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_ 22nd December 1994, Edgecrestwood, Tempest, West Virginia

She play'd & she melted in all her prime,_

And the winter call'd it a dreadful crime. _________ William Blake, "Soft Snow"

Archibald Lightfoot would come to remember that Christmas party - 1995 - as the last time they were all happy. His sons, his legacy, were still so young and pure and did not know the awful destiny that would befall them - little Stephen, his miracle boy, had not yet turned one and Andrew only a few months older than three. Junior Lynch, his only true friend, was still alive - his four-year old son Bligh, and Archibald's own sons, had been left in the care of Junior's father Gus, "Pappy," for the evening. Back then, too - Maggie still loved him, still found him the same charming rake who had swept her off her feet at the Black and White Ball in Pittsburgh all those years ago. He still had that, but the harder he gripped, the more uncertain it became, until at last he would not have her at all. It was many years yet, decades more to reflect and to realize. For this is the lie, but also the comfort, of nostalgia: like a favorite book one reads again and again, the action, the ending, they are never in doubt - and the taste of the bittersweet never fades, when life, once, was so full of promise. But, for now, there he was, standing by the window in his study, Tom Collins in hand, staring into the darkness that was only dimly lit by the lights of his house - the struggling electric lights illumed the snow underneath it, a pale sickly yellow that gave way to a purer white the further and further the shadows stretched. Somewhere behind him, outside the double-doors that were opened by two hand-chased brass knobs that together combined to form the Lightfoot family crest - sounds of merriment, the buzz of delight, simply having a wonderful Christmastime, this was something his father would do every December and Archibald had only recently taken it upon himself to do the same, a holiday party of open invitation, tiny as their town, Tempest, was, and tinier still Archibald and Maggie's actual circle of friends. But Archibald had been beset by something he could not readily shake off, some nagging feel of connectedness to the past. Alcohol sometimes did this to him - he would be on a street outside a bar and suddenly absorb the city he was in, a realization of himself in the world that made him - so proud and patriarchal and blithely ruthless - feel small. Christmastime - when he most missed his father, who he knew, no fool, everyone thought a far greater man and captain of the Lightfoot name than he - did this to him the worst. He had retreated here - fleeting memories of Christmases past, people past, time long gone, replaying in fragments he kept trying to shake away with the shiver of the outside cold. The frost on the pane, framed as it was by enormously thick carved oak that made the window look like an imperious, all-seeing eye out onto the world, was a phantom cob's web on the outside of the glass that he traced with his finger, a melancholy wistfulness slipping into his inebriation - he was trying to piece something together, some dim recollection that stretched from a life he had forgotten into something like his half-drunken present. But he was interrupted as the door behind him swung open, and the haughty, halting laughter of his equally drunk wife suddenly filled the room. "Oh ho-ho-ho!" She whirled about in an extravagant circle, flopping herself into one of the two throne-like chairs on the opposite side of the ancient Lightfoot family desk - everything about the room was big, powerful, wooden, and antique, but here she was, new and vivacious in red and gold, the rich girl who wanted to be a poet from Monroe County who, by some weird miracle, was his wife. Archibald regarded her impassively, too self-indulgently introspect to want to smile. "Damn that cheese dip Susan Anne made was good!" she slurred, all the grace of her presence erased with an immodest burp and a shrill, embarrassed guffaw. "But this wine - even better!" "Sounds like someone needs a little more cheese dip and a little less wine, dear--" "Oh blow it out your ass, Archie, I'm having fun." "That's exactly what'll happen if you don't stop with the wine and the cheese dip..." Archibald said drily, now allowing himself a small smile at his own joke. With viciously rolled eyes Maggie straightened herself in the chair, striking a pose with an upraised eyebrow. "What's got you in here? You should be out there - I had to talk to all those people for you, Hell, I don't even know most of them!" "Well you invited half my damn client-sheet, Maggie--" "Because you should be the one talking to them, not me!" A long pause followed her remark - Archibald shrugged demurely, turning away from the window, but still close enough to the glass to feel the cold on him. "Maybe...I didn't want to talk to them. Not - yet." Maggie's eyebrow went up as far as it could. "Archie - what's wrong with you?" Her question needled him as it was designed to, it got right to the point and through his façade because she knew it well, the mask, the disguise, Archibald could hide nothing from her and he counted himself both thankful and wretched for it. "I - wasn't feeling well, that's all." "I don't believe you." They locked eyes for a moment - Maggie's expression softened and became, actually, kind, and she smiled softly, that clever, intimate way she only did with him. "Smile's catching..." she murmured, her favorite game, trying to get him to do it back, to not be so inside his own head as too often was. Archibald glanced away, feeling the smile back appear as it was summoned. "There it is," she said, pleased. "Now - Archie - are you going to tell me what's gotten into you?" He did not his answer his wife - not at first - and he lost his cue when one of the double-doors opened and in popped his best friend, his only real friend in the world, Junior Lynch. "Gah - dammit ta Hell if I never hear that Barnes woman talk again--"

He shut the doors quickly behind him - Maggie threw him a bemused look as he plopped down into the chair next to her. "Figured I'd found y'all here," he said, his thick mountain accent coming from a crooked grin that was a little too loosened up from alcohol. He looked only somewhat like his father, Gus, Pappy, that venerable paterfamilias that had outlived Archibald's own father to become the only citizen of their tiny pocket of the Greenbrier Valley that was universally respected - his face had shades of it, little reminiscences of his ancestry that curled around his mouth and framed his nose. But the color of his eyes - bright, icy, piercing blue, the very shade of the Polar that only the Lynch men seemed to have, which even his little son Bligh had - distinguished him as one of his house, the Irish struggle across the sea to the Appalachians made flesh. "And you were right!" Maggie exclaimed, a hand over her heart and her mouth agape in mock amazement. "How - did you know?!" Junior, picking up on the joke, leaned in: "Well - I tell ya. I seen it in a dream. I was all alone--" He put his glass, eggnog in crystal, on the desk before him. "When all o'sudden--" "Coaster, boy--" Archibald murmured, gesturing to a circular piece of crystal near them. The joke ruined, Junior did as he was told, cocking his head at him with the same unruly grin. The crystal and the glass clinked together. "Sure gotta lotta rules, there, sir!" Archibald sniffed - he moved away from the window so that the desk more evenly separated them. "Been over here enough, you oughta know them - now where's your wife?" "Yeah where is she?" Maggie added. "You gotta tell her - you gotta tell her how good that cheese dip was--" Junior let out a cry of disgust. "Cheese dip, Hell! She been with that awful Sandy Barnes the whole damn night! Why the Hell ya think I'm in here?" "Oh Lord," Maggie said. "I thought she went home!" "Yeah, she did, she went ta go check on - what's that girl's name o'hers?" "Betsy," Archibald offered. "Betsy!" Junior repeated back. "Then - then she came back - God _Amighty_the mouth on that woman!" He threw up his arms as Maggie began to laugh. "If she dun talk ta hear her own head rattle I ain't sure who do!" Maggie was taken with Junior's exaggerations, made funnier by his accent, and leaned back over the arm of the chair in peals of laughter. Archibald took a long sip of his drink as he watched the two of them, managing another sniff, and a smile - but soon his wife's laughter faded and Junior, sizing him up, frowned at him.

"S'wrong with ye?" "Oh just Mr. Moody in one of his moods," Maggie teased, tossing herself in the chair so that her thin legs dangled over the other oaken arm. "Caught him in here all by his lonesome--" "I am not being moody!" Archibald fidgeted where he stood. "Suuure sound like it!" Junior tittered. Archibald rolled cleared his throat. "No - I - just got a little on my mind..." Maggie turned to Junior and pronounced it: "See? Moody." Junior chuckled gamely. "Now there, Ms. Lightfoot, I'm sure ol Archie gotta reason now--" "I'm - just thinking about--" He sighed, long and deep. "Old times, and - and old friends...days gone by, all - all that." "Well that's not so bad," Junior said. "This time o'year - I can see - can see why, if I put my mind t'it..." The drunken jollity that Maggie and Junior had brought into Archibald's study - his sanctuary which, after all, they had entered without invitation - evaporated into nothing, and now they too, felt the same poignant stings as he did. "Mmm," Maggie intoned, downing enough of her glass that only a little remained. And then again: "Mmm..." "It's a thing," Junior agreed with another of his odd little laughs. "Oh it's a thing, yessir..." "Yes it is," Maggie said, before sighing. "But - wait - who? Where?" "Who where what?" "Oh c'mon Archie, who - what old friends, and what - old times?" Archibald, once again, did not answer her directly - he paced back to the window and, with his back turned to both of them, gazing at nothing out the window, took another sip of his mixed drink. "Well - Jones, for one--" "Fischer," added Junior with a heavy nod. "Fischer too, if we's talkin bout folks from the Lake--" "If I never heard those names again I'll be a blessed woman," Maggie said with a mirthless laugh. "What a godawful Summer that was." She paused. "But is - is it - is it weird I still wonder about that whole thing sometimes? I know I shouldn't, I really shouldn't, but - I do." "Don't we all," Archibald said. "I'm - I always - I been inclined to believe what those old folks say down by the Lake there..." "Wazzat now?" Junior asked. "You - you remember. Bout how Mike Fischer's a big ol catfish himself down there at the lakebottom, after he went crazy like he did..." Junior's eyes flicked away as though to try and weight the absurdity of the idea. "I - I gotta tell ya, Archie, I dun rightly think--" "Just old folks talking, darling..." Maggie finished for him. Archibald was nonplussed. "A lotta what they say turns out to be true sometimes--" "What ye gettin at, though?" Junior asked, training his eyes on his best friend. "Ain't just that, is it?" "It's--" Archibald hesitated, stirring the ice in his glass, his eyes trailing to the carpet.. "You're right." "I knew I would be." "But--" Archibald took up the conversation. "But - I - I've been - thinking, maybe...maybe there was something else to it."

Maggie looked at him askance. "What are you trying to say?" "I'm saying he - he might be still around - those old folks they - they're right about a mess of things, ain't they? And we known an awful lotta folk that went missing - or - something happened to them..." He swallowed back some peculiar emotion that he didn't like. "They might be still around - somewhere." He felt his eyes grow liquid, he was losing his composure and he hated it, but the alcohol was liberating him, he could be vulnerable and he could speak in front of his closest, tightest circle and it wouldn't matter. "They - they might be still around..." he repeated. "Well of course they might be, who the heck knows?" Maggie looked to Junior. "At least - at least I..." She didn't finish, seeming to see Junior's own enigmatic expression. Archibald took a shot from his glass, making a face as he tasted the watery mess the melted ice had made it, before he eased himself into his chair, his wife and his best friend opposite, looking at him with equal anticipation. "There's...weird things - that go on - well, here but - everywhere...this state, these parts." "That's not really news," Maggie answered flatly, before allowing herself to laugh at her own remark.

But Junior now seemed disturbed, and he moved to the edge of the chair he had chosen to sit in, suddenly serious: "Archie - Archie, c'mon now--" "Can it be helped?" Archibald gulped back a forming lump in his throat as he said it. "That we - that we think of those who've - who've--" He stopped, unable to continue. Maggie shifted in her chair to face forward. "Archie, baby - c'mon. It's Christmastime - we should be happy..." Ducking her head a little, she conceded the point her husband was making. "And it's just a fact of life around - here - that people..." She cleared her throat. "Sometimes bad things happen to good people, Archie - nobody's fault." "Then what do we do?" Archibald's voice was uncomfortably moist with emotion. "I - think about everyone gone - dead, or - missing and I - I - what do I--?" A silence passed.

"We live," said Junior at last, with a grin that almost made him look like his father. "N'we keep on livin - fer them- n'fer us." Archibald stared at his best friend before he started to nod - slowly at first, and the quicker, until he stopped to bow his head.

A twinge in his face - a bolt of something he wasn't used to but could not, for the moment, suppress - made him catch his breath, and choke back his words.

He lowered his glass, then raised it again, what little liquid left shaking at the bottom of the glass. "To old friends," he whispered. Maggie and Junior raised their own glasses, got off their chairs to near him, and clinked them together, a note of finality. "To old friends," they repeated - and drank. They stood in silence, the three of them, the last time they would be together like this, though they did not know it - for a respectful moment that should have been longer. The sounds of the festivities grew suddenly loud again, a reminder that somewhere outside the doors and the walls and the window there was a world beside the strangeness and the tragedy that they had all lived through, as though everything was just a bad dream, and now they could awake. Junior stirred in his seat to rise with the callous awkwardness that comes from being drunk, swaying where he stood. "Y'all--" he began, quietly, the crooked smile like his father's growing one side of his face. "Reckon we oughta go back." Maggie threw her head with her own pursed smile to Archie, who rose himself with a half-hearted nod. "Well?" "If Junior says we should then--" The nod became stronger. "Perhaps we can." Now Maggie slid out of her chair, grabbing her drink, winking at her husband. "That's the spirit..." she murmured. "I think I've had too much spirit," Archibald said as he came round to join them. "Well I ain't think I had enough!" hooted Junior, to the laughter of the other two - even Archibald, unforced, laughed when his best friend did. The double doors came open and back they mingled into the party - Archibald, last one out, turned off the lights, and the study with its centuries of history and secrets was draped in overabundant shadow for another night. The darkness on that side of Archibald's house, Edgecrestwood, mingled in with the titanic, impenetrable West Virginia darkness outside, the Winter stars diamondiferous in a sable sky - gone was the feeble electric light, and with it, the vain effort to keep December, the cold and the finality, and the passage of time itself, all out... Nostalgia means knowing the end of the tale, the favorite story read again and again, and so for the Lightfoots, for the Lynches - for them, at least, does it pain one, to turn the page.