“I think we did okay,” I said.
Beth bounced to her toes and threw an arm around my shoulder. “We did more than okay. We’re amazing. What have I always told you?”
It was after midnight by the time I left. Standing alone on the smooth, paved driveway, I turned back in the darkness to gaze at the picture window, my breath rising in steam. The tree shone, majestic and solitary, seeming to hover protectively over the room before it. Rubbing my hands together and blowing on them, I regarded it, watching the string of colored lights pulse and flicker behind the ornaments.
Beth walked into the room, holding Dylan in her arms while he clung to her purple turtleneck. She kissed him on the forehead and held him out so he could reach for an ornament, her lips moving. When he had taken the shining ball from the tree, she swung him around in a circle. Through the window, I could see him chortling happily, looking up at her as her lips moved. It looked as if she were singing.
I felt a pang of a feeling I couldn’t name, remembering the dreams I’d had when Amos and I had bought our own house, the scenes I’d imagined would take place there.
But it doesn’t matter, I thought. I’m happy. I don’t mind.
I don’t mind.
After a few minutes, I lowered my eyes and strolled away, back to the solitude of my car, humming the song from the radio quietly, trying to remember the words.
* * *
—
The store was closed between Christmas and New Year’s, a decision I disagreed with but that wasn’t mine to make. There was a snowstorm the day after Christmas, and for two days my grandmother and I stayed in, her dozing in front of her game shows, me curled up on the sofa or by the window in my room, reading. The book unsettled me, the way it made me sympathize with the ragged Raskolnikov, the killer, and hope he would escape. I hadn’t believed it was possible to feel such a thing.
When I’d turned the last page, I puttered around uselessly for a while, thinking, then drove into Carlisle. The town was a slippery grid of gray slush, low and gloomy. There was one nice street, however, that had old brick townhouses with shops on the ground floors. I parked and walked into one of the antique stores, keeping my hands out so they wouldn’t think I was shoplifting, knowing I smelled like my grandmother’s cigarette smoke and the bottoms of my jeans were frayed.
The first store didn’t have the right thing, and the second and third ones didn’t, either—just a bunch of heavy-looking brass and tarnished silver. I didn’t even know what I was trying to find until I saw it: a glass bird, an open-beaked sparrow poised on a branch, its wings raised and tensed, caught in the moment just before it pushed off and lifted itself into the air. It should have been tacky, and maybe it was, but there was something in the energy of it, the sense of movement that saved it. Its neck was stretched, its white breast pushed forward, the wings strong and pointed.
I knew I couldn’t afford to pay for it, but I did, cradling it carefully as I walked out.
Up on the mountain, surrounded by the fog that had descended as evening drew near, I knocked on the hostel’s front door, lifting the heavy brass ring and tapping it against the wood. My other hand held the bird against my chest, trying not to put any pressure on the wings.
Martin must have been out, because after a minute had passed, I saw the curtains twitch in the breakfast room and the stranger himself opened the door.
“Oh, hello!” he said. “I didn’t expect to see you today. How was your holiday?” He was wearing a different sweater, I noticed, cream-colored, probably something Martin had spotted at a church basement sale.
“Good, thanks. Here, this is for you.” Pushing the bird into his startled hands, I took a step back and waved. “I’ll see you.”
“Oh,” he said, surprised. “Yes, but wait—won’t you come in?”
“Sorry, I can’t. I have to go back and make dinner. Maybe next time.” The car engine was still running, the Jeep spinning out a white thread of exhaust that blended with the gray fog. “I hope you like it.”
“Yes, of course! It’s lovely. I—I had no idea—I really wasn’t expecting—” His expression suddenly turned to one of regret. “I’m sorry I have nothing to give you, myself.”
“It doesn’t matter—I don’t want anything.” I turned back and climbed into the car. “See you later.”
He took a step forward, half raising a hand.
“Happy New Year,” he called. His voice echoed in the valley, and he covered his mouth, his eyes wide.
I couldn’t help but laugh. On an impulse, I rolled the window down. “Happy New Year,” I called back, letting my voice echo as well.
It was one of the moments I thought about later, when they told me who he really was, or who they thought he really was. At the time, I simply watched him in my rearview mirror, a slender white apparition holding the glass figure to his chest and waving his hand, gradually growing thinner and smaller, evaporating into the fog that had spun its web around the mountain.
PART TWO
1
January always showed us the faults in our memory. There would be a week, or even two, of unexpected warmth, the sun shining and the snow melting, people wandering around looking half-blind and dazzled. It wasn’t exactly pretty—brightly illuminated mud was still mud—and it was dangerous for the trees, tricking them into leafing and budding long before the winter had actually passed. Still, there was something about it, something that drew all of us outside, pointing at one another’s light jackets, wondering if this had ever happened before. Of course it had; it happened nearly every year. And yet it worked its magic, the notes of it reaching into us like the Pied Piper’s tune. It was enough to make a person wonder how much of human life still hinged on accidents of the weather.
I began spending my mornings on the porch, dragging a chair into a patch of sunlight and looking out over the mountains, shorn now of both leaves and snow. Sometimes, as I held a book in my lap, I found myself thinking about Amos. Not deliberately, of course—I never thought about him deliberately—but in brief snatches, like flickers of interference in a radio program, a strange signal cutting in when you’re not expecting it. A look on his face, a phrase he had used, a fragment of a scene between us. I would glance up from the book and stare out at the trees, my mind momentarily caught up in these trailing wisps of the past.
I still had dreams about him at times, dreams that weren’t quite nightmares but weren’t exactly pleasant, either. Dreams in which we sat across a table from each other and I found I couldn’t bring myself to leave. Dreams in which I opened a door with a sense of dread, knowing he would be in the room behind it. As in life, he never said much. For the most part he just seemed to stare, sometimes with an expression of sadness, sometimes without any emotion at all, as if he’d been drained of himself, like one of those decorative eggs that’s pricked with a pin and eventually becomes hollow.
They said, after the accident, that I might not remember things, that there might be gaps in my memory big enough to swallow months or even years. They were wrong: I remembered everything. Nothing had become blurred, nothing was gone. Maybe I should have told them that, should have turned my face up to them when they were standing around my hospital bed and said: I remember every hour of every day. It might almost have been fun to spook them like that.
The way we met was so ordinary that later I was annoyed with myself for thinking there was anything special about it. It was a Saturday in September, just after I had turned fifteen. I had spent the night at Beth’s house, and the two of us were perched on the couch in our pajamas, our feet propped up on the coffee table, watching a soap opera that I had always secretly found boring but Beth loved. Her older brothers were in the backyard with some friends, trying to train a basset hound they’d found by the side of the road and named, optimistically, Hunter.
Laughing and jostling one another, the boys came inside, Amos among them. He had a round face, sandy hair that fell over his forehead, blue eyes I noticed right away.
Tall and ruddy, he looked at once older and more boyish than the rest, glancing around him with a thoughtful expression and saying little. When he did speak, it was with a deliberate drawl, scratching his face as if speaking were something unnatural to him, but I noticed that his eyes darted from person to person, object to object, as if he would someday be quizzed on everything in the house. “Hello,” he said when I edged past him to take my bowl to the sink, and then seemed to lose interest when, surprised and shy, I mumbled a hello in return.
To my shock, he called the next day, and for weeks we talked almost every night, when I was home from school and he was back from his job as a mason’s assistant in Mechanicsburg. I would sit on the carpet in my room, leaning against the closet door, the phone pressed to my ear, smiling as he told stories about his boss, the customers, life in a town that was big enough to have things like bars and traffic jams. When I hung up, my fingers would be stiff from gripping the receiver while I listened, trying desperately to think of something interesting to say in response.
“Amos Guttshall?” my brother said with disbelief when I told him. I was sitting on the edge of his bed, watching him stuff shorts and a T-shirt into a duffel bag before basketball practice. We had the same dark hair and slender build, but it looked better on him; girls loved the way his blue eyes and black cowlick stood out against his skin, with an air of innocence and daring at the same time.
“Yeah,” I said, pulling up my leg and picking at the rubber toe of my hi-top sneaker. “Why?”
“Nothing,” he said.
I would think about it later, that “nothing.” What was behind it, really? Why wasn’t I supposed to know?
At the time, all he said was, “He’s okay. Little bit funny, though. His parents are rich—I mean, not rich, but his dad sells houses and his mom’s some kind of counselor. They’re doing pretty well for themselves, but you’d think the guy didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. Acts like he’s the biggest born redneck who ever walked the face of the earth.”
“I think he’s smart,” I said. At least, he sounded smart over the phone.
“Oh, he’s smart enough. He just doesn’t want anybody to know it.” He waited for me to slide off the bed so he could turn off the light. “What’s he doing now?”
“Mason,” I told him.
He whistled appreciatively. “Ooh, my little sister’s bagged herself a union man,” he said, sauntering out of the room, ignoring my protests.
Before I knew it, my friend Melanie—a tall girl who ran track—was sewing me into a homecoming dress, a long black velveteen sheath she’d worn the year before. The hairdresser had curled our hair and woven primroses into it, and when I looked in the bathroom mirror at Melanie’s house I was taken aback by the slightly sunburned but elegant brunette who stared back at me.
“I told you,” Melanie said, leaning forward and applying a bright swath of red lipstick to her lips with practiced motions.
“Told me what?”
“That you could be pretty.”
In spite of the cool fall weather, we drove into town to the ice cream place, the one that still looked exactly the way it had in the 1960s, and ordered vanilla milkshakes in lieu of dinner. I had never worn high heels before and was taking short steps back and forth across the parking lot, trying not to dwell on the thought that in a few hours I would be dancing in these things, turning in circles while pressed against the body of a man I barely knew. Melanie had struck up a conversation with a guy in a Camaro, someone she knew from track. I was beginning to worry that we would be late when I pivoted painstakingly and, looking up, saw Amos.
He was sitting in a truck that was parked across the road, leaning out of the window and beckoning to me. My stomach flipped; he wasn’t supposed to see me yet, not until we met up at the school, where someone was going to have to sneak him in since he’d already graduated. I walked toward him, praying I wouldn’t trip over the hem of the dress.
“Hey,” he said. His eyes seemed luminous, and a warm, sweet odor of sweat mingled with cigarette smoke rose from his skin. He was wearing a gray work shirt with the masonry company’s logo on it, and his hands and forearms were lined with the short scrapes I would come to know so well, the ones that came from the edges of stone. “Listen. Do you still want to go to this dance?”
“I. Well. Why?” I blurted out.
“I mean, we can if you want to. But I was thinking you might want to do something else instead.”
“Like what?” Melanie had covered my eyelids with a vast amount of green powder, and I found myself blinking at him.
“I don’t know.” He tapped his fingers on the wheel and looked through the windshield. “Have you been up to Waggoner’s Gap? I was thinking we could just talk. You know. Since we’ve never done that. Not in person, I mean.” Although his sentences were fumbling, there was a sincerity in his face, a kind of intelligence that seemed to find difficulty compressing itself into words.
“All right,” I said slowly, and shortly afterward found myself sitting next to him at the gap, on North Mountain, looking out over Carlisle’s web of lights in the darkness while talking in quiet, halting tones about our lives. I will remember this, I thought at the time, and I did. The country station on the radio playing its Saturday-night classic songs, the towns below us glittering like scattered cinders. It was like the movies; it was, I thought, how it was supposed to be. Sitting there, I felt as if the whole thing were magic, something I didn’t deserve, but I also felt like I’d achieved something. Like I should carry it forward so it could keep being the perfect story it was.
It’s amazing, the power of a story.
We were married not long after I graduated, on a bright summer day a few months before I started classes at the state college in Shippensburg. Amos kept his job in a town forty-five minutes away, his hands perpetually covered with dust, the scrapes gradually forming small, light-colored scars. From the first, I decided I was going to be good, a good wife, that the marriage was going to be a success. Even through the haze of my nervous happiness, I had seen the glances at our wedding, at my pointed seventeen-year-old elbows poking out of the frilly, adult-looking gown my grandfather had insisted on buying for me. Amos’s mother, for one, had cried so much during the ceremony that I’d begun to be embarrassed. But I was as sure about Amos as I had ever been about anything. To the extent that I even acknowledged the glances, I was set on proving them wrong.
As I propped my feet up on the porch and thought about these things—or tried not to—the stranger would usually appear, also with a book in tow, scarf looped gently around his mouth and nose. If one of the hunters showed up, he would quietly slip away, but often we sat together for hours, the table between us, lost in our own thoughts. He was mostly silent, but I could sense him, sitting there with his eyes calmly lowered, occasionally turning a page. As the days passed, I found that I didn’t mind his presence, that in some way it helped to keep the ghosts of the past at bay. Like me, he would sometimes look up, his hand marking his place, and stare out over the mountains. Maybe both of us, I thought, found each other’s company useful for the same reasons. I still wasn’t used to spending so much time with another person, but it didn’t seem to hurt either of us to have someone there who could keep us from sinking into the backwards pleasure of tormenting ourselves, dwelling with astonishment and regret on the hours that had passed us by and the people we used to be.
He found an old book of crossword puzzles and set about solving them whenever he joined me, leaning across the table from time to time to ask questions. Looking into his face, so open and somehow sensitive, I could never bring myself to ask him about the bad thing he said he had done. He was here illegally, I understood that much, but I decided the rest didn’t matter. It wasn’t for me to ask questions, and besides, the past was the past; if that could be true for me, then it could also be true for him.
I failed to realize that the present had brought its own problems, ones our mutual retreat into the
depths of the woods wouldn’t fix.
“Would you look at that!” he exclaimed one morning. “‘Summering for St. Petersburg,’ five letters. It’s a dacha! I didn’t know Americans knew any Russian words besides vodka.”
“We don’t,” I said, and he slid his chair over next to mine, holding the book over my knees to show me. His shoulder brushed against mine.
“See?” he said, pointing. But I was looking up, watching a figure in a camouflage coat cut across the picnic grounds, treading slowly, a large gun I had never seen before dangling from one arm. It was Jerry.
“That’s funny,” I said, my eyes on the long black barrel, the powerful-looking scope. It was no longer rifle season.
Realizing that I wasn’t talking about the crossword, the stranger looked up, too. “What?”
The figure had disappeared down the trail, the gun barrel leading the way before it. Before I could blink, it had vanished into the trees.
“Nothing,” I said.
* * *
—
That afternoon, my grandmother collapsed facedown in her coffee while playing cards at the Friends of Eagles. The phone in the store still wasn’t working, but somebody must have called the park rangers, because one of them came to find me. He took off his hat as he stepped through the door—something nobody ever did, except for the oldest hunters—and cleared his throat, looking uneasy. I put down the book I was reading, and we looked at each other for a long moment. He offered me a ride, but I shook my head.
The ambulance had taken her to the hospital in Carlisle. I sat in the waiting room on the strange pastel-colored chairs, my gaze periodically drifting to a TV without sound, trying to stop myself from imagining the worst. As the hours slid by, I tried to call my parents from a pay phone outside, but there was no answer.
The nurse, a squat blond woman bearing a clipboard, called my name just as I was opening a soggy-looking ham-and-cheese sandwich I’d bought from a vending machine. I hurried after her.
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