The Winter in Anna Read online

  Really, it was entirely possible I felt fine.

  You don’t need anyone else that badly. You can live just fine by attending to the day in front of you. These were lessons I had learned. These were ideas I had fixed against the chaos. These were the beliefs I held fast on the nights I sat in my blue chair and watched dawn peel away the darkness above Main Street. Yes, I was doing well. I did not need anyone.

  Chapter 9

  THE THING ABOUT LATE SPRING BLIZZARDS is they’re followed by late spring floods. The snow stopped, the sun came out, the sky and earth were the same startling unblemished white, as if God had created the universe ten seconds ago, and then it started to melt, and soon the streets were black and running with dirty water and mud was everywhere and the river was rising too fast.

  During my few months in town, the Derry River had been this half-asleep brown snake that wound through the oldest neighborhoods, a quiet presence hidden behind cottonwoods and cedars that you could wade through in spots or skate across in the winter with a single hard push. Now it began creeping up dead lawns, approaching stone foundations already turning black with dampness. The river ran along the edge of downtown and briefly paralleled the railroad tracks, where it was kept back by a low levee that people sometimes sat along on nice days. Soon the water was lapping near the top of the embankment.

  Like most every bad thing in life, it was lousy for everybody else, but good for the newspaper business. We had two weeks of real news: storm, melt, rising river, and, best of all, flood. I never saw how Anna did in snowstorms. When the sun came out I spent half a day trudging around town taking pictures, and when I called her the next morning, she was ready to come back to work—paler, perhaps, a little drawn, but businesslike and resolute.

  They were piling sandbags along the riverbank by then. Everyone knew what was coming. But an ice dam farther up the river held the water back until it had risen in mass, a sudden lake that came pouring out when the ice gave way, rushing downriver, tearing holes in the dikes and flooding the low-lying parts of town. For a week we worked day and night, taking more pictures, interviewing families forced to leave their homes, the kids and old men and women filling sandbags, the police, the firemen, the mayor.

  Art and Louise released everyone else to work on the dikes and then the fallback dikes, so it was just me and Anna putting together the paper. We stumbled in at the end of each day, pants legs covered in mud, hands chapped and raw, heads overfull, to turn what we had learned into news, typing long into the night. It turned out Anna knew how to run every piece of equipment except the press. I handled the darkroom work, watching scenes resolve in the developing tray: houses like floating islands, figures bent over sandbags in the narrow beams of truck lights, men collapsed in exhaustion against the side of their pickups while darts of sleet streaked the picture like static.

  Anna did everything else, setting the type and the headlines, designing most of the pages while I typed up the last-minute news. On Thursday night, when we met in the back room to lay out the pages, the building echoed as if we had been forgotten, left behind after the bombs fell. Todd, working now on the reinforced dike being thrown up to keep the water from reaching downtown, was scheduled to show up at midnight to run the presses, but we had no idea exactly what we were going to do with the paper after that, how we were going to get it delivered and who would be there to receive it.

  Neither of us had been sleeping much. We had twice as many pages as normal to put together and we were starting late. For the first three hours we worked without saying anything more than necessary. “Have you got the two-point border?” “Can we crop that half an inch?” “We need jump space if we’re going to run this full.” It was a little after eleven when I straightened up at my light table, feeling the bones in my spine crack back into place, and realized we were going to make it. A rush of exhausted exhilaration swept over me.

  “We’re going to put out a paper.”

  Anna smiled tiredly, focused on her work. “That was the idea, yes.”

  “No, I mean a paper. A great paper—in the middle of a flood. A great fucking paper, full of all kinds of stuff people want to see. This is what it’s all about. This is the whole thing. And we did it!”

  I could see she was pleased.

  “And you,” I said. “You wrote the best thing in here. The story about the Sweeneys losing their home.”

  This left her flustered. She kept her eyes on the light table.

  “Come on. It’s good. It’s good. It’s good!”

  Anna shook her head slightly side to side, as if the compliment were a bothersome fly.

  “We need to celebrate,” I said.

  “Maybe we should finish first.”

  “We’re almost finished. We’re finished. We can take a five-minute break.” I looked around the mausoleum of the back shop in search of our celebration. All I found was the stale coffee in the pot. “We should have brought some beer.”

  Anna finished laying the last strip of copy into place at the bottom right of a page and stepped back to view it critically.

  “Well,” she said, “there’s Louise’s secret stash.”

  “What?”

  “She keeps a bottle in Art’s office. You thought she was just naturally like that in the morning?”

  • • •

  THE HALF-FULL BOTTLE hadn’t had a chance to gather any dust. Anna slid it out from behind a stack of North Dakota Horizons magazines and twisted open the cap. She poured modest shots into our empty coffee mugs.

  “To us.” I tipped the mug back.

  Anna sipped. “What’s so funny?”

  “It’s blackberry brandy. I drank this when I was a kid . . . What? What’s funny about that?”

  “Nothing.” Anna lifted her mug again. “To the paper.”

  “The Shannon Sentinel, long may she wave.”

  Art’s office was claustrophobic, his grandiose banker’s desk piled high with newspapers and other papers teetering on the edge of chaos, the bookshelves lining the walls ready to disgorge a sympathetic landslide of old magazines, notebooks, unopened correspondence, and sheaves of yellowing typewritten pages that probably traced the history of Shannon back to the moment the first railroad surveyor’s boots hit the ground. We’d left the lights off, as if we were misbehaving teenagers, so we stood in the middle of this disorder in the pale wedge of light from the half-open door.

  It was one of those moments when it’s just you and someone else and the rest of the world has vanished, was quite possibly never there to begin with. Yet the stories we had been working on, the photographs we had been staring at, were so alive in my mind they persisted as an afterimage, as if the walls had fallen away and we were simultaneously floating above Shannon and could see the engorged, moonlit river, the men and women behind the dikes, the ordered rows of Monopoly houses waiting for the water, and then, surrounding it all, the vast blank blackness of the state, the eternal frame on our portrait. We were somehow alone and standing close to each other amid all this.

  In the suddenly awkward silence Anna’s gaze met mine and then slid quickly over my shoulder. I thought she was afflicted with the same double vision: the world, near and far.

  “A heck of a storm,” I said.

  Her already uncertain smile froze.

  This bothered me. We had been working together nonstop for hours and I wanted to hold on to the feeling of shared toil and triumph.

  “It’s been great, hasn’t it?” I said.

  “Eric.”

  “No, no, of course, terrible. But come on—”

  I had her attention. She was watching me now with interest, as if I had suggested the night could be painted some brighter color.

  “I suppose it could have been worse,” she said.

  “Come on. I know it’s bad, but look what we’ve done.”

  Anna sipped her drink carefully. “Are you saying it’s been fun?”

  “Yes, you know it’s supposed to be fun.”

  “
I’ve heard.”

  “Here’s to fun.”

  We touched coffee cups and I felt the brandy as a warm flush. Anna rocked forward as she emptied her cup and the faint wedge of yellow slid to illuminate her eyes, her left breast, her hip.

  “Well, I suppose . . .” I said.

  She stared into her empty cup and then rocked back slowly and looked up at me.

  “Yes.”

  But an idea had come to Anna. I could see it. I had no idea what, but I felt myself about to be drawn into a conspiracy—I could tell she was about to suggest something that broke the rules and the idea buoyed her heart, and before I even knew what it was, I was there.

  “You know what we should do?” Anna said. “We should bring the paper to everyone working on the dikes.”

  The idea took a second to settle in my overheated brain.

  “Deliver it by hand—”

  “Yes.”

  “Just give it away—”

  “Yes.”

  “—to everybody out there! To let them know—”

  “Yes!”

  And that was what we did. Todd was nervous when I told him to run three hundred extra copies, wanting to call Art or Louise to make sure it was okay, but I told him it wasn’t necessary—I was the editor, dammit—and there was a certain unhinged exhilaration in saying that, especially since I was still coherent enough to be aware I really had no authority to spend more money on newsprint. It didn’t matter. I was too taken with the idea to hesitate. Todd ran the extra copies, and we threw them into the back of the office pickup, and Anna and I drove them out to the war zone as the first light streaked a gray sky.

  The men and women shoveling sand into bags, dirty faces the exhausted pallor of the water leaking through the dikes, looked at us with disbelief, as if we had woken them from a dream. They straightened slowly over their shovels, from their places in the line passing sandbags forward, from the side of the dike, and fumbled with the pages with numb, gloved hands. Then they were squinting at the pictures and elbowing each other, holding the paper out for a better look, handing copies back and forth, and it was only for a few minutes, of course, before they had to go back to work, but they held the paper and they smiled and laughed and frowned; they read bits aloud and pointed at people they recognized in photos. Anna and I stood to the side and every once in a while one of them looked up at us with a mixture of disbelief and awkward Midwestern gratitude.

  We drove along the dikes dropping off copies every block or so, ending where the biggest battle was going on and the most people working. They took the paper and it was the same. They opened the pages; they read; they looked up. Some of them complained good-naturedly about their photos; some of them thanked us, but nobody had to say anything, really. Newspapers were folded and shoved in pockets, stuck inside jackets, carried to cars and trucks for safekeeping. Shovels scraped into gravel, bags passed from hand to hand with a heaviness you could feel from a distance, the air filled with plumes of breath, groans, and good-natured complaint. The river was still rising on the other side of the dike.

  We were both exhausted and freezing. I felt Anna shivering against my shoulder and, maybe without even knowing, she leaned in to me for warmth. I became very aware of this, and felt myself doing the same. It was time to for us to go home, but we stood there, very gently leaning against each other for support, the last few copies still tucked under our arms, neither of us ready to leave.

  Chapter 10

  THE LAST ROUND OF DIKES HELD, more or less. There was a break that flooded a couple more houses and a vacant lot on the edge of town, but the river fell with the same swiftness with which it had risen, and the earth resurfaced, black and battered. The sky was such a psychotically cheerful blue that the memory of those gray days soon felt like a fever dream. Art looked a bit ashen when I told him about the three hundred extra copies, and the financially unfortunate fact that I had given them all away, but Louise was nodding so vigorously, he had little choice but to pretend it was a brilliant idea.

  The town seemed quietly grateful. We were minor league heroes, at least in our own minds, and The Shannon Sentinel sailed into the summer with a giddy, light-headed, end-of-school feeling, even though of course for us there was no end of anything, just another issue to put out every Thursday night. It didn’t matter. It felt easier. It felt less like work and more like some oddball calling, a thing all of us in that small office with desk chairs bumping up against each other were meant to be doing.

  I noticed there were a couple of men, one a farmer, another a junior officer of some kind at the bank, who stopped by the front desk with excuses to talk to Anna. The farmer was shy and the bank officer spoke a little too much, but they both seemed kind and clearly interested. Anna listened, smiled, and maintained a kind of bland, polite distance that provided no encouragement whatsoever.

  On a warm Thursday night with the doors propped open so we could enjoy a spring breeze heavy with the scent of the flowering apple tree in Art and Louise’s yard across the street, I teased her about the men.

  “That farmer. What’s his name—Orville?—seems pretty nice.”

  “Orlin.”

  “Orlin? Jesus, Norwegians. Anyway, I think you could definitely do worse.”

  Anna stripped a border around a photograph and trimmed the tape neatly at the corner. “You do, do you?”

  “Absolutely. Sweet and not bad-looking. Tall. That’s always good, right? And look at the pickup truck he’s driving. I’d say he’s doing all right.”

  “Oh, I think he’s doing just fine.”

  “Well . . . then. What’s the problem here?”

  “I am done with men.”

  She meant to say it lightly, but it didn’t quite come off. The silence that always floated in the big, empty room settled around us.

  “Really? All men? All three billion men on the planet—Chinese, Japanese, Indian, French, Norwegian, Irish, Portuguese? Short, tall, fat, skinny—”

  “Definitely the Irish and Portuguese. I’ve never really cared for short or fat men, either.”

  “All right, we’re narrowing the field. That’s fine. Choosy is good. But that still leaves—wait, let me do the math—one-point-six billion men.”

  She still hadn’t looked up. “I think you’ve got the decimal off. I think it’s one-point-six men.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, you better watch your decimals. Remember, that’s what got Stacy in trouble.”

  For some reason I couldn’t let it go. “I don’t know. We can’t all be that bad.”

  “No one really believes how bad you can be,” Anna said. She stepped back to consider her finished page, flexing the fingers in her right hand with a barely visible wince. She had early onset arthritis, one of a series of health problems I would discover over time. She was never well, really, when I knew her.

  “Come on,” I said. “I was just—”

  “You know I was married.”

  The flat declaration of that statement, too, bothered me in a way I didn’t quite understand.

  “Well, yes. The kids—”

  “The kids. Yes. Well, it didn’t go so well.”

  “But it was just one marriage.”

  “It was enough.”

  “But it’s the modern age—marriages are like hats, you try them on until you find the one you like,” said the twenty-year-old with no experience trying on multiple hats or marriages.

  “Really? Is that how it works now?” And again, it was a little too sharp. I wished I could rewind this conversation and start over.

  “Absolutely,” I said, because it seemed the best bet was to hurry past whatever was going on.

  “Here’s how it worked for me, Eric. The first time I left, I came back after a week. I told myself it was just for a day. I had the baby to care for, and I had to get everything together. I left her with a friend in Bismarck, and I came back. He—we—had been living in this trailer out in the country and, when I came back, he called my mother and
father, and they drove out to try to convince me to give him another chance. They’re Catholic, you know, and he always charmed them; he always helped out . . .”

  She laid a fresh sheet of paper on the light table and bent toward the faint blue lines on the empty page, her perfect profile lit from below, her eyes reflecting the color of a clouded lake.

  “They tell me I have to give him a second chance; he knows he’s made some mistakes, but he’s promised to change. He’s going to change. He’s really going to change. He’s gone out while they’re talking and when they leave he comes back. He asks me if I’m going to give him another chance.”

  She fumbled at the edge of the table and found her coffee cup. The strips of copy were arranged on the table beside the empty page but she hadn’t touched them.

  “I said I would. He said good, I could cook him dinner. He knew I didn’t like blood. I have trouble with blood. So he goes out the front door and he gets this big slab of meat from something he had killed, a deer, or an elk, and he slaps it on the table in front of me. Cook this, he says, and he goes back out the door. I’m trying to cut up this bloody meat in the sink and I can hear my parents saying I have to stay with him, I have to give him a chance, and it just seems so absurd, it’s funny. It seems like it’s happening to someone else. My little girl is in Bismarck and I’m cutting up this bloody meat . . . and I look down and I’ve cut the tip off my finger.”

  Anna held up her left hand. I’d never noticed that the ring finger was flattened and slightly shorter.

  “It’s bleeding—really badly—but you can’t tell. It’s all mixed up with the stupid bloody meat that’s impossible to cut, and it just seems so absurd. I don’t even stop. I just keep hacking away. I wrap it all up, the blood, fingertip. I fry it up. He eats it. Doesn’t even notice. Doesn’t notice I’m bleeding. Doesn’t notice anything.”