But wouldn’t it be romantic to peer down from these woods through the dark and spy some shining, many-winged lodge lying below, windows ablaze, like an exotic casino from some Paul Muni movie. Graceful skaters adrift on a lighted rink. A garlanded lift still in stately motion, a few, last alpinists taking their silken, torchless float before lights-out. The great tree shining from the summit.
Except, this is not a particularly pretty part of Michigan. Nothing’s to see—dark trunks, cold dead falls, swags of heavy snow hung in the spruce boughs.
And she is stiffening. Just that fast. New muscles being visited. Best not to go so far.
Daisy, her sister, comes to mind. Daisy, who will soon exit the hospital with a whole new view of life. Inside, there’s of course been the 12-step ritual to accompany the normal curriculum of deprivation and regret. And someone, somewhere, at some time possibly even decades back, will definitely turn out to have touched Daisy in ways inappropriate and detrimental to her well-being, and at an all-too-tender age. And not just once, but many times, over a series of terrible, silent years. The culprit possibly an older, suspicious neighborhood youth—a loner—or a far too avuncular school librarian. Even the paterfamilias will come under posthumous scrutiny (the historical perspective, as always, unprovable and therefore indisputable).
And certain sacrifices of dignity will naturally be requested of everyone then, due to this rich new news from the past: a world so much more lethal than anyone believed, nothing being the way we thought it was; so much hidden from view; if anyone had only known, could’ve spoken out and opened up the lines of communication, could’ve trusted, confided, blah, blah, blah. Their mother will, necessarily, have suspected nothing, but unquestionably should’ve. Perhaps Daisy, herself, will have suggested that Faith is a lesbian. The snowball effect. No one safe, no one innocent.
Up ahead, in the shadows, a mile into the trek, Shelter 1 sits to the right of Nordic Trail 1—a darkened clump in a small clearing, a place to rest and wait for the others to catch up (if there were others). A perfect place to turn back.
Shelter 1 is nothing fancy, a simple rustic school-bus enclosure open on one side and hewn from logs. Out on the snow lie crusts of dinner rolls, a wedge of pizza, some wadded tissues, three beer cans—treats for the forest creatures—each casting its tiny shadow upon the white surface.
Although seated in the gloomy inside on a plank bench are not school kids, but Roger, the brother-in-law, in his powder-blue ski suit and hiking boots. He is not singing karaoke after all. She noticed no boot tracks up the trail. Roger is more resourceful than at first he seems.
“It’s eff-ing cold up here.” Roger speaks from within the shadows of Shelter 1. He is not wearing his black glasses now, and is barely visible, though she senses he’s smiling—his brown eyes even narrower.
“What are you doing up here, Roger,” Faith asks.
“Oh,” Roger says out of the gloom. “I just thought I’d come up.” He crosses his arms and extends his hiking boots into the snow-light like some species of high-school toughie.
“What for?” Her knees are both knotted and weak from exertion. Her heart has begun thumping. Perspiration is cold on her lip. Temperatures are in the low twenties. In winter the most innocent places turn lethal.
“Nothing ventured,” Roger says. He is mocking her.
“This is where I’m turning around,” Faith ventures. “Would you like to go back down the hill with me?” What she wishes for is more light. Much more light. A bulb in the shelter would be very good. Bad things happen in the dark that would prove unthinkable in the light.
“Life leads you to some pretty interesting places, doesn’t it, Faith?”
She would like to smile and not feel menaced by Roger, who should be with his daughters.
“I guess,” she says. She can smell alcohol in the dry air. He is drunk and is winging all of this. A bad concurrence.
“You’re very pretty. Very pretty. The big lawyer,” Roger says. “Why don’t you come in here?”
“Oh, no thank you,” Faith says. Roger is loathsome, but he is also family, and she feels paralyzed by not knowing what to do—a most unusual situation. She wishes to be more agile on her skis, to leap upward and discover herself turned around and already gliding away.
“I always thought that in the right situation, we could have some big-time fun,” Roger goes on.
“Roger, this isn’t a good thing to be doing,” whatever he’s doing. She wants to glare at him, then understands her knees are quivering. She feels very, very tall on her skis, unusually accessible.
“It is a good thing to be doing,” Roger says. “It’s what I came up here for. Some fun.”
“I don’t want us to do anything up here, Roger,” Faith says. “Is that all right?” This, she realizes, is what fear feels like—the way you’d feel in a late-night parking structure, or jogging alone in an isolated factory area, or entering your house in the wee hours, fumbling for your key. Accessible. And then, suddenly, there would be someone. Bingo. A man with oppressively ordinary looks who lacks a plan.
“Nope, nope. That’s absolutely not all right.” Roger stands up but stays in the sheltered darkness. “The lawyer,” he says again, still grinning.
“I’m just going to turn around,” Faith says, and very unsteadily begins to move her long left ski up out of its track, and then, leaning on her poles, her right ski up and out of its track. It is dizzying, and her calves ache, and it is complicated not to cross her ski tips. But it is essential to remain standing. To fall would mean surrender. What is the skiing expression? Tele … Tele-something. She wishes she could tele-something. Tele-something the hell away from here. Her thighs burn. In California, she thinks, she is an officer of the court. A public official, sworn to uphold the law—though not to enforce it. She is a force for good.
“You look stupid standing there,” Roger says stupidly.
She intends to say nothing more. There is nothing really to say. Talk is not cheap now, and she is concentrating very hard. For a moment she thinks she hears music again, music far away. It can’t be.
“When you get all the way around,” Roger says, “then I want to show you something.” He does not say what. In her mind—moving her skis inches at a time, her ankles heavy— in her mind she says “Then what?” but doesn’t say that.
“I really hate your eff-ing family,” Roger says. His boots go crunch on the snow. She glances over her shoulder, but to look at him is too much. He is approaching. She will fall and then dramatic, regrettable things will happen. In a gesture he possibly deems dramatic, Roger—though she cannot see it—unzips his blue snowsuit front. He intends her to hear this noise. She is three quarters turned around. She could see him over her left shoulder if she chose to. Have a look, see what all the excitement’s about. She is sweating. Underneath she is drenched.
“Yep, life leads you to some pretty interesting situations.” He is repeating himself. There is another zipping noise. This is big-time fun in Roger’s worldview.
“Yes,” she says, “it does.” She has come almost fully around now.
She hears Roger laugh a little chuckle, an un-humorous “hunh.” Then he says, “Almost.” She hears his boots squeeze. She feels his actual self close beside her. This undoubtedly will help to underscore how much he hates her family.
Then there are voices—saving voices—behind her. She cannot help looking over her left shoulder now and up the trail where it climbs into the dark trees. There is a light, followed by another light, like stars coming down from on high. Voices, words, language she doesn’t quite understand. Japanese. She does not look at Roger, but simply slides one ski, her left one, forward into its track, lets her right one follow and find its way, pushes on her poles. And in just that small allotment of time and with that amount of effort she is away. She thinks she hears Roger say something, another “hunh,” a kind of grunting sound, but she can’t be sure.
In the condo everyone is sleeping. The plas
tic rubber-tree lights are twinkling. They reflect from the window that faces the ski hill, which now is dark. Someone, Faith notices (her mother), has devoted much time to replacing the spent bulbs so the tree can fully twinkle. The gold star, the star that led the wise men, is lying on the coffee table like a starfish, waiting to be properly affixed.
Marjorie, the younger, sweeter sister, is asleep on the orange couch, under the Bruegel scene. She has left her bed to sleep near the tree, brought her quilted pink coverlet with her.
Naturally Faith has locked Roger out. Roger can die alone and cold in the snow. Or he can sleep in a doorway or by a steam pipe somewhere in the Snow Mountain Highlands complex and explain his situation to the security staff. Roger will not sleep with his pretty daughters this night. She is taking a hand in things now. These girls are hers. Though, how naive of her not to know that an offer to take the girls would immediately be translated by Roger into an invitation to fuck him. She has been in California too long, has fallen out of touch with things middle American. How strange that Roger, too, would say, “Eff-ing.” He probably also says “X-mas.”
At the ice rink, two teams are playing hockey under high white lights. A red team opposes a black team. Net cages have been brought on, the larger rink walled down to regulation size and shape. A few spectators stand watching—wives and girlfriends. Boyne City versus Petoskey; Cadillac versus Sheboygan, or some such. The little girls’ own white skates are piled by the door she has now safely locked with a dead bolt.
It would be good to put the star on, she thinks. “Now it’s time for the star.” Who knows what tomorrow will bring? The arrival of wise men couldn’t hurt.
So, with the flimsy star, which is made of slick aluminum paper and is large and gold and weightless and five-pointed, Faith stands on the Danish dining-table chair and fits the slotted fastener onto the topmost leaf of the rubber-tree plant. It is not a perfect fit by any means, there being no sprig at the pinnacle, so that the star doesn’t stand up as much as it leans off the top in a sad, comic, but also victorious way. (This use was never envisioned by the Filipino tree-makers.) Tomorrow others can all add to the tree, invent ornaments from absurd or inspirational raw materials. Tomorrow Roger himself will be rehabilitated, and become everyone’s best friend. Except hers.
Marjorie’s eyes have opened, though she has not stirred on the couch. For a moment, but only for a moment, she appears dead. “I went to sleep,” she says softly and blinks her brown eyes.
“Oh, I saw you,” Faith smiles. “I thought you were another Christmas present. I thought Santa had been here early and left you for me.” She takes a careful seat on the spindly coffee table, close beside Marjorie—in case there would be some worry to express, a gloomy dream to relate. A fear. She smooths her hand through Marjorie’s warm hair.
Marjorie takes a deep breath and lets air go out smoothly through her nostrils. “Jane’s asleep,” she says.
“And how would you like to go back to bed?” Faith whispers. Possibly she hears a soft tap on the door—the door she has dead-bolted. The door she will not open. The door beyond which the world and trouble wait. Marjorie’s eyes wander toward the sound, then swim again with sleep. She is safe.
“Leave the tree on,” Marjorie instructs, though asleep.
“Sure, okay, sure,” Faith says. “The tree stays. We keep the tree.”
She eases her hand under Marjorie, who, by old habit, reaches, caresses her neck. In an instant she has Marjorie in her arms, pink coverlet and all, carrying her altogether effortlessly into the darkened bedroom where her sister sleeps on one of the twin beds. Carefully she lowers Marjorie onto the empty bed and re-covers her. Again she thinks she hears soft tapping, though it stops. She believes it will not come again this night.
Jane is sleeping with her face to the wall, her breathing deep and audible. Jane is the good sleeper, Marjorie the less reliable one. Faith stands in the middle of the dark, windowless room, between the twin beds, the blinking Christmas lights haunting the stillness that has come at such expense. The room smells musty and dank, as if it’s been closed for months and opened just for this purpose, this night, these children. If only briefly she is reminded of Christmases she might’ve once called her own. “Okay,” she whispers. “Okay, okay, okay.”
Faith undresses in the Master Suite, too tired to shower. Her mother sleeps on one side of their shared bed. She is a small mountain, visibly breathing beneath the covers. A glass of red wine, half drunk, sits on the bed table beside her molded neck brace. A picture of a white sailboat on a calm blue ocean hangs over the bed. Faith half closes the door to undress, the blinking Christmas lights shielded.
She will wear pajamas tonight, for her mother’s sake. She has bought a new pair. White, pure silk, smooth as water. Blue silk piping.
And here is the unexpected sight of herself in the cheap, wavy door mirror. All good. Just the small pale scar where a cyst was notched from her left breast, a meaningless scar no one would see. But a good effect still. Thin, hard thighs. A small nice belly. Boy’s hips. The whole package, nothing to complain about.
There’s need of a glass of water. Always take a glass of water to bed, never a glass of red wine. When she passes by the living-room window, her destination the tiny kitchen, she sees that the hockey game is now over. It is after midnight. The players are shaking hands on the ice, others are skating in wide circles. On the expert slope above the rink, lights have been turned on again. Machines with headlights groom the snow at treacherous angles and great risk.
And she sees Roger. He is halfway between the ice rink and the condos, walking back in his powder-blue suit. He has watched the hockey game, no doubt. Roger stops and looks up at her where she stands in the window in her white pjs, the Christmas tree lights blinking as her background. He stops and stares. He has found his black-frame glasses. His mouth is moving, but he makes no gesture. There is no room at this inn for Roger.
In bed, her mother is even larger. A great heat source, vaguely damp when Faith touches her back. Her mother is wearing blue gingham, a nightdress not so different from the muumuu she wears in daylight. She smells unexpectedly good. Rich.
How long, Faith wonders, has it been since she’s slept with her mother. A hundred years? Twenty? But good that it would seem so normal.
She has left the door open in case the girls should call, in case they wake up and are afraid, in case they miss their father. The Christmas lights blink off and on merrily beyond the doorway. She can hear snow slide off the roof, an automobile with chains jingling softly somewhere out of sight. She has intended to call for messages but let it slip.
And how long ago, she wonders, was her mother slim and pretty? The sixties? Not so long ago, really. She had been a girl then. They—the sixties—always seem so close. Though to her mother probably not.
Blink, blink, blink, the lights blink.
Marriage. Yes, naturally she would think of that now. Though maybe marriage was only a long plain of self-revelation at the end of which there’s someone else who doesn’t know you very well. That would be a message she could’ve left for Jack. “Dear Jack, I now know that marriage is a long plain at the end of which there’s etc., etc., etc.” You always thought of these things too late. Somewhere, Faith hears more faint music, “Away in a Manger,” played prettily on chimes. It is music to sleep to.
And how would they deal with tomorrow? Not the eternal tomorrow, but the promised, practical one. Her thighs feel stiff, yet she is slowly relaxing. Her mother, the mountain beside her, is facing away. How indeed? Roger would be rehabilitated tomorrow, yes, yes. There will be board games. Changes of outfits. Phone calls placed. She will find the time to ask her mother if anyone had ever been abused, and find out, happily, not. Unusual looks will be passed between and among everyone. Certain names, words will be in short supply, for the sake of all. The girls will again learn to ski and to enjoy it. Jokes will be told. They will feel better, be a family again. Christmas takes care of its own.
Under the Radar
On the drive over to the Nicholsons’ for dinner—their first in some time—Marjorie Reeves told her husband, Steven Reeves, that she had had an affair with George Nicholson (their host) a year ago, but that it was all over with now and she hoped he—Steven—would not be mad about it and could go on with life.
At this point they were driving along Quaker Bridge Road where it leaves the Perkins Great Woods Road and begins to border the Shenipsit Reservoir, dark and shadowy and calmly mirrored in the late spring twilight. On the right was dense young timber, beech and alder saplings in pale leaf, the ground damp and cakey. Peepers were calling out from the watery lows. Their turn onto Apple Orchard Lane was still a mile on.
Steven, on hearing this news, began gradually and very carefully to steer their car—a tan Mercedes wagon with hooded yellow headlights—off of Quaker Bridge Road and onto the damp grassy shoulder so he could organize this information properly before going on.
They were extremely young. Steven Reeves was twentyeight. Marjorie Reeves a year younger. They weren’t rich, but they’d been lucky. Steven’s job at Packard-Wells was to stay on top of a small segment of a larger segment of a rather small prefabrication intersection that serviced the automobile industry, and where any sudden alteration, or even the rumor of an alteration in certain polymer-bonding formulas could tip crucial down-the-line demand patterns, and in that way affect the betting lines and comfort zones of a good many meaningful client positions. His job meant poring over dense and esoteric petrochemical-industry journals, attending technical seminars, flying to vendor conventions, then writing up detailed status reports and all the while keeping an eye on the market for the benefit of his higher-ups. He’d been a scholarship boy at Bates, studied chemistry, was the only son of a hard-put but upright lobstering family in Pemaquid, Maine, and had done well. His bosses at Packard-Wells liked him, saw themselves in him, and also in him saw character qualities they’d never quite owned—blond and slender callowness tending to gullibility, but backed by caution, ingenuity and a thoroughgoing, compact toughness. He was sharp. It was his seventh year with the company—his first job. He and Marjorie had been married two years. They had no children. The car had been his bonus two Christmases ago.