The Center of Winter: A Novel

by Marya Hornbacher

  “All right.”

  “I mean it.”

  “I will.”

  “Right now. Okay? I’m going to go now.”

  I held on to the phone.

  “Claire? Here I go. I’m going to hang up now. You can call in a few hours and talk to Kate again.”

  I nodded.

  “All right. ’Bye, now, hon. You’re gonna want to hang up that phone.”

  The sound of the dial tone filled my head all morning.

  I sat on the couch, facing the window. The light came from the left, inching its way across the yard until it stared me full in the face. I stared back.

  Arnold’s chair and I sat in silence.

  You see, now, he said gently. How hard it is to get through a day.

  The sunlight crossed to the right.

  I’m sorry, I said. But he was gone.

  “Hi, Mom,” Kate whispered, and crawled onto the couch with me. Without thinking, I pulled her onto my lap, and we stared out at the dark.

  It was snowing. It had started snowing sometime after dusk.

  Eventually I smelled food. I turned my head. Donna was setting the table. She looked up at me, crossed the room, and put her hands on my shoulders. She squeezed. “Come on. Haven’t eaten a bite all day.”

  The three of us ate hot dish from the funeral party. There was nothing to say. Kate was sleepy, and Donna put her to bed.

  She sat down next to me on the couch. “You didn’t go in,” she said.

  I shook my head.

  “Well,” she finally said. “How about a shower?”

  I bent over and put my arms around my knees. “How am I going to tell Esau?”

  She rubbed my back. I started to shake.

  “Yep,” she said. “About time.”

  My body flooded with pain so extreme I opened my mouth but couldn’t make a sound. I looked up at her for help, my hands gesturing at my chest.

  “I know it,” she said. “Let’s go.” She took me by the waist and walked me down the hall.

  There was the door. I turned my face away and groaned.

  “Come on,” she said firmly, and we went into the bathroom. She turned on the water and pulled my slip over my head, as efficient as a mother whose child has peed herself and is bawling in shame. She held my hand as I stepped in, soaped a washcloth, and scrubbed me till my skin was raw.

  I stood there naked in the boiling spray and cried.

  She handed me the washcloth. “Wash yourself,” she commanded.

  I shook my head, choking. “I can’t.”

  “Yes you can.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. Gonna have to happen sometime, Claire.”

  I took the washcloth and turned away from her. I washed a part of me that I was hoping never to hear from again. My belly contracted and my legs buckled and I lay down in the porcelain tub, my knees pulled up to my chest, and dug my nails into my skin.

  I heard Donna kneel by the tub. She grabbed my wrists then threaded her fingers through mine. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. See? You’re still here.”

  She left me wrapped in a towel and came back with a nightgown. She tugged it over my head. “Bedtime,” she said.

  “I’m sleeping on the couch.”

  “No you’re not. You’re sleeping in your own bed.”

  “I’m not ready.”

  “You ain’t ever gonna be. Now’s as good a time as any.”

  She opened the door. There on the wall that faced us was a wide spot, unnaturally white, whiter than the paint. The room was cold. I noticed the window was cracked open. It still smelled like bleach.

  Donna crossed and closed the window.

  Now that she had gone in, the room was a room. Not a hole. A room.

  There was my vanity, just as I’d left it. A tangle of jewelry, an open pot of blusher, a brush. The old oval mirror above it reflected the shadow of us in the doorway against the hallway light. There was Arnold’s highboy. There was his reading chair, under the window, through which shone a dusky snow-filled light. His good pants hung over the shoulder of the chair, the belt still through the loops, and his good hat perched on the lamp. And there was the bed, bigger than I remembered it, neatly made. On Arnold’s bedside table, a book and a near-empty bottle of beer.

  Donna reached down and turned on the bedside light. She folded down the comforter and kicked off her shoes.

  “He didn’t get to finish the book,” I said, still standing by the door. I could see the bookmark sticking out, two-thirds of the way to the end.

  Donna looked at me. “Hop in,” she said. I crossed the room and sat down on the edge of the bed.

  I could smell him in the sheets.

  Donna went to the linen closet and made herself a bed on the floor, next to me. She straightened. “Lie down, hon. Can’t sleep sitting up.”

  She pulled the covers over me, turned out the light, and settled herself on the floor.

  I lay there listening to her breathe until she fell asleep.

  I turned my face to look at his pillow. I rolled over and put my face in it and breathed in his whiskey-sweat-soap smell, deep, gulping breaths. I pulled the pillow over my face, breathing so hard I got dizzy. I could not breathe him deep enough.

  Sometime in the night, I woke myself crying. I felt the bed sink under another body’s weight. Through a haze of half sleep, I felt Donna’s hand on my back. It was warm and heavy, and it seemed to hold me down.

  It was February. He might have waited till February to do himself in, the sonofabitch.

  My son did not know his father was dead, because I had not told him. We visited him on Sundays, as faithful as churchgoers. Kate appeared, silent, in her best dress and shoes, ready to go at nine A.M.

  Kate had stopped talking.

  I thought I ought to object in some way, tell her, “Go play, Katie,” or “Katie, come talk to me,” something like that. But I knew why she was silent. She knew. I knew she knew what I had done.

  And in the face of that, I too had nothing to say.

  I had not gone back to work. Every night, I meant to. Every night, I stayed up nursing memories until I passed out on the couch. Every morning, I woke up sick, kneeling in front of the toilet, my face cold and my body burning hot. I threw up so often I worried I was pregnant.

  And every day, all day, I tried to untangle in my mind the words I’d use to tell Esau what I’d done.

  No. What his father had done.

  No.

  What I’d tell Esau about the hole in our lives.

  Around one in the morning, I was working on my foxtrot in the living room, holding a glass of wine out in front of me, conducting Sinatra with a cigarette. Kate opened her bedroom door and stood there with her hand on the knob.

  My tiny ghoul. My little nightgown ghoul.

  I hesitated, but Frank did not, and so my feet began again. Your fabulous face…

  Everything reminded me of everything. Nothing was the genuine article, as he would say. This song was not a song now but a song ten years ago. He danced well enough, in that way of large men: What they lack in grace, they make up for in effort and affable grin.

  Now he’d poisoned everything. Mornings, bent over the toilet, I imagined I was throwing him up.

  I stopped my drunk stumble, sobbed, sighed. Kate stared, impassive. I turned my back on her and poured a drink. I wanted her to go to sleep, let me keep dancing and watching the movie in my mind.

  When I turned back, she was still there, my baby rat, my blue-veined mute, my little leech.

  Winter began to break. I went back to work. Still Esau didn’t know, and still Kate would not speak.

  She and Davey played in companionable silence. Sometimes he talked, but mostly only to point something out: more snow, less snow, wet snow for snowballs, a frozen bird. She would look up, nod, and take his hand. They could not be pried apart.

  At home, she sat in her father’s chair and listened to me intently —in the kitchen, on the phone, talking to her, ge
tting a glass and pouring a drink, opening a door and closing it again.

  Gradually we stopped eating anything except tomato soup, creamed corn, and bacon.

  The click of the can opener, the hiss of air from the can, and the spitting sound of a piece of bacon hitting the pan. The clang of a pot to the stove. I began making noise so she would have something to fill her hungry ears.

  The snow began to melt, sliding off the eaves with huge wet thuds.

  In April she got up and put a record on the record player and sat back down. After that, she went straight to the record player every day when she got home from school, without taking off her coat. She got up when the record finished, and put the needle at the edge again. She sat down, bit her fingernails to the quick, and looked out the window. I put Band-Aids on her bloodied fingertips and kissed them, kneeling at her feet.

  And then one day, she smiled shyly, and took my hands, kissing each fingertip in turn.

  The record she liked was Simon and Garfunkel, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. It had a black cover with flowery writing on it, and she studied it while she listened. One Sunday she took the record with her so Esau could see it. She clutched it on her lap for the entire silent ride to State.

  She held the record out to him when she saw him coming down the hall. He crouched and hugged her. She continued holding the record out to him with both hands, looking up urgently. He took the record. He said it was beautiful. He looked at me, bewildered.

  “She wants you to have it,” I said. “I think.”

  “Oh, Katie, I can’t take your record.” He looked down at her, half smiling.

  Kate went over to the hallway wall, slid her back down it, and tilted over onto her side on the floor, where she lay quietly studying his blue tennis shoes.

  “Honey, don’t lie on the floor in your nice dress,” I said.

  Kate stared into Esau’s giant eyes when he put his face next to hers on the floor.

  “You want to listen to it?” he asked. She moved her head in a semi-nod. “You have to get up, then.”

  She got up and followed him into the dayroom. An old man waved at her, and she waved back shyly. Esau put the record on the old player and pulled her onto his lap in a chair.

  She put her face next to Esau’s, and together they looked out the window. He sang along with the songs and rocked her slightly back and forth. Her small hand kept time on his back.

  When the record got to her favorite song, she put her mouth next to Esau’s ear with a secretive smile on her face. I heard her sing, very softly, “‘A-a-a-pril, come she will. When streams are ripe and swelled with rain.’”

  Then she was quiet again. I looked through the window to the courtyard below, the people pacing in circles, the apple trees blooming white, moving back and forth with a strong spring wind.

  I want to take him home.

  It was May. I was sitting in the conference room with Esau’s psychiatrist and his primary staff. I put my Styrofoam cup of coffee to my lips again, hoping it would ease the words out of my mouth. The three of them were looking at me, waiting for me to say something. They’d just given me his monthly report, and they were waiting for a response. They wanted to know when I planned to tell him his father was dead.

  I wanted to go back out and watch Kate and Esau play in the courtyard. Kate had started talking the day the lilacs sent out shoots. Soon the house would bloom with them, the white lilacs that grew on the tree outside. She had run into the house to find me in my bedroom, reading, and she jumped up on the bed and whispered in my ear, “Mom! The lilacs are coming! There’s shoots!” Now they were out in the courtyard garden, and Esau was showing her the pale green tips of his tulip bulbs.

  I did not like sitting here in this generic room in these generic uncomfortable chairs with these professionals staring at me, wondering what was wrong with me and why I was refusing their sound advice.

  “We really feel it is not in the patient’s best interest to remain in the dark, as it were,” said the psychiatrist, and coughed. It was a fake cough. He didn’t need to cough, I could tell. I didn’t like this we, this general we. And as it were, what was that supposed to mean?

  “I know that,” I said.

  “Which is not to say we don’t sympathize with your situation. You are having a difficult time yourself, to be sure,” said another of the three.

  “It’s not a situation,” I snapped. “And kindly refrain from telling me what kind of time I’m having.”

  I sat there enduring their pitying looks.

  “Of course,” said Esau’s primary nurse, nicely, after much too long a pause. I wanted to hit her.

  “I just want to take him home.”

  They looked at me, and then at each other. “We would probably not recommend that at this time,” the psychiatrist finally said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “We feel the patient would benefit from a longer stay.”

  “Jesus! Longer than what? He’s been here for months. You said yourself he’s doing remarkably well. That’s exactly what you said. ‘Remarkably well.’ You said he hadn’t had an episode in months. Every week he’s better.”

  “Well, Mrs. Schiller, that’s precisely my point. He would continue to improve under our care.”

  “And he would deteriorate under mine? That’s what you’re saying?”

  “Not exactly. We feel there is an appropriate time for his release, and we are moving toward that time, but that time is not right now.”

  “Because what? You want me to tell him his father shot his head off and then leave? Just say, ‘Have a nice week, Esau, good luck with that one’?”

  “Yes. And leave him where he can safely interpret that information.”

  I pitched my coffee cup into the garbage can, furious, and leaned forward. “It’s not information for him to interpret. It’s a death. His father’s death. And I am not, under any circumstances, leaving him in this piss-stinking place full of strangers to deal with it.” I stood up.

  “Mrs. Schiller, I believe you have the best of intentions. But perhaps your maternal instincts are not, in this case, well placed.”

  I hid my hands behind my back to hide their violent tremor. “Sign him out,” I said.

  “I can’t do that in good faith.”

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass what kind of faith you do it in. Sign him out,” I repeated, and walked out of the room.

  I ran down the stairs two at a time and flung open the door to the courtyard. I stopped to look at my children, crouched in the garden’s mud. Esau turned his face and smiled, then spoke to Kate, who turned and waved. I walked over to them.

  “We’re going home.”

  Esau looked stricken.

  I bent. “No, no, sweetheart. All of us. We’re all going home.”

  I wrapped my arms around them and closed my eyes. Tonight I would tell him. For now, I breathed in the smell of damp, fertile ground and my children’s hair. I felt as if we were a planet, spinning out of any orbit but our own. Terrified, I hung on.

  ESAU

  When I lived in the place, it was fall and then winter and pretty soon I knew for sure they were not going to take me home.

  My father carried me up the stairs. I remember that.

  I remember him talking to me in the car, the whole way. Like some kind of music, not stopping. I closed my eyes in the backseat and clung to his voice, feeling like I was spinning, like I was on a carnival carousel, those scary painted horses at the county fair, and it was going too fast and I wanted to get off, and so I pictured my father standing at the edge, spinning past, spinning past, and I tried to get to the edge so I could jump and he could grab me, like when I was little, and we were in the lake and he was trying to teach me to swim. Reaching his arms out: Come on, you’ll make it, he said. And because he said so I closed my eyes and jumped and I didn’t drown. His hands around my rib cage in the green water, lifting me up and out into the blinding sun, holding me over his head while I spat and laughed an
d gasped.

  So we swam through the dark, in the car, with his voice like his hands, guiding me, keeping me afloat. And he promised me I wouldn’t drown and I didn’t.

  He did.

  And he carried me up the stairs and laid me down on a bed in a dark room. Then there were lights everywhere and there were bars on my bed and I liked that. I checked every edge with my fingers and feet, bars all the way around, I wouldn’t fall out. My father’s hands on my head. I heard him say he would be back.

  But I never believed him. Every time he left, they’d tell me again. He’ll be back, they said. He’s only just gone for a little while.

  So I sat on my bed a lot waiting for him to get back. I made my bed superwell and sat on it with my back to the wall. My window looked out on the sky. Every so often I’d get up and stand by it and look down at the parking lot. I’d watch the highway for blue cars. There are a lot of blue cars. So I trained myself not to believe it was him. Because I am a person who likes math and I am good at it, and so I knew the statistical likelihood of it being him in a blue car out of billions and trillions of the blue cars on the planet that could potentially be driving south on County Road 10 was very very small. The statistical likelihood was that it was not him, and never would be him, and in the event that it was him, it was practically a mathematical miracle. I would see a blue car and watch it shoot down the whole thin ribbon of road that cut across my windowpane, north going south, and I wouldn’t blink until it had crossed to the southeast corner of the pane and out of sight, not even slowing at the driveway to where I was. Then I’d blink. Then I’d wait for another blue car, and know it wasn’t him, and prove it by watching it speed past.

  So when he died, I already knew he wasn’t coming back.

  He left me there, but he didn’t want to. I know that. I always knew that. He left me there because I couldn’t get better. So I stayed there and tried to get better as fast as I could because I knew he didn’t want to leave me there and it broke him all to pieces because he thought it was his fault and it wasn’t his fault. At all.