The Winter Girl

  ALSO BY MATT MARINOVICH

  Strange Skies

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by Matt Marinovich

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Cover images: (man) Matteo Malagutti, Italy / Moment Open / Getty Images; (face) Stephen Carroll / Moment Open / Getty Images

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Marinovich, Matt.

  The winter girl : a novel / Matt Marinovich. — First edition.

  pages ; cm

  ISBN 978-0-385-53997-5 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-385-53998-2 (eBook)

  I. Title.

  PS3613.A7488W56 2015

  813'.6—dc23 2014040417

  eBook ISBN 9780385539982

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Matt Marinovich

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Eve, Daphne, and Mato

  The two lights in the upstairs bedroom of the house next door were on a timer. I was certain of this.

  They turned off at 11:00 p.m. every night, as if some ritualistic loner decided to go to bed at the exact same minute every evening. I remember I looked out our kitchen window one night and I said something to Elise about no one really living there.

  It was early December and we were staying at her father’s place in Shinnecock Hills, about halfway between Hampton Bays and Southampton. His house, like the others on Ocean View Road, faced the bay. In the distance, you could see that thin strip of sand where the most expensive houses were. Green and red lights blinked way out there at night, where the helicopters landed. That winter, I never saw one.

  In the winter, hardly anybody was around. It was nice to see a distant light through the dark scrub pine.

  We’d been staying there for three weeks, so that Elise could visit her father in the hospital during the day. His colon cancer had metastasized and she was forced to take a leave of absence at the office where she worked as a speech therapist. It would have been nice if we’d had some of her other family members to help us, but Elise’s mother had passed away when she was a kid, and she heard from her younger brother only when he called to wish her a Merry Christmas from the Hamilton County jail in Ohio where he was serving a five-year sentence for distributing a controlled substance and burglary. Needless to say, it really pumped up the mood on Christmas Day when her phone rang and I could hear the recording: “You have a call from an inmate at the Hamilton County jail. If you choose to accept the call…”

  Of course, she always accepted the call, closing the bedroom door so she could talk to him for a few minutes in private. Being the curious type, I always turned down the volume on the television until I could just make out what she was saying. Since I’d never met her brother, or even spoken to him, all I had to go on was Elise’s half of the conversation. The only problem was that they spoke in a maddening sibling code. V-Rex I assumed was the nickname for her father. The Hub must have meant me. Screech was what she had nicknamed her profession for him. She always signed off with him in a loving, ironic voice that was one of my favorite things about her, mixing a perfect amount of affection and cruelty. Love you, Greasebag, she actually said once. He must have said something equally pithy, because she laughed out loud before he hung up. Then she composed herself behind the closed door as I slowly turned the volume up again, unable to ask her anything.

  At night, Elise and I mostly watched television and avoided talking about how long it was taking her father to die. By early December, it was getting dark pretty early. By then, we had a routine down. I’d have dinner ready by the time I heard the wheels of our car on the short gravel driveway. Sometimes I’d watch Elise gather herself together in the Volvo, as if she were trying to put away what she’d seen in the hospital so that she could deal with me. The overhead light would flip on and I could see her reaching for things on the passenger seat. Once she gripped the steering wheel and pulled at it, as if she were going to tear it off. Then I saw her wiping the tears away with her sleeves, her mouth still gaping with grief. If you’re wondering why I didn’t run out there and comfort her, I don’t have an exact answer. One of the reasons is that it had been going on for almost a year. He’d just gotten worse.

  That’s the terrible thing about watching a parent die. One day they look like they’re ready to check out, and the next doctors might be talking about a five-year plan. They had assured us that it was a matter of months. Something in me was telling me that I had to pace myself.

  The day she fell apart in the car was the first day I’d crept through the woods to take a look at the house next door. It was early in the afternoon, but the temperature had dropped below thirty and gray waves were sloshing in the bay. Hiding behind the crusty bark of a pine tree, I stood looking at the house’s gray shingles, its bay windows, the fence around an empty pool that was shaped like a giant kidney bean. I stood there smiling, trying to look harmless, in case someone really did live there and was hiding behind a curtain, looking right back at me.

  “It’s empty,” I said later. “I was right about the lights being on a timer.”

  I was standing over the sink, my glasses fogged by the rising steam from the pasta I’d dumped into the colander.

  Elise was sitting at the table in the living room a, bunch of her father’s bills in front of her, like a game of solitaire. A moment passed without her answering, but I was used to that. Our conversations had become satellite transmissions, like those far-flung reporters you see on TV, waiting for the delayed voice of an anchor.

  “It’s the off-season,” she said, picking up one of Victor’s bills. “Of course it’s empty.”

  I felt a surge of blood warm the back of my neck. It had been my great accomplishment of the day, finding out the truth about that house. She was wearing her father’s old Irish sweater. I walked up behind her and squeezed her shoulders, and noticed that she quickly put one of the bills behind another. I caught a glimpse of it just long enough to see that it was from PSEG, the electric company.

  “Another late payment?” I said.

  “Please don’t start with that.”

  Every few weeks, she went through a pile of them and paid them with our money. She had assured me that her father would pay her back when he got out of the hospital, but the subject added only another layer of stress to our situation. I decided to let it go, for the good of the night.

  “You want a massage?” I said.

  She tore open another envelope. I started to knead her shoulder, and for a
moment she leaned back and closed her eyes.

  “Imagine if this house was ours,” she said. “If we had a little space?”

  “We can pretend,” I said.

  “It’s not the same,” she said, tapping my right hand to let me know the massage was over. She wanted to get back to looking over Victor’s bills.

  That’s pretty much where we left it that night. We ate the pasta. We drank a bottle of wine. I can’t remember what we watched on television. I know we didn’t have sex. It was more or less like every other day that had preceded it for three weeks. In the back of my mind, I was wondering what kind of shape her father would be in when Elise showed up at the hospital in the morning.

  —

  I’m a photographer. I used to teach at the New School before they cut half the adjunct staff. In the fall, I ended up photographing Asian newlyweds in Prospect Park. It was a gig I got through an Asian student of mine. For three hundred bucks, I’d take fifty to sixty shots of the bride and groom, smiling at each other under some dying tree. It was always the same tree. An elm with a beautiful black bark that made the yellow leaves above seem even more unreal. I don’t know why the work stopped. But by late October, I didn’t get any more calls from Asian newlyweds, or even my Asian student. When I stopped by the New School to ask my old boss if he had any work, he asked me to walk with him as we talked. I thought that was odd since he had been sitting down when I walked into his office. We walked, he nodded his head, and he promised me he’d get in touch. Of course, he never did.

  Elise is a pediatric speech therapist. She shares an office with another speech therapist in Park Slope, Brooklyn. On Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays, Elise makes seventy-five bucks an hour teaching little kids to say “car” instead of “tar.” She has a real degree for this stuff, but one day, back when we were really in love, I pretended I was another speech therapist filling in for her. The parent brought her little girl in and I faked my way through a whole hour. Invented my own kind of speech therapy and probably set the kid back two years.

  “You’ve got to open your mouth like this,” I kept saying. “Like you’re blowing a bubble.”

  I thought that sounded good. The little girl’s mother sat watching us on the couch, and I could sort of see up her skirt. With Elise furtively listening outside the door, the whole situation became oddly arousing. Like I was skating on the surface of some real crime.

  The funny thing about the day I pretended to be a speech therapist is that it also turned into the first real argument between me and Elise. I basically told her that she’d wasted seventy-five thousand dollars on a master’s in speech and she told me I’d wasted ten years of my life pretending to be a photographer. We made up later that night, but looking back, I realize we never forgave each other. Part of each of us was always keeping an eye on the other from then on, even after we got married.

  The day she heard her father was getting really sick, I drove the car to her office. I double-parked on President Street and ran into her office suite. It was the first time she’d let me back in since I’d pretended to be a speech therapist. It was a narrow office. I’m sure it still looks pretty much the same. A small desk. Sheetrock walls through which every loud telephone conversation of the lawyers next door can be heard. A thin beige wall-to-wall carpet. A thick wood door with frosted glass panels on either side.

  It was late September when she got the news that her father’s colon cancer had spread. I held her in my arms in the office. I said all the stuff any normal guy would say and I meant it. So sad. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I would have added He’s a great guy, but I couldn’t force myself to spit that one out.

  Elise’s mother had left her father a long time ago. Her mother is Puerto Rican and her father’s Caucasian. The truth is, he married his housekeeper. He was vaguely rich by then, making all his money in direct marketing. He had made a pile on the Hensu Knife, then sold his agency at the right time, just before the company diversified and went down the drain.

  Needless to say, after years of abuse, his late wife or incarcerated son didn’t make it to Southampton Hospital that day, weren’t there to inhale the vague scent of urine in the private room. I was the one who kept on ferrying snacks back from the vending machine, buying newspapers he’d end up never reading, changing channels on the television above his bed as Elise held his chalky, dry hand.

  I clipped his fucking nails.

  Elise had fallen asleep halfway through doing them. Her father was asleep too. I watched the nail clipper slowly slip off the bedsheet and fall to the floor, and I sat watching it for a good long time as it got darker in the room, and Arthur, of all things, played on the television above his bed. After about ten minutes I leaned over and picked up the nail clipper and I resumed the job. It’s odd clipping the nails of a sleeping man you vaguely detest. There were eight fingers that Elise hadn’t finished, and by the time I got to his pinkie, he was awake, his dark blue eyes murkily looking at me.

  “You’re a manicurist now?” is what he said.

  There was no point in trying to explain what I was doing, or how much his daughter loved him, or why I thought he was a hypocrite and a liar. Instead, I tossed the clipper on the table beside the bed and told Elise I was going to do some shopping in town. I stepped through the automatic doors of the emergency room and kept walking. I sat in our black Volvo S40 and turned on the radio and listened to 1010 WINS, the news anchor gently laying out the day’s murders and a late report of a missing woman who was last seen leaving a bar with a registered sex offender.

  I drove down Gin Lane into Southampton. There seemed to be a red bow or hanging strands of Christmas lights in the window of every store. Even the hardware store had gotten into the spirit, with a mechanical Santa waving his arm in the window. I was stopped at a light, trying to figure out why it seemed like something was missing, and then I realized what it was: people. There were only two people out on the street—an older couple who waved at me, mostly because they were concerned I might run them over when the light turned green. I waved back and continued driving down the empty street. Past a Saks Fifth Avenue, a clapboard church, the white picket fence of a small graveyard.

  It was about two weeks before Christmas, and Elise was visiting her father in the hospital again, and I was standing on the frozen front lawn of his house, looking out at the bay. Peering through a set of old-fashioned binoculars. I scanned the inlet, where a duck blind bobbed on the opaque, wind-whipped waves. In the distance, on that spit of land where the most expensive houses are, a pool of golden sunlight was growing, carving itself into the sea until it blinded me just to look at it. I turned right and looked through the binoculars at the house next door. Its shingled, gabled roof. The sky reflected in its bay windows. The lounge chairs stacked up on one side of the pool. It was twice the size of Elise’s father’s house. Three chimneys. At least four balconies on which no one stood, admiring the view. There was a deer path that led from her father’s property to the house next door, and I traded the binoculars for my digital camera and stole up to it again, looking through the lens as I walked toward the pool, as if being a photographer were the perfect excuse.

  I let myself through the small gate that led to the pool deck, which was in terrible condition. I walked across it, certain that I would fall right through the wooden planks at any second. I looked down into the oblong concrete cavity, about fifty feet long, thirty feet wide, with brackish water at the bottom, the reflection of me holding my Nikon.

  I walked around the house itself, touching the levers and handles of every door. They gave half an inch, but each one was locked. In what I supposed was the downstairs bedroom, a blind had been pulled almost all the way to the floor. Getting down on my hands and knees, I could see a low queen-size bed, a watercolor painting of an Indian squaw on the wall, and right in front of me, a phallic-looking cactus, drooping all the way out of its clay pot to get at the meager light that spilled onto the carpet.

  I stood up again and moved quickl
y past the windows of the living room, noting a winding staircase and an assortment of incredibly green fake plants, including a ficus tree that had even somehow shed its fake leaves onto the painted wooden floor. There was a miniature Cleopatra statue on the glass coffee table.

  I could see right into the kitchen. There was another bouquet of fake flowers on the counter, in a clay pot. There was a table right at the window, set for three people. There was a large porcelain pig wearing a chef’s hat, and it was carrying a chalkboard, on which someone had neatly written THE BEST IS YET TO COME.

  —

  “He’s a little better,” Elise said, when she got home from the hospital that day. I was tucking newspaper under three logs, building a fire. I watched the sports section burst into flame, an athlete’s sideways touchdown catch incinerated. She was in the kitchen, and I could almost hear her thoughts as she slowly walked across the floor. He hasn’t made dinner. It’s the least he could do.

  “That’s fantastic,” I said, stuffing more newspaper under the log, crumpling another sheet and getting it ready.

  “What were you doing with the binoculars?” she said.

  I winced a little, realizing I’d left them out.

  “Looking at birds,” I said.

  Elise emerged from the kitchen with a skeptical look on her face. I turned toward her, my cheek warmed by the popping flames.

  “Looking at birds?” she said, raising her eyebrow. She was wearing black cotton tights under a pleated gray skirt. She peeled off her black gloves, setting them carefully down on one of the pompous coffee-table books her father had probably never read. The log popped again and I pushed the grate back, sat down on the polished stonework next to the fire.