The Winter Girl (5 page)

Under the recessed lighting I could see the rain sparkling on Elise's black sweater, the cold drops suspended in the fibers. Suddenly she reached up and pulled the turtleneck off, tossing it on the green carpet. She unzipped her black jeans and mashed them down around her ankles, nearly tripping as she stepped out of them. I watched her sit on the bed and reach for the biggest pillow. She placed it under her stomach and playfully raised her ass in the air, her black panties reflecting two streaks of yellow light.

“Hurry up and fuck me,” she said. “It's freezing in here.”

I unbuttoned the jacket and tossed it on a chair in a corner of the room.

I pulled down her panties and ran my hand up the hollow of her back, feeling her arch as the heel of my hand traveled downward. I unzipped and pulled my cock and stroked it like some sordid john as I watched her look back at me. She was lightly playing with herself. I entered her as she hunched over some stranger's pillow. I dug my arms under the pillow and pulled her stomach toward me. For the first time in months, she reached back and grabbed my balls. I grabbed a handful of her hair and she didn't scream at me. We made up for three months of not having sex in less than ten minutes. I went down on her, her cold thighs pressed tight around my warm ears. I caught her looking in the mirror once, with a slight smile, pleased with the view, her hand pushing my forehead back.

“Do it nice,” she said, playfully slapping my cheek, then she went back to looking at us in the mirror, her eyes closing. I got on top of her, my hands underneath, my mouth in her ear. I was already out of breath.

I finished outside of her, on the comforter. She kissed me and laughed. I distinctly remember that my chin was hooked over her bare shoulder and that my face was too close to hers to bring her eyes into focus. I slipped my hand into hers and she squeezed two of my fingers. We didn't lie there long because there was an odd, metallic odor and I remember telling Elise it was probably because the sheets hadn't been changed in a year. I poked my arms back into that stiff jacket and she pulled on the soaked sweater with a wince. We looked down at the wet spot on the blue sheet.

“We should probably take off the comforter,” I said, looking at the mess I'd made on it.

“Why? No one lives here anymore.”

I leaned over the bed and started to tug at an edge of the comforter when Elise reached for my arm and stopped me.

“We'll wash it and bring it back,” I said. “Look at them. Don't they look like decent people?”

Elise had grown impatient with my attempts at playing housekeeper. She took a deep breath and stared at the photographs on the dresser. Mr. Swain and his fleshy face, the double fold of skin around the cheeks, a ready smile, white teeth. There was something about his eyes that seemed wrong. His wife was a narrow woman with a nest of silvery hair and a small mouth, wearing a diamond necklace, her hand oddly clenched on his shoulder, as if she were using him for support rather than showing affection.

“Let's just leave it,” she said, walking toward the doorway and reaching for the switch to turn off the ceiling light. But I had already ripped the thin comforter off the bed. One more second and we would have been standing there in the dark. I would've just followed her out of the room, and none of this would've happened.

It was Elise who screamed before I noticed a thing. It was so obvious that I didn't see it at first. The dried bloodstains covered almost half of the sheet underneath. It wasn't until my eyes reached the blue of what was once a bedsheet that I realized what I was looking at.

Elise screamed again, then covered her mouth, looking at me with startled eyes. I followed her as she ran back toward the living room, but we never made it to the door. She doubled over and threw up.

“Don't panic. There's no one here,” I told her, rubbing her back as she finished and looking up the winding staircase at the dark upstairs rooms.

I kept telling Elise to calm down, but as soon as she left the house, she started to run down the driveway. I caught her shoulder and she wheeled around.

“We have to go the other way,” I said. “Down the deer path.”

“I'm not walking that way. Someone's going to kill us.”

I pointed at the dark outline of the house we had just left and tried to make her understand that no one was in there. We could call the police from Victor's place.

Elise continued walking down the driveway anyway, and I followed her. I couldn't see anything through the mist, just the trunks of the dark, wet elms that lined the driveway, the bark glistening with water. At the bottom, we pushed open a wooden gate that said
S
WAIN'S
W
AY
and walked onto the shoulder of the highway. You could see the silent explosion of each car's brights long before they crested the hill and sped past us. We ducked our heads each time they passed, sure the drivers were watching us, probably making a mental note of the two of us, arm in arm on the road. We were both breathing heavily. That's the thing about getting the shit scared out of you. It's like you've run ten miles.

I think it was about 11:30 when we got back to the house. Elise took a hot shower. I raked through Victor's liquor cabinet for the last of his booze. I poured some Bacardi into a glass and drank it warm and straight as I looked out the window in the living room. The lights in the upstairs room of that house, the ones on the timer, had long since turned themselves off, but I quickly figured out why there still seemed to be a dim yellow reflection floating through the trees.

“Left the light on in the bedroom,” I said to myself, picking up the binoculars I had placed on the coffee table. I scanned the whole house again through the mist, momentarily startled by a dark shape in another upstairs window. I stayed on it until I realized that it was probably a mirror. At the very least, it was reassuringly rectangular, and not human-shaped.

I knew, of course, that I'd have to go back. It wasn't just the light. My wife had thrown up on the floor. We'd left a comforter balled up in a stranger's bedroom. A bloody mattress exposed as if we'd known just what we were looking for.

Upstairs, I heard the sound of my wife showering, the splatter of water as she shifted positions, the sound of the water stopping. It sounded as if she were coughing for a moment. It took me a few seconds to realize what it was.

I walked upstairs, knocked on the bathroom door. Slowly pushed it open.

She was sitting there on the toilet in a white bathrobe, eyes red-rimmed with tears. She looked at me warily, as if I had somehow caused the whole situation.

“If this gets ugly,” she said, “I'm never going to forgive you.”

I let a night pass. Twelve hours in which I tried not to think of the situation in the house next door.

I was boiling Campbell's tomato soup in a small saucepan when I heard Elise's agitated voice on the answering machine, calling from the hospital.

“If you don't call them,” she said. “I will.”

I shut the burner off. I wasn't interested in the pale orange soup anymore. Its bubbling circumference.

I picked up the phone and imagined myself dialing 911. I think this should be taken into consideration, just how close I came to doing the right thing.

I put the phone back down because I needed to rehearse what I would say. For instance, how could I explain the semen on the sheets we had left in the room, or the fact that my wife had thrown up on the floor, or the wine bottle somewhere out there in the woods, or the fact that I had used a stranger's house as a marital aid? Conceivably, if I called 911, I might be in prison by the end of the night, and for all I knew, the bloodstain on the bed had an explanation. Maybe a disturbed relative had cut his wrist in that guest room, or maybe a beloved son had blown his brains out, sending his family into exodus. Then I would be the craven next-door neighbor who had decided to break in and have sex on his deathbed.

If this had happened on the road somewhere, if we had gone exploring near a vacation rental, it would have been different. But with Victor ill, we couldn't just drive away from the house next door.

What ended up happening that afternoon was that I walked right into another blind spot. Instead of calling the police, I poured myself a second Bacardi and Coke and watched some famous chef make Beef Carbonnade on television. I found a pair of yellow kitchen gloves and pulled them on. Then I laced up my sneakers, stuck one of Victor's king-sized linens under my jacket, and left the house with a dollar-store mop and a soapy bucket of water. It was almost dark when I climbed over the fence and found the deer path.

I
waited inside the front door of the house for a long time, just listening. I could feel my heart pulsing in my neck and wrist as I tried to distinguish outside and inside noise, the sound of the sloshing waves from the sound of the refrigerator in the kitchen suddenly kicking in. But I was still jumpy and nervous, crying out “Hello” when I thought I heard something upstairs. I convinced myself it was a pine tree branch scraping against the window.

The mess on the living room floor was relatively easy to take care of. I flipped on the chandelier in the double-height room and mopped up the crusty trail on the floor. There wasn't even that much to clean up.

I left the bucket and mop by the door, admired the shiny rectangle of cleanliness I had created on the white floor, and walked to the bedroom. The ceiling light was still on there, glowering over the stain on the bedsheet. There was no question it was blood. It flaked slightly in the quilted ridges, and I got the impression that it had penetrated deep into the mattress.

I was right. When I peeled back the sheet, the mattress underneath was saturated with blood. The relatively faint light cast by the recessed light made it look more black than red. The bloodstain stretched across the mattress in chromatic layers of varying darkness, even turning the small white buttons red. I leaned forward and caught that metallic odor again, the tang of it sticking inside my nostrils.

Pulling Victor's queen-size sheet over one corner of the bed, and then another, I stretched it over the stain. I leaned over the bed again, stretching toward the third corner, and lost my balance slightly. My face was inches away from the bloodiest part of the mattress, and I flinched at its metallic smell, like old silverware left in a drawer for years. It wasn't as overpowering as a pint of moldy sour cream, but it was still distinct. Snapping the last corner of the bedsheet underneath, I stepped back, expecting to see a fist-sized circle of wet red blood mar the clean sheet, then other fists appearing all over the cotton. But it stayed dry as long as I looked at it.

I balled up the bloody sheet and stuck it under my jacket. I put the comforter back on the bed and even stretched it over the two pillows. I zipped up my jacket and then I did one last tour of the house, because I told myself I'd never see it again. I suppose if I wasn't wearing those yellow gloves I would've just left. Instead I opened the dresser drawers in the bedroom, found nothing of interest except for a flowery dress and an eggshell-blue cashmere sweater, and closed them again.

You won't have any particular interest in the many objects I picked up and put down in that house that late afternoon. A half-empty bottle of conditioner. A frilly box of soap.

I walked into the kitchen, retrieving Elise's bent spoon, stuffed it in my pocket. I slowly walked up the winding staircase, admiring the glassy guts of the chandelier. At the top of the stairs I flipped on another bank of lights. There were two more bedrooms, a sitting room, a study. As I opened and closed the dresser drawers in the two bedrooms, knelt down and inspected the spaces under the beds, it began to occur to me that the only exceptional quality of the house was the bloodstain.

It was the kind of place that had a candelabra on the side of the bathtub. One too many Ken Follett novels in the sitting room. A wicker basket of light jazz CDs. There was a collection of creased Fodor's travel books. Venice. Provence. The Grand Canyon. There were DVDs on a shelf near the flat-panel television that were equally unremarkable and fairly ancient.
Rain Man, Black Hawk Down, Fried Green Tomatoes, Shine.
I opened them, just in case some porn had been hidden in one, but every one was in its right place.

It was impossible to reconcile the situation in the downstairs bedroom with everything else I saw in the house. There was a photograph on a marble table in the sitting room. His wife was standing on his left, leaning against him slightly, her narrow face pinched into a smile, a silk scarf covering her head. Her right hand was crumpled around the handle of an aluminum cane.

I opened another dresser drawer, peeling back the paper lining it. I heard one of the closet doors knock slightly against its runner and I straightened instantly. I had to force myself to move toward it, as if I were encased, suddenly, in some kind of mental ice. When I slid it back, there was nothing inside except a thickly bunched row of padded jackets and a black dress covered with red roses. Everywhere I looked in that house, there was some version of a fake flower. Flowers on the plates on the wall. Painted flowers on the floor. Flowers on dresses. I had the feeling the wife was covering herself in them after some tragic event, or could see some terrible event coming. But that was just guesswork.

Flipping off the lights, I grabbed the bucket and mop and walked outside.

Near the deer path, I chucked the dirty water into a bed of dead pine needles and made my way back to Victor's house. It had begun to snow. Large wet flakes falling on the dry branches around me without a sound. Out on the bay, there were hardly any waves. A black rash of seaweed visible just underneath the water, and a few ducks slowly moving toward one another. I wondered if it was out of affection, or because of the current.