The Winter in Anna

by Reed Karaim

ART WAS DISTRESSED; LOUISE SEEMED flummoxed and then nodded firmly, as if it had been her idea all along. “You’re ready to move on to a daily,” she said. We were sitting in Art’s office and there was really nothing more to say. The date had been set. But there was one more thing I had decided I was going to make happen.

  “You need to make Anna editor,” I said.

  Art’s hands came off the desk like startled birds. Louise’s death-star eye fixed on a spot on the wall somewhere above my head.

  “I don’t know about that. It takes a certain kind of—”

  “She can do it. She’ll do it her own way—more . . . quietly. But she can do it.”

  Louise was shaking her head but I could see the possibility turning over in her mind.

  “You know what I really appreciated about working here?” I said.

  “That we had some fun?”

  “Sure. That, too. What I appreciated was that you gave me a chance. I hadn’t done this before and you were willing to give me a chance.”

  Art was holding the side of his head like he had a toothache. Louise’s eye burned a hole through the wall directly above my head. Then she smiled, the way she did when she looked over my shoulder while I was writing and saw a turn of phrase she liked.

  “I’ve been working with her for months,” I said. “She can do the job. She won’t ask for it. But she can do it.”

  “We’ll see,” she said. “I’ll talk to her, Ricky.”

  “Give her a chance, Louise.”

  Now it was Art, unexpectedly, who spoke. He gestured outward to take in the entire human menagerie of the newspaper and the print shop on the other side of his wall.

  “Surely, my boy, you’ve noticed we give everyone a chance around here.”

  • • •

  ON A SUNDAY MORNING I drove out of Shannon for the last time, the backseat and the trunk filled with cardboard boxes. There had been an official going-away party, of course, and several “final” rounds at the Buffalo Bar. Todd had insisted on helping me pack, although it was sad how little I had really accumulated during my time in town, not one stick of furniture, a few albums and books of my own, a few more books and albums that Emily had left behind. A sturdy pair of winter boots. A white enamel whiskey bottle of Elvis. Too few photographs.

  Todd and I sat amid the boxes, the day graying outside the window, and drank a final beer.

  “You should come back and visit sometime,” he said.

  “Absolutely.”

  “You still don’t have a job lined up?”

  “Not yet, nope.”

  “You’ll find something.”

  “How’s married life?” I asked, because I thought it seemed good, but I wanted to know.

  Todd cocked his head. “It’s good. It’s great, man. It beats ESPN. You should try it yourself sometime.”

  All the goodbyes, the usual promises, but, blessedly, no one around as I got into my loaded car and drove down Main Street one last time. The town was still asleep, and instead of heading straight out to the highway, I cruised the length of Main and then circled back, past the park, the high school, blocks of already familiar homes, and out to the edge of town by the Midwestern Forge factory. The two places I avoided were the office and Anna’s home. I wanted to remember the office the way it had been on my last day, Edith working with her blunt red pencil at the front desk, Art in his office, Todd and Paul in back, the part-time women making themselves busy with typesetting and ad design.

  Only Anna had been absent, finding an assignment that took her out of the office when it was time for me to leave. I understood, and it didn’t change anything. In my mind she was there. I saw her at her desk in front of the big window, hands on the keyboard, wrists arched in the manner any typing teacher would applaud, chin high. Perfect posture. I had seen her like this out of the corner of my eye for months, a quiet reassurance tucked into nearly every day. Anna.

  • • •

  I TOOK OUT A MAIL SUBSCRIPTION to the Sentinel. It arrived in my mailbox in the Twin Cities nearly a week late. I was working in a copyediting job for a legal publishing firm and hating it. I leafed through every issue that came, reading the stories Anna liked enough to give herself a byline. I could hear her voice when I read them and it kept me company at night in my tiny apartment too near the squalor of Hennepin Avenue. I stayed at the publishing firm for six months before I got a job with the Duluth News Tribune, a mid-sized daily in a tough steel mill and port town perched on the frigid shore of Lake Superior. The city had everything a reporter could want: corrupt politicians, angry labor unions, seedy nightlife, occasional bloody mayhem down by the docks. I started out covering the county commission and got moved to the city council just in time for the scandal of the decade: the city planner had been taking paybacks from a local Indian tribe to deed them a block of city property that would allow them to build a casino in the heart of town.

  I broke the story when his secretary, an honest woman from the Iron Range who hated him with generations of stored-up, working-class ire, slipped me an envelope with the check numbers and the bank account in North Dakota he had been using. (Only a Duluth political hack could mistake North Dakota for the Cayman Islands.) I wrote the story and my career was made.

  I read the Sentinel diligently when I first moved to the Twin Cities, but I had less time for it in Duluth. The News Tribune was owned by the Knight-Ridder Corporation, which as I said has since been chopped up and devoured by corporate piranhas. At the time it was the second largest newspaper chain in the country. When a job in the Knight-Ridder Washington Bureau covering the senators and congressmen from the Upper Midwest came open, I applied and got the post. I moved to Washington, D.C., and the Sentinel subscription never made the journey. I was too busy to call and straighten it out, and when the subscription expired, I lost touch.

  Anna and I never spoke after I left Shannon. She sent a postcard once from the state newspaper convention in Fargo on the day the paper won four awards. She tried to give me credit, but it was all her. I called her old number to offer congratulations, but when the machine picked up, I hung up. I don’t really know why.

  We never spoke, but she was part of so many things in those years after the Sentinel: the resolve that allowed me to get up and face every day at the legal publisher’s without complaining; the determination that it wouldn’t be where I ended up; the wisdom that it was better to be alone than to be with the wrong person, a lesson I learned imperfectly, but that at least gave me the sense to know what I had found when I met my wife. In all this, she was present.

  The person I kept in touch with was Todd. He continued to pass on regular news of the local high school sports teams under some misapprehension that they had mattered to me. He never said much about himself, but he did send pictures of their first baby, and the second, and the third. I tried to picture him growing older, the ink stains ever darkening on his fingertips, but he was lodged in my head as the young man with the jumping Wile E. Coyote tattoo and the lawn-mower haircut.

  Art Shoemaker died of a heart attack in his house one autumn afternoon, toppling over piles of newspapers that nearly completed the burial right then and there. Todd wrote me that the firemen had a hard time clearing a path to get the body out. Louise ran the shop and newspaper for another year and then sold both to Paul Strand, as I’d thought would eventually happen, and moved to Florida, where she had a sister. I tried and couldn’t imagine her sitting contentedly on a beach. It didn’t seem like she would be having nearly enough fun.

  And I couldn’t imagine her without Art. They now seemed so clearly joined by love.

  Todd’s communication over the years had all been by mail, not even email, but the old-fashioned kind that arrives in an envelope. It might have been because he could use the envelopes and the postage machine at the office and never had to pay for anything. I didn’t recognize his voice, or even place his name at first, when he called to tell me Anna was dead.

  “How did it happen?” I asked.r />
  He told me, and a vision of Anna silhouetted in a darkened room, the bottle rising through the shadows, the very real weight of it in her small hand, the brief, deceptively cool feeling of the plastic against her lips, filled my head and then flared out as if I had been staring into the sun. The world burned away into a perfect blackness and blankness, an infinite emptiness. Todd’s voice drifted up out of this void. “. . . bleach, man . . . it had to hurt like hell.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know about the motel, either,” he said, “why she drove all the way across town like that.”

  Each word seemed to arrive out of the darkness with a strange clarity.

  “She didn’t want to leave the house haunted, for her kids, or whoever ended up living there,” I said. “That’s the kind of thing she would think of.”

  “Yeah. I suppose.” He sounded doubtful. “It’s terrible, man.”

  We spoke for only a few more minutes. He told me about the half-open door and the plans for the funeral, which was in a couple of days. I was leaving town that night for an assignment there was no way I could get out of, so I wouldn’t be able to go. The thought was a small, shameful relief. I didn’t want my final memory of Anna to be of her in a box.

  After Todd and I had finished I tried to go back to work. It had been a lot of years and I had some misguided sense I should try to carry on. But I couldn’t concentrate. So as I said at the beginning, I rode the elevator down to the bottom of the National Press Building, walked over to Lafayette Square, and took a seat on a bench.

  The street was busy, the square filled with tourists and cubicle dwellers escaping briefly into the sun. The fact of Anna’s suicide, the particulars of her death, settled on me, and I could hardly move. But mingled in the sorrow was a strange sense of dislocation, as if time had slipped out of order. How, I wondered, could this be now?

  • • •

  THE DAY OF THE BUS ACCIDENT, when we sat in her car and then went inside, Anna made me a cup of coffee and sat down beside me on her couch, and I remember I was somewhat surprised by this, how close she sat, but I never understood—what did I understand, really?—and she told me that four days after Katy had frozen to death, after the police had come and gone, after the social worker visits, after her husband had fled, and her broken parents had retreated to their farm, she found herself alone one evening in the trailer, vacantly packing their belongings. Every time she passed through the kitchen, the door called to her, a silent invitation, insinuating and knowing. Finally she saw there was no point in trying to resist. The door knew her secret. They wanted the same thing. She looked around the trailer for a length of rope, but there was none to be had. Then she had an inspiration. She took a kitchen knife and walked around the back of the house, where hay bales had been placed against the foundation to keep the wind from getting under the trailer. She sawed at the stubborn bailing twine and finally cut loose a long strand. She pulled hard on it. Sturdy enough. She put it in her pocket and walked back around to the front of the trailer.

  The night was nothing like the storm, she said. Cold and clear. A quarter moon, but enough light reflecting off the snow to see. She followed the path she thought Katy must have taken, down the familiar route toward the creek, and then lost, veering off into the meadow. She came to the spot, what she thought was the spot in the dark, but there was nothing there, no way to hold herself, to make sure she couldn’t escape her own judgment. The temptation was just to lie down, close her eyes where Katy had, but she was afraid she would change her mind, would find some reason for a pardon or simply surrender to her own weakness. She walked a few yards farther toward the creek and an idea came to her. An old threshing machine had been left behind generations ago, rusting and slowly sinking into the earth. A part of the machine, a long boom used to dump grain into trucks, still rose into the air. Anna tied the twine carefully and tightly around one wrist and then tossed a loop over the boom. She tied the other wrist. It was difficult above her head, but she repeated the knot until it was impossible to undo. The twine was stiff in the cold, but she was careful to do it properly. When she was finished wrapping her other wrist, she stood on her toes and slid the loop of twine higher up on the angled boom, until it was just below the spot she had noticed silhouetted against the moon, the spot where there was a notch in the metal. She stretched and jumped and the loop slid an inch higher and caught in the notch. She wasn’t going anywhere now. She had fixed herself to the night and the growing cold. The twine cut into her wrists, but soon she couldn’t feel it any longer. The cold was the same, very soon it went from something you felt to a concept, like the infinite distance revealed in the night sky. She could see back to the place where she believed they had found Katy, and over time the spot seemed to collect and hold the wintry light. The last thing she remembered was thinking she could see the faint impression of her daughter filled with stars.

  “My dad cut me down at about three in the morning,” Anna said. “He woke up in the middle of the night convinced I was going to do what I did and he drove back out to the trailer and found me. They thought I might lose the use of my left hand at first, but it hadn’t been long enough. Then I had to stay in a hospital for a while until they were convinced I wouldn’t go looking for more rope and another threshing machine.” She fixed me with a weak smile. “So. That’s the story behind the mystery of Anna’s long sleeves. What do you think?”

  What could I say?

  “I think there aren’t that many of them still around. Threshing machines. The odds you could find one in that condition again are probably insurmountable.”

  Anna leaned into my shoulder, laughing and maybe crying, and for the one and only time, gave me a fierce hug. I have said she was a small but not delicate woman, and yet at that moment she seemed so fragile, I hardly dared to put my arms around her.

  • • •

  HOW LONG HAD I BEEN sitting on the bench? The people in the square were all different and the sun had moved an odd distance across the sky. A child, a little girl, escaped her mother and ran into the pigeons farther down the path, where a bored middle-aged man had been tossing them scraps of his sandwich. They scattered into the air in a flurry of wings and ruffled feathers, gathering quickly and circling in a black and gray arc to land exactly where they had been. I was struck by a sense of time as fleeting and illusory as their flight, all the years a tight circle back to where we started. Could this really be the answer—all she had done, the children raised, the friends, the work, the good stories, the things she made her own, all of it too brief a turn through a sky filled with fading light?

  The rest of the day was like sleepwalking. I marched through it blankly, unable to think, unable to tell anyone, not even my wife. I caught my plane out of National Airport that evening, and I was looking down at an island of lights far below on some featureless Midwestern plain, when I remembered a summer night in Shannon. A bonfire on the edge of the lake, a distant shore nearly invisible in the darkness. A rowboat.

  How did we come to be here? A drunken bet that Anna and I could beat Todd and Christina across the lake. Something to do with who would make the better pirates, a conversation started by Christina.

  Anna and I were lousy pirates. Despite a hearty shout of, Ahoy, matey, and many an, Avast, ye black’earts, the other boat had coursed ahead into the inky blackness and soon we were rowing alone across the mirrored lake, the stars parting at our prow and rippling back into their proper constellations in our wake.

  When we had both tried to row we had been unable to move in a straight line, and now I was idly pulling us in the general direction of the Big Dipper. Anna sat in the back of the boat, trailing a hand in the water. The party on the shore was still going strong and the music and occasional hoots of laughter reached us with crystalline clarity like the music in your head late at night, the voices of dreams, very close and yet far away, not quite real.

  “Beautiful,” Anna said, and I knew she was looking at the stars. I shipped
the oars to rest and we glided along.

  “The air’s still so warm,” she said. “I love it when the day hangs on like this.”

  “That’s because you’re not rowing.”

  “You’re not rowing, either.”

  “That’s true. I give up. They win.”

  “They win,” she said lightly.

  The party going on across the water was for the birthday of the owner of the café where Christina worked. I was only there because she had invited Todd and he wanted someone he knew along. Christina had invited Anna, whom she always felt needed more nights out, away from the kids.

  “Christina wins,” I said. “I think the whole pirate thing was just a way to get Todd alone in a boat.”

  “Oh, I think Todd won, too.”

  As Anna spoke, the bonfire on the side of the lake disappeared, as if slowly erased by an unseen hand. We were floating in perfect, moonless darkness.

  “The party’s gone.”

  I felt the boat shift as Anna looked over her shoulder.

  “How does that happen?” I said.

  “We must have gone around a point.”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  “You’re not rowing in a straight line.”

  “There are no straight lines. The universe is curved.”

  Anna’s head went back, a barely seen shadow of falling hair as she contemplated the broad arch of stars.

  “Yes, it is.”

  We drifted awhile longer, the music fading until it seemed imagined.

  “I suppose we should head back,” I said.

  “No. Let’s stay out here awhile longer.”

  A splash echoed in the silence and we both turned to see a ripple in reflected stars a few feet from the boat. There was another, and another. The still water tangled now with concentric circles, and then the form of a fish half out of the water, barely, briefly there, and, once seen, another. We were both still, watching them feed.

  Then they were gone.

  Anna dropped her arm as deeply into the water as she could—I felt the boat shift—and lifted it high, the sound of water falling back into the lake etched clearly in the silence.