Free As Simple as Snow by Gregory Galloway Page A

were there every time I was at their house. And I always saw her eating it. She would never take more than one piece of candy out of a bowl, but when you have twenty bowls of stuff lying around, that adds up. And Mrs. Cayne always said the same thing: “I can’t eat any of it. Help yourself.”
    I left Mrs. Cayne and her candy and went with Anna to her room. She closed the door and cleared a space on the floor for us to sit, pushing books and discs and papers into a heap under her desk. She dug around in a pile of discs and pulled out one with a dark cover, and white lines forming jagged mountains on the black. It looked like a cross between an X ray and a topographic map. “This was my dad’s favorite band, when he was in college,” she said, and put the CD in the player. She turned on her computer and showed me some fan sites. “The lead singer killed himself two days before they were starting their U.S. tour.”
    “It sounds like it,” I said.
    She gave me a disapproving look and moved on, jumping from site to site, subject to subject. We moved from the band to the city of Manchester to a site about London. “Have you ever been?” she asked.
    “No. I haven’t been anywhere.”
    “There’s nothing wrong with here.”
    “Are you serious?”
    “Sure. This is fine by me. You might want to try and see the world someday, though.”
    “And where have you been?”
    “I’ve been lurking around in the dark,” she said, “waiting for you.”
    She ejected the disc and fished around for another. The cover was a black-and-white photograph of an antenna and wires. “My dad just played this for me yesterday,” she said.
    It wasn’t music. People were reciting numbers in foreign languages, over and over, often barely discernible behind the static. A horn or a buzzer went off every few seconds. There were four discs of the stuff, recordings of radio broadcasts.
    “What is it?”
    “Nobody knows,” she said. “It’s been going on a long time, for more than twenty years. Some people think that they’re coded messages, used by spies, the CIA, KGB, stuff like that.”
    There was a knock on the door. I quickly got off the bed. It was her father.
    “Please keep the door open,” he said. He looked at the stereo. “What do you think of this?”
    “It’s weird,” I told him.
    “Have you ever heard anything like it?”
    “No.”
    “Are you staying for dinner?”
    I looked at Anna and she nodded at me to accept. I did. “I just need to call my mom,” I said.
    “Well, after dinner, let’s go listen to some more of this,” he said. “But on the radio.”
     
     
     
    Mrs. Cayne was dressed in a princess costume when we came to sit at the table. She had her hair pulled back so that she could fit her funnel-shaped hat on her head, and I noticed for the only time a resemblance between her and her daughter.
    “What does your mother do for Halloween?” Mrs. Cayne asked me.
    “She likes to bake.” This wasn’t entirely a lie. My mother bought the cookie dough that comes in a tube, and all you do is crack it open, separate the pieces, and put them on a cookie sheet and then into the oven. She would take the fresh-baked cookies and go sit in the dark. When I used to dress up and go trick-or-treating, my mother would have a spread of candy. Actually, it was a well-ordered regiment. She would arrange the candy in neat, precise rows, and then re-sort and rearrange the rows as she handed out the candy. It was maddening to watch this compulsion, which demonstrated an organization and ardor she failed to exhibit anywhere else. This woman who couldn’t file or answer a phone properly could arrange candy in rows on the hall table, alphabetically or by size or according to who knows what exact system, and then dispense the candy in a logic and method known only to her, but in an obviously even way, updating the rows so that they kept their structural integrity. How was that possible?
    Once I had stopped dressing up in a