Inverno by Cynthia Zarin

Author:Cynthia Zarin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Did Alastair and Caroline see each other? Do they now? One of Caroline’s tactics when at a loss, or pretending to be at a loss, was to conduct her interior life in the open. To hide in plain sight. What Caroline knew without being able to say it aloud, without even thinking it, was that for Alastair the Internet, which he entered through the blue screen, late at night, was the mirror he had looked into when he washed the blood from his cuts in the fifth-floor bathroom of the school. It was the same blue as the flickering televisions of their childhoods, when to order a lamp, a handy cooler, a guaranteed weight-loss plan, a fire ladder made of rope you could keep in your child’s second-floor bedroom for when disaster strikes, as it will, you called MUrray Hill 7-7500. Hello there. On the Internet, he told her, he was known as ——. Caroline cannot remember it now, the name. When she tries to think of it, the tips of her fingers grow numb. When he told her this, she knew that she had known all along.

What did she know? The reason rowan leaves are not brought into the house is that they smell of the dead. Caroline, who as a child would not look in the mirror, did not look now; instead, she looked down into the pool in which Alastair was swimming. You see the can? Well, it doesn’t see you. What language is the language spoken in the icy pool? There is no language. It has worn off the keys, the water lapping has worn it away. Because she had known it all along, she continued to move through the months with the certainty of someone in a dream.

By November they had made a plan, because Caroline had insisted. They decide, writing to each other late at night, conspirators, they will meet in November. This involves complicated arrangements, not surprisingly. For one thing, the house in Maine, where they plan to meet, is shut up for the winter. For another, if it snows hard, the road may be impassable. What kind of car do you have now? Alastair asks. Caroline tells him. Probably okay, he says. It is the first normal conversation they have had. Ordinary. When Kai disappears into the frozen wood from the town square, Gerda—once she discovers he has gone—follows him. Caroline had not thought about Alastair for many years, except in dreams in which she was on a bus going to see him but traveling in the wrong direction, and the conductor would not accept her ticket, dreams in which she was both calling him on the telephone, the black coil connecting her to the phone box, and not picking up the phone in the house that she was calling—a thwarted call-and-response, in which she quite literally hung up on herself. She did not know that Alastair was lost. He was lost to her, but that is something else. But he was

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