The Center of Winter: A Novel

by Marya Hornbacher

  “I saw my mom cry,” he said sullenly.

  I stopped walking. “Your mom cried?”

  “Sort of. She didn’t make any noise or nothing. She was just sitting with the baby in her rocking chair and sort of crying. Come on, we’re gonna be late.”

  We started walking again. I couldn’t picture his mom crying. She always knew what to do. She was pretty.

  We got to the school. “Ready?” Davey asked. He grabbed my hand and shoved through the door.

  After school let out, Davey came over. We were playing explorers in the yard when my mom came out on the back porch. “Davey, honey, do you want to stay for supper? I already called your mother. She said it was okay.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”

  She laughed and went back in the house. Then she stuck her head back out. “You guys want to walk down and get your dad? He’s at Frank’s.”

  We decided we did and headed off down the road. We liked Frank’s. Everybody was nice to us there. We went there sometimes to get my dad, and Frank gave us a Coke. Sometimes fries, if we were lucky.

  “Well, look what the cat drug in,” Frank said when we came in the door. We blinked in the hazy dark, getting our bearings. The pool tables were busy, and men stood leaning on their sticks, squinting at the green felt. They tapped their hats at us and slugged their beer.

  My dad was sitting at the bar with a couple of other guys. He turned his head and grinned. He said, “Well, Frank, you know what that is.”

  “What’s that?” Frank popped the tops off our Cokes and put straws in them.

  “That there is a couple of first-graders.”

  “Naw,” Frank said, slapping the counter.

  “Yes, sir, it certainly is.”

  “Well, tarnation.”

  Davey gave me a push up onto a stool and sat down next to me. “Hi, Frank,” he said.

  “How’s by you, little man?”

  “Oh, not bad, I guess.” He put his face close to a giant jar of pickled pigs’ feet and studied it.

  My dad kissed my head and slapped Davey on the back. “Well, I tell you. This is an occasion. This calls for a treat. What’ll you have?”

  “We want fries,” I said. “Please.”

  “Fries it is,” Frank said. He called back to the kitchen, then leaned his hands on the bar. “So tell us. How’s it, being first-graders?”

  Davey and I looked at each other. “S’all right,” Davey said.

  They laughed. “So you think you’ll go back, then?” Frank asked.

  “We got crayons,” I said, pulling them out of my bag. “Mrs. Johnson brought crayons for everybody.”

  “Damnation!” my father said. “Will you have a look at that, Frank.” He whistled through his teeth.

  “Kate did better than anybody on letters,” Davey bragged. “She won the big box of crayons.”

  I hit him in the arm and drank my Coke, elated. My dad picked me up and put me on his lap. Davey scooted one stool closer.

  “Well, you know why?” my dad said. “’Cause you two are about as smart as they come. You two and your brother, I tell ya. Make the rest of us look like we ain’t got the brains God gave a goose, is what it is,” he said, winking at Frank and raising his empty glass.

  We wiggled happily and ate our greasy fries. Frank poured my dad another drink. “Last one,” he said.

  “Aw, hell,” my dad said, joking. “Why you want to make a fella beg?”

  Frank turned his back and started polishing the long row of sparkly bottles. My dad picked up his drink. “You want the olive?” he asked me, and I stuck my fingers in and ate it. “How’s your dad, then?” he asked Davey. “Ain’t seen him around in how long.”

  Davey ate the ends off his fry and handed the rest to me. He only liked the crispy parts. He shrugged. “I dunno.”

  “Whaddaya mean, you don’t know? You saw him just this morning.”

  Davey slid off the stool and walked to the bathroom. I twisted around on my dad’s lap. “He doesn’t want to talk about it,” I said.

  “Hup. Why’s that?” My dad licked his thumb and rubbed something off my cheek.

  “’Cause they got in a fight. His mom and dad.”

  “That so?”

  I nodded. “His dad’s mean.”

  “Hey, now, Katie,” he said, frowning. “Don’t be talking about folks.”

  “Well, he is,” I said, and moved to my own stool again.

  “Naw, he ain’t mean.” My dad stared into his glass and turned it in circles. “Man’s got all kinds of reasons. You don’t know.”

  “I do know.” I sulked.

  My dad shook his head and smiled at Frank, who was popping open two more Cokes. “Thanks,” he said. “Ain’t that so, Frank?”

  Frank leaned his hip against the bar and smiled at me. “Carrottop, tell us what’s so.” He glanced at my dad, sighed, reached back on the bar, and poured him another drink. “Drink it slow, ’cause that’s all you’re getting,” he said, and my dad raised his glass at him. I think Frank was my dad’s best friend. I turned to look at the bathroom door, wondering what the heck was taking Davey so long anyway.

  “Kate here and I were just discussing that it’s best not to talk about folks.”

  Frank nodded wisely. “That’s so.”

  “A’cause you can’t say, really, what’s what. You just don’t know. They got all kinds of reasons, and you just don’t know.”

  My dad was getting boring, so I slid off the stool and banged on the bathroom door. “Davey!” I yelled.

  “What?” he yelled back, so I knew he was okay.

  “You fall in?” That was one of my favorite jokes. I cracked up.

  “No, dangit!” he yelled. He sounded mad. I stopped laughing.

  “Well, come out already, then.” I picked at a crack in the wood door, and then it swung open and Davey walked right past me. I scrambled after him. He got on the stool next to my dad.

  “My dad’s a big jerk,” he said loudly. “That’s how he is.” He grabbed his Coke, took a deep breath, and blew bubbles furiously through the straw.

  We all stared at him. My dad picked him up and put him on his lap. Davey leaned back into his chest, holding his Coke with both hands. His nose was running and he wiped it with his sleeve. He glanced at me and then away. His eyes got super blue when he cried. They were cornflower. I had a cornflower crayon. I didn’t like it when Davey cried. I shredded a little napkin.

  “Say, now,” my dad said, smoothing Davey’s hair for him. “Had a long day, I think.”

  Frank stood there with his arms crossed, looking sadly at Davey. “Well, little man,” he said. “You know what this calls for?”

  Davey shook his head. There was so much snot on his face I finally wiped it off with my own sleeve.

  “Cheeseburgers,” Frank said seriously. “That’s what. Wouldn’t you say?” he asked my dad.

  “Damn straight,” my dad said. He set his chin on Davey’s head and rocked him a little. “Damn straight.”

  I hopped down and went to call my mom to say we’d be late.

  In September, Esau went Away. I know it was September because on the first day of school, he was there, and then he was not. He came home, but Away hung over the house like the threat of war: We waited. The waiting gave us something to do. There was some quiet agreement among us that we would not proceed without Esau, and this agreement killed my father.

  I am getting ahead of myself.

  Every time Esau went Away, it was only for a Little While, until he was Feeling Better.

  “How long is a little while?”

  “A few weeks.”

  “And then he can walk us to school.”

  “Of course he can.”

  “Does he go to school at Away?”

  “No. He’s not feeling well enough.”

  “How is he feeling?”

  My mother was standing at the window with her hands on her hips. My father and I were playing gin rummy.

  �
�He’s delusional.”

  “Arnold,” said my mother, her voice heavy with sarcasm. “That’s very helpful.”

  My father was drunk.

  “What? I’m not going to lie to her.”

  Somehow my mother was able to convey, with her back, disdain.

  “Gin,” my father said.

  “What’s delusional?” I watched the cards arch under his rough thumbs.

  “Cut,” he said, smacking the deck on the table between us.

  “See?” said my mother. “Now you’ve got her started.”

  “It means he doesn’t know who he is,” said my father, and dealt. He looked once at his cards, laid them down, and went over to the bar. “Want an olive?” he asked me. I nodded, trying to organize my cards without dropping them.

  My mother turned. “I’m going out,” she said.

  “Out where?” my father asked.

  “I don’t know,” she yelled, startling us both. “Just out, if you don’t mind.” She walked over to my father, furious, and yelled in his ear, “Out!”

  And left.

  I didn’t want to look at my father. I studied my cards and carefully laid down the queen of spades.

  We sat there for a very long time.

  “Is she coming back?” I asked.

  My father nodded slowly. “I would assume so,” he said. “One never knows.”

  He picked up my queen.

  After a while, I asked, “Do you know how to cook?”

  He looked up at me. “What?” he said. “Yeah, I know how to cook. Why?”

  I shrugged. “What do you know how to cook? Eggs?”

  “Sure, I can cook eggs. I can cook all sorts of things, Katie, why?” He laughed.

  “In case she doesn’t come back,” I said. “Gin.”

  My father tossed his cards down on the table, threw his head back, and roared. “Oh, my,” he said. “Katie, what would I do without you?” He sighed and giggled and got up for another drink. Passing me, he ruffled my hair and said, “Well, we won’t starve. I’ll tell you that for sure.”

  “So she might not come back,” I crowed, triumphant.

  “Naw, she’ll come back. She’d never go anywhere without you,” he said, and looked out the window, and remembered his drink. He drank the whole thing and set the glass down hard on the table. “Let’s go get ice cream.”

  We stumbled to the store in the thick September night.

  My brother was standing on the sidewalk outside the grade school staring up at the sky, his thumbs hooked through the straps of his blue bag.

  “You’re home,” I said as we started walking.

  “Looks that way,” he replied.

  It was a cold day, and his cheeks and nose were red. I stopped and dug my gloves out of my bag. We hunched forward against the wind.

  “Didja see it snow?” I asked. “We were at recess. It melted, though.”

  He nodded. The buses passed us in a streak of yellow. He glanced down at me. “What happened to your face?” he asked mildly.

  “Nothing.” I put my hand to my cheek where the wind stung it, just under my left eye.

  “Looks like someone scratched you.”

  “So?” I scowled. Sara Mortinson had a bump on her head where I whacked her with my reading book when she said, loud, that my brother was crazy. I wasn’t really sure what order things happened in, whether I hit her or she scratched me first, but we both sulked in the nurse’s office with ice while the nurse whisked papers.

  “So nothing. Just asking.”

  “Are you better now?” I asked after a while.

  He shrugged. “Guess so,” he said. He nudged me with his elbow. “Let’s go down to the creek.”

  We rustled through the thick trees and dropped our bags in a pile of pine needles. We crouched by the creek. The September rains had come and gone, and the water was clean and high.

  “What was it like?”

  He picked up a long, narrow branch and snapped it into tiny bits.

  “Slow,” he finally said. “Everything was slow.”

  “Is everyone crazy?”

  He shook his head. “Not really.”

  “Why are they there?”

  He wrinkled his nose. “Just sad, I guess.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t seem crazy.”

  “I know,” he said. “I don’t feel crazy.”

  “What’s wrong with you, then?”

  He swept his bits of pine branch into a careful pile with his hands. “I feel too fast,” he said, sounding confused. “And I have dreams that I can’t tell whether I’m sleeping or not.” He scratched his nose. “And I get scared.”

  “What did you do there?”

  He was silent for a minute. “I don’t remember,” he finally said. He made a shape with his hands, a sort of oval he seemed to be holding gently, like an egg. “Your dreams got better there. It’s like you’re dreaming all the time.” He considered the oval he was holding. “It’s nice.”

  I had collected a handful of pine needles and was sorting through them. “Are you going back?”

  “I dunno,” he said.

  “Were you homesick?” I wanted to know if he missed me.

  He shrugged.

  I got to my feet, angry, and said I was going home.

  Later that evening, Esau and I were playing Monopoly. From the kitchen came my father’s voice: “Esau, come take your medicine.”

  Esau stayed where he was, organizing his properties into tidy piles. My father took a few steps around the corner. “Esau?” he said. “Kiddo, come take your medicine.”

  I rolled the dice. Esau continued, unnecessarily now, to tap the edges of his piles on the table. I moved the dog onto Park Place and sighed; Esau owned it and had covered it with hotels.

  My father set a glass of water and two large pink tablets next to Esau’s elbow.

  “I don’t want it,” Esau said flatly.

  “Well, I don’t know what to tell you,” said my father. “You gotta take it.”

  Esau picked up the water, stood to get some leverage, crushed the tablets with the base of the glass, and brushed the powder onto the floor. I hesitated, counting out what I owed Esau, then kept counting.

  “There’s plenty more where those came from,” my father said, “but if you do it again, it’s coming out of your allowance.” He leaned against the bar with one hand and dropped ice into his glass with the other.

  “I don’t care,” Esau said.

  “Let me explain something to you,” my father said patiently, taking a drink. “Every time you stop taking your medicine, you get sick. And every time you get sick, you wind up in the hospital. And every time you wind up in the hospital, I wind up further in debt.” He walked back into the kitchen and came out with two more pills, holding on to them this time. “Eventually I will run out of money,” he said, his voice rising. “Do you follow? And there won’t be any left for hospitals or medicine or your mother or your sister or your sorry ass, for that matter. So you’re going to goddamn take your medicine if I have to force it down your throat.”

  Unexpectedly, his voice broke. He leaned down and awkwardly touched his forehead to Esau’s hair, his drink resting on Esau’s shoulder. Esau, who was holding the dice, waited until my father straightened up and then put his hand out for the pills. He sat looking a little sick after he swallowed them.

  “Can I have some milk?” he asked.

  My father brought him a glass of milk. He drank it, then got up from the table and sat down on the couch. My father sat down next to him. From the back they looked like the same person, only different heights. Esau’s head dropped onto my father’s shoulder and I knew he’d fallen asleep.

  I stood up and went over to them. My father was looking out the window, but there wasn’t anything to see. It was too dark.

  Maybe it was the same night, maybe another. It didn’t matter. I woke to the sound of voices in the living room.
I cracked open the door.

  My mother’s legs were crossed and she held a glass of wine. My father’s elbows were on his knees, his drink dangling between them, catching the light. He was crunching ice. In the silence it sounded like he was chewing on glass.

  “He’s not any better,” he said.

  My mother didn’t answer for a moment. “He is. He’s a little better.”

  My father shook his head. “Claire,” he said, “we’re just biding time.”

  She said nothing. My father sat back in his chair.

  “So what, then?” she said. “So we’re just biding time. Do you have a better idea of what we should do?”

  It was hard to tell sometimes whether my mother was being mean, what with the smooth southern drawl that rolled along under her words like a low tide. Her words came out soft and slow when she was telling me stories, and they came out soft and slow when she said to my father, Oh, honey. Go on to hell.

  “You think it’s my fault,” my father said.

  I wondered what my mother was looking at. She was staring steadily ahead. She sat with her back straight, her fingers playing around the stem of her glass.

  “No,” she said eventually, her voice neutral. “Not your fault, exactly.”

  My father looked at her. “What’s that supposed to mean? Exactly?”

  She sipped her wine.

  “It’s sort of my fault, then? A little bit my fault?”

  “Arnold,” she sighed. “It’s not your fault. Is that what you want to hear? It’s no one’s fault. That’s what the doctors said.”

  “But that’s not what you think.”

  “I don’t think anything.”

  “Of course you think something. You think that whatever I touch turns to shit. You think whatever’s wrong with the world is somehow the direct effect of me.”

  “Arnold, don’t be dramatic.”

  “Claire, you are a true bitch, you know that? You really are.”

  “Yes, you’ve told me.”

  My mother took a sip of wine, and my father stood up to freshen his drink.

  The night fights were as familiar and expected as breakfast in the morning and church on Easter. They fought almost companionably, as if it were as good a way as any to converse. But later I would riffle through the fights in my head, trying to find the one fight that set it all off, the one where they turned a corner, the one where it was no longer a quiet, ever present cruelty but something more. For years I was sure my mother’s slow, cruel words made my father do what he did; and then for other years I was sure my father had done something to make my mother say what she said. Now I think that certain things just tend toward their own center, and implode.