Snowstorm Lamp Glow

It took less than two minutes for Angela to appear on my doorstep after I got home Saturday night. I hadn’t even texted her to tell her I was back yet. Somehow she just knew. I’d only had time to drop my suitcase next to the kitchen table and read the note Noah had left for me there - went to the bars with Chris, catch you later - before her signature four-knock rapping echoed out. When I opened the door she was standing under the awning in running shorts and a thin pink V-neck.

            “Jesus, Ange, aren’t you cold? It’s November.”

            “How was it? How are you?”

She stepped forward and wrapped her arms around me, resting her head against my chest. I hugged her back and set my chin on her glossy black hair, gazing at a flickering street light.

“I’m good. It was a nice service.” I didn’t know what else to say about it. “You should come in. It’s freezing.”

As we shuffled inside I turned on the floor lamp next to the kitchen table. Our apartment was small and all the rooms sort of flowed together, so when Angela took two steps to the left she was in the kitchen. She began opening cabinets, bouncing on her toes to reach the ones above the stove. “Where are Noah and Chris tonight?”

“Out drinking, I guess.” I tapped the note on the table. “What are you looking for?”

“I’m making us hot chocolate.” She pulled two packets of Swiss Miss down from the cabinet, which I’m pretty sure were hers anyway. Somehow she seemed to provide more of our groceries than any of the three of us did. “So how’s your grandpa holding up?”

            “Decent, I think. He doesn’t show much.”

            “That’s understandable. And you’re sure you’re alright?”

            “Yeah. We’ve been expecting it for a while. My mom says it’s sort of a relief, really. I’ve just never experienced it before, you know?”

            “I don’t think it’s something you ever get used to.”

            “Probably not.” I moved past the table into our living room, where two couches positioned in an L-shape faced Chris’s huge TV in the corner. “Listen Ange, I’m pretty drained. I think I’m just going to watch football for a while and call it a night.”

            “I can go when I finish these if you want.”

            “No, you don’t have to. I’m just saying. Actually, would you mind staying?”

            We watched the Arkansas-Ole Miss game. It was already in the third quarter when I flipped it on. Neither team had any significance to us but there was something soothing in just sitting there with Angela, the sound washing over us.

            Noah and Chris stumbled in around 11:30. I was surprised to see them so drunk so early in the night. Chris patted my shoulders and told me he was glad I was back before charging upstairs to his room. Angela rubbed my back before going back to her apartment next door. Noah followed her out like a puppy. Everything was quiet again and I watched Ole Miss kick a field goal, sending the game into overtime.

-

            I first met Angela in early August when I broke her desk lamp. Chris and I were moving into our new apartment, as was everyone else living in the complex for the year. We were in Norman, and in typical Midwest fashion the temperature was a sultry 101. It was hot and hectic and my only concern was making as few trips as possible from my truck to the apartment, so I piled four misshapen cardboard boxes on top of each other until I couldn’t see over the stack.

            When my feet plowed into the curb in front of our apartment, I tumbled forward, dropping the boxes. They all fell open along the sidewalk, but I broke my fall by running into something else. Of course, that something else happened to be Angela. She fell forward in front of me, and I fell on top of her, and the small red desk lamp she had been carrying shattered into several ceramic chunks on the scorching cement.

            “Oh, God, I’m so sorry,” I said, leaping to my feet and offering her my hand. “I didn’t even see you " ”

            “Don’t worry about it,” she said, taking my hand. I helped her up. There was a thin stream of blood flowing down her leg.

            “S**t, your knee,” I said. “Does it hurt?”

            “Relax, it’s fine. I’m fine.” She looked at the boxes strewn behind me. “Are you moving in here? 3A?”

            “I’m " yeah. 3A. And you’re…?”

            “3B,” she said. “Well, I’m Angela. But 3B.”

            “Drew.” We stared at our conjoined apartments. Each unit was a duplex, A and B. Same floorplan, just flipped. “I’m sorry about your lamp.”

            “It was an old thing anyway. Thrift store find, nothing lost.” She turned around toward the parking lot. “Tell me, is that your truck?”

            I met her gaze. “Yeah. Why?”

            “You don’t think you could do me a huge favor, do you?”

            “Are you kidding? Anything after this mess.”

            On the drive across town Angela told me all about herself. She was starting pharmacy school at Oklahoma after living in Nebraska her entire life. Well, most of her life. She was born in Vietnam but had been adopted before her third birthday. She had three older brothers, all biological children of her adoptive parents. When she told me her mother had passed away just last March, she started to tear up a bit, but quickly brushed the moisture away when her GPS dinged. We got out of the car together.

            There was an old, sky blue house at the end of a cul-de-sac. The old woman standing in the driveway took us into the garage to show us what we had come for " a small floral couch with cream-colored upholstery and curved wooden legs that Angela had found on Craigslist. Twenty bucks. Looked slightly Victorian. We tested it out, pounded out some of the dust buried deep within the cushions, paid the woman, and loaded it into the truck.

            When we got back to 3B I helped Angela carry it all the way up to her room on the second floor. I realized her bedroom shared a wall with mine on the other side in 3A. Her roommates, Laura and Becca, were eating Chinese carryout in the living room when we walked back downstairs. Angela offered to share some with me for my help, so I stayed an extra hour or so hanging out with the three of them. It was close to eight by the time I went back to my apartment.

            “Where have you been all afternoon?” Chris asked. He was standing in the middle of the living room building a flimsy Ikea shelf.

            “I really like our new neighbor.”

-

            I guess it’s only fitting that we got to know Noah because of Craigslist too. Chris and I had had a third roommate lined up, a guy he knew from sand volleyball club. But at the end of July he’d had a family emergency " his dad was diagnosed with cancer, I think " so he transferred to a school back in Maryland to be closer to home. We were really bummed about it, but our lease had started and without a third roommate we were going to be screwed on rent. As the end of August got closer and we got more desperate, I put the place up on Craigslist.

Noah was a senior like me. A transfer from the University of Southern California, he’d lost his track scholarship after injuring his leg mid-season. He wasn’t happy about moving back to Norman and we weren’t happy about having to live with a stranger, so it seemed like a good fit. We did meet him once before making the decision though, and he seemed like a decent enough person. He had thick upper arms and a rigid jawline hidden beneath a layer of light blonde scruff. Long hair that fell to one side when he laughed, which he did a lot. Seemed sort of pompous, but oddly charming. He was one of those people you didn’t really want to like but had to regardless.

            After he moved in in early September, things with Angela just started to come naturally. She came over a lot to hang out with Chris and I, often bringing her roommates too, but as soon as Noah moved in she started popping up on our doorstep alone. Then she started coming over when just Noah was around. She went everywhere for him. I think it started because they had a chemistry class together and it was easy for them to spend time together doing the homework. So I watched from a distance, maintaining a friendliness as they became inseparable.

-

            Chris served me a plate of scrambled eggs when I came downstairs the next morning. He looked a little hungover. I’d apparently left the TV on after the Ole Miss win last night. ESPN was just playing the top 10 plays of the week over and over again.

            “Noah still at Angela’s?” I asked.

            “Uh huh,” he said, melting into the chair across from me at the table. “He’s not back here at least.”

            “You think they’ll ever be more than just a thing?”

            “I doubt it.” Chris laughed, coughing on the orange juice he’d just swallowed. “Especially not after last night.”

            “Why’s that?”

            “We ran into Clare at O’Connell’s. Well, he did. I was at the bar getting another drink and when I came back they were making out in the booth.”

            Clare was one of Noah’s ex-girlfriends. They’d dated off and on all through high school, but drifted apart when he moved to California. Now that he was back they’d started hanging out again, but from what I’d heard from Noah, she wasn’t interested in him anymore.

            “Gross.”

            “If it’s any consolation, they were both really drunk. Hell, so was I.”

            “It makes me so mad he won’t tell Ange he’s still seeing her.”

            “Yeah. Angela likes him though. And he likes her, too. I just think he likes Clare more.”

            I didn’t know what to think. When he came back later that afternoon he asked to borrow my truck to take Angela out for dinner. I almost said no instantly because it had been snowing all day and I didn’t trust him driving it. But I also wanted Angela to be happy, and I knew she’d be so excited to actually be going out with him. So I tossed him my keys and told him to have a good night.

            I heard them talking in her room later when I was lying in bed. It was just muffled noises, lost to me through the barrier of flimsy plaster, but she was laughing a lot. I heard her creaky bedspring and the low roar of a TV, but most of all it was the laughing.

-

            Snow pummeled the entire town the following week. It was unseasonably frigid for the end of November. Everything started to freeze over and the three of us in 3A skipped class on Thursday and Friday because it would have been too much of a hassle trying to get to campus. Besides, it was more fun to spend the days drinking and neglecting end of the semester responsibilities.

            Thursday night Angela texted Noah and told us all to come over. She’d made cider and Noah had three-fourths of a handle of whiskey he needed to get rid of. We’d already been day drinking so we were a little stupefied when Angela poured us each our first glass.

            I was talking with but not listening to Laura and Becca while Noah and Angela discussed something in the kitchen. Their voices were low and Angela’s face was blank, her deep brown eyes vacant hollows. Noah was doing all the talking and Angela stood unmoving as a wall.

            After they joined us we played a couple card games and drank some more. Someone turned Katy Perry up on the stereo. Angela touched my wrist. Other people started to flow into the cramped apartment, which was sort of odd because I didn’t remember anyone inviting them. But they kept coming and I didn’t recognize anyone and before long everyone was moving together and the room felt like it was living and breathing.

            At some point I found myself upstairs in the bathroom adjacent to Angela’s room. Someone who’d been in there had pulled down the shower curtain and my reflection in the mirror seemed like it was moving faster than I was. I really just wanted to get away from everyone downstairs for a while, but it only took a couple seconds for Chris to fling the door open.

            “Dude, get out. I need to piss.”

            “What if I need to?”

            “You don’t, you’re just standing there. Come on.”

            “Fine. I just wanted to chill.”

            “That’s cool, but go do it somewhere else.”

            I shot him an angry glance before moving past him toward the door.

            “Oh, and by the way,” he said, unbuttoning his pants. “You’ve got to stop thinking about Angela.”

            “What are you talking about?”

            “You’ve been gawking at her since we got here. Look, I know you like her and I know it sucks watching Noah, but she’s crazy about him.”

            “Sounds good.” I just wanted to get out of there. Downstairs was somehow getting louder. Maybe I was just feeling more out of it. I ducked into Angela’s room next door and sat down on the floral couch against the wall.

            I hadn’t been gawking at Angela. We’d all been drinking and surely we’d all been looking at everyone else. It bothered me that Noah wasn’t more “crazy” about her. He should’ve been. Or at least told her that he wasn’t.

            I thought about the funeral last weekend and how she just knew I might need someone. She always knew things even when people didn’t talk about them. She was the word yes to me " yes I am here, yes I will help you, yes yes yes.

            Noah came in then muttering something beneath his breath. He walked right past me and over to the sliding glass door leading out to the balcony. He turned on the tall floor lamp in the corner, and the glow it emitted reflected off the pale snowdrifts piling up on the balcony. He was staring straight out the window at the snow and the naked trees. When I tapped my foot on the floor he jumped.

            “God, Drew, I didn’t see you there.”

            “Sorry.”

            “What are you doing up here, man?”

            “Don’t know. Needed a minute to breathe, I guess. You?”

            He pressed his palms against his eyes and exhaled slowly. “That sounds about right.”

            It was silent for a moment. All I could hear was the soft, regular click of the clock on Angela’s desk. I counted out twenty seconds before I opened my mouth again.

            “Why don’t you like her?”

            I thought he was going to look at me, but he kept staring at the snow. “Angela?”

            “Yes.”

            “I do. She’s great.”

            “So?”

            “She’s too good to me. I don’t deserve it.”

            I counted out thirty-five more seconds on the clock.

            “I don’t know, man,” he said. “I can’t stop thinking about Clare, you know? I mean, I really loved her. And Angela matters so much to me. I just really don’t know.”

-

            Inside Noah was a system of giving and taking. Angela was working on chemistry homework in our living room the next week, and he wrote down all her answers while strumming away on his guitar in the corner. The next night he made dinner for her and her roommates in 3B. Shortly after, he called her to pick him up from a bar at nearly one in the morning even though she had already been sleeping for a major exam the next morning. And she did. Yet still every night he stayed over I’d hear laughter through the wall.

            “What do you think of Noah?” she asked me one evening when we were putting up the battered artificial Christmas tree in her living room.

            “I think he tries.”

            “Tries?”

            “He means well. But I think he’s more selfish than anything.”

            She hung a golden bulb on a low branch. It shimmered in the multicolored lights draped among the stiff needles. “I told him he could take my car to Colorado.”

            “What?”

            “Is that crazy?”

            “Kind of. What’s he going to Colorado for?”

            “Some of his friends wanted to go skiing this weekend. Relieve some stress before finals.”

            “Jesus. He asked you to borrow it?”

            “Yeah.”

            “That’s like a nine hour drive.”

            “Yeah.”

-

            I thought going to Colorado right before finals was a really stupid decision, but having Noah gone would give Chris and I some quiet time to study and Angela some time away from him. I definitely wouldn’t have let him take my car, especially with all the snow we’d gotten and how much there was going to be in the mountains. But I was still sort of relieved watching him pack his things into her car Thursday morning.

            Rather, I was relieved until I saw his friends arrive out in the parking lot. They’d carpooled over to the complex. Two of them looked a lot like Noah although I didn’t recognize either of them, but the fourth member of their party was Clare. Something seemed to snap when she got into the passenger’s seat of Angela’s car and I saw Noah laughing as they pulled out of the parking lot.

            That weekend was quiet. Chris and I mostly stayed in our rooms studying. I hadn’t heard anything from Angela until she called late Sunday night just before I was going to bed.

            “Can you come over?”

-

            What I remember most about that night was the stillness. Angela led me upstairs to her room without saying a word. Everything looked heavy somehow, especially the rickety floral couch from all those months ago. All the lights were off save for the tall floor lamp in the corner next to the balcony door. The needle on her record player was poised upright in silence. The clock on her desk had shorted out just a few moments past one, the second hand no longer trembling through time. The swollen piles of snow out on the balcony didn’t seem to grow any larger, even though I knew it was still snowing. I couldn’t make out the falling flakes in the heavy darkness. I remember thinking it seemed like our silhouettes should have been dancing along the walls, as if distorted in the warmth of a flickering candle, but they were motionless under the light of the single unwavering lamp bulb.

            And suddenly there were our bodies, sprawled out together on the floor, one next to the other. We sat down together at the foot of her bed, and when she toppled over away from me, I lay down next to her. She wasn’t looking at me. Her arms were tucked under her chest and her legs were curled up beneath a blanket. I thought I heard her crying but she wasn’t shaking at all.

Half of the ceiling was illuminated in the soft golden glow of the residual lamp light, but the corner was still shrouded in shadow. I wanted to know what was going on. To bridge the gap. I reached across her body but I felt her flinch at my touch; I felt something dim.

            “Why’d you call, Ange?”

            “I didn’t know what else to do.” Her voice was soft, the sound mostly stifled by the wooden floor into which she was speaking.

            “What happened?”

            “It’s Noah.”

            “He’s coming back tomorrow, right?”

            “He’s at the hospital.”

            “He’s what?”

            “I’m sorry.”

            “Stop it.”

            “I shouldn’t have called.”

            “Stop. What happened?”

            “They were driving back from the mountains for the night. Slid on an ice patch. Too fast around a corner, he said. Crashed my car into a tree " ”

            “Is he okay?”

            “He is. He called. One of his friends got ejected from the car. Said she should be fine, but her responses are still delayed. They’ll be back in a couple days.”

            I knew I should have been more worried. But all I could feel moving up inside my chest was something warm and fast and slightly furious. He was so irresponsible. Two states away in the middle of winter with Clare in a car that wasn’t his.

            “Ange, he wrecked your car.”

            “It’s my fault.”

            “What?”

            “I let him take it. What if I hadn’t?”

            “Ange, that’s nonsense. You know it is. What you did was insanely generous. You can’t get that all mixed up with guilt. This is his own fault.”

            “I just wish I’d done something.”

I held her tighter, rubbing her arm. The glow mellowed and expanded. “Why’d you let him take it, Ange? What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. I just can’t tell people no. Never been able to.”

“You’ve got to learn how.”

“It’s not me.”

“You can’t keep thinking of everyone else before yourself.”

“I just want them all to be okay.”

“I do, too,” I said. She moved in closer to me. Her body felt like pudding, something I couldn’t keep from slipping through my fingers. I still couldn’t see her face, but I felt a few wet drops sliding down behind her ears. “But I want you to be okay, too.”

            When I kissed her forehead, I didn’t feel her there beside me. It was the glow of the lamp alone I saw behind my closed eyelids, its heat pulsing to the rhythm of the slowly falling snow. She finally looked up at me, but her glance grazed my ear, falling on the shadow of my body on the wall behind us.

“No,” she said, turning away. “I need some time alone.”

-

            It wasn’t stillness I felt lying in my own bed, but a slowness in the way things moved: the snow falling, the stars dimming, my mind swimming. I felt guilty. Of what, I didn’t know. Maybe I’d chosen the wrong time to finally show Angela what I felt. But even more, I was upset I’d manipulated the crash, tried to make it about me somehow. That I’d even thought of doing that in the first place. Clare was in a hospital in Colorado and I couldn’t bring myself to care or even utter a hurried, faithless prayer into the dark. What kind of a friend was I if I didn’t tell Angela anything about her? I thought maybe it didn’t even matter to me if Noah came back tomorrow, or the next day, or at all, until I realized things with Angela wouldn’t be the same if he didn’t. Maybe I was feeling guilty that’s the only reason I wanted him back.

            I tried listening for Angela through the wall, and even though I didn’t hear the familiar footsteps or the one creaky bedspring, there was a comfort in knowing she was just on the other side.

Not even the moonlight reflecting off the thick white drifts outside pushed its way in through the blinds. I couldn’t stay awake. The last thing in my head before falling away to the night was a small pool of dull yellow light evaporating into the darkness.