The Winters(85)

He threw back the tarp. There she lay, the woman I’d feared and loathed, her body still wrapped in its original shroud, filthy and eaten away in patches, beneath which was brown skin flaking off gray bone and tufts of her hair, dirty blond, a term I could never hear again without shuddering. Was that what Dani had seen last night? Her face was thankfully obscured by what remained of the tablecloth, the leather belts still intact. They were loose enough for us to slide our hands under and lift her into the garment bag, her bones collapsing only slightly. Max was right, she weighed very little. At the sound of the garment bag’s zipper, I wanted to throw up, but there was nothing in my stomach. I closed my eyes to pray instead.

Max took the front handle of the bag, waiting for me to lift the back. “Let’s go,” he said. He’d already pulled the truck up to the greenhouse. We placed her on the flatbed. He escorted me to the passenger’s side of the truck and we drove together to the boathouse. Max remained silent for those thirty seconds, and I sat next to him, thinking, trying not to panic.

Max’s instructions were the only thing keeping my limbs from turning to silt. Winch the boat down onto the slip, he said, while I unload the body. I did. Pull back the aft cover, would you, love? I did so as he carefully lay her down across the back of the Aquarama. Get some kettlebells for me, please. I grabbed two from the gym on the riser. Where are those belts? I handed them over. He looped the new belts through the handles of the kettlebells and cinched them tight around the outside of the garment bag. As he pulled, the plastic crinkled and I could sense the gathering of her bones. He covered her body back up with the boat tarp, instructing me again to help him snap it down until she lay flat. When we finished, I placed my hand on the bump and said something to the effect of “please forgive me.” Release the boat, he said, and with a turn of the winch, Dani’s Luck slid elegantly into the water, barely making a splash.

He handed me the keys. “You drive. It’ll be like the old days.”

I slapped the keys away.

“Get in the boat.”

“I’m not going with you, Max.”

He stood seething, uncertain. I knew if I got on that boat, he would kill me, I would become another luckless casualty in Max Winter’s storied life. His bride of one day, an experienced boater, no less, lost at sea, presumed dead.

“Get in.”

“No. When you come back, I will be gone and you’ll never hear from me again.”

I turned to leave. He hooked his hand around the back of my head and yanked me close to his face. “Get. In. The. Fucking. Boat.”

I stiffened, my feet welded to the dock. He grabbed a fistful of my hair and pulled me towards the Aquarama. I began to scream, a pathetic howl that bounced around inside the cavernous boathouse. I had done this to myself, I thought. I crossed a line with him, never thinking there’d be another line awaiting me, then this final one, barbed and vicious. But still I fought him hard, resisted him with all my youth and terror, twisting like a cat in his grip, kicking and spinning. Then a loud crack echoed through the boathouse, and my legs gave out beneath me.

I thought the sound had come from above us, that when I hit the back of my head on the dock, one of the beams had fallen on top of me. My ears rang with a high-pitched scream, not mine. I tried to lift my head but it felt weighted down by a sticky, dull ache. Craning my neck, I could make out Max in silhouette, coming at me. He stepped over my body, muttering, “Jesus Christ, Dani.”

Dani? NO! Get out of here!

Then I found something in me, a drop of adrenaline, enough to roll myself onto an elbow. There stood Dani in sweats and a wrinkly shirt, hair a wicked fright. Her tiny arm shook as she pointed her too-big gun at her own father. I lifted my hand, a weak, useless stop sign.

She shot at him again—crack. This time he caught the bullet in his shoulder and he pivoted, like a fierce, awkward dance move that stilled him only for a moment. Then he wound himself up again, unwrapping the rope from the Aquarama. He limped aboard as a bloody star spread fast across his upper chest.

“I’m sorry, baby,” he yelled, starting up the engine. “But I really have to go now.”

Dani stepped closer to me, taking shaky aim over my body. Though my vision was blurred, I saw her wet cheeks, her quivering chin. I heard another crack. If she hit him, Max didn’t flinch. He simply circled the steering wheel with a finger, sweeping an arch of water out of his way. Then he was off, Dani’s Luck lifting like a swan about to go airborne, churning the black bay into a long white arrow in its wake.





TWENTY-NINE


For the longest time I could not cry, something I blamed on the concussion, along with the fact that I couldn’t recall if I’d seen Dani leave the boathouse with the gasoline that she used to burn Asherley down to the ground. I wasn’t lying by omission, or to protect Dani. She denied nothing, her reason for the fire particularly poignant.

“He killed my kitten. So I burned his fucking house down,” she said, an alarmingly reasonable explanation that still landed her in a New York hospital for a month of psychiatric evaluations, to determine what, if any, charges should be laid.

Very little of the contents of Asherley was salvageable, beyond a couple of marble busts, some silver frames, and several pieces of heirloom jewelry locked away in a fireproof safe that Dani had no knowledge of until everything around it blackened and fell away. To this day it moves me that amidst her fiery rampage, Dani thought to bring me ice cradled in a tea towel for the back of my bleeding head. While the flames took hold, she sat next to me on the woodpile, lit a cigarette, and apologized for wanting to wait until the second floor caught fire before she called an ambulance.