The Winter Girl

by Matt Marinovich

  I love you, I wanted to say. Or Holy shit. Or Please don’t. But all that came out of my tongue-trapped throat was another boyish cough. On the verge of bursting into oblivion, it was as if I was becoming younger and younger. And then that familiar shaking began. My legs, my arms quivering. Then my whole jaw doing the sewing-machine bit. My eyes welling up. I didn’t want to stare at her finger, my wife’s slender familiar index finger curled around the trigger, so I bowed my head. On my knees, I bowed my head, and I waited.

  “Scott,” she said. “What the fuck are you doing?”

  When I looked up at her again, she had taken another step to my left and now she was carefully resting the gun against the wall. She took the box of matches from my hand, knelt next to me, and struck one, holding it to the edge of the newspaper until it caught fire. I could suddenly feel the spit in my mouth again.

  “I thought,” I said to her softly, “that you were going to shoot me.”

  I waited for her to answer me and provide some kind of clarification, but she just leaned back and sat on the carpet, watching the flames spread.

  “I need to know everything that woman said to you,” she said.

  I sat down on the couch and softly punched one of the flowery pillows near the armrest. Once, when we had first arrived here after Victor’s hospitalization, I had gotten a little drunk and spilled wine all over the couch. I thought it was a tragedy until I realized Victor had Scotchgarded the whole thing. It wiped off as easily as water. Which was more than could be said about the blood on the bed next door.

  Elise poked at the fire a little more and then sat down in the armchair across from me.

  “She says she’s got a hundred secrets about you, Elise,” I said. My voice sounded hoarse, and I lamely punched the pillow again. Elise had changed position and had crossed her legs. Her face framed by the L of her fingers. She seemed to be sizing me up like one of her speech patients. One of those blubbering kids who couldn’t wait for the candy to be doled out at the end of the session.

  My throat was dry. The sun hadn’t even gone down and I was slurring my words a little because I was drunk. It occurred to me that only one woman was telling the truth. Carmelita or my wife.

  “So tell me some of them,” Elise said.

  “Just,” I said, trying to begin. But how do you broach the subject of your wife being a child thief? Or having a half sister? I resolved to start with the bigger secret. Number ninety-nine.

  “Just what?”

  “How many members are there in your family, exactly?” I finally managed to utter.

  “Well, my father and mother are dead,” she said. “So that leaves my brother. Who’s in a halfway house.”

  “Is there a half sister?” I said. My voice had a higher pitch than I wanted it to. If there were secrets to excavate, I couldn’t start asking them this submissively.

  “Half sister?” Elise said. “Is that what she thinks she is?”

  “No,” I said, startled. “She says your half sister disappeared. Was never heard from again. She used to follow you around like a puppy.”

  Elise closed her eyes and hit her forehead with the heel of her hand.

  “Wait, it’s coming to me,” she said. “I know it’s in there somewhere. Some girl with big brown eyes following me into a forest. Holding my hand. I’m throwing breadcrumbs.”

  “This isn’t funny, Elise. You have to tell me the truth.”

  “Why do I have to tell you the truth? What will you do if I don’t?”

  She knew I was powerless, and when she saw how helpless I looked, it seemed to mildly cheer her up for a moment.

  “I’m your husband,” I said in a weak voice. “Can’t you just clue me in a little?”

  And there it was: I wasn’t even demanding basic respect anymore, just a one-minute head start before everything caved in.

  “I’ll tell you,” Elise said, shaking her finger at me and using a fake drunk slurring voice I hadn’t heard in ages, “because I like you, butternuts.”

  “I’m all ears,” I said, glancing through the window at the darkening blue of the sky, the motionless black spines of the scrub pine. The usual platoon of seagulls hovered and drifted along the bay until they became hard to see. Black scraps of paper, floating higher and dipping wildly again.

  “My half sister? You know what? I do remember her. One of my father’s great ideas. Forced me to spend the summer with her and her family when he had to go on a business trip. I wanted to kill her the second I saw her stupid, trusting face. This idea that he had another kid and didn’t even tell me until about three minutes before he dropped me off. I finally had someone to hate more than myself.”

  “But she’s gone now, right? She vanished. That’s what Carmelita said.”

  “I thought she vanished,” Elise said, biting her lip, as if she were keeping a very particular emotion in check. I wasn’t sure if it was rage or laughter. “That’s what they told me anyway. The girl was a mess. Suicidal. It just had to be teased out.”

  There it was. The beginning of the end, if you really want to be blunt about it. But my wife didn’t show the vaguest tinge of guilt. In fact, it was her face that was reddening as she stared at me.

  “And now you just fucked her,” she said. “So much for the vanishing part.”

  Elise watched me twist nervously again on the couch. I guess I’m one of those people who tend to rewind uncomfortable conversations, in the hope that everything eventually makes perfect sense.

  “Can we back up a little bit?” I said. “The part where she follows you around like a puppy. How many years ago was this?”

  “I was sixteen, maybe seventeen. She was a couple of years younger.”

  “That girl is more than a couple of years younger than you.”

  “She wasn’t the only girl he made me soften up, Scott. You want to hear about the one who left her mother to get ice cream on a beach? The friend I brought home when I was in middle school? Why aren’t they squatting next door?”

  I stared out the window again. My favorite time of every lousy winter day, when the sun set over the marina, its unused yachts tightly shrouded for the winter. I didn’t want to think about Elise, wearing a kid’s pink sunglasses, waiting in the passenger seat of Victor’s sedan as they watched a girl run toward an ice-cream stand to take her place in line. I can see Victor, handing Elise a couple of dollars, saying one or two words of final instruction before she is allowed to push open the heavy car door. A blue day. A perfect glassy sea. A thousand oblivious laughing children.

  “You know what?” Elise said, standing up. “We’re done.”

  We were always done. We’d spat out those two words to each other multiple times. But this time, if she just happened to take three steps toward the fireplace, she could pick up the loaded shotgun and aim it at me and she’d never have to threaten me with those words again. I had helped murder her father, and now I was an accessory to all of his old crimes. By the look on Elise’s face, I had the firm impression she wasn’t going to try to find closure with the ice-cream girl. Or with Carmelita.

  She must have seen the uncertainty clouding my face, because she expelled a short jet of air through her nostrils and bit her lower lip. And then it began, her mouth tightening up as she tried to hold back all her emotion. She pawed at her eyes with the back of her index finger, successfully wicking away the moisture, even though her jaw was trembling now.

  I was surrendering to my own wife now, slowly raising my hands.

  “I just want to understand you better,” I said.

  “Understand me,” she said, sneering at me. She seemed grateful to be able to focus her anger outward again. The water in the corner of her eyes dried up. Her lips straightened ominously. I’ve always been more fearful of her mouth than her eyes in arguments. It always tells me where a situation is headed a few seconds ahead of time. This wasn’t a half smile, or even a frown: it was just a dash that looked like it was chipped in stone.

  I lowered my a
rms. I stopped surrendering and stood up. The burning newspaper under the fire had blossomed and burned out, leaving a scant flame on the edge of one of the logs. It needed attending. I got down on my knees, pushed back the grate, and grabbed the box of matches. I could hear Elise passing behind me, and I felt the muscles in my back stiffen. I ripped another sheet of newspaper in two, crumpled it up, and laid it under the blackened log. Elise was climbing the stairs slowly. I knew this because I could see her reflection in the glass of the painting that hung above the fireplace. For a moment, I could see the lower half of her body pause before the top of the steps, her hand gripping the banister, as if she didn’t fully trust me alone either. But the shotgun was still leaning against the striped wallpaper, right where she had left it.

  I had just struck another match when I heard her shout my name. I leaped up and ran down the entrance hall, took the stairs two at a time. Was there someone in the house? Had she already been taken hostage in Victor’s study?

  But she was alone, staring into his closet at the open safe.

  “She’s taken everything,” she said. “I don’t know how she got the combination.”

  I touched my wife’s stiff arms, which were tightly held against her sides. I was thinking of Victor’s last mumbled words to Carmelita. Maybe Help me hadn’t been the last thing he had said to her. Maybe he’d given her the combination then. Maybe he’d whispered a few last instructions that would put us in more danger than we could even foresee.

  “We have everything, Elise,” I said, wondering why she couldn’t see how lucky we were. “Don’t we?”

  —

  There was nothing left in the safe besides a manila envelope containing two of Victor’s expired passports and a faded green box of Remington UFC handgun ammunition. It was empty.

  “He never told you the combo?” I asked Elise, reaching deep inside the safe and finding nothing else.

  Elise chucked the worthless passports into the safe and stood there for a moment, looking at the squat iron box, which Victor had spray-painted white on one of his idle bachelor days.

  “There was stuff in there no one should see. He liked to keep a record of the things he did,” she said.

  “He’s dead now,” I said. “Let the girl keep it if she wants it. Victor can’t hurt us now.”

  Elise squeezed between the desk and the wall, clutching one of the heavier curtains in Victor’s room so she could get a clearer view of the house next door. It was early in the evening and it was impossible to make out any shape in the opaque windows.

  “He can still hurt us,” Elise said. “Forget about the other stuff she’s gotten her hands on. She’s also armed. He kept a handgun in there. A nine-millimeter he bought from some alcoholic ex-cop who used to work for him.”

  Elise’s cell phone was ringing in the other room. Before she could make a move toward it, I’d already left the room. I was sure it was going to be Curt Page, but when I picked it up I didn’t recognize the number.

  “Who is this?” I said, staring at Elise in the doorway. She moved toward me and reached for the phone, but I shook my head and backed away from her.

  Whoever it was wasn’t speaking. All I could hear was the sound of some faint radio show playing in the background. The muffled voice of some rush-hour DJ discussing an upcoming charity auction in Lancaster. And then the call ended.

  “It’s probably Curt,” Elise said, picking up the phone and glancing halfheartedly at the number.

  “That’s not Curt’s number,” I said. “I know, because I called him last night and warned him to stop stalking you.”

  “You think I know who it is,” she said angrily, stuffing the phone into the pocket of her jeans as it began to ring again. “It’s some asshole calling the wrong number.”

  “Then answer it,” I said. “Because someone’s driving through Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and they sound like they want to talk to you.”

  She didn’t touch the phone. She let it go silent in her side pocket, its blue light still visible through the fabric of her jeans.

  “That girl next door could put me in jail for years,” she finally said. “And if she does that, I’ll take you with me.”

  “You know what I just realized,” I said, though realizing it didn’t improve anything one bit. “This is not a healthy relationship.”

  My wife turned without answering me and I followed her, grudgingly, down the stairs. She paused at the landing, squinting into the sunlight that poured through the front windows of the house.

  “What are you waiting for?” I said.

  “You need to get the shotgun,” she said. “Be careful. I forget if I left the safety on.”

  We were pretty drunk, I have to admit, when we walked through the pines early that evening, watching the light in the upstairs bedroom of Swain’s home extinguish itself. Since we had been using it as a beacon to guide us through the gully on a moonless night, Elise and I had to pause right where we were standing.

  “I can’t see anything,” she said, moving closer to me.

  “Upstairs light will come on any second now.”

  I was carrying the shotgun, but I had been careful to unload it, stuffing the two shells in a pocket of my jeans. The muzzle had quickly turned cold in my left hand, so I blew on it for a moment, then clutched the waxy blue steel.

  I hadn’t remembered it taking so long for the lights on the timer to complete their nightly circuit. At least thirty seconds had gone by and Swain’s house was still completely dark.

  “Maybe we should do this early in the morning,” I said, shifting my feet and listening to a tiny branch split under my foot.

  “So she can see us coming?”

  I was going to tell her it was no use when I saw the upstairs light finally switch on. From our vantage point, I could see only the dim outline of Swain’s kitchen windows and a hazy whiteness around the sliding glass door. A shadow passed in front of it, temporarily dimming its brightness.

  I hadn’t even caught a glimpse of Carmelita yet, and I already knew there wasn’t a chance I could go through with this. Only an hour ago, I’d sat next to the fire with Elise, watching Victor’s newspapers go up in smoke. I’d listened to Elise softly tell me, as if Victor were still breathing in the other room, that we had both made a very serious choice. I did protest at that point, stammering about the spiked Ensure and the fact that the whole fucking thing was supposed to be a fucking rehearsal and that I’d probably never have gone through with it anyway.

  Elise had listened to my spluttering cursing fit, her head tilted to one side as if I were one of her speech-therapy clients. And then she stood up, grabbed the shotgun, and told me she was going to take care of it herself. She was about to climb over the fence when I caught up to her and took the gun back.

  Now I was just staring at the light in Swain’s house, unable to move.

  “Scott,” Elise whispered. “We can’t just stand here.”

  “I need to run through this one more time,” I hissed back.

  “There’s nothing to run through. You just walk into the house. You keep the gun pointed at her chest.”

  I cracked open the gun and then I reached into my pocket and fished out the two shells. The shaking had started again. My legs were quivering, my hands, my arms. The jaw again, and I knew it was all fear despite the cold. I couldn’t even drop the shells into the barrel of the Browning.

  “You’ve got to help me,” I said to Elise, handing them to her. “It’s just the cold.”

  I watched her take them out of my hand and drop them in, each one landing with a faint click. I snapped the gun shut.

  It was only about twenty yards to the pool gate, and when we got there we huddled again because we heard a man’s voice. It took me a moment to realize that Carmelita must be standing in the kitchen, right above us, playing the old message on the answering machine.

  “Swainy,” that familiar voice on the machine said. “It’s Bill again. You better be dead. Because it’s almost Septem
ber and I still haven’t heard from you. This is your last chance to meet us at the Peconic Grill. The oysters are on me.”

  I couldn’t imagine why she was replaying that message, but if she was in the kitchen, I had to move fast.

  “Stay here,” I told Elise. “I’ll shout your name when it’s safe.”

  I reached over, unlatched the pool gate, and ran across the rotting deck, praying I wouldn’t fall through and accidentally shoot myself. I made it to the patio, then the sliding glass door, and there was no sign of her. I pulled it open and swung the gun to the right, marching into the kitchen and calling her name.

  “Carmelita,” I said, bursting into the kitchen just in time to see a figure dash out. The answering machine was rewinding itself, one gray button pushed down. I ran through the same door I had just seen her vanish through, reentering the living room.

  I ran after her, but I stopped as soon as I saw what was happening. Carmelita was pointing a black handgun at the sliding glass door, where Elise was standing.

  “She never panics,” Carmelita said, talking sideways to me as she kept the gun, a nine-millimeter, trained on my wife. For the first time, instead of waiting for the timer, she simply reached over and turned on the lamp in the living room. I kept the shotgun pointed at Carmelita and let her hear me flick the lever of the safety off. The shotgun’s polished stock felt too old-fashioned, as if I were holding an antique that would quaintly implode. There was some crosshatching on the grip I rubbed the back of my thumb against. At least the weight felt good.

  “We’ve all got to settle down,” I said. But the words sounded strange and small because my throat had become very dry.

  I turned my head quickly to look at my wife, who didn’t seem fazed at all that Carmelita was aiming a gun in the general direction of her heart. Elise slowly took a step inside.

  “It’s freezing out there,” she calmly said to the two of us, as if both of us weren’t holding weapons. “Do you mind if I close this?”

  Neither one of us protested as my wife turned her back and pulled the door shut. Now we were all hermetically sealed in that dusty living room again. I listened to Elise’s boot crush one of the fake ficus leaves as she confidently made her way to the fireplace and grabbed one of the iron pokers hanging there. Without warning, she cocked it behind her shoulder and swung as hard as she could, sending crushed bits of glazed tile flying.