“Mm-m,” she said.
He hugged her and lightly rubbed her, cursing her constantly, cursing the position she’d put him in. For a long time she didn’t get any warmer, kept falling asleep and barely waking up, but finally something clicked on inside her, and she began to shiver and clutch him. He kept rubbing and hugging, and then, all at once, her eyes were wide open and she was looking into him.
Her eyes weren’t blinking. There was still something almost dead in them, something very far away. She seemed to be seeing all the way through to the back of him and beyond, out into the cold space of the future in which they would both soon be dead, out into the nothingness that Lalitha and his mother and his father had already passed into, and yet she was looking straight into his eyes, and he could feel her getting warmer by the minute. And so he stopped looking at her eyes and started looking into them, returning their look before it was too late, before this connection between life and what came after life was lost, and let her see all the vileness inside him, all the hatreds of two thousand solitary nights, while the two of them were still in touch with the void in which the sum of everything they’d ever said or done, every pain they’d inflicted, every joy they’d shared, would weigh less than the smallest feather on the wind.
“It’s me,” she said. “Just me.”
“I know,” he said, and kissed her.
Near the bottom of the list of conceivable Walter-related outcomes for the residents of Canterbridge Estates had been the possibility that they’d be sorry to see him go. Nobody, least of all Linda Hoffbauer, could have foreseen the early-December Sunday afternoon when Walter’s wife, Patty, parked his Prius on Canterbridge Court and began to ring their doorbells, introducing herself briefly, noninvasively, and presenting them with Glad-wrapped plates of Christmas cookies that she’d baked. Linda was in an awkward position, meeting Patty, because there was nothing immediately unlikable about her, and because it was impossible to refuse a seasonal gift. Curiosity, if nothing else, compelled her to invite Patty inside, and before she knew it Patty was kneeling on her living-room floor, coaxing her cats to come and be stroked and inquiring about their names. She seemed to be as warm a person as her husband was a cold one. When Linda asked her how it had happened that they’d never previously met, Patty laughed trillingly and said, “Oh, well, Walter and I were taking a little breather from each other.” This was an odd and rather clever formulation, difficult to find clear moral fault with. Patty stayed long enough to admire the house and its view of the snow-covered lake, and, in leaving, she invited Linda and her family to the open house that she and Walter were hosting on New Year’s Day.
Linda was not much inclined to enter the home of Bobby’s murderer, but when she learned that every other family on Canterbridge Court (except two already in Florida) was attending the open house, she succumbed to a combination of curiosity and Christian forbearance. The fact was, Linda was having some popularity problems in the neighborhood. Although she had her own dedicated cadre of friends and allies at her church, she was also a strong believer in neighborliness, and by acquiring three new cats to replace her Bobby, who certain irresolute neighbors believed might have died of natural causes, she’d perhaps overplayed her hand; there was a feeling that she’d been somewhat vindictive. And so, although she did leave her husband and kids at home, she drove her Suburban over to the Berglund house on New Year’s and was duly flummoxed by Patty’s particular hospitality toward her. Patty introduced her to her daughter and to her son and then, not leaving her side, led her outside and down to the lake for a view of her own house from a distance. It occurred to Linda that she was being played by an expert, and that she could learn from Patty a thing or two about winning hearts and minds; already, in less than a month, Patty had succeeded in charming even those neighbors who no longer opened their doors all the way when Linda came complaining to them: who made her stand out in the cold. She took several valiant stabs at getting Patty to slip up and betray her liberal disagreeability, asking her if she was a bird-lover, too (“No, but I’m a Walter-lover, so I sort of get it,” Patty said), and whether she was interested in finding a local church to attend (“I think it’s great there are so many to choose from,” Patty said), before concluding that her new neighbor was too dangerous an adversary to be tackled head-on. As if to complete the rout, Patty had cooked up an extensive and very tasty-looking spread from which Linda, with an almost pleasant sense of defeat, loaded up a large plate.
“Linda,” Walter said, accosting her while she was taking seconds. “Thank you so much for coming over.”
“It was nice of your wife to invite me,” Linda said.
Walter had apparently resumed regular shaving with the return of his wife—he looked very pink now. “Listen,” he said, “I was awfully sorry to hear your cat disappeared.”
“Really?” she said. “I thought you hated Bobby.”
“I did hate him. He was a bird-killing machine. But I know you loved him, and it’s a hard thing to lose a pet.”
“Well, we have three more now, so.”
He calmly nodded. “Just try to keep them indoors, if you can. They’ll be safer there.”
“I’m sorry—is that a threat?”
“No, not a threat,” he said. “Just a fact. It’s a dangerous world for small animals. Can I get you something else to drink?”
It was clear to everyone that day, and in the months that followed, that Patty’s greatest warming influence was on Walter himself. Now, instead of speeding by his neighbors in his angry Prius, he stopped to lower his window and say hello. On weekends, he brought Patty over to the patch of clear ice that the neighborhood kids maintained for hockey and instructed her in skating, which, in a remarkably short time, she became rather good at. During small thaws, the two Berglunds could be seen taking long walks together, sometimes nearly to Fen City, and when the big thaw came, in April, and Walter again went door to door on Canterbridge Court, it was not to berate people about their cats but to invite them to join him and a scientist friend on a series of nature walks in May and June, to get to know their local heritage and to see, up close, some of the marvelous life the woods were full of. Linda Hoffbauer at this point abandoned the last vestiges of her resistance to Patty, admitting freely that she knew how to manage a husband, and the neighborhood liked this new tone of Linda’s and opened its doors a little wider to her.
And so it was all in all unexpectedly sad to learn, midway through a summer in which the Berglunds hosted several barbecues and were much sought after socially in return, that they would be moving to New York at the end of August. Patty explained that she had a good job in education that she wanted to return to, and that her mother and her siblings and her daughter and Walter’s best friend all lived in or near New York, and that, although the house on the lake had meant a lot to her and Walter over the years, nothing could last forever. When she was asked if they might still return for vacations, her face clouded and she said that this wasn’t what Walter wanted. He was leaving his property, instead, to be managed by a local land trust as a bird sanctuary.
Within days of the Berglunds’ departure in a big rental truck, whose horn Walter tooted while Patty waved good-bye, a specialized company came and erected a high and cat-resistant fence around the entire property (Linda Hoffbauer, now that Patty was gone, dared to declare the fence somewhat ugly), and soon other workers came to gut the little Berglund house, leaving only the shell standing, as a haven for owls or swallows. To this day, free access to the preserve is granted only to birds and to residents of Canterbridge Estates, through a gate whose lock combination is known to them, beneath a small ceramic sign with a picture of the pretty young dark-skinned girl after whom the preserve is named.
Jonathan Franzen, Freedom
(Series: # )
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