Ann Patchett: Commonwealth

“Where’s Albie?” Franny asked her mother.

Her mother shook her head and made a little sound that stood in for the words no idea. Her mother never did learn to speak French.

“If you see him would you let me know?”

Her beautiful mother, maybe embarrassed now, looked up from her book for just a second and nodded. “Sure,” she said.

Franny didn’t think of knocking on the door to Bert’s study and asking him if he’d seen Albie, or checking to see if maybe Albie was in there with him. The thought never crossed her mind.

Instead, she went out the back door. She was still wearing her uniform from school: a plaid skirt and kneesocks, saddle oxfords, a sweatshirt from track over her white blouse. Her mother didn’t tell her to put on a coat or ask her where she was going the way she would have had Franny walked out the back door on a snowy night a few years before. Her mother was lost in a sea of irregular verbs.

Franny looked in the garage but Albie wasn’t in the garage. She walked a circle around the house and then went down the street, walking two houses down in one direction, three houses down in the other. She looked at the snow for bicycle tracks but there was nothing there, only her own footprints going in every direction. She was chilled now and her hair was getting wet. She was a little worried but only a little. She was thinking she could find him. She decided to go back to the house for her coat and as she was coming up the driveway she saw him, just a few inches of the side of his head behind the boxwoods beside the front door. He was wrapped in his red sleeping bag, staring up at the snow.

“Albie?” she said. “What are you doing?”

“Freezing,” Albie said.

“Well don’t. Come inside.” She walked across the soft snow covering the lawn until she was standing right in front of him.

“I’m too high,” he said.

Around every streetlight, every porch light, there was a soft halo of snow. Everything else was dark. “No one’s going to notice.”

“They will,” he said. “I’m really high.”

“You can’t stay out here.” Franny was starting to shiver. She was wondering what she had been thinking of, going out without her coat.

“I can,” he said. His voice was so light, so airy, as if it were part of the snow.

Franny stepped between the boxwoods, thinking she would have to pull him up. Albie was taller than she was now but he was skinny, and anyway he wouldn’t fight her. But as soon as she got back there with him she understood the appeal of this particular spot, the way you could see all things without being seen. The overhang of the roof kept them out of the snow for the most part. She could smell the pot on him now, sweet and strong. Franny and Albie drank together sometimes, and they smoked cigarettes, but they didn’t smoke pot together. Later that would change.

“Let me in,” she said.

And just like that Albie raised up his arm, never taking his eyes off the snow, and she sat down beside him. The sleeping bag was filled with down and when they were wrapped up together it was remarkably warm. They sat there like that, their backs up against the brick of the house, the coarse hedge just in front of them. They watched the snow fall and fall and fall until they thought that they were the ones who were falling.

“I miss my mother,” Albie said. In the one year when they were very close it was the only time he said it, and he only said it that night because he was very high.

“I know,” Franny said, because she did know. She knew it exactly, and she pulled the sleeping bag tighter around them and they stayed there together just like that until she lost the feeling in her feet and she told him they had to go inside.

“I lost the feeling in my feet a long time ago,” he said.

They put their arms around one another in order to stand. The front door was locked so they went down the driveway, dragging the sleeping bag behind them. Franny’s mother wasn’t in the kitchen anymore but the light was still on beneath the door to Bert’s study.

“I told you no one would know if you were high,” Franny said, and for some reason this cracked Albie up. He sat down on the floor and pulled the sleeping bag over his head, laughing while Franny got out the cereal and the milk.

Franny brushed the snow off her shoulders and made her way to the rented SUV. She had never told that story to Leo. She had meant to but then for some reason she decided to hold it back. Now she understood that at some point far out in the future there would be a night just like tonight, and she would remember this story and know that no one else in the world knew it had happened except Albie. She had needed to keep something for herself.

Ann Patchett is the author of seven novels and three non-fiction books. Both The Magician’s Assistant and State of Wonder were shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, which she won with Bel Canto in 2002. She has won the PEN/Faulkner Award and been shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize, and her work has been translated into over thirty languages. She is the co-owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee.

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