The Center of Winter: A Novel

by Marya Hornbacher

  I went back to the bathroom. Esau mumbled, then let out a raspy scream. I thought his throat must be hurting by now, but if the glass didn’t hurt then maybe his voice wouldn’t either. My mother struggled to hold him, one hand around his wrists and one on his ankles, Esau’s naked body stretched and arched in the middle like a bow, trembling violently. My mother looked up and said, “Where in the hell is your father?”

  “He said he’s having a pick-me-up.”

  She laughed. “Oh, Jesus,” she said, shaking her head. “All right. I need you to get something out of the medicine cabinet.”

  I stepped over Esau, stood on the edge of the bathtub, climbed onto the sink, and opened the cabinet.

  “Top shelf,” she said. “Back behind the other bottles. Brown bottle. No, the one next to it. That’s it. Get me four of those and a glass of water.”

  I climbed down. Esau opened his eyes and looked straight at me.

  “Three days, I was dreaming the numbers, all of the numbers, I had the answers, are you listening?”

  I nodded, paralyzed, holding the pills and the water.

  He talked to me when he had his episodes because he knew I would listen. My parents said he didn’t know who I was, but that was a horrible lie. Your brother always knows who you are.

  My mother took the pills. “Katie, come hold his wrists.” I knelt on his wrists, but they pulled away. I tried to be heavier, to hold myself steady as Esau’s arms shook and yanked under my knees. My mother put an elbow on Esau’s chest and pried open his mouth with one hand, pushing the pills to the back of his throat with the other. Esau gagged and spit, wrinkling his forehead. Tears ran down the sides of his face and into his ears. She poured water into his mouth. Esau coughed and gagged, but he swallowed.

  We sat in silence for what seemed like hours while he screamed, then sobbed, his cries gradually slowing down.

  “Now what?” I whispered. Esau’s body jerked awkwardly.

  “Now we wait,” my mother replied. Her face was drawn.

  I slumped where I sat on Esau’s arms. “Why does this happen?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, why does he get sick like this?”

  She sighed. “He has a sad-sickness.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it runs in the family.” She looked at me. “You know how you have red hair like mine and Esau has black hair like Dad’s?” I nodded. “Well, that’s what it means when something runs in the family.”

  “Did he get it from Dad?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “Why do you think that?”

  I studied her face and decided she was lying. I only asked because she had told my father to his face that this was All His Damned Fault.

  “Was it Aunt Rose?” I asked doubtfully.

  “Maybe. We don’t know.”

  “Am I going to get it?” I panicked a little and looked down at Esau. He was breathing more deeply, his eyes low lidded like a frog’s.

  “No, you’re not going to get it. You’re born with it. It’s not like catching the flu.”

  “I have the flu.”

  She laughed a little. “I know.”

  “I don’t want to go to school today.”

  “No, you don’t have to.”

  “I want to stay here with Esau.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Esau’s staying home today,” I told her. “Esau,” I said, watching his face. His eyes didn’t move.

  “He can’t hear you, baby,” my mother said.

  “He can so. Esau,” I said again, shaking him. His chest was narrow and caved in, the ribs moving under the skin when I shook him. He looked like the drawing of Jesus that hung on my grandmother’s wall. Skinny and dead. “Esau, you’re staying home with me to play Monopoly and have SpaghettiOs and take a nap. We’re not going to school. We have the flu. We have a sad-sickness. Dad has a pick-me-up. He’s not mad about the coffee. Right?” I looked at my mother. She nodded.

  “Esau,” I said. His mouth moved slightly.

  “He wants to talk to me,” I said, louder. I felt my chin start to wrinkle and pursed my mouth to stop it. “He has something to tell me.”

  My mother reached out to touch my head. I jerked away.

  “He’s not here, honey,” she said.

  “Yes he is here, he is so here,” I cried, shaking him some more. “He has something to say, he said we should listen, you’re not listening to him.” I put my head down by Esau’s mouth to listen. I felt his breath on my ear, the hissing sound of words that wouldn’t come out.

  “Katie, he’s sleeping.”

  “Liar!” I yelled. I stood up and went to the door and turned to face my mother. “You’re going to send him to Away, aren’t you?”

  “Katie, we—”

  “You are. You’re going to send him to Away and then I can’t sleep and we eat fish sticks and Dad goes for a drive for forever and everyone leaves me and and and—,” I wailed, and started crying too hard to talk, so I gasped and hiccupped and sat down on the floor and put my head on the bathroom tile and watched it get all wet from tears.

  She picked me up and carried me to my room. We walked down the hall, through the dining room, past my father in his chair. I bawled, “He hates Away, he told me the food is awful and the beds are hard and everyone’s sad there and he hates the white room,” and my mother said, “Shhhh, you’re tired,” and I yelled, “I’m not tired, what about Esau, he hates the white room.” I was falling asleep as we walked, as my mother set me down on the bed and pulled the pink quilt over me. She leaned down and put her hand on my forehead and said, “You’re giving yourself a fever, honey. Just try to sleep. I’ll be back in a little while and bring you Seven-Up,” and I said, “Everybody just leaves me,” and my mother said, “I’m not leaving,” and I nodded and closed my eyes. My mother began to move away and I said, “Mom,” and I had something to ask her, but I forgot what. The morning light came through the curtains, a cold winter white. She leaned down and kissed my forehead.

  “I’m not going to go away,” she said. And shut the door.

  I could hear my parents talking in the living room. I slid off the bed and opened my door.

  “Arnold, we have to take him in.” My mother stood with her back to my father, looking out the window with her arms crossed. My father let out a long breath.

  “I know,” he said.

  “How long do you think it’ll be this time?” my mother asked.

  “I don’t know, Claire. How would I know?”

  In September, it had seemed like a very long time. The longer it was, the quieter they were, until they were almost whispering when they sat at the table. As if the words were so heavy they couldn’t be said out loud, they would be too hard to lift. I had heard them talking about the doctors. My father had spat out the word institution. He had spat out facility.

  Institution, facility, episode. Also, medicine, court order, and They.

  You could arrange the words to mean different things. I arranged them in my head, filling in the blanks like I did in my vocabulary workbook. The way they went, if I had it figured out correctly, was: The episodes are occurring with increasing frequency and severity. (Sometimes there were long phrases or whole sections of the conversation that I didn’t get.) The facility where Esau usually went was low security. They said that the patient might soon require a high-security facility. Otherwise known as an institution. Or simply State.

  My brother, in other words, would be institutionalized and, my father spat out, turned into a zombie, handed over to the experts who could take care of his son, goddammit, better than he could himself.

  On the other hand, you could arrange it this way: They were having increasingly frequent episodes and the patient would institutionalize the zombie experts himself. Goddammit.

  It was good to have a word.

  There was a pause. My mother asked, “Do you think they’ll put him into State?”

  My father shook h
is head. “Could be. I almost hope so. We can’t keep paying for this.” He put his head in his hands. “Do you know what this means?” he said quietly. “I will have failed. Do you understand that? Failed.”

  My mother turned from the window then and looked at my father. “No,” she said. She touched his shoulder, and went down the hall to the bathroom.

  I went out to my father where he sat and waited at his elbow until he picked me up and put me on his lap. Together, we looked at the place where my mother had been.

  Somehow the day disappeared. My father’s voice rumbled on the phone, and then he went into the bathroom and wrapped Esau in a quilt. He carried him, looking like a quilted cocoon, to his bedroom. I listened to my mother in the kitchen and went down the hall to sit where I could watch her. I heard my father close Esau’s door and watched him go to the bar.

  His voice sounded like someone talking underwater.

  “I’ve put him down,” he said.

  “What time are we taking him in?” asked my mother, accepting the drink he handed her as he entered the kitchen.

  “They said early afternoon. Need to leave around ten.” He leaned back against the counter, set his glass down, and put the heels of his hands to his eyes. “Do you know what he said to me?” he asked.

  My mother shook her head, staring down at the pan on the stove.

  “He said—he looked right at me, you know how he does? How he gets clear for a minute, like the fog just lifts for a second? He looked at me and said, ‘Dad, it’s better in here.’ Like to reassure me.”

  My father laughed as if he couldn’t believe what he was saying. “And I didn’t know what he meant. Better where? In the blankets? In the hospital? He doesn’t know where he is, Claire. In his mind, maybe? He said, ‘It’s quiet now.’ Before he fell asleep. ‘It’s quiet.’”

  He fumbled behind him for his drink, his mouth moving.

  My mother turned and offered him a plate of mac and cheese, and he knocked it out of her hand. A splat of yellow hit the wall by the new avocado-colored phone that matched the fridge.

  Then he cried.

  My mother’s hand hovered in midair. She put it on his arm. He jerked away, bumping into his drink, the glass skidding on the counter, sloshing a little. He leaned against the hallway wall and bent over, his fists against his stomach.

  “What have I done?” he said.

  Then he walked into the living room and put his fist through the window.

  Cold wind exploded into the room as if it had been pressing up against the glass, a dark animal rubbing its skin against the house, looking for a way to get in.

  He stared at his arm, distracted. What little blood there was, what with the cold, froze to his skin in black dribbles of ice.

  He walked down the hall. The front door shut and the car started, its wheels crunching through the snow.

  My mother came into the living room and rested her hands on the back of the couch, looking at the black hole where the window had been. The oak tree behind the house seemed to have come inside to stand between the La-Z-Boy and the TV, its boughs sagging with snow, blue in the moonlight that poured into the room. Wind picked up the dry snow and sent it hissing over the windowsill, small drifts piling against the furniture, settling into the corners of chairs.

  I went to my mom. We looked at the window together.

  “We can’t leave it like that,” I said. “Can we?”

  She shook her head.

  “Should I get a blanket?”

  She pushed herself off the back of the couch, and we got blankets from the linen closet. I held them while my mother threw them over the curtain rod. My hands got cold.

  My mother dropped her arms when she was done, and said, “Go to bed now, Kate.” She turned and went to her room.

  I stood there, looking around. The dark living room was like a winter field, shadows of furniture gradually disappearing under blown snow. There’s glass under there, I thought to myself. Carefully, I walked through the snow, skidding my toes first. I decided to wait until my father came home. I would keep him company while he played cards. I sat down on the snow-covered couch and looked at the blankets, blowing softly, letting in snow.

  My face was frozen. Esau was sleeping in the other room. Tomorrow he would be gone. He was going away for a long time. They were taking him and it was their fault and now there wasn’t even a window.

  I stood up, yanked down all the blankets, and sat back down on the couch.

  I watched the wind whisk a pile of snow from a branch of the oak and blow it toward me. I flinched and closed my eyes as the spray of ice hit my face.

  On Christmas morning, I woke up and lay in bed, not wanting to leave the tunnel of my own warmth. Out in the living room, my mother put on a Christmas record. I smelled bacon and coffee. My father’s voice came down the hall, booming along with the carols.

  Everything was fake. They were only doing it because I said I was quitting Christmas. Last night I had refused to trim the tree. It was Esau’s and my job. Both my parents were drunk and nearly set the house on fire, getting tangled in the lights and laughing until they sat down in the middle of the boxes of tissue-wrapped ornaments and cried.

  We were going to visit him at State.

  I got up and dressed in all red. I knew my mother wouldn’t tell me not to wear red, what with my orange hair, because it was Christmas and I could do anything I liked. I got my sleeves confused and went out the door and my father set me straight.

  “Santa came, Katie,” my mother called. “Why don’t you see what he brought you?”

  “Your mother’s making pancakes,” my father added, sitting down on the couch and rubbing his hands together. He nodded toward the tree, lit up like Las Vegas. “Go on and look in your stocking.”

  I shook my head, but my parents looked so crestfallen I couldn’t keep it up. I sat down among the piles of presents and started fishing treasures out of the stocking my grandmother had knit for me when I was born.

  There were dozens of presents from Oma and Opa, the cousins and uncles we never saw, my parents, who always were broke after Christmas. My father spiked his eggnog with brandy and my mother put used bows in her hair. They sang. They laughed when I liked things. The pancakes were from scratch. They gave me candy and oranges and new red boots. They gave me everything on my list.

  They gave me the orange boy’s bike. The one Davey had. My heart’s desire.

  I said thank you and began to cry, for reasons of which I was not aware.

  “Oh, now. Say now,” said my father. He came over and sat next to me on the floor, rubbing my back with his hand. “See here.”

  “It’s not the bike,” I said, wiping my face with the heels of my hands. “I love the bike.”

  “No, of course not. It’s everything,” he said.

  “It’s just everything.”

  “I know. Of course it is.”

  “The bike is the best present ever.”

  “It’s not bad, is it? No. It’s all yours. We’ll teach you to ride in the spring.”

  “With Esau. I want Esau to teach me to ride.”

  The record had stopped. My mother got up and moved the needle to the edge. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir exploded into the room like a drunk uncle, screaming, “Joy to the World.”

  “Well now,” said my father. “We’ll just see what’s what when the time comes.”

  I was done crying. “I want to go see Esau,” I said.

  “Well, we’re going to,” said my father, surprised.

  “Now.”

  He looked up at my mother. She raised her eyebrows and shrugged.

  “Hup, then,” my father said, getting to his feet. “I guess that settles it. I think I’ll get my shoes on first, if that’s all right?”

  I nodded.

  We slid through the winter landscape as if the car was on skates. Whiteness. White ground, white sky, neat piles of snow on the thin wooden fences at property lines. Bare black branches of windbreaks here a
nd there. My father babbled excitedly for a while, then lapsed into a silence that lasted until we arrived.

  The building wasn’t ugly, exactly. It looked like a mansion, brick and five floors high. I trailed behind my parents, who straightened themselves and walked toward the double front doors. My father pushed me slightly before him as we stood waiting at the reception desk, as if he’d brought me there as a gift. My mother carried a shopping bag of presents for Esau and looked hopeful.

  I began to regret having asked to come.

  “Visiting?” asked the square woman at the desk. Glasses dangled on a cord off the shelf of her bosoms.

  “No, we’re checking in,” my father said, and laughed loudly at himself. She looked up at him with her chin tucked in. He cleared his throat.

  “Name?” she said.

  “Schiller.”

  She fussed and shuffled. “Hmm,” she said, as if she had discovered something on the piece of paper she held. “Fifth floor,” she said with finality, and put her glasses on her nose and started typing.

  We got in the elevator. As the door closed, my father muttered, “Merry Christmas to you too.” I giggled.

  The elevator opened and we stood outside a Plexiglas door, through which I could see a desk and then another door. A buzzer sounded, and my father pulled open the first door.

  A pretty nurse looked up at us and smiled. She wasn’t wearing the silly hat. “Merry Christmas,” she said. “Nice to see you again, Mr. Schiller, Mrs. Schiller.” She looked at me and said, “And you must be Kate.”

  I nodded, feeling put on the spot.

  “Your brother talks about you a lot,” she said, coming around the desk with a huge key ring. She paused in front of the door and turned to face us. “Now, I should tell you, Esau’s not doing so well today.” She studied the reactions on our faces. “He had a long night last night, and we had to put him down with a pretty powerful medication. You know how it comes and goes. He’s done just great this week, really. But today he’s not very clear.”

  My father nodded, as if taking this lightly. “So, he’s a little foggy?”

  “He might not know who you are.” She looked at him steadily.