The Winter in Anna by Reed Karaim

Author:Reed Karaim
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Chapter 18

THE FIRST TIME HE HIT HER it was raining hard, the sound like a machine gun against the tin roof of the trailer. The baby was crying. Nobody could sleep. He had come home late, fishtailing the Pontiac down the switchback dirt road until he lost it on a corner and left the car nose-down in the ditch. He was soaked when he came through the door. Sitting at the kitchen table, he asked for a glass of water, and her arms felt strangely numb and it slipped from her hand as she was bringing it to him. The glass shattered and shards bounced across the yellow linoleum floor, and when he stood he stepped on one, cutting his foot badly, and it was only then that she noticed he was barefoot, that somewhere in the night he had lost both his boots and his socks.

He shouted in pain and swung wildly with a half-closed fist, which flashed an odd blue in the corner of her vision, and then she was sitting on the floor, staring at pieces of glass between her legs, each with a small halo of light, like gems of some incalculable value.

Before he stumbled through the door she had been lying in bed with the baby beside her, hoping that would stop the crying, listening to the mad pummel of the rain, and it had felt to her she could feel the drops falling all the way from the farthest stars to her roof, that she could apprehend the depth of the universe in the silver line of their descent. And as she rode the distance toward the small square box of her home, visible like a metal bull’s-eye amid the wild country, she could trace the path of her marriage in their plummet.

The sound they made as they annihilated themselves against the corrugated tin was a shot and a hollow echo, as if the metal were snapping back into place; after a while it transformed itself into two words repeated a thousand times a minute, too young too young too young too young too young. Her husband was too young to be asked to come home every night and sit in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do but stare at a video or listen to the wind sneak past the cheap window frames with the squeak of nervous mice. He would try, sometimes for three or four nights in a row, but the other men were all single and they were all going into town and why shouldn’t he join them for a quick drink? What could be wrong with joining them for a couple of drinks or maybe one more after that? He worked hard. He was working hard to support her and the baby and hadn’t he earned a drink or two? Could she say he hadn’t earned a drink or two, and if he was still the boy who had first leaned forward in the light of the dash

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