by Reed Karaim
The
Winter
in
Anna
a novel
Reed Karaim
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
Independent Publishers Since 1923
NEW YORK • LONDON
This is for Lisa.
The
Winter
in
Anna
Chapter 1
THERE ARE LIVES THAT END BADLY. Hers was one of those. I would like to pretend that isn’t true, but I can’t. So this is how Anna’s life ends. On a night sometime late in winter, in an anonymous motel somewhere in the Midwest, she sat down on the edge of the bed and drank a quart of bleach, irreparably burning her esophagus and her stomach and dying alone and quite painfully. I can’t change this, and I can find no honest way to make it sound less terrible than it was.
There was one other thing the friend who called with the news told me.
“She left the door open.” He hesitated, confused. “I guess she wanted to be found. Maybe she was hoping someone would stop her.”
“I suppose,” I said, but I didn’t think that was it at all.
“I mean, why would you do that, if you didn’t want somebody to see you and stop you?”
“I don’t know,” I said, but I was picturing the door half open, the parchment light of the winter moon framed like a formal invitation, maybe even snow falling in a familiar, seductive whisper, and I did know.
Knowing was the hardest part. After we hung up I rode the elevator down to the lobby and walked over to Pennsylvania Avenue, where the midday sun washed out the world briefly, mercifully. I sat down on a bench on Lafayette Square and I can’t say what I felt at first. A distant sense of absence. A loss, yes, but almost abstract, a feeling some part of my past had been reordered, as if I had just found out that a treasured memory was not as I had remembered.
Oh, Anna, I thought, you almost made it to another spring.
And in the simple act of clearly forming her name—Anna, that unadorned, oddly balanced teeter-totter of a name—sorrow came crashing down, and it wasn’t distant or abstract at all. I could see her so clearly it took my breath away. No one had been more alive to my younger self. No one had held the bright possibility of existing fully in each day more than she had. No one had seemed to defy the idea that our future is written in our past more than Anna. Our time together filled my mind, and what I remembered was not a surrendered life.
But the open door was still there, and with it the possibility I had been wrong about everything. Years later and I still don’t know. So I’ve decided to write this. I will tell you Anna’s story, and you tell me if I have written a tragedy.
Chapter 2
I MET ANNA WHEN I WAS TWENTY, and I was her friend, or whatever you decide to call it, for a little more than a year. Also, during most of that time, her boss. We were working at a weekly newspaper in a small town in central North Dakota. The town of Shannon was positioned at the spot in our national geography where the Midwest becomes the West: distances expand, the sky gains dominance over the earth, and the wind arrives unimpeded from beyond the sere edge of the world, a herald of how vast and empty it really is.
The Shannon Sentinel had a full-time staff of three, the editor, the assistant editor, and the sports editor, along with a collection of older women who performed part-time jobs. It was run by Art and Louise Shoemaker, the couple who owned the print shop in back, which was the part of the business that actually made money.
I had taken the job as the sports editor after dropping out of college one semester short of graduating. My last act on campus had been to tear the phone number of the Sentinel off an advertisement for the job pinned to the bulletin board of the university newspaper, where I had been working as a student editor. My inability to finish school so close to the end was the result of the distraction caused by a girl, who had realized quite correctly that she would be better off without me, and a host of lesser factors, not the least of which was that I had grown up on college campuses—my parents were both teachers—and it suddenly felt intolerable that I should spend one more day in the company of the stately red brick, manicured lawns, and vaguely indolent springtime air of the state university, where I had more or less stopped attending classes anyway.
So I drove out to Shannon and, blessed with the confidence that comes from not caring, got the job. The town had 4,532 people, a factory on the edge of town that manufactured bomb parts for a multinational corporation headquartered in Dallas, towering silver grain elevators along the railroad tracks, and, in a nondescript one-story brick building on the far end of Main Street, the office of The Shannon Sentinel.
The “newsroom” was in front, visible through a plate-glass window to anyone wandering down the sidewalk. It wasn’t much of a newsroom, three metal desks pushed together in the center of the room, another two along the wall. There was a counter by the door, as if we were a dry cleaner’s or a bait shop, and when someone came in, one of the older women stood up and took their classified ad or announcement of the Knudson or Payne family reunion, or simply stood and chatted about the day’s news, which often seemed to be the only point of the visit.
I had one of the desks in the center of the room, but during my days as the Sentinel’s sports editor (and only actual sportswriter) I spent little time at it. My job was to cover the high school teams in the county, and I worked mostly at night. I’d taken an apartment above a bank, two blocks from the paper, that had once been a doctor’s or dentist’s office. You entered through a narrow hallway that led to the other rooms, each behind a heavy wooden door with a frosted glass window, on one of which you could still faintly make out the name of Dr. Neil Epstein. I had a bedroom, a bath, and a living room/kitchenette with a sink, stove, and a few cabinets along the inside wall. Oddly enough, the apartment had no refrigerator.
Large old-fashioned casement windows looked out on the Buffalo Bar across Main Street. The bar’s red neon sign, the name written in cursive letters intended to look as if they had been formed by a lasso, reflected faintly along the bottom of the windows in both the bedroom and living room. The rest of the street was desolate at night, plate glass and locked storefronts, the empty sidewalks the dull gray of a worn tombstone.
The bar was where I ended up eating most evenings. I knew no one in town and it was often late when I got home. There was a pool table in back, and I played one of the old men who seemed to live at the Buff, and went back to my apartment sometime before closing. I wasn’t actually old enough to drink legally in North Dakota, but they knew I was working for the newspaper and nobody thought to ask.
I have slept poorly or not at all since I can remember. As any insomniac can tell you, there is a perfect stillness and sense of emptiness that comes very late, when you have worried about all the things you can worry about, when the house has settled in for the night and even the stray barking dog has given up and is balefully eyeing the duplicitous moon, a moment when the universe collapses into simpler forms, the pillow beneath your head, the warmth of an old quilt, the faint play of light along the ceiling, which at three a.m. can assume the shape of almost anything.
Now I am a married man, with my wife beside me and a young daughter asleep in the next room, and I lie silently and very still, letting my dreaming wife and child believe their world is at rest. Now it’s easy to wait out the night, but when I was young I couldn’t stand to lie in bed with the possibility that the blank screen of the ceiling would start to show me movies I didn’t want to see. I was only twenty years old, but in the darkness my life already felt filled with a vague sense of failure, as if I had missed some intersection along one of North Dakota’s razor-straight roads that I should have seen coming long in advance, so I often s
tayed up reading or just sitting in the dark.
The best thing about my apartment, the reason I had taken it despite the absence of food-cooling apparatus, was the windows looking out on Main Street. After coming home from the bar I sometimes stood in front of them and rested my forehead on the cool glass, watching the deserted street with a strange feeling of expectation, as if, should I wait long enough, I’d surely see something that would explain why I was here. I often tugged over the beat-up blue chair that came with the apartment and rested my feet on the sill. After a while I felt as transparent and insubstantial as the glass, and this was a solace, a kind of peace, even if I was still afraid to lie down until dawn appeared above the flat-topped mercantile buildings across the street.
I’d met Anna by then, probably on my first or second day on the job, but she had registered only as this dark-haired, slender, silent, and somewhat furtive woman, pretty, perhaps, but hard to say, one of those people who seem to be always sliding out of the edge of your vision. We would like to think we will recognize the people who come to matter to us at first sight, but of course that’s absurd. They often slip into the corners of our lives, unnoticed, then taken for granted, until one day, if we are lucky, we see them anew with startled comprehension, and think, There is my best friend, or There is the woman I love, or There is someone who saved me.
The truth is, I didn’t think about her—I didn’t think much about anyone at the newspaper—until the day in Shannon that my future arrived in the form of an obituary.
Chapter 3
“THIS CAN’T BE GOOD,” is the first thing I remember Anna saying.
She had a soft voice, often barely above a whisper, but wine-dark and burred along the edges, the voice of someone who smoked a pack a day of Marlboro Lights and drank way too much coffee. Even then, she was quietly pursuing her poisons.
I was at my desk trying to finish a story on the regional track meet. I looked through the window to see a half dozen somber-looking middle-aged men and one woman marching down the sidewalk toward the door.
“Who’s that?”
“The entire city council,” Anna said with the tone of someone observing an unusual flock of migrating birds.
They marched in, past us and into Art Shoemaker’s office in the back of the room. The murmur of discontented voices leaked through the wall.
I had staked out a privately held position that there was nothing in Shannon I would ever care about and that my responsibility for the community’s welfare ended with correctly tallying box scores. Still, I couldn’t help myself.
“What’s going on?”
Anna sat at her typewriter with her fingers on the keys, wrists very straight, excellent secretarial school form. She had finely sculpted features and a compact, attractive figure, and all that registered in the back of my mind, but I wasn’t sure I remembered her name. It was either Anna or Sarah or maybe Myra.
“I imagine it has to do with the error,” she said.
“The error?”
“There was an error in the story on the council meeting Tuesday.”
The story had been written by our editor, Stacy Reynolds, who was only a couple of years older than I was, but who had managed to graduate from a journalism school in Minnesota and who spent most of her time trying to sleep with the county’s buffed-out deputy sheriff. His exploits had been on the front page three out of the last four issues, which was a feat, since the last recorded crime to go beyond a juvenile misdemeanor in Shannon had happened before I’d joined the staff. The most recent photo of him standing front and center, muscled arms across his broad chest while, in the background, blurred high school students filed outside for a fire drill, seemed particularly gratuitous.
Stacy was out now, sleeping in. Perhaps last night had been the night.
“So—what error?”
“A number. Almost nothing, really.” Anna’s eyes widened slightly. “Literally, nothing. An extra zero.”
“An extra number? In what?”
“The cost of the city repaving project. It went from seven million to seventy million dollars.”
Three hours later I was in back, in the pressroom, wasting time with Todd, the younger of the two printers, when I felt a hand on my shoulder.
Louise Shoemaker was standing too close, as she always did. Louise was tall, taller than her round and soft-faced husband, with square shoulders and a long, strong jaw that made her look like an unnerving cross between Eleanor Roosevelt and Burt Lancaster. But the jaw was nothing, really. Her left eye was the thing. It was bloodshot, perpetually and completely bloodshot, a kind of fiery red collapsed sun. There was something wrong with it, but no one at the paper had ever had the nerve to ask what.
When she was standing close, the most important thing was not to look at her eye, and yet it was impossible. You’re supposed to look someone in the eye—not one eye, of course—but there you were, trying to be polite and look Louise in the eyes, both eyes equally, and there was this one ordinary eye, possibly a light gray or blue, and this other eye, this miniature stellar phenomenon, with swirling depths and odd veins and pools of blood-red light and a terrible gravity tugging at you.
I usually tried to look at the point just above her nose and directly between her eyes, which left me feeling slightly cross-eyed and meant Louise was never quite in focus.
“How are you, Ricky?” She was a woman of bottomless heartiness. “Are you having fun?”
It was her favorite question, one she asked almost every time she saw me.
“Absolutely.”
“It’s supposed to be fun, you know.”
“It is. Absolutely.”
“Good. We need a new editor.”
My gaze slipped and I was staring into her about-to-go-nova eye, and I felt myself falling through space and time, perhaps even experiencing interdimensional travel.
“It’ll be a lot of fun!”
“Stacy—”
“Stacy makes too many mistakes, Ricky. She makes mistakes with names. She makes mistakes with numbers. Do you know we’ve never had a single complaint about the box scores this entire basketball season? I can’t remember the last time that happened!”
She said this with such a flourish of appreciation, I felt I had balanced the federal budget or solved one of the world’s great mathematical puzzles. My vision slid over her shoulder and I saw Anna standing by the door to the newsroom. I had no idea how long she had been at the paper, but I knew it was longer than I had.
“What about . . . Anna?” I asked, taking a stab at the name and a silent breath of relief when it appeared I was right.
“No, no, no, she’s happy where she is. Come on, it’ll really be fun!”
Anna was still, but our eyes met and I thought I saw a brief brush of gratitude.
“I’ve been thinking about going back to school,” I said.
I hadn’t, but in the face of real responsibility, it suddenly seemed like a good idea.
Louise leaned closer. “If you can’t do it, Ricky, I’m going to have to take over myself. I’d like to stay retired, but if I have to get behind a desk again, well, we’ll just have a great time!”
Louise had once been a hell-raising reporter at the daily paper in Fargo before marrying Art, the small-town print shop owner, and becoming the editor of the Sentinel, in those early days knocking back bourbons and water at lunch before settling in to bat out denunciations of the petit bourgeoisie, le imbéciles de conservateurs de commerce—editorials that left the town’s civic leaders both shell-shocked and searching the municipal library for French dictionaries.
It seemed possible Louise had been drinking heartily this noon. Behind our boss, Anna was shaking her head, slowly but firmly, side to side.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I need to think about it.”
• • •
I WENT OUT to the municipal golf course to avoid thinking about it. In early April the flags weren’t up on the greens and the grass was still a pale, winterish brown.
A thick fog had risen after a late morning rain and there was no one else on the course. I hit my ball off the first tee into an earthbound cloud as I heard a car pulling up behind me.
I turned to see Todd rolling down the window and looking uncomfortable.
“There’s been an accident at the railroad crossing. Art asked me to get you.”
“How did you find me?”
Todd was wiry, with a shock of straw-colored hair and skin as pale as newsprint from his long days in the windowless back shop. He had a tattoo of Wile E. Coyote on his left bicep and a ghost of a mustache he had been working on since I’d arrived in town.
“There’s like five places you could be, man. I checked your apartment first.”
Rain had started to congeal out of the fog. I could see my breath.
“So, anyway, with you being the new editor—”
“No. I haven’t decided yet.”
Todd shrugged. He didn’t like to offend anyone.
“Well, I guess you’re as close as we got right now. You want me to find your golf ball?”
• • •
THE RAILROAD TRACKS bisected the town, east to west, with thirty feet of stone slag on each side creating a dead zone that ran through the heart of Shannon. On Main Street a pair of crossing guards, with the usual red lights that flashed when descending, marked the intersection. The guards were down and the lights were flashing as I pulled up. A train was nowhere to be seen, but the city ambulance and the sheriff’s car were parked west of the tracks, the fire engine on the other side, with a city police car next to it.
Men from the volunteer fire department were walking up and down the rails in the rain, which was falling steadily now. They walked in pairs, staring at the gravel ahead of their feet, and every once in a while someone stopped and reached down to pick up something obscured by the gauze of fog and rain. They all wore green rubber gloves, and the day seemed to have no color but for the industrial green of the gloves, which reached up to their elbows and unnerved me for some reason that floated just beyond my comprehension.