The Winters(33)

I took the winding road through the forest slowly, tires scraping the mounds of dirty snow piled along the side. Soon it would be spring, then the second summer since Rebekah’s car accident. Max once pointed out to me the tree she’d hit, now cut down to a black tabletop of a stump, nestled in skeletal ivy.

“There,” he said. “That’s where the fire started. See all the way to the edge of those trees over there? All burnt.”

We paused that day, the car idling. I watched his profile, somberly handsome in the twilight. I realized that every time he left Asherley and every time he arrived home he must think of her. Every time he drove through this part of the island he must remember that horrible night. How the fire trucks roused him. How he must have smelled the smoke before he saw it. He probably knew she was dead before he was told they’d found her remains, the shell of her car. For him and Dani this was living history, this part of the forest. This patch would always be scorched to them no matter how big and green these new trees grew. Of course I understood that. How could anyone not understand that?

I had begun to relax when the causeway came upon me, the sea churning on either side. This was the first time I had driven over the narrow passage myself, and Max was right, it was disorienting if you looked left or right. The trick to avoid vertigo, he told me, was to stare straight ahead and drive.

After I bumped off the causeway and back onto the mainland, other houses began to poke through the forest, one or two pretenders to Asherley, stone mansions newly built, plus a few simple saltboxes here and there. These were ostensibly our neighbors, and I wondered if I’d ever know them. If my vehicle broke down and I banged on their doors in distress, would they believe me that I lived at Asherley? Would they say, But you’re not Mrs. Winter, Rebekah died years ago, before slamming the door in my face?

East Hampton came upon me quickly, its pretty neatness reminding me, in parts, of seaside George Town but with bigger vehicles and wider roads. The town really only consisted of two main shopping strips, so the hardware store wasn’t difficult to find, nor was parking. Walking into the store, as always, my father was there in the smell, a combination of plastic packaging, leather, and cleaning supplies. I took my time down the narrow, cluttered aisles, savoring the flood of nostalgia, remembering what my father had said about certain brands of epoxy and what clamps worked best, which varnish to use on mahogany. Waiting in the cashier’s line, I was proud of my selections, rehearsing in my head how I’d explain the process to Max, imagining him puffing up at my knowledge and self-sufficiency, and the care I would take in refurbishing the boat. I also realized I’d forgotten sandpaper. When I turned around to fetch some I bumped directly into a small woman wearing a long fur coat and large sunglasses.

“You forgot something,” she said, and shoved a wallet at me. It took me a second to realize it was my wallet, and that it was Dani standing there.

“Thank you. I— What are you doing here?” I was more alarmed than surprised, uncertain whether this was a generous or menacing act on her part.

“Gus was driving me into the city.”

I wanted to explain myself, to say that I had always charged things to Laureen’s accounts when I shopped for her, and I never seemed to need a wallet or purse when I was with Max, who swatted away all attempts I made to pay for anything. I wanted to tell her I wasn’t a complete idiot for forgetting this at home, inside my own purse, which was probably hanging off the back of a chair in the kitchen.

“You are a lifesaver. Thank you so much.”

“Sure,” she said, turning away.

“I’ll see you at dinner.”

“Probably not,” she replied over her shoulder.

The door banged shut behind her. The line had inched up, leaving a large gap between the checkout counter and me. Perhaps it was common here, that fur-clad teenagers suddenly appear, hand you money, then disappear, because no one around me seemed disturbed. It was as though some strange comet had streaked through the hardware store and I was its only witness.





THIRTEEN


The morning of Max’s second day away, I went to the barn to find more tarp and walked in on Gus about to decapitate a small animal with a shovel.

“Stop!” I yelled. “What are you doing?”

He pulled back the shovel and rested his arm on the handle, exhaling loudly. “It’s almost dead anyway.”

I knelt down to examine its tiny body, its silent mouth reaching for food. It was a kitten, maybe three weeks old. Gus told me the barn cat had given birth deep inside a gable. When he spotted the cat around the property recently, avoiding the barn completely, he assumed she’d abandoned them. Sure enough, when he dug into the crevice between roof beams, he discovered only one of six had survived.

“So she was pregnant.” I don’t know what possessed me to intervene; I didn’t believe it was cruel to kill suffering animals. When a mother cat abandons her kittens, it’s usually for a good reason. But the kitten, though hungry and filthy, seemed otherwise hearty, intact, with the same long hair as its mother. I scooped it up and headed straight to the kitchen, where I found Katya stuffing a chicken with lemons.

“What is that?”

“A kitten,” I said. “What can we give it?”

“I don’t want it in my kitchen.”

I ignored her and wrapped the squirming kitten in a tea towel to contain it, then perched it in a bowl next to me. I pulled the kitchen laptop towards me. “What do month-old kittens eat?” I said out loud as I typed the sentence into the search bar.