The Center of Winter: A Novel

by Marya Hornbacher

“Does he know it’s Christmas?” my father asked. He sounded so sad I winced.

  “Hard to say,” she replied as she turned and unlocked the door. She held it open for us and we filed in.

  The wide, carpeted hallway smelled of medicine, Lysol, and pee. We went into a large room where people were clustered at tables and on couches, or sat alone in chairs. The room was decorated like a classroom, with glittered cutouts of paper stars, Christmas trees, and angels pasted to the windows. A little plastic tree sat crooked on a side table and an old woman in a hat knitted a long thing.

  “Esau,” the nurse called, going over to a shrouded figure in a chair by the window, its back to the room. We followed her and stood stiffly a few feet away as she bent over what I realized was my brother, shrunken. “Your family’s here to celebrate Christmas with you.”

  Esau turned around and looked at us, his eyes moving slowly from one to the next, taking each of us in. “Hello,” he said formally, as if it took him that long to think up the right word. “Why don’t you sit down,” the nurse suggested, dragging chairs up in a semicircle around him, as if he was going to give a speech. To my father she said, “Let me know if you need anything.” She left.

  “Merry Christmas, son,” my father burst out, leaning down over Esau and giving him a hug. My mother kissed him on the cheek. “See, we brought your presents,” she said. I sat down in a chair and tugged my skirt over my knees.

  “Hello,” Esau said again. “Thank you.” He paused. “Hello.”

  “Do you know who we are?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said, looking right at me, and I believed him.

  “It’s Christmas,” I said.

  “Okay. Thank you for the presents,” he said slowly, as if his mouth was sticky.

  I helped him open them because his hands shook from the medicine. He thanked us for the magazines. He thanked us for the new games. He thanked us for a book on bugs, thick, elaborately illustrated, that I wanted myself. He unwrapped the last package, looking bewildered by the sudden largesse of his world, and held the ink-blue corduroy shirt in his hands.

  “A blanket,” he said softly, pleased with it. He ran his hands over its nap.

  “That’d be your good old-fashioned shirt, son,” said my father. “For wearing.”

  My brother nodded. “To sleep with.” He bunched it carefully and held it up to his face.

  We sat silently, trying to decide what to do with this.

  “Well, I don’t see why the hell not,” my father said finally, and reached out to pat Esau’s knee. It startled Esau, and he pulled himself into the corner of his chair. I saw the hurt cross my father’s face as he took his hand back and showed it to Esau, palm out, the way you’d show your hand to a skittish dog.

  The smells of cafeteria food seeped into the room, and the garbled murmurs of the other residents grew louder.

  “I have to go now,” Esau said, his voice heavy with regret. He stood, holding his new shirt, abandoning his blankets in the chair. “Thank you.” He walked stiffly to the doorway. Our heads craned to watch him explaining something excitedly to the nurse. He showed her the shirt and gestured. She helped him get his arms into the sleeves, pulling the corduroy over the shirt he already wore. She led him back, and he sat down again. He looked pleased.

  “She says—” He looked up at her and suddenly went blank. “Oh! She says do you want lunch.”

  “Would you like to stay for lunch?” the nurse echoed. “Esau would like it if you stayed.”

  “It’s a special thing,” he added.

  “It’s a special Christmas dinner,” she translated. “The residents planned their favorites. What did you pick, Esau?”

  “Peaches!” he crowed, rocking in his chair.

  “I think he picked pizza, but that’s all right,” she said. “I’m sure there will be peaches too. There always are.”

  We ate pizza, French toast, corn, and peaches for Christmas dinner. Esau ate with unexpected daintiness, a napkin tucked in his collar. After lunch there was medicine in paper cups and Christmas carols.

  Esau didn’t go over to the group that gathered around the ancient record player. He hung back, with us, standing next to my father, every now and then reaching out to touch my father’s face. My father sat very still as Esau’s pale, translucent hands fluttered near his eyelids, tapped his brow, his earlobes, his chin. My father began silently to cry.

  Esau edged closer to him, a look of concern on his face. He pressed his thumb into each slow tear as it appeared, then walked his strange stiff walk across the room and returned with a tissue. He handed it to my father, and my father blew his nose.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “You’re welcome,” Esau replied. He waited until he saw that my father had finished crying. He sat down in my father’s lap, his thin side against my father’s chest, his arm over my father’s shoulders. Carefully, my father wrapped his arms around my brother. They rocked.

  “I have to go now,” Esau said peacefully. He pulled up the hem of his new shirt and laid it against his face. His head fell heavily against my father’s neck.

  I sat in the backseat of the car, watching night fall on the white prairie, unaware that in the front seat my parents’ marriage had cracked down the center the way a frozen lake will crack: deeply, invisibly, without explanation, the eerie noise a muffled clap of thunder that rolls from the south side to the north.

  My mother drove. Both of them smoked. Nothing was said.

  We drove through the night in a narrow tunnel of headlights. I felt safe and hot, zipped into my jacket, buckled into my seat.

  I kicked the back of my father’s seat steadily and he didn’t tell me to stop, but I grew bored with it and I stopped.

  As soon as we pulled up to the house, I ran in to survey my new riches. My mother made toast from Christmas bread for supper and called us. We’d been sitting there only a minute when my father pushed himself away from the table. But instead of getting a drink and sitting down again, he just picked up a bottle. Then he went out to the porch and sat down in a chair full of snow.

  My mother turned to me. “I can’t do it,” she said, as if she and I had been discussing something. “I just can’t.” After a minute I nodded, because she seemed to be waiting for a response. She nodded once in return, stood up, and went into the kitchen to make coffee.

  I sat there awhile. Since no one was looking, I ate all the toast. Eventually my father came back inside and sat down in his chair. I got up from the table and passed by him, feeling invisible. I wondered if this was what it was like to be a ghost. I sat down on the floor of my bedroom with my blanket and watched him in the living room and wondered if Esau could do this. If he was a sort of ghost, and could float through space, watching. The idea comforted me, and I thought I felt him settle down next to me on the floor. I laid part of my blanket over his invisible knees.

  My mother came out of the kitchen with two cups of coffee and handed one to my father. She sat down on the couch. She looked out the window, the way I had noticed her doing more and more—as if she was looking toward a particular place, a place she wanted to go. I thought of what lay in the direction she was looking: first, the Andersons’ yard, then Main Street. If she was looking at Main Street, she might be thinking about turning left. To get to the city, you turn left on Main Street. If you turn right, you wind up in Canada and then the North Pole.

  I figured that if I needed to find my mother, I would have to take a left on Main Street.

  But they were sitting there, my mother and father, peacefully enough. I pulled my blanket up to my nose and smelled it and thought maybe things were all right now that they were having coffee and it was Christmas night.

  When you’re six, you don’t know about what happens at the end. Because the world revolves around you when you’re six, you assume the end must be catastrophic, because it would be catastrophic to you. The end would be dramatic and loud.

  But what really happens at the end is that yo
u sit down and have coffee without looking at each other. There is a sort of strange relief: The thing that was hanging in the air like a gas leak, invisible and toxic, has happened. It’s out. It’s a relief. It is a solid, tangible. When you’re six, you can’t possibly imagine that your parents—who are blowing carefully on their coffee—are only being peaceful because they know what you don’t: that there is no stopping whatever comes next, and so they might as well have coffee while they wait.

  Four little Indians. Three little Indians. Two little Indians, sitting on the couch.

  I watched my mother cross one nyloned knee over the other, and I thought that the best thing about night, in wintertime, was how cold it is outside and how inside the lights are yellow and safe.

  “I’m in love with you, you know,” my father said.

  “That doesn’t seem,” my mother said gently, “very relevant.”

  “Well put,” he said. He took a sip. “You’re thinking of leaving me, aren’t you?”

  After a minute, my mother said, “Yes.”

  There was a long, calm pause in the living room.

  My father said: “Claire, I want to die.”

  Carefully, my mother replied, “You’re aware that you’ve said that before?”

  “Jesus, Claire,” he said. I flinched at the rising voice. “I mean, my God, you won’t let me near you, not that I blame you, I don’t have the energy to do a damn thing with myself. Christ, I’m useless, I sit here all day thinking about you, about Esau, what I could have done, anything I could have done—” He put his forehead in his hands. “I don’t blame you for wanting to leave. I don’t have anything left, Claire.”

  “You do have something left,” she said, her voice low and angry. “You have us. You have a family. You selfish, selfish man. What more do you want?” She turned her face away from him and I watched her wipe a finger quickly under her eyes.

  “So do you!” he cried. “And what, you’re planning to walk away yourself! What the hell business have you got telling me to stay for the sake of my family?”

  She turned on him. “I need to leave for the sake of my family! I cannot have them watch you sit here and rot! I will not let my children watch their father die!” She put her face in her hands. “Darling,” she said, her voice fragile. “Darling, darling man. They love you so much.”

  “They do,” he said flatly. “Not you.”

  She looked up, resting her chin on her fingertips. She said, “I do. I wish I didn’t. But I do.” She turned her face to him.

  “You’ve left already,” he said slowly. “Haven’t you?”

  She didn’t speak for a moment. Then, angry, she said, “Why should I stay when you’re already gone?”

  He looked at her, then slumped forward in his chair. His face showed a fury I had never seen. He spoke slowly. “You don’t have to wake up every morning and think of one reason, just one good fucking reason, to go on.”

  My mother was quiet for a minute. Then she said, “Are you waiting for me to feel sorry for you?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Because I don’t,” she said, setting her coffee down. “I just don’t.”

  I watched her walk down the hall.

  My father’s face crumpled like a paper napkin.

  Sometimes you are very young when you learn how important it can be to lie. How you can sometimes shatter an entire tiny universe by telling one horrible truth.

  I watched my father sit there in his chair with tears running down his cheeks. Not making any noise. I wanted to stand up and go over to him and tell him it would be all right.

  But I was glued to the floor, and it wouldn’t be all right.

  You don’t know until you’re older how many times you will go over one night in your head—replay each exchange, remember each look, each gesture. You will remember how you sat glued to a dark corner. You will remember how you did nothing.

  You did not go to your father.

  You did not say it would be all right.

  You did not say the magic words.

  You did not say, I love you. It’s not your fault. It will be all right.

  You did not lie.

  You did not say good-bye.

  My father wiped his face and stood. I heard him out in the garage. I went to stand at the living-room window, pressing my face against the glass.

  Out in the dark, I watched a tree split down the center from cold.

  CLAIRE

  I heard the shot.

  In memory, I knew before I heard. It goes like this:

  I know. My head snaps left.

  I hear the shot.

  I run. Kate is coming down the hall. In one motion, I grab her, turn, fold over on her completely, in slow motion, as if actually tucking her into my rib cage.

  I remind myself of an animal.

  We sat in the back of the sheriff’s car, heading north, toward Nimrod.

  I might have bitten the officer, which would take some explaining. I wiped Kate’s nose with my hand. Her head was damp. She was hysterical, which calmed me.

  She fell asleep in my lap. We crunched into their drive. The door flew open. Oma trudged through the high snow in her nightdress and a coat and yanked open the car door. Opa peeled Kate off me, tucked her under his arm, and plodded back into the house while she screamed and flailed.

  Oma wrapped a blanket over my shoulders. “Inside. Right now,” she said. She watched me for a moment, then slapped my left cheek, whipped out a flask, poured whiskey into my mouth, and snapped my jaw shut with her gnarled hand. “Ja, ja. Okay. Here we go, dear.” I swallowed it and gasped, and she pulled me out of the car.

  I was almost two feet taller than she and I trailed her like a gigantic child.

  Inside, Oma poured me another whiskey. Kate was under the dining-room table, playing with two spoons.

  She showed no intention of coming out anytime soon. Her spoons whispered happily to one another and danced. Her lips were purple with grape juice. Her skin was the color of paste, her eyes sunken and blue. She looked dead. Tubercular. Drowned. I took a swallow of my drink.

  “Katie,” I said.

  “What.” She fitted the spoons into each other. Turned to look at me with her horrible eyes. “What,” she repeated.

  I couldn’t think of what, so I left her alone and she forgot me. Are you dead, Katie? I was not feeling myself.

  Around three in the morning, she emerged from under the table and crossed to the center of the room. She lay down on the floor, tucked her arms and legs tightly under herself, and shut her eyes, her rump in the air, like an infant.

  Oma sat in the chair across from me, knitting. “Kleine,” Oma said. Her twisted fingers did not stop. “Kleine,” she said again, more firmly. She sighed, set down her knitting, pushed herself out of her chair. “Bed now,” she said. “To bed.” She bent down and took hold of Kate’s shoulder, whereupon Kate, without opening her eyes, let out a shriek that could have shattered glass.

  “Go away,” Kate said calmly. “I’m sleeping.”

  Oma sat back down in her chair and resumed her knitting.

  It was still dark when Opa’s bedroom door opened. His after-shave preceded him down the hall. His white hair was combed and slick. He had a little piece of bloody tissue stuck to his Adam’s apple. He stopped when he saw Kate.

  “What the hell,” he said, shaking his head. He hooked his thumbs through his suspenders and gave them a snap. “What in the damn-blasted hell.”

  He looked at me. “’Bout time for coffee, you think?” He turned and went into the kitchen. The percolator began to spit and hiss like a cornered cat. When he came out, he crouched over Kate, his hands on his knees. He eased and grunted his way down to one knee.

  “Say there,” he said. “Say there, Salamander.” She pretended to sleep.

  “Salamander Suzy,” he sang. She fought a smile.

  He put his arms around her and wrestled himself upright. He walked out of the room with her, whispering, “Slippery s
limy Salamander Suzie.”

  It was silent for a moment. Then, in the guest room behind us, I heard the gruff rumble of his made-up salamander song.

  At breakfast we told her he was dead.

  She was eating a soft-boiled egg in an egg cup. It was her favorite thing, and I couldn’t make it for her. Only Oma. At home, she’d sit at the table and squawk, “Three minutes!” like a tiny queen. But I never cooked it right. “Three minutes, Mom,” she’d call, and despite my vigilance at the kitchen clock, despite knowing how she wanted it, a liquid yellow yolk without any watery white, despite the fact that I could for God’s sake boil an egg, I always lifted it from the slow-boiling water with a sinking heart. At my silence, she got nervous. I’d hear her chair push back, her feet squeak across the floor. She’d step over to the egg and the two of us would look at it. “Take his hat off,” she’d suggest, as if this time I might have done it right. I’d get a sharp knife from the drawer, tap the shell once, and slice off the pointed end, holding the egg upright. I knew before I lowered it for her to look. “Too done,” I’d say. A gold yolk, not hard-boiled but not liquid either—four minutes, easily. She’d give it a long look, deciding if she could pretend. She wasn’t a good liar, though, and she’d say, “That’s all right.”

  It wasn’t as if the child starved.

  Oma dropped an egg into boiling water when Kate came into the kitchen, herded by her grandfather, who had braided her hair with lopsided good intent. One braid by her ear, one near the nape of her neck. Kate settled into the chair he pulled out, making minute adjustments to her place setting: grapefruit spoon laid out below the grapefruit bowl, fork switched to the right of the plate, where it could more easily commune with knife and spoon.

  “Napkin in your lap, Katie,” I heard myself say. My voice startled me, and I watched Katie place her napkin over her knees. She looked up at me, waiting. For approval? Greeting?

  Helpless for the correct reaction, I said, “Oma’s making your egg.” Kate smiled and turned to look at Oma. I went into the bathroom and threw up my coffee. I ran cold water on my wrists and looked at myself in the mirror. This will be the face I have now, I thought, though it made no sense, the face was no different than it had been twelve hours before. This will be my face.