The Winter in Anna Page 4

“I heard there’s a dance there tonight.”

  “There was. A high school dance.”

  “High school? Shit.”

  “It’s over now.”

  She was walking a little faster, but the car matched her pace.

  “Yeah? Well . . . you want to come into town anyway?”

  “No. Thank you.”

  “Why not?”

  “I have to get home.”

  He moved slightly and the green light lit a corner of his smile.

  “You’re in the middle of nowhere.”

  “My home’s right up the road here.”

  “No kidding? Well . . . I’ll bring you right back.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Come on. I’ll buy you a Coke or something.”

  “No. Everything’s closed.” She was walking as fast as she could now without running and felt slightly out of breath.

  “No shit? Well, just a drive. You can show me the sights.”

  “There are no sights.”

  “Is there a streetlight?”

  She stopped. “What?”

  “A streetlight. You know, like a lamp hanging from a pole.”

  She had to think about this.

  “Yes. On Main Street.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “My name?”

  “Yes, your name. What’s your name?”

  “Anna.”

  “All right. Anna, I would like to see that streetlight. I haven’t seen a single streetlight since I came up here. I would like to see that streetlight with you.”

  He leaned across the seat and opened the passenger door. The dome light came on and she got her first good look at him.

  “About a half a mile up,” she said, “on your right, you can’t miss it.” And she was running, stumbling down into the ditch and across the broken pasture toward the lights of her home, and she was never sure because of the roar in her head from her own ragged breathing, but she thought she heard him laughing.

  Lying in bed that night, wide awake, watching the hills smolder, unable to stand the weight of the covers pressing against her, she kicked them aside and felt a warmth, a mild electric current working itself up her body. She saw the hard planes of his arms and shoulders etched in the shadows, the way his face with its hollow cheeks, thin, serious mouth, and glinting eyes emerged in the light, and she thought, He knows where I live.

  Of course, I can’t know that last part. The story Christina told me ends with Anna running through the dark toward her home. But there was always a longing about Anna, a wistfulness for some lost thing that surfaced at odd times. She would hesitate over the perfect egg of a stone left behind on a lakeshore, the pattern of a cobweb in a window, a pinwheel of light through a rotting barn wall. Yes, these are moments of stray beauty that can capture anyone, but they seemed like something more to her. She would pick up the stone, brush the cobweb, hesitate in the pins of light, and there was a sadness when she set them aside, as if some elusive connection had been missed.

  So I see her in bed that night, and whether the hills were burning or not, whether it was hot or cold in her room, whether she kicked the covers aside or pulled them closer, I know her thoughts, and they were that she had been found.

  Chapter 7

  WE WERE BECOMING FRIENDS, good friends, I thought, and yet there were mysteries, always, things I could not fit into the woman I was coming to know. They were there from the beginning. Like sudden changes in the weather.

  “Okay,” I said to Todd, “I’ll buy one.”

  “That’s funny.”

  “I’m serious. I’ll buy one.”

  “No, man, it was just practice.”

  “I know, but I need a vacuum. I really do. My apartment has carpet.”

  The thatch of straw on the top of Todd’s head seemed to stand up even straighter in alarm.

  “No. But. Man. It costs five hundred dollars!”

  “But there’s an installment plan. You said so yourself.”

  “Jesus, Ricky. I didn’t—”

  “You’re trying to sell vacuum cleaners, right? Well, I’m buying one.”

  A late spring storm had blown in, a blizzard that had trapped us all, knocking out the electricity in my building and forcing me to move in with Todd, who rented a small house from the Shoemakers directly across from the newspaper office. We’d been thrown together for three days and, among many things, I’d discovered that Todd had been driving to Bismarck on weekends and training to become a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. The last step in the training was a full dress rehearsal sales pitch in front of a friend. With no one going anywhere, I had qualified.

  He stared at the shining metal machine at his feet: the best vacuum cleaner known to man—or so he had just spent the last half hour telling me.

  “I can’t do this. I can’t sell these things.”

  “Do you really need the money?”

  “I don’t know. I just thought it would be something to do.”

  “You can’t feel guilt as a salesman.”

  “I don’t feel guilt, man. I just don’t like ripping people off.”

  “Okay. Still, it could be a problem.”

  “Yeah . . . You shouldn’t buy one. Five hundred bucks, that’s crazy.”

  “I do need a vacuum cleaner. I should clean my place every once in a while.”

  “You can borrow my old Hoover, man. It works fine.”

  “All right.”

  “Cool.”

  Todd kicked the vacuum cleaner over with the ball of his foot. We stared out the living room window, the storm an unchanging wall of white painted on the glass. After three days we had stopped hearing the wind except when it seemed to move the old house.

  “I think it’s getting better out there,” Todd said.

  I had learned he was a good guy who liked to drink beer and watch wrestling and old Andy Griffith reruns. He was willing to watch almost anything, however, and we’d survived seventy-two hours together on Budweiser and cable. But the Budweiser was almost gone, and after last night’s horror movie marathon, so was the cable.

  “It’s definitely getting better,” I said.

  “Definitely.”

  Slumped on the couch, Todd stared into his can of beer and squished it. The Wile E. Coyote tattoo on his bicep scrunched up as if Wile E. had just been hit by an anvil.

  “You really gonna put out a paper this week?”

  “Art says they’ve never missed an issue.”

  “What are you going to fill it with?”

  “Well, there’s a storm.”

  Todd smiled. “I guess that’s news. I’ll be running the presses. Paul’s buried alive out there.”

  “Cool.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah.”

  He slumped on the couch while I remained sunk in the overstuffed chair he had picked up at some rummage sale. The remote control lay on the floor, tragically just out of the reach of both of us.

  “I’ll call the city office and find out when we’ll get dug out,” I said, just to say something. “I’ll take some pictures downtown, and I’ll get Anna to take some up her way.”

  Todd grimaced.

  “What? There’s something else?”

  “No, no, man, it’s nothing like that. It’s just . . . Anna doesn’t do so good in storms.”

  I didn’t think I’d heard him right. “Do so good in storms?”

  “Yeah. Snowstorms. She doesn’t function so well in them . . . Well, doesn’t function at all in them, really.”

  He tossed his empty beer can toward the trash can. Wile E. Coyote jumped as if stuck by a pitchfork.

  “Wait a minute. She lives in North Dakota—she was born in North Dakota—and she doesn’t do so well in snowstorms?”

  He shrugged. “You remember the big storm we had last year? No, you weren’t here yet. We had this big storm, probably bigger than this one, and it knocked everything down, and Stacy—she was our editor then—
was stuck out of town, so Art and Louise had to take over, and they were trying to get Anna to help, and she wouldn’t answer her phone. They called her every couple of hours and you could hear it ringing on the other end of the line, and where could she be, right? But she wouldn’t pick up. Not just during the storm, but a couple of days afterward, too, when it was just clear and cold, and everybody was trying to dig out and get things started up again. So Art’s getting worried, and he sends me up there. Paul has a snowmobile. I took that. It was a blast, man. There were snowbanks so high I was driving past people’s second-story windows.”

  “Where was she?”

  His grin dissolved into a look of confusion.

  “She was home. It wasn’t even so bad up there. The wind had blown most of the snow down into the valley. The ridges were really pretty bare. There were a bunch of kids out playing in that gulch they got up there, digging tunnels and building forts. I look, but I can’t see her kids. I knock and I stand in the doorway for a while and then I get worried. I mean, it just didn’t seem right, you know, so I try the door and it’s not locked and I open it and step into the kitchen and I call her.”

  He hesitated, probably wishing he hadn’t started this story.

  “So her boy, the older one, comes running out of the back of the house. He looks scared until he recognizes me. The little girl just peeks around the corner. I ask them if their mom’s okay, and they both nod, but, you know, it just feels weird. I’m standing there, trying to figure out what to do, and Anna comes around the corner. She’s wearing a robe and it looks like she hasn’t been out of bed or taken a shower, man, for a week.”

  He paused again, even more uncomfortable.

  “You want a beer?” I said.

  He nodded gratefully. When I came back from the kitchen he opened his beer and took a drink.

  “So I ask Anna if she’s sick, and she kind of shakes her head, like she doesn’t understand the question or something. The kids are looking worried, and I wonder why they’re not out there with all the other kids. Snow day, right? And I’m wondering what I should do, call Art or the police or something. And Anna says, ‘It’s bad weather. It’s just bad weather. Tell Art I’m sorry. I’ll be in tomorrow.’”

  Todd shrugged and took a drink of beer. In the kitchen the back door shuddered once in the wind.

  “Have you ever noticed,” I said, “that she always wears sleeves that are too long?”

  “Yeah, that’s weird, too.”

  “What do you think was going on?”

  He looked down at his bicep and flexed. He was a skinny guy and it really wasn’t that impressive.

  “I don’t know, man, I’m just the printer. I think she doesn’t do so well in snowstorms.”

  That was already many years after she met the boy, where Anna’s winter begins, and it was months before I would finally hear the story. But when I remember Todd telling me this, I see Anna out in a storm, stumbling down the steps and into a blind world where everything disappears and, far too late for it to matter, I understand.

  Chapter 8

  I SAID MY PARENTS WERE COLLEGE TEACHERS, but what I didn’t tell you was that my father wasn’t teaching anymore when I dropped out of school. He’d had the first of the strokes that would eventually kill him, and he was stuck at home, half blind, an erratic parody of the man he had been, some parts of his personality larger, some smaller, some strangely shaded, a familiar portrait with the colors all slightly off. My mother was still teaching and trying to hold everything together, including keeping track of my younger brother and sister, both in high school and trouble, roughly to the same degree.

  I came home right after the stroke, stood at the side of the hospital bed, and listened to my father, a brilliant man, loop through a two-minute conversation repeated over and over as the beginning disappeared from his mind before he reached the end. We had always been close in the way of fathers and sons who can’t get along because they are bound by the same flaws, and seeing him there with part of his mind sheared away was like being severed from my own connection to the material world. The doctors would get him on blood thinners and God knows what other meds and his memory would get better, but not so many other things.

  I went back to the university and missed most of the worst, but college life, which already echoed with too much of my young past, now felt as insignificant as a children’s play put on in the basement on a slow winter day. There was no real reason why I was there. I’d gone to school and taken up journalism because I liked reading, I didn’t mind writing, and there seemed to be very little math. I also liked that it wasn’t teaching; my parents’ life had left me with a dread of the desiccated, chalk-filled routines of the classroom. But my choices were no more profound than that; they were a stall, a delay. Somewhere up ahead, I was sure, my life would take up its main course and become a raging Amazon of purpose and direction, even if it had so far been a series of meandering, minor eddies in which I drifted along until the course ran dry.

  Now, with my father’s illness, what had been the best thing about going to school, the sense of stealing time from responsibility, was barren, attended by a constant whisper of shame. Everyone said I should stay in school and I knew I should be at home helping out. The problem was I couldn’t make myself believe I would be any real help at all.

  What you want desperately at a time like that is for something to mean something to you, not the thing you are fleeing, but something else. I had been seeing Emily since shortly after arriving at the university, when I first stumbled into her sneaking into the bathroom in my dorm one morning. It was a men’s dorm and she’d spent the night with someone—I was smart enough never to ask who—and she was wearing an oversized Clash T-shirt and nothing else, which was really all it took. I complimented her on the shirt, stepped back out the door, and waited until she was finished. But when I left the bathroom, she was waiting in the hall and asked if I wanted to get a coffee. I said it seemed she might be busy; she said that had been a mistake and was over. She might have been discussing some half-forgotten annoyance that had happened in the distant past, perhaps another life completely.

  “Give me five minutes,” she said, running down the hall, stopping, and turning once to consider me. “You know, you look a little like Mick Jones.”

  I don’t really, not at all. But we liked the same music and we liked playing tennis and getting late-night Mexican. If we were ill suited in other ways more profound and complicated than either of us wanted to think about, well, it was college and there were certainly stranger couples than we were.

  Still, there were times when I was walking across the campus at night to meet up with Emily and each step seemed to get heavier and heavier until I stopped and leaned against a wall with a leaden sense of defeat. She was pretty, sexy in a slightly old-fashioned way, bobbed blond hair, startling light blue eyes, and a sensual mouth, and, if I’m honest, that was why I always kept walking. The truth is, we were a fallback couple pretending to each other we were something more, spending time with our arms draped around each other at parties while measuring other possibilities out of the corners of our eyes.

  This was how it was, anyway, until shortly before my father’s stroke, when Emily started seeing the owner of a club everyone went to. He was young for a businessman, but a lot older than those of us who were making him prematurely wealthy. Suddenly I had lost my girl, if I’d ever really been able to call her that, and the place I went to most often at night. How I might have measured the relative weight of these losses I can’t tell you, but on a night after my father had his stroke, I was sitting on the steps of my dorm, staring across the campus quad. The quad had a flagpole at its center where all the sidewalks met like the spokes of a wheel. Emily and a girl I didn’t know appeared out of the shadows beside the Student Union and started across, moving in and out of the light from the faux-British streetlamps above the sidewalk.

  The night was a stage and, as she stepped from spotlight to spotlight, I found mys
elf waiting for each reappearance with a surprising urgency. I knew her walk. I knew that tilt of her head. I knew the way she held her shoulders and I knew that slightly distracted smile, and the fact I had lost her, had half wanted to lose her, filled me with such panic I couldn’t breathe. I had found the thing I wanted, I needed, I had to have, and it made no sense, and I felt it all the more strongly for that. It was all I could do not to run across the grass and tackle her, carrying her away to a cabin in the Rockies or an island in the middle of the Pacific, and yet at the same time, I was aware of the incongruity of my feelings, and that only made it worse, as if I had lost the ability to hold the world in its correct form, had woken up to find some essential part of myself missing.

  Not calling her the next two days was like willing myself not to place my hand over a bleeding wound. The act of not acting consumed the totality of my being every minute of each day. I read from my roommate’s collection of Louis L’Amour westerns by a lamp until dawn and then closed my eyes briefly before stumbling through classes. The end of my academic career came the following morning in transformational grammar as I stared at the second page of my exam without picking up my pencil for ten minutes, folded the paper so the blank pages weren’t visible, brought it to the teacher’s desk, pretended I didn’t notice his look of concern, walked out of the classroom, down the hall, and out into a day that seemed to explode with color.

  I tore the Sentinel’s phone number off the bottom of the advertisement and within a week I had my apartment over the bank, was working as a sportswriter, and had left everything and most everyone I knew behind, without bothering to tell anyone at school. And it was only in this sudden, impulsive move from east to west, from the leafy college town on the edge of Minnesota’s lake country to the windblown, brown Dakota plains that I felt my sense of self return.

  The nights were still long, but the days had a simplicity and order. I had these things to do, and when they were done, I had done the things I had to do, and I could play pool at the Buffalo Bar and eat chicken pot pies late at night and read Travis McGee mysteries and listen to Minnesota Twins games on the radio, and, even before I became the editor, life started to feel okay and then pretty good. It was only at unexpected moments, when my mind had wandered too far into some unmarked cul de sac, that I found myself seeing her short, tousled blond hair and wide, crooked smile that still did something to me, slightly blurred my vision. But it wasn’t that often and most of the time I felt pretty good.