The Winter Place (6 page)

“We have a neighbor,” Tess said, her eyes a little cloudy, the muscles of her face loosening. “Mrs. Ridgeland. She lives just . . .” Instead of saying where, Tess simply pointed up the road. Her finger was shaking. Her whole arm was shaking.

“That's fine,” the older man said. “All right.
Rick is going to go and get her. How about that, Rick?” He looked at the younger officer, who nodded.

“Why do you need Mrs. Ridgeland?” Axel said.

“I'm James,” the older officer said, stepping down off the front stoop and holding out his hand for Tess to shake. She didn't. “Do you mind if I come inside for a minute?”

“It's open,” she said.

“Well, all right.” James smiled, the effort behind it plain enough to see. He stood there for an awkward moment, and when it became clear that Tess wasn't going to give him more of an invitation, he returned to the front door and swung it wide. Rick, the jumpy young officer, was already back inside his cruiser. The siren light spun silently as he pulled off the shoulder, back onto the county road.

“I said, why do you need Mrs. Ridgeland?” Axel was getting annoyed now.

“Why don't you come on inside?” James said. “We can talk in here.”

Tess was the first through the door, pausing for a moment to grip the frame. James and Axel followed. Inside, the house smelled of butter and of burning. A greasy film of smoke hung about the light fixtures on the ceiling. “Oh dear,” James said.

“There are pies in the oven,” Tess said, her voice flat. “We forgot them.”

“Shouldn't leave the house with the oven on,” James said, sort of to himself. He went from window to window to air out the A-frame. When he opened the oven, a hefty belch of smoke slurped out. Waving a pot holder in front of his face, he retrieved the two pies and dropped them in the sink with the water running. They sizzled like doused campfires. Tess lowered herself onto the couch. Axel wanted to shake her. He wanted to be big enough to shake this old police officer, too.

“Doesn't anybody give a crap about the bear?” Axel all but shouted it.

Tess just looked at him. She was crying, now—God, why was she crying? It was more a sound than anything else, like awful hiccups caught between her belly and her throat. Like she was choking on the air. It made Axel so angry. The bear was getting away, and Tess was just sitting there and the cop was condescending to him the exact way every stupid adult always condescended to him. His sister reached for him, but Axel pulled away.

“Honestly, son, we haven't heard boo about any bears.” James coughed a little as he exited the kitchen. He saw what was happening with Tess and sat down next to her. It was only now that
Axel noticed how sad the man looked. His eyes were red and wet, too, but also hard. “I can ask around, though. You say you saw a bear, and I believe you. Sounds like something that should be looked into.”

Nobody said anything more, and a clean night chill slowly filled the house. Before long they could hear the crunch of tires on the dirt drive outside. Mrs. Ridgeland pushed her way into the A-frame before the younger officer had even unbuckled his seat belt. She was still in her pajamas and robe—she hadn't even bothered to put shoes on. James stood to greet her, but she went right past him, setting on Axel. She took the boy into her arms and virtually carried him over to Tess and glommed her into the embrace as well. Axel could feel the shudder of Tess's crying, thrumming through the trunks of Mrs. Ridgeland's arms. But all he could think was: How could they? How could they tell her before they told us? He's our dad. He's
ours
, and they told her first.

An accident. A crash on 690, eastbound into Syracuse. The barest of bare bones, and it's all they got. The police persuaded Mrs. Ridgeland to unlatch from the children and then spoke to her for a good long while. As though Tess and Axel had been rendered deaf—as though they'd slipped out
the open doors and windows with the rest of the smoke. Though, to be fair, they'd all but done so. Axel had never seen his sister like this. He'd seen Tess cry, sure, but only once or twice. And even then it was just a few neatly controlled tears, a perfect distillation of a particular moment of anger and frustration. But this was something else, horribly alive and unselfconscious. Axel, on the other hand, felt anything but alive. It was almost as though he'd been ejected from his life and was watching this whole maudlin scene unfold on high-definition television. It was strangely comforting. As though, if things got too bad, Axel could simply change the channel.

Over at the kitchen table Mrs. Ridgeland was telling the police about how Saara, Axel and Tess's mother, had died a decade ago. The children had no aunts or uncles that Mrs. Ridgeland knew of, and no grandparents, either. At least none who ever visited. She thought it was a safe enough guess that any family they had were either dead or else not on speaking terms.

“We have a grandfather,” Tess said, her bleary eyes turning to the bookshelves. There was a picture of Grandpa Paul right there in the middle, just as rangy as their dad but older and more used up. He was sort of smiling, sort of squinting, seated in a canvas camp chair on the edge of a clear pond,
the skin on his shoulders pink and peeling. He wasn't smoking in the picture, but you could tell from it that he was a smoker. “He lives in Florida,” she said. “He's afraid to fly. We visit him.”

“That right, honey?” Officer James said. “You know where in Florida?”

Tess didn't answer right away. She and Axel had been to their grandpa's actual house—if you could give such a name to a single-wide trailer with only occasional electric and plumbing—only a few times. It was on the outskirts of a little town called the Boils, named for the warm freshwater springs that burbled up deep in the juniper prairie of the Ocala reserve. The trailer didn't exactly have a street address, and what's more, their grandpa liked to move it from time to time. He said it was to change up his view, but even Axel knew that it was more to change up his neighbors. Grandpa Paul could be a hard man to get along with, as evidenced by the fact that their dad got along with basically everybody on the planet except for him.

“Not exactly,” Tess said. “I know his number.” She took out her phone and read it aloud. Rick, the younger of the two officers, stepped into Sam's study to call. He emerged less than a minute later, mouthing “out of service” to James and Mrs. Ridgeland.

“He doesn't have a lot of money,” Axel said. He hadn't quite articulated this before, to himself or anybody else, but wow was it ever true. He thought of his granddad, groomed and quaffed whenever they met, reeking of aftershave and effort, wearing clothes that sometimes still had outlet-store tags on them. Axel supposed they'd live with him now, and that was as weird a thought as any. It rivaled the backyard bear in oddness.

“Nothing to worry about,” James said. “We'll find a way to get in touch with him. Until then, is there anyone else? Somebody closer by?” He waited, looking at Tess.

How could it be possible that the answer was no?

It was decided in very short order that the kids would go home with Mrs. Ridgeland. She and the two officers waited by the front door while Tess and Axel emptied their backpacks of schoolbooks and stuffed in their pajamas and their toothbrushes. Axel felt strange as he wandered the house, as though he had just minutes to save a few possessions before evacuating the area, the A-frame a loss, doomed to be consumed by a forest fire racing down on them from the hot heart of the leafless park. He made one last stop to drop some more food and water into Bigwig's hutch before closing the door to his bedroom for what would be exactly the second-to-last time.

“Do you two have any questions?” Officer James asked once they were all packed.

“Not about . . . just . . .” Axel sensed it was wrong, but he couldn't help himself. It wouldn't leave his head. “About the bear. I want to know if somebody is going to go look for the bear.”

The adults just stared at him.

The angels in Mrs. Ridgeland's yard blazed white one by one as they caught the high beams and fell back into nothing when the cruiser passed them by. Tess was still crying when she stepped out of the car, but it had cooled now to a sort of teary daze. Mrs. Ridgeland and Axel got out as well, and the sound of their doors shutting seemed loud enough to knock the trees over. Officer James lowered his window and explained that someone from Social Services would be around in the morning, to work out a better arrangement until next of kin could be located. Mrs. Ridgeland said that the children could stay with her as long as they needed to.

The cruiser backed cautiously down the drive, and Mrs. Ridgeland fumbled with a big ring of keys. She led them through that cramped hallway and into a sitting room swollen with yarn and construction paper, old photographs spilling out of open boxes on the floor. “You two probably aren't
hungry,” Mrs. Ridgeland said, “but you should try to eat something all the same.”

Axel nodded. He was actually starving. The pies had immolated, and he hadn't eaten a thing since the sweet barrel pickle he'd bought at the court-of-foods that afternoon.

Mrs. Ridgeland waited for another moment and, getting no indication either way from Tess, she said: “I'll see what I can find. After that, we'll sort out a place for you to sleep.” She was talking mostly to herself now, fading in the direction of the kitchen.

The children sat silently on opposite ends of a little love seat facing an enormous picture window. Mrs. Ridgeland's giant, copper-plated telescope was set before the window. It made about as much sense as the angels cavorting out in her yard. Axel thought, once again, of the bear. It was out there too. “Dad is gonna flip when we tell him about it.” It was only when Tess turned to stare at him that Axel realized he'd said this aloud.

“We're going to have to make do,” Mrs. Ridgeland said, returning to the sitting room. She held a tray with three mugs on it, a box of crackers, and an assortment of store-brand dips in plastic tubs. “I'm used to shopping for one.” She squeezed in between Tess and Axel, orange construction paper crumpling beneath her, and made
space for the tray by whisking her forearm across the coffee table.

“I'm afraid the bedrooms are a bit . . . messy.” She opened each of the tubs and gave the contents a good sniff. The onion dip and the southwest dip were promptly recapped and set off to one side. “But there's a couch in the basement,” she went on. “It doesn't fold out, but it's a sectional. I think you two should fit all right.”

“Thank you,” Tess said.

“None of that.” Mrs. Ridgeland put a hand on Tess's cheek, not even trying to brush away the heavy gloss of tears. “Listen,” she said, turning to Axel and putting her free hand on his. “This is awful. This is a terrible thing that's happened to both of you. But it
happened
. It's real, and it's permanent. You can feel whatever you need to feel, whenever you need to feel it. You can be as tough as you want to be right now. Denial, I've found, is underrated. As long as it's only to delay pain, have at it. But understand—the facts are forever. Your father was . . .” She trailed off, her eyes drifting to her telescope. Axel followed her gaze and noticed something moving in the yard. It was a dark thing, slithering serpentine between the statues. Not the bear—the wheelchair. It entered the rectangle of orange light cast out the window and seemed to stare up at him patiently. It seemed,
for a weird moment, like Mrs. Ridgeland could see it too.

“To be honest,” she continued, “I never knew your father that well. But he seemed like a sweet man. He's gone now, and he isn't coming back.” This last bit seemed directed at Axel in particular. She stared down at him as she said it, and her voice had a strange, pleading ring to it.

Tess pulled away from Mrs. Ridgeland, whose hand stayed exactly where it was, clutching the air where her cheek had been. “You're
terrible
at this,” Tess said.