“The rest of the family,” Curt Page continued, but not before another lungful of air had been expelled to let us know how deep this was going to be. “His wife and kid. They were sitting in the grass nearby. Not a mark on them. That’s a story. That’s a story I’m going to write just for you, except I’m going to make it beautiful. Tell Scott that. Ask him if he can make the most fucked-up things beautiful like I can.”
Curt was so high with interstate insomnia that he forgot to turn off the phone. I could hear the white noise of the highway behind him, the sound of him singing some unintelligible song he’d made up to himself.
All I could make out were the words golden and creatures and hot coffee before the voicemail mercifully cut him off.
“How the fuck did you ever decide I was your type of guy, Elise?” I said. “Why’d you ever single me out?”
She let my question hang in the air for a while, absentmindedly swiping the face of her phone.
“I thought you were normal,” she said.
—
We made it back to Victor’s house late that afternoon, greeted by an agitation of large black crows launching themselves from the scrub pine around the property. A handful of newspapers, in their blue plastic sacks, had started to pile up at the end of the driveway. I gathered them in my arms and walked back into the kitchen, dumping them all in the wastebasket.
Elise was standing out on the deck, scanning Swain’s house with a pair of Victor’s old binoculars. Then she turned her attention to the bay, panning the binoculars toward the inlet where the radio beacon pulsed against a yellowish sunset.
At least this is it, I thought to myself. I’d spend a few days helping Elise get the house in order, as we’d agreed. A couple of real estate agents were already scheduled to take a look at the place on the weekend. The plan was to be very low-key and stick to the story that had been completely true, up to a point. We had left our jobs in Brooklyn to care for her sick father. Thank God he didn’t suffer. What was the market for a house in Shinnecock Hills? We owned two of them.
“Scott,” Elise said suddenly.
I turned to see where she was pointing her binoculars. The upstairs bedroom light in Swain’s house had come on.
“Calm down,” I said, though my throat felt instantly dry. “They just haven’t cut the power yet.”
“It just startled me, that’s all.”
I took the binoculars from her and pulled the window into the tightest focus I could. The only thing that had changed was that the wallpaper was now hanging downward from the ceiling, casting its own triangular shadow. I could see part of the dresser and just make out its wooden knobs, and toward the dark hallway a river of that stained white carpet. But that was all.
Zooming in on the other windows, pulling them in and out of focus, I couldn’t make out anything in the early-evening light. I was panning toward the upstairs window again when the light suddenly clicked off.
“Did you see that?” Elise said.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s the end of it probably. No more power.”
Except it wasn’t. One by one, the lights in each room came on. Kitchen. Living room. Guest bedroom. Even the chandelier, which I could see the top of. It was as if some mind-fucking phantom had run around the house flipping every switch it could get its hands on. The house was blazing with light now, and I pressed my eyes hard against the binoculars, twisting the focus knob as I searched every visible room.
There was nobody there. Just carpet, and wallpaper, and countertop, and the same old chairs gathered in the breakfast nook. I could even see the silhouette of that four-foot-high pig in the chef’s hat and its gleaming snout. THE BEST IS YET TO COME.
“Someone messed with the timer,” I said. “Maybe Swain’s caretaker comes by once a year.”
“There’s no caretaker,” Elise said. “We’re the only ones who care about that place.”
We stood there a few minutes longer, bracing for what might come next.
“Maybe it was her,” I said. “Maybe she changed the setting right before she died.”
Elise wasn’t interested in my theory. She stormed back inside the living room and walked upstairs. Even before she reappeared two minutes later, I knew she’d have the shotgun in her hands.
“Let’s get this over with tonight,” she whispered through the screen.
“They’re both dead,” I shouted back at her. “It is over with.”
“We’re just unplugging the timer, Scott,” she said patiently. “Last thing we need is this little light show every night.”
—
As we made our way across the gully in the darkness, Elise marked the trunk of each pine with a flashlight so I could find my way. It was late January and a few scraps of snow still remained from a snowstorm we had missed. I held the shotgun, as I had the last time, and broke it open, to make sure it was loaded.
“No shells,” I said, turning toward Elise so she could see the empty breech.
“Do you want to go back and get them?” she said, flashing the light in my eyes.
I told her to forget it. We’d just unplug the timer and leave Swain’s house for good. Of all the things we’d done in the last month, this would be the easiest.
I unlatched the gate to the pool and scrambled toward the patio, with Elise right behind me.
At least everything looked the same. That depressing fake ficus and its ragged circle of dead leaves. It occurred to me only then that Carmelita, bored out of her mind in the winter cold, must have pulled them off, one by one, as she stared at the bay. The only difference I could see was the amount of light pouring out of Swain’s house. Every piece of furniture stood in the same position.
I pulled open the sliding glass door and turned toward Elise, who hauled it shut with two hands, its runner sticking in the rust. The skin of her face and neck was flushed, as if she’d just sprinted a hundred yards. She looked nothing like the person I’d met almost ten years before. If you’d held up the two pictures of the now and then, it wouldn’t have made any sense. In 2003, she’d been standing on the balcony of a mutual friend’s home, with a plastic glass of champagne in her hand. Our first conversation began only vaguely flirtatiously. We guessed each other’s professions and got them completely wrong. She had me pegged as a bartender at a fancy steakhouse and I told her that she was finishing her residency at Lenox Hill.
We followed each other through rooms that weren’t ours, finally making out self-consciously next to a bed piled high with coats.
And here we were, as we had always been, following each other through other people’s rooms again. Except now her eyes darted all around me, searching for something particular. Her black hair was tangled and greasy, and she stretched her hands outward, as if something violent would come hurtling toward her at any second.
“It’s probably upstairs,” I said.
“What?” she said, briefly allowing me her full attention again. Her pupils dilated as they adjusted to the spot on the living room floor I was standing on. Two feet away from the bar. Eight feet away from the stairs. Right under the chandelier and its hundreds of crystal facets.
“The timer,” I said. Now I was the one who felt I should calm her down.
“I heard something,” she said. “Did you hear that? Outside.”
I told her I didn’t hear anything, which was true. It was a windless night. The bay was calm. Through the dark shapes of the scrub pine I could see some moonlight on the frigid water, and the beacon of the radio tower, reassuringly pulsing.
“Take the gun and stand right here,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
I handed her the shotgun, but its heaviness in her arms didn’t seem to make her feel any better. It didn’t matter. She could handle the emptiness of that room for a minute as I climbed the stairs, two at a time.
It was odd how the timer had been reset. The lamps in four different rooms had been preset, instead of the lights in the upstairs bedroom that had routinely clicked off around 11:00 p.m.
I pulled out the whole timer and everything went black, or kind of black, the redness of the vanished light still sliding across my eyes.
“She’s here,” Elise shouted. Her voice sounded as if it were dropping away.
I was standing at the balcony now, the plastic timer gripped in my hand like some kind of plastic heart.
“Who’s here?” I said, trying to adjust to the darkness. I could just make out Elise’s legs, but the rest of her body was cut off by the chandelier, its glass barely reflecting the moonlight.
“Outside,” Elise called up to me. “I saw her face.”
“Carmelita?”
Elise didn’t respond. She had taken cover behind the couch, crouched there with the shotgun. I repeated my question as I slowly made my way down the stairs.
“Yes, Carmelita,” Elise said. “I’m sure it was her.”
I was crouched next to Elise now, safe behind the couch, and I didn’t know which was worse: a wife who believed we were being hunted by a ghost or the idea of Carmelita, bandaged and sutured and armed, running around this wrecked house.
“You’re sure you saw something?”
“The back of her head. She was running away. She was wearing a man’s coat.”
This was completely impossible, and I reached for Elise’s arm, as if my fingers rubbing up and down her taut forearm could bring her back to reality.
She shrugged me off, ducked her head behind the couch again, the shotgun pointed up at the chandelier.
“Let’s go see,” I said.
I stood up, leaving my wife hunched there like a refugee, and walked over to the coffee table, where she’d left the flashlight.
I pulled open the sliding glass door and walked calmly up the chipped patio, the toes of my sneakers hitting the weedy tufts between the stones. At the top of the ruined wooden steps that led down to the bay, I stopped and turned around. Elise had followed me to the edge of Swain’s property, still holding the gun.
“You’re going to break your neck,” she said. “The steps end halfway down.”
“It’s all right,” I said, pointing the flashlight up at her. “I’m just going to make sure we’re okay.”
The steps, just as Elise had promised, did end halfway down. I perched on the last one and clicked off the flashlight. I could see my breath now, faintly, in the quarter moonlight. I could see the outline of black nets that curled around two long poles about two hundred yards offshore. Once I had spent an hour watching a fisherman in a rowboat leaning on each stake, making sure they were still firmly planted in the silty bottom. There was a moment when his body seemed to angle too far off the side of his boat. His hands still gripped the wood and I was sure he’d fall into the water. Part of me wanted to see him fall, expert that he was. I’d even run down the thin strip of beach and offer help, but it never came to that. He simply pushed away and sat down in the boat again, his task accomplished.
Up above me, I heard Elise talking to someone. She was speaking so softly that I couldn’t hear the words. What was it that she was repeating, again and again? Was it a prayer? And if so, was she praying for herself, or me, or both of us? Was she asking forgiveness of Carmelita’s coat-wearing ghost?
The more I listened to the cadence of her words, the more I felt it was forgiveness she was after. And then I heard the sound of the shotgun being broken open. A few seconds passed and it was snapped closed again. Nothing closes as perfectly as that. If it made her feel more brave to let a ghost know she was ready to take her on, then let it be.
Myself, I just poked the beam of the flashlight around the gray sand beneath me. Then I pushed off the last splintered step and jumped, the back of my head bouncing off a half-buried scrub pine root. I held on to a tangle of branches and listened to the sand sluice around me. The sound was almost peaceful, and I tried hard to pretend I was just out here playing a game. The flashlight, beam still intact, rolled down toward the bulkhead and flared out.
I let myself roll down the dune another ten or fifteen feet, my sneakers filled with sand now, a bloody scrape curved across the back of my neck and skull. I picked up the flashlight first, clicked it uselessly on and off, then chucked it angrily toward the water.
I knew where I was, or at least I thought I had a good idea. There had been two tall pine trees just uphill from where we had buried Carmelita. Two pine trees that had grown so close that when the wind picked up, I remember hearing the two trunks creak against each other. This was the sound I had listened to as I finished burying her.
There was no wind now, so there was no creaking. But even in silhouette I was sure it was these two trees.
I got down on my hands and knees and started to dig with my hands. As soon as I felt one rigid limb, one stony finger, I’d shout up to Elise, finally giving her the reassurance she needed.
I scooped out handfuls of hard, cold sand. The small pebbles caught under my nails.
“Is she there?” Elise said. She was standing on the last step. I could see the blackness of her hair, darker than the rest of her face. When she moved I could see the barrel of the gun.
“Give me a minute,” I said. “And be careful with the gun. That whole staircase is ready to fall into the sea.”
For some time, I dug in silence, scooping and flinging the sand to my sides. Then I thought I felt Carmelita’s arm and it terrified me.
“Got it,” I said, my mouth going dry. Because it was an it. A hard bony length of arm, gone scaly underneath the sand. But when I pulled, all the sand around it seemed to move, and when I ran my hand down its length I realized it was just another buried scrub pine root.
“Is it her?” Elise said.
“No. Just a root. Maybe I’m in the wrong place.”
Above us, I could hear the distinct sound of tires on Dick Swain’s driveway. It was odd enough that I immediately stopped digging and looked up at Elise.
“You hear that?” I said.
She didn’t say anything, which infuriated me. Had she been immobilized by fear again? Did she think Carmelita was driving up to the house in a brand-new car?
“I don’t hear anything,” Elise finally said.
I could hear it. The driver turned off the engine. Whoever it was climbed out and slammed the car door.
“Please keep on digging, Scott,” Elise said. “You have to find her.”
I stood up. I was done with digging, and I was just about to let her know that when I heard a man’s terse voice call her name. Fucking Curt, I thought. He’s found her.
“Keep digging, Scott,” Elise said.
They were standing together now, Elise and Curt. I heard him whisper something to her, to which she mumbled something I also couldn’t hear.
“Hey, Curt?” I yelled up at him. “Why don’t you read me some of that story you wrote for my wife? Or some of that unpublished novel that we always laughed about behind your back?”
“That’s a grand idea,” Curt said.
Except it wasn’t his voice. And there wasn’t any pretentious haaaaah of air after the statement. No, it positively was not Curt Page, and the moment I realized it I felt more fear than relief.
I’m not stupid. I’m not the sharpest tack in the drawer, but I’ve always managed to piece together my small moments of doom, up till now, and done my best to avoid sailing into them head-on.
There was nothing in the cold sand, and then there she was. A piece of hard fabric. The softer texture of shoelaces. An empty sneaker. All that they’d left of her. She’d been moved, of course. And I’d be killed here. Then moved.
Elise’s friend, whoever he was, had taken the gun from her. I could hear him whispering something important to her now, almost as if he were asking her for a cue, and I knew the barrel was trained on me.
My wife didn’t say anything. My wife was an absence. Elise, her name always reminded me of the word ellipsis, and the
tiny dots that replace the dreadful secret. Suddenly, she simply wasn’t there. It was only when I heard the thump of her foot against one of the upper steps that I realized she had left me for good.
“That’s good,” he said. He had no discernible accent. His voice just sounded tired. As if he’d worked two shifts and then busted his ass to get down here and finish one last job. “Use her shoe. That way you’ll get more sand.”
I knew who this was now, but I didn’t permit myself confirmation just yet. Because that was the only person, besides me, who’d believe he had so little to lose that he’d do anything she’d ask.
I did as I was told. I knew if I stood up and ran one step in any direction he’d blow a hole in my back anyway.
I dug like a child in that sand with Carmelita’s sneaker. I scooped out tar and pebbles and something wormy with its heel until I realized the rubber had been eaten through.
“Merry Christmas, Scott,” Ryder said.
I was about to answer him, because I thought we had left it that he was going to buy me a beer. I was about to tell him how nice it was to finally meet him in person, when he pulled the trigger.
There was a moment in which I thought I was saved. I was only lying on my back and looking at what was left of the moon. Maybe it was what had been shot away. There was music playing on the car radio now. Elise didn’t want to hear what was happening down here, and when I opened my mouth to point this out, I swallowed my own blood, and what was left of my front teeth.
This is her story, I wanted to tell him, arching my back a little so I could begin. Blow away the rest of the moon. Not me. Because I could be the best friend you ever had. I could save you a whole lot of trouble right here, right now.
He was standing over me now. I think he was. I think I was still holding Carmelita’s sad little sneaker, squeezing it as if it could bring me some last good luck. In the distance, Elise was getting impatient. She’d hit scan, and the radio was only touching on songs. Five seconds on each one. It landed on something ridiculously smooth and jazzy. Please don’t let me die on something jazzy, I thought.
Give me five more seconds.
The Winter Girl Page 18