Bag in hand, she quietly slid open the glass door. The rain had become mist. She scouted the yard, her bare feet squishing in the soaked grass. She scooped up the sodden paper, wadded it, and threw it in the bag. She found the umbrella and put it in, too, its metal tip stretching the black plastic. The notebook cover was all the way against the fence, under the dripping branch of a juniper. She added it to the rest, spun the neck of the bag closed, and once inside stuffed the bag under the spare twin bed.
Dani never told anyone Jess had come that night. Never the police in all those interviews. Never her mother. Never Paul. What she told was the essential truth: the last time Dani had seen Jess Winters, she was alive. No, she hadn’t harmed her. Never. She swore it. She didn’t know anything else. She didn’t know where she went or if she was with anyone. She buried the image of Jess—kneeling in the rain with her face upturned—deep inside the ice.
Over the days, and then weeks, and then months, and then years, Dani had imagined scenarios for what had happened that night: No, Jess was fine. Jess ran, warming herself as she splashed through the waterlogged streets. The rain plastered her clothes to her skin, and she lowered herself to a large puddle and washed her scraped knees and palms. Then she hitched a ride to Phoenix, drenching the car seat with rainwater. She stole a car, she rode a bus, she hopped a train—never mind there was no bus station, no train depot within fifty miles. Dani never had believed her father or anyone else was involved. Jess left on her own two feet, and she found her way out of this place—what she had always wanted. Or, at least, once had wanted. Dani retreated behind her ice wall, and she shut the rest of it out.
For the second time in her life, Dani went to the garage for a shovel. She ran her fingers around the curve of the metal spade, brushed at the flecks of dried dirt. Was this Hugh’s, or her father’s? Was it the same one? She began to dig. She dug next to the place she had dug almost twenty years ago, next to the secret she had buried to protect herself.
She panted, struggling with the spade in the hard, dry earth, and then she began to tremble so hard she had to sit down on the grass. Her teeth chattered, and she pressed her face to her knees and held on to her calves. She pressed her eyes, stifling the burn. No, she told herself, as she had told herself when she looked away from Maud. She squeezed her eyes shut tight, and then she could see her teenage self, calm, her mind at a clinical distance, focused on what she needed to do: dig, dump ruined notebook and umbrella from bag and into hole, shovel dirt, tamp down. The ground soft because of the rain, mud sticking to the spade. She saw the yellow pencil at her father’s ear. She saw those serpentine clumps of cells through a microscope. She heard her own voice as it sounded now when she swabbed the soft, tender flesh of an inner elbow and raised the needle: Hold still. This is going to sting. She always looked away from their fearful, pleading faces, kept her eyes on the task under her hands.
Dani tried to stand up, but she couldn’t get her legs under her. She tried to dig from a sitting position, with the shovel between her knees, but she couldn’t put enough pressure on the spade. So she laid the shovel on the grass and used her hands.
The surface was so dry she formed her slim fingers into claws and scratched. Dirt crammed under her short nails, and one bent backward, but she didn’t stop. By the time the sun set, she had marked the outline of a hole large enough to hold the Captain’s small body but had scraped only two inches down. The dirt grew cool, crumbly, moister but not damp. Her clenched fingers ached as the sky turned to gray and then to black. Her eyes adjusted enough she could see her hands, but little else, the yard a charcoal sketch of itself. She flexed her hands and stretched her shoulders, and she kept on, scratching and scratching, wondering when she would feel it: the metal rod of a blunt instrument, flakes of decomposed paper. The earth gave way, inch by inch. She had no idea how long it would take to make a hole deep enough.
Outside the Window
August 15, 2009
Dear Dani,
Every time I start a letter to you, I never know how to begin, and so often I never do. Too often I have not said what I should say. I have left pages blank for too long.
I saw the news yesterday. It was in the paper here, and on the radio, too.
I am sorry, Dani, for what this news makes us examine again. As if we ever stopped. I am the first to say, I do not want to revisit that time again. But that is my fault, not yours. It was not hers, either. I am the one at fault. I know that. I have had eighteen years to turn it inside out.
We never have talked about what happened. I have respected your wishes that I stay away. I assume you read my letters, even though you do not write back. I know you cash the checks, which is fine. I hope the money helps in some way.
What you do not know, because I do not always send them, is I write letters to you every morning. It is how I start my day before I head in to work. I tell you what is outside my window that morning and throughout the day. Yesterday, I told you about a half moon hanging over the western sky. I told you the morning’s temperature (today, 63). A few days ago, I told you about the deer grazing five feet from the window, so close I could see the ripple of their necks as they swallowed acorns they nipped from the grass. I have told you over and over about the winter pines and bare oaks in silhouette at dawn, about the stillness of the air, how it seems as though time stops on some mornings. Hardly newsworthy details. But something about sharing it with you makes it seem real. I often feel as though I am watching the world from a distance.
It hit me today that I have lived here, looking out this window I once found so alien, longer than I lived with you. Seventeen years with you, eighteen years here. I was forty-four when I left, I’m sixty-two now. Headed out of my second act and into my third, as your mother might say. Living in a cabin. Selling houses part-time in Flagstaff, painting houses in the warm months, painting mediocre paintings in a studio with southern light. In a life I never could have imagined then.
But here we are.
Still I do not know how to begin to tell you everything. So I will begin with the most recent news from my window:
It is barely light out; I have become an early riser though I still do not sleep well. The sky through the pines is blue this morning, with a fat white scar of a cloud. The cloud looks like a zipper, like a spine. Otherwise, the sky is as clean as a plate. I have the window open, and the air smells of pine needles. The wind has picked up, and the tops of the pines sway. What else? It is trash day. The neighbor is pulling in his bin. He wears a red wool cap even in summer. His name is Errol Jorgenson, and he’s a retired army sergeant. A robin lands on the boulder to the left of the window, a worm hanging from its beak. Its breast is the color of rust.
Do you remember your old Squareback? The hood and tails and doors were thick with rust when I found it. I sanded it, primed it, and found the original green and repainted it. It may sound strange, but it is among the most satisfying tasks I have ever accomplished. I sold that car a few years ago to a young man hitchhiking on his way to Albuquerque. I never drove it anymore, left it parked on the side of the cabin. I drive a regular pickup now. With the roads here in winter, it is good to have four-wheel drive. The drive into Flagstaff is about a half hour each way, but I have come to like it, the time it takes to transition from work to home. Everyone here on the road in the Village knows each other, but we keep to ourselves. What else? The kitchen could use a new coat of paint. Ironic, with all the painting I do. This spring I had a new roof put on. We do not need air-conditioning here, but we have a wood-burning stove.
We—just me.
Oh, Dani, how to begin? How to end?
I look at her photograph in the paper, and it is a wonder to me that I have days now when I do not wake up seeing her face, that I go full days without even thinking of her. There was a time I believed I would not stop seeing her everywhere. That I would not stop waking with her face behind my eyes. That I would not stop hoping she would show up on my doorstep and come inside. I am sorry if that i
s painful to read. But it is the truth, and the truth is something I think you and I need a bit more of between us.
The night I left, you asked me: Why? Why her? Why did I do it? I did not have an answer then. I don’t know, I told you, over and over. This question of course has haunted me. Why? Why her? A teenage girl, my daughter’s friend? Why would I walk knowingly into such a minefield? Why would I do such a thing?
The first time I opened the door and saw her on the doorstep, I thought not of her but of me. Of my awkward teenage self. Growing up, I got teased a lot for my nose. Beaker and the like. I was skinny and clumsy, had a habit of hanging on to my elbows as though I could keep myself from flying apart. At first, I saw Jess only in the light of memory. I looked at her as if on my former self: empathetically, fondly, wishing for her to hang in there.
I still cannot pinpoint the moment it shifted—how it became what it did.
I did love your mother. People ask, but were you in love? Or out? In or out. As if it is so clear-cut. I always loved Rachel, though it was honestly a more gentle love that had turned into friendship and familiarity. You know our story. College sweethearts, met when she took an art class on a whim. She always says she was a terrible artist, but she was not. She had a wonderful eye. Still does, I imagine. She and I grew up together in a sense, roaming around New York, she far away from her Midwest childhood and me removed finally from my lonely adolescence. The theater, art shows, clubs, waiting tables and living off soup and crackers and Chinese leftovers. We were not planning to have you when we did. Though we were old enough, we wanted to get ourselves established, get ready. Still, it was the happiest day of my life, Dani, when I got to hold you for the first time. We knew we could not stay in that loft on Wooster Street in SoHo, living off scraps; those were heady times in the art world, but we knew we had to change. Rachel got her position in Sycamore and we bought that sweet little house on Piñon and there we were. She had a good stable job, and I had, what? I did not know. I had you. I got my Realtor’s license, and that became a way to contribute. I set up my “art studio,” where I could pursue my pedestrian paintings that nonetheless fulfilled a restlessness in me. I was not unhappy.
Why not just say, I was happy? Well, I was not unhappy but I was not happy, either. A shifting, in-between place. Adulthood is full of such uneasy spaces, as I am sure you know. Happiness comes in waves, not as a permanent state. If I had to describe that time, I would say I was holding steady. I was helping raise you, a joy every day. I was helping Rachel, who was so busy and exhausted in her teaching and work that some weekends after a show she would sleep a full day without waking. I felt some days as though I was the kickstand of our marriage. My job was to prop Rachel up, to keep her—and you—from falling over. Which meant I could not teeter; I had to stand straight. Perhaps that is not a fair description. I’m not sure I felt this at the time, only in looking back. I’m not sure I was able or ready to admit we had a problem. A real problem.
Part of that problem, I know now, was my perception of how Rachel had begun to see me. That is, in my view, she no longer did. There was a time when she lit up when I entered a room, when we were two artists together, not one successful and one struggling—one failed, in fact. Before I was a man who could not finish a painting because he saw that it could not—should not—be finished because it would never be good enough. She would never admit it, but I knew: she had given up on me. I could see it in her face, a face I knew by heart: how it pinched up when I told her I’d started a new piece, the flare of her nostrils and cut of her eyes when I said I was going upstairs to work. I had lost her faith, if not her love. This was no one’s fault but my own, but it was devastating if I allowed myself to think of it. Further, in my failure, she thrived. That symbiosis was not easy to know. I am not blaming your mother. Please understand that. My actions are to blame. Yet I think she and I both know now there were things we should have voiced. I should have voiced them.
I want to be clear, though: problems or not, I believed in that life. I saw it before me like a well-made table. Stable, sturdy, welcoming, a place of refuge and peace. I had no intention of leaving it. Until Jess, the most I envisioned for us was more travel, seeing more of the world.
That is part of what happened. But there is more.
When everything exploded at Thanksgiving, Rachel asked me, Is this about your mother? I denied it. Of course not. Why would it be about her? You know some of that story, most of it probably, though we have never spoken about it. My mother left my father, older brother, and me when I was fourteen—when I was that beaky boy who held his elbows. She was a painter, and she became famous in the years after she left. She did not stay in touch. No letters, no postcards, no phone calls. I believe now that is the only way she could live with herself for abandoning us—for choosing herself and her work over her children. My brother was seventeen, on his way out, already nearing adulthood, so perhaps she did not see it as abandonment, or us as children. I do not know. I know that he and I both struggled, though he turned away from her in anger, shut her out, while I tried desperately to get her back. Letters, postcards, unreturned calls. After a couple years I stopped trying to contact her, but I always followed her career. Her work hangs in the Museum of Modern Art, in the Art Institute of Chicago, many places. I knew she had left New York. I knew she lived in Colorado, not ten hours from us in Sycamore, on a small ranch outside Durango. The image I have of her, the one that persists, is a photograph taken when she was in her forties, about ten years after she left us. She sits on a tree stump outside her cabin, looking away from the camera, her dark hair swept by the wind. Frances Barnes. My mother, a beautiful stranger. She was not mine. I cut out the magazine page and kept it folded in a dresser drawer.
I never saw her again. I always believed someday I would. I did not.
When she died, at only sixty-four, she was alone. Alone in a small house on a large swath of land. They did not find her for three days. By that point, she had little money, but she had a number of paintings, which I kept with me for years. My brother and I have since sold them and divided the estate—the money I send you is from those sales, from an account I set up for you.
The irony is not lost on me. Here I am, alone, cabin in the woods, estranged from my child and former wife. History repeats itself.
So if you were to ask me the question now—Was it about my mother?—my answer is less emphatic. Because of course it was. How could it not be? She is the reason I wanted to paint. She is the reason I will never be good enough. She is, in a sense, the lost love of my life.
While I understand this truth now, it is also too easy to chalk my behavior up to the idea that I was traumatized, I was deranged by her absence, I was grieving, I was seeking my mother in a new love. That is only part of it.
Still there is more.
Trying to explain love is to lapse into cliché, is it not? It is like the language of sympathy, burdened with overuse and abstraction and inexactitude. (I am so very sorry for your loss. I wish you comfort in this terrible time of sorrow.) To speak of souls is laughably naive, sentimental. I have struggled—am still struggling—to find the right words, any words, to describe what I felt for her, my inappropriate, ill-advised, immoral love. But I will try again.
We humans speak of falling in love. Falling. Losing control. Taken over by gravity. Reeling toward the ground, toward scrapes and bruises and shattered bones, unless something—or someone—breaks the fall. Water. Soft mattress. Waiting arms.
Yet the sensation of falling is also the closest we have to flying. Something we can do only in dreams.
With Jess, I fell, as if from a great height. God, did I fall. I saw the ground coming, and I could not stop myself.
Why? Why her?
Because she was the sky.
Jesus, what does that even mean? All I can get at are strained metaphors. Here is what I think I mean: I looked up, and there she was—blazing blue, sun and shadow, air and cloud and lightning, a goddamn palette of nature,
innocent and fragile but also strong, impervious. I could not stop staring at her shifting light.
Yet if I am honest, the power of the feeling intensified not because of how I saw her but because of how she saw me. She looked at me with such ragged longing, only in part sexual. There was a nakedness in her gaze, and I mean that both in the sense of straightforwardness and vulnerability. But more than that, in her eyes I saw reflected a version of me that I hardly knew myself. She did not know of my failure as an artist, or that my mother had left me, or that I would never be extraordinary. Under her gaze, I could forget those parts of me.
More truth, Dani? I wanted the physical, too. No, I did not touch her, but yes, I wanted to. I was willing to wait, but that waiting was not chivalrous or patient. I was mad with it, desperate, driven to distraction by the depth of that desire. This went beyond sex and pleasure, which I had had plenty of in my life. This was not a cliché, a middle-aged man frustrated in his bedroom. I felt more akin to a teenage boy, unable to control myself. The sight of her—smart, quirky, funny, radiantly beautiful—unleashed a wildness in me I still do not understand. Ferocious. Left me shaking.
I cannot speak for her, of why she was attracted to me. The obvious question: Was she trying to replace her father? It would be hard to say no. Even at the time, I recognized that likelihood. I knew she was confused and vulnerable; I knew the loss she sought to heal, even if she did not know it. I should have known better. I did know better. And I did it anyway.
Why, why, why, why, why? The question that haunts me. Hunts me, really. Chases me into the night, howling.
Today’s answer: Because I loved her, because of my mother, because of my marriage, because of my fallibility, because of lust, because of my life at midlife. All of them are true, all at once.
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