The Winter Girl by Matt Marinovich Read Free Book Online

you have. I don’t look too bad when I’m feeling down myself, but Elise’s brown eyes seemed to grow browner, her eyelashes longer. Don’t believe all that garbage you hear about happy couples. The sad ones know more, feel everything twice as much. That’s why they hardly speak. They can share pain just by twitching their mouths a certain way, or choose not to reassure each other with a single word that used to provide comfort. When it comes right down to it, misery is just another art form, as hard to perfect as any other craft, only we aim to leave nothing behind. We’re the copper thieves of our own houses, ripping out our own wires. Slowly, we’ve stolen the best parts of each other, carted ourselves away.
    Part of me was admiring how uncertain and almost girlish she looked as she sat there in her coat in the kitchen chair, snowflakes vanishing on her shoulders as she watched me stand there with my mop. Part of me was hearing myself explain my grand theories.
    “I have no idea,” I said. “But I think he blew his wife away with the shotgun in the closet.”
    “Why didn’t you call the police?”
    “And what I’m thinking is that she had cancer or something, because she had a scarf on her head. So maybe he gets tired of her being a burden and being ill and he just puts her out of her misery.”
    “Answer me.”
    “Because it’s breaking and entering.”
    “We just walked in. We didn’t break anything.”
    “It’s still a crime. They’d laugh at us and throw us in jail.”
    Elise looked down at the bare table in front of her, shook her head slightly.
    “It’s something worse now,” she said. “It’s like we’re helping cover something up.”
    I asked her how her father was, something that would make her feel like she wasn’t a criminal.
    “Worse,” she said.
    “Matter-of-days kind of thing?” I said, realizing instantly that it was the wrong way to put it.
    “He’s my father. He’s not a thing.”
    We argued after that. Then we argued about arguing. I wondered if the only place we really had a chance was in that house that wasn’t ours. In a bedroom we could never sleep in.
    “My clients are leaving me,” she said, narrowing her eyes as if she could see them, changing their minds after all the work she had done with their children.
    “They’ll come back.”
    “No, they won’t,” she said, finally pushing away the chair and standing up. “They never do.”
    —
    T here was a big fir tree at the end of that cul-de-sac on Ocean View Road. It had been wrapped with strings of big colored lights. There was an older couple who lived on that property, but we’d never met them. Maybe we’d seen their car pass by once or twice. That week before Christmas, Elise and I were coming back from the supermarket in Hampton Bays and saying nothing as we turned right on the dark road that led to Victor’s house. We drove past all the darkened summer homes, dim blue lights lining one massive driveway, as if it were a curved runway. Their rich owners, I assumed, were shoulder to shoulder in the city, in paneled rooms that teemed with holiday conversation, with candlelight doubled in mirrors and caterers carrying silver trays. This was the winter season they would never see, a chilly hollowness that their caretakers could hardly be bothered with, letting bagged newspapers build up against white gates.
    As I drove toward Victor’s house, I thought to myself that I could have picked any of these dark homes. Instead I’d had sex in a murder scene, in one of the less impressive houses. I was an idiot.
    I was driving, my jaw set, thinking of that porcelain pig and its snouty grin, the promise that the best was yet to come. When we took the last right, we could see it through all the dead branches. That amazing tree. I pulled the car over and we just stared at it in silence. There was no need to say anything. It made us that happy, and when an unhappy couple is happy, it’s almost like having a vision,