The Winter Girl (11 page)

“Anyway,” I said, slowly walking toward her and reaching up to hand her the envelope. “This is yours.”

That should have been the end of our entire interaction. I should have turned around, walked right back out onto the ruined patio that faced the sea, and immediately divulged everything to Elise.

Instead I watched her open the envelope and count the twenties Victor had carefully placed inside and then the five-dollar bill and the stingy buck, added like a specific insult. As she counted the money, I could clearly see that her nose was misshapen, probably broken, and that there was the faintest trace of purple under both eyes, a sliver of it suspended underneath the skin, but still visible in that light.

She didn't continue walking down the stairs; she sat down, folding the envelope in two and then four before stuffing it into her pocket. She made a snuffling sound with her nose and I took another step closer, ready to comfort her, until I saw that she wasn't crying. I watched her wipe her sleeve against her runny nose and then, for the first time, she smiled.

“This is fucked up,” she said.

There are some people who can smile and you wish you could send them back to the happiness shop: my old boss, for instance, Chuck Meyer, at the New School, who looked like he was rising out of a coffin every time he cracked a joke, his thin red lips stretching back on his unusually small teeth. But Carmelita had a smile that changed everything about her face. It went right to her flashing brown eyes, then back down to her lips, making them purse in a way that seemed more innocent than sarcastic. I'd only just met her and I didn't feel wary at all. In my dream, the stranger had reached out to touch my face with cold fingers, but when I finally made the silly gesture of shaking Carmelita's hand, her fingers were warm, her handshake polite, before she pulled her arm away and folded her arms again.

“It is fucked up,” I said, glancing quickly at the sliding glass door, just to make sure Elise hadn't followed me there. Was she even still asleep? Or was Victor handing her another envelope for Carmelita so that she could find me here? It didn't matter. I'd tell her everything as soon as I got back to the house.

“I thought he was dead,” she said, her smile vanishing. She was sizing me up again. “I was relieved. No one was going to bother me for the rest of the winter.”

“What are you doing here?” I said.

“I worked for Richard Swain,” she said. “He was a nice guy. His wife was sick. Brain tumor. He spent everything he had on doctors. He was losing his mind a little too. He didn't even ask for the house key when he let me go. He was going to travel to Lake Geneva with her. There was a doctor there who said he could keep her alive for another three months.”

She reached into her pocket and took out a single house key on a rusty ring.

“So I came by this summer. I thought at least he'd be back,” she said. “But I don't know where he is. Maybe he's dead. He told me he had no interest in living after she was gone.”

The image of Richard Swain changed in my mind again. I could picture him over his dying wife in an ornate hotel room on Lake Geneva. The rasp of her breathing. Her grayish eyes open but unfocused. Carmelita pocketed the key again.

“Maybe he'll surprise us,” I said.

“No,” she said. “Victor's the only one who noses around. For weeks he didn't even have the guts to let himself in. He's a coward, you know. I watched him sneaking around, pretending he was just a normal guy when he heard a car on the road. He would put his hands on his hips and try to look like he was interested in the house.”

“That sounds about right. I can see that.”

That didn't earn any points with her—the fact that I could sympathize. I had the feeling that others had tried that route, and it disgusted her now. She wrote it off and simply moved on to the next subject.

“So I have a useless house key and some cash from an old man. Maybe there are worse things.”

I told her there were. I cleared my throat. I told her I should be getting back to my house. I meant Victor's house. We both didn't belong where we happened to exist at that moment. So it was hard to establish an official way to say goodbye.

“I'll hit him up for some more cash,” I said, backing away. “If that helps.”

She didn't say a word. She just smiled quickly. Stood up and watched me step outside. She knew I'd be back.

When I got back to Victor's home, I made sure to walk around the back side of the house. I picked up a cold mug of coffee I had left on the deck and stood there admiring the lifting fog. Elise, wrapped tight in a terry-cloth bathrobe, her hair still wet from the shower, joined me out there.

“Give me a sip,” she said, reaching for the mug. I handed it to her and she made a face as she drank.

“Sorry,” I said. “I let it get cold.”

“How long have you been standing out here?”

“I don't know. Half an hour? I didn't want to wake you up.”

I was waiting for the right moment to tell her exactly what I was doing and what her father had been up to. Then it occurred to me that there would be a very good chance that Elise would be furious, tearing downstairs to confront her father, and then even the girl next door. But there was another reason I held my tongue. I needed more information. At least one more visit with Carmelita to find out exactly what had been going on.

I could hear the sound of a car's tires on the gravel driveway and then the slamming of a door. Sandra, Victor's home health aide, had arrived.

“Saint Sandra is here,” Elise said, tossing the coffee on the brown grass below. “Want to hear something disgusting?”

“Sure,” I said, squinting at the sunlight that had suddenly begun to fall everywhere. A slab of white light thrown across Elise, making her wet hair gleam. “Does it involve Victor?”

“Who else? I walked by the bedroom yesterday and saw him squeeze her thigh. Sandra slapped his hand right off and he would've tried it again if he hadn't seen me.”

“No shame. He should really be forced to live in a giant glass box with a heat lamp and a rock.”

Elise smiled at that, the thought of her father as a giant reptile, walled off for good.

“You know what the funny thing is?” Elise said, picking up the empty coffee cup and hurling it as far as she could. I listened to a distant thump as it landed on the sandy hill. “He's getting better.”

“No, he's not,” I said, a little taken aback by her annihilation of the coffee cup.

He wasn't getting better. I'd heard him sucking harder on his oxygen, I'd listened to the coughing fits. The man had bedsores. He was losing weight. His eyes were glistening and faintly yellow. Two nights ago he had awakened early in the morning, screaming for his pain medication, and then his hydrocodone. The doctor had assured us that he had three months to live, and that was six months ago, just before they checked him in.

“Maybe it's being back home,” Elise said. “Maybe the doctor was wrong.”

“We saw X rays. It's all over the place. It's in his lungs. His bladder. He's barely hanging in there.”

Elise shrugged and then turned away, opening the screen door that led directly to our bedroom. I stayed out on the second-floor deck, watching her let the bathrobe fall to the floor and then walk to the mirror over the dresser, frowning at herself as she picked up a hairbrush and plucked away some strands in its pins. If it had been any other day, I would have played the part of the intruder, slipping in and dragging her to the bed, fucking loudly enough so that Victor and Sandra could hear us downstairs.

But I was looking at the house next door, and then not just looking, but also shielding my eyes against the sun, wondering if Carmelita had been watching us from one of the blistered windows of Swain's home, trying to guess what I had been confessing to my wife. When I glanced back at the bedroom, Elise, to my surprise, had turned around again, pulling on a pair of jeans and balancing on one leg. She grabbed her bra from the chair and walked toward the screen door, pressing her face against it.

“Don't even think about that house again,” she said. “We've got plenty to deal with over here.”

“Promise,” I said, opening the door and giving her a kiss on the cheek as I passed her. Downstairs, I could hear Victor having one of his epic coughing fits, followed by him cursing at Sandra, as if she were responsible. I couldn't hear how she comforted him or see what she was doing, but almost magically there wasn't another sound.

“We should really fire her,” Elise said, pulling on her turtleneck and looking at herself sideways in the mirror again.

I
told Elise I was going to take a walk down by the water and clear my head. She was busy making some calls in the kitchen, trying to keep up with her old contacts in the city. There was a speech rehab center in Mastic that one of her colleagues had recommended, and when I left the house she was joking about the name of the town.

“I'll take anything that'll get me out of the house,” she said, tapping the end of a pen against a piece of paper she had scrawled a handful of numbers on. “Thanks, Debbie.”

I was walking down the driveway, with the idea of looping around by the small beach and then climbing the ruined wooden staircase that led to Swain's home.

“Scott,” Elise said, following me to the entrance of the driveway. She was holding my Nikon in her hand. I stood there as she placed the strap over my head and gave me a quick kiss. “Take some pictures at least. We've got to remember who we are, otherwise our brains are going to rot.”

I could feel the heat rising in my face as she turned and walked back to the house, but not before facing me one more time and shouting out one last wish.

“Take a photo that will change our lives,” she said, smirking playfully. “It can't be that hard.”

It was low tide around noontime, the water in the bay slack and unrippled, brown islands of rubbery seaweed plainly visible underneath. In the distance I could see that the two duck-hunting blinds were still set up, two small thatch houses on a wooden float, about five hundred yards apart. I raised the camera to my eye and zoomed in on one of them, surprised when I saw a small skiff docked next to it, and then a stream of blue smoke from a cigarette. I couldn't see the person's face, but from the way the right side of the float dipped into the water, I figured he must be overweight and fat-fingered, snug in a red-and-black checkered hunting jacket.

I took the photo just to check the light, and then I continued up the beach. Though the fog had lifted and the sun was visible, it was still just a few degrees above freezing. As I walked parallel to Swain's home, I suddenly felt a sense of dread, as if I were willingly about to commit a terrible mistake.

And the choice was simple: I could walk right back to Victor's house and wait for my wife to finish setting up the interview. I could take her to a movie in town, then have lunch at that seafood shack on the canal and watch the fishing boats go by. Or I could risk breaking my neck by walking up a crooked row of splintered wooden steps that led to Swain's home. It looked more like a broken ladder than a staircase anyway, and to even reach the bottom step I'd have to clamber up a sandy dune and then lift myself up. And for what? Carmelita and her five hundred and six dollars would be long gone.

Decision made,
I told myself, walking back toward Victor's house. I was that close to putting it all to rest when I thought I saw something move out of the corner of my eye. I glanced to my left, at the sun-smeared windows of Swain's home, and saw her looking at me. It was only movement I could see; not even her face. I knew only that she had been there, watching me, and now she wasn't.

F
or a long time, we said nothing. I sat on the far end of Swain's dusty-smelling couch and Carmelita sat at the other, her arms around her knees. I fiddled with the dial on the Nikon and told myself it was definitely time to leave. She hadn't exactly greeted me with a smile when she opened the sliding door. It was funny how I had waited for her to let me in, even though I could have barged right in myself. An opaque layer of plastic sheeting had been stretched across the broken glass of the sliding door and fastened there with duct tape. An ad hoc repair I thought wouldn't last past the first wind gust. We both had the same rights to be in that house, which is to say none at all.

“No envelope from Victor today?” she said, tilting her head to the side.

“No, I'm sorry,” I said. “I mean, I could ask him for more.”

She let that offer hang in the air for a bit, and then she leaned over and reached for my camera.

“What kind of pictures do you take?” she said.

“Brides. Mostly weddings. A lot of Asian couples. Some bar mitzvahs. Out here, though, nothing much.”

She had turned the camera on but was looking up at me quizzically, not understanding how to browse through the recent photographs with the viewfinder. I moved closer to her, realizing, as my shoulder touched hers, that I was crossing another small line. Seeing myself as an amateurish adulterer, I moved away from her again and watched her scan through the photographs. My attempts at bringing out the best of Shinnecock Bay hardly registered on her face.

“I like the one of the long black bird,” she said. Then she corrected herself, staring at the camera. “Its shadow.”

“Yeah,” I said, disgusted with myself. “I really pushed the envelope there. Bird pooping on a dock.”

She laughed and gently handed the camera back to me. As she did, the sleeve stretched back on her right arm and I could see the reddish scabs again.

“You burned yourself?” I asked.

Her face flushed, but for only a few seconds; the redness around the nape of her neck quickly vanished as she pulled her sleeve back down around her wrist.

“One day I sat there and he tied me up,” she said, nodding at an ornate ivory chair.

“Victor?” I said.

She nodded and told me the rest in a detached voice, as if the facts hardly mattered anymore.

“Sometimes he burns me, sometimes he bites.”

She coughed out a laugh and covered her face with her hand, her fingers splayed across her nose and eyes. It was as if she were watching Victor kneel before her as she sat in the chair and begin to go to work on her.

“Fucking scumbag,” I said, nervously fiddling with the camera dial again. I took off the lens cap and popped it back on.

“When I fell over in the chair, I got the tape off my hands and freed myself,” she said. “He came over with the flashlight later. He took half the cash from the envelope and told me he was disappointed. He told me he'd have to come up with a better system.”

“He wanted you to just lie there and suffer?”

“It's a game,” she said, looking at me warily. “He pays me for it. And I get to stay here the rest of the winter. It was all right until you got curious about the house.”

“So Victor owns this now,” I said, prying a little. “He said he bought it from the Swains.”

“He didn't have to buy anything. Richard Swain shot his wife in the bedroom downstairs. She was dying and he'd fallen in love with someone else anyway. He ran away and left everything just like this.”

“You said he took her to Lake Geneva and he told you he couldn't live without her.”

“No, I didn't,” she said defensively. “And what if I did? All I know is that I'm here.”

I needed her to straighten out her story. Had Victor told her several outcomes and was she screwing them up on purpose to get back at him? I could tell she was angry I was pressing her about this missing couple. I was suddenly worried she had never worked for them at all. I wanted to ask her how much she had made an hour, what time the Swains retired for the night, whether they watched television or sat side by side on this couch reading books by the fire. Who had written
THE BEST IS YET TO COME
on the grinning pig's chalkboard?

Carmelita quickly wiped her runny nose with the sleeve of her sweatshirt and stared at me.

“Martha Swain died here is all I know,” Carmelita said. “Victor says he knows where Richard Swain buried her.”

“Then he's an accomplice. Tell you what,” I said, picturing Victor squeezing Sandra's thigh as she rubbed lotion on his withered legs. “You want him to pay you double? Triple? It's going to be even easier now.”