The Center of Winter

by Marya Hornbacher

  I thought this over. “Sometimes but not really.”

  “Do they tell you to do things, ever?”

  “No. My voices. They’re me. Parts of me talking. Only at night, falling asleep. All my voices at once, fast.”

  “Do they have conversations?”

  “Yes.”

  “What does it feel like?”

  I ran out of words. I looked at him, helpless.

  “That’s a hard one, huh?”

  I nodded.

  “Okay. We’ll skip that one, how about. So what about visions. Do you see things, sometimes, and wonder if they’re really there?”

  “Dreams.”

  “Yes, like dreams, but when you’re awake?”

  I sat quietly. I didn’t want to tell him. I took a deep breath and looked at him, hoping the words would come out straight.

  “They are. My dreams. And you can’t have them.”

  He looked back at me, not writing on his pad. I could tell for sure he heard me.

  “Pretty good dreams.”

  “My dreams.” I nodded and studied the coils and spirals of my fingerprints.

  “Sometimes, are there bad ones? Where you get confused?”

  “Lost.”

  “You get lost. In the dream?”

  “Can’t find the door. Horrible trapped.”

  “I bet it’s horrible to be trapped. It is horrible.”

  I got up and went over to the door.

  “Are you ready to be done?”

  I made sure the door was unlocked and slid my back down it to sit on the floor and wrapped my arms around my legs and wanted my dad.

  “Still with me?”

  I nodded into my knees.

  “Esau.”

  I looked up.

  “Nobody wants to take your dreams. I don’t want to. But what if we could find a way to keep the good ones and make the bad ones go away?”

  I watched his shoes. Black shiny shoes on the floor.

  “And maybe the voices would slow down. And you could hear them better.”

  I looked up at his face. I liked his thick bushy overgrown eyebrows. I wanted to touch them, but I stayed where I was. I decided I would say my secret.

  “Because they have the answers.”

  “The voices.”

  “They tell me the answers.”

  “To the math.”

  I nodded and smiled into my knees. I chewed on my jeans. “And the other things. The how things work things, the bats. Wings. A hawk drops two hundred miles an hour. Birds, fish. Bugs have a thorax. Man-eating plants.”

  I covered my ears with my hands. Shhh.

  “Sorry too fast,” I said.

  “Not a problem.”

  “Didn’t make sense.” I peeked out between my knees.

  The doctor smiled at me. “Sure it did.”

  “Crazy crazy.” I bonked my head five times with my fist.

  “Nah. Just going a little too fast, is all. We’ll get you slowed down some, and then we’ll see what’s going on. Okay. Now, I’m going to get up and come over there.”

  I scootched my butt out of the way to let him pass. He opened the door.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said.

  The statistical likelihood was good.

  “Hello.”

  I was watching my hands. They were trying to shuffle an old deck of cards, some torn, some crayoned, and I was thinking, slowly, that it would be easy to memorize the cards and cheat, if only I could get my hands to shuffle them. But my hands were pretty uncooperative.

  “Hello,” the voice said again.

  I looked left and studied the person out of the corner of my eye.

  These were the things I could figure out right then for sure: 1. It was nighttime. 2. There were three people in the dayroom not counting me. I was sitting back in the corner so I could see them all. We wore the same hospital pajamas, so we were all the Patients and not the Staff. 3. One of these people was standing by the table where I sat. It was him, I figured, who said hello.

  He had a bandanna on his head and was big.

  I meant to say hello but only wound up jerking my head in a nod. That was going to have to do. I resumed my shuffling attempts and now only my right hand would work; the left lay limp on the table. This frustrated me. “Fuck fuck!” I said. I shook the deck hard.

  “Hey! Now. Little buddy. Calm down, there,” the big person said. He had a very soothing voice and he was not making fun of me, which was good because otherwise I would have hit him. “Mind if I have a seat?” When I said nothing, he pulled a chair out slowly and sat down.

  “Name’s Beast,” he said, sticking his hand out and startling me.

  “Beast!” I shrieked, rearing back in my chair.

  “Whoa! Hey now. Sorry about that. Shh. S’all right.” He patted the table lightly with his giant hand. The other two in the room glanced up and then went back to their nothing.

  He didn’t look too upset, but I still felt bad. To make it up to him, I offered him some crayons. I pushed an orange, a periwinkle, and a burnt sienna his way.

  “Thanks, buddy.” He sounded genuinely pleased, and only took the neat row after I’d removed my own hand. He got up and returned with some paper, sliding a stack across to me. Paralyzed, I stared at it, still gripping my cards.

  “You want some help with those?” he asked. I studied the tattoo of a bald eagle on his forearm, fascinated. Underneath his bandanna, his head was shaved. He was a giant. I was in love with him. I nodded. “Happy to shuffle them for you, you want,” he said.

  “Stuck,” I said miserably.

  “Say what?”

  I held out my hand, wrapped around the worn deck.

  “Huh,” he said, looking at it. “Well, shit. You want I should unwrap you there, or you gonna sit there holding them all night?”

  I shook my head, wanting badly to draw.

  “All right, ready? Just like getting a fishing hook out of your finger. One yank and it’s over. So gimme your hand.”

  I screwed my eyes shut and braced myself. He twisted my wrist so fast I dropped the cards. He’d let go of me before I even had a chance to scream.

  I looked at the pile of cards on the floor and then at him. He was whistling, a tiny stub of crayon wedged in his huge hand, drawing a field of periwinkle grass.

  “Howdja?”

  “Old army trick,” he said, grinning. “Disarm a fella quick.” He picked up the orange crayon and drew in the sun.

  I got down on the floor and swept the cards into two piles, red cards and black cards. I would sort and memorize them later. I set them to my right and sat down in my chair.

  “Been here long?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  He looked at me. “There you go.”

  I cocked my head.

  “Whole sentence,” he explained. “You used a whole sentence.”

  I nodded. “Sometimes, okay. But I think,” I said, tapping my head. “All the time.”

  “You think in whole sentences?”

  I nodded again, relieved.

  “Well, fuck me,” he thundered. “That’d piss me right off, I couldn’t get the words out.”

  “Fuck fuck,” I concurred, happy that finally someone understood. I rocked awhile, watching him from the corner of my eye. I reached across him and tapped his wedding ring. He stopped drawing and looked at it.

  “Little Miss Molly. Prettiest girl in town,” he said, smiling. “Prettiest girl in the world. See, and I been halfway around the world, and there are all manner of pretty girls, I will admit that, yessir, but there is no one like my Molly, nosiree.”

  “MollyMolly. MollyandBeast,” I said. I liked the name Molly. I decided I would marry me a girl named Molly.

  He laughed, throwing his head back. When he lifted it and stopped laughing, his face was wet from tears. I worried.

  “Tried to kill myself,” he said.

  “Oh,” I said, horrified. “Oh no oh no.”

 
“Yep. Broke that girl’s heart.”

  “Oh, Beast Beast.” My left hand picked that moment to come alive, flying off in no direction until I sat on it. With my right hand, I started going through the cards, organizing them, aces low. “Beast Beast Beast. Can’t do that.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  “What for’d you did that for?”

  “Damned war. Got myself all crazy over there, I guess, that’s what the doctor says.”

  “And then you had a dark.”

  “Huh. Ain’t that the truth. Came home. Never saw such a dark in my life as over there, but when I came home, it was like cobwebs, couldn’t shake it. Poor girl, trying to make me happy. Telling me it was all right. Over and over. I swear I started to feel like I was going to have to kill her she told me it was all right one more time.”

  “Allrightallright.”

  “And then, I guess, I just couldn’t see my way out of the dark.”

  I nodded. I got up and went to the snacks table and made myself and him some cocoa from packets. I took the Styrofoam cups over one at a time in my right hand.

  “Molly Molly,” I said, sitting back down.

  “Molly Molly,” he agreed.

  “Out of the dark,” I explained. “Molly.”

  He looked at me.

  I picked up a black crayon and drew a long winding black line all over the page, up to the top-right corner. There I put a red X. To clarify, I put an arrow pointing to the X. MOLLY, I wrote. Around that, I put little yellow lines.

  “Sunbeams,” I said, pleased with my work. “For Molly.”

  He wiped his nose, nodding his head. “Okay,” he said. “That’s right. I guess that’s about right.”

  I took a new piece of paper and drew him an apple tree. I drew it so he was looking through a window, with his hands on the window, he could see his hands. And out there the apple tree in spring, with all the white flowers. I drew it so he would have an apple tree to look at while he was here.

  He drew me a horrible fire.

  I drew him a bed of giant hydrangeas.

  He drew me a gun. He labeled all the parts.

  I drew him Kate.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Kate my sister Kate.”

  “Miss her?”

  I nodded and drew him the sunrise.

  “Snowing,” he said, looking past me, out the window. I turned. I got up to stand by the window.

  I heard him push back from the table and approach, but he still said, “Right behind you, buddy,” which was nice of him, he didn’t have to do that but he did and I appreciated it. We watched the snow slant down onto the brick-walled garden below, the buried garden covered in snow.

  “Ask you a question?” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “You think I’m crazy?”

  I thought it over. I tilted my head and butted his arm with it twice. Then I looked up at him and said, firmly, so he would know for sure, “Definitely definitely not.”

  His face lit up. I got shy and looked away.

  I took his hand and fit mine into it. His hand was rough and he didn’t know what to do at first but then he squeezed. We looked out the window.

  “All right then,” he said. He shook my hand firmly, like we had won a race.

  Out in the courtyard, a male cardinal lighted on a snow-heavy branch, shaking it so a small landslide of snow tumbled to the ground. The smells of hospital breakfast seeped down the hall.

  Geronimo and I were playing cribbage when the prettiest girl in the world walked into the room.

  Geronimo saw her first. He was in the middle of his turn, shuffling and reshuffling his hand, ordering it in some kind of way that made sense to him, and I was waiting to see what he’d put down because I was trying to figure out if there was any mathematical logic to Geronimo’s cribbage rules at all, but anyway, he looked up and stared, so I turned to look and there she was, the prettiest girl in the world.

  I had so many feelings at once I pulled on my hair a few times and turned my chair a little so I could keep an eye on her.

  “Your go,” I said.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Molly,” I said.

  “Who’s she belong to?”

  “Beast.”

  “Hell and damn.”

  The prettiest Molly ever in history smoothed her hands over her red skirt and looked around and sat down on the edge of a couch and picked up a magazine, which she held in her lap awhile.

  Since everyone was staring at her, she looked a little uncomfortable. “Stop it,” I said to Geronimo. “It’s your go.”

  He looked at his cards. “I can’t go.”

  “Course you can. Here, let me see.”

  “No.” He pulled his cards close to his chest. He was totally crazy but a nice old guy. His real name was Charlie but he said he was Geronimo in a past life, so he went by that now since no one was stopping him and he wouldn’t answer to anything else.

  “Well, how’re you gonna make a play if you don’t let me see?”

  “That’s cheating.”

  “For Christmas sakes!” I yelled, pounding my leg. “How can it be cheating if you know I’m doing it, if I already just this second told you I was doing it?”

  He stared at me. I was doing pretty good today. Staff said so. I made the choice to stop yelling.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It just is.”

  “Well, I already know what you have anyway.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know.”

  “Why do you always just know shit? How in the hell’s a man supposed to play cards with you when you already know what’s what ’fore he even lays a card down, Jezus Mary Joseph! I ask you, where’s the suspense?”

  I sat there arranging my cards. I made the choice to say nothing. Over the top of my cards, I watched Molly, who paged through the magazine but kept her eye on the door.

  “He’ll be here in a minute,” I said.

  She looked at me and I looked away.

  “Statistically speaking, it won’t be more than six minutes,” I said to my cards.

  Her eyes didn’t leave me. I turned my chair around so I could see her from the corner of my eye but she couldn’t see me. She wore a white blouse with her red skirt and had dark brown hair in a ponytail and bosoms. I wanted to go over and look at her bosoms closer up. They were round. They looked grabbable. I sat on my hand.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “You are most very welcome,” I replied.

  “What are you playing?” she asked after a minute.

  “This young man,” Geronimo boomed, “is cheating at cribbage. He is a spy.”

  I shook my head. “Not cheating.”

  “You are a spy. You are a very small spy. That’s why they think they can get away with it.”

  “I am not a spy.”

  “You are a Red and a spy.”

  “I am not a Red!” I shrieked, and slapped down my hand. “Give me your cards or make a play yourself or I quit.”

  He laid down an ace and two twos.

  I stared at his play. “You’re going by sevens and fives,” I said, delighted.

  “See?” he thundered, smacking his hand on the table.

  “And you’re collecting the queens!”

  “That’s it! No more! I’ll have nothing more to do with this spy!” He poured a carton of milk all over the table, set the empty carton down, and stormed out of the room, shouting all the way down the hall.

  Beast appeared in the doorway and stopped dead at the sight of the prettiest girl in the world. She stood up and the magazine fell off her lap and she didn’t even notice, that’s how much she loved him right then. And it took him only two giant steps over to her to pick her up and swing her around and sit down on the couch with her in his lap.

  He had her smushed so close to his chest I started to worry he would crush her, but his face over her shoulder was smiling and he was talking softer than I could hear so I decided
not to say anything. I made myself invisible and watched her pull herself back, look around quickly, and kiss him a million times all over his face.

  “Here I am,” she said. She said it again and again, like she was teasing him about something, telling him a joke only he knew. Kissing his eyelids and his nose. “Here I am.”

  He looked like a big dog basking in the sun, his two hands wrapped all the way around her waist.

  I snuck off to my bedroom and jerked off in the closet, feeling sort of guilty but not too bad, thinking I would find me a girl named Molly with fat cheeks and soft bosoms and a whisper and a red skirt and when I was in the hospital or in a Dark she would come and kiss me all over my face with her soft bosoms pressed up against my chest.

  I came in my sock. Then I curled up and took a nap.

  I had a stack of books, and was drawing fish skeletons from memory, and Geronimo and Captain Sir Joe had started calling me Lieutenant Darwin, from the book I was reading. I had several fine rocks from the garden, from when we went on walks around the grounds.

  And then one afternoon, when everyone else was having a nap because their meds made them fall asleep, I was lying on my bed staring at the ceiling when I felt someone looking at me. I turned my head on the pillow. Doris was standing in the doorway.

  She looked at me, waiting for me to say something, but I didn’t know what and my words were all a mess that day anyway. So I just sat up with my feet sticking off the side of the bed. I straightened the covers.

  Slowly, as if it was hard to move, she shuffled across the linoleum to the side of the bed. She handed me my new sketch pad. Doc Hammerstein had just given it to me, it was mine, and so far I had used five pages. I was saving them, I didn’t want to run out. I used only one page a day, the rest of the time I used regular paper from the stack.

  I took it from her, along with the box of brand-new colored pencils, which were very sharp. Every time I used them I sharpened them with the sharpener that had its own compartment in the gray box so that they would be sharp every time I opened it because otherwise it was unlucky.

  I sat there holding my things to my chest and looking at Doris from the corner of my eye. She gazed over my head, out the window.

  Then she shuffled over to the chair and pushed it so it was facing me. She sat down. She smoothed her housedress over her knees. And then, in the swiftest motion I had ever seen her make, she reached up with both hands and unwound the thick bun of her hair.