When I found it, however, I leaned back against the wall and closed my eyes. It was amazing, I thought: the things we did that no one else knew about, that didn’t leave a sign, that we ourselves almost couldn’t believe.
When the night came, I turned off the light, curling up on my side and reaching under the mattress to feel for the paper bag I knew was there. Pinching two of the small ovals, I slipped them into my mouth and held them on my tongue for a moment before swallowing them without water. They were slightly bitter but otherwise tasted of nothing.
It was then that I realized I had never turned on the heat for the stranger. Even as the thought entered my mind, however, the deep red curtain fell over me, weighing on me, sending me into sleep.
2
The next morning was brighter, the sun slipping over the horizon as I stood in the bathroom, prodding my knee where I’d smacked it against the ice. There was an ugly bruise there, painful to the touch, but it was nothing. I pulled my clothes on, the fabric sliding up over the old scars, and turned my back on my reflection as I switched off the light.
Outside, I checked the mailbox, hoping for a postcard from my brother, as I always did. He’d left the valley years earlier, marrying a girl from Texas, someone he’d met in basic training, and moving from base to base before finally being sent overseas. I sometimes found a note from him among the bills and Publishers Clearing House envelopes, although not very often. When I did, the handwriting was always slanted and sparse, as if he were writing while running. Maybe he was.
The mailbox was empty.
The light was just breaking through the clouds as I drove the five miles to the gas station. At this hour, the only other people there were truckers, holding steaming cups of coffee as they chatted with one another, leaning against their rigs. One of them I thought I recognized from high school—elementary school, really. He was heavyset, with a pale, doughy face and hair in a crewcut. His father had been a trucker, too, I remembered, driving eighteen-wheelers for the potato chip company down in Hanover. John, the son, had always had a gravelly voice and almost dog-like friendliness, rasping good-naturedly to anyone who passed by. We’d been confirmed in the same church, long ago, two of the only Catholic children in the area, our families holding out somehow against the gulf of stern Scotch-Irish Presbyterianism and fiery Lutheranism that surrounded us. I still remembered kneeling next to him at our First Communion, envying his dirty knees and scuffed shoes as I sat there in my silly white dress.
I walked into the station as briskly as I could, staring straight ahead. The truckers’ eyes followed me, then dropped down to their cups. Only John continued to watch, his gaze meeting mine accidentally. I nodded, not knowing what else to do, and he nodded back, giving me the shy, cautious half-smile people had been giving me since the accident. Some of them remembered the rumors and were uncomfortable, I could tell; others simply didn’t know what to say. It didn’t matter; I wasn’t angry with them, not anymore. After all, I didn’t know what to say, either. Maybe there was nothing to be said.
The sun shone through the trees as I wound my way back up the mountain, a rapid patter of light and shade playing against the windows. The bottoms of the trunks were still blackened in places, but the branches were uplifted, tall and defiant, as if there had never been a fire. Farther on, the blue-and-gold memorial to the three girls passed by, a dark blot backlit by the sun. I wondered, at times, who maintained it. It had been there for some seventy years, the signboard with its short, stark sentences, and yet it never leaned, never faded. The paint was always fresh. One of the more thoughtful retirees, I imagined, some aging farmer who snuck out early in the morning to touch up the gold lettering and returned home before anyone could discover this strange impulse of anonymous kindness, this sentimentality about someone else’s long-ago tragedy.
The porch outside the store was empty, which gave me a small twinge of pleasure as I pulled into the lot. A few minutes later, I was sitting at one of the dusty tables, feet propped up on a chair, attempting to find my page. Martin, I noticed, had returned from Carlisle, a jumble of what looked like metal parts filling the back of his station wagon. I wondered if he had met the stranger yet—assuming, of course, that the stranger was still there.
The book was slow going. Even at the store, in the unbroken quiet, I sometimes found it difficult to follow the story, a fact that puzzled me. During my years in college, I had flown through books, consuming piles and piles of them, as if I were feeding them into a fire. Beth, my best friend, and I had shared a place for a while, two married women temporarily bunking away from our husbands, and together we’d devoured an almost unthinkable number of books. My husband, who was still living and working thirty miles away in Mechanicsburg, preferred that I didn’t go out, while her husband was struggling to feed and house himself and Beth on a noncom’s salary. And so we read, sometimes getting so lost in our conversations, our chance to try out ideas without anyone else there to say we were wrong, we forgot to eat the food in front of us. She was usually the one who was brave enough to say something first, and I remembered the sound of our laughter when we said something so bold we didn’t know what else to do, looking around as if somebody would surely catch us.
Today, she was one of the few people I could speak to for a long period without losing my concentration, although as the months went by I felt less and less of a need to discuss anything with anyone at all. There was something to be said, I thought, for a quiet life, for self-sufficiency.
Around noon, Martin’s wiry figure rounded the corner of the hostel, carrying an armful of branches. Waving with his free hand, he motioned for me to join him. I put the book down and mounted the hill.
“So!” he said, throwing the branches into a pile by the old stump he used for splitting wood. He was short, with a sharp, narrow face that should have been ugly but somehow wasn’t—or if it was, I had long since stopped noticing. There was something oddly magnetic about the hopeful expression he always wore, a cheerful alertness that seemed to radiate from his very skin. “You’ll never guess what I’ve got out in the trunk.”
“You’re right, I probably won’t.” I watched him pull a hatchet from his coat, testing the blade with his thumb. “What happened? Did your car eat some other car?”
“Very funny. I’m not going to tell you what it is, actually. I can tell you it’s going to be awesome when I build it, though. And I mean totally awesome. Like, phenomenal.” Bending down, he dragged a branch onto the stump and began quickly chopping it into kindling, pausing to smile up at me as he did so.
I watched him toss the handful of sticks into a pile. “But for some reason I’m not allowed to know what it is?”
“You’ll see. I mean, you can try and guess if you want, but I don’t think you’ll get it.” He picked up another branch and broke it into pieces with his hands.
I glanced up at the station wagon.
“Go ahead!” He laughed, his grin showing two gray teeth among the white ones. “Guess.”
“Guess? I don’t know. A medieval printing press.”
“What? Come on—that’s not a real guess. Try again.”
“A Ferris wheel.”
“All right, wiseacre, so you’re not going to play along. That’s okay—you’ll see it soon enough. Man,” he went on, the hatchet knocking against the stump, “I wish I’d invented this thing. I almost did! One of those blueprints I drew up last winter wasn’t far off.”
“Speaking of which,” I said, “whatever happened to that grill thing you built? The one with the old oil drum?”
“That? That’s ancient history. I raffled it off for the church last week.”
“Raffled it off?” I looked up. “After all that work?”
“Sure! Don’t worry, I’ll build another one—maybe even better. Gotta keep busy up here somehow.” He winked. “So how’s your friend?”
I handed him a branch, smelling the deep reassuring smell of black walnut. “What friend?”
�
��The Russian guy. The odd one.”
“Oh—good, you met him. I was worried he’d skip out without paying.” I hadn’t been worried, really; whoever he was, something about him seemed honest, although it had occurred to me that someone who had appeared so abruptly could probably disappear with just as little notice.
“No, he seems to have decided to hang out for a while. He’s hitchhiking around or something and says he’s enjoying the peace and quiet. I told him if that’s what he’s looking for, then believe me, he’s found it.” Martin straightened. “He’s a lawyer, you know. That’s what he told me.”
“Really?” I pictured the tall, threadbare foreigner standing by the door, face half hidden behind his scarf, hat in his hands.
“I wouldn’t lie to you.” Martin gathered up the split kindling and tipped an imaginary hat. “Thanks for the help,” he said, ambling back toward the hostel in his slightly bowlegged way.
“See you, Martin.” Smiling to myself, I walked back down the hill. I liked Martin, I thought: he had never once asked me a personal question, and I returned the favor. It was one of the best kinds of friendship I could imagine.
In the store, I unwrapped the sandwich I’d bought at the gas station and ate it standing up. There was an old combination radio and cassette player on top of the ice cream case, and although the radio part was useless up here, the tape deck worked fine. Picking a cassette from the pile on the hidden shelf under the counter, I opened the cracked case and nudged the volume up. A woman’s plaintive voice threaded its way through the room, accompanying me as I filled a plastic pail and reached for the mop, diligently erasing footprints and dust with swaths of water. Patsy Cline. I wrung the mop and pushed it methodically, back and forth, under the shelves, into the corners. It was warm in the store, at least, thanks to the grill and the rattling electric heater along the back wall. When I was finished, I made a fresh pot of coffee, leaning back against the counter and inhaling the sharp scent as Patsy warbled in her somehow luxuriant sadness, her melancholy pleasure. Then I refilled the pail and did the chore again, humming, letting myself drift off into the simple rhythm of it, my joints gradually loosening.
“Crazy,” I sang with Patsy, letting my voice ripple through the empty aisles while the backup singers chimed in: ah, ah, ahhhh. “I’m crazy for feeling so lonely…” The wet strands of the mop kept time.
“Excuse me, is this your book?”
I turned sharply. The foreigner was standing in the doorway, wearing the same coat, the same scarf drawn over his mouth, holding a thick hardcover before him. His eyes were bright.
I switched off the tape and looked at him guardedly, taken aback by his seeming ability to materialize out of nowhere.
“Yeah, looks like it,” I said shortly. “Did I leave it out on the porch?”
“That’s where I found it, yes.” He gazed at the cover thoughtfully, pulling his scarf down and running a thumb over the embossed letters of the title. “Is it really yours? You’re reading it?”
I bent and lifted the pail of dirty water, trying not to show that this was difficult. “Yes, it’s mine.” Then, raising an eyebrow, “Why? Do I not look like someone who would read books?”
“Oh.” He placed the volume on the counter and rubbed his gloveless hands together. “I’m sorry—that’s not what I meant. It’s just that it’s a very good book. I didn’t expect that that was what you would be reading.” He winced. “Sorry, I mean that—well, you know, it’s a Russian book, and—”
“Never mind. I knew what you meant.” I emptied the water in a cascade of brown, then took my place behind the register, sliding the book onto the hidden shelf where he could no longer see it.
He stood with his hands folded in front of him, gazing hesitantly around the store. Something about him looked apologetic, I thought, although—as I remembered belatedly—I was the one who had left him to shiver through a second mountain night with no heat.
“You want something?” I asked, making an effort to sound, if not friendly, then at least slightly less hostile. “Coffee?”
“Oh—no, thank you. I left my wallet up there at the, ah—” He gestured uphill. “Not the hotel. What did you call it?”
“The hostel.” I reached for the glass pot. “It doesn’t matter—just take some. Whatever I don’t drink by the end of the day just goes to waste anyway.”
I put a cup on the counter and filled it. With a quick look at me, he took it and held it in both hands, as if to warm them.
When he didn’t show any sign of leaving, I had the unfamiliar sensation of realizing I would have to think of something else to say.
“Um. Have you been out hiking?” I glanced around in search of a task with which I could busy myself.
“Hiking? Oh, no. I wish I could, but it’s not good for me to be out in the cold air for very long, unfortunately. I’ve just been, you know, looking around a bit here and there.” He took a sip of the black coffee and grimaced. I pushed the tall glass sugar jar toward him, and he tipped it carefully, watching the thread of sugar disappear into the liquid.
There was something about his face—the set of the eyes, maybe, or the fine-looking line of the jaw, like a bird’s bones—that almost compelled me to look at it. Disconcerted, I turned away from him and settled on cleaning the coffee machine even though it was still hot.
“You’re really in a very pretty place,” he said behind me. “This park, I mean.”
“I’ve always thought so,” I replied, wetting a napkin. It was, in fact, a place so beautiful I sometimes felt as if my entire soul were bound up with it, although I wasn’t about to explain that to a stranger.
“So are you the only one who works here?”
I pulled out the used filter and wiped down the dull metal inside the machine. “I certainly seem to be.”
“I see.” There was a slight pause; I could picture him sweeping his gaze over the small space again. “You’ve been here for a long time?”
I shrugged, keeping my back to him as I rubbed at a stain. “Depends what you mean by ‘a long time,’ I guess.”
“A year or two?”
“Something like that.”
“Oh. Longer?”
I scrubbed harder. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Since you finished university?”
I stopped and looked down at my reflection in the scratched surface of the machine.
“Martin says you’re a lawyer,” I said after a moment, turning and throwing the napkin away. “Is that true?”
He seemed to be studying me. “Martin is the man I met at the hostel?”
“Yes.”
He smiled, although I didn’t see what was funny. “Well, in a sense, yes, I’m a lawyer. I was a lawyer in Uzbekistan, although that isn’t very useful here, I’m afraid.”
“So what brings you here, then?” It was my turn to study him, looking over the rim of my coffee cup as I raised it to my face.
“You mean, to America?”
“Yeah, I guess.” There were thin lines at the corners of his eyes, I noticed, and his brows seemed somehow weighted, as if he spent much of his time thinking about problems that could only be solved with great difficulty.
“I’m a student,” he said simply.
“Oh. You’re on your winter break or something?”
“Yes, something like that.” He rolled the sugar jar between his palms. “So, you like Dostoyevsky?”
I narrowed my eyes—was he about to mock me?—but his face was sincere. I looked down, fingering the book under the counter.
“Yeah, I do,” I said softly, surprising myself with the honesty of the words. Then, “Well. I don’t know, exactly. I mean, I read The Brothers Karamazov in school, and it—I guess you could say it drew me in. This one, though…”
He waited, watching me expectantly. “You don’t like it?” he said finally.
I bit the inside of my lip. “It’s not that. It’s…” I remembered the hours I’d spent hunched over the opening cha
pters on the very day he’d first walked in, how vividly the scenes had played out before me in the emptiness of the store. “Actually,” I admitted, “I like it very much. It’s just that it’s so focused on the psychology of the main character, the murderer. And as strange as it probably sounds, I still can’t really understand why he killed the old woman to begin with.”
A light came into his eyes. He spoke softly. “Do you happen to have the other chair? May I sit down?”
After a moment of hesitation, I walked to the broom closet and dragged it out for him.
He sat and faced me across the counter, folding his hands. “Perhaps you could tell me why you think he killed the old woman?”
His pose was so earnest that I almost laughed in spite of myself. “I thought you were a student, not a professor.”
“Oh, I’m not a professor at all. It just happens that Crime and Punishment was one of my father’s favorite books. He and I used to talk about things like that sometimes—over tea, much like this.” He waved a hand at our cups of coffee, smiling. “He wasn’t well-educated, but somehow he always used to find the best books, even the ones the government didn’t allow. I used to see him sitting in his chair for hours, just reading, and then he’d call me over. I was a boy with his head in the clouds—I always thought foreign books were better—but those were some of my favorite times.”
I blinked at the openness of the words, the frank affection in them. Nobody I knew would have spoken that way. I reached under the counter and retrieved the book, thumbing through the pages.
“My grandfather was a bit like that,” I said, almost to myself. “All right, Dan—Dahn—sorry, how did you say your name?”
“Daniil—like ‘Daniel.’ You can call me that if you like. Or ‘Danya’—that’s what friends call me in Russian.”
“Russian? Is that what they speak in Uzbekistan?”
He chuckled. “That’s what I speak in Uzbekistan. I’m from a Russian family, as I mentioned.”
Ways to Hide in Winter Page 3