“Okay. Daniil. Right.” I held a hand to my cheek, looking down at the open pages. A moment passed as the wall clock ticked. If this man really was a lawyer, I thought, then he probably had twice the education I did. It would be absurd to go on.
“Please,” he urged.
I looked up, surprised.
“Well,” I said slowly, “the first few chapters make you think he did it for the money, obviously. You can tell he’s desperate, wandering around penniless and in rags. And yet…” I paused. “Somehow, that doesn’t seem to be what bothers him the most. He spends all those hours dwelling on his sister and how she’s thrown herself away—marrying that older man—for his sake. And that other girl, too, the one who becomes a—a prostitute so she can feed her family after her father dies.” I looked up with embarrassment, expecting to find an expression of disappointment on his face, but he was leaning forward, paying attention to every word. “I don’t know. I guess I don’t quite understand it, really. Especially since, after the murder, he just buries the jewelry and the money he steals and never comes back.”
“Yes, that’s the mystery, isn’t it? He goes to all the trouble of planning and carrying out the murder, and then he seems to care very little about the money.” The stranger gripped his cup, the light glancing off his ring. His eyes held mine. “Do you think he kills the old woman, the moneylender, just because he can? That’s what some people say.”
I let out a small laugh and shook my head. “I’m not sure why you’re so interested in what I think. I can promise you I know a lot more about hamburgers than I do about literature.”
He leaned back and blew a puff of air through his lips. “Nonsense,” he said, unwinding the scarf from his neck and placing it on the counter. It was tattered and stained, coming apart at the ends. “Of course I’d like to know. Otherwise I wouldn’t ask.”
I was still looking at the scarf, at his bright eyes and ragged hair.
“Okay,” I said finally. “What I think, Daniil—”
“Danya,” he interrupted with a quick smile. “No need to be formal.”
“What I think, Danya, is that this Raskolnikov—the murderer—is driven insane by living in a world where people suffer so much, and for no reason, and where there’s this kind of horrible, relentless cruelty everywhere you look. And the people who are cruel, or who even just exploit others, like the old woman he kills, are never punished. They rarely even seem to feel guilty about what they’ve done.” The words sounded jumbled and confused, but I pressed on. “To him, killing her is like evening the score, or—I don’t know how to explain it. Taking an eye for an eye, I guess. In some ways, I think it’s that simple.”
He remained silent for a moment after I’d finished, watching my face. With a flicker of irritation—what was it about the fact of my standing behind a counter that made people feel free to gawk at me as if I were an animal in the zoo?—I turned away to pour the last of my drink down the drain.
He stopped me by drawing a breath and reaching for the book. “May I?”
I made a vague gesture.
“I agree with you in some respects,” he said. “But what I’ve always thought Raskolnikov can’t bear is that so many people around him are…” He drew a breath, seeming to choose his words with care. “…Sacrificing themselves for others. All the best characters in the story, the most noble and honest and innocent ones, do that. And ultimately it causes them great pain without giving any real benefit to the people they intended to help.” He closed his eyes, speaking almost as if to himself. “I think it angers him, knowing that so many of these sacrifices are useless. ‘Futile,’ perhaps, is the word I’m looking for. Yes, that’s it—‘futile.’” He opened his eyes again, giving me a self-conscious smile. “Sometimes these words just seem to escape from my memory, you know? I often regret that my English isn’t better.”
“What? Your English is perfect.” I was relieved at the change in subject. “You must have been living here for a long time.”
“Not at all, actually. In fact, I’m still a recent arrival, you might say.” He continued to smile lopsidedly, rising to his feet and sliding the book back toward me. “But perhaps,” he went on as he reached for his hat, “you could tell me what you think when you’ve finished? I’d be most interested to hear your views.” He looked away, then back at me again. “Only if you’d like that, of course.”
I watched him, reluctantly intrigued. “I don’t know. I guess I don’t see why not. You’ll be long gone by then, though, I’m sure.” I opened the cover to look at the due date, scratched there in pencil by a librarian with a shaky hand. Then, almost as an afterthought, I added, “You’re lucky your winter break starts so early. I don’t think most schools give the whole month of December off.”
For the briefest of moments, he was flustered. I could see it in his face, an expression of unease that flew over his features, although it passed almost immediately. His hands twitched toward one another, a small involuntary movement. When he replied, however, his voice was as amiable as before. “Yes,” he said. “It is very lucky. They want us to have a rest, you know—after our exams. And it’s a good thing, I’d say. After all, this really is a beautiful place, isn’t it? The perfect place to take a holiday.” Then, with a wave, he was gone.
Through the window, I watched his dark, shambling figure step off the porch and climb the path to the hostel, his shoulders jerking awkwardly with each step, his head bent.
Sliding the back of the ice cream case open, I reached for a butter knife and began chipping away at the fuzzy layer of ice that had accumulated inside. My mind, however, kept drifting back to the conversation. It wasn’t that anything he’d said was especially outlandish; if anything, his manners were almost painfully correct. But there was something odd behind the smiles, I thought, an uncertainty, as if he were afraid of something he might say.
On the other hand, who knew? Maybe he just wanted to be liked. It had been ages since I’d felt any impulses in that direction myself, but I could dimly remember what it felt like to care about that kind of thing. He was young and probably still did.
He would learn.
I swept the ice chips into my palm and stretched. It felt good to do physical work, even in such a small way. Before the accident, I had loved helping friends do farm work, stacking bales of hay, building sheds, mucking out stalls. There was something so pleasing about being able to see the results of all that effort, the stump that had been dug out, the crumbling wall that had been repaired, the door that had been re-hinged. There was something satisfying, too, about picking up a tool and knowing how to use it. You want that old stall divider taken down? Sure. Thinking of this, I looked down at the now-slightly-bent butter knife and smiled slightly. It was true that I couldn’t do most of those things anymore, but I still did what I could. Maybe there was something in me of my grandfather’s old stubbornness.
As afternoon slid into evening and I prepared to lock up, gathering my things into a pile, Jerry came in, bringing the smell of the woods with him. He was carrying a hunting rifle in one hand—an old one, I noticed, with a worn walnut stock. It must have been his father’s or grandfather’s, I thought as he propped it next to the door.
“Burger with onions,” he grunted. He was a big man, with a thick beard and a bad back that had gotten him laid off from the Pepsi plant in town. A dusty black cap was settled on his head.
“Sure.” I put the slab of frozen meat on the grill and covered it with a pot lid. It cooked more quickly that way, I had discovered. “You want the onions fried, too?”
“Naw, that’s all right.” He reached into his back pocket and fumbled for his wallet, his stomach bulging under his camouflage jacket. “How you been, Kathleen?”
“Been okay, I guess. You get anything out there?” I lifted my chin at the window, the woods outside.
“Nothing yet. Looks like it’s gonna be a hard season.”
“Yeah, that’s what everybody’s saying.”
He waited quietly the way he always did, his cap pulled low over his eyes, like someone who could never quite get used to being indoors. I decided to throw an extra patty onto the burger and reached back into the freezer.
“Thanks,” he said when it hit the grill with a hiss.
“No problem.”
Then, reaching into his jacket pocket, he pulled out a brown packet—a paper lunch bag, as usual—and put it on the counter.
Without speaking, I moved the bag to the shelf next to the cassette tapes and extracted two twenty-dollar bills from my purse, giving them to him with his change for the burger. He was shifting from foot to foot, I noticed, as if trying to ease a pain that couldn’t be eased. “How’s your back?”
He shrugged. “Not so good. Nice of you to ask, though. I might need surgery one of these days, it sounds like, but I’m trying to put it off as long as I can.” He began his slow stroll back to the door, holding the sandwich awkwardly in one hand and picking up the gun with the other.
“By the way.” As he opened the door, he looked back over his shoulder without turning. I could see twigs clinging to the hood of his coat, a spatter of mud. “You oughta be careful, you know?”
I looked at him blankly.
“Out on the ice,” he said. “I knowed a kid that drowned that way, back before you were born. It ain’t safe.”
I stared at him. By the time I opened my mouth to respond, he was shuffling out, the rifle gripped in his hand.
“Just because you’re used to this place don’t mean it ain’t dangerous,” he murmured, and then the door closed behind him, scraping against its sill.
“Okay,” I said softly, watching through the window as he placed the gun on a rack on the back window of his pickup and climbed stiffly into the cab. A dog clambered to its feet in the backseat and put its paws on the window, panting, seeming to look at me as the truck drove away.
After he had gone, I opened the paper bag and looked into it, counting. They were all there, twenty of them, small and white and oval. I folded the bag again and held it in my hands for a moment, looking down at the floor, then stuffed it into my pocket and walked onto the porch, gathering the ashtrays and flipping the sign on the door so it read CLOSED.
3
The emergency room lights were harsh. My grandmother lay on her back on a stiff cot, shivering in her gown, looking angry. Her small eyes, focused on nothing in particular, were watering, and her mouth was set in a thin, contemptuous line. Her hand, when I tried to take it, was cold and papery, the skin wrinkled like a newborn dog’s. She pulled it away and aimed her gaze grimly at the ceiling. Her breath came in short rasps, as if she were breathing through a straw.
It was a few days after the stranger had arrived. I had found her that morning, collapsed on her knees next to the couch, clinging to it with her yellowed nails as if she would drown.
“Mrs. McElwain,” the doctor said, holding her file in a closed folder at his side, as if he already knew what it contained. I recognized him from my time with my husband. He was younger than most of the doctors I had met, in his forties, with two daughters who went to a private school the next county over. His curly hair made him look ridiculously, almost insultingly boyish, as if he’d discovered the secret to eternal youth and refused to share it.
My grandmother turned her eyes in his direction briefly before resuming her vague, sour examination of the ceiling tiles. The silence lengthened.
“What?” she rasped finally, gathering that a response was expected of her.
“Your chart shows you were diagnosed with emphysema two years ago.” He spoke in a gentle, reassuring doctor–tone I knew she would hate.
“Yeah?” she said, nearly spitting the word.
“Mrs. McElwain, you need to stop smoking. Immediately. To be honest, I’m amazed you’re not on oxygen already. Because what you’re doing—” he sat on the end of the cot, crossing one leg over the other “—is weakening your lung tissue, which is going to impede your airflow more and more. So, when you get sick, like you did this morning, you’re going to have a very difficult time breathing and could face some serious problems. In fact—”
Her eyebrows contracted and she looked away, raising a hand dismissively.
“Mrs. McElwain, I’m serious. I’m concerned about you.” His eyes were a wide, deep blue. “I know it’s hard, but please consider—”
She muttered something and coughed, still facing the wall.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said, ‘I don’t know why everybody keeps calling me ‘Mrs.,’” she snapped. “He’s been dead for years.” Although she was a small woman, the gown left her arms and legs bare, exposed in their motionless, lumpen whiteness under the lights. Her breasts hung slack under the fabric.
The doctor stood up, her folder under his arm. “All right, Mrs.—Lydia,” he said curtly. “Just remember what I said, please.” He went out, white coat flapping behind him as if he were some kind of overgrown dove.
“I hate him,” my grandmother said when I helped her into the Jeep afterward. She glared out the window at the parking lot, the bleak exterior of Carlisle Hospital. “Dr. Blue Eyes. Always talks to me as if I were stupid.”
“He’s trying to help you.” I put her seatbelt on and tightened it over her shoulder. “Are you going to do what he said?”
“Bah.”
“Well, are you?”
She scowled at me. “Have you ever tried quitting smoking? After fifty years?”
I paused, my hands on the steering wheel.
“What?” she said after a moment. Something must have shown itself in my expression.
I slipped the key into the ignition.
“Nothing.” I shook my head. “And no, I’ve never tried quitting smoking, but there must be—”
“Take me to that restaurant by the War College. I want dinner. They didn’t feed me at all in that place.”
I closed my eyes briefly, then put my hand on the gear shift. “Okay.”
“Is he the doctor that patched you up?” She turned suddenly and regarded me intently, squinting.
“What?” I looked at her, startled.
“After the accident. You know, when—”
My stomach lurched, but I kept my voice even. “No, Grandma. They took me to Hershey.”
“They did?”
“Yes. In the helicopter. You visited me there.” I remembered the day clearly, my grandmother sitting starchily at a table in the cafeteria until the attendant had locked the brakes on my wheelchair and left. Bending toward me with her gruff expression, she had opened a cup of applesauce and fed me patiently, spoonful by spoonful, as if I were a baby, holding a bottle of water with a straw up to my lips and wiping my mouth carefully with a napkin. It had been my second trip out of my hospital room and the first time I had been able to sit up in the wheelchair for more than two minutes.
“Oh.” She was quiet for a moment, touching her tight gray curls. “Well, that’s a good thing, then. These Carlisle doctors ain’t worth nothing.”
I glanced at her; she didn’t usually use words like “ain’t.” “Dr. Padovese is Catholic, you know.”
She looked over with sharp surprise. “Where’d you hear that?”
“His daughters go to high school at Bishop McDevitt.”
“Is that so?” Considering this, she smoothed her shirt, as if she were still wearing the gown. “I don’t care,” she finally pronounced. “He still ain’t worth nothing to me. When’s the last time he tried to quit smoking after fifty years, that’s what I’d like to know.”
We went to the diner near the Army War College and ate our grilled cheese sandwiches in silence, surrounded by stiff-looking men in civilian clothes. As I watched them, I thought of the stranger with his enthusiastic gestures, the way he leaned forward against the counter as he quizzed me about the park, Centerville, my progress through the book. He had kept coming in, buying a cup of tea with small change and wrapping his long fingers around it as he spoke
, sitting tentatively as if afraid of overstaying his welcome but staying anyway. It was hard to imagine a greater contrast with the men who now sat chewing in the booths behind my grandmother, their backs straight and their eyes fixed on something invisible that seemed to hang in midair just beyond their plates.
When we finally arrived home in the darkness, the light on the answering machine was blinking.
“Beth again, I’ll bet,” my grandmother gasped wetly, picking her way toward the overstuffed chair and coughing. “You better call her back this time.”
I picked up the receiver and carried it into the kitchen, dialing Beth’s cell number, the mustard-yellow cord trailing behind me.
“Kathy!” Beth chirped, over the noise of an engine. I could picture her in her dented blue Jetta, steering with one hand. “How’s my baby girl?”
“I’m good. Sorry I didn’t manage to call you back before.” I glanced at the clock on the oven. “Where are you?”
“Driving home from Target—I had to pick up some diapers for Dylan. You want to go out tonight? I can leave him with my parents for a while.”
I looked through the doorway at the back of my grandmother’s head; she was motionless, probably already dozing off. “I don’t know. I mean, I’d like to, but Grandma’s been sick.”
“Oh, that’s too bad. Well, whatever you want—I was thinking we’d just pop over to the Joyride, maybe shoot a round of pool, and come home. But it’s up to you.” Her voice had the bright, upbeat tone of the barista she was by day, although I knew her husband’s latest deployment weighed heavily on her.
“All right, sure.” I gave in. “You want me to meet you there?”
“No, I’ll come pick you up. I think you need to have at least two drinks while we’re out. Wait, I take that back—three drinks. At least.”
“Here you are, a good Christian girl—”
“Yeah—” she laughed.
“A Sunday school teacher even, and yet you’re always trying to corrupt me,” I said, making an effort to smile even though she couldn’t see me. “I can only imagine what you do to those children.”
Ways to Hide in Winter Page 4