The Winter Girl (13 page)

“Two hundred and three dollars,” he said, shaking the envelope in the air as if it were a lure. “It's all I have until Elise drives me to the bank. I want you to give it to Carmelita.”

“Only amateurs pay people off in odd numbers, Victor,” I said, remembering the tip Elise had playfully given me.

“Who told you that?” he said, a little unnerved. “Carmelita? Tell her I'm getting better. There might be a spring fling, after all.”

“I doubt that,” I said, taking a seat in the canary-yellow chair that faced him. I noticed it was still warm and wondered if Sandra had sat here while singing, wising up to his searching fingers.

“You know nothing. You heard what the doctor said.”

“Cancer is cancer, Victor. It's lighting you up right now, like a pinball machine. You just can't hear all the pinging noises it's making.”

He didn't like that. He ran his index finger along the envelope and stared at me, his face darkened as the sun vanished for a moment outside. The light was dimming fast and I was running out of time to visit Carmelita before Elise got back from Mastic.

“Did you find anything in my study?” he said. “I heard your footsteps.”

I shook my head slowly, watched him lean forward and adjust a pillow behind his back.

“There's a key there,” he said. “Taped under my desk. I'm sure you found it.”

“Maybe.”

“I locked her up once. I got so worried I'd lose it that I taped it there.”

“That's bullshit,” I said.

“Is it?” he said, waving the envelope at me tauntingly again. “Why don't you ask her?”

I stood up and faced the window. The scrub pine between the two houses was already turning a washed-out black. In Swain's upstairs bedroom, the lights, still on a timer, popped on. I squinted, but I couldn't make out any figure in Swain's upstairs bedroom.

“You better be on your way,” Victor said. “Before Elise gets here. You wouldn't want me to tell her anything behind your back.”

I snatched the envelope from his hand, but I didn't leave right away. I got down on one knee, so he could see my face clearly.

“You're a piece of shit,” I said softly.

“That's all?” he said, gratified as my face flushed red with impotent anger. I stood up, though every one of my nerve endings wanted to make one decent connection and slap the smirk off his face.

“I'll cover for you, Scott,” he said hoarsely, then broke into one of his coughing fits. “I've got your back.”

“T
wo hundred and three dollars,” Carmelita said, laying the crumpled bills on the coffee table.

“And he's got a message for you,” I said, snorting out some disgusted air. “He wants you to stick around until the spring. He says he's feeling better.”

Carmelita didn't respond to that. She picked up the money and stuffed it in the pocket of her jeans. It was getting dark in the living room, so I reached for the lamp next to the liquor cabinet.

“Don't do that,” she said, walking toward the sliding glass door. I could hear one of the fake leaves from the fake ficus tree crustle under her unlaced boot.

“I won't be able to see you in another ten minutes. We're losing light.”

“There's a system with the timer. First the upstairs light turns on, then the one on in the kitchen, then the living room. It's a really comforting routine.”

I couldn't entirely make out her expression. Was she joking?

“I have a key,” I said, taking it out of my pocket. “I found it under his desk.”

“So?”

We weren't making progress as strangers. The simple math was that she didn't trust me.

“He says he locked you up in a closet. Is that true?”

“Maybe,” she said.

Since I was standing next to the dusty bottles of liquor, I unscrewed the cap of the bottle of crème de menthe. I took a long swig, realizing suddenly that I'd chosen the Amaretto. The fluid had turned chalky and vile, and I spat it on the floor. Outside the sliding glass door, the sun had finally set, leaving a line of dim red over the hills near the inlet.

She walked toward the kitchen, but I could only make out her silhouette now.

“This is when I usually eat,” she said.

“Eat what?”

I twisted the cap on the bottle of Amaretto and touched the other bottles, looking for something with a more familiar shape. I found what looked like a bottle of Tanqueray, and in the dim light, what I thought was greenish glass.

“The things people leave behind,” she said. “Cans of stuff. Tins of tunafish. There are other houses.” We were standing next to the bare kitchen table. I moved closer to her so I could see her face in the light that was still filtering through the room.

“You break into other places?”

“Only for food. And then there's even a place…I don't know if I should tell you this.”

The gin, at least, was gin. I took a healthy swallow and felt reassured as it burned all the way down to my lungs. I told her to go ahead, suddenly aware, out of the corner of my eye, that something had skittered across the floor. A mouse? A rat?

“There's one small house on the top of the hill,” she said. “An old couple lives there year-round. They sleep like logs when they take their hearing aids out. So once I thought
Why not.
I undressed in their bathroom. I took a hot shower.”

I pictured an older couple, wheezing in bed, the unheard sound and unseen steam of Carmelita's shower.

“You can take one at my house,” I said. “And you can eat whatever you want.”

She laughed at that, finishing with an amused moan.

“Does that turn you on? Allowing me the basic necessities?”

“Of course not,” I said. “I'm just trying to be a good guy.”

“What would I owe you for a hot shower and some leftovers?”

“Nothing,” I said, angry at myself for even having made the offer. Once, when I was photographing a young bride under that tree I'd staked out in Prospect Park, I had told her husband that he was making her self-conscious and had to move farther away. At first the bride had looked concerned as her husband skulked off in his blue tuxedo, eventually sitting on a park bench to anxiously smoke a cigarette. It was a small act of control that made my heart beat faster, as if I'd run two miles. It was the expression on her face that excited me, as she stood there in that cheap gauzy white dress, waiting for me to tell her exactly what to do.

“Hey, good guy,” Carmelita said, waving her hand in front of my face. She smiled to let me know she'd let me off the hook for now. “It would never work anyway. Victor told me he'd shoot me point-blank if I ever showed up on his doorstep,” she said. “That's the one house I leave alone.”

“Why are you scared of him?” I said, taking one more sip of the gin and wiping a warm trickle off my mouth.

“Why are you?”

There was resentment in her voice. It was a bad situation, but she wasn't going to suffer self-righteous questions from a hypocrite. Besides that, it had long since been time to go. I had heard the sound of Elise driving up to Victor's house. The car door slam. Even from within this mausoleum, I was aware of all of that.

“Good night,” I said. “I've got to go.”

There was this odd formality when I left. Carmelita always stood up and pulled open the sliding glass door, which was so stippled with rust along its track that it made an alarming racket.

Before I stepped out onto the weedy flagstones, I felt her lips against my cheek. A quick kiss followed by a teasing remark:

“It was a pleasure having you. Do you need a flashlight or can you find your way back?”

“I'm good,” I said, reflexively touching the wetness on my cheek, instantly magnified by the colder air outside.

“Can I have the key?” she said. “The one for the closet.”

“Why would you want it?”

“One less thing to worry about.”

I fished inside my pocket until I found the key.

“Unless you want to lock me up next time?”

She snatched the key from my hand and turned back toward the house before I could tell her that wasn't my thing. I watched her pull the sliding door shut. I could barely see her beyond the darkening blue that reflected off the glass.

Twice, on my way down the gully, I looked back at Swain's home. I thought I could see the top of Carmelita's head, and then her whole body, turned away from me. I supposed she was fixing herself something to eat in the kitchen, or adding Victor's stingy new bribe to some kitchen drawer. All I know is that I fell hard on my knees and elbows, snagged by a tripwire of thorns. When I finally struggled up to my feet, my wrists and face were burning. Climbing over the fence that marked the border of Victor's property, I rolled my sleeve down to cover the fresh scrapes.

When I walked back into Victor's house, it was abnormally quiet. I made my rounds, walking into the empty kitchen and seeing the box of Entenmann's that Sandra had brought. It was sitting in the trash, bent almost in half.

I noticed a half-empty bottle of Shiraz on the wooden table, and a smatter of red drops that Elise hadn't bothered to clean up.

My wife was sitting in the living room, turned toward the dark fireplace. She gave me a strange, detached smile and swirled the wine in her glass.

“How was the interview?” I said.

She patted the chintzy cushion next to her twice, and I sat down.

“I kept on driving,” she said.

“Past Mastic?”

“Past Mastic, Shirley, Ronkonkoma. I nearly made it to Queens.”

I nodded, trying to stay one step ahead of her as she told me the story of her day. Marital surprises always made me intensely anxious.

“You blew it off.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, taking another sip of wine. She'd pulled both her legs up against her side, so it looked like she was riding the overstuffed couch sidesaddle.

“That's not good?”

I didn't know what it meant actually. I didn't want to pressure her more by making it a statement.

“There's this incredibly large Gulf station in Centereach. I parked near the air pump and cried like a baby sitting at the bottom of a well.”

I tried to put my arm around her shoulder, but she clearly didn't want that. She shrugged off my hand effortlessly, and then she widened her brown eyes and glared at me.

“I fired Sandra,” she said. “Just now. The poor woman actually looked devastated.”

“Why?” I said. “Was it the crumb cake?”

“He was moaning,” she said, allowing a shiver to shake her shoulders. “I didn't even walk into his room to see what he was making her do.”

“Jesus.”

“Her husband was out there waiting for her too, smoking his cigarettes in the car. That's my father. His blood turns to sludge unless he's preying on someone.”

“Yeah,” I said, telling myself that this was the moment to bring up Carmelita. Before another second passed.

“Maybe we should get him an abusive male nurse,” I said instead.

That brought a faint smile to her face again, and she ran the palm of her hand along my leg until she reached my knee cap, her fingers curling over.

“Look at me,” she said. “I still love you so much sometimes.”

The diluted expression of affection chilled me a little, but I let it go. She was having an awful day.

“Glad I could cheer you up.”

She took another sip of wine, emptying the glass. She wanted to talk about the Gulf station in Centereach again. For some reason, as I listened to her, I pictured a human-resources manager at an industrial park in Mastic, waiting for her in his cheaply paneled office, her résumé sitting on his polished desk.

“Well, I sat there for a long time, watching strangers walk in and out of the mini-mart. I was trying to figure out who was in worse shape than us. You know, like a family dragging their kid in to pee. Arguing over snacks inside.”

“That probably would have been us.”

“I'd take it.”

I opened my mouth, ready to give her my valedictory speech about weathering the storm, hanging in there, the hope in hopelessness, but all Elise wanted was three things.

“Don't try to cheer me up,” she said. “Get me another glass of wine. And see if you can get that fire going.”

W
hen I woke up the next morning, I was alone in bed. Elise was fully dressed, standing and watching me. My camera was in her hands.

“What's going on?” I said, turning over on my back.

“What is this?” she said, turning the screen of the camera toward me so that I could see Carmelita's naked, and bruised, breasts.

“I was waiting for the right time to tell you. When you weren't so stressed out.”

“What is this?” she said, her voice rising.

“She's a squatter. She lives next door.”

“Did you pay this whore to take her clothes off? Did you fuck her?”

I told Elise that the girl wasn't a whore. I swore, of course, that I hadn't touched her. I told her that it was her father who had been bribing her for sexual favors, and that it was her father who had performed these precise acts of mutilation on her body.

“Ask him,” I said. “He's the one who told me she was living there. He sent me over there with two envelopes of cash for her.”

That settled one thing at least; my wife sailed out of the room with the camera in her hands, and I ran after her in my boxers, wondering what the old prick would say now.

He wasn't asleep. He was watching television his favorite way, with the sound turned down. He couldn't have possibly been interested in the World Series of Poker on ESPN this early in the morning, but he tried to move his head away from the camera as Elise pressed it close to his face.

“Did you hurt this woman?” Elise said. Her voice was more shrill now, and when he tried to avoid looking at the screen again, she grasped his stubbly chin in her hand and tried to force him to see it. He let her hold his face in that position for a moment, and then he sarcastically gasped.