The Winter Girl (6 page)

It doesn't cost me anything to admit it now. Elise always looked very pretty when she was sad. I think it depends on what type of face you have. I don't look too bad when I'm feeling down myself, but Elise's brown eyes seemed to grow browner, her eyelashes longer. Don't believe all that garbage you hear about happy couples. The sad ones know more, feel everything twice as much. That's why they hardly speak. They can share pain just by twitching their mouths a certain way, or choose not to reassure each other with a single word that used to provide comfort. When it comes right down to it, misery is just another art form, as hard to perfect as any other craft, only we aim to leave nothing behind. We're the copper thieves of our own houses, ripping out our own wires. Slowly, we've stolen the best parts of each other, carted ourselves away.

Part of me was admiring how uncertain and almost girlish she looked as she sat there in her coat in the kitchen chair, snowflakes vanishing on her shoulders as she watched me stand there with my mop. Part of me was hearing myself explain my grand theories.

“I have no idea,” I said. “But I think he blew his wife away with the shotgun in the closet.”

“Why didn't you call the police?”

“And what I'm thinking is that she had cancer or something, because she had a scarf on her head. So maybe he gets tired of her being a burden and being ill and he just puts her out of her misery.”

“Answer me.”

“Because it's breaking and entering.”

“We just walked in. We didn't break anything.”

“It's still a crime. They'd laugh at us and throw us in jail.”

Elise looked down at the bare table in front of her, shook her head slightly.

“It's something worse now,” she said. “It's like we're helping cover something up.”

I asked her how her father was, something that would make her feel like she wasn't a criminal.

“Worse,” she said.

“Matter-of-days kind of thing?” I said, realizing instantly that it was the wrong way to put it.

“He's my father. He's not a thing.”

We argued after that. Then we argued about arguing. I wondered if the only place we really had a chance was in that house that wasn't ours. In a bedroom we could never sleep in.

“My clients are leaving me,” she said, narrowing her eyes as if she could see them, changing their minds after all the work she had done with their children.

“They'll come back.”

“No, they won't,” she said, finally pushing away the chair and standing up. “They never do.”

T
here was a big fir tree at the end of that cul-de-sac on Ocean View Road. It had been wrapped with strings of big colored lights. There was an older couple who lived on that property, but we'd never met them. Maybe we'd seen their car pass by once or twice. That week before Christmas, Elise and I were coming back from the supermarket in Hampton Bays and saying nothing as we turned right on the dark road that led to Victor's house. We drove past all the darkened summer homes, dim blue lights lining one massive driveway, as if it were a curved runway. Their rich owners, I assumed, were shoulder to shoulder in the city, in paneled rooms that teemed with holiday conversation, with candlelight doubled in mirrors and caterers carrying silver trays. This was the winter season they would never see, a chilly hollowness that their caretakers could hardly be bothered with, letting bagged newspapers build up against white gates.

As I drove toward Victor's house, I thought to myself that I could have picked any of these dark homes. Instead I'd had sex in a murder scene, in one of the less impressive houses. I was an idiot.

I was driving, my jaw set, thinking of that porcelain pig and its snouty grin, the promise that the best was yet to come. When we took the last right, we could see it through all the dead branches. That amazing tree. I pulled the car over and we just stared at it in silence. There was no need to say anything. It made us that happy, and when an unhappy couple is happy, it's almost like having a vision, or speaking in tongues. It's like you've somehow burst to the surface on someone's shoulders and been given a few moments to see everything you've been missing.

I felt like I should write a note and leave it on their driveway, thanking them for taking the time to wrap that enormous, perfect tree in so many goddamn perfect lights.

When we got to our own driveway, heard the cold splash of gravel against the tires, Elise started to cry. It all came out then, the whole tangle of everything she'd kept bottled up. The way her father had touched her when she was young. How much more she wanted to be in life than a speech therapist. How she probably couldn't even do that now. For a moment, I didn't think it would come around to me, but it sure did. I couldn't make a living. I couldn't understand her. I had cost her the baby by making her wait until she was too old. And now it had been my moronic idea to go into that house. We'd probably end up broke and in jail. Then she confessed one more thing that stuck with me for days. An ex-boyfriend from college had found her on Facebook and they'd been e-mailing. It wasn't serious yet, but she found herself thinking of him more than me lately.

“Who?” I shouted.

“Curt,” she said.

“Kurt Weidenfeld?”

“Curt Page.”

“You're fucking kidding me,” I said, wishing her face would suddenly twist into a smile and we'd still have one last chance to be a couple again. But she wasn't lying. Even Kurt Weidenfeld wouldn't have been as bad. Curt Page was a pompous, beady-eyed prick with an overgrown mullet and an earring who we'd briefly shared a loft with in South Williamsburg. He was a copy editor for some long-extinct tech magazine, and he was constantly pestering people to read his unfinished novel. He had opinions with a capital
O
and exhaled deeply after each statement he'd make, as if his words were so decked out with brilliance that they might stall before they reached the listener unless he gave them that long, extra puff of air.

One of his opinions was that everyone should be allowed to carry a concealed weapon. There was a .357 he proudly showed us, that he kept under his bed, and an old, lovingly polished Smith & Wesson that had once belonged to his late father. Once our other roommates found that out, we had a house meeting and he was kicked out. It did cross my mind that Curt might blow us all away before he hit the highway, but in the morning, the only ominous thing he left was a handwritten note for Elise, profoundly thanking her for encouraging him to continue with his novel. He promised to keep in touch and then, in his uniquely condescending way, told her that she'd realize, sooner or later, that they were meant for each other. Even though he'd split, I could hear the long exhale after that one.

“He's on the road again,” Elise said, as if this zero was channeling Jack Kerouac.

“Curt Page is on the road. Does the media know about this?”

Elise laughed at that, and for a moment I thought she'd give in, the way all couples do when they still love each other.

“He's going through a painful divorce,” she said. There was too much sympathy in her voice. I thought that asking for any more information about Curt would be like waving the white flag in some way. Admitting that he'd become the most minor issue in our troubled marriage.

“I didn't know he'd even gotten married.”

I climbed out of the car and slammed the door. I think we would have gotten into an argument that would have finally finished us off for good, but it never happened. It never happened because I noticed something troubling directly in front of me. Through the scrub pine I could see the light in the window of our neighbor's house, and then, about fifty feet away, the headlights of a parked pickup truck, streaming in a thicket of nearby branches, its exhaust whipped away by a gust of cold wind, then coiling again.

L
ooking back, I think we did the wrong thing. As soon as we were safe inside Victor's house, we turned off every light. We ran around whispering commands to each other and nearly tripping over the ends of rugs. Then we stood by the sides of the living room window, and I mashed the binoculars against my eyes.

“What do you see?” Elise said. “What are they doing?”

I twisted the center focus knob on the binoculars, heard the tap of the lens against my own glasses. A blurry ghost of a lighted window became a sharp rectangle, but I just missed focusing on the figure that left the room.

“There was somebody up there,” Elise said. “Some guy.”

She was doing better with her naked eyes. I twisted the focus knob again. The house was ablaze now. Someone was flicking switches in every room, and this time I caught a bit of him as he moved past the window of one of the guest rooms. He was thickly built, Hispanic, and his mouth was moving as he turned and glanced over his shoulder, as if he were giving someone else commands. Another face, also Hispanic, appeared in the room, the rest of his body cut off by the window frame.

“Let me see,” Elise said.

I handed her the binoculars and watched her watching them.

“They're back downstairs,” she said. I reached out for the binoculars and tugged them away. I raised them to my eyes just in time to see their backs as they walked through the living room. I panned the binoculars to the truck idling outside, an F-150 with oversized wheels, the dark color impossible to discern. There were two white letters on the side, joined I thought by a fancy ampersand, but at that angle I couldn't make it out. I was still focused on it when the larger of the two men walked right into my field of vision.

“They're leaving,” Elise whispered. “Both of them.”

But they didn't leave. They sat in the truck, smoke from the exhaust pipe curling into the air. I couldn't see through the rear windows.

“What's going on?” Elise said.

“They're just sitting there. There's some company name written on the truck, but I can't make it out in the dark.”

I have no way of knowing exactly how much time passed, but it must have been ten minutes at least. Then the driver's door opened again. He climbed out and walked to the house, and I followed him with the binoculars. Alone this time, he made his way through the same rooms. Once, I saw his shoulder jerk and his mouth pull back into a grimace, as if he had just kicked something. One by one, he turned off the lights. In the bedrooms, in the sitting room, in the guest room, even the light that had been on the timer.

“He's leaving again,” I said to Elise, watching him angrily pull open the truck's door and climb back in.

A moment later, the triangle of brake lights flared and the truck reversed, pulled away, carrying its own saucer of light all the way back down the long driveway.

W
e lay in the dark, on her father's bed, arguing about what we had seen. But it wasn't the normal kind of argument we always had. It was filled with excitement, and every time we disagreed about something, it was only so we could revise and perfect the little we had seen, the little we had to go on.

“I think the heavier one was wearing a Carhartt jacket. Tan,” I said.

“It wasn't tan,” she said. “It was darker than that, and he was wearing a sweatshirt under it. Baggy jeans.”

“About one hundred eighty pounds.”

“Heavier than that.”

“A baseball cap, right?”

“Yes,” she said. “Blue, with some kind of white letter.”

We were holding hands, her fingers squeezing mine, then letting go, each time something else occurred to her. We both agreed that we had never gotten a good look at the other guy.

“What do you think?” I said.

“They're working for somebody.”

“You know what I think?” I said, my big theory seizing up my throat like a little kid.

“What?”

“Maybe it's Swain. Maybe they've got him tied up somewhere and he's gotten something valuable hidden there somewhere.”