The Winter in Anna

by Reed Karaim

  She heard the chair tip over from being pushed back too quickly and braced herself for the blow, but his knotted bicep appeared on the counter beside her as he swept the remaining pieces into his other hand. Trying to help. She dared to look over her shoulder and his face was close, and so sad, desperate and lost, she found she dared to speak.

  “It’s okay. I can do it.”

  He stepped back and stood there helplessly. She swept the last of the macaroni away, turned down the burner, and faced him.

  “Thank you.”

  He poured himself a small shot of Jack Daniel’s before dinner and sipped it carefully while they ate across the small table from each other, the child in the high chair between them, to her right and his left. He came to the end of his bourbon as they finished eating and stood to refill his glass. When he sat back down he had filled two with another modest shot each. He slid one toward her.

  “Have a drink with me. Please.”

  There was such desperation, such a subdued, childlike longing, in his request she lifted the glass and took a sip, closing her eyes briefly as the small fuse it lit burned its way into her chest. When she opened her eyes he was smiling. She took another drink, feeling the flame trace itself past her heart. He took a small swallow and in his fragile happiness she saw the boy she had first fallen for in the green light of the dashboard, and she thought that maybe this was marriage. Maybe this was the kind of thing you had.

  • • •

  WE MARCHED OUT OF THE CHURCH and there was snow swirling down from the heavens and rice on a considerably lower trajectory and, for some reason, popcorn tossed by the contingent from the Buffalo Bar. Todd held Christina’s hand and I thought he might swing her down the steps and possibly right over the car, so happy and relieved did he look. They skipped down the steps together instead and rice stuck in their hair and popcorn bounced off their shoulders and when his eyes caught mine in a brief, absolutely confident glance, I shook my head and started to laugh because this was love, and it was possible, and it happened, and you had to believe in it, after all. You had to believe that people could actually find each other and take the chance and do the right thing. Step out into thin air together.

  I’d walked out arm in arm with Anna, and I turned to her now to share the moment, but she was gone.

  Chapter 25

  THE NEXT NIGHT HER HUSBAND CAME home only a little late, bringing with him a bottle of wine with a straw basket wrapped around its bulbous shape. He was excited by the purchase, proud of it, and they drank the bottle during dinner, taking turns leaving the table to steer the child back into the room. The wind was blowing hard enough to twist the trailer on its metal skeleton. As they drank, Anna felt it was as if they were on a wooden sailing boat making its way across an endless sea, and she saw the spark of romance in her husband’s eyes, and later that night in bed she felt the ice-cold wind that slipped past the rattling window frame along her back as she rose over him and, as she shivered in the mingling of heat and cold, felt she was reclaiming some lost part of her existence, something she needed to believe was worth the price she could distantly feel tallying in her future.

  I don’t know this, of course. I can’t really know any of this. I can only imagine how it must have been. All I know is she told me they started drinking together and for a while it was good again. “The house fell apart,” she said in the distant way she sometimes had when talking about her own past, as if she had peered into a microscope to discover a strange, alien life. “The dishes were always sitting in the sink and nothing got cleaned. But I thought it was better. We were together. I knew we couldn’t keep living like this, but I thought it might be working. I thought we could make it work.”

  • • •

  TODD AND CHRISTINA WENT away on their honeymoon and when they returned they were badly sunburned and happier than ever. Paul and I spent a day helping them move everything out of Christina’s apartment into Todd’s house, and at the end she kissed me on the cheek and hugged me so fiercely I felt embarrassed and offered to stay and help rearrange the furniture.

  I saw them less as they cocooned themselves into their life together, but when I was over there, for dinner, or stopping by after work, I saw the honeymoon pictures on the bookcase and in the evening the wedding china set out on the table and over the weeks the pounds slowly filling out Todd’s frame, and this, too, was a lesson, a glance into the quiet, physical accretion of happiness in contented lives, and I saw for the first time how this could be, how this was for someone not much older than I was. When Christina lit the candles around their new dining room table and poured cheap wine into brand-new long-stemmed glasses and Todd raised one in a brief, half-embarrassed toast, I knew I wanted to be doing this someday around my own table.

  My own apartment was empty when I came home at night. The Buffalo Bar felt empty, too. Without Todd and Christina, it was just me and the old men playing pool, and pretty soon I only went when I couldn’t face eating dinner alone. I sat at the bar one evening in late December, watching the Monday Night Football game, eating chili, and sipping a beer. Bart Tollesrud, who had worked at the bomb factory on the edge of town since it opened, was sitting on the next stool, eating the same chili, drinking the same beer. He had a coarse, three-day growth of beard and watery eyes glued to the game. A spot of chili dripped into his beard; he wiped it away absently with his flannel sleeve, and I saw the ghost of a possible future self and had to leave without taking the time to pay. They would just put it on my tab anyway.

  • • •

  ANNA WAS NEARLY SILENT on our Thursday evenings together. She often appeared a little late, and when she was there, she seemed preoccupied, as if this world were a thin, translucent gauze laid over a real and more disturbing landscape invisible to the rest of us. When I stubbornly tried to reignite our old rambling conversations she sometimes looked up at me as if I had startled her by my presence, and then as if the mere fact of my being in the room caused her pain.

  Something had changed in me, too. I no longer had so many opinions about the world and its easily marked idiocies. A strange feeling of suspension had crept into my judgment. I was no longer so sure; I wanted more time to think about it—all of it.

  I was finishing the layout on a page, and a ghost in a photograph caught my eye. It was a picture of the county commission posing outside a newly completed vehicle barn for county equipment, the most dreadfully boring picture you could imagine, really. But the barn was on the edge of town and in the far distance, in the back of the photograph, a man could be seen sitting in the snow on the side of a hill. At least I thought it was a man. He sat in a gray parka, the hood pulled up around his hidden face, and from his posture he seemed to be staring down at his feet in some silent and defeated contemplation. The hill was otherwise barren, snow rising to an unbroken ridge that served as a soft delineation between sky and earth.

  “Is that a person?”

  Anna seemed to take a while to hear me. She very deliberately put down the scissors she was using and looked over at my page.

  “I don’t know how I missed that,” she said.

  “It’s kind of a distraction.”

  “I don’t know how I missed it.”

  The despair in her voice scared me. “It’s not a problem,” I said. I had an inspiration and went into the front office to grab a bottle of Wite-Out, a kind of liquid eraser popular when people still typed on paper. Anna was staring at the person in the snow when I returned. I pulled the brush out of the bottle and dabbed a stroke of white across the figure, causing it to disappear into the hillside. I glanced over in triumph, expecting her to be smiling at my cleverness, but she was frozen with her hand halfway to the page.

  “You shouldn’t . . .” she began, and then returned to her light table. A minute later she turned to me. “I could have printed another shot.” Her voice was oddly breathless. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “But it was easy,” I said. “It was no problem.”

 
“But it wasn’t . . .” She was trying to compose herself. “I had better shots. You can’t just erase people.”

  “Okay . . . well . . . I’m sorry, but I don’t see why it’s such a big deal.”

  She shook her head and turned away.

  “I know you don’t.”

  “Hey . . .”

  “Just leave it, Eric. Please.”

  For the rest of the night we worked in the cavernous back room in near-silence, passing strips of copy to each other from the waxer, sharing border tape and the one pair of sharp scissors, our carefully polite voices sounding overly loud when we had to speak.

  • • •

  I NEVER SAW HER ANYMORE outside of work, except from a distance on Main Street a couple of times as she shepherded her children from one store to another in the twilight. I had a sense she was spending a lot of time with her kids. They often appeared in the front office at the end of the day, waiting for her to take them one place or another, both unusually quiet, even Samantha, as if the winter had wrapped a woolen muffler around their exuberance. But I suppose they knew well by then what the season did to their mother. I’m sure they knew, because it was impossible not to feel the sadness that surrounded Anna. Impossible not to feel it, and impossible in your weaker moments not to surrender to it as a kind of sleeping sickness that settled over the office sometimes late in the afternoon, when the light was already leaching out of the day, and each visitor brought a gust of cold air through the door and an awkward silence before they spoke in the hushed room.

  In the midst of this late December gloom, Louise appeared by the side of my desk to announce that she had entered several of our stories and a couple of photographs in the state newspaper association awards, which would be announced the following February. She seemed to think this was good news, certain to brighten my day, and so I tried to respond the same way.

  “That’s great,” I said. “Have we done this before?”

  “Oh, we do it every year.” She waved her hand to encompass the paper’s long and, I thought, clearly triumphant past.

  “Great. How many did we win last year?”

  “Oh, none,” Louise said cheerfully. “We haven’t won anything for five years, at least.”

  I became aware that my proud smile no longer made any sense, and I was trying to figure out how to remove it and what exactly should go in its place as she patted me on my shoulder and strolled out the door.

  • • •

  CHRISTMAS AT HOME was the first without my father, but it was astonishing how present he was, how he appeared, quiet and expectant, in every awkward silence, how he took his empty seat at dinner, sitting in inscrutable, possibly forgiving judgment, how he sat in his spot on the couch on Christmas morning and watched us open our presents, waiting to see if we liked what we had been given. For years our presents from our parents had said, From Mom and Dad, on the tag, and this year they simply had our names on them and we all understood, of course, but holding the brightly wrapped packages in our hands it was as if our family had disappeared as a recognized entity. My brother and sister both held theirs too long before they tore the paper with false smiles, consecrating this new reality. I tugged a sweater from its wrappings, and as I held it up with my own hollow smile, I felt my father, who had been standing at the far end of the room with his arms crossed, back into the hallway and disappear. He had lingered to see us through this last loss. Now we were on our own.

  I left two days after Christmas and drove across the gray, somnolent expanse of North Dakota. Shannon was as quiet as the snow-draped fields, Main Street deserted, drifts of snow gathered in the doorways. I was sitting in the chair in my living room, considering the scrim of ice along the bottom of the window, when I realized it was Sunday. Darkness climbed the glass, the broken coastline of ice inching up behind it, until I couldn’t sit still any longer.

  The night was the coldest so far, well below freezing. I hurried to my car and drove aimlessly, passing the deserted newspaper building twice before I saw Anna there, alone at her desk in the sallow illumination of the half-lit office, perfectly framed in the rectangle of the window against the blackness of the clouded night.

  She never saw me approaching and was startled when the door swung open. I stood for a second on the far side of the counter, unable to move until the warmth had penetrated my skin. Anna sat frozen with her hands flat on top of her desk.

  “Where are your kids?” I asked.

  “At a birthday party.”

  “Lousy to have a birthday this close to Christmas.”

  She was silent a little too long, as if processing what I’d said took unusual effort.

  “Why?”

  “Anticlimax. Maybe just one set of presents.”

  She nodded, turned back to the typewritten pages in front of her.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  Her voice was barely audible. “Trying to catch up.”

  The feebleness of this was too much. We weren’t behind. Edith and I had taken care of it. There was no reason for her to be here. I shrugged off my coat and hung it on the rack, crossed the corner of the counter, and, before she could move, bent over her desk to consider the copy she was staring at blindly. I assumed my editor’s voice, which I thought gave me the right to look.

  “What are you working on?”

  A single-page typewritten letter sat on her desk. An application for a job as the lifestyles reporter at The Bemidji Herald, some two or three hundred miles away across the border in Minnesota. She had made a couple of small editing changes in red ink, replacing a which with a that and changing exiting opportunity to exciting opportunity.

  “That second mistake seems blatantly Freudian,” I said, because Shannon had disappeared around me and I had no idea what to say.

  Anna was silent.

  “I don’t know what’s going on. But for God’s sake, don’t leave.”

  She turned her chair slowly, picked up the letter, tugged her coat off the rack, and walked out the door without bothering to put it on.

  I had done something terribly wrong, but I didn’t know what it was. Getting her to attend the wedding wasn’t enough, not for the way her eyes had filled with despair as she raised them from the page. I was supposed to understand something that was escaping me. Yes, a terrible marriage once, I got that. Maybe I couldn’t really know what it meant, but I got it.

  There was something more. I sat at her desk and stared out the window, trying to pull into focus whatever was supposed to be in front of me, but all I saw was the deserted street and the blurred sentinel of a fir tree standing in its cloak of gray snow.

  • • •

  ANNA CALLED IN THE NEXT MORNING and said she wouldn’t be in till late in the afternoon, at the earliest. It struck me that I would be on my way to the chamber of commerce meeting by then and out of the office. I thought about calling her, but she was claiming to be sick. There really wasn’t much to do anyway. At noon I went to the café for lunch, wanting to be alone, but forced to deal with a slow stream of people who stopped by my table to tell me about this news or that or comment on this story or that. I was part of the community now. Halfway through my beer cheese soup served with popcorn instead of crackers, the house specialty since the day I had arrived, I set my spoon down, left money on the table, and walked out the door.

  The wind was coming up and scattered flakes slanted out of a sky perched just above the rooftops. It was a lousy day for a walk, but I turned my collar up and headed toward the city park. Brown brick and dull glass on Main Street, then houses, isolated and smaller, islands braced against a frozen sea. Cars passed but no one else was stupid enough to be out strolling. I reached the park without realizing I had come that far and stared at the swings, each chain encased in a chrysalis of ice, faint reflections of blue and green visible in the indeterminate light. The town felt both overly familiar and strange. I was acutely aware of my presence in this one moment in time, which I felt as a moving, three-dimension
al reality, a kaleidoscope rushing past while I stood motionless in the middle of it all. The sensation was peaceful and yet dissociative, as if the whirlwind had nothing to do with me, as if I’d ended up here completely by accident, opening my eyes to find myself standing in this park with its features erased by snow. My one concrete thought was wondering if I would remember this moment, which felt both vivid and already distant, later when it really was distant, when I had moved on to some future I could not yet conceive.

  I have.

  It seems odd, given all that would soon happen, the kind of event that usually frames itself, claims its permanent space in your memory by clearing away everything immediately before and after. But I understand why I can still see the ice on those chains, still remember the sense of numbness rising in my cheeks, the broken field of snow, the gray reef of sky. I can remember it all because I had run up against the receding edge of my life. I truly had no idea what came next.

  • • •

  THE PHONE RANG in the office at three-fifteen p.m. I was gathering up a notebook and pens, preparing to leave for the chamber meeting, when Edith took the call. She listened for a moment and handed the phone to me without saying a word. The deputy sheriff was on the other end of the line. A school bus returning from a field trip had been in an accident a few miles outside of town. He was heading out and could stop by and pick me up.

  I sat in the front of the car. The heater was on full-blast and it was too warm. The moment we left the sheltering confines of town, snow blew hard across the highway, arriving out of the clouded world on one side of our headlights and disappearing into the nothingness on the other. The deputy drove too fast, pushing us forward into a tumbling tunnel of snowflakes like sparks in the light. I looked away from the road to control my nausea and as my eyes adjusted I saw the ghostly terrain of the barren fields dissolving within a few hundred yards, as if the world were burning away at the edges.