The Winters

by Lisa Gabriele

  I backed out of the garage carefully, thrilling to the feeling of independence that driving anything always gave me. It was the first time in weeks that ease crept into my body. I was embarking on an errand alone to fetch supplies to start a project of my choosing. I didn’t need to go to an event at the library to feel purposeful. I could find my own projects. This drive was an opportunity to reorient myself, to get a feel for driving on the right side of the road, and to remind myself there were things I could do here to fit in beyond loving Max Winter.

  I took the winding road through the forest slowly, tires scraping the mounds of dirty snow piled along the side. Soon it would be spring, then the second summer since Rebekah’s car accident. Max once pointed out to me the tree she’d hit, now cut down to a black tabletop of a stump, nestled in skeletal ivy.

  “There,” he said. “That’s where the fire started. See all the way to the edge of those trees over there? All burnt.”

  We paused that day, the car idling. I watched his profile, somberly handsome in the twilight. I realized that every time he left Asherley and every time he arrived home he must think of her. Every time he drove through this part of the island he must remember that horrible night. How the fire trucks roused him. How he must have smelled the smoke before he saw it. He probably knew she was dead before he was told they’d found her remains, the shell of her car. For him and Dani this was living history, this part of the forest. This patch would always be scorched to them no matter how big and green these new trees grew. Of course I understood that. How could anyone not understand that?

  I had begun to relax when the causeway came upon me, the sea churning on either side. This was the first time I had driven over the narrow passage myself, and Max was right, it was disorienting if you looked left or right. The trick to avoid vertigo, he told me, was to stare straight ahead and drive.

  After I bumped off the causeway and back onto the mainland, other houses began to poke through the forest, one or two pretenders to Asherley, stone mansions newly built, plus a few simple saltboxes here and there. These were ostensibly our neighbors, and I wondered if I’d ever know them. If my vehicle broke down and I banged on their doors in distress, would they believe me that I lived at Asherley? Would they say, But you’re not Mrs. Winter, Rebekah died years ago, before slamming the door in my face?

  East Hampton came upon me quickly, its pretty neatness reminding me, in parts, of seaside George Town but with bigger vehicles and wider roads. The town really only consisted of two main shopping strips, so the hardware store wasn’t difficult to find, nor was parking. Walking into the store, as always, my father was there in the smell, a combination of plastic packaging, leather, and cleaning supplies. I took my time down the narrow, cluttered aisles, savoring the flood of nostalgia, remembering what my father had said about certain brands of epoxy and what clamps worked best, which varnish to use on mahogany. Waiting in the cashier’s line, I was proud of my selections, rehearsing in my head how I’d explain the process to Max, imagining him puffing up at my knowledge and self-sufficiency, and the care I would take in refurbishing the boat. I also realized I’d forgotten sandpaper. When I turned around to fetch some I bumped directly into a small woman wearing a long fur coat and large sunglasses.

  “You forgot something,” she said, and shoved a wallet at me. It took me a second to realize it was my wallet, and that it was Dani standing there.

  “Thank you. I— What are you doing here?” I was more alarmed than surprised, uncertain whether this was a generous or menacing act on her part.

  “Gus was driving me into the city.”

  I wanted to explain myself, to say that I had always charged things to Laureen’s accounts when I shopped for her, and I never seemed to need a wallet or purse when I was with Max, who swatted away all attempts I made to pay for anything. I wanted to tell her I wasn’t a complete idiot for forgetting this at home, inside my own purse, which was probably hanging off the back of a chair in the kitchen.

  “You are a lifesaver. Thank you so much.”

  “Sure,” she said, turning away.

  “I’ll see you at dinner.”

  “Probably not,” she replied over her shoulder.

  The door banged shut behind her. The line had inched up, leaving a large gap between the checkout counter and me. Perhaps it was common here, that fur-clad teenagers suddenly appear, hand you money, then disappear, because no one around me seemed disturbed. It was as though some strange comet had streaked through the hardware store and I was its only witness.

  THIRTEEN

  The morning of Max’s second day away, I went to the barn to find more tarp and walked in on Gus about to decapitate a small animal with a shovel.

  “Stop!” I yelled. “What are you doing?”

  He pulled back the shovel and rested his arm on the handle, exhaling loudly. “It’s almost dead anyway.”

  I knelt down to examine its tiny body, its silent mouth reaching for food. It was a kitten, maybe three weeks old. Gus told me the barn cat had given birth deep inside a gable. When he spotted the cat around the property recently, avoiding the barn completely, he assumed she’d abandoned them. Sure enough, when he dug into the crevice between roof beams, he discovered only one of six had survived.

  “So she was pregnant.” I don’t know what possessed me to intervene; I didn’t believe it was cruel to kill suffering animals. When a mother cat abandons her kittens, it’s usually for a good reason. But the kitten, though hungry and filthy, seemed otherwise hearty, intact, with the same long hair as its mother. I scooped it up and headed straight to the kitchen, where I found Katya stuffing a chicken with lemons.

  “What is that?”

  “A kitten,” I said. “What can we give it?”

  “I don’t want it in my kitchen.”

  I ignored her and wrapped the squirming kitten in a tea towel to contain it, then perched it in a bowl next to me. I pulled the kitchen laptop towards me. “What do month-old kittens eat?” I said out loud as I typed the sentence into the search bar.

  Katya, pulled into the drama, silently read the elaborate kitten care instructions over my shoulder, which included round-the-clock feedings for at least another week, sterilizing equipment, and helping them with everything from temperature regulation to going to the bathroom.

  “Wow. More work than a baby,” I said.

  “Well, you wanted more to do around here.”

  I looked up the closest pet store, which stocked kitten milk powder and other supplies, then called down to Gus, for the first time sending him on an important errand.

  “It’ll be dead by the time I get back,” he said.

  “Let’s take that chance.”

  I hung up and washed my hands. Then I dug out a glass turkey baster and warmed up some watery milk for the kitten to drink.

  “Where are you going to keep it?” Katya asked, her voice stern. I looked around the kitchen. “Nope. Not here. I am not going to have a dirty animal in my spotless kitchen. And no, you cannot bathe it in this sink.”

  I didn’t want to leave it in the barn. The chemicals I’d be using in the boathouse were noxious, they’d irritate her, maybe even poison something this small. No, it needed to stay warm, and near enough so that I could hear it, to keep up with its feedings. Even for a week. I glanced down the hall that led to the back door. With its warmth and proximity, the greenhouse would be a perfect place to incubate a kitten until it was healthy enough to be spayed or neutered, along with its mother.

  I asked for the key.

  “I don’t know where it is,” Katya said. “And even if I did, Mr. Winter forbids anyone going in there. Ever.”

  “I’m sure he’d rather I keep it there than in our bedroom,” I said, holding out my hand for the key. “I promise, if anyone gets in trouble, it’s going to be me.”

  Keeping her eyes on me, she reached her hand into the
sugar bowl above the sink. She placed the key on the counter next to the damp tea towels. “I did not give this to you. You just found it.”

  I scooped up the kitten from the bowl. The corridor that led to the door was dark. I lived here and yet I had a sense that I was trespassing on Rebekah’s prime territory.

  I slid the key into the sticky lock, fussing with it a bit until it gave in my hand. I was shaking. I eased open the door. Inside the air was heavy and close. I inhaled deeply as the kitten stirred. Nothing grew here and yet it smelled sweet and loamy with possibility, the oddly angled glass generating a naturally intense heat. I held out my free hand as I walked down the middle of the star, shadows competing with the sun to caress my skin. From the outside, I had agreed with Louisa’s assessment, that the greenhouse was interesting but ultimately a cold, jagged intrusion on a classic aesthetic. But inside it was warm and light-filled, magic from every angle. Even the gnarly rose stumps looked like they could be revived with just a little water and attention. I could smell and feel the life that had once been in here. From beneath a table I pulled a wooden crate that housed green pots of dead seedlings and carried it over to the sink by the door. I placed the bowl with the now sleeping kitten in the sink. Using a piece of dusty canvas, I created a makeshift cubby in the crate for it to sleep in. All I needed was a blanket, and the conditions for it to thrive in this place would be perfect. I turned on the tap and let the brown water run until it was clear. When I placed the kitten in the warm water, it turned out not to be gray at all but the same beautiful cream color as its mother, with darker orange stripes. Its eyes, cleared of gunk, were a bright mossy green.

  “So you are pretty,” I said, dipping her in the water and shaking the dirt loose. Afterwards, I wrapped her—for it was indeed a female—back up in the tea towel and carried her to a sunny spot to dry. “And you’re going to get me in a lot of trouble.”

  I could see why Rebekah had loved it in here. It had none of the draftiness of Asherley and, even barren, a warmth that reminded me of home. This place could be beautiful again, too, I thought. Why build this lovely, useful structure if it only thrived while Rebekah was alive?

  I kissed the kitten and placed her on an empty sod bag, away from the bare earth so she didn’t get dirty again.

  I would talk to Max about this place.

  * * *

  • • •

  Dani stayed away the rest of the time Max was gone, and I was happy for the break, as was her tutor, it seemed. I missed Max, spoke to or texted him a couple of times a day, glad to hear Dani had told him she’d gone to Louisa’s New York pied-à-terre so that I didn’t have to. Max was unfazed; she did it often, he said, promising she took homework with her. Fine. If this wasn’t a problem for Max, I wouldn’t make it a problem either. That would be my new philosophy. Follow his lead.

  With her away, I thought I’d find myself bounding down the stairs in the morning, skipping through the dim corridors, exalting in the freedom of feeling neither watched nor ignored. But in a strange way, Dani’s absence exacerbated Rebekah’s presence. Wandering in and out of all the rooms, holding the kitten, familiarizing myself with each one’s purpose and view, I saw Rebekah’s hand everywhere. In the parlor, I ran my fingers along the French wallpaper looking for the seams, remembering where she had stood in those first photographs I pored over. In the third-floor gallery, the kitten buried in my neck, I lingered over each photo, noticing that the glass in the picture I’d broken had already been replaced. It looked to be an older photo, black-and-white, taken somewhere in Europe. Rebekah stood on a bridge, a line of blurry ancient buildings behind her. She was wearing a light-colored trench, her fists deep in her pockets, smiling impatiently at whoever took the picture, likely Max. I imagined her demurring at first, saying, Enough with the camera, Max, let’s just go to dinner, and Max saying, No, one more, the light here is perfect. Fine, she’d say, take it quickly. I’m getting hungry. This photo was the product of a loving eye, his loving eye. I thought again back to the awkward moment Max snapped my picture on the boat. Why had he not taken more photos of me like he did her? Now, looking at my reflection in the photo’s glass, holding a mangy little animal, my hair matted from being stuffed under a hat, my face dirty from working on the boat, I knew the answer.

  I turned away from the photos and made my way to what I assumed was Dani’s actual bedroom, where she slept when she wasn’t up in the turret. Surprisingly, the door wasn’t locked. Inside was a teenager’s dream room, though three times as big and quite at odds with the rest of Asherley. Instead of stodgy antiques and quiet rugs, there was a large denim-covered sectional facing a flat-screen TV as big as a small theater’s. On the glass kidney-shaped coffee table, a tangled game console shared space with a clean crystal ashtray and spent sticks of incense. She had her own microwave perched on a small robin’s-egg-blue fridge. Band posters were interspersed with nice art and some African-type masks. Kilim rugs were scattered across the floors, artfully overlapping each other. Her four-poster bedframe had the same ornate quality as ours, though hers was painted white, the drapery pale pink, the comforter and pillows a riot of pinks and reds, the patterns expertly mismatched in a way I attributed to Rebekah’s eye. The dressing table was covered in dozens of tubes of lipstick and compacts of blush and eye shadow. There were also several more framed pictures of Rebekah, some with Dani as a baby, and more recent ones of her looking adoringly at Dani, a mother in love. I hadn’t seen these ones before, not in the gallery nor online. These were intimate, candid, imperfect. Something of real love was captured in the frames. They made me feel indescribably sad.

  Without touching anything, I quietly left the bedroom. Now to the door at the end of the gallery. I knew it led to the turret, to Rebekah’s room, which I had only glimpsed behind Dani that first night. I wouldn’t stay long. I’d just look out those same windows from which Dani always seemed to be watching me, monitoring my movements around the grounds. I closed my hand around the glass knob. It turned easily, but the deadbolt kept me out.

  * * *

  • • •

  During those nights and days Max was away, I was finally busy, so busy I barely slept or showered. Between refurbishing the Aquarama and feeding the kitten every few hours, I was charged with a humming sense of purpose. For the first time since I’d arrived at Asherley, I began to feel useful, especially when I fed the kitten her bottle. I had named her Maggie, after Miss Marguerite, one of Max’s ancestors in the paintings whose shock of white hair reminded me of her.

  I was determined to learn more about the family I was marrying into, not to feel like I belonged at Asherley—I would never feel that—but at least to show Max I cared about its history. Katya pulled down some books about the people in the portraits, flipping to the most important ancestors. She generously spent an afternoon in the kitchen pointing out key facts, only losing her patience once or twice, complaining she had a lot to do, you know, and this was cutting into her precious work time.

  “No, no, that’s Lady Carolina,” she said, correcting me, pointing out the difference between two paintings of a blond woman in the same blue dress. She explained that Lady Carolina, the mother, was a favorite of President Rutherford Hayes while he was a bachelor, before she married Max’s great-great-grandfather. Marguerite Winter Duplessix, their daughter, was courted by a Union general, someone famous she couldn’t remember, before she turned him down and married a local French farmer.

  “Apparently she was an excellent letter writer, threw great parties, and was no lady. Rebekah loved her, ate up any information about Miss Marguerite. She found a large bolt of that blue satin perfectly preserved in the attic and had it made into that little skirt around her makeup table.”

  She said it as though I’d been up there and was familiar with Rebekah’s bedroom.

  “You mean in the turret?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d love to take a look at it,” I said
breezily, hoping Katya would slip me another secret key. She ignored the prompt while tracing a pencil down a long to-do list that included a weekly flower order.

  “Katya, do you think we can order something other than those roses? Wouldn’t it be nice to get lilies or daisies, something fresh for spring?”

  “It’s not spring yet,” she muttered. Then, as if to make up for her brusqueness, she asked about the kitten.

  “She’s sleeping. I emptied the litter.”

  “He won’t like it, you know.”

  “The kitten?”

  “You being in the greenhouse.”

  At that moment I received a text from Max. Can’t wait to see you tonight. Getting in late. Wait up. xo

  “I’ll talk to him,” I said, pocketing my phone. “Another few weeks and I can get her spayed. After that she can run free on the island and we can lock it up again.”