Flat Lake in Winter

by Joseph T. Klempner

  As a teenager, she was the tallest in her class; a freak too tall to attract boys, who were scared off by her intimidating height, even as they were intrigued by her developing breasts. In order to stop growing, she gave up eating altogether one summer, and, when forced by her father to put food in her mouth, she’d comply only to excuse herself afterward in order to go upstairs to her bathroom, where she could run the water to drown out the sounds of her regurgitating the food - food that threatened to deprive her of being petite and normal, like the rest of her classmates. Only much later in life did she come across such terms as anorexia and bulimia in her reading, long after she’d outgrown her bouts of self-starvation and purging.

  She wanted to go off to college, but her father sat her down one afternoon and told her how fragile her mother’s health was. By then, P. J. was already into alcohol and drugs and becoming something of a problem; as for Jonathan, he’d turned out to be little more than a dreamy child in an oversized body of his own. “Your leaving home will be the death of your mother,” her father warned her. “You’re all she has left.”

  Whether it was true or not, Jennifer couldn’t defy her father and risk killing her mother. She enrolled in Cedar Falls Community College, where Klaus Armbrust drove her each morning and picked her up each afternoon. She found the work easy and the other day students friendly. The best thing about it was, by that time, she was no longer the tallest in her class. The boys, at least, had caught up to her. But she’d been sheltered so long that she’d developed no social graces or self-esteem, and she rejected their advances, soon gaining the reputation of being aloof and indifferent. She earned her associate’s degree in English in a year and a half instead of the customary two, intending to transfer her credits to a four-year institution.

  But right around that time P. J. left home, sending their mother into deeper depression and increased drinking. Again Jennifer’s father prevailed on her to stay home “where she was needed,” though he never specified who it was that needed her, or precisely what needs she was expected to fulfill. But stay home she did.

  “What did you do with yourself?” Fielder asked her.

  “Oh, I got a job. My father knew the man who ran the lumberyard over in Pine Creek, and he got him to let me keep the books there three days a week. He figured it would also be a way to give Jonathan something to do.”

  Each day Klaus dropped Jennifer off at work, he’d drop off Jonathan with her. While Jennifer worked on balance sheets and bank statements in the office, Jonathan would amuse himself out back, in the fenced-in yard that contained stacks of two-by-fours, sheets of plywood and paneling, and huge mounds of wood chips and sawdust. If there were chores to be done, like restacking lumber, he’d occasionally help out; at eighteen, he was strong enough to work alongside the hired men, and he could pull his own weight, so long as he didn’t have to keep count of pieces or make decisions on his own. But more often than not, he just sat around in the sun, or passed the time by playing with the dogs that had the run of the yard.

  Jennifer glanced out the window. It was growing late in the afternoon, and as the length of the shadows increased, so did her level of agitation. Finally she stood, unable to continue her narrative any longer. But she needn’t have worried; as though on cue, there was a sound of footsteps outside, the door to the trailer opened, and Troy bounced in, filthy and out of breath.

  She hugged him close and tousled his hair, undeterred by dirt and sweat. “Wash up before you touch anything,” she told him, and he obeyed without complaint, heading directly to the bathroom. Jennifer turned back to Fielder. “Will you stay for dinner?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “You weren’t counting on company. Besides which, I want to find a place to stay, before it gets too late. But I’d like to come back and talk some more tomorrow, if it’s okay with you.”

  “You can stay here if you like,” she said, pointing at the benches. “But I don’t get home from work ‘til one in the afternoon.”

  “How about I come by around then?”

  She shrugged noncommittally. If listening to Jennifer’s story had been enlightening stuff for Fielder, it was apparent that telling it was hardly a labor of love for Jennifer. Still, she hadn’t said no.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, then.” He was careful to make it sound like a statement, rather than a question.

  PULLING BACK ONTO Route 3A, Fielder was relieved to get away. As beautiful as he found Jennifer, and as much as the notion of sleeping ten feet away from her excited him, the trailer made him feel claustrophobic; and the thought of spending the morning cooped up there waiting for her to come home from whatever work she did, was not an enticement.

  He found a Motel 6 outside of a town called Merrimack, and paid $26 cash for a night’s stay, remembering to ask for a receipt so he’d be able to submit it with his voucher someday, if he didn’t lose it first. Then he took a drive north, toward Manchester, hoping to find a place to eat. A McDonald’s had a big yellow banner up, advertising a 99¢ special on Big Macs. He decided to forget being a vegetarian, and he bought two of them to go, along with a large Coke.

  Back in his room, he propped himself up against the headboard of the bed and clicked on the remote control of the TV set. Letters moving across the bottom of the screen told him that the World Series game had been rained out; in its place they were showing a tape of the Yankees’ Game six clincher from a year ago. There were two other channels to choose from. One was all local news programming, the other was showing an old Cheers rerun. He clicked off the set and turned to his food. The Coke turned out to be watery and flat, to the point where it was almost undrinkable.

  But the Big Macs were awesome.

  He fell asleep around nine thinking of Jennifer, half of him grateful to have a good bed beneath him, the other half regretting that he’d passed on her offer to spend the night in her trailer. After all, who was to say what wonderful things might have happened once her son had fallen asleep.

  Yet even in his dream, she never once smiled.

  “WHERE WERE WE?” Jennifer asked.

  They were sitting on the stoop of the trailer, warm in the afternoon sun despite temperatures in the forties. Always cold during the winters he’d spent in New York, Fielder had gradually become acclimated to the weather of the north country. A good part of it was simply learning how to dress. The first thing you did was to trade in your silly city shoes for a pair of good, lined, waterproof Rockports. Then you wore heavy denim jeans, instead of light-weight cotton twills. Next you went out and bought yourself some good thermal bottoms and a serious down vest. And finally you got over your vanity and your urban fear of hat hair, and you put on a wool cap.

  But the other part of it was attitude. You told yourself you didn’t need it to be 68 degrees to be comfortable - that it was okay, even fun, to be outside in the cold. When your body felt like shivering, you took a couple of deep breaths, and started moving instead. Every once in a while, you took your gloves off, just to see how long you could go without them before your fingers started to get numb. And gradually you became acclimated. You got to the point where you came to regard the cold as your companion, if not quite your friend. You became one of them.

  “You were working at the lumberyard,” he said, “and Jonathan was hanging out there.”

  “Right,” she said.

  The arrangement had worked for a while. Three times a week, Klaus would drop the two of them off in the morning and pick them up in the afternoon. They’d ride in silence both ways - the caretaker uncommunicative as always, the boy off in his strange, private world somewhere, and Jennifer left to herself.

  Until, one afternoon, the car broke down as Klaus was on his way to pick them up. Without a car phone or a CB radio, he had no way of calling them, and by the time Jennifer decided he wasn’t coming for them, the place was empty, and there was nobody left to give them a lift home. So they’d set out walking, Jennifer figuring either they’d meet Klaus along the way, or they’d be luc
ky enough to hitch a ride. If not, it was only about eight miles, a distance she guessed they could cover in a couple of hours.

  She guessed wrong.

  After about a mile, Jonathan complained that he had to pee. They left the roadside and found him a wooded area where he couldn’t be seen, an act of precaution on Jennifer’s part, since modesty was simply not in Jonathan’s range of behavior. But, obediently enough, he wandered off a bit and found a tree that seemed to suit him. But as the minutes went by, Jennifer grew impatient.

  “What are you doing?” she called out to him.

  There was no immediate reply, but that was often the case with Jonathan. So she called out a second time.

  This time he answered, or at least spoke. “Need help,” was what he said, as best as she could tell.

  She headed over to where he stood, his back turned to her. It was only when she reached his side that she realized his problem. He had a huge erection, which he held in both hands as though it were some creature that wasn’t a part of him.

  “Need help,” he said again, a look of total bewilderment on his face.

  “I think I may have laughed at him,” Jennifer said now, shielding her eyes from the sun, as though she were somehow trying to peer back over the years. “I made him let go of it, figuring it would go down of its own accord. But it didn’t.”

  Fielder felt a chill that the weather couldn’t quite account for. He wanted to hear the story, but at the same time he didn’t. A feeling of uneasiness spread through his body.

  “Go on,” he said. Closing the distance between them, so she could lean against him if she wanted to.

  “I’d heard somewhere that when it happens to a patient in a hospital or a doctor’s office, they give it a good rap, and it goes away. So,” she said, “I tried to do that. But I guess I was afraid to hurt him, and I must not have done it hard enough. It only seemed to make things worse.”

  By that time, Jonathan appeared to be in real physical pain, so excruciating the sensation must have been. Moreover, he was so frightened by what was suddenly happening to him that he appeared to be on the verge of panic, his eyes darting about wildly as he grunted for his sister to help him.

  “I couldn’t think of anything else to do but to try to bring him off,” she said. “So I began rubbing him. At the same time, I kept telling him to take it easy, that it was going to be okay. I figured at some point he’d have to begin to calm down and enjoy it, instead of being so scared by it. And for a time, he seemed to. He let me sort of push him down onto the ground, where I could do it better for him. I kept thinking it would all work out: He’d relax and get into it, he’d be able to come, and then he’d be okay.

  “But it didn’t work that way. He just kept getting bigger and bigger,” she said, “and harder and harder. And the panic never seemed to go out of him. Then, before I knew it, he was pushing me over, climbing on top of me, pounding me with his fists, crushing me. He was trying to get it inside me, but he didn’t seem to understand that he couldn’t, because of my clothes. And the more he tried and failed, the more panicked and angry he got, until it reached the point where I was truly afraid he was going to kill me.”

  “So?” Fielder asked. But already he knew the rest.

  “So,” she said. “So I let him do it. I pulled off my pants, and I showed him what to do. And, he . . . did it.”

  Only then did she allow her body to collapse against Fielder’s. He took her weight, reaching one arm around her far shoulder, so as to draw her up close to him. When she didn’t resist, he began to rock her softly.

  But there was more.

  “Afterward, I must have bled for an hour. I think we both thought I was going to die. Jonathan couldn’t take his eyes off the blood. I’m sure he was even more frightened than I was. At one point, we saw Klaus drive by on the road; he’d managed to get the car working. But I was too scared to flag him down, and we let him pass a second time, heading back toward home.”

  Eventually, she got the bleeding to stop, but she was still in too much pain to walk. So Jonathan - the same Jonathan who’d just finished brutally raping her - lifted her up, cradling her in his arms, and carried her home, never once putting her down to rest for the two hours it took them to cover the seven miles.

  “It was dark by the time we got back. Somehow I made it to my room and into my bed. I threw away the ruined clothes I’d used to stop the bleeding, but Elna found them the next morning and showed them to my parents.

  “My father stormed into my room and made me tell him the whole story. Instead of being sympathetic, he was livid. He refused to blame Jonathan; he said Jonathan was just a child who didn’t know any better. He blamed Klaus, and most of all he blamed me. He laughed at my mother’s request to let me see a doctor, insisting that a little bleeding was a normal thing in a virgin. That night, he gathered us all together and made us swear on a Bible never to talk about the incident, to carry on as though none of it had ever happened.”

  “And?” Fielder asked.

  “And it might have worked,” Jennifer said, “if I hadn’t gotten pregnant.”

  “My God,” Fielder heard himself saying. “Troy.” Suddenly it all came together for him: the boy who looked so much like Jonathan that instinctively Fielder had known he had to be a Hamilton the moment he’d seen him step down from the school bus.

  Jennifer nodded.

  “Why?” he asked. What he meant was, Why didn’t you have an abortion? But he realized that was a question her couldn’t ask her now, not with her son growing up apparently normal, and so obviously loved.

  “I wanted an abortion,” she said, as though she’d read his thoughts. “But my father wouldn’t hear of it. He was a religious man. ‘It was God’s will,’ he told me, and God would strike me down if I went against his wishes. The only thing I didn’t know was which ‘his’ he meant.”

  So one day several weeks later, without so much as saying goodbye or leaving a note, she’d packed a few things into an overnight bag, taken $200 from her father’s dresser drawer, and walked out onto the road. The first ride she got took her Cedar Falls. At a diner, she struck up a conversation with an elderly couple who were heading for Portland, Maine. She convinced them to take her with them, but had to get out the following morning, when she became too sick to continue. At a service station, she asked where she was.

  “Lebanon,” someone told her.

  “Where’s Lebanon?”

  “Not far from Hanover. White River Junction.”

  “No,” she said. “What state?”

  “New Hampshire.”

  She’d taken the $200 to pay for the abortion, but now she had to use it to pay for food, and for a motel room. “But by that time,” she explained, “I’d already thought about keeping the baby. It was like, as soon as I’d run away, I knew I’d never go back. There was no longer any shame to feel. Instead, what I mostly felt was lonely. I know it sounds crazy, but more than anything else, I think I decided to keep my baby so I wouldn’t feel so alone.”

  “And you never went back?”

  “Never,” she said, “not to this day. Not even to New York State. I’d been gone about six months when Troy was born. I cried for two full days when they told me he was normal; they couldn’t understand why I’d been so worried. Then I needed to tell somebody, so I called Sue Ellen Simms, one of the few girlfriends I’d made back in Flat Lake. She told me she’d heard that my family had disinherited me, and that my father refused to mention my name in public. As far as he was concerned, it was as if I were dead. Worse. It was as if I’d never existed.

  “By that time, I was staying with a family in Enfield, living in a room above their garage. I gave Sue Ellen their phone number, making her promise on her eyesight that she wouldn’t tell anybody else. A few months later, she called to say there’d been a fire, that my parents were dead. Part of me was glad to hear it; I hated them so much. But part of me felt guilty for feeling that way. Sue Ellen said, at first, there was some talk tha
t Jonathan had lit it.”

  Fielder stiffened. “I never heard that,” he said.

  “About the fire?”

  “No,” he said. “About Jonathan’s being a suspect. I was told it was an accident.”

  Jennifer shrugged. “Maybe it was,” she said. “But it’s hard to know. My family’s always been pretty good when it comes to keeping secrets. Until now, at least.”

  “I guess a double stabbing is kind of hard to keep secret,” Fielder observed.

  “Doesn’t look too much like an accident, huh?”

  He let her attempt at humor go. “Where did the new name come from?” he asked her. “Walker.”

  “I had to pick something,” she said. “When I went to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get my New York driver’s license changed to a New Hampshire one, I asked them if they could switch the name over to my married one. The woman didn’t want to do it without seeing a marriage certificate, but when she looked at my belly, I guess she decided that was proof enough. I was eight months pregnant at the time and pretty big. But she insisted on keeping Hamilton as my middle name.”

  “Good thing she did. I never would have found you otherwise.”

  “I’m glad you did,” she said. She reached up for the hand he’d wrapped around her shoulders, and took it in both of her own.

  “Why ‘Walker’?” he asked her.

  “I don’t know,” she said, with another of her shrugs. “I saw it somewhere. It reminded me of Jonathan a little. The way he’d walked that day, carrying me. By that time I’d pretty much forgiven him, and I wanted my baby to have some connection to him, I guess.”

  “Does Troy have any idea who his father is?”

  “No,” she said. “I told him I was married a long time ago. He thinks his father died in a hunting accident. It’s why he humors me, I think, and allows me to be so overprotective of him.”

  The story was winding down. He knew how difficult it must have been for her, but he also sensed that telling it had been something of a catharsis for Jennifer, a letting-go of things held too close for too long.