Jincy Willett - Winner of the National Book Award

“What are you talking about?” Oh, God, he must have stolen the doughnuts, and I grabbed for the backpack to confirm this, and there they were, the cardboard box, the cheery pink and white bag of doughnut holes. I wanted to shake her, to smack her face, to pummel her old self back into her, but there’d already been too much of that. “Abigail,” I said, slowly, “look here. Look at what I brought you. It’s all right here.”

“Is that supposed to be funny ?” she screamed hoarsely. “Are you in on it too ?”

“In on what?” Did she think the doughnuts were poisoned? This was some kind of psychotic break. How could I have left her alone at such a time?

“You know I can’t eat that !”

“Can’t eat what?”

“I. Can’t. Eat. That.”

Slowly, keeping my eyes on her, I reached into the bag and retrieved a doughnut hole. “Look, Abigail,” I said, holding it up to my mouth and biting into it. “See? It’s perfectly—”

She slapped it out of my hand. “I hate you!” she screamed. “I hate both of you!”

I was shaking now, with anxiety and exhaustion. “Listen to me,” I said. “There’s no way I can get an ambulance here today. Probably not even tomorrow. They’re saying we can’t dig out until the army comes, and the army can’t fly in before the weekend. You have to calm down. You have to start making sense. That’s all there is to it.”

“Fat chance,” said Conrad. He stood right in back of her, his head right above hers, so that it looked disembodied, perched, like the Cheshire cat, on top of hers. “She hasn’t made sense for quite some time. I was hoping—praying, really—that between the two of us we could straighten her out.” He grinned widely, just like the cat, showing me all his teeth.

“Do you have any idea, ” she whispered, “how much fat and processed sugar is in just one of these ?” She held up the bag of holes as though it were a dead rat.

“See what I mean?”

“Do you know what the caloric count is for a jelly doughnut? No, of course you don’t. You never had to count a single calorie in your life.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you saying you—”

“Yup,” said Conrad. “Sad, isn’t it? If you only knew how hard I’ve tried to get her to eat just a little sliver of cheese, for Christ’s sake, a slice of toast, without butter, even. She simply won’t listen to reason.”

“You bastard hypocrite,” she said, over her shoulder, not bothering to turn and face him. “Ask him what he did with my chicken bouillon. Ask him what he did with all my zwieback crackers and my cottage cheese and my celery and carrots and my Tab, I had two six-packs left, and all my cans of spinach and green beans. Ask him.”

“See, she’s flipped. Where on earth would I—”

“I know where you hid them. They’re out there someplace under the snow where I’ll never get to them, until it’s too late!”

“What difference does it make anyway?” He sounded reasonable, exasperated, as though he had been trying to teach long division to a slow child. “Clearly,” he said to me, “she needs something more substantial than zwieback. She’s wasting away. She’s gone too far. I’ve tried and tried to convince her, but she just won’t listen to me.”

“ Liar! He wants me to quit! He’s been sabotaging me for weeks! I’m winning, and he can’t stand it!”

I was so tired. I had traversed the frozen waste alone for this: two lunatics locked in some stupid love-death spiral, with me utterly, laughably irrelevant. Whatever else was going on, I was off the hook. They didn’t need me at all. “Have you been drinking water?” I asked her.

“Well, of course,” she said. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“It means you’re not dehydrated. You’re not going to die, at least not tonight. I can go to bed now, and in the morning I can get up and leave, and in the meantime you two psychos can stay the hell out of my way. Thank you so much.”

It took me a half hour to haul the convertible settee from the frigid back porch into the living room, and another half hour to find clean bedding, and in my quest to do so I didn’t run into either of them. It was so cold in the house, despite the constant rumble of the basement furnace, that I went down there to check on it. There seemed to be plenty of heating oil. The old furnace just hadn’t been able to keep up with the freezing gale. I collected an armful of maple logs from Guy’s tidy firewood stack, and brought them upstairs. Kindling was a problem, until I remembered where Conrad kept his precious blue-lined three-hole notebook paper, and for good measure I dumped the jelly doughnuts onto Hilda’s big cutting board over the kitchen sink and tore the greasy cardboard box into three pieces. Soon I had a good fire going. The fire calmed me down. It had been, I decided, a real Jack London sort of day.

I got in bed and stared into the flames and pretended I was back in civilization with Rocco and Bev and the civics teacher, and that I had never been forced to see my sister, my Warrior Bawd twin, reduced, perhaps for good, to a pathetic, whining mantis-creature. At the end of the day, all we have, any of us, is pride. At least I still had mine, and it would have to do for us both. In the morning I would get her out of here if I had to kick her all the way to the county line. I was saddened, but temperately so, and full of clean resolve. I did not allow him space in my conscious mind. These were my thoughts as I drifted off.

And opened my eyes at midnight to a dying fire and he was there, sitting on the floor beside my bed, stroking my head with a gentle hand. I had been dreaming the sort of dream I hadn’t had since I was young, and I came awake smiling. He put his other hand over my mouth, light as a wink, and whispered, “Shhhhhhh. She’s sleeping.” And then he put his lips on mine, and they were dry, and his breath was whiskey and smoke and some tantalizing third scent, like cloves, only it wasn’t cloves, and I opened my mouth to his tongue, and his fingertips traced my brow, my throat, my collarbone. This was joy. I rose up against him hard, my arms strong around his back, and he held still, and I hung suspended, breathing him in; and then he pressed me back down and leaned in close and whispered, “Perfect. Don’t move. Wait right here.” And then he was gone.

It happens just that fast. No rhythm to it, no inexorable buildup, no shrieking violins. You slip through an open door you didn’t know was there. It closes behind you, sealing you off forever from everything you knew and all you were. You are in the void, and all directions are down. What else are you capable of? How far can you fall?

I listened for the answer while the fire died, my mind perfectly white, untracked, alert as any dog to all sounds real and imagined. I listened to the pop of unseasoned firewood, the final shift as it crumbled into embers, the emptied silence. I waited without moving until I could see in my mind’s eye the shape of this day, not at all a Jack London sort of day, and then the shape of my entire life, the hard bright ruined arrow of my life, and I arrived at the spot where I had been led, and then I understood. Endgame.

Well played.

And I had known all along, hadn’t I, that it was a game, that he was a terrible man, one who simply loved bad weather. I had been given every clue, every chance. The only thing I hadn’t known was my own weakness. But he had. Because, apparently, we really are all alike, and there is not and never has been anything special about me. I am of no consequence. I am not an honorable woman. I am not a contradiction in terms.

You would think that, having arrived at a place where there was nothing to hope for, and so nothing, really, to fear, you might just close your eyes. But even with nowhere to go I had to wander. I stood up, creaking and sore like the old woman I soon enough would be, wrapped my blanket around my shoulders, and roamed, like my own ghost, about the first-floor rooms, settling for a time on the parlor window seat, searching the moonless sky for the promise of light. When day came I would have to do some pointless thing.