The Winters

by Lisa Gabriele

  Max took the front handle of the bag, waiting for me to lift the back. “Let’s go,” he said. He’d already pulled the truck up to the greenhouse. We placed her on the flatbed. He escorted me to the passenger’s side of the truck and we drove together to the boathouse. Max remained silent for those thirty seconds, and I sat next to him, thinking, trying not to panic.

  Max’s instructions were the only thing keeping my limbs from turning to silt. Winch the boat down onto the slip, he said, while I unload the body. I did. Pull back the aft cover, would you, love? I did so as he carefully lay her down across the back of the Aquarama. Get some kettlebells for me, please. I grabbed two from the gym on the riser. Where are those belts? I handed them over. He looped the new belts through the handles of the kettlebells and cinched them tight around the outside of the garment bag. As he pulled, the plastic crinkled and I could sense the gathering of her bones. He covered her body back up with the boat tarp, instructing me again to help him snap it down until she lay flat. When we finished, I placed my hand on the bump and said something to the effect of “please forgive me.” Release the boat, he said, and with a turn of the winch, Dani’s Luck slid elegantly into the water, barely making a splash.

  He handed me the keys. “You drive. It’ll be like the old days.”

  I slapped the keys away.

  “Get in the boat.”

  “I’m not going with you, Max.”

  He stood seething, uncertain. I knew if I got on that boat, he would kill me, I would become another luckless casualty in Max Winter’s storied life. His bride of one day, an experienced boater, no less, lost at sea, presumed dead.

  “Get in.”

  “No. When you come back, I will be gone and you’ll never hear from me again.”

  I turned to leave. He hooked his hand around the back of my head and yanked me close to his face. “Get. In. The. Fucking. Boat.”

  I stiffened, my feet welded to the dock. He grabbed a fistful of my hair and pulled me towards the Aquarama. I began to scream, a pathetic howl that bounced around inside the cavernous boathouse. I had done this to myself, I thought. I crossed a line with him, never thinking there’d be another line awaiting me, then this final one, barbed and vicious. But still I fought him hard, resisted him with all my youth and terror, twisting like a cat in his grip, kicking and spinning. Then a loud crack echoed through the boathouse, and my legs gave out beneath me.

  I thought the sound had come from above us, that when I hit the back of my head on the dock, one of the beams had fallen on top of me. My ears rang with a high-pitched scream, not mine. I tried to lift my head but it felt weighted down by a sticky, dull ache. Craning my neck, I could make out Max in silhouette, coming at me. He stepped over my body, muttering, “Jesus Christ, Dani.”

  Dani? NO! Get out of here!

  Then I found something in me, a drop of adrenaline, enough to roll myself onto an elbow. There stood Dani in sweats and a wrinkly shirt, hair a wicked fright. Her tiny arm shook as she pointed her too-big gun at her own father. I lifted my hand, a weak, useless stop sign.

  She shot at him again—crack. This time he caught the bullet in his shoulder and he pivoted, like a fierce, awkward dance move that stilled him only for a moment. Then he wound himself up again, unwrapping the rope from the Aquarama. He limped aboard as a bloody star spread fast across his upper chest.

  “I’m sorry, baby,” he yelled, starting up the engine. “But I really have to go now.”

  Dani stepped closer to me, taking shaky aim over my body. Though my vision was blurred, I saw her wet cheeks, her quivering chin. I heard another crack. If she hit him, Max didn’t flinch. He simply circled the steering wheel with a finger, sweeping an arch of water out of his way. Then he was off, Dani’s Luck lifting like a swan about to go airborne, churning the black bay into a long white arrow in its wake.

  TWENTY-NINE

  For the longest time I could not cry, something I blamed on the concussion, along with the fact that I couldn’t recall if I’d seen Dani leave the boathouse with the gasoline that she used to burn Asherley down to the ground. I wasn’t lying by omission, or to protect Dani. She denied nothing, her reason for the fire particularly poignant.

  “He killed my kitten. So I burned his fucking house down,” she said, an alarmingly reasonable explanation that still landed her in a New York hospital for a month of psychiatric evaluations, to determine what, if any, charges should be laid.

  Very little of the contents of Asherley was salvageable, beyond a couple of marble busts, some silver frames, and several pieces of heirloom jewelry locked away in a fireproof safe that Dani had no knowledge of until everything around it blackened and fell away. To this day it moves me that amidst her fiery rampage, Dani thought to bring me ice cradled in a tea towel for the back of my bleeding head. While the flames took hold, she sat next to me on the woodpile, lit a cigarette, and apologized for wanting to wait until the second floor caught fire before she called an ambulance.

  “I want it all to come down, so we can never come back here again,” she said.

  We held hands and watched the flames take everything except for Rebekah’s greenhouse. The glass panels directly attached to the house were stained with licks of smoke, but otherwise the structure remained undamaged.

  We heard the sirens before we saw the lights. The two officers who had come earlier that morning got out of their car and separated us. (Thinking back now, those few hours, each of us telling them our own version of events, might have been the longest we spent away from each other for the better part of the year.)

  At that point, I wasn’t yet aware how Dani had arrived at Asherley that morning. She was always doing that, taking off, running to and from places. So I assumed she had just walked out of detox and got into a cab. Later, when they reunited us, she told me Gus had picked her up and taken her as far as the gate, unable to drive any farther because Max had changed the security code. Dani assured him she could walk from there, afraid to get Gus into more trouble than she already had. When she heard me screaming in the boathouse, she said she knew Max would kill me, and she took her target practice gun from the cabinet in the anteroom. I tried to imagine being a fifteen-year-old girl, running towards a murderous scream with a gun I intended to use, and I could not. Dani Winter became the bravest person I had ever known.

  Dani hadn’t come to Asherley that day to kill her father. She only intended to quit rehab, pack her stuff, and flee to Louisa’s pied-à-terre until the first big chunk of her inheritance came through on her sixteenth birthday. She said an image had resurfaced, one so disturbing that even drugs could no longer blot it out. The image was of her father in the greenhouse, rolling a blanket into a shallow grave, a tuft of Rebekah’s unmistakable blond hair jutting out from one end. She remembered it the way Max had told me it happened. So we concluded that Dani had stumbled downstairs before the tranquilizer Max had laced her water with had taken full effect. That image became buried in a watery dream she’d have for months after Rebekah’s death, one that eventually dissolved, until the day they discovered me in the greenhouse with Maggie and everything flooded back to her: the heat, the other woman, the fight, the car speeding off, Max’s visit to Dani’s bedside, Dani creeping downstairs in a semi-drugged state in time to see her father bury Rebekah’s body in a hole he’d dug in the ground. When I told her, in a quiet moment, who that other woman really was, that she was not a lover but her birth mother, a young, troubled woman who had come to Asherley looking for her, Dani wilted in my arms.

  “My mother,” she cried, inconsolably. “She came for me. She loved me.”

  “Yes, she did,” I said, stroking her dirty hair. “She loved you very much.”

  “He killed everyone who ever loved me.”

  “No, he didn’t,” I said. “Not everyone.”

  There was one place where our stories didn’t dovetail, didn’t knit themselves into one co
hesive narrative. I was certain Max had told me he had gone upstairs twice that night, the first time to check on Dani, giving Dani’s mother the opportunity to lunge at Rebekah with the shears. The second time it was to drug Dani back to sleep so he could deal with the aftermath of Rebekah’s murder and the fatal car accident. But Dani was certain he’d come upstairs only once, which, in her version of events, put Max in the greenhouse when Rebekah died, and who murdered her in doubt. He had, after all, more reason to kill Rebekah than Dani’s mother did.

  Rebekah’s fatal error had been leaving the entirety of her fortune to Dani, and Max was running out of money, hence no prenup. He didn’t want me to see there was really nothing to divvy up in the event of a divorce. His fake Instagram account primed the pump of Dani’s instability. The dress swap provided a breakdown both public and indisputable. Dani couldn’t damage Max’s reputation by loudly contesting a conservatorship this time. Everyone who mattered, who might affect his reputation, or his reelection, saw plainly that Dani was unhinged, maybe even dangerous, and that poor Max, a loving, caring father, was just trying to get on with his life.

  Though I believed Dani, there was no way to prove Max murdered Rebekah. So it remained a theory, but one to which Gus adhered because, he said, Dani’s mother was not capable of violence. He knew this, he said, because she was his older sister. This news was both shocking and welcome. In fact, the picture Max had found on his wall was of his sister as a child, not Dani, though the resemblance was uncanny. Gus admitted that he only ever took the job at Asherley because he knew his sister had left Dani there. So for years he kept one eye on his niece and the other on the long driveway in case she returned, not believing, like his family in Bethpage, that she was dead. He told us her name and talked about her hopes and dreams, painting a picture of a complicated young woman who was much more than just the cartoonish junkie Max described. The biggest regret of his life, he said, was staying away that hot night, when Rebekah had insisted. She knew Dani’s mother was coming by for what she thought would be another payout, one she was willing to make, even if Max was not.

  Some of these things I learned firsthand, some through bits and pieces I read online, because ours was a story that had captured the world’s attention, everyone being sick to death of politics that year. I learned new things, too, about Rebekah that were contrary to everything Max had said. She was, according to most reports, an excellent mother, and I began to believe this, because Dani believed it. Maybe children’s memories are pliable, but their feelings aren’t. Dani told me she felt loved by Rebekah, deeply, she said, so therefore she was.

  After those first few days of questioning, when we were finally alone, surrounded by flowers and food left for us by Louisa, whom we did not wish to see, we looked at each other for a long time.

  “Thank you,” I finally said, kissing her hand. I was out of words. I had only feelings left, and the strongest one was of gratitude for this remarkable girl.

  “I’m sorry about Daddy,” she whispered. “I had to.”

  “Yes, you did,” I said, nodding vigorously.

  And then she cried and cried, and made me promise to never leave her alone. So when Dani wasn’t talking to her doctor or spending time with Claire, to whom she apologized, she was with me, reading, listening to music, watching TV, or walking around in a circle holding my arm until she was tired enough to fall asleep.

  * * *

  • • •

  Six days passed before the coast guard found Dani’s Luck, empty, capsized, out of gas, and gently turning in a natural whirlpool four hundred miles southeast of Montauk. By then I had been discharged and was staying at a hotel near Dani’s hospital, selected because its underground garage allowed me to avoid the press gathered in the lobby. Having no social media profile, a good photo of “the second Mrs. Winter,” as I would come to be known, fetched top dollar. Some even called down to the Caymans, offering a lot of money for my staff picture. Laureen Ennis told them to bugger off.

  “I said, you got nothing better to do than harass a young widow after her husband tried to murder her, you fucking vultures? Go fuck yourselves, I said.”

  If you had told me four months after I slammed the door of her shabby office that Laureen Ennis would drop everything and fly to New York to help me, and that I would fall into her arms when I saw her, I’d have laughed and laughed. But she remained by my side the whole time I was admitted for the concussion, alternating from my room to Dani’s until Dani was transferred.

  The first thing Laureen said to me was, “Jesus Christ, I figured he’d be a difficult man, but I had no idea.”

  She was also in my room when a nurse, who had assumed Laureen was my mother, told me I was pregnant.

  “Well,” Laureen said, patting my hand, “you have options, you know. The fascists haven’t taken that one away yet.”

  Laureen took a suite next to mine at the hotel. Every morning, during the weeks they kept Dani under observation, I could hear her yell at whomever she had left in charge of her boats, or anyone else trying to contact me for an exclusive interview. She brought me food and took away the papers. Elias wrote me to say he’d had no idea Max was so deranged; he truly thought a conservatorship was in Dani’s best interests and was mortified to be implicated in the crime. Still, he lost his license to practice law, as did Jonah.

  It took them twenty-one days to come to the conclusion that Dani Winter wasn’t mentally ill, that she was guilty only of behavior endemic to any teenager insidiously gaslighted by her father, with access to too much money and unsupervised time. A judge determined that she was to be released under my supervision. I was made her legal conservator until she turned eighteen, after which they’d reevaluate. Dani agreed, teasing that this would make me her paid companion, despite the small fortune she insisted on bequeathing me once she decided to sell the island. Originally she had offered to split her half of the proceeds with me, the other half going to Louisa, a notion I found absurd. We compromised on a trust fund for the baby and enough money to open a boat-refurbishing business back in the Caymans, next to Laureen’s marina.

  Moving to the Caymans that coming winter, buying a house near Laureen’s in time to have the baby, these were Dani’s ideas. They had become surprisingly smitten with each other, Dani often typing Laureen’s most memorable quotes into her phone to giggle over later with Claire. She wanted to learn everything there was to know about boats and fishing and running a business. But first we wanted to be on the move for a while, our travel plans unfolding organically.

  Barcelona was the first stop in our beautiful exile, a place I loved the best. The food, the sea, the walking, all of it a necessary palliative. After a few weeks in the city we drove up the coast, rented a cliffside house with a red-tiled roof where we passed the rest of spring, which, we were told, was unseasonably cold for Spain.

  After that we flew to Prague for a week of museums and music, then Italy for the rest of the summer and early fall. We shopped in Rome, loading up on summer clothes, bigger tops for me, bikinis and books for Dani. Then we hired a driver to take us along the Amalfi Coast, where another house and another season, this one hot and slow, awaited us. We read a lot, trying to avoid news from back home.

  I remained anonymous, which made moving around easier for me than Dani, something she eventually came to envy. One day, while I waited for her at a café in Positano, a young woman with tanned skin and short brown hair plunked down next to me, chin in hand, grinning.

  It took me a second to recognize her.

  “Oh my God, Dani!” I said, touching her silky bangs. “Look at you.”

  “What do you think?” she asked, an uncertain hand pulling the baby hairs at the back of her neck. “I think it makes me look more like you.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said, tearing up at her wide-open face. “But I think you look like you.”

  Louisa wrote us, asking to meet us. She was going
through her own complicated grieving process; she loved her brother, after all, and, of course, Asherley. She’d lost much that day, too. Though the investigation cleared her of any wrongdoing, Dani remained skeptical, worried that if her father were alive somehow and on the run, Louisa would be the only one in touch with him. She agreed to see Louisa so long as we didn’t divulge which hotel we were staying in and met in a public place.

  When I saw her, however, I knew instantly that Louisa was our friend.

  “My dear,” she said, her warm eyes taking in my face, her hand on my growing belly. “I am beyond happy to see you.”

  By dinner Dani’s doubts had disappeared, and she happily resumed gossiping with her aunt, showing her pictures of Spain and the road trip to Positano on her new—private—Instagram account. The next morning, side by side on beach chairs, swathed in sunblock and sunglasses, my growing belly under a towel, Louisa and I watched, with a mix of pride and trepidation, as Dani and a friend turned heads in the shallow waves, as sixteen-year-old girls in tiny bikinis do. Some invisible magnet would always pull Dani towards another easily bored princess type, a Brit or an American, with excellent manners and casual disdain for the adults who spoiled her. Sometimes, once they figured out who she was, what she’d done, and what had been done to her, they’d either retreat or get way too close, forcing Dani to eventually cut them loose. She navigated these relationships with the savvy granted to those who’ve gone through hell and come out the other end not giving a damn what anyone thinks.

  That night, waiting for Dani to join us for dinner, I asked Louisa something to which I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer.