Taillights

Snow started falling around four in the morning, and by seven it was a good 14 inches deep on top of David Cornwall’s Buick. David stood at the kitchen window with his coffee and watched it come down, piling higher with each passing minute.

"That's got to come off before it sets up," he said. "Sun gets at it, it turns to cement."

"Just wait for the plow. He’s supposed to be by here around noon,” his wife Dorothy said. "It's in the lease, so they have to do it."

"The plow." He set his cup on the sill with a scoff. "They’ll shove a berm up behind everybody's bumper and calls it a day. Last February Miss Edna couldn't get her car out for a week!"

"She didn’t have anywhere she needed to go, Dave."

"She had dialysis."

"And her granddaughter took her to that appointment. You watched them while you stood in that same window and drank your coffee from that exact same mug, just like you always do."

He drank his coffee standing up, which she had quit remarking on sometime around the second Bush administration. Out in the lot the snow came down heavy and wet, the kind that bent the pines over the dumpster corral.

Channel 45 had been calling it ‘Snowpocalypse” since Thursday, cutting to reporters standing in empty parking lots, and Frederick County had closed the schools before flake one had even flown.

"It isn't even that cold out," he said. "This is nothing. We drove to your sister's in the blizzard of '96. Now that was snow."

"You were barely thirty years old in '96."

"And today I'm sixty, Dor. Not eighty."

He went through the coat closet twice. "Where'd my good gloves get to?"

"Wherever you left them."

"I left them in the coat. They're not in the coat."

"Then that's not where you left them, now is it?"

He dug the thin brown pair out of his work jacket. Cheap fleece from the Royal Farms, bought for pumping gas, not for working.

Dorothy dried her hands on the dish towel.

"There's coffee on yet," she said. "Do the car then come and warm up. The walkway can wait for the HOA contractor – that's what we pay them for."

"Twenty minutes."

"Don't come crying to me when your back goes out then, David!"

He didn't answer that one. He never did. He pulled his boots on at the door, took the shovel from behind it, and went out past the radiator where his good gloves lay drying, palms up, where she had set them the night before.

Nobody else was out yet, and that suited him. The lot lay smooth, every car its own drift of snow, and the flakes came down as fat as communion wafers. David set the blade at the bottom of the stairs and pushed.

There was a right way to do this. You kept your lines straight, you took less on the blade than you wanted to, and you let the legs do the work. He cut three clean passes from the stairs to the Buick and stood a minute in his own breath, pleased with them. Then he started on the car. The wet snow folded off the windshield in slabs, and he worked the brush in long strokes, roof to hood, and the Buick came up navy blue out of all that white like a barge out of the fog.

Then, without warning, his left arm went heavy on him. He shook it out and blamed the cold and the cheap gloves before heaving another chunk of snow off the Buick.

The driver's side was cleared to the paint. He laid the brush on the hood and was reaching across for the far wiper when the world went sideways. The shovel stayed upright in the drift where he had planted it. The ground came up slow, as if the world were tilting under him. The snow was pressed against his cheek but it felt warmer than he would have figured. Somewhere a woman was screaming. But it wasn’t Dorothy.

* * *

I was doing the breakfast dishes when the scraping stopped. You live with a man forty-one years and you kinda quit hearing him. Instead, you hear when he’s absent. That shovel had come through the window glass steady as a clock since half past seven. Push. Scape. Push. Scrape. I had the radio low and the water running, and when it stopped I thought, good, he's taking a breather. He'll be up directly, stamping in the hall, wanting his coffee and his told-you-so. I rinsed the cups. I set them in the drying rack. I was pleased that he was stopping.

The scream came from the parking lot. A woman's, not his.

I went out in my housecoat and slippers to see what the scream was about. The snow came in over tops of my slippers and packed against my ankles, and some fussy housekeeper’s voice in me – the one that never shuts up – said these would be ruined now, soaked clean through. I heard that voice as if it were the radio. Then I came around the tail of the Buick and saw him.

He lay on his back between our car and the Hendersons', one arm flung out, and the snow was still coming down onto his open coat. Donna from Building B knelt over him with her phone flat against her ear, shouting our address into it, getting the building letter wrong and correcting herself, and the Hartman boy from the second floor was already pressing on his chest with both hands, counting his compressions out loud, and I stood there in the falling snow and could not put together why nobody was helping David up.

“Come on, Dave, your coffee is getting cold,” I had said. “And put your hat on before you catch a cold!”

His hat had come off. That was what I couldn't stand. Sixty years old and lying bareheaded in the snow while it fell on him. I got down on my knees at his head and put my hands over his ears as though the cold were the emergency. He looked like a man asleep on the sofa at halftime, and I kept saying his name in the voice I use when the phone rings during his nap. “David. David, honey. They're here. Get up.”

He had the brown fleece gloves on. Two dollars and change at the Royal Farms, thin as socks. His good gloves, the deer-hide pair the kids gave him, lay on the radiator by our door, where I had set them the night before to dry. He'd worn them out to the mailbox in the wet and left them balled in his coat pocket, and I'd found them and laid them out flat, palms up, and never said a word about it. He went through that closet twice this morning, hollering where'd they get to, and I stood at the sink with my back to him and said wherever you left them. Forty-one years married and I couldn't give him that.

The Hartman boy counted. One – Two – Three – Four – Five. Breathe.

Donna prayed into her phone. Far off toward 340 a siren started up, and I knew it at once for the volunteer company, coming up from the firehouse where David had called bingo numbers every third Friday for the past eleven years. A rib snapped under the boy's hands. He flinched and looked up at me as he kept pressing on David’s chest. God bless that child. He kept on, and I told him he was doing fine. Somebody's mother should tell him so.

The ambulance turned into the lot with chains ringing on its tires. Then there were four of them around my David with their hands moving fast. Scissors went up the front of his shirt, the paddles, the air bag over his face. They worked on him a long time right there in the snow. Longer, I think, than they believed in, because I was standing over them in a housecoat. A woman kept trying to put a blanket around my shoulders. I don't know who.

At 8:47 a young man with snow in his beard stood up from beside my husband and looked at me.

“I’m sorry, ma’am. He’s gone.”

The words were already in his eyes before his mouth spoke them. He was kind about it. They must practice it. I remember nodding as if he'd told me the road was closed.

The Buick sat half cleared off. Where the driver's side had been clean to the navy paint, new snow was forming an additional layer. The passenger side still carrying its portion of the drift, and David’s brush lay on the hood, right where he'd laid it to before reaching across. The shovel stood upright in the snowbank where he had planted it, the handle leaning a little, like a spade left in a garden. Where they had worked on him the snow was stamped down flat and gray, printed all over with boot soles and knee marks, and a syringe cap sat in the middle of it, bright orange. Nobody had bothered to pick it up.

Neighbors stood in their doorways up and down the building, storm doors held half open, and I could feel them wanting to come to me and not knowing how, and I was grateful to every one of them for staying put.

The van from the medical examiner's came at half past ten. The roads had held it up that long, and I passed the time bargaining. I am not proud of the form the bargaining took. I did not offer God my church attendance or my remaining years.

I stood in the snow and said to Him, let this be Tuesday again. Let him come home. Let me have my David, and he can clear the car from now until ninety. I will zip his coat at the door. I will hand him his good gloves off the radiator. I will never say one word about his back, and I will wave from the window like the young bride he married. That was my prayer, if it was a prayer at all.

Two men in dark coats placed him on a gurney with a burgundy cover over him. They were gentle and slow with it. The wheels cut two thin ruts in the fresh fallen snow.

They asked was there somebody they could call. They asked if there was someone else at home.

“My sister is coming from Hagerstown.” Donna had called her for me. They closed the doors on the back of the van softly, one after the other, the second man holding his so it wouldn't slam.

The van idled a minute while the driver wiped his windshield. Then the van pulled out, slow, in low gear, and its tires packed the snow down with a crunch under the tires.

I stood where I was and watched. The taillights came up red at the mouth of the lot, and the glow spread over the fresh snow turning it pink, then red as the driver applied the brakes before turning. The van eased onto the county road as it turned East and I watched David leave for the last time.