Cheryl spent the rest of Thursday with her stomach churning as she waited for her husband. When he arrived that evening there was no need to explain anything, because he already knew. Kathryn had called him. Frank grabbed Cheryl by the hair, dragged her into their bedroom, slammed the door so violently the walls shook, and punched her so hard in the chest it left her gasping desperately for air. When he saw this, Frank was afraid he had gone too far, and went to his own room in a fury. On the way he bumped into Evelyn, who was waiting anxiously for the chance to go to Cheryl’s aid. Frank pushed her out of the way and stormed off. Evelyn ran to the bedroom and helped Cheryl lie down. She made her comfortable on the pillows, gave her painkillers, and put ice compresses on her chest, afraid Cheryl might have suffered some broken ribs, just as she herself had when attacked by the MS-13 gang members.
That Friday before anyone was awake, Frank Leroy left home very early in a taxi to catch his flight before the airport closed due to the blizzard. Cheryl spent the whole day in bed, drugged with tranquilizers, and Evelyn looked after her. Cheryl remained stubbornly silent, not shedding a tear, but as she lay there, she decided she must act. She loathed her husband and it would be a blessing if he left with Kathryn Brown, but that was not going to happen in the normal course of events. The bulk of Frank Leroy’s wealth was in offshore accounts that she would never have access to, but the remainder still in the United States was in her name. This was something he had set up to protect himself if he ran into any legal problems. To Frank, the best solution was to get rid of her and Frankie. He had fallen in love with Kathryn Brown and was in a sudden rush to be free. Cheryl could not have suspected there was an even more powerful reason: his lover was pregnant. She only discovered that in March, when the results of the autopsy were made public.
Cheryl thought she must confront her rival, since it was useless to try to reach any kind of agreement with her husband. The two of them only communicated on trivial matters, and even then they were at odds, but once she understood the advantages of her offer, Kathryn Brown was bound to be more reasonable. Cheryl was going to suggest she could keep her husband; she would grant him a divorce and guarantee to remain silent, in exchange for financial security for Frankie.
On Saturday Cheryl had left around midday. The pain from the blow to her chest and what felt like a crown of thorns at her temples ever since the beating on Thursday had grown worse. With two glasses of liquor and a large dose of amphetamines in her stomach, she told Evelyn she was going to her therapy. “They’re just clearing the streets, señora, you’d do better to stay calm at home,” Evelyn begged her. “I’ve never been calmer, Evelyn,” Cheryl replied, then left in the Lexus. She knew where Kathryn Brown lived.
When she arrived she saw Kathryn’s car out on the street. This meant she was thinking of going out soon, otherwise she would have left it in the garage to protect it from the snow. On an impulse, Cheryl felt in the glove compartment for Frank’s pistol, a small semiautomatic thirty-two-millimeter Beretta, and put it into her pocket. Just as she had suspected, the key she had found was to the front door of the house, and she could slip in without making any noise.
Dressed in her sports gear, Kathryn Brown was about to go out, a canvas bag slung over her shoulder. She gasped in surprise when she suddenly found herself face-to-face with Cheryl. “I only want to talk to you,” said Cheryl, but Kathryn pushed her toward the door, screaming insults. Nothing was turning out as Cheryl had intended. Pulling the pistol from her coat pocket, she pointed it at Kathryn, intending to force her to listen. Far from cowering, the young woman burst out laughing defiantly. Cheryl slipped off the safety catch and clutched the gun in both hands.
“You stupid bitch! You think you can scare me with your damn pistol? Wait and see when I tell Frank!” shouted Kathryn.
The shot rang out of its own accord. Cheryl had no intention of shooting her when she pulled the trigger, and as she swore to Lucia Maraz when she told her, she didn’t even take aim. “The bullet hit her in the middle of her forehead by pure chance, because it was written, it was my karma and Kathryn Brown’s,” she said. It was so instantaneous, such a simple, clean act, that Cheryl did not register the sound of the shot or the recoil of the weapon in her hands. She could not understand why Kathryn fell backward or what the black hole in her face meant. It took her more than a minute to react and realize the other woman wasn’t moving, then to stoop down and discover she had killed her.
After that, all her movements were made in a trance. She explained to Lucia that she could not remember what she did in any detail, even though she had never stopped thinking about what happened that cursed Saturday. “At that moment, the most urgent thing was to decide what I was going to do with Kathryn, because when Frank discovered her it would be terrible,” she said. The wound had not bled much, and the stains were all on the rug. She opened the garage and drove the Lexus inside. Thanks to a lifetime of swimming and exercise, and thanks to her rival being so small, she was able to drag the body along on the rug and heave it into the trunk. She threw the pistol inside and put Kathryn’s key in the glove compartment. She needed time to sort things out and had forty-eight hours before her husband was due to return. For more than a year now the fantasy had been going around in her head that she should call the FBI and testify against him in return for protection. Above all she had to calm down: her heart was about to shatter. She headed for home.
In March, during the investigation into Kathryn Brown’s death, she was only briefly questioned. The prime suspect was her husband, whose alibi of being in Florida playing golf proved useless because the state of the cadaver made it impossible to determine the exact time of death. Perhaps if she had been questioned in the days immediately following the young woman’s murder, Cheryl would have given herself away, but the interrogation did not take place until two months later. Those months gave Cheryl the chance to make peace with her conscience.
She had lain down to rest that Saturday at the end of January because she had a blinding headache, only to wake up several hours later with the terrifying sensation that she had committed a crime. The house was in darkness, Frankie was asleep, and Evelyn was nowhere to be found, something that had never happened before. She could easily have gone mad, envisaging all the possible explanations for the incredible disappearance of Evelyn, the car, and Kathryn Brown’s body.
Frank Leroy got back the following Monday. Cheryl had spent the two intervening days in a state of absolute panic, and as she confessed to Lucia, had it not been for her sense of duty toward her son, she would have swallowed all her sleeping pills and put an end to her miserable existence once and for all. When Frank couldn’t find the missing Lexus or his lover, he imagined all sorts of explanations, apart from her having been murdered. He only learned about it when her body was discovered and he was accused of the crime.
“I think Evelyn got rid of the evidence to protect Frankie and me,” Cheryl told Lucia.
“No, Cheryl. She thought your husband had killed Kathryn and went to Florida as an alibi, without ever imagining someone might use the Lexus. The cold would preserve the body until the Monday when he returned.”
“What? Evelyn didn’t know it was me? So why did she . . . ?”
“Evelyn took out the Lexus to go the drugstore while you were asleep. My partner, Richard Bowmaster, collided with her. That’s how he and I got mixed up in all this. Evelyn thought that when your husband returned he would know she had used the car and seen what was in the trunk. She was terrified of him.”
“In other words . . . You didn’t know what happened either,” murmured Cheryl, the color draining from her face.
“No. I only knew Evelyn’s version. She thought Frank Leroy was going to eliminate her, to silence her. She was also scared for you and Frankie.”
“So what’s going to happen to me now?” asked Cheryl, horrified at what she had confessed.
“Nothing, Cheryl. The Lexus is
at the bottom of a lake, and no one suspects the truth. What we’ve said stays between the two of us. I’ll tell Richard, because he deserves to know, but there’s no need for anyone else to find out. Frank Leroy has already done you and many others enough harm.”
Epilogue
At nine in the morning of the last Sunday in May, Richard and Lucia were drinking coffee in bed with Marcelo and Dois, the only one of the four cats that the dog had become friendly with. For Lucia this was early: what need was there to wake up so soon on a Sunday? For Richard it was part of the enjoyable decadence of life as a couple. It was a brilliant spring day, and in a while they would go and fetch Joseph Bowmaster to take him for lunch. That afternoon the three of them would then proceed to the bus terminal to wait for Evelyn, because the old man had insisted on meeting her. He could not forgive his son for neglecting to ask him to take part in that January’s odyssey. “What would we have done with you in a wheelchair, Dad?” Richard kept saying, but Joseph saw that as an excuse rather than a reason; if they had managed to take a Chihuahua along, they could have taken him as well.
Thirty-two hours earlier, Evelyn had left Miami, where, in the months she had been living there, she had begun to create a more or less normal existence for herself. She still lived with Daniela but was thinking of becoming independent in the near future. She worked looking after children in a day care center and waiting on tables in the evenings. Richard was helping her financially, because as Lucia always said, you have to spend your money on something before you end up in the cemetery. Evelyn’s grandmother Concepcion Montoya had put to good use the money orders Evelyn regularly sent her, first from Brooklyn and then Miami. She had replaced her shack with a brick house that had an extra room from which she could sell the secondhand clothing her daughter dispatched from Chicago. She no longer went to the market to sell her tamales, but only to buy provisions and chat with her neighbors. Evelyn thought she must be around sixty, but in the eight years since the deaths of her two grandsons and Evelyn’s absence, suffering had aged her, as she could tell from a couple of photos that Father Benito had taken. These showed her in her elegant attire, the outfit she had worn for thirty years and would go on wearing until her dying day: the thick blue and black woven skirt, the huipil blouse embroidered with the colors of her village, the red and orange sash around her waist, and the heavy, colorful headdress on her head.
According to Father Benito, Concepcion was still very active, but her body had shrunk and shriveled. She was as wrinkled as a monkey, and since she was always going around murmuring prayers under her breath, people thought she was crazy. That worked in her favor because no one asked her to pay protection money anymore and she was left in peace. Once every two weeks Concepcion spoke to her granddaughter on Father Benito’s cell phone, because she refused to have one of her own, as Evelyn had offered. It was a very dangerous apparatus that worked without a plug or batteries and caused cancer. “Come and live with me, Grandma,” Evelyn had begged her, but Concepcion thought this was a dreadful idea. What would she do in the north, and who would feed her chickens and water her plants while she was away? Strangers could come and take over her house; you had to be very careful. Yes, she would visit her granddaughter, but she would see when was a good moment. Evelyn understood that this moment would never arrive and hoped that someday soon her own situation would allow her to pay a visit to Monja Blanca del Valle, if only for a few days.
“We’ll have to tell Evelyn the truth about what happened to Kathryn,” Richard told Lucia.
“Why complicate things? It’s enough that you and I know. And besides, it’s not important anymore.”
“What do you mean it’s not important? Cheryl Leroy killed that woman.”
“I hope you’re not thinking she should pay for her crime, Richard. It was an accident.”
“You’re a disastrous influence in my life, Lucia. Before I met you I was an honest, serious man, an academic beyond reproach . . .” He sighed.
“You were such a bore, Richard, but even so, I fell in love with you.”
“I never thought I would end up obstructing justice.”
“The law is cruel and justice is blind. We tilted the balance slightly in favor of natural justice, because we were protecting Evelyn, and now we have to do the same for Cheryl. Frank Leroy was a criminal and he paid for his sins.”
“How ironic they couldn’t catch him for the crimes he committed and he had to escape for a crime he didn’t commit,” said Richard.
“You see? That’s what I mean by natural justice,” said Lucia, kissing him lightly on the lips. “Do you love me, Richard?”
“What do you think?”
“That you adore me and can’t understand how you lived for so long without me, bored and with a hibernating heart.”
“ ‘In the midst of winter, I finally found there was within me an invincible summer.’ ”
“Did you just think of that?”
“No. It’s by Albert Camus.”
Acknowledgments
The idea for this novel came at Christmas 2015 in a brownstone in Brooklyn where a small group of us had met to drink a first cup of coffee in the morning. I was with my son, Nicolas, and my daughter-in-law, Lori; her sister Christine Barra; Ward Schumaker; and Vivienne Flesher. Someone asked what I was planning to write on the rapidly approaching January 8, the date when I have begun all my books for the past thirty-five years. Since I had nothing in mind, they began to throw out ideas that came to form the skeleton of this book.
As always, I was aided in my research by Sarah Hillesheim, and by Chandra Ramirez. Also by Lori Barra, Susanne Cipolla, Juan Allende, Elizabeth Lesser, and Beatriz Manz.
Roger Cukras was the inspiration for the romance of the mature couple Lucia and Richard.
My first readers and critics were my son, Nicolas; my editors Johanna Castillo and Nuria Tey; my agents Lluis Miguel Palomares and Gloria Gutierrez; the fierce reader from the Balcells agency Jorge Manazanilla; my brother Juan; and my wonderful friends Elizabeth Subercaseaux and Delia Vergara. Also of course Panchita Llona, my mother, who at the age of ninety-six has not relinquished her grasp on the red pencil with which she has corrected all my books.
To all of them and many others who have lent me emotional support in my life and writing over the past two years, which have not been easy for me, I owe these pages.
An Atria Reading Group Guide
In the Midst of Winter
Isabel Allende
This reading group guide for In the Midst of Winter includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
Introduction
A blizzard in New York City brings together three strikingly different people, each burdened with a difficult past. Lucia, an aging Chilean writer who has survived political exile, disease, and betrayal, is marooned with her dog in a basement apartment in Brooklyn. Richard, an academic chairman at NYU, is a broken man haunted by guilt for his fatal failures as a husband and father. And Evelyn, a brave young Guatemalan woman, is an undocumented home health aide who fled her native country due to gang violence, which claimed the lives of her two brothers and very nearly destroyed her own.
Over the course of several days, these three—each a misfit in a different way—are forced by circumstances into a rare level of intimacy. As the result of a shocking crime, they depart on a precarious epic journey that reveals their painful inner demons and ultimately enables them to forge a tentative peace with their pasts.
Topics & Questions for Discussion
1. Each of the three main characters—Lucia, Evelyn, and Richard—experiences some kind of isolation in their present life. The book begins with Lucia physically isolated in her apartm
ent during a snowstorm. In what other ways is she isolated? How is her isolation different from Evelyn’s? And from Richard’s?
2. Evelyn comes to the United States as a refugee fleeing violence. Compare her experience entering the country with that of other immigrants you know of or have read about. Why did they leave their native countries, and what were their first experiences as immigrants? Did you find any aspects of Evelyn’s journey surprising? It is said that the United States is a country of immigrants, and that immigrants made this country great. Do you agree? Why or why not? Did this book change the way you think about immigrants? If so, how?
3. Many immigrants in the United States currently work in caretaker jobs: as nannies taking care of small children, or as home health aides caring for the sick, elderly, or dying. Do you know of any immigrants in these kinds of jobs? Do they encounter any difficulties similar to Evelyn’s? How do Frankie’s parents treat Evelyn? Why does she seem “invisible“ to Frankie’s father?
4. Evelyn‘s relationship with Frankie is very special, and reveals a lot about her character. Why is she so successful at caring for him? In what ways does she expand his horizons? Do you know of someone who works with people who are physically, mentally, or emotionally challenged? Do they share any of Evelyn‘s character traits?
5. When Evelyn leaves her native village, she tells her grandmother Concepcion, “Just as I am going, Grandma, so I will return.” Compare Evelyn’s relationship with her grandmother to her relationship with her mother, Miriam. What positive things has each of them given to Evelyn?
6. Lucia loses her brother during the political turmoil in Chile during the early 1970s and is forced to flee the country, eventually becoming an exile in Canada. What qualities does she have that help her face her life as an exile? Do you know of anyone who is an exile? What special difficulties do they share? How do the challenges of Lucia’s exile compare with Evelyn’s challenges as a refugee?