WINTER

My brother and his friends called themselves the Stunt Kids. They’d ride their bikes home from school, taking the long way, past a high embankment. They’d walk their bikes up to the top and ride down at full speed. Pretty dangerous, but then kids never seem to get hurt. My brother never did, not until later. 

One day, one boring day between seasons, my brother told me about winter. I’d never seen snow. It seemed magical, glittering and clean in my imagination. My brother told me all about winter in our old town. I was a baby then and didn’t remember any of it but he told me everything.

The Snowman

Once the snow fell, and they couldn’t be Stunt Kids anymore, my brother and his friends Robbie and Nick would explore the town. Getting in snowball fights, making snow forts. Robbie and Nick were brothers, a year apart. One day, they were all walking along Canal Street. Snow was getting ready to fall again and the sky was gray and heavy. They were heading home when they saw a snowman. Not a very good one. No arms or hat or even a carrot nose. Just two holes dug out for eyes and an even bigger one for its wide-open mouth, like some kind of primitive idol. It was standing near the sidewalk and my brother gave it a good shove as they walked by. The head tumbled right off and Nick screamed like a girl, my brother said, because there was blood inside the snowman. They knocked it apart and there was a kid in there, too. Dead, of course. Upside down, like he’d been swallowed into the snowman’s frozen insides. His skin was turned purple with the cold. Eyes full of blood and an expression of terror still on his face. Frozen there, my brother said. 

They ran. After all, they didn’t want the police to think they’d been the ones who killed the kid. They left it so someone would find it though, and someone eventually did. Thing was, my brother said, a week later he saw another snowman just like it. Featureless with only that scooped out face. Snow had fallen earlier, but there were no tracks around the snowman. Just perfect, fresh snow. It was near dark and my brother ran the other way. 

Under the ice

My brother was out by himself, on the big frozen lake just past the Miller’s farm. Old men sometimes used it for ice fishing and my brother decided he wanted to see their spot for himself. He took a fishing pole out, past where all the kids were skating. When he got to the ice fishing place, he could see where all the holes had been drilled. They’d iced over again, but not all the way and the dark blue water still showed through. My brother knelt down for a closer look when something moved under the ice. He thought it was a fish until it floated closer to the surface. Then he could see it was a face. He even recognized it: Ron Frye, a high school senior who’d gone missing. At first my brother thought he was dead and his body had finally floated up and pressed against the ice. Then Ron blinked his milky eyes and punched his fingers through one of the fishing holes. My brother began to run, slipping and sliding, back to the shore. 

Ron kept pace the whole way, pulling himself along under the ice with his palms. He moved fast. Once my brother slipped and came crashing down, hitting his chin. For a moment he was mesmerized by Ron. They were face to face, inches away. Then a bit of blood dripped onto the ice and it sent Ron into a frenzy. He began throwing slow-motion underwater punches that looked funny but began to crack the ice. My brother could hear it creaking under him. He scrambled up and kept running with Ron right under his feet. When he got near the shore, Ron broke away and was gone in an instant but my brother never went out on the lake again. We moved before it thawed anyway. 

The Crossroads

The Stunt Kids walked all the way across town, until the buildings gave way to farms. They passed the old abandoned barn where they were forbidden to go and the Andel’s farm, with all the cows shivering in the snow and giving stupid looks to passerby. They kept going until they came to a crossroads. There was a man there, and you could tell something bad happened my brother said, because of all the blood. At first they thought he was alive, a drunk who fell down and hit his head maybe. Then the man looked up and they could see the ragged cut across his throat. He snarled at the Stunt Kids. It came out more like a wheeze through the cut, but they knew what he was doing and backed away. The dead man had created a track in the snow, between the left and right fork. They watched as he crawled one way, then the other, then back. Because he had died at a crossroads, my brother said, he would never be able to find his way home. 

THE ICE QUEEN

Another kid had joined my brother’s group, but he wasn’t one of the Stunt Kids. You couldn’t be until you proved it on your bike. They were walking to a hockey game on the Zylstra’s pond. Snow was falling steadily, big puffy flakes of it, and they passed an old woman coming the other direction. She walked slowly, bent over and using a stick, with a scarf wrapped around her face. She asked them if they could spare anything for an old woman on a cold day. My brother gave her the quarter he was supposed to keep in case he had to call home in an emergency. Robbie had no change, but he offered her some gum and told her chewing it would help keep her warm. Nick searched his pockets but only came up with a small stone. It was wet and shiny when he found it, now dry and dull with a few striations. The old woman seemed to like it though, so Nick shrugged and gave it to her. The other kid didn’t give her anything. He laughed, grabbed the crotch of his snowpants and asked if she wanted his nuts. The woman screamed and swung her stick as if to hit him. 

Instead, there was a flash that was over so quickly my brother wasn’t sure what he saw. The other kid was frozen in a column of ice that reached above his head, with his hand still making the obscene gesture. The old woman was gone. Disappeared with a quarter, a few sticks of gum, and a dull stone. 

The Stunt Kids used their hockey sticks to break the ice and free the other kid. He was alive but he was never the same, my brother said.

THE DOORWAY TO SUMMER

My brother and Robbie were hunting around by the abandoned barn they had been told never to go in. Nick was home with a cold. Robbie sounded like he was getting one too, but he never let anything hold him back if he could help it. Part of his being disabled, my brother said. It made him want to be tougher.  

There was precious little sunlight that day, just cold white light that hurt to look at for too long, shining through the clouds. 

Suddenly Robbie was yelling for my brother. He was standing by the side of the barn. The snow had piled up in a drift but from underneath, something seemed to be glowing. 

My brother and Robbie cleared the snow away until they uncovered the door of a root cellar. The funny thing was, there was light coming out of it. Yellow light, shining through the cracks. My brother pulled off a mitten and held his hand in the light and he told me he remembered it being very warm. The whole thing was padlocked but when Robbie tested it, the lock just popped open. They pulled the root cellar doors back and inside there was a big, open summer meadow. It was warm and bright and inviting, my brother said. It smelled like honeysuckle. Stone steps led down into the warm of summer and a path twisted away through the gentle green field. Above, the sky was blue and clear. A stream babbled mindlessly alongside the path. My brother stuck his head through the door and suddenly, he could hear a voice. Many voices actually, but speaking as one, calling for him. They were sweet voices, harmonious and beautiful, and he began to step through. 

He felt Robbie pulling him back and my brother said he’d never been more angry in his life than he was at that moment. Then he was pulled clear of the doorway and the cold of winter brought him back to his senses. The smell of honeysuckle was cloying and the voices had changed. They were evil and corrupt, ancient voices speaking inside an ancient trap. My brother and Robbie looked at each other and without a word, slammed the cellar doors down and piled snow over them until every bit of light was blocked.

ADULTS

Christmas break was coming up and it kept right on snowing. My brother and Robbie were in the same class. Nick was a year below them. Robbie was an interesting guy and I would have liked him, my brother said. His mom had smoked while she was pregnant, and Robbie came out with one of his legs just a stump below the knee, and one hand with only two misshapen fingers and a thumb. Nick was his younger brother and had come out perfect, as if their parents had learned a lesson. Robbie and Nick were the first friends my brother made in the new town, when I was still a baby. 

The only time my brother ever saw Robbie cry over his disabilities was in class. They were doing arts and crafts, making reindeer faces on construction paper with googly eyes and trace-outs of their hands for antlers. This was right before lunch and the classroom slowly emptied. The teacher was gone and Robbie sat at his desk, crying and trying to hold it in. My brother asked him what was wrong and saw Robbie was crying over the antlers. One of them would be deformed just like his hand. It would have three branches instead of five. My brother and a girl named Lindsey and a girl named Melissa comforted him and told him it just meant his reindeer would be better than the rest and stand out. They waited with him while Robbie drew his reindeer, then they all went to lunch.

THE GREAT WHITE WOLF

I was just a baby and not even talking yet, so I couldn’t remember when we moved away. My brother told me that it was still winter and the skies were still gray and it was still cold and snow still covered the ground. We were packing up the car to leave and my brother heard an awful howl. It was low and mournful and sounded like all the sadness in the world. I was in the car already, strapped into my car seat, and our parents had gone back into the house one last time. No one heard it but my brother. He looked away across the fields, but there was nothing. Then he turned and looked towards the school and saw it over the tops of the buildings. He could see the ridge of its back above the roofs. It was covered in pure white fur and between the post office and the courthouse, my brother caught a glimpse of one liquid red eye. It was the great white wolf, he said, come out of the howling wastes to feed. It was hungry after the long winter. Then our parents came out to the car and got in and we drove away from the town forever. My brother watched behind us as the great white wolf went through town, eating people and growing larger until he was bigger even than the buildings. He ate and ate until the last things alive were the Andel’s stupid-eyed cows and the wolf ate those one by one. Finally he stood in the empty fields howling at the sky, his pure white fur almost invisible against the snow, except for his jaws streaked with blood.

My brother told me all about it.

COLLEGE LIFE

I remembered my brother’s stories well. Every one of them, all his tales of winter in the town we’d left so long ago. I felt like I knew it. A magical place, better than any memory. We moved out of it to California and my first memories are of the desert. Of sand, and heat, and rose-colored mountains, and winters with no snow. 

I saw snow for the first time my freshman year of college. This was in Philadelphia and it was not the magical snow I’d always envisioned. Its falling entranced me, but it was soon turned to dark slush in the streets. I can think of things that have hurt me more, but none that has disappointed me so much as that.

WINTER’S NIGHT

I remember that night very clearly. I’d been walking. I couldn’t write that night, so I walked across campus. I looked at the dirty snowbanks, piled high on the sidewalks. I tried to imagine something, to force a story out of the snowy night so I could return to my room with an idea. I walked and thought and bad ideas came and went. Finally my face was cold and my shoes were soaked through and I turned back to my apartment. 

My roommate had left a note for me to call my parents. I did and my mother answered. I could hear it in her voice, struggling to put grief into words, and I knew that someone had died. At first I thought it was my father, but it was my brother. 

When I hung up, I sat on the couch in silence. My shoes were by the door in a puddle of water. I was alone in the apartment, but I still went to my room and closed the door to cry into my pillow, as I had when my brother and I shared a bedroom. I cried harder at the thought. All the things my brother had been or would ever be were gone, his life ended on a road in Alaska. He’d gone to work there. The road turned right, and he went straight over the embankment. He slammed into a telephone pole at the bottom going nearly 70 miles an hour. A Stunt Kid, all grown up and no longer indestructible. 

That night, I lit candles in my room. I put the Rolling Stones on and played Winter. It seemed appropriate. Then I sat on my bed and wrote. I wrote the stories he told me, exactly as I remembered them. And I know they were exactly as he told me because I could hear him in my head as I wrote. It was the last time I ever heard my brother’s voice. I’ve tried to call it back over the years, but now I only hear my own voice saying his words. I can remember his face but perhaps that will fade too, until all my love for him is a shadow in my heart. 

No storybook ending for any of us. 

I wrote all night then I wrote it out again, neatly this time, with no scratched-out words or misspellings. By the time I was done, I was writing by daylight. I took the papers and put them in an envelope and sent them to his girlfriend Jess, in Alaska. He talked about her often. I thought she might like to know more about my brother. I suppose it was the right thing to do because Jess called to thank me, and I learned then that Jess was my brother’s boyfriend. We talked for a long time and shared the good things about his life we thought the other should know. All the stories he’d told, and all the ones he hadn’t.

Outside my window, the snow is melting and almost all gone. It’s nearly spring and for that, I am glad.