14 Degrees Below Zero

by Quinton Skinner

  “Why don’t you come over for dinner Friday night?” asked Stan. “Celia can make something nice. You don’t want me cooking.”

  “No, I don’t,” Lewis said. “And let’s say maybe. I’ll call you.”

  Stan let out a long sigh that arrested itself somewhere toward its end. In the past few years Stan had taken on a kind of somber authority, having lived through the ugly meltdown of his first marriage to Katherine, a wisp-thin woman who had turned out to be harboring a seething rage toward Stan which she manifested in the form of an ugly legal battle which ended in Stan keeping their house but paying dearly for it in the form of cash, present and future, and the souring of his relations with his son. Then had come the discovery of the blockage, and the bypass, a real danger to his existence that trumped all of Lewis’s pains and fears. With his burly mass and bloated-up, boyish face, he seemed to have reached a sort of uneasy accord with himself and his fate. He also seemed to understand Lewis on some fraternal level that made Lewis want to either embrace him or throw him out into the snow.

  “And what’re you planning to do with that?” Stan asked, nodding over Lewis’s shoulder.

  “With what?” asked Lewis.

  “You’re being cute again,” Stan said. “I’m referring to that firearm you’ve tried to hide under the paper.”

  “Oh, that,” Lewis smiled. The record ended, and the tonearm came to rest with a thump. “I was cleaning it.”

  “You were cleaning it,” Stan repeated.

  “Look, Stan, it’s legal,” Lewis said. “I live alone. I have a right.”

  “Hey, I have two,” Stan said. “But I don’t leave them sitting out.”

  “I don’t have to explain myself,” Lewis said.

  “No, you don’t.” Stan gave a long, ponderous nod of agreement. “So how are you getting along with the boyfriend?”

  “My boyfriend or yours?” Lewis asked.

  “Very funny.” Stan shook his head. “Come on, Lewis. How long have we known each other?”

  A long time indeed. Stan had been a stalwart ally during Anna’s illness, bringing her food and books, more than once spending an afternoon with her and sending Lewis out to the movies for the sake of his sanity. Lewis owed Stan a debt.

  “There’s no problem with Stephen.”

  “Stephen.” Stan snapped his fingers. “That’s his name. You know what? I don’t believe you.”

  “Why—”

  “Because the last time I talked to you, you were complaining about him.” Stan winced as though his words pained him. “You said he was bad for Jay. You remember? Now she’s miserable, you’re evasive, and you practically twitched when I asked about him. I know how you get, Lewis. If you don’t like one of Jay’s boyfriends, there’s trouble.”

  “You’re off base on this one, Stan,” Lewis said. “Apparently Jay and Stephen have broken up, but I had nothing to do—”

  “Oh, Lewis,” Stan said sadly.

  “What?” Lewis exploded, about to tell Stan to mind his own business, when the doorbell rang. Lewis looked up and saw another shadow beyond the door.

  “Fucking Grand Central,” he muttered, leaving Stan in the living room. He opened the door to a young man in a suit.

  “Lewis Ingraham here?” the kid asked. He was scrubbed and broad-chested, like one of the kids who worked under him at AmEx.

  “Yeah?” Lewis barked. “What do you want?”

  The kid pressed a manila envelope to Lewis’s chest.

  “You’re being served,” the kid said with a trace of satisfaction. “Hennepin County Court.”

  Lewis took the envelope but didn’t open it.

  “What the hell—”

  “Restraining order,” the kid said. “You have a hearing in ten days. Until then, do not contact or get within five hundred yards of Stephen Grant.”

  “You’re out of—”

  “Do you understand?” the kid interrupted.

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Thank you and have a good day,” the kid said, then made for his car. Despite the cold, he wore only a suit jacket. He was obviously made of hardier stuff than Lewis, who shivered as he slammed the door shut.

  When he turned around, Stan was emptying the bullets from the gun and putting them in his pocket.

  “That’s mine,” Lewis said.

  “I’ve seen enough,” Stan said. “Talk to me in a couple of weeks, and if you’re making sense, I’ll give this back to you.”

  Stan stuffed the .38 into the pocket of his jeans.

  “Fuck you, Stan.”

  Stan shook his head, sadder than before.

  “I’m just being your friend, Lewis.”

  “I mean it,” Lewis said, caressing his sternum with his free hand. “Fuck you, Stan.”

  “You should step back and look at yourself, Lewis,” Stan said. “This isn’t right. This isn’t you.”

  “I’m more myself than I’ve ever been.”

  “Think of Anna,” Stan said. “Think of how she would take this craziness. It would break her heart.”

  “Anna’s gone!” Lewis shouted. “She made me—”

  “What?” Stan said, eyes widening with curiosity. “She made you what?”

  “Nothing,” Lewis whispered. “Just go. Get out.”

  “Will do,” Stan replied. “Just one thing.”

  “What?”

  “You do what that shithead said,” Stan told him. “Stay away from that boyfriend. Don’t get yourself in trouble.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Just stay away,” Stan hissed. “You have a weird look in your eyes, Lewis. Don’t fuck your life up.”

  Lewis let his head drop and motioned Stan to the door. Don’t fuck your life up. As though it was anything other than fucked already.

  16. BECAUSE SHE WAS A LOT LIKE HER FATHER.

  By rough count, Jay served forty-five people food, drinks, and desserts in a thirty-six-hour period—not counting Ramona, who consumed her usual ration of macaroni, snack chips, whole milk, and sliced fruit. It was routine, it was monotony, it wasn’t all bad. Jay felt infinitely thankful to Ramona for being who she was: the one person whom Jay would never think badly of, and who (hopefully) would never think badly of her.

  Now the day’s work was done, and an unusual silence reigned over her apartment. Ramona was in her room playing a game on the machine Lewis had bought for her—weird tinny song snippets and demented voices burbled steadily into the hall. And, strangely enough, the phone was not ringing. She was a little surprised that Stephen hadn’t called since she’d broken up with him, although prideful silence wasn’t an unfathomable reaction on his part. What was odder was Lewis’s sudden lack of communication. Jay hadn’t heard from him since early the day before, which meant he was about six or eight phone calls behind. It surprised her to feel the omission of hearing about Carew’s latest transgression against dignity, or the most recent bout of fear and loathing Lewis had experienced at Marshall Field’s.

  It occurred to Jay to call Lewis, but she decided to enjoy the respite—one that was bound to be temporary. If this was to be the feel of life without the pressures imposed by Lewis and Stephen, well, so be it. She mixed herself a weak gin and tonic in the kitchen, looking out over the snow and the fading light of day. It was going to be a terrible winter. Thanksgiving was still a long stone’s throw away, and already it felt as though the cold had locked in, the feedback loop of frigidity set and immutable. Steam vented from the smokestack on top of the apartment building across the way, and through the storm windows she could hear the lonely scrape of a snow shovel against the pavement.

  The harsh rhythms of winter had shaped Jay’s temperament since she was a little girl. Lewis always tried to soften the terrifying reality of the natural world dying off and frozen stasis setting in—he would extol the bright blue skies, and make sport of the very coldest days by performing physics stunts such as tossing pots of warm water into the yard to make weird abstract ice sculptures. But even in her most
innocent childhood she knew this was Lewis’s equivalent of whistling past the graveyard—in fact, she understood how much of Lewis’s behavior was a variation on this theme.

  She took a sip of her drink and was glad she’d taken the time to slice a lime. In the next room a computer cat was singing a song about being a real cat. The windows gave a little rattle to commemorate a gust of wind.

  Jay knew she couldn’t complain—not without being churlish, nor without failing to recognize the incredible good luck she enjoyed to be who she was. There were people being bombed and blasted, people starving. Yes, she knew all this. But she knew her nature—several senses, a mind and memory, a hunger for evaluation. It might have been rational to keep on serving food and paying the rent and reading the occasional book, and calling that a good life—though, among other ironies, those who knew her would regard her as a defeated failure. But there were worse things than self-determined resignation. Maybe it was simply a matter of deciding to be content. She still had the bulk of her twenties ahead of her; maybe the key was simply to quit worrying so much.

  But that wasn’t going to happen, was it? Maybe she had too much Lewis in her, too much of an impulse to hold everything up to the light, too strong an impulse to ask what was wrong. Her mother hadn’t been like that, but then Anna was in many ways a mystery to her daughter—she was a source of comfort, a calm voice of compassionate reason, yet Jay could never claim to understand her. A mother could never know herself the way her daughter knows her, Jay thought, but if she was unable to define Anna, how then did Anna define herself?

  In the weeks before she died, when everyone including Anna knew that her time was drawing short, she began saying strange things. In a half-lucid state, her face bathed in sweat and her eyes filmy, she talked of planes and trains. She talked about looking down from the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro, and walking the streets of Rome. She described going to Detroit and looking in on her brother’s family.

  Don’t be ridiculous, Anna said when Jay questioned her about these journeys after Anna had come fully awake. I never said anything like that. If I did, I’m even crazier than I thought.

  “Hey, Peanut,” Jay said, looking into Ramona’s room. Ramona was partly perched on the chair in front of her desk, one foot on the floor, the other leg folded beneath her.

  “Hi, Mama,” Ramona said without looking up from the toy screen. Her hand twitched with mouse-clicks.

  “You want something to eat?” Jay asked.

  Ramona blinked. “Maybe,” she said. “Can I have some of those cheesy things?”

  “Um, you mean Cheetos?”

  “Yeah,” Ramona said with a glimmer of enthusiasm. “Those.”

  “Well, you can have the ones that are left,” Jay said, never enthusiastic about feeding Ramona processed snack food, but also willing to admit that small pleasures were not to be underestimated. “But there’s no way I’m going to let you eat them in your room. All that cheese dust would clog up that keyboard.”

  “Oh.” Ramona sagged a little.

  “Wait until you’re done,” Jay suggested, taking a sip of her drink.

  “All right.” Ramona stared ahead for another moment, then looked up. “Oh. Mama.”

  “Yes?”

  “I saw Grandma Anna the other day,” she said, raising her arms in one of her favorite gestures of happy triumph.

  Jay felt a chill. “What do you mean, Peanut?” she asked. “Do you mean like in a dream or something?”

  “Kind of like a dream,” Ramona said in a far-off voice. “Kind of like real.”

  Jay leaned against the doorway. She took a deep breath and let it go. “You know Grandma Anna is gone, right?”

  “Well, she’s not here,” Ramona said, looking up from the machine. “Is that what you mean?”

  Jay didn’t know what to say. Ramona had seen Anna’s dead body after Jay’s final time alone with her. Ramona had kissed Anna’s forehead and burst into tears. Later that day, when Ramona asked what happened to things when they died, Jay had told her the truth. She had said that she didn’t know. No one did.

  “Kind of not here,” Ramona said. “Kind of like here. Sometimes.”

  Ramona’s voice trailed off into uncertainty. She looked up at Jay in that new, guarded way she had—totally open to her mother’s appraisal and judgment, yet now only recently holding something back, some apprehension entirely her own.

  “You’re not worried, are you, Peanut?” Jay asked.

  “What?” Ramona replied, as though the concept was entirely foreign to her.

  “Nothing,” Jay said. “You go on and play your game.”

  “Mama?”

  “Yes, Ramona?”

  “Are you worried?”

  Ramona absentmindedly chewed on a long strand of hair that fell to one side of her face. Her arm holding the mouse was long, pale, unblemished—its supple forearm elongated and no longer showing the rounded curves that harkened back to her babyhood.

  “About what?” Jay asked.

  “I don’t know.” Ramona adjusted the stuffed animals in her lap. “About Grandma?”

  “Peanut, I’m not worried,” Jay said. “I mean, I’m a grown-up, so there are some things I worry about. But nothing big. Nothing you need to be worried about.”

  “But I’m not worried,” Ramona said.

  “Well, good.”

  Ramona turned her face back to the computer screen. “And I did see Grandma the other day. She smiled at me.”

  Jay lingered awhile in the doorway, waiting for some other clue to understand what her daughter was talking about. But none came. Ramona was starting to learn to seal off her secret world. Probably, in the end, it was healthy for her.

  Jay stretched out on the sofa in the living room, vaguely taking in the clutter all around her but too tired, really, to even consider dealing with any of it. It would wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow: the time when all problems would be solved.

  It had been such a short time since she broke up with Stephen, and though she felt his absence like the ghost of a severed limb, she didn’t regret what she had done. She realized all at once that she had broken up with Stephen because she could not break up with Lewis. It wasn’t Stephen’s fault that he was older, that he wanted his love to make her better. She simply needed to make her way through the thickets of these days alone.

  Poor Stephen.

  Still no call from Lewis. A remote sector of her consciousness sent up a flare indicating that she should be worried about him. He seemed completely healthy, physically. Jay had of course noticed his nervous tic of rubbing his chest, and the pallor of his complexion, but he was on medication and probably, now that she thought about it, suffering from hypochondriac anxiety after months spent with the dying Anna. Lewis never took anything easy. For someone like him, a big rupture in his life was an event of monstrous proportions. And how did Jay know all this? Because she was a lot like her father.

  Stephen had said so. Of course Stephen rarely spoke to his parents, so Jay had never enjoyed the luxury of meeting them and pointing out his flaws by dissecting their failings. Her life had been lived all in one place. She was easy to read. She could barely walk down the street without being flooded with memories.

  And maybe that was the problem. Jay rested her drink between her breasts, enjoying the cold through her long-underwear top. She pushed out her heels, stretching her hamstrings. There was something to this train of thought—she had long felt constrained and ill served by being locked into this body of hers. But it was possible that her body wasn’t the problem at all. Maybe it was the city. It could be that she was at such an impasse because she had exhausted the possibilities of Uptown, of the windy streets below the downtown skyline, of the motley architecture of South Minneapolis.

  Granted, she wouldn’t be the first to run away from her problems. But why should that stop her? A new city, she thought, a place where no one knew her, and where she could define herself any way she saw fit.

  Ramona might h
ave a hard time. She would miss Lewis. But she hadn’t started school yet, and when she did there would be a new cast of characters in which to immerse herself. It would be better for Ramona if Jay were happy. It was a source of unending guilt to Jay to think that Ramona might be growing up with an unhappy and unfulfilled mother.

  But where? Chicago, maybe, though that city’s vastness had always been daunting. Madison? No, too small, worse than Minneapolis and with the same weather. Milwaukee? Please.

  Jay surprised herself by laughing, alone in the fading light, at herself for devising a way out of her maze—and for having the temerity to dismiss a city she’d never even seen, all its inhabitants and secret corners rejected as though she was some sort of princess.

  “Hey, Mama,” Ramona said, coming into the room rubbing her eyes. “I’m done playing.”

  “Come here,” Jay said, holding out an arm but not get-ting up.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Just thinking,” Jay said.

  “About what?”

  “You know, you’re talking so well these days,” Jay said. “I don’t think you’re going to need to see that speech therapist they were talking about when I brought you in to get tested.”

  Ramona pondered this. She sort of shrugged. She was not particularly adept at accepting praise.

  “Mama,” Ramona chirped. “Where’s Grampa? And Stephen?”

  Jay ran her hand over her daughter’s fine brown hair. Ramona was standing over her, and unconsciously pressed the side of her body against her mother’s.

  “Honey, I don’t think we’ll be seeing Stephen anymore.”

  Ramona’s thumb thrust up into her mouth, and she turned away while pressing harder into Jay.

  “Honey, are you all right?” Jay asked, startled.

  And here came the tears. Ramona cried these days as though she was ashamed of herself for doing it. But this was unexpected. Ramona’s standoffishness to Stephen had been unremitting. Jay realized now that she had underestimated the depth of Ramona’s feelings. She sat up, put her drink on the table, and took Ramona in her arms.

  “Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I love Stephen, too. It’s just that it wasn’t going to work out with me and him. It’s messy grown-up stuff, honey. I’m so sorry.”