The Melting Season

by Jami Attenberg

  “Los Angeles,” I heard Timber say. “I’ve never made it that far west before, but we are dying to go there on vacation. I heard there are amazing flea markets there.”

  Flea markets? The world felt all lopsided. Valka handed him her card.

  I looked down at the booth and stared at the glittery swirls embedded in the table and I imagined myself inside one of those sparkles. That I had shrunk down to the size of nothing, a fraction of my former self, and could just disappear forever.

  Valka ordered some food and Timber ran behind the counter. I could smell the meat as soon as it hit the grill, and the gentle sizzle comforted me. Valka slid into the booth with me.

  “Okay, how did you not know he was gay? That man is as queer as they come.”

  “I don’t know,” I mumbled. “Nobody is ever gay around here.”

  Valka craned her head around the diner. “This place is so charming,” she said. “I just want to take it home with me and plant it in Santa Monica and have Timber make me lunch every day for the rest of my life.” Her phone rang—a ringtone of “Let It Be”—and she pulled it out of her bag. She looked at me and raised her eyebrows even higher. “It’s Paul McCartney,” she mouthed, and then answered the phone. “All right?” she said.

  I fished my phone out of my bag and dialed Jenny again, and then my mom. No answers all around. Maybe they were sleeping off the storm, too.

  “Kiss-kiss,” said Valka. “And thanks again for the flowers. They stirred my soul.” She shut her phone. “Well. This is really turning out to be a hell of a trip.”

  I was glad for Valka, that she was getting such a kick out of her life at that moment. And if we were still safe in bed in Las Vegas I could have even mustered a smile. But I was not with her on the other side anymore. I was not the Catherine of my childhood, or the Moonie of my marriage, or the Cathy on the run in Las Vegas. I was just a girl in a diner in Nebraska trying to figure out what to do next.

  Timber brought over two burgers. Mine was smothered in cheddar cheese.

  “You looked like you needed a little cheese,” said Timber.

  Valka clapped her hands together. “This is the prettiest burger I’ve ever seen,” she said. Timber stood and watched Valka take her bite. Some of the juice from the meat dripped down her hands and Valka licked it up gingerly. “Delish,” said Valka. Timber just smiled and stared at her. He was in love with her as much as I was, any fool could see that.

  She took another bite and then put her burger down. “Now,” she said. “We just need a plan.”

  “I don’t even know where to start.”

  “What do you need a plan for?” said Timber.

  “We’re here on a mission,” said Valka. “A secret mission.”

  “Tell me more,” said Timber.

  And then Valka said the same word to Timber that she said to me in Las Vegas to get my ass on the plane.

  Jenny. It was all about Jenny, of course.

  Jenny, and that tiny little life bubbling up inside her. Jenny’s arm in a sling. Our mother waiting for another chance to teach her a lesson. Jenny trapped in that house forever, or out in the snow somewhere, worse or better, I could not decide. Jenny making the wrong decisions. The decisions being made for her. My little sister, lost and alone and hurt. Doing her crooked cartwheels so no one would notice what was wrong with me. Jenny with her hands on her hips, looking at me.

  Where do you think you’re going, missy?

  “Timber, where is my sister?” I said.

  Timber shook his head and sat down next to me in the booth.

  “Your mom’s got her over at the house. She said she took away her car keys, locked her up in her bedroom, and she’s been telling everyone she’s not letting her out till spring.” Timber looked at me kind of funny. “We all were just kind of hoping she was kidding.”

  “But what about the baby?” I said.

  “There’s a baby?” said Timber.

  “Uh,” I said.

  “I don’t know anything about any baby. She’s been telling everyone that Jenny said she was going to run away. To find you.” He put his hand on mine. “Looks like you’re her hero.”

  It was not possible I could be anyone’s hero. But when I looked at Valka she was nodding, and when I looked at Timber he was nodding. I did not nod back.

  In the end, we did not need much of a plan. We just got in the BMW and drove to my parents’ house, Timber following us in his truck. Although we did act like we were secret agents as we were walking out the door of the diner. Valka sang the theme song to Mission Impossible and Timber pretended to shoot imaginary criminals and did a dive into the snow. If we had known what we were going to face when we got there, we would not have acted so carefree.

  22.

  No one had cleared the snow from the driveway at my childhood home. At every other house on the block the massive drifts had been pushed aside onto front lawns and sidewalks. At our house, the snow piled up above the bottom of the front porch and around Jenny’s car all the way to the windows. Giant, swirling icicles hung everywhere, blocking the windows and the garage. I noticed for the first time that the right side of the roof was sagging. Had it always been that way and I had just never noticed? It was starting to get dark, and a new layer of chill crept over me.

  “I have never seen snow like this in my life,” said Valka, as we waded toward the front door. “It must crush the spirit.”

  “I don’t mind it,” said Timber. “You kind of buckle up and go for the ride. And just when you think there’s no chance for hope, that you’ll never see another black-eyed Susan—”

  “—or the cornfields,” I said.

  “—or an American elm,” said Timber.

  “—or cranes on the Platte,” I said.

  “Then there’s spring,” he said.

  Valka laughed at the both of us, at our spring fancying.

  “We love Nebraska,” I said.

  “We do,” said Timber.

  We reached the front door and I stood, ankle-high in the snow, and tried to unlock it. The dead bolt was locked. I did not have a key for it. It was something my mother had put in years ago, when there had been a mass murder at a Wendy’s near the Walmart where my dad worked. The killer had taken his ex-girlfriend and all of her coworkers into the deep freezer and shot them all execution-style. The police found the bodies bent over gallon jugs of ketchup and mustard. The killer made it all the way to the Canadian border but was stopped by the guards there. Wrestled to the ground. Screaming holy hell. They showed him in cuffs on the TV. He was a local boy, just like the rest of us. But he had gone mad for love. My mother muttered about the crazies for a few weeks and then finally one night my father pulled out his drill and installed the dead bolt. We used it just at night. Just to keep the crazies away. Crazies like me.

  “She does not want me here,” I said. I pointed at the door. “She used the extra lock.”

  “Too bad,” said Valka. “You’re here.” She sounded tough and masculine. She could crush someone at any moment.

  We stood for a moment, balancing ourselves in the snow.

  “We could throw something through a window,” said Valka.

  “Or climb up to the second floor,” said Timber.

  “Or we could just walk around the house and use the back door,” I said.

  They both booed me.

  “You are like the least fun superhero ever,” said Valka.

  We trudged around back through the snow, all of us taking turns at tipping over. I eyed the right side of the roof as we passed it. It looked like the house was shedding itself, scallops of siding dripping down toward the ground. That could not have just happened this winter.

  We rounded the corner, past the shivering, barren elms and the tips of the thatched wire fence that bounded what was once my mother’s vegetable garden. When we were little we would help dig up potatoes with her, and then she would slice and fry them and make fresh French fries for dinner. She stopped gardening once we go
t older, but there was still rosemary and a handful of lonely potatoes every summer.

  I heard a cough and looked up. It was my father sitting on the bench on the back porch. He had a glass in his hand filled with brown liquor and ice. He was smoking, something I had not seen him do for years. I moved faster, leaving Valka and Timber behind. As I got closer I could see he was as skinny as a stray cat begging for scraps. It was so quiet, except for the sound of us wading. He coughed again. The sky was gray. My father was surrounded by snow, which he had dug out and molded to make a sort of chair for himself, including arm rests. A bottle of whiskey and a ring of cigarette butts sat at his feet. Valka fell again and shrieked, and he looked up.

  “Well, looky-here,” he said. “Miss Catherine.” He had never taken to calling me Moonie. I was named after his mother. “I thought you’d be in Hawaii by now. Doing the hula.” He did a halfhearted sway with his hands to one side and then another. Oh, he was ripped.

  “Dad, what’s going on in there?” I said.

  “Well,” he said and leaned back, resting his arms on the snow. “Something’s come over your mother.”

  His skin was white and the circles under his eyes hung down a few rungs.

  “You know what I mean,” he said.

  Yes, I did.

  23.

  Something had been coming over my mother my entire life. We all knew it, in my family. We all knew my mother had been wounded. We all knew she was only sometimes healed, and if it was only sometimes, it was probably not at all. We never talked about it. We never told a soul. We were all in her shame with her. In it so far we could not make our way out again.

  I had been keeping my secrets for so long. Other people’s secrets. I took everyone’s pain for my own. But when I left my husband, when I lost my mind, when I stole all the money, when I hit the road, when I saw the mountains build in the distance until I was right up next to them, so close it seemed I could have climbed right to the top, when my world unfolded before my eyes, all I had wanted to do the whole time was tell someone this one thing. I could not tell Valka. It just seemed too dangerous to give it all to her, and I needed her too much. But I could tell someone else. Someone new. And I had.

  AT 5 A.M. ON NEW YEAR’S EVE, Valka and Paul McCartney were making out in the other room. I could hear the low laughter and sometimes there was a loud smack of the lips. Britney Spears had been the last one at the party, and they had finally booted her out. (“Y’all are gonna miss me when I’m gone,” she screeched.)

  It was dark in the bedroom except for light coming through the curtain on the French doors. Prince crawled across the bed toward me like a cat and when he got to me he let out a meow and we both laughed.

  “I wanna lap you up,” he said.

  “Oh,” I said. “I don’t know.” I was dizzy, and then there was that clenching-up feeling inside.

  “Come on,” he said. “Just let me love you for a little while.” He put his face close to mine. He smelled spicy.

  I blurted it out: I have a hard time feeling. It was so nice to say it out loud, even though I felt humiliated at the same time. I hoped it would get better as time went on. I could not go back to not saying it again. I knew that much.

  “I know, baby,” he said. “It’s a rough world. People have a hard time letting go.” He ran his hand down the side of my face, a fingertip down my neck, a full hand again on the top of my chest, and the side of my breast, and finally down to my hip. A warm trail followed his hand on the outside, but on the inside I was chilled. “You just have to relax.” He moved his hand to my hip.

  “I can’t.” I started to cry and choke a bit. He is going to do it anyway, that is what I was thinking.

  I know now it makes no sense to think that way. But that was just what I had always believed. That thought was stuck deep inside me.

  “Okay, okay, baby,” said Prince. “You calm down now.” Prince pulled his hand away from my stomach. Of course, I was freaking him out. Of course. I am a freak. But then he put his hand in mine, and lay down next to me.

  “You want to know about not feeling?” he said. “I got that covered.”

  Prince started talking and told me stories from when he was still living his life as a girl in Memphis. Tough enough being mixed race, let alone feeling like she was supposed to be someone else entirely. Girls looking away in locker rooms, when she got caught staring. Boys treating her rough in the hallways and after school.

  The story ended with her mother catching her making out with her lab partner and kicking her out of the house.

  “It was actually a relief,” Prince told me. She cut off her hair. She bound her breasts. She changed her clothes. There were a lot more lab partners out there, just waiting for a girl like her. A man like him.

  When she was done talking, I said, “You win.” He had been through the wringer, just like me. Thrown out into the world by his mother. He had turned into something new though. All I had done was steal a bunch of money.

  “What do I win? Do I win you?”

  I took a deep breath. “Okay.” I shifted and then started to unbutton my shirt.

  Prince laughed. He was not being mean, but still it stung. Then he pushed my hands away gently from my shirt. “What kind of man do you think I am? I don’t want to make you do anything. We can just talk. Come on, you tell me. Tell me your hard-luck story. I promise not to laugh at you or judge you or say anything to make it worse. We’re just two strangers meeting for a night. You can trust me.”

  Our faces were so close.

  “It is not my story,” I said. “It is my mother’s. The bedtime story she used to tell me.”

  “If she told it to you, it’s yours, too.”

  I turned up toward the ceiling. I sucked in some air and held it and then burst it out when I could not stand it for a second longer.

  HOW DID THAT STORY go again? The one she was always whispering in my ear before bedtime. Hovering with that wine breath. Watery eyes. Fingers that pinched. Sometimes there were stories about my father, about what a waste of time he was. In bed, in life. And when I wake up in the morning, he is still there. She made that sound like a bad thing, but I always knew it was good. That someone would be there in the morning. She rattled off her complaints. Her voice swerving. I knew she was just complaining, but it made me sad anyway. I could handle sad. But then there was the one story that scared me.

  How did it go? It started in Omaha. A college girl heading to France, her first time away from home. She was wearing a hat she had bought at the Brandeis department store that looked like one she had seen in a magazine. A white summer hat with a wide, creamy ribbon around it. There was an early morning plane to Chicago, another to New York City, a flight to Paris, and then she would have to take a commuter train to Rennes, where she would live at the university there. More than a day of travel. Out-of-her-mind tired. Her first time on a plane, her first time anywhere. Big eyes for the world.

  She had felt cool and confident when she left in the morning, but on the plane to Paris she was a mess. Her linen dress was wrinkled. Her blue eyeliner was smudged around the corners of her eyes, the matching shadow falling down her cheeks. The pins in her hair kept jamming into her head. She took her hair down. She washed her face in the bathroom. You are a mess, is what she said to herself in the mirror. A target, she realized later. A single woman traveling alone. Anyone could have seen it. Especially the man in the suit across the aisle, a man just short of her daddy’s age, if he were still alive. He would have been happy she went to France. He would have been scared the whole time she was gone and never told her a thing but he would have been happy. Did not matter anyway. He was dead now, three years past. She was on her own now. Whether she wanted to be or not. But here was this man across the aisle. He did not want her to be alone.

  What did he look like? I asked that once. When I thought it was just a bedtime story. Maybe I asked the first time she told the story. Never again. I never asked another question again.

 
He was muscular, but short. He had a thick jaw. He had brown hair, and he wore it a little long. He had young hair, but an old face. He had big hands. His teeth were white and huge. He wore an expensive suit. It was cut tight around him. He filled out his suit. He filled out the seat he was sitting in. He took up all the room around him he possibly could. He was an ice-cold block of a man.

  He was chewing gum. He offered her a stick. She took it. He spoke to her in French.

  Coming home?

  I am visiting.

  Oh, you looked French to me. This hat, this dress. So French.

  My mother was flattered.

  I am American.

  He smiled painfully at my mother. Then he started speaking in English to her and she was relieved. She knew she was going to have to speak in French the entire time once she landed. This was the point of her going. But she was not totally ready. To give in to being on her own. In her head, on her own.

  What did they talk about? That part I do not remember. Maybe she told me once. I remember the gum, and that she told him she was American, and that they talked for a while. He asked her questions, she answered. She asked him questions, and he told her very little. He was a scientist. A man of science. He was coming home from a conference. That was all she knew. He was more interested in her. In her being an orphan, in her being alone, in this boy she had just met at an ice cream social at school, but, no, he was not her boyfriend. Yet. He was most interested in her having to find her way to the train all by herself.

  They walked off the plane together. She pulled out the letter that had been sent to her by the immersion program. It contained all the directions to the train she would take to Rennes. There was a phone number. She was dizzy. The airport was huge. It was late in the afternoon, but it could have been any time at all.