I entered the bleak, brightly lit produce aisle and dropped two dirt-streaked potatoes into a bag. The hams were at the back of the store, and I was edging my way there past displays of holiday candy when I saw Amos’s mother.
She was standing with her back to me in front of a row of Christmas cookies, wearing a stylish black jacket with a belt around the waist. I caught a glimpse of her in profile as I passed, her dark eyes, pert nose, and tanned skin, and felt my throat contract. I did not want to see her. Most of all, I did not want her to see me.
“How come you never talk to her?” my mother had asked once.
I had shrugged, or tried to.
“It makes it look like you don’t like her,” she had persisted. “Or like you feel guilty or something.”
I had turned and fixed her with a long look.
“I do not want,” I’d told her firmly, “to talk about this ever again.”
This was shortly after I had left the hospital, when I was still as thin as a starved animal, with long red scars not entirely hidden under my clothing and an expression that struck even me as angry and raw-looking. She had stared at me, startled, and quickly turned away to do something else.
Amos and I had met when I was fifteen and he was nineteen, and gotten married on the mountain as soon as I’d finished high school. The marriage had lasted for four years, almost five, and then he had died. There didn’t seem to be anything to say about him aside from that. When the lights come up, the show is over, and there really isn’t much of a point in hanging around the theater.
The truth was that the whole thing—everything that had happened—still made me sick inside, although what I felt was more anger than sadness. More than once, I had opened my mouth to talk to Beth about it, but was always stopped by a sense of unsteadiness, almost nausea. Early on, when I had just come out of one of the surgeries, she had stroked my hair and said, “We can talk about it when you’re ready, hon.” But I was never ready: never ready to tell her, or anyone, that I wasn’t feeling what I was supposed to feel, that instead of sorrow I felt a fury so corrosive it seemed to be eating away at me on the inside, hollowing me out like a snakeskin, making me grind my teeth at night. Women weren’t supposed to be this angry; no one was, especially not someone who, according to everyone else, was grieving. Angry is what I was, though, and it was an absolute anger, the kind that comes from the cold, hard knowledge that something unfair has happened, something you will never be able to forgive.
In any case, I had no desire to come face-to-face with Amos’s mother. The very thought gave me a sense of dizziness, causing me to wander, disoriented, into an altogether different section of the store. I stood for several minutes under the pale lights of the frozen-food aisle, staring stupidly into the frost-covered glass, before coming to my senses, grabbing the ham, and fleeing to the car.
At the house, my grandmother was waiting for me, her hands on her hips. Her housedress, I noticed, was stained, as if she had spilled something on herself that day. A cigarette was pinched between her lips. “You didn’t tell me your father was coming.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, putting the grocery bags on the counter. She rifled through them, ash dropping onto the floor.
“Where are the beans?”
“What?”
“I told you to get beans.” Her brows were so deeply furrowed that they seemed to meet above her nose. “And I don’t know why you didn’t tell me he was coming. Just because I’m old doesn’t mean I don’t care about my privacy anymore. Just because I’m old—”
“Yes. You’re right. I’m sorry.” I hung up my coat and moved toward the stairs.
“Where are you going?”
“Just—upstairs. I’ll be back in a minute.” I bolted upstairs with as much dignity as I could and stood in my room for a moment, facing the faded map on the wall, forcing myself to keep still. Uzbekistan, I verified, composing myself, was between Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, west of a place called Tajikistan. It even shared a border with Afghanistan, where my brother was probably at that moment sleeping in a tent behind some nameless hill.
After a few minutes, I went into the bathroom, where I rubbed cold water on my face and made myself practice a smile in the mirror. Everything was fine, I reminded myself. Nothing had changed.
When I opened the door, I noticed, for the first time, a foreign aroma in the house, which usually smelled of smoke and dust and the cheap soap my grandmother always bought at the Dollar Store. The scent was heavy and sweet.
“I made a cake,” my grandmother announced when I returned to the kitchen and began searching for the potato peeler, bending and digging through drawers filled with rusting keys and teaspoons and can openers.
“You what?” I looked up at her.
“I said I made a cake. Pineapple upside-down. It’s on the table.” When not perturbed, she bore a marked resemblance to the Queen of England, albeit in somewhat heavier form. She had the same gray curls the queen had in tabloid photos, the same round, powdery-looking face and soft jowls. Nodding pointedly, she disappeared into the dining room and returned bearing a gooey-looking casserole dish that was much too heavy for her, the cigarette still clamped in her mouth. I took the dish from her hands and placed it on the stove, mystified.
“It smells delicious. What made you decide to do that?”
“I don’t know,” she said carelessly. “It seemed like if you were going to go to the trouble of making a ham and all…” Her voice trailed off, and she turned to peer into the now-empty bags again. “And anyway,” she added in a darker tone, “I needed something to do while your father was in here poking around and asking a bunch of stupid questions.”
“Oh.” I began covering the ham with sheets of foil. “What did he ask?”
“Just stupid things about my smoking and my lungs. I don’t see how he has any room to talk—he smokes like a chimney himself. Menthols, too. Now those things,” she said with conviction, “those things are disgusting. Full of nasty chemicals. You’d never catch me touching that kind of”—she searched for a word—“garbage. No, sir.”
Turning on the oven, I stifled a smile.
“And he had a bunch of questions about how we went to the hospital yesterday, but I don’t let him bully me. Just like you shouldn’t let anyone bully you.” Taking two plates from the cupboard, she fished some silverware from a drawer and walked creakily back to the dining room.
“Wait. What?” I looked after her, blinking.
“I said—”
“No, I mean, I heard you. I just wasn’t sure what you meant.” I stood facing her, holding the potatoes.
“Exactly,” she grumbled, continuing to set the table and then settling into her overstuffed chair, from which she turned on the TV and sank into silence.
After a time, I heard her turn the TV off again and shuffle across the room to the record player she’d bought at a yard sale a few years earlier. Peggy Lee began belting triumphantly, her voice sailing over the dusty furniture and into the kitchen. Peggy, my father had once told me, had been my grandmother’s brother’s favorite. He would come home in his handsome army uniform and swing my twelve-year-old grandmother around the living room while the singer celebrated in her brassy tones. Then he’d gone to the Pacific theater and come back a changed man, sitting wordless and grim and staring obsessively at his hands until, eventually, he’d been put away somewhere. At my grandmother’s wedding, he’d slumped on a pew at the back, attended by a nurse, crying inconsolably. Maybe he knew that my grandmother had married a hard man.
I put a pot of water on to boil and stooped over the trash can, working briskly with the potato peeler. The scent of roasting ham filled the kitchen, and for a moment, I wondered just how much of my day I spent standing over food, waiting for it to be ready. More of it than I cared to admit, I thought, at least when there were actually customers. It was a good thing I had the library to keep my brain from turning into paste.
Maybe Beth was right, I allowed myself
to think tentatively, rubbing my forehead with the side of my hand. Maybe it was time to find a way to go back to school.
But no: even if I had the money, which I didn’t, and even if the woman currently standing over the record player didn’t need me, which she did, something about the idea made me uneasy. I wasn’t ready, I thought. That person wasn’t who I was anymore.
And anyway, I had a settled life, one I had more or less arranged to my satisfaction. Maybe it wasn’t all I had hoped, but it wasn’t bad.
An hour later, we sat at the table. Peggy had been replaced by Dean Martin. “This is good,” my grandmother said, chewing a mouthful of potatoes and meat and wiping her mouth roughly.
For the first time that day, I felt a sense of calm. “Thank you.”
She sniffed her glass of milk suspiciously before drinking. “Will you take me to Christmas Eve mass next week?”
“Sure. It’s not next week, though. It’s two weeks from now.”
She shrugged and shook a generous amount of pepper onto her potatoes, sending the black grains flying all over the table. “It doesn’t matter. Just tell me when the day comes. It’s all the same to me.”
“Okay.” We finished the meal in silence, and I cleared the plates and sliced the cake. It was like caramel on the bottom, leaving sticky droplets all over the counter.
“It’s good,” I said, returning to the table and taking a bite. Then, taking another, “Really good.”
“Well, I should hope so. It was my mother’s recipe. They made that kind of thing back then.”
“I can see why.”
“Canned pineapple,” she said. “We thought it was the greatest thing God had ever invented. That and the atom bomb. Shows you what we knew.”
“Hmm.” Absorbed in my own thoughts, I finished the slice of cake, then cut myself another, bending over it as I ate. My grandmother watched me.
“I’m not going to live very much longer, you know,” she said.
“What?” I looked at her, a forkful of cake half-raised to my mouth.
“‘What?’ ‘What?’ Is that all you know how to say?” She raised her eyes to the ceiling. “I said I’m not going to be here much longer. That’s what I told your father, but he can’t accept it.”
I stared at her, lowering my fork, unnerved. It suddenly occurred to me that there might be a reason for this dinner.
“I don’t think that’s true,” I said.
“What, that it’s going to happen or that your father can’t accept it?”
“That it’s going to happen. Not anytime soon.” A shadow of hesitation flickered across my mind, an uneasy twinge that told me I did, in fact, think it might be true. I shook my head as if to wipe the thought away. “The doctor didn’t say anything like that. Not when I was there.”
“Puh! The doctor. What does he know?” She took a bite of cake and chewed, closing her eyes. “All I know is that it’s coming. Which is why I’m telling you. So you know.”
“Grandma,” I said. “Don’t talk like that.”
She opened her eyes and lifted her chin regally. “I’m telling you,” she repeated, “because I want you to be ready.”
I glared back at her, a knot of anger and dread growing in my stomach.
“There’s no way to be ready for things like that,” I said, barely managing to refrain from adding the obvious: and I should know.
“Yes, there is.”
I looked down at my plate with its slab of cake oozing caramel. Her breath was still ragged; I could hear it. The record player had at last spun itself into silence, and a car could be heard passing by outside the house. There was an old mansion on the mountain, to the east of the park, from whose enormous stone porch it was possible to look out over the entire valley. For a moment, I imagined how we must appear from that great distance: just a point of light, far away, surrounded by shadowed stretches of field and clusters of trees like inkblots. To anyone sitting up there, we would be invisible, she and I, as we sat here at the table under our single bulb, facing each other without speaking. Like prisoners.
“All right, Grandma.” I reached for her empty milk glass and stood, taking my own plate in my hands. My head had begun to ache again, just as it had that morning.
She looked up at me, trying to read my expression with her clouded eyes. I ignored her and continued clearing the table, wrapping up the remainder of the cake and sliding it into the refrigerator. When I had finished washing the dishes, I wiped the floor with hot water and rearranged the utensils and knickknacks on the counter, leaving everything spotless the way I always did.
Mounting the stairs in the dark, I entered my room and closed the door without turning the light on, stripping quickly and pulling on sweatpants and an old T-shirt before sliding under the blankets on the mattress on the floor. The blinds were raised, and a mist of light rain coated the window. I rubbed my eyes and lay quietly in the darkness for a while before reaching under the mattress and pulling out the brown packet, the one Jerry had given me. Shaking two of the pills into my hand, I swallowed them quickly. It seemed as though I watched the moon pass across the sky for a long time, thinking about lonely, silent tents in the mountains of Afghanistan, before falling asleep.
4
The days passed, much like most other days save for the continuing presence of the stranger. Sitting across the counter, he would fold his hands almost primly as he chatted about the weather, stories in the newspaper, Raskolnikov the killer and his unthinkable deed. I would offer him something to eat, but he always refused—out of pride, I suspected; maybe he sensed that I knew about his dwindling funds. As he spoke, sometimes he would forget himself and begin to gesture, his hands swanning through the air, not seeming to mind that my responses were largely limited to nods and neutral murmurs. He always kept his dignity, somehow, and yet I had never in my life seen anyone who looked so singularly out of place. Perhaps he knew this; there was something in his words, a wistfulness, a hint of irony behind the smiles, that made me think he did.
When he wasn’t at the store, he seemed to spend most of his time in his room, although a few times I spotted him outside, leaning against the hostel with his hands in his pockets, apparently gazing at nothing in particular. He didn’t look bored, but neither did he look as if he were actively contemplating the principles of modern forestry.
“What are you looking at when you stand around like that?” I asked one day when he came in.
“What do you mean?”
“When you just lounge around up there. I can’t tell if you’re half asleep or if you just find empty space particularly captivating.”
He laughed. “Well, at first I was waiting to see if there was a bus that came through here. Then I realized there was no bus. Now I just sort of think about things.”
“A bus?” I looked at him in disbelief. “Do you understand where you are?”
“I certainly understand it now. I don’t mind—I was just curious.”
“Well, let me satisfy your curiosity. You are, certifiably, in the middle of nowhere. Nothing comes in and nothing goes out.”
“Yes,” he said. “I can see that. I suppose in some ways it’s good—it helps to maintain the peace and quiet.”
He rubbed his fingers together and blew on them. I looked him up and down.
“Do you need a ride somewhere?” I asked finally.
He paused. “No,” he said at last, with his usual courtesy. “I couldn’t ask you to do that. Besides, it would cut my holiday short. I’ve really only just settled in.”
I peered at him, tempted to ask why someone who was supposedly waiting for a bus would want to settle in, but held my tongue.
It was a few days later that I arrived at work early and was horrified to find him attempting to chop wood.
The rain had eroded the snow, leaving only small, ice-encrusted patches scattered around the grass. He had propped a log on the old stump Martin used for such purposes and was standing with his back to me, holding a heavy axe in
his hand. After a moment of scrutinizing the log, he raised the axe above his head, his back bending, and swung it down sharply. I cringed and watched the blade bounce off the wood, sending reverberations shuddering through his arms. The scarf was drawn tightly across his face, and he rubbed his forehead, examining the head of the axe. A minute later, he began to lift it again, his shoes sinking into the mud.
“No!” I called sharply, beginning to mount the hill behind him. “Don’t.”
He turned, surprised. Sweat shone on his brow, and his cheeks were flushed. “Oh! Hello.” His voice was muffled by the tattered fabric.
“You’re going to hurt yourself.” I reached the place where he was standing and looked around, seeing a large pile of logs but no tools aside from the axe. “Where’s the maul?”
“The what?” Even when he was short of breath, his words were carefully shaped, like the small carvings of birds my grandfather had once made.
“The maul, city boy. It’s like a big mallet.”
I was using words he didn’t know. He squinted slightly, looking to the side. “I’m afraid I’m not sure.”
“Martin should have given it to you. I’m assuming he’s the one who told you to do this.” I began marching toward the hostel, the puzzled stranger following behind me.
“Well, he didn’t order me, if that’s what you mean. I asked if there was anything I could do, and he said I could do this.”
“I don’t care what he said—you can’t use the axe.”
I strode toward a closet in the reception area, rummaging through the rakes and shovels inside. The maul was at the back, its wooden handle streaked with tar from some unknown source. I pulled it out and found a wedge on a high shelf.
Ways to Hide in Winter Page 6