Page 51 of The Last to Let Go
Once she gets situated and swears on the Bible, Mr. Clarence asks about the first time she ever noticed that something was wrong between my parents. I expect her to tell a story like the one Jackie told me. But right away it’s clear that’s not going to be her story.
“Allison was a senior in high school—they’d been going together for a while at that point. One night she called me from this diner where the kids used to hang out. It was late for a school night. Eleven o’clock maybe. She wanted me to come and pick her up—which was strange because she never asked me for rides, she was always very...” She pauses, trying to find a word. “Independent, never wanted help with anything. She told me they’d gotten into a big argument. She said Paul suddenly started yelling at her, calling her names. And then he left her all alone and told her she couldn’t leave until he came back. She said she’d been waiting for three hours and the restaurant was closing. And I asked her...” She stops abruptly.
“Please, take your time,” Mr. Clarence tells her, something in his demeanor softening.
“I said, ‘Sweetie, why are you staying there?’ I didn’t understand why she wouldn’t justwalk. It wasn’t very far, a block away; she used to walk there all the time. And I remember she whispered this part so quietly I could barely understand her, like it was too humiliating to say it any louder... shecouldn’twalk home because he took her shoes and her coat. It was January.”
I watch the faces of the twelve jury members. No one looks impressed. Like maybe they don’t get how messed up that was. They look hungry and bored. Maybe Mom wasn’t so wrong about wanting to keep me away from this.
When the judge calls a recess, I rush out of the courtroom to avoid being seen. Outside I stand on the steps of the building and fill my lungs with freezing air. As I exhale, I watch my breath turn to fog. I can’t help but imagine what I might feel like if I were standing here without my boots and my coat right now. I try to take as many deep gulps of air as I can—that familiar old suffocating, straitjacket feeling wrapping itself up inside of me.
“Too cold to snow.”
I turn to my left. Caroline is standing there. She’s bundled in a puffy mauve parka and a knit hat and scarf, and the kind of gloves you buy at any drugstore for ninety-nine cents. Between her fingers she holds a long, slender cigarette.
“What?” I ask.
“The weather. It’s too cold to snow.”
“Oh.”
“Do you mind?” she asks, nodding at the space between us—at least the length of one tall person.
I’m not sure if she’s asking whether I mind her smoking or if I mind her standing next to me. I shake my head, because honestly, I have no good reason to deny her either. She takes a deep, long drag from the cigarette, her cheeks sucking inward and her eyes squinting against the wind.
“I was a weather girl,” she says. “For two years, when your mother was a baby. Channel four.”
“You were a meteorologist?” I ask.
“No. Just a weather girl—a weathercaster,” she corrects, bending her gloved fingers twice, air-quoting with a cigarette. “Never finished my degree, but I was close.”
“W-why not?” I ask, not sure if my stutter is from the chatter of my teeth or how surreal it feels to be standing next to this woman with whom I share DNA and not much else.
“I got pregnant in my last year of college,” she says matter-of-factly, puffing away. “So I dropped out and got married. Got myself hired for the news anyway. I was young then—pretty. I don’t think anyone cared that I actually knew what I was talking about.” There’s a wistful half smile on her lips that makes her look so much like Mom. “But then I started getting hit in the face too much to be on television anymore.” She shrugs, then side-eyes me, checking for my reaction.
I nod and mumble something that might sound like “Oh.”
“Well, it’s actually not that it’s toocold,” she continues. “You hear that, but it’s really all about the moisture in the air. The colder the air, the less moisture there is for the water vapor to form snow crystals, so that’s why it usually won’t snow if it’s this cold. But it has to do with moisture, not temperature.”
“Huh,” I mumble, finding it increasingly difficult to be verbal. I wonder if cold has an effect on speech, too.
“It all starts way up in the atmosphere,” she says, looking up into the thick gray sky. “A tiny particle in the air—dust, something like that, pollen, whatever—all it takes is for one droplet of water to stick to it. It freezes. Then it travels down, collecting the water vapor in the air, forming more ice crystals, more and more and more, and water does what it does...,” she explains, as if there’s one obvious, known fact about what water does.
I nod.
“That’s why no two are alike—that’s true, you know, not just an overprecious metaphor—each individual snowflake has its own journey down to the ground. A million tiny factors make each one different.” She takes one long last inhale of her cigarette. “You’re planning on college, right?” she asks me, breathing out a thin stream of smoke after the words.
I nod again.
“Good.” She tosses her cigarette to the ground, stomping on it like she’s crushing a bug. “Well. Not sure if you like science, but...” She pauses, looking up at the thick layer of clouds sitting above us, as still as a picture. “If you ever get the chance to look at a snowflake under a microscope, you have to see it. It’s magical.” She bends over with some difficulty, wobbling slightly as she picks the cigarette butt up off the ground.
I look at the clouds too. I have a million things I want to know, but I can’t think of a single question. So I ask the only coherent one that comes to me: “Do you think it’ll snow soon?”
She raises her head to the sky, shielding her eyes with one hand, studying something there that I can’t see, and says thoughtfully, “Pretty soon.”
It’s silent in the space between us as we both look out at the traffic on the street. Out of the corner of my eye I see her breaths on the air, coming in quick succession, and it makes me wonder if she’s breathing heavy because of the smoking or because of me—if I’m making her as nervous as she’s making me.
“I do like science, by the way,” I blurt out, an afterthought.
