The Winter Girl (8 page)

“I need you to look at me,” the photographer said. “Forget about the tree. It's not going to hurt you.”

I'll tell you one more thing: we named our little boy Frank. We called him that when they gave us a few minutes alone with him at the end, his eyes shut, his face blue, one small fist touching his chin.

I built a fire on Christmas night and Elise made dinner. Every now and then I could hear Elise lift the aluminum foil covering the turkey, and the hiss as the liquid fell around it. I was crouched by the snapping logs, thinking of the dollar I'd left in Victor's wallet and the fact that he'd probably thrown it all in the wastebasket as soon as I left the room.

We were speaking to each other while we concentrated on our mundane tasks. Voices raised over simmering turkey and the snapping fire so that we could hear each other from the different rooms. We'd already exchanged Christmas presents. A belt I didn't need. A half-price coat that she pretended to admire in the mirror before finally telling me the sleeves were too long. You can tell a lot about a marriage by the gifts couples give each other. I was always reminded of how little she knew about what I wanted, what little I knew of what she really desired.

“I've got the store credit receipt in my wallet,” I said, watching her sadly fold up the sleeves of the coat. She looked expensively homeless.

Store credit receipt,
I thought to myself. Three words that would really cut the distance that was stretching between us. But yet there was a receipt in my wallet, and I had bought her a coat on sale at the Bloomingdale's in Hampton Bays. And in some parallel universe they hang husbands for that. Briefly, I felt awful. But then my gift had been a thin leather belt that she finally confessed she had found at half price in the ladies' section.

“You bought me a woman's belt?” I said, threading it through the loops in my jeans and fastening the shiny rectangular buckle.

“It's plated,” she said, a little defensively, still hovering near me in that overlarge coat with its green dangling price tag. “I've got the receipt for that too.”

“It's perfect,” I said, facing the large mirror in the entrance hall and pulling up my shirt so that I could see the silver buckle, winking at me in the lamplight. “I want to be buried wearing it, actually.”

“I'll try to remember that,” she said.

I gave her a quick thank-you kiss on the cheek.

“I should check on the turkey,” she said.

A
t around eight in the evening on Christmas Day, I sat deep in Victor's overstuffed sofa, staring at yet another bottle of ancient liquor I had rescued from his cabinet. It was a bottle of Cutty Sark I held in my hands, and every so often I'd set it down on the floor and try to twist off the cap of the wretched half-empty bottle.

“You don't need two signatures to empty a joint account,” I said. I twisted with all my might again and the cap finally came loose from the neck of the green bottle. I grabbed the glass on the side table and filled it halfway, trying not to notice three brown particles that floated to the top.

Elise and I had been talking about the bank papers we'd found next door, and whether Mr. or Mrs. Swain could have emptied the mutual account.

“How do you know?”

I couldn't tell her exactly how I knew, because it would have ruined our dinner. After the miscarriage, we'd had a fight about money that had grown so serious I spent a week at a friend's house in Manhattan, researching divorce in New York State and getting to know terms like
wasteful disbursement of assets.

“First of all,” I said. “Let's just say he empties the account.”

The Cutty Sark wasn't awful. I fished one of the dusty particles off my tongue and flicked it onto the rug.

“Or she empties it,” Elise said.

“Maybe she blew
him
away.”

Elise shrugged and popped back into the kitchen, and I continued to pore over the bank statement. For all I knew, he'd blown himself away after some financial turmoil. Maybe he was a real-estate tycoon in Atlanta and this was his second home. Maybe the property next door had been foreclosed on. The only thing I felt I knew for sure at that point was that the house hadn't been lived in for a couple of years. I could tell by the layer of dust on the counters, the shrunken onion, the backdated bank statements. If I'd succeeded in burning it down, I would have probably done everyone a favor.

“Something awful happened there,” I said. “It's not like there were just a few drops of blood.”

Elise didn't say anything. I knew she didn't like being reminded of the blood. The careful way someone had stretched a clean blanket over the caked fluid, as if it were a temporary fix and they were coming back. But by making a decision not to call the police immediately, we had implicated ourselves. It was as simple as that.

“It has something to do with the Swains,” I heard Elise finally say. “That's all I know.”

I pictured Richard Swain leaning over a new mistress in the fighting chair of a fishing boat, bobbing on the limpid waters off the Florida Keys, helping her reel in a sailfish skittering in the distance. Tucked between the bank papers was a copy of an investment questionnaire. In a wobbly hand, he'd written his desired bond and stock ratio, his timeline for retirement, eight years away, and specified that he had a low appetite for risk. At the bottom of the sheet of paper, he'd included his contact information.

“We could pick up the phone right now and call Richard Swain,” I said. “I'm looking at his phone number.”

“And say what?” Elise said, poking her head around the kitchen door, just in time to see me pour another pre-Christmas ration of Cutty Sark into the chipped crystal glass.

“I know what you did, Dick.”

I watched Elise smile against her will and then touch her forehead, gently shaking her head as if she couldn't believe what I'd just said. But why would that be any more complicated than what had come before? Hadn't he forced us into this position by sending his hired gang to the house?

“You've got to use a lower voice,” Elise said. “More calm and monotonous.”

I tried it again, and for a moment she stopped smiling, as if I might actually have the balls to do this.

“Let's sleep on this one,” she said, walking toward me. She held out her hand, and I gave her the glass. She took a sip, winced, and handed it back to me.

“I'm going to give you a number, Dick,” I said in my blackmail voice, which had taken on a faint Eastern European accent. “And you're going to write it down very carefully.”

“I'm sure he'll write it down very carefully,” Elise said. But something made her stand in front of me, carefully folding a dishtowel like a small flag, waiting for me to say something else. I think she liked my Eastern European blackmail voice, as far-fetched as it was.

“Three hundred and seventy-eight thousand,” I said, sliding my hand up her ribbed leggings. She gripped my wrist before I reached her thigh.

“Five hundred even,” she said. “Only amateurs come up with odd numbers.”

W
e made it look nice before we sat down. Elise found a box of tapered candles and we set them all around the dining room. We put on some thundering Bach organ chorale and added each dish to the sideboard as if we were some kind of proof. Proof of love, proof of stability, proof of a single unadulterated ordinary moment.

And then, just like he did every year, her brother called. She picked up her cell phone and immediately I could hear his voice wishing her a Merry Christmas as she walked back into the kitchen.

I turned down the stereo, just as I'd once turned down the television in Brooklyn, so I could hear Elise's end of the conversation. She was trying to keep her voice low, but I could tell she was upset about something.
You stupid shit,
she said.

Her brother spoke for a good long time, explaining something to her that I would never hear. I could hear my wife try to interrupt his monologue on the other end by repeating his name again and again, only to go on listening to whatever Ryder had to say.

I was watching her through the frosted glass of the kitchen door as she anxiously paced and shifted the phone to her other ear, and then I suddenly imagined that her own brother had molested her too. Or Victor had done something to both of them. Why would they talk to each other once a year, adhering to this one last, painful custom?

Whatever Ryder was saying to her must have reassured her because suddenly she was asking him if
he
was safe. Then it hit me. There had been no recorded voice asking her if she wanted to accept the call from the Hamilton County Jail.

I was standing to the side of the door now, the stupid platoon of violins on the stereo beginning their slow build. I tried to hear over them, but now I was just catching a word or two.

“The Hub…blood…Dick's house…V-Rex…Merry Christmas to you too.”

As soon as she hung up, I pushed open the swinging door and confronted her.

“Nice of him to call,” I said. “I don't know what we'd do without him.”

“Not now,” Elise said, pulling open the oven and shoving her hand inside a pale blue oven mitt.

“It's really too bad he can't join us out here. Share a little of the turkey this year.”

“He's an inmate in Ohio,” Elise said, dumping the foil-covered roasting pan on the counter. “I don't think he's going to make it.”

When I get angry, my saliva feels like it's turning to acid. I could feel it stinging my throat as I tried to swallow.

“I didn't hear the voice asking you to accept the call,” I said. “He's out of jail. He's not an inmate anymore.”

Elise shook off the kitchen mitt and lifted the foil to take a peek at a singed turkey wing, lightly touching it with her fingers.

“He's at a halfway house in Urbana, Ohio,” she said, staring at me as if I'd accosted her. “He shares a room with a sex offender and a nineteen-year-old arsonist. He's wearing an ankle bracelet. I don't think you have to worry about him, Scott. But it being Christmas, some compassion would be nice.”

“Elise, I was listening,” I said, moving toward her. I tried to hug her, but she ducked away. Our positions were reversed now. I was standing by the stupid turkey and she was standing by the door. “Did Ryder send those guys?”

Elise looked like she wanted to kill me. And that pissed me off. Blood isn't thicker than water. It was as simple as that.

“I'm your husband,” I reminded her. “That still counts for something, right?”

“Yeah, it counts for something,” she said tersely. “My brother isn't some kingpin. He's been kicked around since he was born.”

Even without laying eyes on the guy, I could tell how much Elise loved him. And that pissed me off even more. If she could make that big-sister face for some loser with an ankle bracelet, where did I fit into the equation? For starters, there were going to be no more secrets. I wanted to know every petty crime the guy had committed. How they'd grown so close. Had she ever given him money? Lied for him?

“This brother thing,” I said. “It's a blind spot for me. We're going to have to start from the beginning.”

“There's no beginning to start from,” she said. “I'm the only one he trusts. He didn't send anyone. He owes people favors. He has a big mouth and they know he's got a rich father. He sent them to the wrong house on purpose to
protect
 us.”

“Well, that's great,” I said. “Because it's just a matter of time before they find out Victor lives eighty feet away.”

“They're stupid. They didn't find anything. Believe me, they're done.”

I briefly found myself picturing the guy who had nearly kicked the living shit out of me and Elise just humbly moving on to the next act of violence or extortion, wherever that might take them.

“Thank you for letting it go tonight,” she said before I could say another word. “It's not exactly a world-champion family.”

“V-Rex, though,” I said, finally able to mention her nickname for Victor. “That's pretty apt.”

I laughed a little, but she didn't join in. She waited for my mouth to straighten up again. Her refusal to let me share in this private language made me even more envious. Because how close can a couple be if they can't create their own private language?
Fuck Ryder,
I thought.