The Winter Girl

by Matt Marinovich

  I stood up and walked to the window, picking up the binoculars and searching every corner of the property, and then what I could see in the scrub of the gully that led to the house next door. But no one was lurking anywhere.

  On my way toward the bathroom, I noticed the family photograph I had never paid much attention to, sitting on the dresser. It was a fading snapshot of Victor, Elise, and Ryder, her younger brother. The kids might have been fourteen and twelve, I guessed. Her brother’s eyes are almost closed, his mouth parted as if he is speaking to the photographer. His arm is thrown around his taller sister’s shoulder. The display of affection sticks out only because Victor stands at least a foot away from them, with an uncertain smile on his face, as if he had just happened to wander into the shot, like some sort of tourist instead of a father.

  —

  That day, we both managed to get through a visit with her father, watching him open two presents. As drugged as he was, it had taken him forever. Elise had given him a cashmere sweater. I’d given him a wallet and a silvery-wrapped bottle of Freixenet. He put them back into the wrong boxes and weeded the cheerful reindeer wrapping paper from his bedspread. Out in the hallway, a strand of lights was winking on and off and an orderly was whistling the first bars of “Winter Wonderland” again and again.

  “Well, that’ll do it,” he finally said. “Very thoughtful of you.”

  For a moment, just for a moment, I had felt sorry for him. Maybe it was the way his pale cheek doubled against itself as he flicked away the last offensive bits of wrapping paper, or the way he raised his chin back up, almost like an expectant boy, as his daughter leaned over to kiss his forehead. She patted his limp hand and told me it was time to go.

  “I left a dollar in it,” I said, pointing to the box he’d put the wallet I’d given him in. “For good luck. Don’t be offended.”

  He didn’t say anything nasty this time. He didn’t have to. He just pursed his lips slightly, to let me know he was trying very hard to hold his tongue. Of all the people, I knew he was thinking, to give me luck.

  Before I left the room, though, he called my name. I turned and saw that he was gripping the bottle of cheap champagne.

  “Take this with you,” he said. “I don’t drink anymore. I’m surprised Elise didn’t tell you that.”

  “I’ve got a lot on my mind, Daddy,” she said, leaning over to give him a quick kiss on his waxy forehead. She took the offending bottle out of his hand and we ended up leaving it near a potted plant in the hallway.

  We drove home in silence, and I slowed as I passed the fir with the Christmas lights.

  “Do you think they have children?” Elise said as she looked at it.

  “I don’t know,” I said, annoyed at the question. “Why would it matter?”

  “It’s a little self-indulgent if they’re just doing it for themselves.”

  I let the argument go. It was Christmas, after all. I didn’t want to spend it having a conversation about the importance of children. That’s why we hadn’t bothered with a tree ourselves. I knew Elise would imagine the little one-year-old boy who would never get to see it. It was just over a year before, with Elise pregnant, that we’d come up with a final list of names: Rusty. Derek. Jack. Frank. It was possibly the happiest week of our lives. We’d sit in the small living room of our apartment on Bergen Street, oblivious to the nasty argument breaking out in the apartment next door. Elise, I remember distinctly, had a small pad of paper in her hand and a smile she couldn’t keep off her face the whole night. We debated each name as if we were debating a real person, because a Frank was very different from a Derek, and a Jack would surely be a boy who would be admired but not necessarily need as much company as a Rusty.

  We got it down to two, Jack and Frank, and then we promised we’d make the final selection the following day. Elise went to work as usual. Early in the afternoon, just as I was leading a particularly polite and attractive Asian couple to my wedding tree, I got a call from her on my cell phone. She was having terrible cramps. The doctor had told her to come in.

  Some emergencies take only a second to develop—a car crash, for instance. You get the picture instantly; you might even be able to shout something or brace yourself. But I’ve always thought the worst emergencies are the ones that start almost innocently, as if the day were two joined plates of ice that had just begun to separate. The worst emergencies have always made me feel like I’m still in control at first.

  I was slightly alarmed after Elise’s phone call, and I knew I would take the subway to Manhattan and meet her at Saint Vincent’s, but I still felt that the day had nothing vicious in store for me. I wouldn’t have lifted the Nikon to my eye and urged the Asian couple to move closer together. They called a few days later, to ask me about the photographs, and I told them what had happened. Elise had slept for two drugged days after the miscarriage, but I had wandered around the hallways of the hospital, exhausted but filled with the need to speak to someone, anyone, about our personal tragedy. I was under the mistaken impression that the story itself might be revised, and that by starting at the beginning again I might arrive at a different ending.

  “Do you remember when my cell phone rang?” I asked the husband I had photographed. “She was calling me from her office. She told me not to panic. She was just having some cramps.”

  He kept saying “sorry” as he listened, and I think he realized he couldn’t ask me when he might see the photographs. He wanted to get off the phone; I could hear it in the murmur of his voice. It made me angry.

  “What if I wasn’t standing by that fucking tree?” I said. “What if I’m sitting at home and when she calls I drive her to the city. It saves time. Wouldn’t that have saved time?”

  “I don’t think you can blame yourself,” the man said softly. He wanted to hang up now. Maybe when I got over my grief I’d get around to mailing him a refund.

  “See, this is the thing,” I said. “I do blame myself. I blame you too. I blame your wife. Why the fuck did you call me that day? What the fuck do you people find so fascinating about Prospect Park? Why can’t you get your photographs taken outside a church or something, like normal people? If you didn’t have this stupid obsession about my park I’d be holding my son right now.”

  He was a patient, sympathetic man. He must have listened to me rage for fifteen solid minutes as I paced in the small glassed-in alcove of the hospital, turning away from the elevators each time they opened, because I couldn’t look at one more joyful relative without wanting to strangle them. At the very end of the conversation, when I had run out of ways to tear apart a man I didn’t even know, I sat on a small wood bench by the window, pinched the bridge of my nose, and went to pieces.

  “I’m still here,” he said softly. “Okay? I’m still here.”

  I was touched by that, I really was.

  But I have to tell you, my wedding-photographer gig started to go south after that. There was even another photographer, a black guy I vaguely knew, who’d taken over my tree. I watched him taking pictures there one day, trying to use humor to loosen the smile of a bride who kept lifting her frothy white dress off the carpet of yellow leaves, casting nervous glances at the wet black bark of that tree.

  “I need you to look at me,” the photographer said. “Forget about the tree. It’s not going to hurt you.”

  I’ll tell you one more thing: we named our little boy Frank. We called him that when they gave us a few minutes alone with him at the end, his eyes shut, his face blue, one small fist touching his chin.

  I built a fire on Christmas night and Elise made dinner. Every now and then I could hear Elise lift the aluminum foil covering the turkey, and the hiss as the liquid fell around it. I was crouched by the snapping logs, thinking of the dollar I’d left in Victor’s wallet and the fact that he’d probably thrown it all in the wastebasket as soon as I left the room.

  We were speaking to each other while we concentrated on our mundane tasks. Voices raised over simmering tur
key and the snapping fire so that we could hear each other from the different rooms. We’d already exchanged Christmas presents. A belt I didn’t need. A half-price coat that she pretended to admire in the mirror before finally telling me the sleeves were too long. You can tell a lot about a marriage by the gifts couples give each other. I was always reminded of how little she knew about what I wanted, what little I knew of what she really desired.

  “I’ve got the store credit receipt in my wallet,” I said, watching her sadly fold up the sleeves of the coat. She looked expensively homeless.

  Store credit receipt, I thought to myself. Three words that would really cut the distance that was stretching between us. But yet there was a receipt in my wallet, and I had bought her a coat on sale at the Bloomingdale’s in Hampton Bays. And in some parallel universe they hang husbands for that. Briefly, I felt awful. But then my gift had been a thin leather belt that she finally confessed she had found at half price in the ladies’ section.

  “You bought me a woman’s belt?” I said, threading it through the loops in my jeans and fastening the shiny rectangular buckle.

  “It’s plated,” she said, a little defensively, still hovering near me in that overlarge coat with its green dangling price tag. “I’ve got the receipt for that too.”

  “It’s perfect,” I said, facing the large mirror in the entrance hall and pulling up my shirt so that I could see the silver buckle, winking at me in the lamplight. “I want to be buried wearing it, actually.”

  “I’ll try to remember that,” she said.

  I gave her a quick thank-you kiss on the cheek.

  “I should check on the turkey,” she said.

  —

  At around eight in the evening on Christmas Day, I sat deep in Victor’s overstuffed sofa, staring at yet another bottle of ancient liquor I had rescued from his cabinet. It was a bottle of Cutty Sark I held in my hands, and every so often I’d set it down on the floor and try to twist off the cap of the wretched half-empty bottle.

  “You don’t need two signatures to empty a joint account,” I said. I twisted with all my might again and the cap finally came loose from the neck of the green bottle. I grabbed the glass on the side table and filled it halfway, trying not to notice three brown particles that floated to the top.

  Elise and I had been talking about the bank papers we’d found next door, and whether Mr. or Mrs. Swain could have emptied the mutual account.

  “How do you know?”

  I couldn’t tell her exactly how I knew, because it would have ruined our dinner. After the miscarriage, we’d had a fight about money that had grown so serious I spent a week at a friend’s house in Manhattan, researching divorce in New York State and getting to know terms like wasteful disbursement of assets.

  “First of all,” I said. “Let’s just say he empties the account.”

  The Cutty Sark wasn’t awful. I fished one of the dusty particles off my tongue and flicked it onto the rug.

  “Or she empties it,” Elise said.

  “Maybe she blew him away.”

  Elise shrugged and popped back into the kitchen, and I continued to pore over the bank statement. For all I knew, he’d blown himself away after some financial turmoil. Maybe he was a real-estate tycoon in Atlanta and this was his second home. Maybe the property next door had been foreclosed on. The only thing I felt I knew for sure at that point was that the house hadn’t been lived in for a couple of years. I could tell by the layer of dust on the counters, the shrunken onion, the backdated bank statements. If I’d succeeded in burning it down, I would have probably done everyone a favor.

  “Something awful happened there,” I said. “It’s not like there were just a few drops of blood.”

  Elise didn’t say anything. I knew she didn’t like being reminded of the blood. The careful way someone had stretched a clean blanket over the caked fluid, as if it were a temporary fix and they were coming back. But by making a decision not to call the police immediately, we had implicated ourselves. It was as simple as that.

  “It has something to do with the Swains,” I heard Elise finally say. “That’s all I know.”

  I pictured Richard Swain leaning over a new mistress in the fighting chair of a fishing boat, bobbing on the limpid waters off the Florida Keys, helping her reel in a sailfish skittering in the distance. Tucked between the bank papers was a copy of an investment questionnaire. In a wobbly hand, he’d written his desired bond and stock ratio, his timeline for retirement, eight years away, and specified that he had a low appetite for risk. At the bottom of the sheet of paper, he’d included his contact information.

  “We could pick up the phone right now and call Richard Swain,” I said. “I’m looking at his phone number.”

  “And say what?” Elise said, poking her head around the kitchen door, just in time to see me pour another pre-Christmas ration of Cutty Sark into the chipped crystal glass.

  “I know what you did, Dick.”

  I watched Elise smile against her will and then touch her forehead, gently shaking her head as if she couldn’t believe what I’d just said. But why would that be any more complicated than what had come before? Hadn’t he forced us into this position by sending his hired gang to the house?

  “You’ve got to use a lower voice,” Elise said. “More calm and monotonous.”

  I tried it again, and for a moment she stopped smiling, as if I might actually have the balls to do this.

  “Let’s sleep on this one,” she said, walking toward me. She held out her hand, and I gave her the glass. She took a sip, winced, and handed it back to me.

  “I’m going to give you a number, Dick,” I said in my blackmail voice, which had taken on a faint Eastern European accent. “And you’re going to write it down very carefully.”

  “I’m sure he’ll write it down very carefully,” Elise said. But something made her stand in front of me, carefully folding a dishtowel like a small flag, waiting for me to say something else. I think she liked my Eastern European blackmail voice, as far-fetched as it was.

  “Three hundred and seventy-eight thousand,” I said, sliding my hand up her ribbed leggings. She gripped my wrist before I reached her thigh.

  “Five hundred even,” she said. “Only amateurs come up with odd numbers.”

  —

  We made it look nice before we sat down. Elise found a box of tapered candles and we set them all around the dining room. We put on some thundering Bach organ chorale and added each dish to the sideboard as if we were some kind of proof. Proof of love, proof of stability, proof of a single unadulterated ordinary moment.

  And then, just like he did every year, her brother called. She picked up her cell phone and immediately I could hear his voice wishing her a Merry Christmas as she walked back into the kitchen.

  I turned down the stereo, just as I’d once turned down the television in Brooklyn, so I could hear Elise’s end of the conversation. She was trying to keep her voice low, but I could tell she was upset about something. You stupid shit, she said.

  Her brother spoke for a good long time, explaining something to her that I would never hear. I could hear my wife try to interrupt his monologue on the other end by repeating his name again and again, only to go on listening to whatever Ryder had to say.

  I was watching her through the frosted glass of the kitchen door as she anxiously paced and shifted the phone to her other ear, and then I suddenly imagined that her own brother had molested her too. Or Victor had done something to both of them. Why would they talk to each other once a year, adhering to this one last, painful custom?

  Whatever Ryder was saying to her must have reassured her because suddenly she was asking him if he was safe. Then it hit me. There had been no recorded voice asking her if she wanted to accept the call from the Hamilton County Jail.

  I was standing to the side of the door now, the stupid platoon of violins on the stereo beginning their slow build. I tried to hear over them, but now I was just catching a word or two. />
  “The Hub…blood…Dick’s house…V-Rex…Merry Christmas to you too.”

  As soon as she hung up, I pushed open the swinging door and confronted her.

  “Nice of him to call,” I said. “I don’t know what we’d do without him.”

  “Not now,” Elise said, pulling open the oven and shoving her hand inside a pale blue oven mitt.

  “It’s really too bad he can’t join us out here. Share a little of the turkey this year.”

  “He’s an inmate in Ohio,” Elise said, dumping the foil-covered roasting pan on the counter. “I don’t think he’s going to make it.”

  When I get angry, my saliva feels like it’s turning to acid. I could feel it stinging my throat as I tried to swallow.

  “I didn’t hear the voice asking you to accept the call,” I said. “He’s out of jail. He’s not an inmate anymore.”

  Elise shook off the kitchen mitt and lifted the foil to take a peek at a singed turkey wing, lightly touching it with her fingers.

  “He’s at a halfway house in Urbana, Ohio,” she said, staring at me as if I’d accosted her. “He shares a room with a sex offender and a nineteen-year-old arsonist. He’s wearing an ankle bracelet. I don’t think you have to worry about him, Scott. But it being Christmas, some compassion would be nice.”

  “Elise, I was listening,” I said, moving toward her. I tried to hug her, but she ducked away. Our positions were reversed now. I was standing by the stupid turkey and she was standing by the door. “Did Ryder send those guys?”

  Elise looked like she wanted to kill me. And that pissed me off. Blood isn’t thicker than water. It was as simple as that.

  “I’m your husband,” I reminded her. “That still counts for something, right?”

  “Yeah, it counts for something,” she said tersely. “My brother isn’t some kingpin. He’s been kicked around since he was born.”