“Do you think it’s weird I’m wearing this cardigan?” she said, plucking at the dark sweater and looking at me imploringly.
“It’s just the TSA,” I said softly, giving her a sideways hug. “They just want you to walk through their little X-ray peep-show machine.”
“I should take it off,” she said, starting to tug it off one arm. “It’s freezing in here. Isn’t it? Is it just me?”
“Yeah, the air-conditioning is turned up pretty high,” I lied. The truth was I was wearing only a T-shirt and there was already a sheen of perspiration on my face. I watched Elise roll up her sweater and stuff it in her carry-on.
“I’m good,” she said, flipping back her bangs with a finger and giving me a quick smile.
But she wasn’t. The line curled around the rope chain two more times and I noticed that Elise was staring at a particular woman standing a few feet ahead of us. The woman had a plain white face and light brown hair. She might have been in her late forties or early fifties. The problem was that she was staring right back at Elise, then me, without the vaguest hint of an expression. Her lips stayed pressed in a tight, flat line.
That was enough for Elise. She whispered something to me I couldn’t even hear, then ducked under the rope. I did the same, catching up to her at the freakishly bright counter of an Auntie Anne’s.
“I’ll take the pretzel nuggets,” Elise said, glancing at me. “You want to share them or are you going to want your own?”
“I’ll have two of yours,” I said, giving the counterperson a patient smile. “My wife’s a little bit of a mess. Family funeral.”
The counterperson offered his condolences, but I could feel Elise’s eyes glued on me as we moved our little red tray down the counter and paid.
She waited until we had taken a seat, and then she lashed into me.
“Don’t ever fucking do that again,” she hissed at me. “You never make one more joke about any of this. Do you hear me?”
I let her think she’d won that one. Dipping a pretzel nugget in mustard sauce, I leaned back in the chair and chewed it thoughtfully.
“That’s going to require an apology,” I said.
“Or what?”
“I don’t know,” I said, squinting at a bland watercolor of some empty golf course at dawn on the wall. “I have to think about it.”
My warning, barely a threat at all, seemed to empty all the color from my wife’s face. Intently, she watched me pop the second pretzel nugget in my mouth, the way a scientist might study an injected rabbit at Plum Island.
“Scott,” she said as I continued to analyze the golf-course watercolor. It looked like heaven to me. I imagined myself purring up to the green in a golf cart, the bracing chill in the air, a family of amiable wild parrots watching me high up in some palm tree.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m still here.”
She reached for my hand and pulled it toward her stomach earnestly.
“I’m sorry, okay? I’m completely freaked out.”
All the anxiousness had vanished from her face. The fluorescent lights revealed the darkness of the circles under her eyes. Her nails were bitten down to the cuticles. She wasn’t wearing any makeup. And despite how humid it was inside the airport, she had to hug herself again, to keep from shivering.
The counterperson, a tall black man with a receding stubble of hair around his temple, approached our table with a basket of fresh cinnamon pretzel nuggets.
“On me,” he said kindly. “Looks like you two lovebirds are having a rough time.”
—
When we landed at LaGuardia, we retrieved the Volvo from long-term parking and drove back to Park Slope. A few inches of snow had fallen the night before and was still visible atop the median as we sped down Grand Central Parkway.
We parked the car and walked up President Street and climbed the two flights of narrow, buckled stairs to the one-bedroom we had sublet to a friend of Elise’s for the last five months. The key, as promised, was under the mat. Elise had told Michaela that we’d be stopping by to grab some of the photo equipment I’d been storing in one of the closets.
It was unnerving walking into our old apartment, our old life, and seeing how completely Michaela had made it her own. It was tidier than ever before, with a new two-gallon Brita filter sitting on the kitchen counter and one of those collage family photos sitting on our bedroom dresser. Michaela, with the same identical smile, cheek to cheek with everyone she loved. I was looking at it, more than a little resentfully, when I saw Elise cross behind me and flop onto our old bed.
“She’s going to be home in a couple of hours,” I said, but Elise was already asleep. Her mouth open and a thin line of spit descending onto Michaela’s freshly puffed-up pillow.
On the couch, as promised, Michaela had been collecting our mail. It sat in two heaps, bound with rubber bands. I sat down and started throwing out the junk—credit-card offers and auto-insurance quotes. There were a few bills I needed to keep, and I set them aside. Then there was a brown envelope addressed to me, taped up so thoroughly I had to cut it open. Inside, a plastic DVD jewel box and an untitled disc inside.
I gently closed the door of the bedroom and walked into the living room. I slipped the disc into the DVD player. The screen turned from blue to black, but no image appeared. Then suddenly, staring at me with that same condescending smile, was Victor himself. He was standing outside Swain’s home in a tan windbreaker, his white hair tossed by a gust of wind. It looked like it might be late summer, just before he was admitted to the hospital.
“Beautiful summer day, isn’t it?” he asks, wincing into the wind as if he were standing on the prow of a yacht. The cameraman takes a few steps backward, and more of Victor comes into focus. There are fresh drops of blood on his windbreaker, just beneath the neat little snap-on epaulet. Then he turns and walks back across the cracked paving stones of Swain’s patio, the cameraman’s dark shape briefly reflected in the sliding glass door, and then the sound changes as they walk inside. It’s crystal quiet, quiet enough to hear a woman’s voice, instantly familiar, repeating Victor’s name.
Victor stops at the small bar, not to pour himself a drink but to fastidiously adjust the cap of the bottle of crème de menthe. Then, followed by the camera, he enters the downstairs bedroom, where Carmelita lies on the bed.
She is barely conscious, her face covered with blood. The window shade has been pulled and the dim light in the room makes it even more revolting to watch. As the camera moves closer to her face, Victor’s hand brushes in and out of frame, as if he were introducing an object he had made. But the light is all wrong, and all that can really be seen are the whites of Carmelita’s eyes. The rest of her battered face streams away in undifferentiated pixels, as if it were running downstream.
“You’re a champ,” Victor says, bending over her and yelling into her ear, as if she’d gone temporarily deaf from the blows. The sound of his voice makes her raise her head slightly, but it doesn’t bring her back to full consciousness. “Isn’t she a fucking champ?”
He’s staring at the camera now and his voice has changed and turned deeper and hoarser.
“What do you want to do?” he says to the camera. “You want me to hit her again?”
He raises his palm into the air, right above Carmelita’s head, and makes a sudden fist.
The bedroom door opened and Elise stood watching me, her mouth dropping open in amazement.
“Where did you find that?” she said.
“It was in the mail on the couch. Addressed to me.”
She tried to grab the remote from my hand, but I pushed her away.
“Michaela just texted me,” she said in a distant voice, watching the scene on the video unfold. “She’s on her way home.”
I was transfixed by Victor’s image as he leaned over Carmelita’s bruised body. The person with the camera walked around the bed for a better shot. Victor licks the top of her dark nipple and then pushes her left breast back with his hand
and bites her hard, just underneath. Carmelita screams so loudly it redlines the audio, making it sound more like high-pitched static.
Elise grabbed my shoulder, trying to get to the remote again, but I twisted away from her. I stood in between her and the television, determined to see the rest of it.
“Turn it off,” Elise screamed at me.
Victor, strangely, stares at us through the screen, as if he could hear his daughter’s voice. He’s actually smiling, and the person with the camera momentarily pans down to his crotch, where he’s massaging himself through his khakis.
“Why don’t you get on the bed too?” he says to the person behind the camera. “You can lie next to her, like the old days. I promise I won’t touch you.”
“Fuck you,” Elise, the cameraman, says, keeping his momentarily disappointed face square in the frame.
“Do you hear that, C?” he says, turning toward the bed again. Carmelita is pulling a pillow toward herself and for a moment I think she’s going to hug it for some false sense of comfort. But she lies on her back, arches upward, and places it underneath the small of her back. With the other hand she drags her panties down her left thigh, too weak to complete the task.
“There you go, Champ,” he says, helping her tug her panties the rest of the way off. I brace myself for the next part and quickly look at Elise. She only stares blankly at the screen, with a look of such detachment I want to wring her neck.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “Nothing more happens. It’s like he loses heart. Can you imagine that?”
I watch as Victor takes a step toward the bed and then seems to grow unsteady on his feet. He places his palm on his forehead and sweeps the thin white remains of his hair back. Then he takes a step toward the camera and dry-heaves twice. He bends over and presses his hands on his knees, waiting for the moment to pass.
“Getting too old for this, Dad?” Elise says to him in the video.
“Shut it off,” he says, slicing the air with his hand and then returning his palm toward his bent leg. “Shut it off and lock her up in the closet. We took her out too early. That’s what happens when I listen to you and start feeling sorry for her.”
After plucking the orange parking ticket from the windshield wiper of the Volvo, I warmed up the car. I drove in silence up the Belt Parkway, watching an airplane’s wing flash in the sky as it banked toward JFK.
“Why did you help him?” I said.
“Because I always did, ever since I was a little girl.”
“And then what you do…” I said, incredulous. “Is stop. Just stop what you’re doing.”
“Like we’re stopping?”
What was I going to say? That it was all her fault? That I didn’t understand exactly how this added up?
“Why did she let him do it?” I said.
“You already know,” Elise said, the side of her head touching the passenger window.
“His money?”
“Sure,” Elise said, without conviction.
“Or fucked-up sex?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, which one was it? I need to know.”
“It’s me. I’m the one who could have warned her. Because it all happened to me first. You know those poor shits who kneel next to each other in front of a ditch with their hands tied behind their backs, waiting to be shot? They never speak to each other because there’s nothing left to say. But I could have changed her life. I guess she had a problem getting over that.”
“So she just showed up?”
“I don’t know when she showed up last summer. All I knew is that he wanted my help with her, like he always did. Stupid bitch.”
“She’s your fucking sister, Elise. You could give her that much credit, now that she’s dead.”
“Half sister. Half slut. Half worthless. Half crazy.”
There was a gas station on the median just before Southern State Parkway. I veered off and parked next to one of the pumps.
“Take it slow, Scott,” Elise said, reaching toward my knee as I turned off the car. A relentless beeping sound ensued. It didn’t bother me.
“Don’t touch me,” I said. “Ever, ever again, you evil cunt.”
She let me finish the sentence and then she reached back and slapped me across the jaw. I suppose I wanted to sit there, waiting for the hot mark left by her outspread fingers to fade. But I turned and I slapped her back, or tried to. I caught mostly armrest as she ducked and then flung open the passenger door.
I dragged her back in by her hair, almost pleased by how firmly it was connected to her skull. I wasn’t counting on a Ford Ram truck pulling up right behind me as she kicked wildly, her sneaker thunking against the window. Her scream instantly got the attention of the driver, who raced around my side of the car and pulled open my door.
“We’re married,” I said helpfully, Elise’s black hair still stretched in my right hand, her fist flying into my stomach.
“Let go of your wife,” the man said calmly, placing his thick white fingers around my neck until I could feel my eyes puffing out of their sockets. “Or I’m going to start hurting you.”
I had trouble with this proposition. I’ve always had problems with direct threats, no matter who they come from. It’s not whether I’m capable of retaliating in any meaningful manner, it’s just that I freeze. I’m always waiting for people to come to the conclusion that they’re the true idiot, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that they’ll keep on increasing the pressure, digging their rebar-strength fingers deeper into your neck.
My Adam’s apple felt like it was caught between his index finger and thumb. I could feel the cold metal of his wedding band. He grabbed my other hand, the one that was still attached to Elise’s hair, and pinched down expertly on a pressure point on my wrist, automatically snapping my fingers open.
“I’ve got a confession,” I gargled. “You can be the first to hear it.”
It was satisfying to feel Elise’s heart beating faster. I couldn’t see it or hear it, but I knew it was.
“Let him go,” she begged this Good Samaritan. “It’s my fault. He just found out I was cheating on him.”
“You sure about that?” he said. He relaxed his grip just enough that I was finally able to swallow the spit caught in my mouth.
“I’m a moron,” Elise said, cupping her hand over the stranger’s and gently prying his index finger away. The rest of his hand followed, dropping away from my neck. “I should’ve waited for a better time.”
There were other customers gathered around the car now, peering in at me, shouting offers of assistance to the fat-knuckled Good Samaritan. He patted me insincerely on the shoulder blade, a little peeved that he’d never get the chance to beat me senseless in front of my wife.
“What you’re going to do now, guy,” he said, offering me one last piece of advice, “is drive nice and safe all the way home.”
He reached over and turned on my radio, turning up the volume on a syrupy Katy Perry song.
“I’ll be right behind you for a while. Make sure everything is on the straight and narrow.”
—
“I love you,” Elise said as I cruised up the highway at a steady sixty-eight miles an hour, the Dodge Ram right on my bumper. I did take the liberty of switching off Hot 97, however.
“I love you too, honeybunches,” I said robotically, massaging the flesh back to life around my neck. “This is definitely one of those times that being married to you makes absolute sense to me.”
She actually had the nerve to put her hand on my right thigh as I drove, running it up and down my jeans a little and bringing her face closer to me. Strange that after all the surreal events of the past few weeks, her breath still smelled kind of nice, her hand felt warm and good, and something was still rattling around my overmatched brain, still wanting to trust her.
I wouldn’t let it.
“We’re going to have to figure this thing out. This divorce.”
“Yeah, that’s fine,
” she said, taking her hand away. She leaned back in her seat and gave our new friend a little wave as he sped by, leaving us alone forever. “If that’s what you want to do, then we’ll do it.”
“And I don’t give a fuck about the money,” I said. “That’s yours. You deserve every filthy little penny.”
“It’s a lot of money,” she said, pressing her finger against the condensation on the passenger window and drawing a little face with X’s in the eyes. “You’re going to need some of it to get on your feet again.”
I thought about arguing that point as well, but then I thought about another Asian bride, posing for me in Prospect Park, another week of making four hundred and fifty, tops.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’d be great. Maybe a few months’ rent in Albany, or wherever I end up.”
We drove in silence past all the ugly-sounding towns on the Southern State Parkway. Ronkonkoma. Shirley. Mastic. We were near Port Jefferson when Elise’s cell phone vibrated in the purse between her feet.
“Ryder?” I said.
“No,” she said, picking up the phone. She let it ring until the voicemail picked up. But I wasn’t going to leave it at that.
“Let me hear the message,” I said.
She sighed, quickly punched the code for her voicemail, and then put it on speaker.
“Hi, Elise. You want to hear something fucked up? Your husband left three threatening messages on my voicemail. His voice gets deeper and deeper with each one. Dude is serious. One serious dude. Listen, I need you to remind him that I still have that .357 Magnum and that I’m carrying it right now. I’m also freshly divorced and I’m on the edge. The edge of the edge.”
There was a pompous exhalation of breath, and then Curt continued: “I’ve been driving all night and I just saw the most fucked-up thing. A car just exploded in flames on Interstate 81. They’d set up flares and were waving us through the one open lane. But the driver was burned to a fucking crisp. His hair was still smoking…”
“Heard enough?” Elise said. “He probably hasn’t slept in days.”
The Winter Girl Page 17