by Cat Winters
He lifted his chest away from mine, and I maneuvered around his locked arms and slid off the side of the mattress.
“Damn it!” I bundled up my clothing in my arms. “Damn! Damn! Damn!”
“Don’t panic so much.”
“Don’t tell me not to panic!”
He eased himself up to a seated position and wobbled as though drunk.
I slung my slip over my head. “Oh, Christ, you men have it so easy.”
“Don’t turn this into a sexist thing. We both agreed to do that.”
“What does it feel like to be able to screw and know you can walk away without consequences? What does it feel like to not have to worry about your parents ripping you out of their lives and your hard work collapsing around you?”
He staggered around in the darkness of the other side of the bed and hit his knee on the bedside table. “Damn!”
“Did you ‘pull out’ so expertly when you shacked up with your nurse at your training camp?”
“I told you not to bring up past lovers.”
“Did you knock her up?”
“No!” He tugged his pants up to his waist and buttoned them up. “If you must know, we used French letters. Condoms.”
“Why didn’t you bother to get any for me?”
“Because we’re in the middle of goddamned nowhere, Alice. You know that. I did the best I could right now. Don’t invite me into your bedroom if you can’t handle a fuck.”
I grabbed up one of my shoes.
Don’t invite me into your bedroom if you can’t handle a fuck, I heard him say again, and my fingers gripped the smooth leather.
Aw, you’re so loose, Stu had told me, some other chap was bound to knock you up anyway.
Michael plopped down on his side of the bed and turned his undershirt right-side out before pulling it down over his chest.
I didn’t even remember walking over to him.
All I saw was the side of a head of golden-blond hair that resembled Stu’s, and then blood, spattering my cream-colored slip from a strike of the sharp edge of the heel against his skull.
Michael’s mouth opened wide. He dropped to his knees on the floor and held his head, and I hit him with the shoe again, this time behind his ear.
“Alice!” he shouted. “What are you doing?”
He tried to reach out with his left hand, but I hammered his head a third time.
“Stop it!”
More blows. More blood. Tears drenched my face, and I wanted to stop, but I found myself being rushed on a gurney down the too-bright halls of a hospital, my womb contracting, people staring, staring, staring, and blood everywhere. Four months pregnant, they’d told me, and I pretended that was nothing. I pretended I hadn’t wished for the loss to happen. I pretended I didn’t care . . .
Michael grabbed the vase of geraniums from the table behind him and whacked it against my skull with a blinding pain that knocked me sideways, onto the edge of the bed.
“What have you done?” one of us yelled—I wasn’t sure who.
I fell backward to the floor, and the room blurred; my ears blared with a horrendous ringing commotion that drew vomit to my throat. An orange light blinked and throbbed in front of my left eye, on and off, on and off . . .
“Is everything all right in there?” asked a garbled voice in the distance.
“Oh, Christ. Get up, get up, Alice.” Michael shook my shoulder. “This doesn’t look good—you in just your slip, bleeding from the head. They’re going to think I attacked and murdered you if you die. They’re going to think you fought back, instead of the other way around.”
I rolled back and forth against my shoulder blades, my arms and head too heavy to lift off of the floor.
“Get up—please!” Michael stared down at me with his fingers wrapped around the vase, his teeth chattering, his eyes damp, his forehead bleeding. “Oh, God,” he said. “Why did you hit me? Why’d you go nuts just like Bec did? You’re all ripping me to pieces right now. Get up!”
His face turned dim and distorted and then faded from view as my eyes no longer stayed open.
Someone slammed his weight against the door from the other side. More voices. Stern voices.
“Oh, Christ, Alice,” cried Michael. “I’m done with all of this. I’m done!”
The vase shattered against the floorboards.
A window opened.
Cold wind blasted through my hair.
CHAPTER 32
I woke up with surges of pain pulsating through my left temple—surges that brought on a dire need to vomit. Bandages squeezed the top of my head, and the smell of fresh gauze only added to the nausea. I crawled across the bed on my elbows and my belly and threw up on the bare floor below.
More sleep ensued, and then I awoke with a start, remembering.
Down on the floorboards at the foot of the bed, blood betrayed our violence. Piles of discarded clothing lay about like naughty children unwilling to hide their misbehavior. I still wore nothing but my slip, and I couldn’t imagine what the Harkeys had thought when they found me lying in the middle of the room, half-naked, a wound gaping from the left side of my head. I remembered the sound of the window opening and wondered if they’d found Michael gone, or if he had stood there cradling his skull that I’d pummeled over and over again.
Not a soul seemed to stir downstairs.
I dressed and tiptoed down the staircase. A sickening wave of dizziness rolled through my brain, but I gripped the banister and called out, “Is anyone down here?”
Mrs. Harkey tromped into view upon shoes with sturdy heels that summoned more bile to my mouth. She wrung her hands and burst into tears. “We’ve called the police . . . and the doctor. No one can come until the roads get plowed.”
I stiffened. “You—you called the police?”
“He attacked you and left you for dead. It was horrifying, finding you that way.”
“Where is he?”
“He left.”
My heart stopped.
“We don’t know how far he got,” she added, biting her lip.
“But . . . there was a blizzard.”
“He escaped out the window before Al could pry open the door.”
“There was a blizzard!”
“I bet it was this awful old house that did it.” She wiped at her eyes with her hands. “Did he think he was attacking Mrs. Gunderson? Was it Al’s obsession with death—or his stories about cannibalism? It’s too much, isn’t it? I always tell him, it’s too damn much!”
I left the bottommost step and froze in place, for I spied Michael’s black overcoat, still hanging beside my jacket. His gloves and his scarf drooped out of the pockets.
“Do . . . do you know why he attacked you?” asked Mrs. Harkey, still sniffling.
I shook my head, not knowing how to answer—too confused to properly decide whether I needed to lie about the entire situation. I couldn’t stop staring at Michael’s coat and gloves.
Mrs. Harkey coughed and choked before sputtering out, “Al’s out digging through the snow in that vegetable garden. The storm passed, and he couldn’t wait. The house is driving him out of his mind, too. All he talks about is those disgusting bodies.”
“I’ve got to find Michael.” I sprang for the coatrack and grabbed my jacket.
“The snow’s deep. Please—wait for the police.”
“If he’s still alive he’ll need help.”
“Mrs. Lind . . .”
“He’s not wearing much clothing.” I slung my arms through the sleeves.
“Mrs. Lind, I’m so sorry, but unless he made it back inside the house without us hearing . . . There’s nothing but open fields out there . . . Even if he had worn his overcoat . . .”
I muffled a sob and buttoned up my jacket, my chin tucked against my chest, my throat swelling shut.
“The police will probably want to know why he hurt you. If it was marital abuse . . .”
I wrapped the scarf around my neck, not caring that it choked.
&n
bsp; “They won’t understand what this house does to people.” She rubbed her hands along the sides of her skirt. “I know you said you don’t behave like Mrs. Gunderson anymore, but . . .”
My hands went still on the scarf’s yarn. I met her eyes.
“Do be careful how you answer their questions.”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
“Don’t bring up that you were once Cornelia. The police might worry about you, too. Things that sound normal inside this house don’t sound quite right to outsiders’ ears.”
“But I wasn’t Mrs. Gunderson—that’s the thing. There’s been a mistake. I got caught up in the excitement of reincarnation and put too much stock in coincidences.”
“But—”
“Michael lost his temper and attacked me. That’s what happened. He attacked, and I fought back, but it had nothing whatsoever to do with Mrs. Gunderson. Nothing. He attacked me first. It had nothing to do with my past.”
The woman just stood there with her arms by her sides.
“Do you understand?” I asked. “Do you believe me? I was never Cornelia Gunderson.”
She gave two blinks of her bloodshot eyes, her pupils noticeably constricted, as though she partook in laudanum to endure the Hotel Yesternight.
“F-f-fine,” she said—the same old response I myself was trained to give to the schoolchildren.
MY EARS ACHED from the lack of sound in that open field of endless, virgin snow. A troubling stillness had seized the land, and it seemed to thicken the air I breathed.
Twenty to thirty yards to the south of the house, a figure in a brown coat and Homburg hat shoveled snow away from a patch of earth. I saw Mr. Harkey’s breath curling into the air and heard the faint swoosh of his blade digging into the powder, but he didn’t even notice me out there.
My legs sank into snow clear up to my thighs; my muscles strained to clamber through the piles. I scanned the prairie as I went, in search of a stripe of color, an uneven hump, a patch of blond hair . . .
I saw him.
Oh, dear Lord.
To the east, a snowdrift the size of a man broke the flatness of the land. I covered my face with mitten-clad fingers and breathed with strangled gasps.
You must go to him, I told myself. He once reached out to you in a storm. Go.
I slogged through a sea of snow over three feet deep with my eyes tearing up from the cold and the pain, and again Bea’s warning from Thanksgiving haunted my head.
Don’t insert yourself into other people’s stories.
Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.
But I did.
He was Janie’s father. Janie’s father. How I envied that little girl for her newfound sense of peace—for the love and acceptance heaped upon her, even when she behaved in the strangest of ways. Everyone swore how much they protected her, and look what I did.
LOOK WHAT I DID.
This was not the life I was meant to lead.
This was not who I was.
Michael O’Daire lay flat on his stomach with his face angled toward me, his right cheek pressed against the frozen ground, his eyes faded to the coldest shade of blue. He wore only his undershirt and trousers and a pair of untied boots, and snow dusted them all. His skin had turned purple; his lips and the tip of his nose, a shocking black. Traces of blood stained his blond hair behind his left ear, above his forehead, on the top of his skull . . .
I wheeled around in the other direction and clasped my hands beneath my chin, shaking, crumbling into a thousand pieces. Tears hot and bitter burned my mouth and my tongue.
Mr. Harkey’s shovel whooshed through the snow, and the Hotel Yesternight rose up in the near-distance, its slanted roof stretching toward a colorless, unwelcoming sky. Sunlight reflected off one of the upstairs windows—the one through which Michael had made his exit. My vision blurred, and the reflection seemed to be a wink, as if the house were telling me, You may not have ever lived here, Alice, but, my goodness, you sure do behave as though you did.
I sank down onto the snow in front of Janie’s father and contemplated whether I should stay by his side and freeze into the prairie along with him, or if another chance still awaited me.
If this was the end, or a beginning.
If I would always have to be this Alice, or if I could heal myself into something entirely new.
Part IV
JOHN
CHAPTER 33
November 12, 1930
Faye Russell, a seven-year-old girl with bobbed red hair, sat down in the chair across from my desk at the Portland elementary school in which I now worked on a full-time basis. Naturally, the child reminded me of Janie O’Daire, as redheaded little girls were apt to do.
I took a moment to compose myself. Another incident earlier that day had already thrown me out of sorts, and the timing of Faye’s arrival half-convinced me that the universe aimed to put me on edge. To taunt me. To test me. I aligned my pencil next to my notebook and engaged in the soothing breathing techniques Dr. Benoit had taught me in our sessions.
In through the nose, out through the mouth,
In through the nose, out through the mouth . . .
“Welcome, Faye,” I said, and I folded my hands on my desk. “As you may already know, Mrs. Schmidt sent you into my office because she’s concerned about you being so sad in her classroom. Is everything all right at home?”
Faye pulled on the skirt of her blue and yellow dress, which hung over a frame that lacked any meat. I anticipated her answer before she even said it. In fact, our attendance at the school was dropping at an alarming rate because of the response I knew her to be on the brink of giving.
“Daddy lost his job,” she said, her tone hushed, her big brown eyes cast toward my desk instead of at me.
“This has been the case for many fathers over the past year, I’m afraid.” I unclasped my hands. “How has your life at home changed because of him being out of work?”
“Who’s that?” Faye pointed at my photograph of John, taken in a studio two months earlier, to commemorate his fourth birthday.
I’d forgotten that I had turned his photograph away from my view when I’d first sat down that morning. Feeling guilty for doing so, I slid the frame back toward me and saw the fair hair and striking eyes that so resembled his father’s.
In through the nose, out through the mouth,
In through the nose, out through the mouth . . .
“That’s my son,” I said.
“Did his daddy lose his job?”
The question chilled the backs of my arms. Again, I straightened my pencil and debated how best to answer without sharing much of my private life—without causing more fears about fathers and loss.
“His daddy hasn’t worked for a long while,” I said, my mouth dry. “Now, tell me about your father. How is he behaving now that he’s without work?”
Faye proceeded to share with me the same accounts of family hardships I’d been hearing from far too many children ever since the crash of the stock market the autumn before. Fathers hunted for jobs with stooped shoulders and dark-ringed eyes. Tables wanted for food. Mothers cried and spoke in nervous voices. Tummies ached. Children dropped out of school to help out at home.
My troubles of the morning seemed so odd, so petty, in comparison to what the pupils endured.
Twenty minutes later, Faye walked out of my office, her tears dried, her emotions purged, and, after her, at least a dozen other children entered my unfussy little quarters that day. I assisted the students, consoled them, tested them, dabbed at their tears with handkerchiefs, and, hopefully, sent them away standing a little bit taller than when they had first slouched their way through my door. One boy described a dream he kept having about eating lamb chops with mint jelly, but most students didn’t share their dreams with me. None of the students ever spoke of past lives—to my great relief. Until the day when I would open a newspaper and read about Janie O’Daire breaking codes, developing theorems, or whatever she might do with
her fantastical mind, I didn’t care to think about the topic of reincarnation anymore.
I was done with that chapter.
At the end of the school day, I buttoned up my coat and fitted my wool hat over my head.
“Have a good evening,” said our principal, Mr. Carver, with a pat of my shoulder. “Keep doing what you’re doing to cheer up these kids. We lost two more today.”
“Yes, Mr. Carver.” I nodded. “I’ll do my best.”
“You’re a treasure.”
“Thank you.”
He peeked over the shoulder of his smart gray suit and straightened a lock of auburn hair that had fallen across his forehead. We’d slept together once, in the squeaky backseat of his Oldsmobile, my legs and black shoes raised in the air, his pomade greasing my cheek, a condom providing an essential barrier between us. Dr. Benoit had called the tryst a detrimental step backward and warned me I could get fired from a job that represented a vast improvement in my career.
I considered it progress.
I hadn’t shed one drop of Mr. Carver’s blood in the aftermath.
JOHN AND I lived with Bea and Pearl in the same Northeast Portland neighborhood in which the elementary school was located, one neighborhood to the north of my parents’ house. A November chill had arrived in just the past week, and my walk to fetch John from my mother proved more painful to the cheeks and hands than in recent days past. Normally, I would stride with a brisk step through such weather, but today my legs lacked the enthusiasm to rush. My chest hurt too much to exert myself. In fact, I had to stop and grip the edge of a picket fence with my feet braced two feet apart, while my shoes disappeared into a blanket of red and gold leaves.
You must have imagined what happened this morning, I told myself. It was just your nerves, frazzled by the drinks you shared with the blond fellow you met in Dr. Benoit’s waiting room last week. That’s all it was. A touch of guilt.
I pushed onward to Mother’s; to my son.
And yet I couldn’t stop dwelling on breakfast.
John had dawdled as usual over his food, taking a hundred years just to finish a slice of buttered toast.
“Hurry up, John,” I had said, carrying my own dishes to the sink. “Grandma’s waiting.”
