The Invisibles

Whiteout

57 whiteout— Now the snow poured down so Mason only glimpsed the road between wiper flaps. On the windows the snow built to ridges and fell away, and when he looked out seeking a familiar glimpse of flat, snowbound farmland, there were only individual flakes whipped out of a slurry of descending whiteness. He’d been alone on the road for almost an hour, a privacy he’d used to cry about Wendy at first, though the grief had passed, giving way to a feeling of giddy excitement. He was going home for the first time in thirteen years. The freeway was closed, and there had been no patrol cars since the announcement, back before the radio voices turned mushy. He doubted he would see one before he reached Mansfield. It was Christmas Eve, and the slashed state budget meant fewer cops all over. A deejay had described the storm stretching from the Canadian Rockies to the Appalachians, dumping snow on central Ohio until tomorrow afternoon, delivering more white than anyone wanted for Christmas. Mason had laughed. Like a snow globe, the pun contained the entire Midwest. He opened the ashtray and got out the baggie of crushed cocaine. He had it tied off with a twister around a red cocktail straw for easy access while driving, and he took a snort, never taking his eyes from the vanishing and reappearing road, careful to miss nothing. It was four o’clock and growing dark. In his parents’ house the furnace bellowed in the basement. His older brother was opening dessert wine and his mother dusting the cookies with powdered 58 — whiteout sugar while his father stood by the tree at the living-room window, gazing out on the weather with the military sternness that was his mainmast. That was how it had been thirteen years ago when Mason returned from college at about this hour. He had come in lugging a bag of dirty laundry, prepared to deliver a rehearsed speech about how he’d failed out his first semester. He was not ready to see his mother so happy, wiping her hands on her apron so she could take him by the ears and kiss his forehead and cheeks, or Leonard waiting behind her with a second glass of port, or his father drifting in, a smile breaking through his solemn features . All that week Mason was unable to tell them, and afterward he’d driven back to school and worked in the tire shop, avoiding their calls until he found a job at a resort in Kentucky and started making his way south. No doubt they came looking for him, found the empty apartment they’d been renting. He might have been in Memphis then. It was hard to say, it was so long ago he felt more embarrassment now than guilt—he had been a boy then. Eventually he’d reached New Orleans and called that home, though these last few years, when he was feeling especially rotten and desolate, he’d taken to monitoring his family on the Internet. He thought about calling sometimes, but it felt like a lame gesture, and he was more interested in them, anyway, than in telling the story he sensed they’d want to hear about him. Tracking them was easy, given his brother’s tendency to post family news on his blog, even though no one posted comments save for the occasional fat cousin from Michigan whom nobody saw. Mason had been watching them for some time now. He knew all about them, felt as if their lives had been restricted to a small compartment of his consciousness. Sometimes he felt he might be connected to them in a way modern science couldn’t explain. He knew details, his father’s heart congestion, his mother’s struggle with her bone density. He knew Leonard had lucked into a mana- whiteout — 59 gerial position at Toyota and was seeing a woman who had a little girl. He had seen pictures online—the woman, Tanya, was good looking,surprisingly so,given Leonard’s characteristic dullness and expanding paunch, and the daughter, a blonde child with gapped front teeth, was exceptionally cute. He felt he knew Tanya and her daughter intimately, though he’d never met them, and though people in his hometown frowned on mystical thinking, he sensed that if he kept his mouth shut when he met them...