Flat Lake in Winter

by Joseph T. Klempner

  “Does that car of yours really run?” she asked, eyeing it suspiciously.

  “It got me here, didn’t it?”

  “Take me for a ride,” said Jennifer Hamilton Walker.

  THEY HAD TO be back by three, when the school bus would arrive with Troy, so they couldn’t go far. But Jennifer seemed to want to get away from the trailer park for a bit, as though the story, once told, could now somehow be left behind there. They drove around aimlessly for a while, the windows open wide, the heat turned up full-blast to compensate.

  “Turn in there,” Jennifer said, at a sign marked Silver Lake Beach.

  Fielder swung the wheel hard, and the Sidekick screeched its tires and threatened to roll over before complying. They drove past an unattended gate and parked in a blacktop lot next to a lake. It was definitely of the southern New Hampshire variety - small and overdeveloped - and the sight of it made Fielder wonder if Jennifer didn’t miss the unspoiled beauty of Flat Lake, back in a world she’d once called home.

  They got out and walked down to the water. There were hundreds of ducks and geese - either stopovers pausing to rest on their southern migration, or year-rounds who’d lost the instinct and learned instead to survive the winter on handouts from the locals.

  At the water’s edge, Jennifer again took his hand in hers, and they stood on the bank, watching the birds fluttering about, preening themselves and searching for anything that seemed remotely edible.

  “Will you be staying the night?” she asked him.

  He didn’t know whether she meant with her, or in the state. And his confusion must have been transparent, because Jennifer quickly smiled and added, “Here in New Hampshire.”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Is there anybody you’ve got to get back to?”

  “Just your brother.”

  “Stay one more night,” she told him. “I’ll make us all a nice dinner. I’m a pretty good cook, actually. Then I’ll get a sitter for Troy. There are all sorts of people back at the park who’ve been after me to let them watch him, so I can go out on a date.” She smiled conspiratorially. “I’d love to give them something to gossip about.”

  “Is that what you think I am?” He laughed. “Someone to gossip about?”

  “No,” she said softly. “I think you’re maybe someone to love.”

  It took a moment for that to register. But she held his eyes with her own. And in that moment, and from her look, he understood that it wasn’t just about sex, either, any more than it was about gossip. Here was this thirty-year-old woman, as beautiful a person as he’d ever set eyes on, with all this love to give. In her entire life, the only person she’d ever loved was her own son. And now she was asking him, Matt Fielder, to stay a bit, and let her try to love him.

  He guessed her brother could wait another day.

  He freed his hand from hers just long enough to put his arms around her and pull her close to him. The nearby ducks scattered, as though they’d seen enough to know there’d be no handouts here.

  JENNIFER TURNED OUT to be more than a “pretty good” cook. She made chicken breasts stuffed with sautéed mushrooms and wild rice, fresh asparagus, and a pie made from local wild blueberries - ingredients Fielder had insisted on paying for at the checkout counter.

  “They’re paying me serious money to represent your brother,” he’d told her. “Think of this as my way of giving something back to the community.”

  “So I’m a ‘community’ now?” She’d laughed. A part of her had begun to emerge that Fielder hadn’t seen before, a part that dared to smile openly, laugh out loud, and even flirt on occasion. It was as though she’d been required to grow up and become an adult too quickly, and now Fielder’s presence somehow managed to unlock the little girl that always was in her but never had been permitted to surface.

  Dinner in the trailer was itself something of an intimate experience. The three of them sat around the folding tabletop, which all but disappeared under plates, glasses, flatware, and paper towels folded to imitate linen napkins. They talked about work and school and Little League and teachers, about whether rap was really music or not, about which cars were fastest, and which sneakers were coolest. Troy wanted to get a tattoo - just a small one, no dirty words or anything - and his mother had forbidden it. They agreed to give Matt the deciding vote. When he sided with Jennifer, Troy moaned “Grown-ups!” and smacked the palm of his hand against his forehead in mock exasperation. But from the boy’s smile, Fielder could tell he was secretly pleased that they cared enough to intervene.

  Sharing the after-dinner chores was something of a gesture, since the kitchenette barely had room for one person. But they managed to pull it off anyway - Jennifer washing, Fielder drying, and Troy putting things away.

  Around seven, the youth-sitter showed up - Troy objected to the term baby-sitter - and they said their good-nights.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “The movies,” Jennifer told him.

  “What movie?”

  “Don’t know yet.”

  “What’s playing?” he asked.

  “Not sure.”

  “How can you be going to a movie, if you don’t even know what’s playing?”

  She threw him one of her shrugs, topped off with a smile.

  “Hey, Mom,” he said. “Is this like a date?”

  She laughed. “And what if it is?”

  That stumped him, but only for a moment. “Don’t be home too late,” he warned them sternly.

  As almost any single parent could have told Fielder, you can’t do much better than that on the approval scale.

  “SO,” FIELDER SAID, pulling the Sidekick out onto the highway, “were you serious about a movie?”

  “No way.”

  “What’ll it be, then?” he asked.

  “What would you like?”

  “What I would like,” he said, “is to make love with you.” And then he held his breath and prayed she wouldn’t tell him to turn around and drive her back home.

  “God,” she said instead. “This must be what it’s like to feel seventeen years old.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t get your hopes up too high. You haven’t seen the honeymoon suite at the Motel Six yet.”

  “How do you know?” she said, with a wicked wink.

  “Touché.” He laughed. But the truth was, he did know; everything about her told him tonight wasn’t just a date for Jennifer.

  To Fielder, the evening would turn out to be what making love was always supposed to have been about, but never quite was. It would become the single moment in his life when tantalizing anticipation, excruciating eroticism, and breathtaking love would manage to lay aside their differences for a few short hours and come together in perfect, magnificent symphony.

  To Jennifer, it would be everything she’d ever dreamed about and more, for as long as she could remember. Never mind that she’d had to wait until the autumn of her thirtieth year for her handsome prince to come calling. Never mind that he’d finally found her, not at some castle in the clouds, but at a trailer park in someplace called Nashua, New Hampshire; or that he’d ridden up not on a white steed champing at its bit, but in an old green Suzuki with torn mud flaps.

  At the door of his room, he swung her into his arms and carried her inside before remembering that the gesture might have brought back memories that could have ruined it all. But if she remembered she showed no sign of it; she threw her head back and laughed like a child.

  She was shy when it came to undressing in front of him, but it struck Fielder as an honest shyness, as her brash boldness at shamelessly planning the evening suddenly collided with her long years of privacy. She wanted the lights off; he needed to see her. They compromised on a small desk lamp.

  He stopped her from unbuttoning her top, so he could do it for her. Underneath, he discovered some sort of strange, frilly undershirt thing.

  “It’s a teddy,” she told him. “I bought it years ago, through a mail-o
rder catalog. After that, they kept sending me ads for all sorts of other stuff - mesh stockings, sequined g-strings, and cut-out panties. I was so afraid Troy would come across one of them, we had to move. Anyway, you’re supposed to like it. It’s supposed to be sexy.”

  “And it is,” he assured her. “But it belongs on the chair over there.”

  At which point she misunderstood him completely, got up, and proceeded to move to the chair. Which didn’t turn out to be so terrible, either, once she realized her mistake.

  It was like that. Just when they’d get so deeply involved with their bodies and their passions that there didn’t seem anywhere else to go, something would happen to make them laugh, to slow things down, to calm them so they could start all over again.

  If she was nervous, she was also eager; if she was inexperienced, she was also quick to learn. If he was worried about when to be gentle and when to be forceful, at some point he forgot to worry, and he was both. And, when at last they lay quietly side by side, aware of precious time running out, he knew he’d been somewhere he’d never been before.

  “What do you like most about me?” she asked him.

  He thought of her face, her eyes, her too-full mouth, her smile, her long blonde hair that fell a certain way, her little-girl breasts, her flat tummy, her bottom that he hadn’t been able to keep his hands off of, her long legs . . .

  “Well?”

  “The way you kiss me,” he said.

  “I like your voice,” she said. “More than anything else, I love listening to your voice.”

  They dressed in silence for the fifteen-minute ride back to Nightingale Court and reality, each of them forever changed, each of them wondering what the next day would bring. Holding the door open for her on the way out of the motel room, Fielder saw, for the first time that night, how bare and cheerless the place looked, his $26-a-night Motel 6 room, and he wondered what it would be like coming back to it alone in half an hour, for the mundane business of sleeping. When Jennifer reached to flick off the wall switch, he caught her hand.

  “Leave the light on for me,” he said, in his best imitation of a Midwestern twang. But if she caught the joke, she didn’t smile.

  RIDING BACK TO the trailer park, Jennifer seemed every bit as far removed as Fielder was from the evening they’d spent together. But where his thoughts dwelled on the shabbiness of the motel room, hers turned to her son.

  “Do you think he’s all right?” she worried aloud.

  “I’m sure he is.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The sitter seemed very competent. She’d said she’d raised three children of her own.”

  “I know,” she said. “But I didn’t tell her he likes to read before he goes to bed. Or that he needs to be reminded to brush his teeth, and wash his face. Suppose he should get up and walk around in his sleep, like . . .” But there her voice trailed off, her mind apparently preoccupied with a myriad of other terrors that might lie in wait for her child.

  “Listen,” he said. “Troy’s all right, and you’re a wonderful mother. You need to stop worrying about him so much.”

  She looked up at him, and he took her hand and squeezed it, and gave her his most reassuring smile. It seemed to do the trick.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that I’ve never left him before. Not at night.”

  And, of course, Troy was just fine.

  Fielder drove the sitter home, all of 100 yards or so, and headed back to the motel. But not before promising Jennifer to come by for breakfast before he headed home the following day.

  IN HIS DREAM that night, Fielder replayed his evening of making love with Jennifer. Only, each time they came together, some part of her would hold back. Just as he’d be on the verge of entering her, she’d panic and stop him, to ask if Troy had been permitted to read before bedtime, or if he’d been reminded to brush his teeth. “Suppose he gets up,” she cried at one point. “Suppose he should get up and walk around in his sleep, like . . .”

  “Like what?” he asked her.

  Only to awaken and realize he was lying awake in the dark motel room, alone, and that he’d spoken the words aloud, to himself.

  “Like what?” he repeated softly, trying to force his dream to resurface, to come back to him. Making love . . . Jennifer holding back . . . worrying about Troy . . . reading, brushing his teeth, getting up and walking around in his sleep, like-

  Like what?

  But sleep closed over him again.

  BREAKFAST IS A difficult time for those unaccustomed to eating before the afternoon, but Fielder did his best to cope with English muffins and orange juice. Troy raced off to catch the school bus, leaving the two of them in sudden quiet. Fielder motioned for Jennifer to come around to his side of the tabletop, and when she did, he took her in his arms and pulled her onto his lap. Her kiss tasted of crumbs and butter and jelly, and he wondered if maybe he could learn to change his meal schedule after all.

  “How’d you sleep?” he asked her.

  “Like a baby.” She grinned. “You?”

  “Good,” he said. But something tugged at him, as though from far away.

  “I was bad,” she confided.

  “You were wonderful.”

  “No,” she insisted, “I was bad. I called in sick to work.”

  “You were bad,” he agreed with a laugh. “But I’ve got to be getting back.”

  “I know. But I needed the day to myself. I haven’t taken a sick day in five years.”

  They did the dishes, but he kept grabbing her from behind, and they ended up on her bed. At one point Fielder thought the trailer might slip off its foundation, but it held up. They laughed about it afterward.

  “Do you think your neighbors wondered why it was rocking?” he asked.

  “I hope so.” She smiled. She looked at her watch. “Hey, it’s almost ten,” she said. “I suppose we should get up and-”

  And in that instant it all came back to him. The dream. What was it she’d said? Suppose he should get up, she’d said. Suppose he should get up and walk around in his sleep, like-

  Like what?

  “Does Troy really walk in his sleep?”

  “No,” she admitted, after a moment’s hesitation. “But it’s one of the things I worry about.”

  “Why?”

  “Have you ever seen someone who does it?” she asked him. “It’s scary,” she said. “Their eyes are open, and they can do all sorts of things. But they’re still asleep, and in the morning they honestly can’t remember anything about it.”

  But what about the “like”? Where had that come from? Something in him kept telling him that the “like” was important.

  “What does it remind you of?” he asked her.

  She shrugged and looked away from him, as though to check on her son through the window. But he wasn’t out there - he was at school by now - and it hadn’t been her usual, easy shrug. It had been something quite different: a deliberate avoidance of his eyes, and of his question. And in that difference, and from that avoidance, he knew it wasn’t just his imagination that was at work here.

  “What does it remind you of?” he asked her again. Still she looked away, even as he reached out for her. “What?” he pressed her.

  When at last she turned back to face him, there was a strange, glassy look in her eyes, a faraway look he hadn’t seen since she’d finished reliving the story of her childhood for him the afternoon before.

  “Not ‘what,’” she whispered. “Who.”

  The lawyer in Matt Fielder eased up then, and he let her off the hook, his cross-examination done. He’d been taught long ago, when you got the answer you’ve been looking for, try to avoid the temptation of overkill. So, instead of forcing her to speak the name herself, he did it for her.

  “Jonathan,” is what he said.

  She nodded weakly.

  JONATHAN WAS A SLEEPWALKER. He’d been walking in his sleep since early childhood. Sometimes they’d find him downstairs
, or curled up in the bathroom, or even outside on the lawn once or twice, before they had special locks installed to keep him in. He would seem to be awake. His eyes would be open, he could see, he could do things; but he never spoke. In the morning, he’d have absolutely no recollection of the things he’d done, or how he’d managed to end up where they’d found him.

  “After the day - the day Klaus’s car broke down,” she said, “Jonathan began coming to my room during the night. The first time, I thought he was awake, and just wanted to talk. Then I realized he was asleep, and it wasn’t talk he wanted. After that, I’d lock my door, but the lock was so flimsy he’d push his way in anyway. I was too scared to scream, too scared to say anything.”

  “So you . . .”

  She nodded. “So I’d let him. He was never violent again, like the first time. I found it was just easier to rub him, or whatever, until he was finished. It never took long. Then I’d walk him back to his room. I don’t think he knows about any of it, even to this day.”

  But Jennifer had certainly known about it. She couldn’t say if she’d gotten pregnant that first day, or from one of Jonathan’s subsequent nighttime visits; it didn’t seem to matter much to her. What mattered was, there soon came a time when she could no longer live under the same roof as her brother, or her indifferent parents.

  Fielder was positively dumbstruck. “Do you understand what you’re telling me?” he asked her.

  “What? That I was a whore?”

  “A whore?” He grabbed by the shoulders and shook her. “You were a saint. You did the only thing you possibly could have done, to save your life. But that’s not all.”

  “There’s more?”

  “Yes, there’s more. Don’t you see, Jennifer? Don’t you get it? Your brother killed your grandparents in his sleep. He doesn’t even know he did it.”

  THE REVELATION THAT Jonathan Hamilton was a sleepwalker had an immediate and dramatic impact on his defense team. Before leaving to return home, Matt Fielder spent another two hours with Jennifer, grilling her for every minute detail she could supply about her brother’s disorder. It seemed she’d been one of the last in the family to learn of it. Around the time Jonathan was making his periodic nighttime visits to her room, she’d brought up the subject of his wanderings with her mother and both her grandparents, but only in veiled, general terms. All three of them, it turned out, had been aware of the behavior for many years - since the time Jonathan had been about five or six. It had been harmless enough at the beginning, comical stuff such as his wandering about the house, peeing into the kitchen wastebasket, or winding up in someone else’s occupied bed. Later, there’d been occasional episodes involving violence, but nothing had ever been reported to the authorities. Once, Jonathan had fallen down a flight of steps in his sleep; a doctor was summoned, but hadn’t been told the true circumstances surrounding the incident. Another time, Jonathan had lashed out and struck his mother hard enough to give her a black eye that lasted the better part of a week. And once or twice, he’d hurt his hands punching some imagined enemy in the middle of the night, unaware that it was a wall or a door. Jennifer had never talked to her father about the problem; by the time she knew about it, the two of them had all but ceased talking about anything. But she’d found out from several conversations with her mother that the family’s code of silence applied more than ever. Her father reportedly warned the rest of them that if even a rumor got out, the police would be sure to come take Jonathan away, lock him up in an insane asylum, and throw away the key.