Snow fell all around as we walked outside, hands linked paper-doll style, to our little blue Datsun. My father kept a tight grip on the steering wheel as we backed past the NO TRESPASSING! VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED! signs nailed to the crooked birch trees in our yard. As we drove the snowy roads my mother hummed a lullaby I recognized from a trip to Florida years before. The tune climbed higher until we turned into the church parking lot. Our headlights illuminated the simple white structure, the stack of cement stairs, the red wooden doors, the barren flower boxes that would burst with tulips and daffodils come spring, and the steeple with a small gold cross at the top.
“Are you sure she meant this church?” my father said.
The stained-glass windows gave off no light from inside, but that wasn’t the only reason he was asking. Since the building was not big enough to fit the entire congregation, masses were held across town in the gym at Saint Bartholomew’s Catholic Elementary School. Every Sunday, basketball hoops and volleyball nets were wheeled into a storage room while an altar was wheeled out. Felt artwork depicting the Stations of the Cross was draped on the walls, folding chairs and kneelers were arranged over the court markings on the wooden floor. So the actual church was a place we rarely visited, since it was reserved for weddings and funerals and the Tuesday night prayer group my parents used to attend but didn’t anymore.
“Someone was going to drop her here,” my mother said. “Or that’s what she told me anyway.”
My father turned on his high beams, squinting. “I guess I’ll go in alone first.”
“I’m not sure that’s the smartest idea. The way you two carry on . . .”
“That’s exactly the reason I should go in alone. This nonsense has to stop. Once and for all.”
If she had her “feelings” about the predicament, my mother did not speak up any further. Rather, she let my father unbuckle his seat belt. She let him step out of the car. We watched as he followed a lone trail of footprints through the lot and up the stairs to the red doors. Though he left the engine running, heat pumping, he turned off the wipers and soon snow blanketed the windows.
My mother reached over and flicked a switch so the blades swished back and forth a single time. The effect was that of adjusting an antenna on an old TV: suddenly, the static gave way to a clear picture. She suggested I stretch out in back and sleep, since there was no sense in all of us staying awake. For the second time that night, I gave her the daughter she wanted, lying across the stiff vinyl seat with its camel hump. Inside my coat pocket, the book about my parents poked at my ribs, nudging me to pay attention to it. My mother and father were angry about so much of what the book’s author, a reporter named Sam Heekin, had written, so I was not supposed to read it. But the things my sister said before leaving home had gotten to me at last, and I’d snatched a copy from the curio hutch in our living room days before. So far, I’d only been brave enough to trace their names in the embossed subtitle on the red cover: The Unusual Work of Sylvester and Rose Mason.
“I don’t know what’s keeping them,” my mother said, more to herself than me. The faintest trace of an accent, left over from her childhood in Tennessee, bubbled up whenever she felt nervous.
Maybe it was that lilting sound, or maybe it was that book; either way something made me ask, “Do you ever feel afraid?”
My mother glanced my way a second before facing forward again and flicking the wiper switch. Her eyes, glittery and green, watched for my father. It had been twenty minutes, maybe more, since he left the car. She had turned down the heat and things were getting cold fast. “Of course, Sylvie. We all do sometimes. What makes you afraid?”
I didn’t want to say it was the sight of their names on that book. I also didn’t want to say that a prickly feeling of dread filled me up at that very moment as I wondered what was keeping my sister and father. Instead, I paraded out smaller, sillier fears, because I thought that’s what she wanted to hear. “Not passing my tests with perfect grades. Not being the smartest in my class anymore. The gym teacher changing her mind about giving me a permanent pass to the library and forcing me to play flag football or Danish rounders instead.”
My mother let out a gentle burble of laughter. “Well, those things do sound terrifying, Sylvie, though I don’t think you have to worry. Still, the next time you feel afraid, I want you to pray. That’s what I do in scary situations. That’s what you should do too.”
A plow rumbled down the street, its flashing yellow lights reflected on the snow covering the rear window. It made me think of when Rose and I were younger, the way we used to drape blankets over the wingback chairs in our living room and hide beneath with flashlights. “You know what?” my mother said when the roar and scrape of the truck faded in the distance. “I am getting a little worried now. I better go inside too.”
“It hasn’t been that long,” I told her. It had, of course, but I didn’t like the idea of her leaving. Too late, though, since she was already unbuckling her seat belt. She was already opening the door. A gust of frigid air blew into the car, causing me to shiver in my pajamas and coat.