First Winter

We moved at the end of April just in time for spring, when little piles of snow still hugged the corners of our new house where the heavy eaves stole the sunlight. We found it charming and were rather looking forward to experiencing true winter together for the first time. By June Jennifer was pregnant with our first child, and the most necessary of the indoor improvements had been made- restoring the ancient kitchen appliances, replacing windows, stripping the wallpaper from the unventilated, mold-ridden bathroom. Though only accessible through our bedroom, the bathroom had been oddly placed in the center of the upstairs floor plan, robbing it of the option for a window. We painted it a bright lavender to make up for the lack of light and then turned our attention to the soggy fence along the perimeter. The previous occupants had let the whole thing go, inside and out, though who could blame them in this economy?

To keep ourselves on the historic register, the new windows required for our 1914 Craftsman home cost at least three times as much as the windows you could install in a modern home. When we looked into installing a railing along the front porch, the regulations were so specific we ended up walking away from the whole project, Jennifer unable to stand the available options, unwilling to compromise her vision. She had come up with most of these plans before it was even in escrow, long before it was advisable to get her hopes up so high. She was so sure it was going to be ours, but I wonder now how much a house ever really belongs to any one family. While most things bought second hand are considered less than desirable, houses are a strange exception. But it’s the charm of an old house, Jennifer says, a charm you can’t find in a modern condo like the one we shared in Orlando. 

Along with the charm of our new home came noises- a feature also not often found in modern condos or even her parent’s late-seventies Florida home. The noises are nothing that I hadn’t heard before in my grandmother’s dilapidated plantation home in Louisiana. I’d had an entire childhood to come to terms with the things that go bump in the night, but Jenn’s imagination was plagued by them. She claimed it was the heat that drove her downstairs by August, which admittedly in the daytime could reach unbearable temperatures. By nightfall though, the heat dissipated through the wide open northern windows with the implementation of a single fan. I could tell from her uneasiness about being left home alone that the heat was only an alibi for something bigger, something even she could not bring herself to say out loud. 

The good news we’d received in June- a boy we’d named David- was laying on the black and white tile of our freshly-painted bathroom in a bloody, slippery mess on a morning in early December. Sometimes in the night I still wake in a sweat, Jenn’s screams echoing through time and space to rip me from sleep. The resonance of the bathroom provided that morning with a particularly horrific touch while I attempted to hold her, writhing in pain, as she screamed until she lost consciousness. After a short stay at the hospital, we returned home where her father and sisters had been brave enough to mop the floors, scrub the walls, and replace our linens. The baby had been collected and cremated. Jenn hasn’t set foot in her lavender bathroom since. As for me, some mornings I find myself mesmerized by those black and white tiles, toothpaste dribbling down my chin, remembering that morning and the fear I’d felt of losing her. Sometimes I hear her slippers slap along the floorboards, and come back from the dream to find myself in our still childless home. Or I stare at the tile until she knocks- “Travis?” - back to reality. 

That first winter was bleak. She took a leave of absence from work, which seemed like a great idea until the first day I had to leave her home alone. She’d been having night terrors. She claimed the baby was haunting her. I don’t think she could stand the fact that she’d lost him right here in the house. If the ghosts in the attic didn’t send her imagination reeling, David’s entrance and immediate departure from the world certainly did. When we bought the place she was so sure it would be ours that she spoke of it like it already was. Now she moved from room to room like a house sitter, as if the real tenants would be back any minute and she would be free to leave. She didn’t inhabit the whole space like a home but spent most of her time staring out at the bright white cold. In the living room she’s taken to sleeping with the television on to drown out the noises. They’ve gotten louder now, and meaner, and seem to follow her from room to room, no longer satisfied with an empty upstairs. 

The anniversary of our move to Ohio came and went without so much as a word. It was April and the fresh white powder that had felt so magical on our first Thanksgiving here together had become a sludgy grey annoyance at our feet. I found the plans she’d drawn up for the front yard and hit the hardware store for supplies. She was smiling again with a light in her eyes that ached for spring. Before the first frost last fall I had pulled everything except for one last shrub. I had started on it, but the roots were stubborn and so it sat half-in and half-out of the ground all winter, outstretched on its side still partially buried. It reminded me of a corpse trying to dig free of its own grave and I mistakenly told her so around Halloween. I was determined to rid her of any of her morbid fantasies, however small. To do what I could to keep us moving forward. 

What they claimed was the final storm of the season had blown in three fresh inches two nights prior, though the warmth in the air since then assisted me in my efforts to empty the front yard completely of snow. I threw a pebble at the living room window and she came to it dreamily, with bedhead and an old wool sweater, to silently applaud my efforts. Her smile was enough to melt the rest of the snow that sat on the ground, and as she blew me a kiss I reached for a shovel, sweating now under a cloudless sky. All around me water was pouring down storm drains, dripping off of old frozen buckets, pooling under my collar. The only snow left in the yard was huddled up around those stubborn roots. Digging down into the frozen dirt was futile, I know, but I wanted so badly for this winter to be over that I kneeled next to the old shrub to take a stab at it anyway. That’s when I noticed what looked like a bone sticking out of the bank. 

It's not unreasonable. Our neighbors have told us about all sorts of things they’ve found after a snowmelt. Gloves, socks, kid’s toys- lots of cigarette butts. Imagining a cat or some small creature had perished here I kept digging. My winter-dry hands hit an exposed, jagged root and tore the skin open, pouring a shocking amount of blood all over the small bank of pure white. Before I knew it there was blood running down the back of my hand all the way to the sleeves at my elbows. I had dug all the way down to the dirt but could see that the bone was stuck into the frozen ground, at least 7 inches exposed and more than three-quarters of an inch in diameter. My hands, which were warmed by the exercise and the sun, were shaking now. I regretted ever thinking of this last shrub as an unsettled corpse. I regretted bothering Jenn, who I could hear now taking out the garbage in the side yard. 

I held my hand above my heart and kicked at the snow on top of the bank until it covered the bone again. Holding my elbow away from myself, the blood kept pouring out, so much of it that I was sure I’d leave a trail all the way down the driveway. I made my way to the back door and down into the basement where I washed off the blood. She shouted down to me, 

“Hon, are you starting a load? Don’t forget to check the pockets!”

“Right, thanks.”

I pulled off my flannel and ran it under some water, threw it in with the rest. After running the cut under the water for a minute I sat with my hand in a clean rag above my head and caught my breath. For all the times I dismissed her ghost stories, I was starting to question how welcome I felt in this home. 

The next day she had plans to see friends who had been trying to coax her out of hiding all winter. After hemming and hawing all morning she finally decided to join them downtown and I could hardly wait for the screen door to slam before grabbing a pick ax and heading for the front yard. I was sweating bullets in minutes, the ground barely thawed, but after about half an hour of backbreaking work there was a bone in my hands the size of my femur. Though it’s all I’d thought about the last twenty four hours, I thought I must be mistaken. Someone may have buried a pet, I tell myself. A very large pet. I won’t know unless I keep digging. Maybe in a few weeks when the ground has warmed up I can try again. There might not even be anything else down there. Maybe I’m jumping to conclusions, but what if I’m not? Is there anyone I can ask? If I tell anyone she’ll have to know.

A few weeks and many days of much needed sun later, the world was in full bloom. The doctor kept assuring us that all was well, but her cycles had been devastating since last December. One night just after I discovered the bone in the yard I had to take her to the emergency room for fear of all the blood she was losing. I’d been able to distract her in the backyard by building her a few raised garden beds to keep her occupied. She went back to work part time, another miracle that, along with the sunshine, seemed to lift her mood considerably. I didn’t waste any time. I got to work outside her first day back on the job, stomped the shovel into the warm earth and put all my weight on it. The ground broke and immediately I hit something solid. It turned out to be a root, which reminded me what I was supposed to be doing in the first place. She’d be expecting the last of the shrubs to be gone by the time she got home anyway. 

Digging wide around where I assumed the roots to be, I got enough dirt out of the way to rip the whole thing straight out of the ground. Within its roots more bones were twisted, and immediately my heart started pounding again. Somehow I’d convinced myself there was nothing else down here. These bones looked much smaller and to be sure I took a hose to the root ball and immediately the off-white colors were revealed between the maze of dark wet wood. I kept digging and within another hour I had two bones about the size of my shin bones and a whole mess of big and small oddly shaped ones. I kept digging to find a skull - I wanted to know as much as I could before I brought Jenn into this.

This isn’t the life we’d imagined for ourselves. This house was one we’d been talking about since we first met seven years ago. The day we looked at it she knew it would be ours- she just, “had a feeling”. I could see her filling the space with her imagination, how the light sconces that hung on the walls were inching two feet lower in her mind. The fireplace could practically be heard roaring in mid-winter while our future children unwrapped presents underneath the lighted tree that twinkled in her eyes. Each room once came to life in her imagination. While in actuality those first nine months were spent stepping over paint cans, searching for misplaced tools, sitting on the floor sharing take-out- it felt as though we’d lived there all our lives together. I could almost see the smudgy handprints on the low windows, where she imagined our children staring out at the sight of fresh snow. I could almost hear the sounds of their playful laughter when she drew up the plans for our family room, a detailed assumption of what a house might look like strewn with toys and blocks and baby books. 

And now here we were, with ghosts in the attic and bones in the front yard, the grotesque memories of a morning miscarriage and more blood than I ever knew the human body could stand to lose. Despite our best efforts, we were never comfortable in the house. The charming lack of furniture now spoke to a different part of my soul. The rooms seemed to engulf her, her deflated imagination sulked in a corner with the dust bunnies. 

Finally, just before five, I found it, the bones I’d been looking for. As I pushed back the dirt on a perfectly rounded object I told myself to be cool but had to take a few steps back and breath deeply before I could unearth it. All the work we’ve put into this place, none of that would matter if there was a body buried in the front yard. How would I ever explain it to her?

The phone rang ten minutes later and I picked it up, tracking mud all the way from the front door to the kitchen. I had to catch my breath again, but this time from laughter.

“Babe, you’ll never guess what I just found in the garden.”

We’re pregnant again, this time with a little girl. She’s been talking to a therapist and I have to admit, she is serene these days. So placid sometimes I want to skip a stone across her surface just to make sure it’s not an illusion. The therapist told her that whatever she’s experiencing emotionally will be experienced by the baby chemically, and she’s really taking this to heart. She wakes up at the same time every day, goes for a long walk and then returns to the garden before work. 

The deer I dug up in the front yard still perplexes me. Though some of the bones were tangled in the roots of the shrub, the rest of them were only about three feet deep, spread low and wide over the ground. Looking around this suburban enclave, I start inquiring about any previous owners to anyone who might know anything. Our next door neighbor Jill moved here only a year before us, and our other neighbors are shut-ins. I find myself making small talk with perfect strangers who pass by, just by the off chance someone has something to tell me. 

I did some research down at the community college and found out that the long bones and skull I’d found were indeed that of a white-tailed deer. What I will seemingly never understand is why anyone would bury one in their front yard fifteen feet from a sidewalk on a busy street in a nice, quiet neighborhood. 

When she came home that day it was my turn to collapse into her arms, right there in the frame of the front door. She held me and rocked me while I writhed around in the discomfort of my own emotions, unable to find words to match my grief. When I was finally calm she quietly stood and walked into the house. When she returned David’s ashes were in a small box in her hands, and she asked me to take her for a walk down to the park. We found a beautiful oak tree, her favorite, and sprinkled the ashes there. We said goodbye to our first child and walked back to clear the ghosts from the attic for good. The next week we spent filling the front yard with new plants of every shape and size, including an oak sapling for the centerpiece. I retiled the bathroom floor with large marble tiles and she repainted the walls a fresh easter-egg yellow, the same color she chose for the nursery.