Still Life with Bread Crumbs (17 page)

For the first few hours it felt like an adventure, the two of them alone in the deep deep silence, not of the house but of its surroundings, muffled completely by the snow batting in which they found themselves wrapped. Rebecca was pretty certain of the location of her car, but if it was where she thought it was it had been completely buried by a drift that butted up against the shed. Twice more she opened the back window for the dog, but by the second time the snow was even higher and tipped off the sill and into the room, melting on the splintery floor. Sleep that night was not so deep, and toward dawn, or what she thought was dawn—like the aurora borealis, the glowing snow had turned the edges of night into a strange imitation of day—she felt the dog tentatively climb onto the end of the bed, and she didn’t push him off. The house smelled like turkey stock and woodsmoke, and she ran over in her mind how much food in cans she had in the cabinets, and as she did that she realized that she was
completely alone, cut off from everything around her, and that that was a feeling she had had living within her for a long long time without allowing herself to recognize it.

In the morning she pushed the snow off the outside sill of the window with a dustpan, and hoisted the dog over the edge. He fell into a drift, and pushed his muzzle deep into it. He could manage only a few steps, doing his business with his head down as though he was ashamed to have so little privacy. She couldn’t know that it reminded him of all the times he’d looked for a fresh spot to squat when his range was circumscribed by a length of chain and a choke collar. He managed to put his paws on the outside sill, and she hoisted him in by his front legs and gave him half of an English muffin. Since she so often ate at Tea for Two, the poor store-bought muffin was a little hard at one edge.

She put the light on under the stock again just for the heat and the smell, put another log on the fire, and realized as she did that the six others stacked nearby were all she had. There was a whole wall of wood against one side of the house, split and stacked, but all of it was under snow like her car and the snow shovel leaning useless against one wall of the shed. She was overwhelmed by her own stupidity and helplessness. She had a phone and a computer, neither of which worked in this house. Somewhere a few miles down the mountain there were scones, and espresso, and cell service, but they might as well be in Tibet. Or, she supposed, on West Seventy-Sixth Street, which seemed just as far away.

“It has to melt at some point,” she said to the dog, who lifted that one rebellious ear, then laid himself down flat as a throw rug.

She worked for a few distracted hours, reprinting more of the cross pictures, looking at the images taken from different angles. For an hour after lunch she took pictures of the dog, the hard scarred pads of his paws, the rough fur of his back, finally his face, full-on. He seemed to understand his function; he cocked
his head, turned it slightly, raised a brow like a cartoon character. With no one to hear her but him, Rebecca said, “This is what it’s come to. Birds and dogs. Next I will be shooting weddings. I will be working for a studio that takes the high school graduation photos.” The dog listened carefully. He liked it better when she was not unhappy.

Just before four o’clock, with two fast flickers and the asthmatic wheeze of the old refrigerator, the power went off, and in the half-light she closed her eyes and sighed. “Candles,” she said. But there were none. Of course.

For the rest of her life Rebecca Winter would apprehend the rumble of a truck engine in deep silence, or anything dimly like it, even the rhythmic solo roll of a kettledrum in a symphonic passage, as the soothing sound of salvation.

It was past nightfall by the time she heard it, but how far she could not have said. For hours she sat in the dark, with nothing to do except think of things, so that her thoughts covered a world tour of subjects: whether the cross photographs were enigmatic or merely confusing, whether her work would still sell again at slightly or greatly reduced prices, whether she could sell the New York apartment for enough money to live on for the foreseeable future, whether Ben would be bereft if she sold it, whether she could bear to live outside Manhattan, whether she should live closer to her father, what the Mary Cassatt was
worth, what her own life was worth now that it felt oddly like someone else’s life. She thought for the first time in years of being pregnant, and how her body had once felt as though it no longer belonged to her and yet was more hers than it had ever been before (or after). “I’m gobsmacked by those men who say they are aroused by a pregnant woman,” Peter had said, in that way in which he insisted he was merely being factual when he was really being cruel.

She was thinking of Peter, wondering whether the sex and his accent were enough to explain why she had married him (they were, if you threw in the way he read poetry, which was related to both), when she heard the truck climbing the driveway. The spotlights of headlights ran across the front windows, asking a semaphore question, and the dog barked an answer. Rebecca ran to throw open the door before remembering that this was impossible. On tiptoes she could see the very top of the blade of a plow illuminated, yellow as a taxicab, by the lights of the truck. For an hour it moved back and forth, back and forth, like a student driver learning to perform a K-turn, until there were mountains of snow interrupted by flat areas of drive and battered grass. Then there was the scraping of a shovel against the door, and with her on one side and Jim Bates on the other, pushing, pulling, pushing, pulling, the door finally came open, and the harsh winter wind blew in and scattered dead ashes across the stone hearth.

“Damn,” he said, ice on his eyebrows and lashes. “I thought you were asleep. The place is pitch black.” He stomped snow off his boots on the threshold. “Ah, hell,” he said. “No power?”

“None whatsoever,” Rebecca said, twisting her odd mouth in a way that made his heart stutter-stop. What she thought looked wry he read as scared and sad. He was right.

“Wait,” he said and waded back into the cold, and the black, and the silver-white night, turned off the truck, and pulled something from behind the driver’s seat.

“One Coleman lantern,” he said as he put it on the dining table, where it cast a small but somehow unearthly glow, like the last fire in the last place on earth.

The dining room table in the home of a person living alone becomes the entire world, divided into countries: the area for the mail, for work if there is any, a small duchy set aside for the placement of one dish, one bowl, one fork. Rebecca looked at her table in the wan yellow light of the lantern and saw her life in all of its loneliness, and when he looked up she could see it reflected in his face. It was the first time he had been inside her house since he had rousted the raccoon, and it felt entirely different than it had that day, when she was a customer and he a hired man.

“Thank you,” she muttered, as though she was dismissing him.

“You haven’t yet begun to thank me,” he said and pulled a bottle from inside his parka. “Tullamore Dew,” it said.

“Behold,” he said, as his eyebrows thawed and made rivulets down his pink face.

She couldn’t remember the last time she had had whiskey, or even alcohol. In the beginning she had had wine with her dinner, but the solitary glass, the recorked bottle—both had underlined what she thought of as her exile. The Tullamore Dew had a pretty name, was a pretty color, was smooth and easy, particularly after the first jelly glass full. She put her head back against the tired lumpy couch and listened to him talk, about how there was so much snow that Sarah had had to keep Tea for Two closed, about the ninety-seven-year-old woman on Creek Road he’d plowed out, who’d given him half a pie and two dollars—“one in quarters, if you can believe it”—about how the snow had brought down the roof of the volunteer fire station and he’d be working on that as soon as the weather cleared, although he didn’t like to do flat roofs.

He didn’t tell her how Tad had called him and said, “Do you
think Ms. Winter is safe up there on her own?” and he’d said, “Ah, hell,” because he’d gotten so busy plowing out his sister’s place and the woman on Creek Road and the Methodist church where they had the AA meetings that he’d left it too long, maybe because he thought Rebecca was as self-sufficient a person as he’d ever known, despite not knowing when there was a raccoon in the attic and buying firewood from that idiot Kevin.

“You still awake?” he said finally, when he got exhausted filling the silence, a little worried that he’d been rambling in that way people who know they’ve had a lot to drink do. He hadn’t had a lot to eat, he realized, as he smelled turkey, and the whiskey was running a little wild inside him because of that. It was getting cold, too. No power, no furnace. He poked the logs in the fireplace.

“Not entirely,” said Rebecca finally, her eyes faint glimmers at the bottom edges of her lids, and something about that, the spark in the dark, made him lean down and kiss her, a Tullamore Dew kiss that, in the way of semidrunken kisses, got very wet very fast. He was really enjoying himself until suddenly, as though all the languor and relief of being rescued had disappeared in an instant, Rebecca pulled back—no, when she thought of it afterward, ever afterward, she realized she had recoiled, and she was mortified and remorseful.

But that was later.

He pressed himself back against her and she pressed back with her hands, hard.

“What?” he said.

“What?”

“What?”

“Never mind,” she said, standing up and sidestepping a bit as she did, with a small stumble that was either the Dew or nerves or both. “This is ridiculous. How old are you?”

“What difference does that make? You’re making this way more complicated than it needs to be. It doesn’t need to be complicated.”
She looked fierce, the way handsome women do when they are confused, or angry, or embarrassed, or all three.

“I was forty-four last month,” he finally said, putting his glass down emphatically.

“Oh my God.”

“Yeah, you missed my birthday.”

“That’s not the point. Forty-four? Oh my God.”

“Would fifty have been better?”

“I’m sixty years old.”

“Right. So what? You look great. Is that what I’m supposed to say?”

“What?”

“In my experience, if women tell you how old they are it’s so you’ll tell them how good they look.”

“That was not why I told you how old I was. It was so you would understand how ridiculous it would be to—”

“What?”

“What?”

“Ridiculous?”

“Ludicrous.”

“Ludicrous. Hell, that’s even worse than ridiculous,” he said, and with what seemed to be one motion he grabbed his dripping parka and walked back out into the snow. In what seemed to be one mental motion, Rebecca hoped that his truck would start, and that it wouldn’t.

It did. The rumble of salvation became fainter and fainter. The dog whined and circled the room. Rebecca sat back down on the couch, heavily. For most of her life she had not been what anyone would call an emotional person, but at odd, quiet, unexpected times—the climax of an old film, a passage in a book, even the occasional insurance ad—sentiment got the better of her.

“Oh, my goodness,” she said and burst into tears, and sobbed loudly.

For a moment or two she consoled herself with the notion that she was drunk, but it was as little consolation as it had been to most sensitive people over time, although the hard-hearted used it for everything from meanness to manslaughter. The dog licked her face and made a sympathetic noise in his throat that sounded like a rusty hinge. The wind blew down the chimney. Rebecca cried, and cried some more. The Coleman lantern flickered slightly, turning the glass of whiskey Jim Bates had left next to it into a prism.

Then the dog stepped back, sat down at attention, and let out one sharp bark. In a moment she heard the sound he’d heard, with his sharper ears, and wiped hard at her face with the side of her hand as she stood up. When the door opened so much snow blew in that there was a small storm in the living room.

“This is ludicrous,” Jim said, and without removing his parka he put his arms around her and kissed her and kissed her, wet and cold and covered with snow as he was, until he had backed her into the dark bedroom and closed the door shut in the dog’s face.

When she woke it was 7:00
A.M.
The dog had been fed, the coffee made. Rebecca had not ever used, nor much heard used in conversation, the expression “feels like a million bucks.” But for some reason it was circling around her head like the digital news ribbon in Times Square:

Rebecca Winter Feels Like a Million Bucks. Rebecca Winter Feels Like a Million Bucks.

The bottle of Tullamore Dew sat on the dining room table with half an inch still in the bottom. She smiled at the bottle, felt foolish, got coffee, sat on the couch, and thought of various episodes from the previous night. The power had come back on just before daybreak, so that suddenly the two of them were pinned down by an unforgiving overhead light with a hundred-watt bulb, and not the soft-light kind, either. The dark, the dark, the
utter dark had been her friend as she considered the slackness at the tops of her haunches, the cesarean scar on her belly, the creased skin of her cleavage. She had always been small-breasted, and all her life she had hated it until, in locker rooms looking around at the other middle-aged swimmers struggling out of their maillots, she had realized that gravity was more charitable to the flat-chested.

Jim had gotten up to turn off the light, and when he returned he said happily, “Wow,” which was exactly the right thing to say. Fifteen minutes later they were both asleep again.

“Don’t get up,” he said an hour later when he pulled on his pants in the half-light.

She looked out the window. The truck was gone, the snow had mostly stopped falling. Her head hurt, but not as much as she would have expected. She put on her boots and went out with the dog. With the path cleared, the drive plowed, the snow that had seemed so terrifying and overwhelming the day before now seemed merely beautiful. The sky, the ground, the roof and trees, everything was one color, one faintly translucent and glowing shade of white, and it was beautiful in a way that no photograph could ever capture. A few flakes continued to fall, dipping, wheeling, what she’d learned in the tree stand to call riding the zephyrs.