14 Degrees Below Zero (22 page)

23. YOU HAVE TO BE CAREFUL ABOUT PEOPLE LIKE THAT.

J
ay woke after her second night without Ramona. She had spent the day before in a horrid circuit between the hospital, her apartment, and her parents’ house. Stephen hadn’t woken, or stirred, or done much of anything. He’d been moved to a room upstairs and was no longer entombed in heavy blankets. Still, machines breathed for him, and he was wrapped in sheets that spared Jay the sight of his lost fingers and toes.

She had spoken again with officers Wallace and McInnis. Police in the Twin Cities were looking for Lewis and Ramona, they assured her, and come morning they were going to set off a regional alarm that would notify law enforcement in five states—and attract the attention of the media. Jay had given the cops pictures—a head shot of Lewis in front of his house, and Ramona’s photo from her last birthday party.

“We’ll find them,” said McInnis, with girl-to-girl reassurance.

When she had first gone to Lewis’s house she found the door partway open to the cold. That scared her more than anything, because Lewis was an obsessive door-locker and window-latcher. She knew that no intentional harm would ever come to Ramona at Lewis’s hands—really, wasn’t the problem that he loved them
too much
?—but there was a very real possibility that he had lost his mind. The question of whether or not he had hurt Stephen hung over her like a pale shadow. Only he and Stephen knew.

The Lewis she knew would never hurt Ramona. But was that the man who had her little girl?

Not having Ramona nearby was like losing a limb. She got in her car and drove, the air crystalline and inert. She shivered hard in her seat, the temperature too low to be believed. Steam vented from apartment building rooftops. The streets were tunneled by plowed and shoveled snow, which was piled high and frozen hard. It had gotten down to twenty-one below during the night.

It was hard to say precisely where she had spent the previous night; she stayed at Stephen’s side for several hours—his parents had arrived, two amiable granola types who knew almost nothing about Stephen’s life in recent years. She dozed, then drove home in the dark, her poor car sounding like it was barely able to go on, and slept for a couple hours on the sofa.

Lewis had yet to turn on his cell phone.

Bastard.
Hands gripping the wheel at a red light, she tried to fight off tears. All that overbearing love. She had taken it, she had drawn strength from it. She was like Lewis, as Stephen had pointed out.

But to take her daughter away from her? To disappear without a word, however benign his motivations surely were? It was fucking inexcusable. When she saw him, she was going to slap his face. She was going to . . .

Of course there was the possibility that something had happened to them. For a black flash she entertained the notion of their deaths. But no. Not Lewis. He was too strong.

She pulled up into the driveway of her parents’ home. It was just after eight in the morning. She almost slipped on the ice on the steps, which gave way with great fissures and cracking sounds. Someone was scraping their sidewalk down the block, and the sound of it sent a jolt of electricity up Jay’s spine.

Inside it was warm—Lewis kept the thermostat on a timer, and lately had kept the house hot at night and tropical during the day. Jay dropped the newspaper and mail on the table inside, going through the motions as though tending the house while her mother and father were on a vacation.

The house was silent. The place was tidy, much neater than when Jay was growing up. She knew Lewis took a certain grim satisfaction in his particular brand of fussy order. Upstairs she went into the closet where all her mother’s things still hung. She ran her hands over the dresses, the suits, the blouses hanging in a double row all along the walk-in. Then she took a step into their midst, feeling the fabric against her neck and face, breathing deep, trying to get a faint smell of her mother’s ghost.

It was almost like she was there.

In the back was an old burgundy dress that Anna used to wear, years ago, when Jay was just entering adolescence. In the years that followed Anna had put on weight and favored roomy slacks and sweaters. But in the last flower of her beauty—and it wasn’t unfair to say so, for Anna had abdicated conventional sex appeal in favor of sensibly short hair and studied plainness—she had worn clothes like this dress, which showed off her arms and the slender lines above her knee. Anna had been breathtakingly beautiful once, to Jay’s young eyes a standard to which her daughter could never aspire.

The dress smelled like that Japanese perfume Anna preferred—Jay couldn’t remember what it was called. She took the dress off its hanger and laid it out on the perfectly made bed. Stark light streamed in through the windows. Jay stepped out of her jeans, slipped off her sweater and T-shirt. She looked at herself in the mirror dressed only in panties. To her eyes she looked small and plain, her hair hanging straight and unwashed, her nipples red and round. She put on her mother’s dress.

It was almost too big for her—Anna had been a couple inches taller. But Jay filled it out, and its lines rested well on her slim figure. She found a bottle of perfume on the dresser, still there, and sprayed herself on her neck and between her breasts. Then she stood in front of the mirror, wrapped her arms around herself, and swayed in a slow comforting rhythm.

How could Anna have left? Now Jay ran her hands over the dress, half-closing her eyes until she saw her mother in the mirror. Being in the dress was like being inside Anna, the place Jay had started her life. She closed her eyes and listened to her heartbeat in her ears, imagining the time before she was born, when her heart beat in time with her mother’s.

Some time had passed when she realized someone was knocking on the door. As though waking from sleep, she started at the sight of herself in the mirror. Anna stared back at her.

Jay rushed downstairs, thinking it might be Lewis—although, come to think of it, why would Lewis be knocking at the door of his own house? She saw the figure of a lone person outside as she threw open the door. She didn’t bother to hide her disappointment when she saw who it was.

“Hey, Jay,” said Stan. He took in what she was wearing, visibly blanched, but didn’t say anything. “Can I come in? I’m freezing to death out here.”

The blast of cold air shocked Jay, with her exposed arms and legs in Anna’s lightweight dress. She stood aside for Stan to come in, then slammed the door.

“I saw your car,” Stan said. He took off his fur-lined Russian-style hat, wheezing and clenching his stout body tight to rid it of the cold. “Is Lewis around?”

“He’s not here,” Jay said.

“Hey, kiddo,” Stan said, looking at her eyes. “You’ve been crying. What’s wrong?”

“Oh,
shit,
Stan.”

Before she knew it she was in her old neighbor’s arms, sobbing like a little girl and streaking his coat with tears. She tried to talk but he told her to stop, hugging her tight. She remembered how, as a little girl, she had instinctually known that Stan was to be trusted; he was entirely without the reserve and mixed motivations that a child can sense in an adult. Although he had never seemed to like himself particularly, she had always liked him.

After a while she had gotten whatever it was out of her system. She mustered as much dignity as she could, smelling of her mother’s perfume, dressed in her mother’s clothes, distraught and acting like the helpless young woman she was trying extremely hard not to be.

“You freaked me out really bad when you opened the door,” Stan said, releasing Jay from his arms. “You look . . . you know, you look like Anna. I thought I was seeing a ghost.”

“Oh, Stan, don’t,” Jay said. “Not now. I’m trying to keep it together.”

“What’s happened?” Stan asked, his big lined face creasing with concern.

So she told him about it: about Stephen, and the cops’ suspicions, the restraining order, Lewis’s disappearance and the two nights without Ramona. Stan slipped out of his coat and landed heavily on one of the living room sofas, shaking his head.

“Crazy son of a bitch,” he said, then quickly reversed himself. “I’m sorry, kiddo. That was a stupid thing to say.”

“But it’s true,” Jay said. She sat down on the edge of the dining room table in the next room, ten feet from Stan.

“Well, anyway,” he said. “I knew about the restraining order. I was here when he got served with it.”

“What did he say happened?” Jay asked.

“I don’t know,” Stan said. “Lewis wasn’t talking. But I found a gun there on the sideboard.”

Jay turned to look. There were newspapers piled with assorted mail. “A gun?” she said. “He doesn’t have a gun.”

Stan gave a guilty shrug. “Men do things they don’t tell their kids about,” he said. “Anyway, I took it away from him. He got pissed off at me, but I was doing him a favor. I told him not to fuck up and do anything rash. Now it looks like he has.”

“You think he hurt Stephen?”

Stan held up his meaty palms in a who-knows gesture.

“Lewis has always been different,” he said. “I don’t have to tell you that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look, I love your dad.” Stan looked around, as though worried that Lewis would hear. “But he’s a little nuts. I used to tell him that. I’m a licensed counselor, I used to say. I have a certificate on the wall that entitles me to make professional judgments.”

Despite herself, Jay allowed Stan the pleasure of making her laugh.

“No, but seriously,” he went on. “I was a marriage counselor, you know. Used to listen to people’s shit all day. I shared offices with a chiropractor and some guy who handled finances or something. I quit when I had to get the bypass.”

“Stan, what did you think of my parents’ marriage?” she asked. She tugged at the dress, wishing it covered more of her. Stan impeccably managed not to give off any sexual vibrations, but still.

Stan let his head wobble back and forth in comical equivocation. “How much you want to hear?” he said.

There were a lot of years and volumes of unspoken knowledge in Stan’s question. Stan had known Jay’s parents as peers, as fellow adults, a level that a child can never attain. Jay’s lens for viewing Anna and Lewis had by necessity been warped by need, and dependence, and then the setting-apart of adolescence.

But those lenses, those habits, had not served her well. Getting pregnant had been bad luck, sure, but she had let it provide her with an excuse for quitting college. Perhaps she had felt safe to drift by the power of her parents’ embrace, especially by Lewis’s stifling assurances that he would never let her fall. She remembered her resolve of the other night, to find a new town, to become a new Jay Ingraham, to be Ramona’s mother and no longer anyone’s daughter.

Lewis, in his way, had made that not just possible, but unavoidable. Because it was quite likely that Jay was never going to speak to him again once he and Ramona were found.

“Just tell me what you think,” Jay told Stan.

Stan nodded. “All right. Maybe this will do you some good.” He got up, an effort that required a couple of attempts before meeting with success. He lumbered across the room, then back again, talking as he paced. “You grew up in a nice, loving family, Jay. A lot of people would have killed to get such a setup.
Most
people.”

“Then why am I so fucked up?” she asked.

“You’re not fucked up,” Stan said. “You don’t know what the hell you’re doing. So what? Who does? I don’t.”

“You’re not going to charge me for this, are you?”

Stan smiled. “The first one’s on the house.”

“Sounds good,” Jay replied.

“Well, you might not believe this, but I used to lecture your dad.” Stan paused. “I know. It took some doing. But I had to say something. I used to tell him he was lucky Anna didn’t leave him.”

“
Leave
him? But—”

“Look,” Stan interrupted. “Lewis is a great guy. Smarter than hell. But he drove Anna into the ground with all his criticizing, all his little grudges. I swear to God, the man spends all his time figuring out how people have wronged him. Here he had this gorgeous wife—talented, faithful—and what did he do? Pick on her morning noon and night. Nothing was good enough. The house was a mess. She was letting herself get fat. Why did he think she let herself go like she did? Because it didn’t
matter
anymore. She gave up because he was never going to let himself be happy about anything.”

Hearing the history of her family dissected in this manner produced more of an impact on Jay than she thought it would; she leaned back on the table as though pushed back by Stan’s breakdown of her father’s failings. She thought of Anna, how quiet she had grown over the years, retreating to the sunporch and the paintings she never showed anyone.

“But Mom could have
said
something—”

“She did,” Stan countered. “I saw it. She got mad at him, she argued with him, she laughed in his face. Didn’t matter. Some people are like a battering ram, kid, and your dad is one of them. I saw it all the time in my practice. One spouse chips away at the other one for twenty years, and what’s supposed to happen? No one’s getting beat up, no one’s getting drunk all day, they have a nice house, they remember enough about the good days to live in a reasonable facsimile some of the time. You know,
life.
That’s just the way it is.”

“You don’t know—”

“Of course I don’t,” Stan said. “No one does. Lewis surely has a thousand and one arguments that would counter everything I just said. People don’t add up, Jay. They don’t make sense. They remember what they remember and they make up reasons for what they want to do. I’m just saying that Anna got
tired.
Lewis wore her out. Maybe he was better at generating versions of reality than she was. You have to be careful about people like that. They actually
believe
what they’re saying.”

Jay let her shoulders slump; she looked down the front of the dress and saw the soft line of her belly rising and falling as she breathed.

“I’d better go change,” she said.