The Winter Girl (2 page)

It was about two weeks before Christmas, and Elise was visiting her father in the hospital again, and I was standing on the frozen front lawn of his house, looking out at the bay. Peering through a set of old-fashioned binoculars. I scanned the inlet, where a duck blind bobbed on the opaque, wind-whipped waves. In the distance, on that spit of land where the most expensive houses are, a pool of golden sunlight was growing, carving itself into the sea until it blinded me just to look at it. I turned right and looked through the binoculars at the house next door. Its shingled, gabled roof. The sky reflected in its bay windows. The lounge chairs stacked up on one side of the pool. It was twice the size of Elise's father's house. Three chimneys. At least four balconies on which no one stood, admiring the view. There was a deer path that led from her father's property to the house next door, and I traded the binoculars for my digital camera and stole up to it again, looking through the lens as I walked toward the pool, as if being a photographer were the perfect excuse.

I let myself through the small gate that led to the pool deck, which was in terrible condition. I walked across it, certain that I would fall right through the wooden planks at any second. I looked down into the oblong concrete cavity, about fifty feet long, thirty feet wide, with brackish water at the bottom, the reflection of me holding my Nikon.

I walked around the house itself, touching the levers and handles of every door. They gave half an inch, but each one was locked. In what I supposed was the downstairs bedroom, a blind had been pulled almost all the way to the floor. Getting down on my hands and knees, I could see a low queen-size bed, a watercolor painting of an Indian squaw on the wall, and right in front of me, a phallic-looking cactus, drooping all the way out of its clay pot to get at the meager light that spilled onto the carpet.

I stood up again and moved quickly past the windows of the living room, noting a winding staircase and an assortment of incredibly green fake plants, including a ficus tree that had even somehow shed its fake leaves onto the painted wooden floor. There was a miniature Cleopatra statue on the glass coffee table.

I could see right into the kitchen. There was another bouquet of fake flowers on the counter, in a clay pot. There was a table right at the window, set for three people. There was a large porcelain pig wearing a chef's hat, and it was carrying a chalkboard, on which someone had neatly written
THE BEST IS YET TO COME
.

“H
e's a little better,” Elise said, when she got home from the hospital that day. I was tucking newspaper under three logs, building a fire. I watched the sports section burst into flame, an athlete's sideways touchdown catch incinerated. She was in the kitchen, and I could almost hear her thoughts as she slowly walked across the floor.
He hasn't made dinner. It's the least he could do.

“That's fantastic,” I said, stuffing more newspaper under the log, crumpling another sheet and getting it ready.

“What were you doing with the binoculars?” she said.

I winced a little, realizing I'd left them out.

“Looking at birds,” I said.

Elise emerged from the kitchen with a skeptical look on her face. I turned toward her, my cheek warmed by the popping flames.

“Looking at birds?” she said, raising her eyebrow. She was wearing black cotton tights under a pleated gray skirt. She peeled off her black gloves, setting them carefully down on one of the pompous coffee-table books her father had probably never read. The log popped again and I pushed the grate back, sat down on the polished stonework next to the fire.

She looked at me with such a detached, sad expression that I had the dreaded feeling she had made a marital decision. I could see her mouth opening and I could already hear it.
I think we should get a divorce. We haven't been close for a long, long time.

But that's not what she said.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “This has been awful. I know you two don't even get along.”

“No, no, no,” I said. “That doesn't even matter now.”

It did, but I was just happy we weren't getting divorced, on top of everything else.

“Do you want to fool around?” she said.

“Sure,” I said, grabbing another sheet of newspaper, crumpling it. Trying to look useful and productive.

She walked up to me and leaned over, giving me a kiss on the top of my head, and I could feel all the cold she had brought with her from outside. A layer of it still hovering around her face.

By the time I finished perfecting the fire and found my way upstairs, she was lying crosswise on her father's bed, sound asleep. She'd managed to pull off her sweater and boots, but her black tights were still stretched halfway across her calves. I tugged them off and tossed them in a corner of the room, then I lifted her legs so that they lay comfortably on the bed. I found myself staring at her pink bra for a moment, and then I watched her stomach rise and fall. On the right side, about three inches below her breast, was an old appendectomy scar. She'd gone under the knife before she met me and had always been a little bit self-conscious about it. It had healed as well as it ever would, leaving behind a whitish, raised thread of extra skin. Before I turned off the light, I kissed her there, right on the scar, then on the valley of her stomach and once on her hip.

“I'm sleeping,” she said, running her hand quickly through my hair.

“I know,” I said, turning off the light.

B
esides my steadily growing affair with the house next door, there were other disturbing developments that week in December. Whenever I came back from one of my expeditions to the house—I got as far as touching its windows, pictured myself scaling a drainpipe—her father's voice could be heard when I hit the play button on the answering machine.

“You son of a bitch,” he said. “Pick up. I know you're there.”

At first I thought he might be addressing an old colleague, mistakenly dialing his own number in a morphine haze. But there were many messages. Eight of them that particular day, his seething rage crackling on the phone's small speaker.

“Pick up.”

“How does she let you touch her? You're a piece of shit.”

“Pick up, scumbag. You fucking coward.”

It went on like that till message seven, and I felt almost reassured. I was hoping there was someone, somewhere he liked even less than me.

The eighth message cleared that up. He prefaced this one with my name and then told me that if he found me in his house he was going to drown me with his own two hands, right there in the bay. And he'd enjoy every minute of it.

“That's enough, now,” a voice said, tearing the phone away from him.

When Elise came home that night, she shook her head before I could even tell her what I had heard.

“I was there,” she said. “The nurse was too. Apparently, it's typical. Their thoughts become disordered.”

“Actually,” I said, “they sounded very orderly. He wants to drown me in the bay.”

Elise arched her lip as if she would laugh, but then she must have remembered how crazy he looked when he said it, and the humor vanished.

“What's going on?” I said.

“I don't know,” she said. She looked miserable as she stared down at the floor. Lines of mascara blotted under her eyes.

“Do you want to hear the messages?” I said, reaching toward the answering machine.

“No,” she screamed. “Just turn off the phone. Why did you have to listen to them?”

She went upstairs and I thought the night would end there, but she was awake when I walked into the bedroom later. I could see glistening white dots where her eyes were.

She'd been crying in the dark.

I'd always suspected that she had an uncomfortable secret regarding her father. A friend of hers had hinted at it, years before, at a party. The friend had told me that she remembered one day in particular, when they were little girls. Elise's dad had pretended he was a monster and chased both of them around a playground. When he caught Elise, he whispered something in her ear and then gave her a long kiss on the neck.

That night, Elise told me about some of the other things he'd done to her, and then she told me she didn't want to talk about it anymore. It's not worth repeating any of it. It's sick and it's sad and a father who does that to his own child deserves a far worse death than being drowned in a bay.

I remember standing at the window at one point, watching the lights in the house next door. Even though we'd been married only four years, I thought we already knew each other's biggest secrets. But I told myself that one day, when she was ready, she'd tell me the rest, and I'd listen patiently, and then everything would be all right. I wouldn't force her to tell me the things that hurt her most just so I could move on. Otherwise, I'd be just as bullying as her father.

A steady wind was blowing across the bay, and the limbs of the pines on the hill erased the light for a few moments, then snapped back again. Precisely at 11:00 p.m., the lights went out. After that there was nothing much I could see in the darkness. Neither of us slept much that night.

In the morning, I waited to see what Elise would do. I listened to her shower. I listened to her brush her teeth and spit. I listened to her zip on her boots. I listened to her softly close the door, even though she must have known I was only pretending to be asleep, and then she left, once again, for the hospital.

T
hat day, exhausted, I tugged on my sweatshirt and climbed up the deer path to the house next door. A coil of thorns sunk into my jeans and I leaned over and fished them out. I took another step and another coil fastened itself around my ankle. On that particular afternoon it seemed like the house was protecting itself. I made my way around a dark, pebbly mound of deer shit, and walked up the slight hill toward the pool. I knelt by the rusted pool heater and scanned the windows above me, the pale backs of chairs just visible through the kitchen window. The placemats just where they were the day before. That porcelain pig, still holding its optimistic sign.

After a few minutes, I stood up and walked around the fenced pool, up to the patio. Anyone could have seen me there, if they happened to be sitting on a boat in the bay. But there were no boats, just more gray waves rippling toward me, landing on the beach with a sweeping sound.

I remember that moment clearly, because I hadn't really done anything wrong yet. In fact, when I saw a door open on the balcony of a house across the road, I didn't wait to see who would come out. I ran back down the slope and found the deer path, tearing through the thorns that leaped toward me again.

“I
have an idea for a great photograph,” I told Elise that night.

She was bent over a bowl of butternut squash soup I'd spent three hours making, tilting her spoon and watching the orange gruel slide off. She was wearing a Breast Cancer Awareness pin on her pullover. When you spend every day at Southampton Hospital, you get some freebies.

“The soup's a little thick,” she said, eating another spoonful.

“I thought you liked it thick,” I said.

“It's fine,” she said, pushing the bowl a few inches away. “I'm just not hungry after the hospital. I can still smell his room.”

She picked up the remote control and turned on the television. We watched
The Bachelorette.

I never got around to telling her my great idea for a photograph that day, but I'll tell you. I was going to have her pose naked on the front steps of the empty pool of the house next door. I felt like it could be the beginning of a series.
Naked Wife Trespassing,
or something like that. As she sat watching television, I could imagine myself standing in the shallow end of that pool, my camera level with her naked kneecaps, goose pimples raised on her arms and legs. She would wrap her arms around her legs and squint at me slightly in the sunlight.