The Winter Girl (15 page)

We decided that there should be a run-through. First, we'd decided it would be best to be out of the house as Victor drank his laced glass of chocolate-flavored Ensure. Elise would put on her best black cocktail dress, and I would struggle into an old blazer and slacks that I had brought from Brooklyn. They lay waiting for me on the bed, next to Elise's velvet dress. Realizing I had forgotten a pair of dress shoes, I borrowed a pair of Victor's double-tasseled loafers and stared at myself sideways in the mirror as Elise stirred the crushed-up extra-strength Tylenol into his glass. She had just taken a shower, and as she worked on grinding the tablets, the white towel she'd been wearing fell to the floor.

“So when we do this for real,” I said, “we use the Percocet.”

“Right, right,” she said, expertly continuing to stir the glass as she stood there bare naked, the spoon clinking off the sides. “About thirty grams or so, just like this.”

“And he won't taste it?”

“Have you ever tasted Ensure? It's vile. He'll never know the difference.”

I was looking down at Victor's loafers, and suddenly I felt vaguely sorry for him. He had done his best to preserve the old shoes with a shoe horn, but they looked withered and worn out. You wouldn't be able to give them away at a yard sale.

“Are you ready for our practice run?” she said, turning to face me.

I was looking at the cloudy liquid in the tall glass, and then I found myself staring at the old appendectomy scar on her right side. I don't know how I could have explained it away after seeing the bite marks Victor had left on Carmelita's body. It had the same exact appearance. The purplish scar tissue three inches under my wife's breast fit the shape of her father's teeth exactly, and it looked like a thin, upside-down smile.

“When did he do that to you?” I said.

“It's not important now,” she said, pulling open the dresser drawer. She picked out a pair of panties and slipped them on. The silence simply grew between us as she picked out a bra and reached behind her back, hooking it. Then she walked over to the bed, grabbed her dress, and pulled it over her head.

For a moment, she stood with her hands on the dresser, staring at an offending lock of wet black hair in the mirror, and I felt for sure she would finally tell me about the moment her father had sunk his teeth into her flesh, as far as he could, the blood brimming on his stretched upper lip.

“Zip me up,” she said. “And get your nice pants on.”

“A
ll dolled up,” Victor said. “What's the occasion?”

He was watching television in the dark, his white face turning bluer or paler depending on the tint of the scene.

“Boredom, I guess,” Elise said, placing the glass of Ensure on his bedside table.

“Everybody's got to leave the ranch sometime,” I added helpfully, then silently cursed myself. It sounded like code for a homicide, for chrissake. But it didn't seem to faze Elise or Victor, who were now glaring at each other intently.

“Did you talk to Carmelita?” he said, picking up the glass and taking a sip. He didn't seem to detect any difference in the taste.

“Yes,” Elise said. “She told us what you did.”

There was a milky rim of Ensure on his upper lip now, but he didn't wipe it off.

“What I did?” he said. “Look at me. What could I do to anyone?”

“Plenty,” Elise said. “When you could. Do you remember what you did to me?”

Victor seemed to expect this question. He met it with a look of such profound disinterest that I wanted to kill him right then.

“I'm sorry that you think I did something,” he said, his voice trailing away. “I seem to remember a young girl who pretended she was having nightmares in order to crawl into my bed.”

He glanced at her and had the nerve to actually raise his eyebrows, as if he were expecting an apology.

“Put quite a strain on my marriage, to tell you the truth.”

“Because I molested
you,
” Elise said softly, watching him take another thoughtful sip.

“You were a very manipulative girl. I'm sure Scott would agree with me if he didn't fear you so much. I don't fear you though. In fact, I think it's time we all stopped pussyfooting around these tiresome sexual issues and get to the really good stuff.”

“What's the really good stuff?” I said, horrified. I felt as if I had been jabbed in the solar plexus.

“He'll tell you after we go to dinner,” Elise said as evenly as possible. “I'm sure you can spare us until we've had our meal, Dad.”

“I'll spare you,” he said, uncapping a tube of ChapStick and rubbing it across his lips. “But I'll be wide awake when you get home.”

He wanted us to know he had won. He stared at me for some kind of acknowledgment, and then at his daughter, and then at the window and beyond, where the security light in the upstairs bedroom of Swain's house had clicked on again.

“By the way, Scott,” Victor said. “Did you give our girl the key?”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

But Elise immediately seemed to know, and when she turned toward me I knew I'd have to answer for that later. For now, she was able to compose herself and devote all of her attention to her dying father.

“Daddy,” Elise said evenly, giving him a quick kiss on the forehead that seemed to floor him. “Do you want us to bring you back anything? Some lemon chicken? Some rice?”

“I don't need anything,” he said, snapping his gaze away from her and returning it to the television. A German shepherd was being trained to attack an assailant, and it tugged violently at the protective cuff on the arm of its fake victim.

I watched my wife lean closer to him.

“You're going to drop into hell like a stone,” she whispered.

These calmly spoken words seemed to take Victor by surprise, but for only an instant. He was an expert at extinguishing any unwanted emotional reaction. But this time, the thin-lipped smile he stretched across his face seemed utterly unconvincing. As Elise moved away he tried to grab her arm, then her hand, but it was too late.

I followed Elise out of the room. We were in the hallway when he called out her name, twice. I stood there, waiting for my wife to come back, but she had already grabbed the car keys. She jangled them once at me, almost teasingly, and walked out the front door.

“A
nd same thing tomorrow,” I said, sitting in the passenger seat. “Except we really go to dinner.”

Elise started the car, placed her hand on the seat rest behind my head, and backed out of the driveway.

“I'm actually starving right now. How about you?”

We drove past the fir with the Christmas lights, which looked as if they were blinking because a cold wind was stirring the branches.

“I liked the last thing you said to him,” I said. “You could tell it got to him.”

“It's not my line,” she said. “My mom told him that just before she died. But he didn't sink anywhere. We just buried her and that was that. But…”

“What is it?”

“I think he poisoned her. A day before she ended up in the hospital she'd been feeling fine. And then she was doubled over in pain on a beautiful sunlit lawn. Throwing up while all the children in the neighborhood were laughing and playing.”

We were sitting at the intersection of 27 now, and I leaned back so Elise could clearly see the traffic coming in both directions. As usual, being winter, there wasn't a single car in sight. We pulled onto the highway and turned left, toward town.

“Because sometimes I can hear her voice as clearly as his. It's like she never really left.”

“You should have told me all of this,” I said.

“Before we were married? When we were on that blind date playing pool?”

“Yeah, people do that. They come clean. Secrets burn a hole in everything.”

“They were burning a hole in my life before I was even born.”

I had to let it go. She was so agitated that she had crossed the median and was in danger of hitting whatever car might come sailing our way.

“You're on the wrong side of the road,” I said urgently.

She shook her head, disappointed that this was all I had to say. My own well-being, of course, coming first. Taking her time, she edged back into our lane and then slowed to twenty-five miles an hour.

“Is this safe enough for you?” she said.

I
was pushing around the last of my oily fries, looking at the snow falling outside Buckley's Irish Pub. In the nearly empty parking lot, I could see the windshield of our car was already covered with a thin layer.

“Every time I leave his place,” Elise said, wiping some teriyaki sauce off her lip, “I feel normal again.”

“I don't believe anything that psycho said,” I reassured her. “Blaming the victim. You think it's a cliché…until it happens right in front of you.”

“It's all right,” she said, raising her arm for the waitress and forcing a smile. “Down deep I don't even think he knows the truth.”

The waitress, a thin woman with a long face and ropy brown hair, coughed in her hand and apologized.

“Don't worry about it,” Elise said. “I just want two shots of tequila, lime, and a little salt.”

She took our plates and left us alone in the empty dining room. There were two locals at the bar, one staring upward at the television in a forlorn way. The other guy was wearing a red cashmere sweater that had ridden all the way up his back. Even though it wasn't much of a picture, I wished I had my camera.

“We're going to get drunk and drive into a ditch,” I said.

“Sounds romantic,” Elise said, sliding her hand toward mine.

“You were joking about killing your father,” I said softly.

“Why? Did you change your mind?”

I told her I had, which seemed just fine with her. To be honest, I felt intensely relieved. If something could have gone wrong, it would've. The simplest schemes in our lives had never worked out anyway. And there was something else: to that point, other than shoplifting Pop Rocks at a 7-Eleven when I was sixteen, I'd never committed a single crime.

“You gave Carmelita the key,” Elise said, having saved this moment to confront me about Victor's revelation. “Why would you do that?”

“It's just a key,” I said, leaning toward her so that no one at the bar could hear what I had to say next. “He'd lock her up in the closet for hours. Bleeding, who knows? Scared to death.”

“Listen,” Elise said, squeezing my hand. “Everything he does before he dies is part of a plan.”

“I don't understand.”

“That's why we're accelerating the process,” she says. “So he can't put all the pieces together and screw us over before he goes.”

“It's just a key.”

“Does it belong to my dear father?”

“Yes.”

“Then it's not just a key. He asked you to give it to her for a reason. And now we'll have to deal with that too.”

Elise leaned back in her seat and sighed. She didn't look entirely miserable either. She looked like she had work to do. Feasible work that might even make her feel good at the end of the day.

The shots were placed on our table. The salt. The slices of lime. Elise propped up my hand with hers and squeezed some juice on it, then shook a thin layer of salt near my thumb. I waited for her to do the same, and then we touched glasses.

“To Victor,” she said. “May he rest in peace.”

“Or wake up screaming for your forgiveness,” I added, knocking back the shot. I wanted another.

“He's not going to wake up.”

I'd raised my hand for the waitress again, and when I got her attention I mouthed the words “Two more.”

“How's that?” I said to Elise.

“Because there's a very good chance he has ceased to exist. I just wanted to give it an hour or so. I didn't want to hear the dreadful noises.”