Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather

by Jincy Willett

  “Don’t worry,” I told Anna. “I’ll take care of it. It’ll be okay.”

  “Dorcas,” Anna said, “he wanted your number there in Ashaway. I wouldn’t give it to him.”

  When I put the phone down everybody was looking at me. “You got troubles?” asked Rocco.

  No, no, I assured him, everything was perfectly fine, but I needed to make a phone call. I didn’t know how I was going to talk to my sister in such a public place, but right then everybody pretended to be engrossed in some urgent enterprise, reminding grateful me that Rhode Islanders can be, in their own odd way, the most gracious people in the world. I took a deep breath and called Watch Hill.

  After ten rings he picked up. “There you are,” he said. “Whooping it up in Ash Wednesday, I hear. How’s doings? The kid said you were—”

  “Put my sister on.”

  “Hey, that’s kind of rude. So’s leaving without saying good-bye.”

  “Put my sister on.”

  “All righty.” He set the phone down. Sweetcheeks! he called, Honeybun! Your sister’s on the line!

  “Dorcas?” Her voice was small and breathy.

  “Tell me yes or no. Are you alone right now?”

  “Yes.”

  I had to believe her. “What’s happening? Anna said you weren’t yourself.”

  For a full minute she just breathed. Finally she spoke so softly that I couldn’t hear her. She had to repeat herself twice until I heard: “I’m so hungry, Dorcas. I’m so goddamn hungry.”

  “What?” I practically shouted into the phone. Bev, boning up on French’s mustard vinaigrette suggestions, glanced at me in alarm, then looked quickly away. “Then eat something, for God’s sake. The pantry’s full, the refrigerator too, I checked it before I left. You ought to be stuck here with me. All we’ve got here is—”

  “It’s all gone. There’s nothing left.”

  “What? How on earth? It’s only been twenty-four hours.”

  “He’s done something with it. He’s hidden it. I can’t get out the door.”

  “Put him back on.”

  “You don’t know,” she said. “You just have no idea how hungry I am.”

  “Put him back on the goddamn phone,” I hissed, cupping my hand around my mouth, although basically I didn’t give a damn whether anybody heard me or not.

  Again, there was a long, scary silence.

  “Abigail! Go next door. If nobody’s home, just keep looking until you find somebody.”

  “I told you. We’re snowed in. I just don’t have the strength to shovel.”

  “Well, he does. Put him on now. Right now.”

  “I have to go.” Click.

  I stared at the phone for a good five minutes, thinking, calculating, and then I called back and told whoever picked up and refused to speak that I’d be there as soon as possible. “And if that’s you,” I said, “you miserable worthless sadistic bastard, you’d better be gone when I get there.”

  “I’m leaving in the morning,” I told Rocco and the others.

  “But what if—”

  “As soon as it clears. One way or the other I’m leaving. I’ve got an emergency in Watch Hill.”

  Instead of arguing with me like the rest of them, Rocco thought for a while. “Do you cross-country?” he asked me.

  “Cross-country what?”

  “Guess not. Hold on.” He rummaged around in the stockroom and emerged with a big flat box. “They’re yours,” he said, presenting it to me. Snowshoes, brand-new. He wouldn’t hear of taking money. Just bring them back, he said, when you’re through.

  I didn’t think I’d sleep at all that night, but I did, awakening refreshed before the others, and when I opened the door, there, above a neck-high snowdrift, was the rising sun, raying pinkly across an innocent sky. Rocco had put together for me a fantastic snow outfit, warm enough for Greenland, and while I got myself ready he heated up the last of the hot chocolate for me. Whispering together we went over the necessary maps, until I was clear in my mind how to proceed. He showed me how to wear the snowshoes, and how to use the compass he pressed into my mittened hand. He loaded me down with venison jerky, a canteen of Kool-Aid and an ingenious folding shovel, and he wished me luck. Give us a call when you get there, he said, and waved good-bye to me behind the closing door.

  A prince among men. And not once did he, or any of them, ask me what the emergency was about. I love Rhode Island. I really do.

  The trek was arduous and long and absolutely the best time I ever had. I am not the outdoor type; nor was I changed by this experience. It was just the sort of thing everybody should do once. To have the sparkling world all to yourself, free of landmarks, grids, and signs; to walk for miles and hear nothing but the sound of your own breathing. I didn’t see another living creature, not even a bird, until the day was half gone. It is nine miles from Ashaway to Watch Hill as the crow flies, which is pretty much the path I took. I dreaded my destination, but that dread didn’t spoil the day; if anything it sharpened it up. I was going to save my sister. How, I didn’t know, nor did I worry about it. Who could worry on such a day? And who would clutter it up with thought? On that beautiful day I lived in the moment, in pure sensation; in, I suppose, my sister’s world. And this time I was ready for it. I thought for a fleeting moment of Henry David Thoreau, and then I put him out of my mind. He would have done the same for me.

  By the time I got to Westerly, people had begun digging out in earnest, and on the outskirts of Watch Hill I actually found a Dunkin’ Donuts, manned by a cheerful old crone named Olivia, who, in exchange for the story of my journey there, loaded me down with day-old doughnut holes and two dozen freshly baked jelly doughnuts. Now I knew I could save Abigail, and, with the sun beginning to fade, I marched on to Agincourt.

  The sun was setting when I arrived. There was a lot less accumulated snow down there than at Ashaway, but evidently the wind had been fierce off the water, and I had a terrible time finding the cottage, hidden as it was behind a huge drift satiny with ice. They really were trapped inside. I was suddenly exhausted, my ankles were killing me, and the thought of battering my way inside was daunting. I wanted to stand there and bellow until one of them opened a window. Damn the neighbors, if indeed there were any. I didn’t see any signs of one. But after summoning what remained of my strength I got out Rocco’s little shovel and set to work.

  It was dark in there, and it smelled stale, moldy, as though the place had been deserted suddenly, and abandoned for years; as though it were inhabited only by ghosts and mice. Long minutes passed, before my eyes, burned by snow sparkle, could make out even large shapes, the coat tree, the telephone table. Plumply suited and hooded in goose down and lambs’ wool, I stood in the front hall like a wary space traveler, calculating whether to remove his helmet and test the air. Was there sentient life on this planet? And did it mean us harm?

  Where were they? I hadn’t called out, but I had certainly made enough commotion getting in the door to alert them of my presence. At least, I thought, it doesn’t smell downright bad. At least there isn’t what the horror books and police procedurals always describe as “the sweet odor of rotting meat.” This was an unwise thought.

  I untied my hood and listened very hard, breathing shallowly, and then at last, thank heaven, came shuffling sounds from the master bedroom upstairs. I imagined Abigail in her pig slippers (a Christmas present from her husband, which she defiantly wore all the time) slouching toward the top of the stairs. She moved like an invalid, and she didn’t call my name. Surely she had heard me come in. She had to know it was me, come to help her. I opened my mouth to announce myself, and found that I couldn’t speak. It wasn’t fear exactly; more a profound unwillingness to affect the moment, as unsettling as that moment was; to set in motion whatever was going to happen next. I had come to save her, but I didn’t want, right then, to see her.

  The kitchen, I thought, that’s it, I’ll go to the kitchen and find out just how bare those cupboards actually are
. Surely something’s left. I turned to go, and there he was, inches away. “I knew you’d come,” he said. He put his hands on me, unzipped my parka, slid it off me while my arms dangled straight down, like a child’s. He touched my cold face with a colder fingertip. “You are,” he said, “one amazing piece of work. Look how far you’ve come.” His smile was admiring. “You’re mad at me,” he said. “But you’ll get over it.”

  I backed away, circling him until my back was to the kitchen. Behind him, my sister loomed up from the murk, and came to stand beside him, rubbing sleep from her eyes. She looked unwashed, apathetic, as though drugged. He put his arm around her puny shoulders. “Look who’s come to save us, honey,” he said.

  I fled to the kitchen, where things got even worse. The shelves were anything but bare, and the refrigerator was still stocked with milk, cheese, English muffins. In the freezer was even new stuff, acquired since I left, a Sara Lee cheesecake, a gallon of vanilla ice cream. Was my sister delusional? There was enough here to feed everybody at Rocco’s for a week.

  “Do you see?” she asked me. “It’s all gone.” She leaned against the door frame.

  What do you say then? “Abigail,” I finally said, “you’re frightening me.”

  “Did you bring me anything?”

  “Of course I did. It’s in my backpack, in the hall.” I wasn’t going to go back there for it.

  She left, and returned after a long while, dragging the open backpack behind her. She regarded me with horror. “How could you?” she said. There were tears in her eyes. She’d never looked at me like that in her life.

  “What are you talking about?” Oh, God, he must have stolen the doughnuts, and I grabbed for the backpack to confirm this, and there they were, the cardboard box, the cheery pink and white bag of doughnut holes. I wanted to shake her, to smack her face, to pummel her old self back into her, but there’d already been too much of that. “Abigail,” I said, slowly, “look here. Look at what I brought you. It’s all right here.”

  “Is that supposed to be funny?” she screamed hoarsely. “Are you in on it too?”

  “In on what?” Did she think the doughnuts were poisoned? This was some kind of psychotic break. How could I have left her alone at such a time?

  “You know I can’t eat that!”

  “Can’t eat what?”

  “I. Can’t. Eat. That.”

  Slowly, keeping my eyes on her, I reached into the bag and retrieved a doughnut hole. “Look, Abigail,” I said, holding it up to my mouth and biting into it. “See? It’s perfectly—”

  She slapped it out of my hand. “I hate you!” she screamed. “I hate both of you!”

  I was shaking now, with anxiety and exhaustion. “Listen to me,” I said. “There’s no way I can get an ambulance here today. Probably not even tomorrow. They’re saying we can’t dig out until the army comes, and the army can’t fly in before the weekend. You have to calm down. You have to start making sense. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Fat chance,” said Conrad. He stood right in back of her, his head right above hers, so that it looked disembodied, perched, like the Cheshire cat, on top of hers. “She hasn’t made sense for quite some time. I was hoping—praying, really—that between the two of us we could straighten her out.” He grinned widely, just like the cat, showing me all his teeth.

  “Do you have any idea,” she whispered, “how much fat and processed sugar is in just one of these?” She held up the bag of holes as though it were a dead rat.

  “See what I mean?”

  “Do you know what the caloric count is for a jelly doughnut? No, of course you don’t. You never had to count a single calorie in your life.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you saying you—”

  “Yup,” said Conrad. “Sad, isn’t it? If you only knew how hard I’ve tried to get her to eat just a little sliver of cheese, for Christ’s sake, a slice of toast, without butter, even. She simply won’t listen to reason.”

  “You bastard hypocrite,” she said, over her shoulder, not bothering to turn and face him. “Ask him what he did with my chicken bouillon. Ask him what he did with all my zwieback crackers and my cottage cheese and my celery and carrots and my Tab, I had two six-packs left, and all my cans of spinach and green beans. Ask him.”

  “See, she’s flipped. Where on earth would I—”

  “I know where you hid them. They’re out there someplace under the snow where I’ll never get to them, until it’s too late!”

  “What difference does it make anyway?” He sounded reasonable, exasperated, as though he had been trying to teach long division to a slow child. “Clearly,” he said to me, “she needs something more substantial than zwieback. She’s wasting away. She’s gone too far. I’ve tried and tried to convince her, but she just won’t listen to me.”

  “Liar! He wants me to quit! He’s been sabotaging me for weeks! I’m winning, and he can’t stand it!”

  I was so tired. I had traversed the frozen waste alone for this: two lunatics locked in some stupid love-death spiral, with me utterly, laughably irrelevant. Whatever else was going on, I was off the hook. They didn’t need me at all. “Have you been drinking water?” I asked her.

  “Well, of course,” she said. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “It means you’re not dehydrated. You’re not going to die, at least not tonight. I can go to bed now, and in the morning I can get up and leave, and in the meantime you two psychos can stay the hell out of my way. Thank you so much.”

  It took me a half hour to haul the convertible settee from the frigid back porch into the living room, and another half hour to find clean bedding, and in my quest to do so I didn’t run into either of them. It was so cold in the house, despite the constant rumble of the basement furnace, that I went down there to check on it. There seemed to be plenty of heating oil. The old furnace just hadn’t been able to keep up with the freezing gale. I collected an armful of maple logs from Guy’s tidy firewood stack, and brought them upstairs. Kindling was a problem, until I remembered where Conrad kept his precious blue-lined three-hole notebook paper, and for good measure I dumped the jelly doughnuts onto Hilda’s big cutting board over the kitchen sink and tore the greasy cardboard box into three pieces. Soon I had a good fire going. The fire calmed me down. It had been, I decided, a real Jack London sort of day.

  I got in bed and stared into the flames and pretended I was back in civilization with Rocco and Bev and the civics teacher, and that I had never been forced to see my sister, my Warrior Bawd twin, reduced, perhaps for good, to a pathetic, whining mantis-creature. At the end of the day, all we have, any of us, is pride. At least I still had mine, and it would have to do for us both. In the morning I would get her out of here if I had to kick her all the way to the county line. I was saddened, but temperately so, and full of clean resolve. I did not allow him space in my conscious mind. These were my thoughts as I drifted off.

  And opened my eyes at midnight to a dying fire and he was there, sitting on the floor beside my bed, stroking my head with a gentle hand. I had been dreaming the sort of dream I hadn’t had since I was young, and I came awake smiling. He put his other hand over my mouth, light as a wink, and whispered, “Shhhhhhh. She’s sleeping.” And then he put his lips on mine, and they were dry, and his breath was whiskey and smoke and some tantalizing third scent, like cloves, only it wasn’t cloves, and I opened my mouth to his tongue, and his fingertips traced my brow, my throat, my collarbone. This was joy. I rose up against him hard, my arms strong around his back, and he held still, and I hung suspended, breathing him in; and then he pressed me back down and leaned in close and whispered, “Perfect. Don’t move. Wait right here.” And then he was gone.

  It happens just that fast. No rhythm to it, no inexorable buildup, no shrieking violins. You slip through an open door you didn’t know was there. It closes behind you, sealing you off forever from everything you knew and all you were. You are in the void, and all directions are d
own. What else are you capable of? How far can you fall?

  I listened for the answer while the fire died, my mind perfectly white, untracked, alert as any dog to all sounds real and imagined. I listened to the pop of unseasoned firewood, the final shift as it crumbled into embers, the emptied silence. I waited without moving until I could see in my mind’s eye the shape of this day, not at all a Jack London sort of day, and then the shape of my entire life, the hard bright ruined arrow of my life, and I arrived at the spot where I had been led, and then I understood. Endgame.

  Well played.

  And I had known all along, hadn’t I, that it was a game, that he was a terrible man, one who simply loved bad weather. I had been given every clue, every chance. The only thing I hadn’t known was my own weakness. But he had. Because, apparently, we really are all alike, and there is not and never has been anything special about me. I am of no consequence. I am not an honorable woman. I am not a contradiction in terms.

  You would think that, having arrived at a place where there was nothing to hope for, and so nothing, really, to fear, you might just close your eyes. But even with nowhere to go I had to wander. I stood up, creaking and sore like the old woman I soon enough would be, wrapped my blanket around my shoulders, and roamed, like my own ghost, about the first-floor rooms, settling for a time on the parlor window seat, searching the moonless sky for the promise of light. When day came I would have to do some pointless thing.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Abigail. I couldn’t see her in the dark, but she was somewhere close to me. I hadn’t heard her come down. When had she come down? How long had she been here? “He’s passed out now. He won’t bother you anymore.”

  She sounded like a mother apologizing for an unruly toddler.

  “Abigail,” I said.

  “Dorcas,” she said, “I’m so hungry.”

  I could make out her outline now. She was sitting on my bed. I couldn’t speak.