The Winter Girl (9 page)

“We came up with stuff,” she said, looking out the windows at the balcony, the floodlight overhead catching the cold mist coming off the water. “That's the way we coped.”

With that, she turned her back on me and walked into the dining room. I stood there for a moment, and then I picked up the casserole, cursing the hot Pyrex, and brought it into the dining room.

For the rest of the evening, it was as if we'd made a silent pact not to talk about a single consequential thing. We focused on the food.

There were sweet potatoes; stuffing; cranberry jelly the way I like it, right out of the can and still ribbed by the tin; and of course the endlessly defrosted turkey.

I told her it was the juiciest turkey I'd ever tasted, even though she was right. It was bone dry. We danced around each other conversationally like we were on the fucking Wollman Rink, separated by a solid yard of vined tablecloth, decorated with real red berries she had plucked outside. I had moved on to complimenting the berries when she stopped me.

“Stop,” she said, as if she were remembering something.

“All right,” I said, taking another sip of wine. “But this turkey…”

“Shut up,” she said, holding up her hand. “I thought I heard something.”

We both sat there for a moment, tilting our heads.

“Is it that breathing sound?” I said.

“No.”

“Because that's the pump working on the toilet. You jiggle the handle.”

“It's not the toilet.”

“It's the knocking,” I said. “That steady faint sound of knocking?”

“Yeah,” she said.

I smiled, nodded, bit my lip confidently. I knew exactly what that was. I could set her mind at peace on that subject.

After it snowed or rained, the knocking would go on for hours, and it had an odd sonic effect. It could sound like someone hammering, or chopping wood in the forest.

I told her this with pleasure, stabbing a piece of dry turkey.

“But it hasn't snowed recently,” she said softly. “It hasn't rained.”

I said something about a delayed leak on the roof and we both stood near the window and I showed her where the water would drip on the oak railing, but there was nothing dripping, and the sound was still there. Steady, distant, an unmistakable hammering sound, as if someone were working in pitch blackness, driving nails into a hard piece of wood. We both knew it came from the general direction of the house next door, but we never mentioned that. We slowly returned to the table, but our appetites had been ruined. After a few minutes of failing to cover up the sound with feeble conversation, we silently took our full plates back to the kitchen and scraped them into the trash. As Elise loaded up the dishwasher, I walked around the house, making sure that all the doors were locked. It didn't make me feel one bit safer.

We had hardly even celebrated New Year's, watching the ball drop on television. Out on the freezing deck, we shared a cigarette that Elise had bummed from a nurse at the hospital and watched some distant fireworks explode soundlessly across the bay. And then there was nothing but a half moon and the blinking red light of the Coast Guard antenna measuring its own steady beat. We kissed each other and she hurried back inside, leaving me with the last of the cigarette. I smoked it down to the filter, looking at the dark slope of Swain's roof, imagining the cold rooms and moonlit furniture. Then I gathered our champagne glasses from the railing and followed Elise inside.

For different reasons, we didn't sleep much that week, but I think it was a Sunday night, a couple of days after that extremely low-key New Year's, that she turned toward me in the middle of the night and announced the news.

“He wants to die at home,” she said.

I had been fantasizing about blackmailing Richard Swain. Because I figured it was Richard Swain who had murdered his wife. I had all the little details nailed into place in my mind, right down to the obsolete phone booth near the supermarket I'd use to make the first call. I could even imagine the sound of his voice. The silence he'd impose on me after I mentioned the blood. Elise would be sitting in the Volvo, waiting for me, as excited as she'd been when we first trespassed into the house next door. If we were going to save our marriage, we had to keep the adrenaline going, and having her father return to die at home would derail that instantly.

“Why would he want to do that? What's wrong with the hospital?”

“Because this is his home,” Elise said. “This is his bedroom. He wants to be where he feels comfortable. Not some depressing hospital.”

“What can I say?” I said. “Any particular day he was thinking of making the move?”

“You're an asshole.”

“I'm not,” I said, reaching for her hand in the dark. She snapped it away.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “I'm assuming you're willing to help. You don't have any pressing obligations?”

“I don't think so.”

We lay there for a few more minutes, lost in our thoughts. I felt sure she was thinking of what it would be like at the very end for her father, and whether she'd be able to handle it.

Victor arrived, as promised, the following day, accompanied by a very pleasant home health aide named Sandra.

She was a middle-aged white woman with curly yellow hair and fleshy arms. I have this image of her, standing in the driveway in her powder-blue uniform as Victor walked away from the van that had brought him to his own home, its motorized ramp whining back into place. I can see her smiling at me a little uncertainly, because we haven't even introduced ourselves yet, and she's keeping pace with the doomed man. Victor's face is as bloodless as the bland gray sky that hangs over us and he's been dressed as if he were attempting a summit of Mount Everest instead of three steps. I can remember the elaborate pockets of a blue parka, wool hat, fur-rimmed boots, thick brown corduroys, and the forked tube that carried fresh oxygen into his nasal cavity.

My first mistake was attempting to make a joke.

“It's Sir Edmund Hillary,” I said. “Welcome home.”

I don't know what offended him more, the dumb joke or the fact that I had the nerve to welcome him into his own home. His forward progress, which had been glacial to begin with, completely stopped, and he swayed slightly, just enough that Sandra tightened her grip on his elbow and asked him if he was all right. His purplish lips dropped open, the way a mouth does to permit the entrance of, say, a thermometer. It was his version of a smile, and since he could barely speak and inhale that much-needed oxygen at the same time, it was the best he could do to defend himself. I felt so sorry for him then that I think I blushed. Elise and I helped Sandra, and suddenly the three of us were slowly escorting him through the front door. It took us nearly an hour to maneuver him into his bedroom, which Elise and I had dutifully abandoned that morning, retreating to the small room that she used to share with her brother.

Sandra, bless her heart, did everything she could to make Victor comfortable. She changed channels for him, helped him eat, stood with one hand on his shoulder, encouraging him to keep on trying to shit. I know this because I was watching from a distance, amazed at what she was doing without complaint for fifteen dollars an hour. As I listened to her patiently talking to him in the bathroom, I was so moved that I decided to cancel the whole stupid blackmail scheme. I don't know what it was, exactly. Maybe some childhood memory of my own mother encouraging me as I sat in some cold bathroom, a patience tender beyond words. The moments I feel ashamed are always triggered by something embarrassingly specific.

Besides, I no longer pictured Richard Swain standing next to his mistress on a boat in the Florida Keys. That was too easy. My best guess was that he had put his terminally ill wife out of her misery and shot her point-blank as she slept, right there on that bed, and then he had fled. How craven would it be to pick up a phone and torture him now, especially with another terminally ill man squatting in a bathroom a few feet away from me?

There would be other ways for Elise and I to save our marriage. At some point in the spring, or by Memorial Day at least, her father would cease to exist, her brother would do something stupid and be tucked away in Hamilton County again, and by Christmas, next Christmas, we'd be holding hands and drinking spiked eggnog in front of our friends, and if I couldn't get Elise pregnant again, we'd adopt some incredible, loving child from Moldavia, or Peru.

I wanted to share this almost manic cascade of thoughts with Elise, but she was busy in the kitchen, sprinkling 4C bread crumbs on a casserole, so I thought I should let her be.

L
ater that night, Sandra's husband came to pick her up. It must have been around ten o'clock. I thanked her for putting up with Victor.

“You're not getting rid of me that fast,” she said, laughing. “I'm going to see you all bright and early tomorrow.”

It's very hard for me, even now, to recall those words. Of course, she did come back, bright and early. She tended patiently to Victor in the bedroom he had picked for his big exit, softly singing some old song that repeated the same words over and over again until he suddenly barked at her to stop.

I
don't want to be easy on myself. It's always simple to slide away from your own selfishness in a marriage. I mean my marriage. I can think of all the opportunities I had to say something wonderful, or to touch Elise in a certain way.

I could have kissed her neck as she stood by the kitchen counter, reading the pharmacy warnings that came stapled to Victor's opiates. I could have wrapped my arms around her waist, but I didn't because I thought it was too great a risk at the time. She hadn't slept the night before and she'd polished off almost a full bottle of red wine. It's painful when I see myself just glide by her, stand just two feet away from her and crimp fucking aluminum foil around a half-eaten casserole.

I could have told her how much I loved her many times that night, but instead I played it cool, leaving her alone with her thoughts, asking her once, I think, if she had any objection to me running the dishwasher.

“Why would I have any objection?” she said, pouring herself another glass of wine.

Her back is to me, light from the lamp above her head shining down on the furrow in her neck. Her black hair pulled back. I distinctly remember being aware of the fact that she was wearing her good earrings, the sapphires I'd bought her a few years before. I think she had put them on to look nice for her father, who, of course, had probably never noticed.

We didn't argue that night. She told me that she was going to check on her father and that it didn't matter if I ran the dishwasher because he'd be too zonked on morphine and wouldn't hear anything anyway.

She stood by the kitchen door, one hand starting to push it open, eyes cast downward. Of all the things that are painful about that night, the most is the realization I have, even now, of how tired she was of everything, but most of all, of me. There is nothing I can do to change her expression when she finally looked up at me. Elise could let you know how she felt by just frowning slightly or turning her head away.

I cannot lie to you and say that I knew beyond a doubt we were still meant for each other. I realized our relationship probably sustained fatal damage around the time of the miscarriage, but there aren't any breaking headlines when it comes to a marriage. No one's going to arrest you for giving it another week, another month. When she looked back at me, by the kitchen door, all I saw was doubt. It had only grown since I left her in the woods, making my own escape. If her father hadn't come home, I think she might have left me in January.

“Been a long day,” she said. “Maybe tomorrow will be better.”

I poured some Cascade into the dispenser and thought about how I could sum up our bright future in a few words.

“It's just a rough patch,” I said, looking up, but she was already gone. Only one thing was out of the ordinary. She had left her phone on the kitchen table. I could see that a new text had arrived, and even though I didn't know how to unlock her phone, I could read it on the screen.

“on my way :)” it said. And above it, a telephone number I didn't recognize.

I could feel the anger tightening my larynx, and the muscles along my spine seizing up. Pushing open the front door, I stepped outside and listened to some unseen bird flap away in the darkness. Then, carefully re-tapping the number into the keypad of my cell phone, I sat on the cold wood of the front step, waited, and got a voicemail. I knew that voice.

“The only people for me are the mad ones,” the pompous voice breathed, more than spoke. “If you're normal don't even bother leaving a message.”

I hung up. Curt Page. I wondered how this jerk would look ten years after we'd kicked him out of the loft. Curt Page, freshly divorced and apparently headed toward the East Coast.

I called again, waited for the beep, and tried to keep my voice steady.

“Hi, Curt,” I said. “It's your old buddy Scott. If you ever text my wife again I'm going to fucking kill you.”

No, that wasn't specific enough, I thought, bubbles of anger rising up painfully in my chest. I thought of the shotgun in Victor's closet.

“I'm going to stick a shotgun in your mouth and blow off the back of your head. Do you understand me? How's your fucking novel going?”

His voicemail did not object to the tone of my voice. Three more times I called back, asking him in a constipated whisper:
Do you understand me? Do you understand me? Do you?

Then I sat there, the screens of both phones eventually extinguishing themselves and leaving me on the dark step, listening to the small, breaking waves of the bay down below. I felt alone and frantic for a moment, until I saw the upstairs light switch on in the house next door. I knew it was just some automatic system, but the light felt vaguely comforting, even as faint as it was. Just a plain white rectangle partly hidden from view every time the pines were stirred by the wind.

A
fifth of Jack Daniel's was the best of the second-tier hard stuff left in Victor's liquor cabinet. I'd finished off the Bacardi, Sauza, Dewar's, Pernod, Hennessy, Cutty Sark, and Smirnoff. Only the Jack Daniel's and a bottle of sweet vermouth remained. I poured some bourbon into one of Victor's chipped mugs. I poured Victor one too, and I carried my offering into the bedroom that, until that night, I'd somehow thought of as mine.

Victor was watching the military channel from his bed, his index finger loosely pinching the oxygen tube that led to his nose. There was a steady
pssshhh
every time the oxygen released from its canister on the side of the bed. He didn't turn toward me as I walked into the room.

“I brought you a little nightcap,” I said, putting the mug down on the nightstand. I sat on the chair next to his bed and briefly glanced at the television before tuning in to his face. I sipped the bourbon and studied the drifting television phosphorescence that crept back and forth on his waxy forehead. His jaw had dropped open and the only reason I knew he wasn't dead was because once or twice his tongue slid along his bottom lip and glinted in the light. His breathing already seemed highly irregular. His chest didn't seem to move for minutes on end, and then it would suddenly heave. Needless to say, he never touched the bourbon I'd brought him.

I don't know why, but I had a surge of sympathy that makes me cringe now. I leaned over and squeezed his slightly cold foot. He flicked his pale blue eyes downward as if I were touching someone else's extremity. It made the sensation of touching him even stranger. The fact that his foot felt like cold marble underneath the sock didn't exactly help, and I was more than happy to withdraw my fingers.

It's funny how seamlessly the last subject came up. Through the blinds I could see that the lights were on in the house next door. For a moment, I considered telling Victor everything. If there was one person I could confess to, it would be a guy on the way out. Maybe he even knew a thing or two about Richard Swain, having lived right next to him for a number of years. What I decided to share with him, instead, was my uncanny knowledge of the future. I waited a few more minutes, till the green digits on the nightstand's alarm clock read 10:59, and then I told him what was going to happen.

“Those lights are going to switch off in a minute,” I said, pointing at the house next door. “It's always the same.”

This time, Victor turned to me with real interest, and when he spoke, it startled me.

“I own that house,” he said.

I sank back in the chair, watching him watch me. He pinched the tube again, as if he wanted to see what would happen if he interrupted the steady stream. It made him wince slightly and raise his chin. He let go and slid one hand along the bedspread. I decided to let the subject drop. I had seen the warnings on the opiates and was pretty sure he didn't fully comprehend anything.