House Under Snow (27 page)

“You don’t look a day older than twenty, Mrs. Crane,” I can hear him say. “You and Anna could be sisters.” He would have been touching the stubble on his cheeks, running his fingers
along his chin, staring her down in that sexy way he had when he was studying every inch of my body.

“Oh come on, Austin. You don’t have to flatter me,” she would have flirted, and laughed, and moistened her lips.

Maybe my mother would have gotten him to talk. She could do that sometimes. Find a way to enter a man through a soft spot, as if she had found the room in the heart that had been empty and vacant. I had learned from her. I used her method, later, on many other boys. She would walk, at first cautiously, lovingly into that complicated place. And then she would find a way to make it hers, as if she had sensed there was something incomplete, something still childlike she could make dependent upon her. It seems wrong to know this about your mother.

She would have gotten him to talk about his mother. She told me that once. About getting a boy. “Find where he hurts, honey. That will make him yours.”

A strange feeling would have come out of him, colored his eyes. I saw it every time his mother’s name was mentioned in conversation. A wave of loss or loneliness washed over his face—perhaps they are the same feeling—the way the willow tree in the yard sometimes looked so vulnerable covered with frost that it would send a chill down your spine. And then his body tensed. He chewed the inside of his jaw like a cow working at his cud. He picked at the dried skin around his fingers. When he did that I always wanted to take his hands in my own and quiet them. Kiss each long finger. And she might have consoled him. Told him how she knew what it’s like to be abandoned, to lose a mother. My mother was good at that kind of talk.

I have spent too many years turning it over the way you might worry a stone in your hand, sitting by the river on a winter’s day, watching a sheet of ice float with the current, the trees bare and vulnerable, while above you the sky is a sly white light, stealing the truth from you. I have spent all this time, so many hours, so many days, bargaining with my soul, trying to forgive. What is lust? I’ve wondered. Can it be forgiven?

A girl never marries the boy who makes her heart ache, the one she might have risked her life for. She always marries the Edgar Lintons of the world. I have read
Wuthering Heights
on many occasions, and each time I see things differently. It’s the age-old question of passion versus tranquillity. I see the sky turn dark, blue and then bluer, the most insanely exquisite color I have ever seen. I want to look at it forever. I don’t want to take my eyes away for fear the sky will break or disappear. But if I look so intensely, I can’t see or feel anything else, not the swaying of the branches of the willow or the pinpricks of wildflowers or the singular sight of a tall white pine, or the sound inside the body listening to a calm wind. In a softer light I can see further into the horizon.

I only saw Austin again once after that night. He came to Dink’s looking for me, plunked down on a stool, and ordered a cup of coffee from Clara. I can still remember her full girth in her starched white uniform, the smell of her hair spray, her hair pulled back in a hair net. She came into the kitchen to tell me Austin was at the counter. Everyone at Dink’s knew I was crazy about him.

Austin tried to catch my eye when I went to the window to grab an order, but I wouldn’t look back. I don’t think I was
capable of ever looking at him closely again. I was such a fool to have romanticized him, to see him as
my
Heathcliff.

Austin sat at the counter while I did the closedown. I refilled the ketchups, finished the setup on the tables, wiped down the sugar bowls and salt and pepper shakers. I felt Austin’s eyes burning on my back. When Toby, our overweight manager, saw that I didn’t want to see Austin, he asked him to leave. He pointed to the sign next to the clock that said
NO LOITERING ALLOWED
. I felt pain in my chest watching him go.

I wished I could turn back the clock and still lie beside Austin on the grass, and read each pore and blemish on his face, but I knew it was impossible. I would never smooth the veins on the insides of his arms with my fingers, or let my hair fall over his chest when we made love.

That night Austin waited for me in the parking lot of the diner. Hearing the stamp of his Mustang’s engine sent fear through my body.

He pulled out of the parking lot and drove beside me as I began walking home.

“Come on, Anna, just get in. I have to talk to you.”

“Go away,” I said. “I don’t want anything to do with you. I saw you last night in the gazebo.” I looked at his face, at the color rushing out of it.

“Just give me five minutes. You owe me that.”

“I don’t owe you a thing.”

“Anna, if you don’t get in this car, I’m going to drive into that wall.” He started to pump the gas.

“Five minutes,” I said, because looking into his eyes, I knew he had the guts to do it.

He reached over and opened the passenger door.

“I’ll give you five minutes.”

“You don’t understand.” He grabbed me by the shoulders
once I had gotten in the car and he had pulled back into the parking lot and parked. “I can’t live without you, Anna. What I did was wrong. I thought I was losing you. Beep said if I didn’t get him the money I owed, they were going to kill me. I borrowed money to place on a horse Beep was sure was going to win. I racked up twenty thousand dollars’ worth of debt. I was coming to find you. To take you away with me.

“And then your mother said you weren’t coming home after school. I pictured you with Brian. It was stupid. I just did.”

“That’s bullshit. Nothing is going on between Brian and me. You’re crazy. And how could you let yourself get in that kind of debt? What’s wrong with you?” I stared at him with contempt. “Did you think she was going to help you?”

“I don’t know what I wanted,” Austin said. He looked down and cracked the knuckles on each one of his fingers.

“It looks like you got the money somewhere,” I said. “You’re still here, aren’t you? You’re still alive.” His fingers were white from where he’d been squeezing the steering wheel. I watched as he loosened his grip and opened his fingers. I looked at the thick calluses and his hard nails. I continued to stare at his hands, which I could feel, even when he wasn’t touching me, reading my body.

“You don’t believe me, do you?” he said. “You’re not going to come to Kentucky or anywhere with me, are you?”

“Does it matter if I believe you? It’s been done.”

“Anna.” He gripped my wrists as he said it. “Come with me. We’ll get married.”

“You’re out of your mind,” I told him. “There’s no reason for us to get married now.” I thought about our baby and the future that was never to be. It was wrong and I knew it, but I blamed Austin, because I couldn’t forgive myself.

“My father said he would pay off my debts if I moved out
of the track and agreed to go to college next fall. My father likes you. He’ll help us out.”

I would be lying if I said I didn’t consider it. But I knew that I was too young to be married, and if I married Austin it would only be because I wanted escape and not because I’d chosen to. I wasn’t sure Austin and I could ever be together anymore, even if nothing had happened with my mother. It hadn’t bothered me before that Austin and I rarely talked about anything that mattered. That we lived in a kind of dark hinterland beneath words. But I wasn’t sure that the silences, in the end, would be enough. As the summer had disappeared, not emotion, but concrete words and ideas seemed the only source of sustenance.

When I’d first read
Wuthering Heights
, as a child, I was devastated when Cathy marries Edgar. Her betrayal of Heathcliff was unfathomable. But reading it again, I saw what comfort she found in Edgar. Cathy and Edgar are counterparts. Cathy finds security in that which is solely different from her own nature. And Edgar finds temporary bliss in the presence of someone capable of such passion. Austin and I were too much alike. I knew that what was between Austin and me could only exist in brief flashes, like the flame of a match before it is extinguished.

He reached over
and took me in his arms, and I was pulled again, into his aura. I smelled the horses in his hair and on his clothes, a smell that to this day makes me ache. I allowed him to hold my face, and he pressed it into his chest, where the wool from his sweater burned me. I felt his lips on the back of my neck and in my ear.

“Don’t you understand?” I said. I shrugged him off and
pulled away. “Every time I look at you, I see my mother. How could you?” I slugged his chest with my fists.

I gathered my shoulder bag, opened the door, and took off. In the parking lot of the diner, I felt his steps coming after me. He was practically nipping my heels. I heard the busboy open the back door to the diner to throw out the trash in the bin. And then I heard the sound of the door as it slammed shut.

“Please come back to the car,” Austin said. “Please let me explain.”

I followed him, more because I was afraid the people I worked with would overhear us. Once we were back in the car he tried to hold me again. He pressed his face into my neck. “You’re still mine,” he said in my hair. “You’ll always be mine, Anna.” I was despondent. I let him turn my face to his so he could kiss me. I heard nothing, only the sound of his breath. And then I snapped. I hit him until I had no strength left. I was out of control. “Get away from me,” I told him.

“Anna, listen. I’m trying to tell you something,” he said. He grabbed my arms like you would a crazy person to calm me. “I’m asking you to forgive me.” He was crying.

I was listening with my body, the way you listen for the sound of the river, or the
swish
of the wind through the trees, but I couldn’t hear my heart anymore, it was no longer reliable. I looked at him. “You know I have to leave,” I said.

As I walked home that night I felt the last hint of the summer in the autumn air.

There is little redemption in Emily Brontë’s world. Evil and goodness exist simultaneously within her characters. They do not apologize for what damage they’ve done or what heartbreak they’ve caused. They are flawed, imperfect.

Though I once drew comfort from the parallels I saw between Heathcliff and Austin, I did not allow my mother the same kind of indulgence. I could not understand her.

“My nerves were frayed,” Lilly said when I told her I knew.

I was in my bedroom packing.

“I was working day and night on the house. I hadn’t slept in weeks.”

I didn’t say a word. I had no mother.

“I hadn’t realized how much Joe was beginning to mean to me,” Lilly continued. She paced the room. She walked to the window and raised the curtain. “Anna, you know I would never deliberately hurt you.”

I couldn’t bear to look at her. I stared inside the open dresser drawer. When I said nothing, Lilly waited a few moments, then in a huff walked out of the room and shut the door behind her.

Outside, the snow had begun to fall. It was early November by now, and had grown colder as the day went on. In Cleveland
the weather was always drastic. It could be a sunny autumn day, and then out of nowhere the snow would begin to fall. I used to love being inside our house most when it snowed. You could feel the snow falling on the boughs of the pines, on the roof, covering the house in a protective blanket, falling on the windowsills, the ledges. They say that each snowflake is a different shape, that not one crystal is exactly like another.

The wind picked up. A gust whipped leaves across the yard. A sound fierce enough to send tremors down your spine. The wind took a branch off a tree. Whirled it back. It was beautiful, the way the snow began to fill the backyard. How light slipped carelessly into dusk. And then the smell of wetness, loss in the cold air; the weight of another history sealed in the frost settling on the earth’s floor. A promise of a new future when all the ice and snow thawed.