The Winter in Anna

by Reed Karaim

  “Okay. But . . . the man?”

  “We were living with my parents.” She stared through the window and the tumbling snow at her little house. “I was living with my parents again and I told them I wanted to go on a trip. They were just glad I wanted to do anything. They took care of Stephen. I took the bus out and I stayed in a hotel near the water for two nights and then I came home. He sat across from me on the way back. I can’t explain it, but I knew if I slept with him I would get pregnant and I would have a girl. And I knew something else just as good . . .”

  “What was that?”

  “I’d never, ever see him again.”

  I had driven her home in her car, but she had her hands flat on the dash in the passenger seat, as if we were still flying down the highway a hundred miles an hour. I could see clearly the rings of pale, scarred flesh around each wrist. She saw me looking at them but made no effort to tug her sleeves forward.

  “I had my little girl. I had my little girl. I knew I would and I did. I never thought she’d be the same and she wasn’t. She isn’t. But I had my little girl.”

  I stared out the window. After a while I heard Anna shift, felt her staring at me, and when I glanced over, her eyes were filled with tenderness. “There’s a little time before the kids get home,” she said. “I want to go down to the school and meet them. Thank you for stopping me from getting on the bus, Eric. Come in for a cup of coffee. I’ll tell you the rest.” She held up her wrists, as if they were in handcuffs. “I’ll tell you about this.”

  Chapter 27

  I REALIZED THAT NIGHT THAT I HADN’T interviewed the kids on the bus, and the next day I went over to the school at the end of the day and caught a couple of them to hear how they saw it happen. If Stephen saw his mom on the road that day he never mentioned it. We stood on the sidewalk in front of the school while he answered my questions and I found I was overly friendly, trying too hard. There was something in his manner, a way he watched me with a combination of uncertainty and caution, his thin lips held tight on his long, pale face, his feathery hair sticking out warily from beneath his stocking cap. We only spoke for a few minutes before I let him escape, running in his rubber-booted, gangly gait back to his friends.

  The driver of the Jeep and his girlfriend were let out of the hospital within a couple of days, cut and badly bruised, but otherwise intact. The bus driver turned out to be hurt the worst. He’d injured his neck when the collision occurred and suffered from a lingering concussion the doctors didn’t quite understand, but that left him disabled for the rest of my days in Shannon.

  Anna was at her desk the next morning and in the look she gave me as I came through the door nothing was hidden; there was no regret, no retreat from the day before. We went back to our work. Now sometimes there were long periods of silence between us when we finished the paper together at night, but it was different, a kind of intimacy we didn’t need to fill with words. Anything I might say about the passing spectacle of current events, about which I had once made endless pronouncements, now struck me as idiotic. One of the lesser gifts Anna left me was the sense not to take my own conclusions too seriously. I still talk too much, but I really understand if you’re not listening.

  The closest friend, I learned those last few weeks, is someone you share the unsaid things with. Not that we had become a pair of sphinxes. It’s possible Anna spoke more than she had in the past, mostly about her children. Stephen’s overly diligent sense of responsibility. The Man of the House, of course. The night terrors that left him covered in sweat and unable to speak, still caught in the nightmare even after the lights came on. His fondness for military histories, the sweeping martial epics of the ages. How she thought maybe he’d become a historian, prayed he would never become a soldier.

  And then Sam, the girl conceived in a motel in Red Lodge, Montana, how much her fearlessness scared her mother, how much it reminded Anna of Katy, her first child. When Anna told me these things she spoke calmly with a subdued sense of relief, as if it was good to be able to say them aloud. The only time she choked up was when she said the name of her first child. She only said it once. For the rest of that night she said hardly anything, and I understood that Sam had been her bid to keep going, but that the price had been something she hadn’t understood at the time, an inability to ever completely shut the door, not a ghost, but something worse, a sister, alive and determined to make her own mistakes. “I let them go out, you know,” Anna said as we locked up that night. “I let them go out with their friends and by themselves to play and it scares me every time. Sam scares me so much, but I let them go out.”

  I told her about my brother and sister and how they were struggling after my father’s death, and the practical advice she gave me made me feel even younger than I was, and made me doubt I would ever be capable of being an actual parent. We also talked about lesser things, able now to share our opinions of Art and Louise and other people we had come to care about with a new candor, knowing it wouldn’t be misunderstood for cruelty. One thing we never talked about was the letter I caught her writing to The Bemidji Herald. We both knew it hadn’t been sent.

  We finished early one Thursday evening, and while we were waiting for Paul to show up, Anna wandered off to the big press, the one they ran the paper on. It filled up a third of the room, a mad-scientist creation of rollers and gears and moving parts you could lose yourself in. She ran her hands through her thick hair, pushing it off her shoulders, and I remember the way she let her sleeves fall without thinking about it and how I fought off an impulse to hug her.

  “Did you ever think about how amazing this really is?”

  “I’m always amazed when they can get the damn thing to work,” I said.

  Anna kicked the side of my foot.

  “I mean the whole thing. We go out. We take a few pictures—a pretty baby, a thunderstorm above the lake. We talk to a few people, ask some questions, and then we put it into these little stories, we write a few cutlines. And then in just a few hours it ends up on these pages and it goes all over town and people actually read it. They look at the pictures and we make them happy or sad—”

  “Or they wonder why we’re wasting their time,” I said, “or they don’t care at all.”

  This time she pushed gently against my arm with her fist.

  “But they do. That’s what I’m saying. They do. Don’t you ever think how amazing that is? We were sitting at our desks and I was worrying about the kids or the electric bill, and you—well, who knows what you’re thinking, Eric?—but we have all these things floating around in our heads and we push them aside and we put down these words. We type and some paper spins around on this thing and there they are. Forever.”

  “Or until they’re used to line the trash.”

  Anna shook her head. “Or until they’re put away in the attic for the grandkids. Or until they’re filed in the city library. They’re there. We’re really lucky.” She said the word as if she could not quite believe it, and then she spun on a heel to face me. “You do know what I mean. And you think it’s amazing, too.”

  “Sure.”

  And before I knew what I was doing I kissed her on the temple. Because at that moment we knew we shared a secret: newspapers, which pretended to be the most transitory of media, were really forever. We were part of an eternal narrative that stretched back to Gutenberg and on into the infinite future. We were certain that their cheap, broadsheet record of our world would be with us always. Nothing could take their place.

  Years later I look back on that day and find it framed by the recent memory of the newspaper chain I worked for being sold off in pieces like the estate of some deceased dowager, several of the papers shuttered, others surviving in ghostly half-lives as appendages to websites that serve as glorified billboards. The idea that the past promises us a certain future is always an illusion, of course, but to see the substance of our world slipping out of existence would have been unimaginable to Anna and me then, and so it strikes me this st
ory is, in some lesser part, also a record of a time when words were physical things, immutable once they were stamped into paper, and a small newspaper could believe it mattered, was providing a record for the community it served—flawed, inadequate, but as permanent in its own way as parchment inked by monks bent over their copy boards a thousand years earlier.

  • • •

  IN LATE FEBRUARY Louise burst into the newsroom, looking more drunk than was usual at noon.

  “We won!” she announced, teetering as she spread her arms to take in an adoring crowd.

  A brief, confused silence. “Won what?” Edith asked, without bothering to look up from the copy she was editing.

  “The state press association awards! We won three first-place prizes!”

  And we had. Our flood coverage had won the overall award for community service, which was the big one. A photograph taken by Anna of exhausted workers toiling in the dark at the dikes beneath the floodlights had won best spot news photography. Three linked stories about the county commission’s struggles to adjust the mill levy for badly needed highway repairs, which I’d considered quite possibly lethally boring when I’d written them, had even won the award for best investigative series.

  Louise broke out the bottle of blackberry brandy from Art’s office and we were drinking a toast in paper cups when Anna surprised us all.

  “I’m going to hold a party,” she said. “To celebrate.”

  • • •

  IT WAS A NICE PARTY. Anna bought pinwheels and party hats for all the kids and they careened through the house making helicopter noises. Willie Nelson was singing a bit too loudly about a redheaded stranger and there was mulled wine, thick with fruit and nuts. “It’s called glogg. I’m Swedish, you know,” Anna announced with mock gravity when I looked into my glass with eyebrows raised.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said with the same deadpan. “My mother’s sister married a man from Oslo.”

  “That’s Norway.”

  “Just drink,” said Todd, who had been listening with his arm around Christina. “You won’t care.”

  I did and I didn’t, and the mulled wine definitely helped when we gathered in the living room for the toasts by Art and Louise, his overly brief and hers too long, but at least free of French quotations. Todd led a hearty cheer when Art held up our three first-place certificates, just paper, really, but embossed with gold foil and words written in formal dark blue calligraphy. The kids, piled onto the couch, blew their noisemakers, Stephen blowing his very seriously, as if auditioning for a place in a band, Sam shaking her head sideways with pure joy, her red curls bouncing side to side as she blew so hard she slid backward off the couch and landed at my feet, looking up at me with hair in a tangle and her eyes wild and wide. “Mr. Eric!” she shouted, and blew her horn at my knees.

  It was all silly and loud and perfect—I still remember that moment as perfect—the squeaky but exhilarated fanfare of plastic whistles proclaiming the unlikely triumph of The Shannon Sentinel.

  When the official celebration broke up, I retreated into the short hall that led to the bedrooms. I had been smiling for an hour and I wanted a moment to myself. I reached the slightly ajar door to Anna’s bedroom, which I could see had been carefully put in order, and before I really thought about what I was doing, I slipped inside.

  It was a small room, lit only by a bedside reading lamp. At the center was a sagging, full-sized bed with a plain beige coverlet and an old brass headboard. A small circular table, the kind you can find at any discount store, sat on one side, and a bookcase on the other. I looked briefly at the books, but it was hard to make out the titles in the gloom. On the wall across from the bed stood a low dresser with a mirror. Pictures of her children sat in frames on top of the dresser, and there was another photo stuck in the side of the mirror at eye-height.

  I considered it absently, feeling mildly guilty for prying, and then I had the oddest sensation, as if the world blinked out and then refocused, slipped into a brief, heart-stopping void, and then returned with surreal clarity. The music and voices drifting into the room disappeared. It was perfectly quiet. I tugged the picture out of the mirror frame and then I was standing beside the bed, holding it beneath the light. Looking at a picture of myself.

  The photograph was in partial profile, a close-up taken outdoors on a day of scattered clouds. A moment drifted back: Anna and I sitting on the fake island by the lake, taking pictures of sailing boats. The camera clicking in my ear. And here it was. In her mirror. In her bedroom. I felt my own complete and overwhelming stupidity, my ignorance of every single thing that mattered in the last year of my life, and about the only thing I knew for sure was that you didn’t put a picture there of someone who was just a good friend.

  I put it back. When I stepped into the hall I was terrified she would be standing outside the door, but no one was, and I hurried through the living room and past the group in the kitchen, smiling, nodding, saying I needed to get a little air.

  Out on the sidewalk I realized my coat was lying on the bed in Stephen’s room. The night was cold but I couldn’t go back in. I needed to get away from the street, where I felt nakedly visible, so I stepped around the side of the house. It was darker here, the snow-covered yard falling away into the dark ravine. I stood out of sight of the kitchen window, holding myself against the cold, trying to think. The door opened and shut with a rattle and I heard her walking up behind me.

  “Eric? What are you doing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Anna moved up to my side and when I looked at her I knew I was right about the photograph. She stood silently beside me for what felt like a long time.

  “You know what you need to do now?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “You need to go.”

  This was not what I expected.

  “What?”

  “You need to go. You need to leave Shannon. You’ve been here long enough. You’re twenty-one years old. You need to move on.”

  The wind blew through our clothes and this was a lonely place, there was no debate. She stood the way I had seen her so many times, with her arms crossed across her chest, her over-long sleeves held in in the palms of her hands. She was pale and indistinct in the faint light behind her home, a sketch of a woman I realized I had never really known, and this only seemed to clarify her, the one knee bent slightly, the slight arch of her back, and the way she always held her head, as if an invisible book were perched there. She was drawn in these few lines and I had to fill in the rest. I felt like I was seeing her for the first time, and I knew how much she meant to me.

  “Move on,” I said.

  “Come with me.”

  We walked down the ridge. Her house was the last one in line and it didn’t take long before we had left it behind. Shannon sparkled and glowed off to the south, but to the north and west the broad, enveloping darkness of the American plains brought the sky and earth together in a single black sheet, broken only by a handful of stars and a solitary farm light off in the distance.

  “You know, sometimes I come out here at night after the kids are asleep, and I don’t look at Shannon. I look out there,” Anna said. “In the dark it seems like there’s nothing between you and the rest of the world. Everything is out there. You need to get out there, Eric. You’ve done what you can with this little newspaper. You’ve done all you were meant to do here. You don’t want to get stuck.”

  “What about you? You’re the one who comes out here at night looking at the rest of the world.”

  Anna smiled, but her eyes never left the invisible distance.

  “I’m just a romantic. This is my home. I’m happy here.”

  I was smart enough to know that was true and not true, but too young to realize it’s the same for almost everyone at some point: we stop moving, we come to the end of the search, yet some part of us forever inclines toward the horizon, the way you feel your legs still moving after a long day on your feet, som
e restless phantom wants to go on, even if we have made a home. I write that with a wife I love asleep down the hall, but Anna was alone, except for her children. I have a daughter, I know how much that is. I also know it’s not the end of desire.

  “I don’t believe it,” I said. “I think it’s just as small a place for you as it is for me. I think you could go somewhere else.” I hesitated, and amid a confused rush of longing I barely heard myself say, “We could find work somewhere together.”

  She stepped close enough to place her hand flat against my chest. Her sleeve slid down, leaving her arm naked and exposed in the dark. I felt her palm against my heart.

  “Oh, Eric. Here is what you’re going to do. Next week you’re going to tell the Shoemakers that you’re quitting at the end of the month. You’re going to go back to school and finish or you’re going to find a job somewhere else. You’ve got experience, and you’re impressive. You’re an impressive young man.” Her voice tapered off and she let her forehead touch my chest. Just briefly. “You are. So you’re going to move on. If you don’t, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to edit an error into one of your stories so severe they’ll have to fire you. And you’ll have to leave Shannon, anyway.”

  She lifted her head so I could see her eyes and know she was serious. Then, gently at first, but with ever-growing firmness, she pushed herself away.

  “Just don’t tell me you did that to Stacy,” I said.

  “No, Stacy managed all by herself. No need for help there.”

  “I guess I’m not quite as capable.”

  “Well, you’re young. You’ll learn how to screw up soon enough.” And I thought she might cry, but she managed one more smile. “But not today.”

  I tried one more time. “Listen—”

  Anna turned toward her house. “Come on. We have to get back inside. You don’t understand, do you? I’m throwing you a goodbye party.”

  Chapter 28