The Winter People (11 page)

“We should cover it back up. Leave it alone,” Fawn said.

Ruthie half thought her sister was right. But they had to look, didn’t they? What if whatever was in the box held a clue about what might have happened to their mother?

Ruthie got down on her knees, sitting before the hole in the floor in praying position. She reached for the gun, then stopped, her hand hovering just above it.

“Please don’t,” Fawn said, eyes frantic. “It’s dangerous.”

“Not unless you pull the trigger. Besides, maybe it isn’t even loaded.” Ruthie picked up the gun, surprised by its heaviness. Fawn clapped her hands over her ears and squeezed her eyes shut. Ruthie held the weapon gingerly by the metal barrel, not wanting to put her hand anywhere near the trigger. Carefully, she set it down on the floor next to her, making sure it was pointed away from her and
Fawn. She reached back down into the hole and pulled out the box.
Nike
, it said on the side.

Ruthie flipped open the top of the shoebox. There was a Ziploc bag tucked inside. The bag held two wallets: a black leather billfold and a large beige one designed for a woman. Ruthie held the clear plastic bag in her hand, suddenly afraid to open it. A prickling feeling worked its way from her hands up her arms and shoulders, settling in her chest.

This was silly. They were only wallets.

Ruthie opened the bag and pulled out the smaller billfold. It held a Connecticut driver’s license and credit cards belonging to a man called Thomas O’Rourke. He had brown hair, hazel eyes, was six feet tall, 170 pounds, and an organ donor. He lived at 231 Kendall Lane, Woodhaven, Connecticut. The woman’s wallet belonged to Bridget O’Rourke. There was no driver’s license, but she carried a Sears credit card, a MasterCard, and an appointment card for Perry’s Hair Salon. Both wallets had a little cash in them. Bridget had change in a special zippered pocket that also contained a small gold bracelet with a broken clasp. Ruthie pulled out the bracelet—it was too tiny to belong to an adult. She dropped it back in.

“Who are they?” Fawn asked.

“No idea.”

“But why are their wallets here?”

“I don’t know, Fawn. What do I look like—a walking crystal ball?”

Fawn chewed her lip harder.

“Sorry,” Ruthie said, feeling like shit. With Mom gone, she was all Fawn had right now.

She knew she hadn’t exactly been the best big sister, even from the very beginning. Ruthie had been obliged to be at Fawn’s birth. The midwife had handed her a drum—the beat was supposed to help keep her mom focused in labor. Ruthie thumped at it halfheartedly, feeling out of place and awkward. When Fawn came out, she was squalling and scrunch-faced—not at all precious or beautiful, despite what her parents and the midwife said. She’d reminded Ruthie of a grub.

As Fawn grew, Ruthie would occasionally play with her—dolls, dress-up, or hide-and-seek—but only because her parents made her, not out of sisterly love. Not that she didn’t love Fawn—she did—but their age difference seemed to put them on entirely different planets.

“All this is just making my head spin, you know?” Ruthie explained. She looked down at Thomas O’Rourke’s driver’s license again. “This is old. It expired, like, fifteen years ago.” She tucked it back into his worn leather billfold, put both wallets back in the bag, then carefully placed the bag right back in the shoebox.

“If Mom gets back, we have to pretend we never found any of this, okay? It has to be our secret.”

Fawn looked like she was about to cry.

“Come on,” Ruthie said, smiling like a cheerleader. “It’s not that hard. You can keep a secret, right? I know you can. You won’t even tell me where you and Mimi were hiding.”

“You said
if
,” Fawn said.

“Huh?”

“You said, ‘
If
Mom gets back.’ ” Her chin quivered, and a tear rolled down her left cheek.

Ruthie stood up and took her little sister in her arms, surprised to find her own eyes filling with tears. Fawn felt small and hollow. She was burning hot. Ruthie hugged her tighter, cleared her throat, and shook off the urge to cry. She needed to take Fawn’s temperature, get some Tylenol into her if it was as high as it felt. Poor kid. What a shitty time to be sick. Ruthie tried to remember everything Mom did when Fawn was sick—Tylenol, endless cups of her own fever-reducing herbal tea, piling the covers on Fawn, and reading her story after story. It was the same stuff she’d done when Ruthie was little.

“I meant
when
,” Ruthie whispered soothingly into Fawn’s ear. “
When
she shows up. Because she will.” Fawn didn’t hug back, just stayed limp in Ruthie’s arms.

“What if she doesn’t? What if she … 
can’t
or something?”

“She will, Fawn. She
has
to.”

She pulled away, looked down into Fawn’s face. “You feel okay, Fawn? You have a sore throat or anything?”

But Fawn’s glassy eyes were focused down on the secret hole in the floor.

“I think there’s something else in there,” she said.

Ruthie dropped to her knees and reached in. The edges of the compartment went farther back than she’d thought. Tucked against the far corner was the squared edge of a book. She pulled it out.

It was a worn hardcover with a faded paper jacket.

“Weird,” Ruthie said. “Why hide a book?” She picked it up, studied the cover, and started to flip through. Her eye caught on the words in the beginning diary entry:
The first time I saw a sleeper, I was nine years old
.

Ruthie scanned the rest of the entry.

“What’s it about?” Fawn asked.

“Seems like this lady thought there was a way to bring dead people back somehow,” she said. Kind of creepy, but, still, why would her mother keep it hidden?

“Ruthie,” Fawn said, “look at the picture on the back.”

There was a blurry black-and-white photo with a caption beneath it:
Sara Harrison Shea at her home in West Hall, Vermont, 1907
.

A woman with wild hair and haunting eyes stood in front of a white clapboard farmhouse that Ruthie recognized immediately.

“No way. It’s our house!” Ruthie said. “This lady lived here, in our house.”

Katherine believed that when the work was going well things just fell into place, as if by magic. It was the artist’s job to open herself up, let herself be guided to whatever the next step might be.

Today was not a day when things were going well.

Work on the new box wasn’t off to a great start. She was having a hard time making any kind of decisions: Should she use a photo of Gary, or make a little Gary doll to sit at the table with the gray-haired stranger? And what would she put on the table? It seemed a huge responsibility, choosing his last meal. Of all the scenes she’d re-created so far, this one relied the most on her imagination.

All morning, she’d felt Gary’s presence so strongly there with her that she was sure he’d been watching over her shoulder, mocking her. She could smell him, almost taste him in the air around her.

What do you think you’re doing?
he asked as she stared dumbly at the empty wooden box she’d just made.

“Trying to understand why the last thing you ever said to me was a lie,” she said out loud, her voice full of bitterness.

It wasn’t only that final lie that bothered her—it was everything that had happened in the days leading up to it. Gary had clearly been keeping something from her.

Two weeks before the accident, they’d gone on a weekend trip to the Adirondacks. The trip had given her such hope. It was the middle of October, the leaves were at their peak of color, and the air was full of change. They’d taken the Harley and stayed in a rustic cabin in the woods. It was the first time they’d gone away since
Austin’s death, and they’d actually had fun—for once, they weren’t completely consumed by grief and fury.

They drank a bottle of wine by the fire, laughed at each other’s jokes (Katherine said the man who ran the cabins had a nose like a turnip, and Gary went on to give produce features to everyone they knew—the best was Katherine’s sister Hazel, who had a head like an artichoke, spiky hair and all). They laughed until their bellies ached, then made love on the floor. And Katherine had thought that, at last, their heads had come back up above the water, they might not drown. They would find a way to continue on, to make a new life together without Austin. Maybe, just maybe, they’d have another child one day. Gary had even brought it up that last night, face flushed from wine. “Do you think?” he asked.

“Maybe,” she’d told him, smiling and crying at the same time.

“Maybe.”

She’d felt closer to Gary than ever. Like they’d been on this tremendous journey together, had seen each other at their absolute darkest, but here they were, coming out the other side, hand in hand.

On the way home, they’d stopped at a little antique store. Gary had bought a metal file box full of old photos and tintypes to add to his collection. There were some old letters and folded, yellowed pages tucked in among the photos, as well as a couple of envelopes. When he opened up one of the envelopes, he’d discovered the funny little ring, which he’d given to Katherine, slipping it on her finger, saying, “To new beginnings.” She’d kissed him then. One of those hungry, dizzying kisses from back in their college days. And she believed, as she turned the little ring on her finger, that they would start over.

But when they got back from the trip, Katherine immediately sensed that something wasn’t right. Gary was pulling away again, worse than ever this time. He was staying out late, leaving early, spending hours closed up in his studio—the workspace he’d walled off at the back of their loft. When Katherine asked him what he was working on, he shook his head, said, “Nothing.”

She reached out to him every way she could think of—cooking his favorite dinners, suggesting they take another motorcycle trip before the weather got too cold. She even tried asking him to tell her a story about the people in the photos he’d been restoring.

“I’m not working on any restorations right now,” he’d told her.

Then what was he doing, hour after hour, in his studio, door locked, music cranked up so high she could feel the pulse of it through the floorboards?

She kept the little ring on that he’d given her, staring at it, willing it to take her back in time to the way things had been at the cabin. But Gary remained distant, secretive.

She feared he was going back into the dark place he’d lived in after Austin died. The place where he was not only a man Katherine couldn’t recognize, but one she had actually been frightened of. A fragile man who drank too much, and who was prone to violent physical outbursts in which he would destroy thousands of dollars’ worth of camera equipment or smash their large-screen television. Once, perhaps two months after Austin’s death, Gary broke all the wineglasses in the kitchen and used a shard to slash at his forearm. The slow leak of blood told Katherine he hadn’t hit a major artery, but he might not be so lucky if he tried again.

“Gary,” she’d said, her voice as level as she could make it as she stepped slowly toward him. “Put it down, sweetie. Put the glass down.”

He looked at her as though he didn’t recognize her, and the truth was, she didn’t know him in that moment, either. Behind his eyes, there was no trace of the Gary she had fallen in love with and married.

“Gary?” she said again, as though trying to wake him gently from a bad dream.

He raised the jagged edge of broken glass and took a step toward her. She ran out of the apartment, terrified.

She never forgot his eyes: black and hollow, like empty, shadowy sockets.

They started grief counseling the following week. There were tearful, desperate apologies, and the rages gradually became rarer, briefer, more controlled. Eventually they stopped altogether—the boundless anger replaced by simple sadness. Gary was himself again, a mourning version of himself to be sure, but recognizable. Katherine believed they might be okay.

And then, back in October, once they’d returned from their weekend away, it seemed all the warning signs were back. Gary was letting the monster of his own grief take over again. And she wasn’t sure how much more she could take.

Then he left one morning to go to a photo shoot, and later that night, she was facedown on the couch, screaming into the cushions, clawing at them until they ripped, because two police officers had knocked on her door.

U
nsure of how to move forward with the inside of the
His Final Meal
box, she decided to begin work on the outside, and was giving the box a brick façade, making it look like Lou Lou’s Café. But when she went to paint the sign above the door, she couldn’t find any of her smallest paintbrushes. They must still be in a box somewhere, but she had already unpacked the cartons labeled
ART SUPPLIES
. Katherine sighed in frustration.

She spotted Gary’s battered red metal tackle box, which he’d used to organize his supplies for cleaning and restoring the old photographs he collected. There should be a small brush in there—he often did retouching by hand. Most people did all their restoration on the computer these days, but not Gary.

She popped open the box and went through it: can of compressed air, white cotton gloves, cotton swabs, soft cleaning brushes and cloths, alcohol, dyes and toners, and there, at the bottom, in a plastic case all their own, were the brushes, including just the one she needed.

Lifting the case out, she saw there was a small hardcover book tucked underneath. How odd.

It felt like a funny joke, a book Gary had planted there for her to find right now:
This is what I’ve become, a visitor
.

She reached for the book, flipped it open to page 12: