed as warmly as I could, and turned off all the lights before I stepped out into the storm, closing the door behind me.