The Winter Girl (21 page)

“You're a champ,” Victor says, bending over her and yelling into her ear, as if she'd gone temporarily deaf from the blows. The sound of his voice makes her raise her head slightly, but it doesn't bring her back to full consciousness. “Isn't she a fucking champ?”

He's staring at the camera now and his voice has changed and turned deeper and hoarser.

“What do you want to do?” he says to the camera. “You want me to hit her again?”

He raises his palm into the air, right above Carmelita's head, and makes a sudden fist.

The bedroom door opened and Elise stood watching me, her mouth dropping open in amazement.

“Where did you find that?” she said.

“It was in the mail on the couch. Addressed to me.”

She tried to grab the remote from my hand, but I pushed her away.

“Michaela just texted me,” she said in a distant voice, watching the scene on the video unfold. “She's on her way home.”

I was transfixed by Victor's image as he leaned over Carmelita's bruised body. The person with the camera walked around the bed for a better shot. Victor licks the top of her dark nipple and then pushes her left breast back with his hand and bites her hard, just underneath. Carmelita screams so loudly it redlines the audio, making it sound more like high-pitched static.

Elise grabbed my shoulder, trying to get to the remote again, but I twisted away from her. I stood in between her and the television, determined to see the rest of it.

“Turn it off,” Elise screamed at me.

Victor, strangely, stares at us through the screen, as if he could hear his daughter's voice. He's actually smiling, and the person with the camera momentarily pans down to his crotch, where he's massaging himself through his khakis.

“Why don't you get on the bed too?” he says to the person behind the camera. “You can lie next to her, like the old days. I promise I won't touch you.”

“Fuck you,” Elise, the cameraman, says, keeping his momentarily disappointed face square in the frame.

“Do you hear that, C?” he says, turning toward the bed again. Carmelita is pulling a pillow toward herself and for a moment I think she's going to hug it for some false sense of comfort. But she lies on her back, arches upward, and places it underneath the small of her back. With the other hand she drags her panties down her left thigh, too weak to complete the task.

“There you go, Champ,” he says, helping her tug her panties the rest of the way off. I brace myself for the next part and quickly look at Elise. She only stares blankly at the screen, with a look of such detachment I want to wring her neck.

“Don't worry,” she says. “Nothing more happens. It's like he loses heart. Can you imagine that?”

I watch as Victor takes a step toward the bed and then seems to grow unsteady on his feet. He places his palm on his forehead and sweeps the thin white remains of his hair back. Then he takes a step toward the camera and dry-heaves twice. He bends over and presses his hands on his knees, waiting for the moment to pass.

“Getting too old for this, Dad?” Elise says to him in the video.

“Shut it off,” he says, slicing the air with his hand and then returning his palm toward his bent leg. “Shut it off and lock her up in the closet. We took her out too early. That's what happens when I listen to you and start feeling sorry for her.”

After plucking the orange parking ticket from the windshield wiper of the Volvo, I warmed up the car. I drove in silence up the Belt Parkway, watching an airplane's wing flash in the sky as it banked toward JFK.

“Why did you help him?” I said.

“Because I always did, ever since I was a little girl.”

“And then what you do…” I said, incredulous. “Is
stop.
Just stop what you're doing.”

“Like we're stopping?”

What was I going to say? That it was all her fault? That I didn't understand exactly how this added up?

“Why did she let him do it?” I said.

“You already know,” Elise said, the side of her head touching the passenger window.

“His money?”

“Sure,” Elise said, without conviction.

“Or fucked-up sex?”

“Maybe.”

“Well, which one was it? I need to know.”

“It's me. I'm the one who could have warned her. Because it all happened to me first. You know those poor shits who kneel next to each other in front of a ditch with their hands tied behind their backs, waiting to be shot? They never speak to each other because there's nothing left to say. But I could have changed her life. I guess she had a problem getting over that.”

“So she just showed up?”

“I don't know when she showed up last summer. All I knew is that he wanted my help with her, like he always did. Stupid bitch.”

“She's your fucking sister, Elise. You could give her that much credit, now that she's dead.”

“Half sister. Half slut. Half worthless. Half crazy.”

There was a gas station on the median just before Southern State Parkway. I veered off and parked next to one of the pumps.

“Take it slow, Scott,” Elise said, reaching toward my knee as I turned off the car. A relentless beeping sound ensued. It didn't bother me.

“Don't touch me,” I said. “Ever, ever again, you evil cunt.”

She let me finish the sentence and then she reached back and slapped me across the jaw. I suppose I wanted to sit there, waiting for the hot mark left by her outspread fingers to fade. But I turned and I slapped her back, or tried to. I caught mostly armrest as she ducked and then flung open the passenger door.

I dragged her back in by her hair, almost pleased by how firmly it was connected to her skull. I wasn't counting on a Ford Ram truck pulling up right behind me as she kicked wildly, her sneaker thunking against the window. Her scream instantly got the attention of the driver, who raced around my side of the car and pulled open my door.

“We're married,” I said helpfully, Elise's black hair still stretched in my right hand, her fist flying into my stomach.

“Let go of your wife,” the man said calmly, placing his thick white fingers around my neck until I could feel my eyes puffing out of their sockets. “Or I'm going to start hurting you.”

I had trouble with this proposition. I've always had problems with direct threats, no matter who they come from. It's not whether I'm capable of retaliating in any meaningful manner, it's just that I freeze. I'm always waiting for people to come to the conclusion that they're the true idiot, but if there's one thing I've learned it's that they'll keep on increasing the pressure, digging their rebar-strength fingers deeper into your neck.

My Adam's apple felt like it was caught between his index finger and thumb. I could feel the cold metal of his wedding band. He grabbed my other hand, the one that was still attached to Elise's hair, and pinched down expertly on a pressure point on my wrist, automatically snapping my fingers open.

“I've got a confession,” I gargled. “You can be the first to hear it.”

It was satisfying to feel Elise's heart beating faster. I couldn't see it or hear it, but I knew it was.

“Let him go,” she begged this Good Samaritan. “It's my fault. He just found out I was cheating on him.”

“You sure about that?” he said. He relaxed his grip just enough that I was finally able to swallow the spit caught in my mouth.

“I'm a moron,” Elise said, cupping her hand over the stranger's and gently prying his index finger away. The rest of his hand followed, dropping away from my neck. “I should've waited for a better time.”

There were other customers gathered around the car now, peering in at me, shouting offers of assistance to the fat-knuckled Good Samaritan. He patted me insincerely on the shoulder blade, a little peeved that he'd never get the chance to beat me senseless in front of my wife.

“What you're going to do now, guy,” he said, offering me one last piece of advice, “is drive nice and safe all the way home.”

He reached over and turned on my radio, turning up the volume on a syrupy Katy Perry song.

“I'll be right behind you for a while. Make sure everything is on the straight and narrow.”

“I
love you,” Elise said as I cruised up the highway at a steady sixty-eight miles an hour, the Dodge Ram right on my bumper. I did take the liberty of switching off Hot 97, however.

“I love you too, honeybunches,” I said robotically, massaging the flesh back to life around my neck. “This is definitely one of those times that being married to you makes absolute sense to me.”

She actually had the nerve to put her hand on my right thigh as I drove, running it up and down my jeans a little and bringing her face closer to me. Strange that after all the surreal events of the past few weeks, her breath still smelled kind of nice, her hand felt warm and good, and something was still rattling around my overmatched brain, still wanting to trust her.

I wouldn't let it.

“We're going to have to figure this thing out. This divorce.”

“Yeah, that's fine,” she said, taking her hand away. She leaned back in her seat and gave our new friend a little wave as he sped by, leaving us alone forever. “If that's what you want to do, then we'll do it.”

“And I don't give a fuck about the money,” I said. “That's yours. You deserve every filthy little penny.”

“It's a lot of money,” she said, pressing her finger against the condensation on the passenger window and drawing a little face with
X
's in the eyes. “You're going to need some of it to get on your feet again.”

I thought about arguing that point as well, but then I thought about another Asian bride, posing for me in Prospect Park, another week of making four hundred and fifty, tops.

“Yeah,” I said. “That'd be great. Maybe a few months' rent in Albany, or wherever I end up.”

We drove in silence past all the ugly-sounding towns on the Southern State Parkway. Ronkonkoma. Shirley. Mastic. We were near Port Jefferson when Elise's cell phone vibrated in the purse between her feet.

“Ryder?” I said.

“No,” she said, picking up the phone. She let it ring until the voicemail picked up. But I wasn't going to leave it at that.

“Let me hear the message,” I said.

She sighed, quickly punched the code for her voicemail, and then put it on speaker.

“Hi, Elise. You want to hear something fucked up? Your husband left three threatening messages on my voicemail. His voice gets deeper and deeper with each one. Dude is serious. One serious dude. Listen, I need you to remind him that I still have that .357 Magnum and that I'm carrying it right now. I'm also freshly divorced and I'm on the edge. The edge of the edge.”

There was a pompous exhalation of breath, and then Curt continued: “I've been driving all night and I just saw the most fucked-up thing. A car just exploded in flames on Interstate 81. They'd set up flares and were waving us through the one open lane. But the driver was burned to a fucking crisp. His hair was still smoking…”

“Heard enough?” Elise said. “He probably hasn't slept in days.”

“The rest of the family,” Curt Page continued, but not before another lungful of air had been expelled to let us know how deep this was going to be. “His wife and kid. They were sitting in the grass nearby. Not a mark on them. That's a story. That's a story I'm going to write just for you, except I'm going to make it beautiful. Tell Scott that. Ask him if he can make the most fucked-up things beautiful like I can.”

Curt was so high with interstate insomnia that he forgot to turn off the phone. I could hear the white noise of the highway behind him, the sound of him singing some unintelligible song he'd made up to himself.

All I could make out were the words
golden
and
creatures
and
hot coffee
before the voicemail mercifully cut him off.

“How the fuck did you ever decide I was your type of guy, Elise?” I said. “Why'd you ever single me out?”

She let my question hang in the air for a while, absentmindedly swiping the face of her phone.

“I thought you were normal,” she said.

W
e made it back to Victor's house late that afternoon, greeted by an agitation of large black crows launching themselves from the scrub pine around the property. A handful of newspapers, in their blue plastic sacks, had started to pile up at the end of the driveway. I gathered them in my arms and walked back into the kitchen, dumping them all in the wastebasket.

Elise was standing out on the deck, scanning Swain's house with a pair of Victor's old binoculars. Then she turned her attention to the bay, panning the binoculars toward the inlet where the radio beacon pulsed against a yellowish sunset.

At least this is it,
I thought to myself. I'd spend a few days helping Elise get the house in order, as we'd agreed. A couple of real estate agents were already scheduled to take a look at the place on the weekend. The plan was to be very low-key and stick to the story that had been completely true, up to a point. We had left our jobs in Brooklyn to care for her sick father. Thank God he didn't suffer. What was the market for a house in Shinnecock Hills? We owned two of them.

“Scott,” Elise said suddenly.

I turned to see where she was pointing her binoculars. The upstairs bedroom light in Swain's house had come on.

“Calm down,” I said, though my throat felt instantly dry. “They just haven't cut the power yet.”

“It just startled me, that's all.”

I took the binoculars from her and pulled the window into the tightest focus I could. The only thing that had changed was that the wallpaper was now hanging downward from the ceiling, casting its own triangular shadow. I could see part of the dresser and just make out its wooden knobs, and toward the dark hallway a river of that stained white carpet. But that was all.

Zooming in on the other windows, pulling them in and out of focus, I couldn't make out anything in the early-evening light. I was panning toward the upstairs window again when the light suddenly clicked off.

“Did you see that?” Elise said.

“Yeah,” I said. “That's the end of it probably. No more power.”

Except it wasn't. One by one, the lights in each room came on. Kitchen. Living room. Guest bedroom. Even the chandelier, which I could see the top of. It was as if some mind-fucking phantom had run around the house flipping every switch it could get its hands on. The house was blazing with light now, and I pressed my eyes hard against the binoculars, twisting the focus knob as I searched every visible room.

There was nobody there. Just carpet, and wallpaper, and countertop, and the same old chairs gathered in the breakfast nook. I could even see the silhouette of that four-foot-high pig in the chef's hat and its gleaming snout.
THE BEST IS YET TO COME
.

“Someone messed with the timer,” I said. “Maybe Swain's caretaker comes by once a year.”

“There's no caretaker,” Elise said. “We're the only ones who care about that place.”

We stood there a few minutes longer, bracing for what might come next.