“I love you, too, Mama.”

And they hang up without saying good-bye.

Dusk in November, the last of the leaves pulled away; it is a little after five, and in the cities and towns of northern New England-in Rutland and Manchester, in Montpelier and Burlington, in Concord and St. Johnsbury and White River Junction and all the rest-the weathermen and air-traffic controllers see, on their radar screens, the same thing: the arrival of the first snowstorm of the season, a widening wedge of lights poking eastward from upstate New York and the Great Lakes. Their faith in their technology is absolute, a religion of professional habit, but they cannot help themselves; the eyes long to see what the mind already knows, and what science has predicted. They see the weather on the screen (there is something Christmassy about it, this expanding cone of light), and lift their gaze to the window, and the snow.

At a long wooden table in the college library, O’Neil takes no notice of the arriving storm; he has pushed his books and papers aside to place his head in the hollow of his folded arms, and is fast asleep, and dreaming. It is a simple, happy dream-a dream of springtime and a golden field in mountains-and O’Neil is both everywhere and nowhere in it. He is the mind of the dreamer and the dream itself, the sunshine and the dreamer of the sunshine, and his pleasure is intensified by a sense of recognition: though he does not know this and never will, it’s a dream he’s had for years. Beside him rest the leavings of his enterprise-his opened calculus text, a pad of paper on which he has scrawled the first equations of a problem set, his pitiless calculator, its batteries draining away-while all around in the high-ceilinged room, students are earnestly working, their minds trained like archers’ arrows on tasks of great complexity. But nothing of this reaches him: not the scratch of their pens or the dry turning of their pages, not the buzz of the fluorescent lights or the muffled coughs and whispered conversations of a Sunday evening in a college library at midterm. Asleep, he soars alone through the vast interior space his mind has made-it seems not made of matter but light itself, to exist outside of time-and when at last he awakens, his dream of happiness exhausted, he raises his head from the table to the window to find his reflection looking back at him, and knows without seeing that beyond the darkened glass the sky has begun to issue snow.

Arthur, stepping from the motel room into autumn dusk, experiences the weather first as a kind of optical illusion; expecting neither snow nor darkness-the hour has escaped his attention-and disoriented from an afternoon in an unfamiliar place where he never planned to be, he sees stars instead, mixed with the cloud of his breath, and all the stars are falling. So persuasive is this vision that for a moment he is held captive by it, in mute awe of it. But then a lone car passes on the highway, traveling with an almost delicate slowness, and in the twin beams of its headlights Arthur sees the snow for what it is: the first, dry flakes of an approaching storm. He hears the soft sound of the car’s tires on the road, and the metronomic rhythm of its wipers; as the car vanishes around the bend beyond the motel lot, he extends a single gloved hand past the edge of the concrete overhang and feels the barely detectable tap of crystals in his leathered palm, like a series of disembodied kisses. It is a strange and satisfying sensation-it seems both to encode this instance with a bright physicality, while also possessing all the familiar qualities of deep childhood recollection, so that the moment is at once remembered and about to be remembered-and he knows what the next gesture would be, if he were a slightly different man; he would step beyond the overhang, tip his head backward, close his eyes, and taste the snow on his tongue.

“Art? What’s it doing out?”

Miriam’s voice, coming from inside the room-the door is just ajar-nudges him from his reverie. Before answering he steps into the lot. On its packed gravel surface, and on the Peugeot’s hood and windshield, a white dusting has taken hold. He tests for traction, shifting his weight without moving, and feels the soles of his loafers slide a little. It’s hard to know how bad the driving will be. Probably not very bad to start, though they are headed west, into the heart of the storm.

“I think we’ll be okay.”

She joins him outside, wearing a sweater but no coat; her hair is wet from the shower. “The TV says six inches. More in New York.” Her voice is noncommittal; she is merely presenting the evidence.

“We could stay the night here,” he offers.

Miriam looks at the car, then back at Arthur. As always, when she doesn’t know quite what she feels, or is presented with a choice that leads her no direction in particular, she pulls her eyes into a squint. “Is that what you want to do?”

The question hangs. And there is an answer, Arthur knows-something correct and patient that he should now say, that Miriam is waiting to hear and that it is his job to provide. To attempt this drive is foolishness. They already have a room. The Peugeot, an expensive disappointment, is not all it could be when the roads are slick. But he has already fallen in love with the idea, driving home through the snowy dark. He loves it because he can imagine it: the slow progress of the car, the sleepy stroke of the wipers, the whirl of flakes before the windshield, like water pushed from the prow, and the lights of the other cars on the highway, refracted in the snowy air; the dry wind of the heater and the hours of silence ahead. He imagines his wife asleep beside him, her body half turned in her seat and wrapped with the old blanket they keep in the car, a sweater or coat used to prop her head against the chilly window; he imagines arriving home in darkness, first into town, its streets quiet under all that new snow with no one about, not even the plows yet, and then the house itself. It is midnight, it is one, it is after two-who knows how long the drive will take? He will wait until the car is stopped and the engine is extinguished before he awakens her, to give her the present of their safe arrival. She stirs, rubbing her eyes. Are we…? she asks. And, How long was I…?

In front of their motel room he puts his arm around her waist and gives it a squeeze. “Come on,” he says.

Their bags are already in the Peugeot; the only thing left to do is return the key. Arthur takes it to the office, where he finds the manager sitting behind the counter, smoking and watching a hockey game on a black-and-white television with aluminum foil crimped to the antenna. The picture is so bad, Arthur thinks, that watching it must be like listening to the radio. He places the key on the counter.

“We’ve decided to take off early,” Arthur says, feeling that he should say something. “To get ahead of the weather.”

The manager rises and accepts the key without comment, depositing it into a drawer under the counter. The carelessness of the gesture suggests to Arthur that it doesn’t matter which key is which; perhaps they are all the same.

“I guess we’ll be off now.”

The manager, already back in his chair-green vinyl, with cigarette burns cut into its wooden arms-looks up, as if truly noticing Arthur for the first time.

“Right.” He takes a long, distracted drag off his cigarette and taps it into a beanbag ashtray on the table beside him. “They say it could get bad.”

“I was thinking that if we left right now, we could beat it.”

The manager gives a thoughtful nod, then returns his gaze to the TV screen. “There’s a theory,” he says.

Leaving the lot for the highway, Arthur finds that the driving is surprisingly good. Already an inch has fallen, but the snow is dry, and the road lightly traveled; there has been no chance yet for the snow to melt and then refreeze as ice. He is mindful of the speedometer, keeping the car at just over forty miles per hour, but when he looks at it a moment later, he finds their speed has drifted upward to fifty. He taps the brakes; the wheels bite soundly.