The Winter Girl

by Matt Marinovich

  I kept telling Elise to calm down, but as soon as she left the house, she started to run down the driveway. I caught her shoulder and she wheeled around.

  “We have to go the other way,” I said. “Down the deer path.”

  “I’m not walking that way. Someone’s going to kill us.”

  I pointed at the dark outline of the house we had just left and tried to make her understand that no one was in there. We could call the police from Victor’s place.

  Elise continued walking down the driveway anyway, and I followed her. I couldn’t see anything through the mist, just the trunks of the dark, wet elms that lined the driveway, the bark glistening with water. At the bottom, we pushed open a wooden gate that said SWAIN’S WAY and walked onto the shoulder of the highway. You could see the silent explosion of each car’s brights long before they crested the hill and sped past us. We ducked our heads each time they passed, sure the drivers were watching us, probably making a mental note of the two of us, arm in arm on the road. We were both breathing heavily. That’s the thing about getting the shit scared out of you. It’s like you’ve run ten miles.

  I think it was about 11:30 when we got back to the house. Elise took a hot shower. I raked through Victor’s liquor cabinet for the last of his booze. I poured some Bacardi into a glass and drank it warm and straight as I looked out the window in the living room. The lights in the upstairs room of that house, the ones on the timer, had long since turned themselves off, but I quickly figured out why there still seemed to be a dim yellow reflection floating through the trees.

  “Left the light on in the bedroom,” I said to myself, picking up the binoculars I had placed on the coffee table. I scanned the whole house again through the mist, momentarily startled by a dark shape in another upstairs window. I stayed on it until I realized that it was probably a mirror. At the very least, it was reassuringly rectangular, and not human-shaped.

  I knew, of course, that I’d have to go back. It wasn’t just the light. My wife had thrown up on the floor. We’d left a comforter balled up in a stranger’s bedroom. A bloody mattress exposed as if we’d known just what we were looking for.

  Upstairs, I heard the sound of my wife showering, the splatter of water as she shifted positions, the sound of the water stopping. It sounded as if she were coughing for a moment. It took me a few seconds to realize what it was.

  I walked upstairs, knocked on the bathroom door. Slowly pushed it open.

  She was sitting there on the toilet in a white bathrobe, eyes red-rimmed with tears. She looked at me warily, as if I had somehow caused the whole situation.

  “If this gets ugly,” she said, “I’m never going to forgive you.”

  I let a night pass. Twelve hours in which I tried not to think of the situation in the house next door.

  I was boiling Campbell’s tomato soup in a small saucepan when I heard Elise’s agitated voice on the answering machine, calling from the hospital.

  “If you don’t call them,” she said. “I will.”

  I shut the burner off. I wasn’t interested in the pale orange soup anymore. Its bubbling circumference.

  I picked up the phone and imagined myself dialing 911. I think this should be taken into consideration, just how close I came to doing the right thing.

  I put the phone back down because I needed to rehearse what I would say. For instance, how could I explain the semen on the sheets we had left in the room, or the fact that my wife had thrown up on the floor, or the wine bottle somewhere out there in the woods, or the fact that I had used a stranger’s house as a marital aid? Conceivably, if I called 911, I might be in prison by the end of the night, and for all I knew, the bloodstain on the bed had an explanation. Maybe a disturbed relative had cut his wrist in that guest room, or maybe a beloved son had blown his brains out, sending his family into exodus. Then I would be the craven next-door neighbor who had decided to break in and have sex on his deathbed.

  If this had happened on the road somewhere, if we had gone exploring near a vacation rental, it would have been different. But with Victor ill, we couldn’t just drive away from the house next door.

  What ended up happening that afternoon was that I walked right into another blind spot. Instead of calling the police, I poured myself a second Bacardi and Coke and watched some famous chef make Beef Carbonnade on television. I found a pair of yellow kitchen gloves and pulled them on. Then I laced up my sneakers, stuck one of Victor’s king-sized linens under my jacket, and left the house with a dollar-store mop and a soapy bucket of water. It was almost dark when I climbed over the fence and found the deer path.

  —

  I waited inside the front door of the house for a long time, just listening. I could feel my heart pulsing in my neck and wrist as I tried to distinguish outside and inside noise, the sound of the sloshing waves from the sound of the refrigerator in the kitchen suddenly kicking in. But I was still jumpy and nervous, crying out “Hello” when I thought I heard something upstairs. I convinced myself it was a pine tree branch scraping against the window.

  The mess on the living room floor was relatively easy to take care of. I flipped on the chandelier in the double-height room and mopped up the crusty trail on the floor. There wasn’t even that much to clean up.

  I left the bucket and mop by the door, admired the shiny rectangle of cleanliness I had created on the white floor, and walked to the bedroom. The ceiling light was still on there, glowering over the stain on the bedsheet. There was no question it was blood. It flaked slightly in the quilted ridges, and I got the impression that it had penetrated deep into the mattress.

  I was right. When I peeled back the sheet, the mattress underneath was saturated with blood. The relatively faint light cast by the recessed light made it look more black than red. The bloodstain stretched across the mattress in chromatic layers of varying darkness, even turning the small white buttons red. I leaned forward and caught that metallic odor again, the tang of it sticking inside my nostrils.

  Pulling Victor’s queen-size sheet over one corner of the bed, and then another, I stretched it over the stain. I leaned over the bed again, stretching toward the third corner, and lost my balance slightly. My face was inches away from the bloodiest part of the mattress, and I flinched at its metallic smell, like old silverware left in a drawer for years. It wasn’t as overpowering as a pint of moldy sour cream, but it was still distinct. Snapping the last corner of the bedsheet underneath, I stepped back, expecting to see a fist-sized circle of wet red blood mar the clean sheet, then other fists appearing all over the cotton. But it stayed dry as long as I looked at it.

  I balled up the bloody sheet and stuck it under my jacket. I put the comforter back on the bed and even stretched it over the two pillows. I zipped up my jacket and then I did one last tour of the house, because I told myself I’d never see it again. I suppose if I wasn’t wearing those yellow gloves I would’ve just left. Instead I opened the dresser drawers in the bedroom, found nothing of interest except for a flowery dress and an eggshell-blue cashmere sweater, and closed them again.

  You won’t have any particular interest in the many objects I picked up and put down in that house that late afternoon. A half-empty bottle of conditioner. A frilly box of soap.

  I walked into the kitchen, retrieving Elise’s bent spoon, stuffed it in my pocket. I slowly walked up the winding staircase, admiring the glassy guts of the chandelier. At the top of the stairs I flipped on another bank of lights. There were two more bedrooms, a sitting room, a study. As I opened and closed the dresser drawers in the two bedrooms, knelt down and inspected the spaces under the beds, it began to occur to me that the only exceptional quality of the house was the bloodstain.

  It was the kind of place that had a candelabra on the side of the bathtub. One too many Ken Follett novels in the sitting room. A wicker basket of light jazz CDs. There was a collection of creased Fodor’s travel books. Venice. Provence. The Grand Canyon. There were DVDs on a shelf near the flat-panel television
that were equally unremarkable and fairly ancient. Rain Man, Black Hawk Down, Fried Green Tomatoes, Shine. I opened them, just in case some porn had been hidden in one, but every one was in its right place.

  It was impossible to reconcile the situation in the downstairs bedroom with everything else I saw in the house. There was a photograph on a marble table in the sitting room. His wife was standing on his left, leaning against him slightly, her narrow face pinched into a smile, a silk scarf covering her head. Her right hand was crumpled around the handle of an aluminum cane.

  I opened another dresser drawer, peeling back the paper lining it. I heard one of the closet doors knock slightly against its runner and I straightened instantly. I had to force myself to move toward it, as if I were encased, suddenly, in some kind of mental ice. When I slid it back, there was nothing inside except a thickly bunched row of padded jackets and a black dress covered with red roses. Everywhere I looked in that house, there was some version of a fake flower. Flowers on the plates on the wall. Painted flowers on the floor. Flowers on dresses. I had the feeling the wife was covering herself in them after some tragic event, or could see some terrible event coming. But that was just guesswork.

  Flipping off the lights, I grabbed the bucket and mop and walked outside.

  Near the deer path, I chucked the dirty water into a bed of dead pine needles and made my way back to Victor’s house. It had begun to snow. Large wet flakes falling on the dry branches around me without a sound. Out on the bay, there were hardly any waves. A black rash of seaweed visible just underneath the water, and a few ducks slowly moving toward one another. I wondered if it was out of affection, or because of the current.

  It doesn’t cost me anything to admit it now. Elise always looked very pretty when she was sad. I think it depends on what type of face you have. I don’t look too bad when I’m feeling down myself, but Elise’s brown eyes seemed to grow browner, her eyelashes longer. Don’t believe all that garbage you hear about happy couples. The sad ones know more, feel everything twice as much. That’s why they hardly speak. They can share pain just by twitching their mouths a certain way, or choose not to reassure each other with a single word that used to provide comfort. When it comes right down to it, misery is just another art form, as hard to perfect as any other craft, only we aim to leave nothing behind. We’re the copper thieves of our own houses, ripping out our own wires. Slowly, we’ve stolen the best parts of each other, carted ourselves away.

  Part of me was admiring how uncertain and almost girlish she looked as she sat there in her coat in the kitchen chair, snowflakes vanishing on her shoulders as she watched me stand there with my mop. Part of me was hearing myself explain my grand theories.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “But I think he blew his wife away with the shotgun in the closet.”

  “Why didn’t you call the police?”

  “And what I’m thinking is that she had cancer or something, because she had a scarf on her head. So maybe he gets tired of her being a burden and being ill and he just puts her out of her misery.”

  “Answer me.”

  “Because it’s breaking and entering.”

  “We just walked in. We didn’t break anything.”

  “It’s still a crime. They’d laugh at us and throw us in jail.”

  Elise looked down at the bare table in front of her, shook her head slightly.

  “It’s something worse now,” she said. “It’s like we’re helping cover something up.”

  I asked her how her father was, something that would make her feel like she wasn’t a criminal.

  “Worse,” she said.

  “Matter-of-days kind of thing?” I said, realizing instantly that it was the wrong way to put it.

  “He’s my father. He’s not a thing.”

  We argued after that. Then we argued about arguing. I wondered if the only place we really had a chance was in that house that wasn’t ours. In a bedroom we could never sleep in.

  “My clients are leaving me,” she said, narrowing her eyes as if she could see them, changing their minds after all the work she had done with their children.

  “They’ll come back.”

  “No, they won’t,” she said, finally pushing away the chair and standing up. “They never do.”

  —

  There was a big fir tree at the end of that cul-de-sac on Ocean View Road. It had been wrapped with strings of big colored lights. There was an older couple who lived on that property, but we’d never met them. Maybe we’d seen their car pass by once or twice. That week before Christmas, Elise and I were coming back from the supermarket in Hampton Bays and saying nothing as we turned right on the dark road that led to Victor’s house. We drove past all the darkened summer homes, dim blue lights lining one massive driveway, as if it were a curved runway. Their rich owners, I assumed, were shoulder to shoulder in the city, in paneled rooms that teemed with holiday conversation, with candlelight doubled in mirrors and caterers carrying silver trays. This was the winter season they would never see, a chilly hollowness that their caretakers could hardly be bothered with, letting bagged newspapers build up against white gates.

  As I drove toward Victor’s house, I thought to myself that I could have picked any of these dark homes. Instead I’d had sex in a murder scene, in one of the less impressive houses. I was an idiot.

  I was driving, my jaw set, thinking of that porcelain pig and its snouty grin, the promise that the best was yet to come. When we took the last right, we could see it through all the dead branches. That amazing tree. I pulled the car over and we just stared at it in silence. There was no need to say anything. It made us that happy, and when an unhappy couple is happy, it’s almost like having a vision, or speaking in tongues. It’s like you’ve somehow burst to the surface on someone’s shoulders and been given a few moments to see everything you’ve been missing.

  I felt like I should write a note and leave it on their driveway, thanking them for taking the time to wrap that enormous, perfect tree in so many goddamn perfect lights.

  When we got to our own driveway, heard the cold splash of gravel against the tires, Elise started to cry. It all came out then, the whole tangle of everything she’d kept bottled up. The way her father had touched her when she was young. How much more she wanted to be in life than a speech therapist. How she probably couldn’t even do that now. For a moment, I didn’t think it would come around to me, but it sure did. I couldn’t make a living. I couldn’t understand her. I had cost her the baby by making her wait until she was too old. And now it had been my moronic idea to go into that house. We’d probably end up broke and in jail. Then she confessed one more thing that stuck with me for days. An ex-boyfriend from college had found her on Facebook and they’d been e-mailing. It wasn’t serious yet, but she found herself thinking of him more than me lately.

  “Who?” I shouted.

  “Curt,” she said.

  “Kurt Weidenfeld?”

  “Curt Page.”

  “You’re fucking kidding me,” I said, wishing her face would suddenly twist into a smile and we’d still have one last chance to be a couple again. But she wasn’t lying. Even Kurt Weidenfeld wouldn’t have been as bad. Curt Page was a pompous, beady-eyed prick with an overgrown mullet and an earring who we’d briefly shared a loft with in South Williamsburg. He was a copy editor for some long-extinct tech magazine, and he was constantly pestering people to read his unfinished novel. He had opinions with a capital O and exhaled deeply after each statement he’d make, as if his words were so decked out with brilliance that they might stall before they reached the listener unless he gave them that long, extra puff of air.

  One of his opinions was that everyone should be allowed to carry a concealed weapon. There was a .357 he proudly showed us, that he kept under his bed, and an old, lovingly polished Smith & Wesson that had once belonged to his late father. Once our other roommates found that out, we had a house meeting and he was kicked out. It did cross my mind that Curt might blow us al
l away before he hit the highway, but in the morning, the only ominous thing he left was a handwritten note for Elise, profoundly thanking her for encouraging him to continue with his novel. He promised to keep in touch and then, in his uniquely condescending way, told her that she’d realize, sooner or later, that they were meant for each other. Even though he’d split, I could hear the long exhale after that one.

  “He’s on the road again,” Elise said, as if this zero was channeling Jack Kerouac.

  “Curt Page is on the road. Does the media know about this?”

  Elise laughed at that, and for a moment I thought she’d give in, the way all couples do when they still love each other.

  “He’s going through a painful divorce,” she said. There was too much sympathy in her voice. I thought that asking for any more information about Curt would be like waving the white flag in some way. Admitting that he’d become the most minor issue in our troubled marriage.

  “I didn’t know he’d even gotten married.”

  I climbed out of the car and slammed the door. I think we would have gotten into an argument that would have finally finished us off for good, but it never happened. It never happened because I noticed something troubling directly in front of me. Through the scrub pine I could see the light in the window of our neighbor’s house, and then, about fifty feet away, the headlights of a parked pickup truck, streaming in a thicket of nearby branches, its exhaust whipped away by a gust of cold wind, then coiling again.

  —

  Looking back, I think we did the wrong thing. As soon as we were safe inside Victor’s house, we turned off every light. We ran around whispering commands to each other and nearly tripping over the ends of rugs. Then we stood by the sides of the living room window, and I mashed the binoculars against my eyes.

  “What do you see?” Elise said. “What are they doing?”

  I twisted the center focus knob on the binoculars, heard the tap of the lens against my own glasses. A blurry ghost of a lighted window became a sharp rectangle, but I just missed focusing on the figure that left the room.