“Could I ask,” I said as we stood next to each other, taking a last look at the valley before turning to go, “what you’re doing here? I mean, what you’re really doing?”
He exhaled and looked down at his hands. A short silence followed. “Yes, I suppose you would wonder.”
“I do, sometimes. Although you don’t need to answer.”
He fingered the fraying end of his scarf and was quiet. Beneath our feet, the rock glittered with fragments of quartz, all but invisible except at this time of day.
“I did a bad thing,” he said finally. “In Uzbekistan.”
“A bad thing?” I looked up at him.
“Yes. That’s why I can’t go back.”
For a moment, neither of us spoke. He scuffed at the rock with his shoe. “I would rather not talk about it just now, if that’s all right with you.”
“Of course. I’m sorry I brought it up.”
“It’s okay.” He glanced at me and attempted a lighter tone. “Now we’ve both accidentally mentioned things. I suppose we’re even.”
“I suppose we are.” I was still trying to read his face, but he smiled and I gave it up, tucking his words away in my mind where I could ponder them later. “All right, let’s get down from here.”
I hopped off the rock, landing heavily on the trail, the nerves in my leg burning all the way to my toes. The stranger lowered himself carefully after me, and we made our way down the mountain, leaning back and grasping at branches to keep our balance. Together, we raced against the diminishing light, arriving at the car just as the last of it drew back into a deepening blue.
When I dropped him off at the hostel, he turned to wave. I nodded and, belatedly, when he had already turned away, waved back.
6
On Christmas Eve, my grandmother and I drove to the church in Orrtanna for the candlelight mass. My grandmother was bundled into the stiff wool coat she seldom wore, her hands in the fur muff she had bought during some long-ago trip to Pittsburgh to visit my aunt, before I was born. Resembling a misshapen package, she hunched forward in her seat, seeming to stare watchfully through the windshield as we drove up over the mountains, passing the old apple orchards and the canning factories. What she thought she was watching for, I couldn’t have said.
We arrived and squeezed into the last parking spot beside the church, a fading pile of red brick with a modest bell tower. Inside, the pews were garlanded with pine boughs, topped with rings of tall white candles at the ends. The altar, too, was festooned with dark green pine, the branches hung with shining white and gold ornaments. I didn’t really believe in any of it—the actual Christmas stuff—but something in me always responded to the music and candlelight. I’d done my best to give a nod to the occasion, pulling on a red silk blouse that had once belonged to my mother and that I’d found at the back of a closet. At least I’d match the clusters of fake berries.
The priest, who was very old and braced himself against the altar as he spoke, delivered the mass in a quavering tone, facing out over the rows of flickering candles. As he recited the words, I helped my grandmother stand and kneel. For a long time—after the things that happened—it had been hard to look at him without anger, but those days had passed. I didn’t know what he saw when he looked at me, but when I looked at him, I saw nothing in particular. He was just a man, an old man, like any other.
Afterward, before we all surged back into the cold, there was a reception in the vestibule, plates of gingersnaps and sugar cookies arranged on folding tables. I was piling some of the cookies onto a napkin—two for me, two for my grandmother, who was chatting with a former neighbor—when I heard a voice behind me.
“Kathleen?”
I turned to find John, the trucker who’d shown up at the Joyride a few weeks earlier.
“Oh,” I said uncertainly. “Hi.”
“Merry Christmas,” he said, extending his hand. A smile creased his face. “Nice to see you. Been a while, eh?”
Not knowing what else to do, I took his hand. “Uh, Merry Christmas,” I replied.
“How you been lately?” he asked, standing in front of me as the other churchgoers—mostly older people—flowed around us.
Did “lately” mean the past few weeks or the past ten years? I thought of my plain room at home, the long days at the store, the stranger as we sat together on the mountaintop. “I’m fine,” I replied. But he didn’t go anywhere, and I soon realized I had no choice but to offer the normal response. “You?”
“Oh, I’m all right—can’t complain.” Despite his bulk, he looked at ease with himself, hands planted in his pockets as he tilted his head back slightly. I had forgotten that he was an inch or two shorter than I was—one of those solid, compact valley men whose impression of strength and immovability doesn’t depend on height. His face had a relaxed, open expression that was somehow startling, perhaps because I almost never saw it on anyone.
“I’m actually back in town for the first time in a while,” he continued casually. “I was living down in North Carolina with my wife, but she—we—got a divorce, and I decided to come back home. Bought a farm out on Route 11, down near Quarry Hill. Beautiful piece of land, about thirty acres. Real nice spread.” He rubbed the stubble on his cheeks. “Don’t tell the priest, though. About the divorce, I mean.” He winked.
“No,” I mumbled vaguely, looking around. “Of course not.” My grandmother was still engrossed in her conversation with the neighbor, which was unusual; there must have been some especially intriguing gossip about somebody she didn’t like.
“I gotta say, it’s good to be back,” John was saying. “I missed this place. You know, we always made fun of it when we were kids, but when you get down to it, there ain’t nowhere like it.”
I stared at him in bafflement. If there was a purpose to his starting a conversation with me, other than some kind of morbid curiosity, I couldn’t see it.
“I think I’ll wind up leasing out most of the land,” he went on, “but I’m definitely keeping the house, even though I don’t really know what I’m going to do with all of it. Not used to having a whole place to myself.” He chuckled.
“Anyway,” he said, “I was wondering if you might like to come over for dinner sometime. Can’t say I really cook much, but I figured I could pull something together. I remember you were always real interesting to talk to, and I thought it might, you know, make the place feel less big. At least for an hour or two.”
Blinking, I stood stupidly with the napkin full of cookies in my hand, at a loss for words.
“Well, I…” I began. My hand opened and closed around the napkin. “Uh, sure,” I stuttered, hoping he understood that I meant “absolutely not.”
“All right, then, I’ll look you up sometime. You take care, now.” Shaking my hand again, he nodded and ambled off.
I looked after him mutely.
“Was that Johnny McCullough? What did he want?”
I turned around to find my grandmother standing behind me, grinning one of her rare grins.
“Nothing,” I said, wondering how she’d managed to sneak around me when I wasn’t looking. “We were just talking. Come on, let’s go.”
With her gripping my arm, we descended the cement steps to the parking lot, the sky a cold, starry vault above us.
* * *
—
We’d barely walked in the door when Beth called. “I’m giving my son a very important lesson in how to decorate a Christmas tree. You want to come over?”
“Yeah, sure,” I replied, still disoriented by what had happened at the church. “I’ll be right there.”
The small ranch house where her parents had lived for as long as I could remember was draped in blinking white Christmas lights. In the driveway, two figures bent with their heads under the open hood of a Mustang, one trim and one with a wide back. When my headlights struck them, they turned around, and Beth’s father—still in the jacket he wore as a maintenance man at the War College—waved welcomingly.
“Hey there, Kathy!” he called. “Merry Christmas.”
The larger figure didn’t say anything, but nodded at me from behind his beard, meeting my eyes as I gave a small start. Of course, I thought, he would be here. I knew his relation to the family; I just managed to keep the world of the store so separate from the rest of my life that I sometimes forgot.
“Hey, Mr. Calaman,” I said. “And…Mr. Calaman.”
Beth opened the door, Dylan on her hip. “Are my dad and Jerry still messing around out there?”
“Yeah.” Inside, the house smelled of butter cookies, the Irish recipe that had been passed down from Beth’s great-grandmother.
“Well, boys will be boys, I guess. Not that I believe in any of that claptrap.” She gave me a peck on the cheek. “You look beautiful, lady! Merry Christmas.”
“Thanks—you, too.” She must have just gotten home from work, I thought; she was still in her coffee-stained jeans and full makeup. Her lipstick—the same brilliant scarlet as the poinsettias on the table—left a smudge on my cheek, which she wiped away briskly and automatically with her hand, as if it were a smudge on her child’s face. “Where’s this tree I’ve been hearing about?”
Dylan pointed into the living room, his other hand in his mouth. A real spruce tree stood in the corner, surrounded by open boxes of ornaments. Beth and I set to work while the boy sat solemnly on the sofa, his legs extended, shaking a snow globe.
“We had Mark watching us on the webcam a while ago,” Beth said, “but it’s the middle of the night in Ramadi, so he had to go. There’s something surreal about all that, but at least he was able to be here, sort of. It’s already hard to believe he was actually here just a month ago.” She stood on her toes to hang an ornament shaped like a rocking horse, probably left over from her own childhood.
“Webcam?” I said. “You can do video over the internet?”
She threw her head back and laughed. “Oh, darlin’, you’re in your own world. It’s one of the things I love most about you.”
The ornament fell, and I picked it up for her, hanging it myself. She looked up at me as I reached for the top of the tree.
“So,” she said in a sly tone, “I don’t suppose you have anything to tell me.”
“Like what?”
She bent to rummage through a box with exaggerated nonchalance. “Oh, you know…like something about a new man in your life.”
“What?” Flustered, I fumbled for a reply. “Where did you hear that?”
“Ah-ha! So there is someone.” She pulled out a glass ball. “Uncle Jerry told me.”
I blinked at her in incomprehension. “Jerry?”
“Yep. Apparently he was out hunting and saw you walking in the woods with some tall, skinny guy. That’s what he said, anyway.”
A tremor of surprise ran through me.
“Oh,” I heard myself reply.
“Yeah. I don’t know how he can sit out there in the cold, given the amount of pain he’s in, but evidently he does. My dad keeps trying to get him to stop, but he’s been kind of funny since Joanne left him.” She sat back and put her hands on her hips. “Anyway, dish. Give me details.”
“There aren’t any to give.”
“Oh, come on. I can’t believe you’re holding out on me. Who is he, some hiker?”
I was about to respond, but a timer rang in the kitchen, and she hurried away, Dylan looking after her. There was the sound of an oven door opening, the clattering of a baking sheet.
Looking down, I fiddled with the bent wire hook affixed to a ceramic snowman, still absorbing what she had said. All right, I told myself. So Jerry had seen us. It didn’t matter; he probably wouldn’t think anything of it. I’d just be more careful in the future. And there was no reason to tell the stranger, who would only be needlessly worried.
Beth stuck her head back into the room. “You want to come here and tell me if these look done to you?”
I followed her and examined the tray of cookies, pressing one gently with a fingertip. “Yeah, they’re done.”
“You’re so freakin’ competent at everything. Seriously, it kills me.” Standing on her toes, she switched on the fan. “You go back in there with Dylan, and I’ll be right out. We’ll just let these cool down for a couple minutes.”
Moments later, she returned, slipping off an oven mitt and tossing it onto the sofa, where Dylan regarded it with surprise.
“So, you’re not gonna spill the beans, huh?”
“Honestly, there aren’t any to spill.”
“All right, suit yourself, but I’m going to drag it out of you sooner or later.” She extracted a long strand of red tinsel from a box with a rustling sound. “Anyway, have you thought about the thing we talked about last time?”
“What did we talk about last time?”
“Going back to school.”
Catching the loose end of the tinsel, I helped her string it onto the tree, each of us following the other in circles. “Yeah, I’ve been thinking about it,” I admitted. “But I just can’t. My grandmother…well, and the tuition, and everything.” I breathed in the smell of evergreen. “Maybe someday, when things are different.”
“Is that a dodge?”
I sucked in my upper lip, going quiet for a moment. “No.”
“Oh, really?” She raised an eyebrow. “How much is the tuition?”
“How much? I’m not sure.”
“That’s what I thought. You should call them and see what they can do.”
“Maybe,” I said, which was the word I always used when I meant “no.” She knew this, and rolled her eyes, although she didn’t fight me.
“So what did Mark have to say when he called?” I asked, trying to change the subject.
Her face took on a neutral expression, and she looked at Dylan, who looked back at her. “Not much of anything, to be honest. I know he’s always glad to see us, but…he just gets this look on his face, like he wants to get back to thinking about something else. Or nothing at all.” She wrapped a string of lights around her finger. “I mean, I understand. But I do sometimes want to point out to somebody that, well, they took my husband away, and they never told me who I’d be getting back at the end of everything. So, there’s that.” One of the lights was cracked, and she rolled it between her fingers. “Sometimes I wonder.”
Dylan grabbed a fistful of blanket and raised it to his mouth, watching us.
“I think it’s okay to wonder,” I said.
She met my eyes and touched my knee without saying anything. I was struck by the heart-shaped face, the constellation of small scars from the chicken pox she had caught when we were sixteen, the features I knew so well. We were still young, I thought, and yet astonishingly, we were also old, well past the age our parents had been in our earliest memories of them.
“Oh, shoot, I forgot the cookies. Silly me.” She pushed herself to her feet and disappeared into the kitchen, returning with a plate of sugary discs. “Although I really shouldn’t eat these things. They’ll make me fat again.”
I reached for a cookie, letting the soft dough dissolve on my tongue. “No, they won’t. You were never fat.”
“Bullshit.” She sank onto the sofa beside me and cast a look at Dylan. “I mean, bull malarkey.” Reaching out her arms in a long stretch as she chewed, she tugged at the hem of my shirt. “Where’d you get this, by the way? I like the color.”
“Yeah, I knew you would.” I looked down at the loose hem and worn buttons. “It was my mom’s, believe it or not.”
I could remember when my mother had worn this blouse. It wasn’t at Christmas—although she may have worn it then, too—but sometime later in the winter, back when I hadn’t been much older than Dylan was now. We’d had a blizzard that night, and my father was somewhere out on the road. My mother would have just come home from her office job, the one she’d had for a while, a receptionist at a doctor’s office or something, before she got fired for keeping a fifth of vodka in the filing cabinet. My brother was play
ing on the floor, ramming trucks into table legs, making a racket. My mother was holding me and watching the road from the window—or at least, what she could see of the road in the dark. I rested my head on her shoulder, gazing at her necklace of shiny black beads, something she’d found at Kmart or Woolworth’s. Slowly—probably without realizing she was doing it—she began to sway back and forth, her hand on the back of my head. I pretended to fall asleep, closing my eyes and keeping as still as I could while she gazed out the window.
It was a shame, I thought, that everything had later unraveled. But things just happened that way sometimes.
Outside, I heard an antique-sounding engine start and a car drive away, followed by silence.
Beth cocked her head at me. “I have trouble picturing your mom in that.”
“What? Oh—yeah, this was before the woodshop. And the denim-jacket phase.”
“You think you’ll see them tomorrow?” She stood, disentangling her feet from a pile of lights and ribbons.
“My parents?” I shrugged. “Who knows? They usually manage to stop by my grandmother’s, though, so maybe. I’ll probably make myself scarce just in case.”
“Now there’s the Christmas spirit,” she said ironically, but I heard her laugh.
“Yeah, I’m kind of the Grinch.”
“No, you’re not. You try too hard. Real grinches are just like that naturally.” Dylan coughed, and she hastened into the kitchen to retrieve a juice bottle. “Hey, there’s a radio in here. Should we put on some Christmas music?”
“Sounds wonderful.”
“Feliz Navidad” came on in mid-chorus, its long-dead singer chirruping joyously. Beth and I decorated industriously, bending and straightening. Her family used a cross instead of a star, and when we had placed it carefully at the top, we gathered the green wires of the Christmas lights and plugged them in, stepping back to admire our work. When we turned the lamps off, the tree glowed with that primal, half-hidden mystery, its pyramid of soft branches forming a veil over the points of light that shone through. It was a sight that always gave rise in me to a half-suppressed, childlike awe.
Ways to Hide in Winter Page 9