The Winter Girl (7 page)

“I don't want to even picture that,” Elise said. “Maybe it's something smaller. Maybe they're just ordinary thieves.”

“But they didn't leave with anything. They just drove off.”

Elise pulled her fingers away from mine and reached toward the lamp on the bedside table.

“Leave the binoculars alone tonight,” she said. “And promise you'll stay right beside me.”

I promised her that I would, but an hour later, I swung my legs to the floor and walked as quietly as I could to the window. The light in the upstairs bedroom of Swain's home was on. I picked up the binoculars and glanced over at Elise's dark shape, curled up in the bed. Either she was breathing steadily in her sleep or staring at me. I couldn't tell. But when I turned the focus knob and pulled the white wall of the bedroom into focus, her breath hitched.

“Hey,” she said, and for a moment I thought she was talking to me. I was about to apologize when I realized she was talking to someone in her sleep, warning them in a stream of mumbled words I couldn't make out.

On Christmas Eve, I stood in Swain's upstairs bedroom, staring at the file cabinet that the intruder had kicked over. The light was already fading in the empty house, shadows unrolling themselves from the walls. I didn't dare touch a switch. I got on my knees and sifted through the paperwork strewn all over the room. The men had clearly been looking for something more valuable than a bunch of old bank statements, none of which contained a whole account number that would have been useful to them. They were all from the joint account of a Richard and Martha Swain, the balance of which was $143,000 in 2010. There were statements from 2009 and 2008, and those balances were noticeably larger, averaging more than $900,000. I carefully folded the most recent and stuffed it in my pocket and left the rest lying on the off-white carpet, four divots pressed into it, a memory of where the cabinet, unkicked, had once stood.

They'd opened all the drawers of the dresser, and even out of frustration thrown one onto the master bed. The drawers in the other room were pulled open as well. A closet in the upstairs hallway was opened and an armful of clothes tossed on the floor. They couldn't have been anything more than amateur thieves. Maybe they'd been tempted to drive slowly up Swain's driveway when they saw what a wreck the entrance was, with its strewn tree limbs and crumbling entry gate.

Walking over to the window, I waved down at Elise, who was standing a few feet away from the flagstone steps that led to the front door, her arms folded against her chest. Seeing the men search the house the night before, we had become convinced there was something valuable there we had missed.

I gave her a thumbs-up, just to show her I was okay. I headed back down the staircase, with the folder under my arm. Far out on the bay, a seam of cold sunlight had broken across the water. I was standing on one of the bottom steps, transfixed by the tenderness of the light that momentarily filled this house that would never be mine. A faint yellow light glowed from within the crystal chandelier, as if someone had turned up the dimmer switch.

I've always believed that the worst things happen when you are most off guard. I felt the warmth of the light on my face as I walked across the living room one more time and pressed my forehead against the cold glass of the sliding door, the same cold pane I had peered in just weeks before. It's funny, but I saw my own face looking in, my own face looking out. Nothing had changed, really, except that I had dragged my wife into an uncomfortable situation.

I remember thinking that my willingness to cross certain boundaries had probably saved my marriage. For months, we'd watched television and cooked frozen dinners while waiting for her father to die, and when we bothered to talk it was as if we were acquaintances passing each other on some windswept street. What were we going to say? Nothing of the smallest significance was happening out there, except the occasional sounds of clam shells being dropped on Victor's all-weather deck by hungry seagulls.

And now it had fallen into our laps: Swain's house, which I now thought of as a double exposure. Both homes now superimposed on the same plate.

I was still standing by the sliding glass door, and I remember watching a fishing boat cross the bay, the noise of its motor vibrating the glass door slightly. I also remember turning and seeing Elise through the window of the front door, Elise perfectly framed there, shrugging in frustration at me, because I was probably taking too long. I held up my index finger to let her know I'd be done in a minute.

I walked into the kitchen, past the breakfast nook, where the placemats were still laid out, looking for anything that the two men might have left behind. The only sign they had left of their search was a single kitchen drawer left open. For some reason, I closed it.

The pig still held its chalkboard sign and its promise. I tried the door that led to the basement, but it was locked.

I walked back the way I had come, and then I saw him, standing just outside the sliding glass door, watching me with a kind of pleased amazement as I turned toward him.

When you aren't supposed to be somewhere and you see someone you shouldn't see, the best idea is probably to get out of there as fast as humanly possible. But I froze. I just stood there and looked at him. He pulled down the bill of his blue baseball cap and smiled at me, almost flirtatiously. Then he knocked on the glass, not particularly aggressively, and indicated the lock on the handle that I would have no problem flicking open. The most violent men have no idea that they're terrible actors. No great voice ever boomed out of the sky and told them, I suppose, that they couldn't be both things.

His face, darkened by shadows, was turned sideways now, and he was saying something that was muted by the glass. I could see the moisture of his breath expand on the window. He tapped the glass with his knuckles again, a little harder, as if I were a little thick and didn't get the point. When I took a step back, he shook his head, and then he kicked it all in. Really, in the end, it's all about a lack of patience. Patience with each other. Patience with the world. Patience with ourselves.

I was running when I heard the glass break. It must have taken him three kicks to clear a path through what was once an intact sliding door. I remember that there seemed to be an exact pause between each kick, as if he had done this professionally somewhere before. By that time I was out of the house, screaming my wife's name. But she was nowhere in sight. I should have waited, even if I could hear his boots crackling on the pieces of glass inside.

“Elise,” I kept yelling.

But I was running.

A
fter escaping, I got lost in the woods above the bay. I waited until it got dark and then I found my way to the highway. I walked along the shoulder, not particularly caring if a van pulled ahead of me and braked hard and I was dragged away. I should have called the police the moment I got back to Victor's house, but I guess I wasn't thinking straight. If I was thinking straight, I wouldn't have sat there in the dark, weeping and talking to myself and drinking bourbon. If I was thinking straight, why would I have climbed over the fence again and walked down the deer path? Why would I have walked around the half-empty pool and right up to the broken sliding door? I walked right back in the way I had come and the moon blazed brighter than the winter sun, showing me the outline of each piece of glass. I picked up a piece just to prove to myself what had really happened hours earlier. The front door was still open, and I walked out and hollered her name again and again. Drunk now, I was as brave as I'd been cowardly before.

I walked back into the house and I remember the first thing I did was turn on the chandelier. The only time I would ever do so. The whole house seemed to glitteringly await my next move. Shards of light hanging on the walls.

I picked up an iron poker from the side of the fireplace. I waved it through the air once, taking a practice swing, then a faster one, until I could hear the rush of stale air against it.

My third swing caught the Cleopatra statue flush, almost decapitating her smug wooden head. My fourth swing was an overhand smash, right into Swain's dining room table. I watched white cracks spider outward. I lifted the poker over my head again and this time the table shattered, shards of it flying into my hair. It sounds crazy, but I felt like I was getting somewhere. I aimed the harpoon tip of the poker into each flowery plate on the wall, closing my eyes as each one exploded. I was sweating now. I was in a rhythm.

In the kitchen, I faced that shiny porcelain pig, with its snouty smile and chef's hat and its
THE BEST IS YET TO COME
chalkboard. I touched its crinkled nose once and then I reached back to obliterate it, but I didn't. I let it just sit there, gleaming.

In one of the kitchen drawers I found a large box of safety matches. It's an oxymoron that delights me now, like friendly fire, hard water, and easy death.

I had this idea you just strike one and a house burns down, but I struck ten, twenty, thirty, holding them against the corner of the counter, underneath chairs, against fucking curtains. Finally, I collapsed on the kitchen floor. I couldn't even set a fringed cushion on fire.

I remember that my fingers were raw and singed as I walked back around the pool and found the deer path. It wasn't until I'd climbed over Victor's fence that I noticed something flash behind me. A curtain, I realized, in the kitchen window, in flames. I watched it in thrilled amazement, I have to admit. And then it extinguished itself.

Convinced the darkness next door wouldn't be disturbed again, I lay down on the sofa in Victor's living room. I dreamed two things that night: that the house finally burned down with a sound like an endlessly breaking wave, and that my wife was safe and had returned home, gently squeezing my shoulder as I slept. Even in my dreams, I knew only one could be true.

“You ran away,” Elise said.

We were both sitting on the couch. It was so late it was early, the sky tugging itself away from the blackness of the bay and scrub pine. Three dark scraps that may have been seagulls or dead leaves floated upward and disappeared.

Elise's wool sweater was lanced with pine needles and ripped near the shoulder. Her sneakers and blue jeans were soaking wet, up to her knees, as if she had made her way out of the sea.

She was impossible to hold or kiss. She tilted away from me, completely detached from how thankful I was.

“I was looking for you,” I said. “I went back.”

“I was hiding in the woods,” she said, “when you ran past.”

We'd already been over it. There was no point in comparing our cowardice. She said that as soon as she saw him, she went around the house as I walked into the kitchen. In fact, if I had looked, instead of closing some stupid drawer, I would have seen her fifteen feet away, outside, waving her arms.

“But when he kicked in the door,” I said. “You ran.”

“
You
ran. You ran right by me, yelling my name, as if that would do any fucking good.”

I had felt bad enough afterward, remembering how I'd shouted for her as I saved my own skin in the woods. It was terrible to imagine her as a front-row spectator, cowering there as I vanished.

“I went back,” I said, looking through the window, the outlines of the chimneys of the house next door visible, its three peaks, unburnt. A bit of blue winking at me in one of its windows.

“You went back,” she said derisively. “After it was safe, after they were gone, after I could've been killed.”

“We both could have been killed. We could still be killed. They could be watching us right now.”

It was the only thing that stopped the argument. It was the only technique that seemed to save us in those last days. The threat of something worse happening.

“Maybe you should run now,” she said, plucking a pine needle out of her ruined sweater. “Get it over with.”

The light from the table lamp was fading in our laps as the sky dialed itself a shade lighter. When I remember our last days, I always try to imagine what would've happened if, just once, we were who we were supposed to be. In bed. Sleeping. Like a normal married couple. But I don't think we would have been as dependent on each other as we were at that moment. We still had a secret that no one else knew, and it was getting bigger every day.

“I tried to burn the house down,” I said, touching the dry mud on her knee.

“That's nice, sweetie,” she said sarcastically, tracing my fingers with hers, her voice hoarse from the exhaustion of waiting in the woods for hours. She stood up and I followed her, just as the flaring sun rose above the inlet, and we climbed the stairs and went to bed.

There was one more thing she said that morning, right before she fell asleep in her sweater, her socks crowned with dirt.

“There was a deer,” she said softly. “It must have stood there for an hour. Just watching
me.
”

It wasn't till after she had fallen asleep that I realized it was Christmas.

We slept fitfully the entire night, sure that the man was near us, ready to attack again. It was only near morning, when the faintest sunlight had begun to appear behind the blinking radio beacon on the inlet, that I really fell asleep.

It might have been an hour or two later when I woke again and saw that Elise was sitting up in bed.

“Maybe we just cut and run,” she said. “Leave this house. Let my father die alone.”

“I don't see you doing that.”

The truth was, I didn't see
myself
doing it. I was all in now. If we escaped to Brooklyn, it would be even worse. She'd leave me next. I felt like I had to give a very convincing pep talk that would persuade her to stay put.

“You don't know me.”

It was a line that she had used before. It's what a couple on the brink always say to each other, as if to protect themselves from judgment after knowing each other for so many years.
Yeah, sure, I don't know you.

“You have a really fucked-up family,” I said, massaging her neck with the back of my thumb. She reached behind her shoulder and lightly grabbed my wrist, squeezing it twice. This would have been the time to tell her stories of how screwed-up my own family was, but compared to hers, they were about as sinister as pancakes on Sunday.

“I know,” she said. “Sometimes I feel like they kidnapped me when I was a kid. Took me from some beach or something when my real family was playing in the waves.”

That was all she wanted to say. Her eyes slowly closed and she fell asleep, her body jerking once before she started to dream again. I wondered if she was dreaming of the beach, or a fairground, or a schoolyard, or any of the other places children feel most safe.

I stood up and walked to the window, picking up the binoculars and searching every corner of the property, and then what I could see in the scrub of the gully that led to the house next door. But no one was lurking anywhere.

On my way toward the bathroom, I noticed the family photograph I had never paid much attention to, sitting on the dresser. It was a fading snapshot of Victor, Elise, and Ryder, her younger brother. The kids might have been fourteen and twelve, I guessed. Her brother's eyes are almost closed, his mouth parted as if he is speaking to the photographer. His arm is thrown around his taller sister's shoulder. The display of affection sticks out only because Victor stands at least a foot away from them, with an uncertain smile on his face, as if he had just happened to wander into the shot, like some sort of tourist instead of a father.

T
hat day, we both managed to get through a visit with her father, watching him open two presents. As drugged as he was, it had taken him forever. Elise had given him a cashmere sweater. I'd given him a wallet and a silvery-wrapped bottle of Freixenet. He put them back into the wrong boxes and weeded the cheerful reindeer wrapping paper from his bedspread. Out in the hallway, a strand of lights was winking on and off and an orderly was whistling the first bars of “Winter Wonderland” again and again.

“Well, that'll do it,” he finally said. “Very thoughtful of you.”

For a moment, just for a moment, I had felt sorry for him. Maybe it was the way his pale cheek doubled against itself as he flicked away the last offensive bits of wrapping paper, or the way he raised his chin back up, almost like an expectant boy, as his daughter leaned over to kiss his forehead. She patted his limp hand and told me it was time to go.

“I left a dollar in it,” I said, pointing to the box he'd put the wallet I'd given him in. “For good luck. Don't be offended.”

He didn't say anything nasty this time. He didn't have to. He just pursed his lips slightly, to let me know he was trying very hard to hold his tongue.
Of all the people,
I knew he was thinking,
to give me luck.

Before I left the room, though, he called my name. I turned and saw that he was gripping the bottle of cheap champagne.

“Take this with you,” he said. “I don't drink anymore. I'm surprised Elise didn't tell you that.”

“I've got a lot on my mind, Daddy,” she said, leaning over to give him a quick kiss on his waxy forehead. She took the offending bottle out of his hand and we ended up leaving it near a potted plant in the hallway.

We drove home in silence, and I slowed as I passed the fir with the Christmas lights.

“Do you think they have children?” Elise said as she looked at it.

“I don't know,” I said, annoyed at the question. “Why would it matter?”

“It's a little self-indulgent if they're just doing it for themselves.”

I let the argument go. It was Christmas, after all. I didn't want to spend it having a conversation about the importance of children. That's why we hadn't bothered with a tree ourselves. I knew Elise would imagine the little one-year-old boy who would never get to see it. It was just over a year before, with Elise pregnant, that we'd come up with a final list of names: Rusty. Derek. Jack. Frank. It was possibly the happiest week of our lives. We'd sit in the small living room of our apartment on Bergen Street, oblivious to the nasty argument breaking out in the apartment next door. Elise, I remember distinctly, had a small pad of paper in her hand and a smile she couldn't keep off her face the whole night. We debated each name as if we were debating a real person, because a Frank was very different from a Derek, and a Jack would surely be a boy who would be admired but not necessarily need as much company as a Rusty.

We got it down to two, Jack and Frank, and then we promised we'd make the final selection the following day. Elise went to work as usual. Early in the afternoon, just as I was leading a particularly polite and attractive Asian couple to my wedding tree, I got a call from her on my cell phone. She was having terrible cramps. The doctor had told her to come in.

Some emergencies take only a second to develop—a car crash, for instance. You get the picture instantly; you might even be able to shout something or brace yourself. But I've always thought the worst emergencies are the ones that start almost innocently, as if the day were two joined plates of ice that had just begun to separate. The worst emergencies have always made me feel like I'm still in control at first.

I was slightly alarmed after Elise's phone call, and I knew I would take the subway to Manhattan and meet her at Saint Vincent's, but I still felt that the day had nothing vicious in store for me. I wouldn't have lifted the Nikon to my eye and urged the Asian couple to move closer together. They called a few days later, to ask me about the photographs, and I told them what had happened. Elise had slept for two drugged days after the miscarriage, but I had wandered around the hallways of the hospital, exhausted but filled with the need to speak to someone, anyone, about our personal tragedy. I was under the mistaken impression that the story itself might be revised, and that by starting at the beginning again I might arrive at a different ending.

“Do you remember when my cell phone rang?” I asked the husband I had photographed. “She was calling me from her office. She told me not to panic. She was just having some cramps.”

He kept saying “sorry” as he listened, and I think he realized he couldn't ask me when he might see the photographs. He wanted to get off the phone; I could hear it in the murmur of his voice. It made me angry.

“What if I wasn't standing by that fucking tree?” I said. “What if I'm sitting at home and when she calls I drive her to the city. It saves time. Wouldn't that have saved time?”

“I don't think you can blame yourself,” the man said softly. He wanted to hang up now. Maybe when I got over my grief I'd get around to mailing him a refund.

“See, this is the thing,” I said. “I do blame myself. I blame you too. I blame your wife. Why the fuck did you call me that day? What the fuck do you people find so fascinating about Prospect Park? Why can't you get your photographs taken outside a church or something, like normal people? If you didn't have this stupid obsession about my park I'd be holding my son right now.”

He was a patient, sympathetic man. He must have listened to me rage for fifteen solid minutes as I paced in the small glassed-in alcove of the hospital, turning away from the elevators each time they opened, because I couldn't look at one more joyful relative without wanting to strangle them. At the very end of the conversation, when I had run out of ways to tear apart a man I didn't even know, I sat on a small wood bench by the window, pinched the bridge of my nose, and went to pieces.

“I'm still here,” he said softly. “Okay? I'm still here.”

I was touched by that, I really was.

But I have to tell you, my wedding-photographer gig started to go south after that. There was even another photographer, a black guy I vaguely knew, who'd taken over my tree. I watched him taking pictures there one day, trying to use humor to loosen the smile of a bride who kept lifting her frothy white dress off the carpet of yellow leaves, casting nervous glances at the wet black bark of that tree.