Let it Snow.

Paul Hina.

The characters and events in this book are fict.i.tious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

I. Clouds.

Annie's sitting on the half-made bed in her and Eric's bedroom. The winter sun is reflecting off the snow on the ground outside, making the light that shines through their bedroom window all the more severe. She stares out into that great, bright whiteness, tries hard to keep her thoughts from Max, tries to erase how sick inside she is for him.

She told herself that she wouldn't react this way, that his coming back home would have little effect on her. But it's been almost ten years since she last saw him, and, as those years acc.u.mulated, she had taught herself to think of him less often. And, over time, he seemed to become more distant, more faded in her memory. His life, to her, had become something lived in the past, rather than a thing presently living. It helped that he lived so far away, and the benefit of this geographical distance between them was that it acted as a safe buffer between their lives. She was able to push him far away because he was far away.

At first, after they separated, she couldn't get him out of her mind. His absence from her life was ever-present. She was constantly aware that she was missing something, that the part of her that he used to fill up was empty. There was something pure and true that he used to give her that she hungered for after he was gone. And there was a time where that emptiness only seemed to grow, and she wondered if it might eventually hollow her out completely.

But those thoughts, those holes were eventually filled by time, and the forgetfulness that time offers. And, at some point, thinking of him went from something she did every second to merely every hour. Then every hour eventually became everyday, or just once in awhile.

She can't say she's ever been rid of him completely, but she's kept the emotional noise of him quiet enough to build a life without him.

But when Eric told her that Max was coming home, that hole inside her, that hunger she had hidden, began to stir. Pangs that she hadn't known in years became familiar to her again. Memories woke up and bent out in front of her. These memories grew fantasies. And, though she's happy with her life, she's not happy enough that these sorts of fantasies don't coax her into dangerous places.

Still, she knew that she would have to deal with Max at some point. He wasn't going to stay away forever. But she'd hoped that the effect of all that time without him would better prepare her to deal with his coming home again. But that's not how it's playing out.

Max has been back for three days, looming just down the road at his childhood home. He's hardly escaped her thoughts at any point over these past few days, even at night, even while sleeping. She just can't push him away. Mercifully, though, she's been able to avoid him. Eric, too, had successfully avoided him. She could tell he was putting the inevitable visit off until the last minute. It's not as if Eric didn't want to see his brother. He did. It's just been so long since they'd shared even a single word that the weight of uncertainty was something to dread. But the time had come, and he's over at his parents' house visiting Max now. Then, tomorrow, Max will be off again, and Annie will be free to return to her life without him, without the nearness of him following her wherever she goes.

But, even with all the turmoil his arrival has brought to Annie, she's happy that Eric has been able to see his brother again. Their fraternal relationship seemed irreparable after she and Eric were married. And Eric has been riddled by guilt, and confusion, ever since. He never quite understood the extent of Annie and Max's relationship. There was much she hadn't told him, and, even if she had told him, it's impossible to properly convey the weight of love.

It's interesting that Eric didn't ask her to come with him today. It wasn't just that he didn't ask. He almost acted as if he were hiding something from her. He only told her about the visit at the last minute, and treated it very casually, as if it weren't a big deal that he was going to see his younger brother for the first time in nearly a decade. Maybe Max had specifically requested that she not come. Or, perhaps, Eric just thought it was best to keep things simple.

And it's still a complex situationa"at least it is to Annie.

If Max's return has shown her anything, it's that she's still capable of a level of emotional complexity she thought she'd lost, or misremembered. For days she's been feeling some mysterious combination of hope and fear, a confused feeling that might only be remedied by seeing him again. But she's successfully avoided the emotional clarity of Max for too long to muddle things with his presence now.

She's become frightened by the intensity of her desire to keep these new emotions awake inside her, desperate to prolong this sense of reverie, clinging to the whimsy and the terror that Max's arrival has brought to her.

She startles at the sound of the jolt and pull of the garage door.

Eric is home.

She gets up from the bed and starts tugging the sheet taut over her side of the mattress, going through the motions of being busy, which is what she should've been doing this whole time. Keeping busy would've been one way to keep her thoughts from Max. But, then again, nothing else she's done these past several days has successfully kept him from her.

She wonders what he looks like now, all this time later. How much has he changed?

How much has she changed?

She can hear Eric come in the house through the garage. She shakes herself from thoughts of Max and tucks the corner of the sheet under the foot of the mattress.

"I thought you already made the bed," Eric says, as he enters the bedroom.

"I did, but I laid down for a minute after you left."

"You feeling alright?"

"Yeah, just a little tired."

"Well, I wouldn't worry about it. I doubt anyone will be coming in here tonight anyway," he says, walking over to the closet by the window. The severe light from outside shines its white spotlight on him.

"No, probably not," she says, smoothing the wrinkles from the sheet with a practiced hand. "How was your brother?"

"Fine. He seemed in good spirits," he says. He places his coat in the closet, and moves toward the other side of the bed. "I hope you don't mind, but I asked him for dinner."

"What?" she asks, her hands frozen, clutching at their comforter.

"I asked him to come to the dinner party."

"Tonight?"

"Are we having a dinner party another night I don't know about?"

"Why did you do that, Eric?" she asks, moving on with her bed making, trying hard to ignore the panic that's rising up inside her, trying to steady the dizziness that's suddenly filled her head.

"We were getting on so well, and it's been so long since I'd seen him, and I had to leave to make it back for the party, and I just thoughta""

"You just thought that we could add another chair to the table, that we'd have enough food fora""

"Two chairs. He's bringing someone. Stacy's her name, I think."

As if it weren't bad enough to find out that Max was coming to their house, now Annie has to see him with another woman. In all her fantasies, he's still alone, living a tortured life without her, pining for their old days together. She pulls the comforter over the edge of the bed, leaves the wrinkles. She sits, or, rather, allows herself to fall on the bed.

"You sure you're alright?" Eric asks.

"You couldn't have called first to ask if I was alright with this?"

"Honestly, I didn't think it would be a big deal. You're the one who's always telling me to try harder to reach out to Max."

"And you did. You saw him, and that's good, buta""

"Our table sits eight, Annie. And I helped you pick up the food. Remember? There's plenty."

"That's not it."

"What then?"

"It's been a long time since I've seen him too. I would've liked a little consideration."

"I'm sorry. I guess I just didn't think about it. It's been so long, I just thoughta""

"No, it's fine."

"If you want, I can call him. Tell him that something came up."

"No, you can't do that. He'd know it was me thata" she starts to say, but trails off and stares out the window again. The sun is just beginning to set, and its light is so bright that it makes it hard to keep her eyes open, but she's afraid if she closes thema No. She's not going to let herself cry.

There's nothing left for her to say. What's done is done. He'll be here soon. In their house. Sitting at their dining room table. He'll look at her, see all those emotions she's been hiding.

"Well, I've got a couple things to finish up beforea"

"Me too," she says, only half-aware that she's speaking.

"You going to be okay?"

"Yeah, I justa You knowa The party. That's all. Just a lot of stuff to think about. All the little details."

"Right. Well, I'm going to go anda" he says, and leaves the bedroom.

"Okay," she says, not looking at him, not even quite aware that he's gone.

Eric moves down the hall to the kitchen. He reaches into an overhead cabinet and grabs two plates, opens a drawer and shuffles through the silver until he finds what he needs. He adds the new plates and silver to the stack of plates and silver he had set out on the counter earlier today, and takes everything to the dining room. He sets the stack on the table. Then he slides the two chairs on each side of the table over enough to make room for the two added guestsa"one more on either side of the table. He grabs the napkins from the sideboard in front of the window, and lays each one in its proper spot. Then he moves the two stray chairs that bookend the sideboard, and squeezes them into their new places on either side of the table. There. That makes eight. Not so hard.

Of course, he knows that Annie's problem with Max coming for dinner has very little to do with how many guests they can fit comfortably at their table, or how much food they have to serve.

For years, he's been aware of the torch she still carries for Max. In the beginning, before they were married, he didn't see it manifest itself as much in her behavior, even unconsciously. The emotional tellsa"her verbal tics, or nervous body languagea"that she exhibits now were nonexistent in those budding stages of their romance. Eric likes to believe that the seeming absence of her desire for Max was because she was as caught up as he was in the joy of their relationship's beginning. But, after they were married, he would notice far off looks in her eyes when someone would mention Max, and it became hard to ignore her self-consciousness, the utter vulnerability written on her face, the shaking in her voice, on the rare occasions she would summon the courage to ask Eric's parents about Max.

Then again, some of this could just as well be due to Eric's insecurities about Annie and Max's history, a history still largely hidden from him.

But it's clear that things weren't as good between Eric and Annie after they were married. There's no question that there is still love between them. Even he's not self-delusional enough to invent the genuine warmth they have for one another. And, besides, it's not as if this calming of pa.s.sions is an outlier when it comes to marriages. As Eric gets older, and meets more married couples, it actually seems quite natural. Many couples seem to settle into something less pa.s.sionate once they are comfortably together, once the pressure's off to win one's lover over. Still, his main objective has always been to make Annie happy. That's all he's ever wanted. But he fears he's not been particularly successful at it.

There are things, concrete things, that his insecurities won't explain away. Years ago, on one of the rare occasions that he found himself putting away some of Annie's laundry, he discovered a large manila envelope full of old photographs of her and Max. The envelope was clearly not meant to be found. It was hidden under some of her delicates at the very back of the drawer. Also, mixed in with the photos, was a stack of notes and letters, and several of them appeared to be written to Max after her and Eric had been married. He a.s.sumed from the little that he reada"before the guilt of violating her privacy made him stopa"that these letters weren't simply early drafts of more polished letters that were later sent, but that these letters were written for Max but addressed to n.o.body. These were letters never sent, probably never even intended for sending. But, instead, Annie was writing out something she desperately needed to say, an outward articulation of feelings that she was tired of composing in her head.

As for the photos, it's not necessarily a bad thing to keep old pictures from past relationships. Even Eric has kept pictures of girls from his college days. But he keeps them out in the open, not hidden away beneath his underwear at the back of a drawer. Eric's always felt that the only reason a person hides something personal is because they've got something personal to hide. In other words, the hidden object isn't nearly as expressive as the reason why it was hidden.

Eric begins placing the silver down at all the place settings, and he's starting to get the nervous feeling that this dinner party has now become much more complicated than it seemed only a few hours ago. Maybe he did make a mistake in inviting Max. It was an impulsive invitation, one that, all of a sudden, he feels he shouldn't have offered. And to see Annie's reaction after he told her that Max was cominga"the fall in her face, the startles in her eyesa"was even worse than he feared it might be.

But they had to face the situation of Max eventually. It just so happened that Max had made the decision for them. He was the one who decided to come to town for the holidaysa"the first time he had been home since the spring before Eric met Annie. And Eric saw Max's coming back as a kind of olive branch. To Eric, it meant, ready or not, the time had come to try and move beyond their near-decade cold war.

So, this afternoon, Eric went to his parents to see his brother for the first time in over nine years. And he went without Annie. He needed to tread lightly. If Max still harbored bad feelings about Eric and Annie's marriage, Eric didn't want to risk making it worse.

But things were fine. And whenever Eric mentioned Anniea"testing Max's reactiona"Max didn't show any sign of hurt. And, overall, it was nice talking to his brother again.

For Eric, the joy of the past nine years with Annie has always been overshadowed by the guilt he felt. The mere idea that he had somehow betrayed his brother has always cast a shadow over Eric. It's true that Max and Annie were a couple for several years before they entered university, but, when Eric met Annie, she had graduated college. Eric was fresh out of graduate school, and was preparing to teach his first ethics course at the university. He just a.s.sumed that she had left any of her youthful entanglements in the past, and that her and Max's relationship was nothing more than the kind of harmless high school thing that one remembers with fondness, but not regret. He was wrong. What Max and Annie had was much deeper than Eric knew. But it wasn't until after he had fallen in love with Annie that the truth of her and Max's relationship started to become apparent to him.

Still, after seeing his brother today, and feeling some of that guilt unclench from around his heart, Eric hoped that if Max came for dinner, Annie might finally be able to loosen her grip on the past. Eric has this idea that she only holds onto his brother because, to her, Max is trapped in the amber of her memories, and that Max still represents something youthful in her. Maybe Max helps her hold onto that hope and vitality we all possess when we're young and the future sits like a black page in front of us.

Maybe if she sees that the years have pa.s.sed for Max in the same way that they have pa.s.sed for everyone else, she will accept that those years have changed him as much as they've changed her. And maybe seeing these changes will start her along the process of accepting that the chances that he's still, even remotely, the same person she remembers are as unlikely as her being the same person he remembers. Then, Eric hopes, she can embrace the years to come as she is and not as she was, and that she'll no longer have a ready excuse to cling to that past.

The doorbell rings and startles Eric. He looks outside the dining room's picture window and sees Michael's car in the driveway. He checks his watch. It's just after five-thirty. He's twenty-five minutes early.

Eric moves to the hallway, sees Michael's silhouette obscured by the frosted gla.s.s on the front door.

"Who's that?" Annie calls from the bedroom.

"It's Michael," he says, trying to stay quiet enough so that Michael won't hear him from outside.

"Well, you're going to have to entertain him for a minute while I finish getting ready."

Eric moves to the front door, takes a breath. "Michael," he says, opening the door. "Come on in."

"I'm early, I know. I hope you don't mind."

"No. No big deal," Eric says as he leads Michael to the living room. "Have a seat."

"Good," Michael says, sounding genuinely relieved. "I'm the first one here."

"Well, that's generally what happens when you show up early."

"You're upset that I've come early."

"No. Not really. It's only a few minutes."

"Right, I make a rule to always show up to these kinds of things early."

"Why's that?"

"I've always hated walking into a gathering like a dinner party after other guests have arrived. All of a sudden you're thrust into the center of everyone's attention, and since you've probably entered in the middle of some conversation, the room probably falls silent. Then, inevitably, awkward, obligatory introductions are made, and only the silence is left as everyone tries to think of something to say. Then you're stuck trying to deftly adapt to this new hyper-conscious social environment. Unless, of course, someone particularly good at breaking those social awkwardnesses tries to follow up on the introduction with a quick question about you, which only thrusts you further into the room's attention. Anyway you look at it, for someone like me, it's uncomfortable."

"I suppose you're right," Eric says, as if he understands. He's used to these kinds of silly histrionics from Michael. They've known each other for long enough now that almost nothing Michael says surprises him.

When Michael first came to the university, he was teaching in the philosophy department with Eric. They had adjoining offices and quickly became friendly with one another, more because of their proximity than their commonality. But then the religious studies program, where Michael worked, broke free from the philosophy department. It started its own department in a new building, and Michael's office moved with it. But they remained friends. In fact, as far as Eric can tell, he is one of Michael's only friends.

Michael has a tendency to rub people the wrong way. Mostly, it's because he's too honest. Michael doesn't like to conform to the traditional social standards that a.s.sume that it's our duty to make everyone comfortable. So, there's no social filter with Michael. Eric is pretty sure that this lack of concern for people's comfort stems mostly from the fact that Michael is rarely comfortable in any social setting. And, so, he doesn't understand how anyone can be made uncomfortable in a setting that is innately uncomfortable from the start.

In the past, Eric has always respected this trait in Michael, though it certainly has made for some uncomfortable situations. It's because of some of those past discomforts that Eric has been nervous about having him over to attend a dinner party. But Michael has been asking Eric and Annie to fix him up with their friend, and Eric's a.s.sistant, Holly, for months. And Eric and Annie decided that it was finally time to try and get them together. Annie thought it might be best to set them up in a dinner party environment. This way, Holly would not be fully exposed to Michael's conversation unfettered by other social constraintsa"not that Michael is good at honoring these constraints, but he isn't altogether oblivious to them either. It's not as if Holly doesn't already know something about Michael. He's around their office quite often, usually showing up early for their biweekly lunches so that he can spend extra time waiting for Eric by Holly's desk, chatting her up. For a long time, he was like an awkward teenager around her, stammering over disparate points of conversation, trying to figure out the right things to say to her. But, lately, they've developed a nice rapport. And it's been interesting seeing Michael, a usually fairly aggressive personality, being so vulnerable around her. It's been endearing. Seeing this side of Michael has humanized him in a way that has made Eric like him more.

Still, Eric's not so sure that being at a dinner party will do anything to suppress Michael's foibles. Eric's not sure that anything could stifle Michael's foibles.

"How about some music?" Eric asks.

"That'd be nice."

"Jazz alright?"

"What period are we talking about?"