The goal, as always: No looking back; just write.
***
The streets of North Center felt more like snowy pathways, the buildings, even when close up to the streets, felt murky and distant, separated by the fog of the gently falling snow. The storm felt anything but stormy — instead, it struck an intimacy to the moment that took Sherry by surprise. She gave a sideways glance at Walt, who looked lost in memories of the last time he had been here. What, that must have been twenty, twenty-five years ago? She looked down at Arden, nestled between Walt and her, and could see the girl looking around, taking it all in, but lost in the exhaustion of the trip. The adrenaline of the sled ride was falling away from Arden, and her eyes were becoming heavy. Sherry could sense the girl simply giving up taking in any more of this adventure, deciding that she was saturated enough with the experience, and closing her eyes and laying her head against Walt’s arm, resigning herself to whatever was going to happen next. She looked warm and protected. They all looked that way, in the back of this funny but roomy vehicle, moving through the quiet, mostly dark streets with dark shop fronts, and the occasional second-floor golden light emanating from the window.
Sherry discovered herself smiling, and then was equally surprised to realize how little happiness she had felt since Lu Ellen’s death. The fact that she could look out on all this snow and cold and feel this calm was confusing to her. She had lived in cold climates most of her life, but winter, and those frozen, isolating months of January and February, were always the hardest for her, were always her greatest struggle of the year, the hardest times for her to keep her head up, to keep a happy outlook for her and Arden. But here in North Center she was suddenly struck with a happiness lifted on the drifts they drove past, cleansed by the pure white flakes falling at a steady pace. Walt had hinted at qualities that North Center had that were, well, almost magical, and she had dismissed the comments at the time as a sentimentality (admittedly an unusual quality for Walt to express) for his childhood home. But now that she was in the middle of it, she wondered if there wasn’t something more at work, something that actually cleansed the spirit and gave one hope to face the elements of days here. Considering the work that went on here, something needed to help the citizens of North Center get out of bed every day. Sherry knew that Chicago often had no such qualities — that if it weren’t for the sound of Arden’s feet padding across the wood floors of their apartment, the gentle nuzzle of that little face in her neck, that she might never rise from bed and face the day. And while she would never want to give that up, she wondered if there might be less need for it in North Center, if this hopefulness that she felt despite the utter exhaustion of the thousands of miles they had traveled in the last three days, was something consistent, permanent, in this snowy Shangri La.
The snow limo was moving away from that area that had resembled a business district. The old-fashioned street lights, which provided little illumination but some lovely character to those dark shop-filled streets, had stopped appearing along the side of the road. They were clearly passing through a residential neighborhood, where again, the only light came from the occasional upstairs bedroom. Sherry was reminded of trips on Amtrak between Chicago and Detroit, before Arden was born, when she was trying to maintain a doomed relationship with a man eight years her junior. He had left Chicago for an engineering job with a car company, and every two weeks she would board the Detroit Limited and snake through the backyards of the midwest while passengers around her read, snored, stared. Those houses looked to be resting, the glow of televisions appearing to be the “stand-by” lights, waiting for its occupants to rise in the morning and re-start the home, taking it out of its recharging mode. Here in North Center, it felt the same, only she wasn’t seeing television glows. Here, the houses, nondescript modern silhouettes with snowy roofs and perfect snow-capped hedges in the front, had no television glow. It was simply the warmth of lamps. Some of them, she thought, seemed to flicker, almost like oil lamps, adding to the sense that she had entered another much less modern time.
And then suddenly, as if passing through a curtain into another room, the suburb ceased, and there was nothing around but snow, as far as the eye could see, which was not far at all. No buildings loomed in the moonless light of the snow. Almost immediately, the flat ground they had been traveling over began to lean up into a gentle grade, and the road ahead, barely visible in the snow limo’s strong headlights already, began to bend to the right. She sensed they were beginning to climb a mountain of some sort. As they continued along the side of the incline, trees became more prevalent, tall evergreens, filled with the snow that had been falling but not looking any heavier for their burden, Though the night was already moonless, it suddenly felt darker. She glanced at Walt again, and now he looked less at ease, as if the transition from city to woods made him realize where they were going, perhaps how close they were to their destination. She had no idea how much further they had to go, but she felt like if she studied his face she wouldn’t need to ask — every mile closer to Shelsandra they came, the more dark his face was cast. The trees cut off the natural light that the snow provided, but the bright dashboard from the front seat of the snow limo still provided enough light for her to be able to see Walt. She had imagined over the course of this trip that he had spent the travel time steeling himself for the moment that now approached, for facing the man he had been trying to escape for so many years. She admired his courage when he had finally decided to take this step, to face the fears he had run from for twenty years. But now she wasn’t sure if any amount of “preparation” would have helped him get ready for crossing the threshold of his childhood home.
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