Blackberry Winter: A Novel (4 page)

“Estella sent me up to help you with this floor,” she chirped. “Big group coming in. We have to work fast.” She grinned. “I see you’ve met Lon.”

I shrugged, patting my pocket. “He tips well.”

Gwen grinned. “He also has a thing for maids.”

“Gwen!” I puffed. “You’re not saying that I would—”

“No, no,” she said, poking my side playfully with the edge of her feather duster. “It’s just that the woman with him now—Susie—she used to work in housekeeping, before you started.”

“You mean, she was…?”

Gwen nodded. “Just like us. And now he keeps her in his suite, all fancy and made up, at his beck and call.”

My cheeks flushed at the thought. “How perfectly terrible.”

Gwen shrugged. “Susie doesn’t seem to think so. He gives her a hundred dollars a week, and access to his car and driver. Sure beats scrubbing the floors.”

“A hundred dollars a week?”

Gwen looked wistful. “A fortune.”

“Well,” I said, taking a deep breath and then exhaling away the thought. “I’d never put myself up for sale like that.”

Gwen shrugged. “Never say never,” she said as we keyed into the first of the eleven rooms that needed cleaning. “These are frightening times. So many people are hard on their luck. My eldest sister lives in Kansas. Her husband is out of work, and they have eight children.
Eight
mouths to feed. Imagine what she’d do to feed her family. I’m just grateful I only have my own piehole to look after.”

I thought of Daniel and the predicament I faced with the rent payment. I couldn’t string Mr. Garrison along very much longer. We’d be out on the streets in a few days, maybe a week if we were lucky.

“Gwen,” I muttered, “you don’t happen to have twenty dollars I can borrow, do you? It’s for my rent payment. I’m in a terrible bind.”

“I wish I did, honey,” she said, her kind eyes sparkling with compassion. I felt a pang of guilt.
How can I expect her to bail me out when I know she’s in the same boat?
“Here,” she said, handing me two crumpled bills. “My last two dollars.”

“I promise, I’ll pay you back,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it,” she replied, pointing to the bed. “Let’s
get started on stripping down these sheets. I’ll even let you have all the tip money we find in the rooms. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

“Maybe,” I said.

By five a.m., we’d finished the floor, even the enormous penthouse suite, and I had raw, cracked hands to show for it. Gwen yawned, handing me a bottle of discarded face cream she’d pilfered from an empty room. “Put some of this on,” she said. “It’ll help.”

I smiled at the kind gesture.

“Want to stop at the diner before heading home?”

“I can’t,” I said. “I have to get back before Daniel wakes.”

Gwen put her hand on my arm. “It’s hard to leave him, isn’t it?”

I nodded, aware of every second wasted. Daniel was waiting. “It’s unbearable, actually.” My eyes stung a little and I looked away.

“This isn’t forever, you know,” she said. “You’ll find your way. You’ll meet someone. Someone wonderful.”

I wanted to say,
But I already did, and look what happened
, but instead I nodded. “Yes,” I said. “My ship has to come in one of these days, right? And yours, too.”

Gwen winked. “That’s right, honey,” she said, giving me a squeeze. “Now, how’d you make out with tips?”

I shrugged. “Four dollars.”

Gwen smiled. “Combine that with my two and Lon’s tip and you have—”

“Not enough to pay rent,” I said, defeated.

Gwen sighed. “Well, it’s a start. Give that handsome boy a kiss for me.”

“I will,” I said, opening the door to the street. A cold wind hit my cheeks, pushing its tendrils into the cracks of my sweater and
sending chills through my tired body. As I stepped onto the sidewalk, I gasped when my feet sank into at least four inches of fresh, white snow.
Good heavens, snow? In May?
The weather matched the uncertainty, the cruelness of the world. I sighed.
How will I get home now? The streetcar can’t be running—not in this weather.

I knew I’d have to walk, and fast. The apartment wasn’t far, but in snow, and with a hole in the sole of my right shoe, it might as well have been miles. But it didn’t matter; Daniel was my destination. I trudged along, steadfast, but a half hour later my feet ached, and I winced in pain at the stinging intensity of the exposed patch of flesh. I hobbled into an alley, tore the lining of my dress free from its seam, and wrapped it around my foot. A man with a sooty face hovered near a trash can. He tended a small fire under a makeshift shelter, poking the embers with a stick. My hands felt icy and I longed for warmth, but his unwelcome gaze told me to press on. Besides, there wasn’t time to stop; Daniel waited. I climbed one hill and then a second. The swath of linen only dulled my frost-kissed skin for a moment before the sting returned, throbbing with fierce pangs.
Two more hills. Keep going.
I could be home by sunrise, to greet him with a kiss the moment he opened his eyes. I owed him that.

By the time I reached the apartment building, I could no longer feel my feet. Even so, I hurried inside, dragging my numb limbs up the stairs. Though unheated, the stairwell’s ten-degree rise in temperature warmed me.

“Well, hello there, good-looking,” a man called to me from the hallway. I hated living above the saloon. It meant pushing past a half-dozen drunkards—some unconscious in the hallway; others angry, looking for a fight; and still more looking for a woman. A bold one reached out and grabbed my hand, but I broke free long
enough to make my way up the stairs and barricade myself inside the apartment. As I locked the door, I panicked for a moment. In my state of exhaustion, I couldn’t remember if I’d let myself in with a key or if the door had been unlocked.
Surely I locked it before leaving for work last night?
Fatigue was playing tricks on me.

The fire I’d lit in the fireplace the night before had long since died out. The air felt cold. Bitter cold.
Poor Daniel, with only a thin quilt to warm him. Was he chilled last night?
I shuddered at the thought of the city’s wealthy—warm and comfortable under millions of down feathers, eating cake at midnight—while my son shivered in his bed in an apartment above a rowdy saloon, alone.
What’s wrong with this world?
I set my purse down and peeled off my snow-covered sweater, dotted with bits of ice that sparkled in the morning light. I walked to the compartment under the stairs and pried open the little door, pulling out my bracelet from its secret hiding spot. Daniel loved running his little fingers along the gold chain. I fastened the clasp, knowing how happy he’d be to see it on my wrist again.

I suppressed a yawn as I climbed the stairs to Daniel’s room, but my exhaustion was unmatched by the excitement I felt to see my little boy. He’d be giddy about the snow, of course. We’d make snowmen, and then cuddle up together by the fire. I’d get an hour of sleep in the afternoon while he napped. A perfect day.

I opened the door to his room. “Daniel, Mommy’s home!”

I knelt down by his little bed and pulled back the quilt, revealing only crumpled sheets. My eyes searched the room, under the bed, behind the door.
Where is he?
“Daniel, are you hiding from Mama, love?”

Silence.

I ran to the washroom, and then downstairs to the kitchen. “Daniel!”
I screamed. “Daniel, where are you hiding? Come out, right this minute!”

My heart pounded in my chest with such intensity it muted the sound of the men engaged in a fistfight on the floor below. My eyes scoured every inch of the apartment, and I prayed it was only one of his little jokes. Surely, in a moment, he’d pop out from behind the pantry door and say, “Surprise!” the way he did when we played games together?

“Daniel?” I called once more, but only my voice echoed back to me in the cold, lonely air.

I pushed through the apartment door and ran down the stairs. I hadn’t stopped to put on a wrap, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t feel the cold; only terror.
He has to be close by. Maybe he woke and saw the snow and decided to go out to play.

I ran past the men loitering around the saloon, and out to the street. “Daniel!” I screamed into the cold air, my voice immediately muffled into a hush by the thick layer of snow. “Daniel!” I called out again, this time louder. I might as well have been screaming through a muzzle of cotton balls. A suffocating silence hovered. I looked right, then left.

“Have you seen my son?” I pleaded with a businessman in an overcoat and top hat. “He’s three, about this tall.” I held my hand to the place on my leg where Daniel’s head hit. “He was wearing blue plaid pajamas. He has a teddy bear with a—”

The man frowned and pushed past me. “Some mother you are, letting a three-year-old out in
this
weather,” he muttered as he walked away.

His words stung, but I kept on, running toward another person on the sidewalk. “Ma’am!” I cried to a woman shepherding her young daughter along the sidewalk. Both wore matching wool coats
with smart gray hats. My heart sank.
Daniel doesn’t even have a warm coat. If he’s out in this weather
…I looked directly at the woman, my eyes pleading, mother to mother. “Have you seen a little boy wandering around here, by chance? His name is Daniel.” I barely recognized my own voice. Desperate. High-pitched.

She eyed me suspiciously. “No,” she said without emotion. “I haven’t.” She pulled her daughter closer as they walked away.

“Daniel!” I screamed again, this time down an alley, where I sometimes let him play hopscotch or jacks with the other children while I knitted in the afternoon.
No answer.
Then it occurred to me to look for footprints in the snow. His feet were small enough that I could distinguish their impressions. But after searching for a few minutes, I realized my efforts were futile. The snow, falling so hard now, covered any trace of his tracks with its cruel blanket of white.

I walked a few steps farther, and this time, toward the back of the alley, a fleck of blue caught my eye. I ran to it and fell to my knees, sobbing, shaking my head violently.
No. No God, no!
Daniel’s precious bear, Max, lay facedown in the snow. I picked it up and held it to my chest, rocking back and forth the way I might have comforted Daniel after a nightmare. I trembled from a place deep inside. My little boy was
gone
.

C
LAIRE

W
e all behave differently in the face of trauma and anguish, or so says my therapist, Margaret. Some people act out; others act
in
—bottling up their pain and holding it deep inside, letting it brew and fester, which had been my way since the horror of last May. Ethan, on the other hand, seemed to deal with his grief by acting
out
. Throwing himself into his work. Drinking copious amounts of scotch. Staying out late with friends—friends, I might add, who had meant nothing to him last year. Even the red BMW he’d bought on a whim in March. It was all tied to his pain, Margaret said. When I’d seen him stepping into the convertible outside the office, my eyes had welled up with tears. It wasn’t the expense that bothered me, but the choice. Ethan wasn’t a flashy red BMW sort of guy.

I’d tried to get him to go with me to my weekly appointments. I thought that if we could talk about the past together, we both might stop pretending it had never happened and learn to face the new normal, whatever that was. But he had shaken his head. “I don’t do shrinks,” he said. And so our paths had diverged. Love still
lingered—I felt it in the unspoken moments, the way he’d leave the floss out on the bathroom counter in the mornings because he knew I had a habit of forgetting; or the way his eyes would linger on mine every time I said good night. But the emptiness grew like a cancer, and I feared it had spread too far to control. Our marriage, it seemed, was verging on a terminal diagnosis.

“Morning, Claire,” chirped Gene, our building’s doorman, as I stepped off the elevator. “Can you believe this weather?”

I cinched the belt of my lightweight trench coat tighter, considering whether to return upstairs for a wardrobe change. Gloves and a scarf, for starters, and—I looked down at my calf-high leather boots—maybe a pair of snow boots. I should have opted for something with a little more traction, but I couldn’t bear to lace up my tennis shoes. I hadn’t worn them since
the accident
, and I didn’t have the confidence to put them on again. Not yet, anyway. “A blizzard in May,” I said to Gene, shaking my head in disbelief as I looked out the building’s double doors. “Why do I live here again?”