Winter Wake

by Rick Hautala

  Julia walked to the corner of the house and looked down along its length, but there was nobody there. It was possible no one had ever been there, that she had imagined it all, due — perhaps — to the fever she was running. Or maybe Bri had gotten home from school early and was goofing around outside.

  “I caught you,” she yelled suddenly, and turning quickly, she dashed around the front of the house to the Oak Street side where she could see both the living room and kitchen windows.

  Again, though, there was no sign of anyone … no footprints in the matted grass or anything to indicate the sound had been other than her imagination.

  With a sigh that came out a thick plume of cold mist, Julia turned and started back toward the front door, but she had taken no more than two or three steps when the front door, which she had left open, slammed shut with a loud bang. It sounded like a gun going off close to her head. Julia jumped back with a startled yelp and stared wide-eyed at the closed door. As she cautiously approached the front steps, she was convinced that below the crunching sound her feet made in the dead grass, she could still hear a low, steady tap-taping sound on a window, only now it was coming from inside the house.

  Trembling, Julia mounted the steps and reached for the doorknob, convinced that it wouldn’t budge when she turned it.

  It’d be just my luck today to lock myself out, she thought as she turned the knob.

  To her surprise, the door opened, and as soon as she stepped inside, the faint tapping sound stopped.

  Shaking her head, convinced she was letting her nerves get the better of her, she took off her coat and hung it back up in the closet. If she had been feeling poorly before, she was much worse now. Her only thought was to get to the couch and lie down before she collapsed onto the floor.

  Lurching forward, her arms raised in front of her like Frankenstein’s monster, she walked over to the couch, thinking she wanted nothing more than let sleep pull her down.

  Damn any tapping sounds, she thought. Damn it all!

  Her knees bumped into the couch arm, and she pitched forward, letting her arms flop out to the side. The knuckles of her left hand dragged across the floor, but she didn’t care. Tiny spots of light swam in front of her eyes like amoebas. She reached for the afghan on the back of the couch and pulled it down on top of her, but it wasn’t going to be enough to cut the chills that was now ripping like a blizzard through her.

  As she drifted away in a thin, disturbed sleep, the tap-taping sound came again, but now not from just one window but several at the same time. The sound grew steadily louder until it rattled every window in the house. It seemed as though the panes of glass would shatter and explode inward, and in her disturbed sleep, Julia thought a howling winter storm — like the chill racking her body — was throwing its full strength against the house. Icy fingers knocked on the windows and reached under the clapboards, trying to tear the glass and wood away.

  Julia was drifting uneasily, so she had no sense of how long these sounds continued, but suddenly another sound as though from another world intruded on her awareness. She heard the screeching of school bus brakes.

  Bri’s home, she thought hazily, rolling her head to one side and staring at the door.

  From outside in front of the house, she heard with unusual sharpness the sounds of the school bus door opening and a brief burst of laughter and shouted conversations that cut off as suddenly as it had begun. Then Bri came up the walkway and opened the front door.

  Hey! ‘‘I’m home!” she shouted.

  “And not playing with the windows anymore,” Julia said lazily as she tried without much success to sit up on the couch.

  “God, you look awful,” Bri said as she walked into the living room and, slinging her backpack to the floor, looked at her mother.

  “Thanks,” Julia said.

  “I’m serious,” Bri said as she came over to the couch and placed her hand on her mother’s forehead. “You’re burning up with fever.”

  Julia nodded and tried to look directly at Bri, but her vision kept wavering in and out of focus like she was looking through a telescope, and someone else was fiddling with the focus. She could still hear a loud chattering sound, but it took her a while to realize it was her teeth, not someone outside tapping on the windows.

  “I guess I … caught a chill when I was outside,” Julia said weakly. “I thought you were tapping on the windows.”

  “I just got off the bus,” Bri replied with a shrug. “You want me to get you anything? Ginger ale or tea or something?”

  Julia shook her head. “I’m fine … but I saw someone … out there. Maybe your friend Audrey stopped by looking for you.”

  Bri started to say something, but no words came out. Looking down at the floor, she acted as if she hadn’t heard her.

  “Does your friend have long, dark hair?” Julia asked. She thought she had caught a fleeting glimpse of dark hair in the window, but then she realized that what she was remembering was the girl she had seen swimming in the ocean beside Randy’s lobster boat.

  Bri’s eyes darted back and forth from her mother to the kitchen doorway.

  “Uh, yeah … her hair’s kinda long, but she’s not my friend.”

  Julia was having trouble focusing as she looked up from the couch. She almost drifted off to sleep and had to force herself to stay awake.

  “Was her at school today? Why would she come around here before school was out?”

  “I don’t know,” Bri said. She picked up her backpack and started toward the kitchen. “I haven’t seen her since I fell —” She cut herself off before she let her mother know about her near drowning the weekend before last. “ — for a long time,” she finished lamely.

  “Maybe it wasn’t her, then,” Julia said.

  Desperate to switch the subject, Bri asked if she wanted some aspirin. Before she could reply, Julia drifted off to sleep, so Bri tiptoed out into the kitchen and poured herself her usual after-school glass of milk. The milk was fresh and cold, but the mere mention of Audrey’s name made it taste sour and curdled. She poured more than half of it down the sink and then went up to her room to do her homework until her father got home.

  II

  The worst thing Julia expected to happen on Thanksgiving Day was that John and his father would plant themselves in front of the TV and watch football games all day while she and Bri did all the work. John was usually good about helping out in the kitchen, and it never failed to surprise her how, on holidays, he acted as if the kitchen was her job and hers alone.

  This Thanksgiving proved different. If anything, John was more helpful than necessary. He stuffed the turkey, kept an eye on it in the oven, and basted it every half hour. He cut and prepared the squash and potatoes, and had the table set before she asked. Julia and Bri felt left in the dust because, whenever they went into the kitchen to start working on something, John was already at it.

  An hour or so before they planned to eat, when Julia went out to start the mashed potatoes and found John getting them ready, she finally figured out what was going on. Glancing at the living room, where Frank sat watching the Patriots smear the Dolphins, she leaned close to John and whispered into his ear.

  “Are you being helpful because I just got over being sick, or are you doing all of this so you can avoid —” She cocked her thumb toward the living room, and at that exact moment, a loud cheer went up from the stadium crowd.

  John frowned and shook his head innocently. “What d’you mean?”

  “I mean I think you’re being Mr. Helpful in the kitchen because you trying to avoid spending any more time than necessary with your father.”

  “Cut me some slack, will yah?”

  He was using a wire masher on the cubed potatoes, and Julia detected a slight increase of pressure as he pushed down on the spuds. She was about to say more when Bri came into the kitchen and grabbed a diet soda from the refrigerator. She instantly picked up that her parents were having one of “those” discussions, so after
popping the can top and taking a glass from the cupboard, she left them alone. She had made tentative plans to get together with Kristin Alexander, a girl she had started being friends with at school, and didn’t want to say or do anything that might upset those plans.

  “Look, John — I mean, since we’ve moved back here … It’s going on two months now, and have you ever sat down and talked with your dad? I mean, really talked — one on one?”

  John sighed and, letting go of the potato masher, allowed his hand to drop to his side. He placed the bowl gently down on the table and slumped in his chair.

  “No,” he said softly. “We never had that much to talk about.”

  Julia looked at him sympathetically and shook her head.

  “Oh, but there is. Don’t you realize it? Your father’s going through a lot right now, what with having to depend on us and all. He needs you to talk to him.”

  John snorted, but he didn’t take up the bowl of potatoes and get back to work. Julia could see that she was getting to on some level.

  “Especially on holidays and with Christmas coming up … he seems to be — I don’t know. You know him better than I do.”

  “I would never claim to know my father.” John shook his head, his mouth tightening into a bloodless line.

  “It’d be nice if you and he could connect, you know, on an adult level. God. Ever since we moved here, you act like a kid whenever he’s around.”

  “Look,” John said, his face suddenly cast over with a frown. “How many times do I have to remind you that I never wanted to come back here? This was your idea.”

  “Let’s not start in on —”

  John cut her off with a quick slicing motion with his hand.

  “As far as I’m concerned, my father and I have nothing more to deal with. I’m his son. He raised me. And I have to live with the good things and the fuck-ups he passed on to me. It’s too late for either of us to change what we are to each other. Got it? So why not just drop it?”

  Julia was silent for a moment as tears welled up in her eyes. She was angry at herself for mentioning it to him, but now she was thinking, There you go … You’ve done it again … You’ve spoiled the whole day.

  She took a step away from the table, casting a fearful glance at the living room doorway, worried that Frank might have heard some or all of their conversation. But the TV was blaring away, and when Julia moved so she could see Frank, he was totally absorbed with the game. The football players on the screen were little more than blue and red blurs through her tears.

  “It’s never too late,” she said, her voice a sharp rasp. She knew John would dismiss anything she said, attributing it to her own situation with her parents, but she had to say it anyway. “You can never say it’s too late … not until the day your father dies. Then and only then can you say it’s too late.”

  John looked at her, at a complete loss for words. His eyes were stinging, and he couldn’t stop following her gaze toward the living room doorway. Although he couldn’t see his father’s back, as Julia could. In his mind, he pictured him sitting hunched up in his wheelchair, his thin hands gripping the armrests so tightly the blue veins and tendons stood out in high relief beneath his pale skin. He could clearly imagine his father’s thin face with its wattle of loose flesh hanging down under his chin … his thin, nearly colorless lips pressed tightly shut … his dull blue eyes glazed by the years, staring at the TV.

  “I want you to promise me one thing,” Julia said as she wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

  “What’s that?” John asked, his eyebrows raised.

  “For me … as a special gift, I want you to promise me you’ll treat your father like you’re both adults.”

  “But I —”

  This time it was her turn to cut him off with a quick chopping motion of her hand.

  “No buts,” she said, softly but firmly. “Promise me, maybe some night when Bri and I go out Christmas shopping or something, that you’ll sit your ass down and talk to him. Try to find out who he is now … before it’s too late.”

  Slowly, John nodded his agreement, but when he reached for the bowl of potatoes, Julia darted forward and took it from him.

  “And the last thing I’m going to put up with is your lumpy mashed potatoes. I’m not going to let you ruin my Thanksgiving dinner with lumpy mashed potatoes.”

  “Lumpy?”

  “You’re darn-tootin’, mister,” Julia said, trying to lighten the mood as she went to the counter and dumped the contents of the bowl into her Cuisinart and hit the high-speed button. “Grab a beer and watch the rest of the game. I can handle it from here.”

  III

  The rest of Thanksgiving Day went fairly well, as far as John was concerned, but it wasn’t great, either — especially as far as Julia was concerned. Bri was ticked off because her mother told her she wanted her to stay home with the family rather than visit her friend Kristin. John ended up spending most of the afternoon in the living room with his father. What little conversation there was between them was strained and quite often hostility surged just below the surface like a hungry shark.

  But it never broke out.

  The dinner was fantastic. In an attempt to get into the spirit of the holiday, Julia added boiled onions and succotash to her usual turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, peas, candied yams, and cranberry jelly. The after-dinner desserts — apple pie with vanilla ice cream, and pumpkin pie — went practically untasted because everyone was so full.

  That evening, Julia suggested they all settle down to play a board game, but once they finally agreed on Monopoly and dug out the old game box, they found several cards were missing and put the game away. Then Julia suggested they go for a walk to help their digestion so they would have room for dessert.

  At first Bri didn’t want to go along, saying she would rather stay at home where it was warm. Maybe she’d have a checker game or two with Frank, but Julia persisted, so she agreed, grumbling as she pulled on her coat, hat, and mittens.

  Once everyone was bundled against the cold, they left by the kitchen door. After a brief hesitation, they decided to turn left and walk along Shore Drive in the direction that would eventually take them out to the Surfside condos site.

  John silently vowed that he would get them to turn around before they got that far. The last thing he wanted was to do was catch even a glimpse of that place. Whenever he thought about the bones that had been found out there, his blood ran cold. Even when he was a boy, there had been stories about Haskins’ barn and the woods around it, and he never had been — and never wanted to be — out there after dark.

  The road was strung with streetlights every hundred feet or so, but on Glooscap, the Highway Department hadn’t yet replaced the old-fashioned bulbs with sodium arc lights. Even directly under them, the thin light cast weak shadows over their faces and the ground. Bri tried to joke about how “spooky” they looked, wandering down the road, but everyone’s laughter was thin and forced.

  Their footsteps echoed hollowly in the cold night as they walked past the houses of neighbors they hadn’t met.

  Why doesn’t John go out and reacquaint himself with the life he used to know? Julia wondered.

  The brightly-lit living room windows, most of which didn’t even have the shades drawn, flickered with the glow of TVs. They looked homey and cozy, but that only made Julia feel colder and more alone.

  As John led his wife and stepdaughter down the road, he experienced an odd mixture of the past intruding on the present. Other than the hike up Bald Hill, this was the first time since they had moved back to the island that he had gone out for a stroll through his old neighborhood. Until now, Shore Drive had been nothing more than a means to get on and off Glooscap and to reach the condo development he was working on. But now — especially at night — the road seemed both intimately familiar and strangely alien. In many ways, he knew it was he, not the road, had changed over the years. Even though there were a few new houses on the outer stretch of
the road, and the road looked different, there was a haunting familiarity, and he felt as though he had never left the place … or maybe the boy he had been, the boy who had walked and run and ridden bike and then driven cars along this road had never grown up and was still somewhere on the island, and he had simply been given that boy’s childhood memories.

  “Maybe it’s me,” Julia said as they walked along the side of the road, “but doesn’t it seem to have gotten colder sooner here than it did in Vermont?”

  “Colder, maybe, but in Vermont we would’ve had snow by now,” John’s breath was a plume of thick steam that looked as if he were smoking a cigarette. “All depends. Sometimes the coast gets snow early in the winter, and it snows like hell all the way through to March. Other years, it just gets frigid and there’s almost no snow.”

  “The cold feels rawer here,” Julia said, “because of the moisture from the ocean.”

  “For sure,” John replied. “What I always liked about it was that we’d get in a lot of ice-skating before snow fell. We almost never had to bother with clearing off a patch of ice to skate, like we did in Vermont.”

  John sighed as memories and images from his past arose in his mind.

  “One winter, it got so cold the bay between the island and mainland froze, and you could walk over to the mainland.”

  “That’d be dangerous,” Bri said. “I thought seawater was too salty to freeze.”

  Whenever they were under a streetlight, John noticed that Bri’s eyes would flick back and forth nervously, as though she was trying to see something on the fringes of the darkness. It was almost as if she was looking for someone.

  “Randy and I crossed the frozen bay that winter,” John said, “but only on a dare, and — yes — it was dangerous. The whole time, the ice was crackling and buckling. A couple of times it split open near me.” He chuckled at the memory. “Truth to tell, I was scared out of my wits. If you fell into that water, fimagine how cold it would be! God, you wouldn’t last more than a few seconds.”