“They will,” he said. “I’m really high.”
“You can’t stay out here.” Franny was starting to shiver. She was wondering what she had been thinking of, going out without her coat.
“I can,” he said. His voice was so light, so airy, as if it were part of the snow.
Franny stepped between the boxwoods, thinking she would have to pull him up. Albie was taller than she was now but he was skinny, and anyway he wouldn’t fight her. But as soon as she got back there with him she understood the appeal of this particular spot, the way you could see all things without being seen. The overhang of the roof kept them out of the snow for the most part. She could smell the pot on him now, sweet and strong. Franny and Albie drank together sometimes, and they smoked cigarettes, but they didn’t smoke pot together. Later that would change.
“Let me in,” she said.
And just like that Albie raised up his arm, never taking his eyes off the snow, and she sat down beside him. The sleeping bag was filled with down and when they were wrapped up together it was remarkably warm. They sat there like that, their backs up against the brick of the house, the coarse hedge just in front of them. They watched the snow fall and fall and fall until they thought that they were the ones who were falling.
“I miss my mother,” Albie said. In the one year when they were very close it was the only time he said it, and he only said it that night because he was very high.
“I know,” Franny said, because she did know. She knew it exactly, and she pulled the sleeping bag tighter around them and they stayed there together just like that until she lost the feeling in her feet and she told him they had to go inside.
“I lost the feeling in my feet a long time ago,” he said.
They put their arms around one another in order to stand. The front door was locked so they went down the driveway, dragging the sleeping bag behind them. Franny’s mother wasn’t in the kitchen anymore but the light was still on beneath the door to Bert’s study.
“I told you no one would know if you were high,” Franny said, and for some reason this cracked Albie up. He sat down on the floor and pulled the sleeping bag over his head, laughing while Franny got out the cereal and the milk.
Franny brushed the snow off her shoulders and made her way to the rented SUV. She had never told that story to Leo. She had meant to but then for some reason she decided to hold it back. Now she understood that at some point far out in the future there would be a night just like tonight, and she would remember this story and know that no one else in the world knew it had happened except Albie. She had needed to keep something for herself.