My grandmother was stretched on the bed with her eyes closed, a shining plastic tube leading from her nose to a beige machine. There were red lines around her mouth, where something—a mask, I guessed—had recently been pressed. Her brows were furrowed, as if, even in her sleep, she were skeptical of everything around her.
I sat next to her and waited, knitting my fingers in my lap. A different nurse padded in to adjust the pillow and check a small device that was attached to my grandmother’s fingertip. While I watched, she smiled at me briefly, then padded out.
Another hour passed. When I had been in the hospital during the long months after the accident, I had tried to stave off boredom by watching animal shows on the television mounted on the wall, or, later, by playing private games, looking out the window and trying to think of as many words as I could that rhymed with a particular sound, my lips moving silently. At other times, I simply sat, letting my mind wander into dark crannies of the imagination I hadn’t known existed. Sometimes, when I looked in the mirror, I was surprised to find that I was still who I had been before, the thin twenty-two-year-old. It was childish, I knew, to be so absorbed in my own daydreams. Yet, gazing out over the hospital’s rolling lawn, I didn’t really care if it was childish or not. The pills made it impossible to concentrate on anything important, anyway. There seemed to be no reason not to drift.
It was only later that I was sad, although I couldn’t have said exactly what I was sad about. For whatever reason, it seemed to be worst when I thought about my brother, riding around in an armored car in some faraway wasteland. I pictured his Humvee from above, a square thing with a gun turret, like some bizarre kind of beetle making tracks in the sand. It seemed like such a useless, dangerous thing for someone as alive and human and real as my brother to be doing. I would cry then, without really knowing why. We had never exactly been close, but I couldn’t bear the thought that he was out there, so vulnerable and exposed. Somehow, it seemed to strengthen the pain that had coiled itself so tightly around my bones, to make it burrow deeper.
Sitting by my grandmother’s reclining figure, I was suddenly overcome by a regret I couldn’t explain. She was, I thought, probably the person who cared most for me in the world, even if it was sometimes difficult to tell how she really felt about anything.
Just before visiting hours were about to end, she woke with a start, grasping the sheets.
“Grandma?” I touched her arm.
She opened her mouth, making a dry sound and looking around as if she didn’t know where she was. The nurse had left a cup of water on the bedside table, and I raised it to her lips. She sucked on the straw, looking at me, gradually seeming to recover herself. As she sipped, she narrowed her eyes.
“You!” she said finally, spitting water onto the blanket. I hurried into the bathroom and returned with a paper towel, reaching out to wipe her chin. She turned her head away with a grunt.
“Yes, it’s me. Here, let me—”
“Why are you here?” Her fingers clenching the blanket, she regarded me with a mixture of anger and embarrassment. I stepped back with a sigh.
“You got sick. Of course I’m here.”
“Pah!”
I crossed the room as calmly as I could and threw the paper towel away. “You probably shouldn’t talk so much right away. You’ll get tired.”
She made a face at me and turned her gaze to the window, where the two of us were reflected. Slowly, she lifted a hand and looked at it. A needle had been inserted into a vein on the back of it, held in place with white tape.
A minute passed. The sound of footsteps reached us from the hall, approaching and then fading. Far away, a door opened and closed.
“Are you going to take me home?” she asked then, in a voice that was more subdued.
“Yes, although I can’t until the doctor decides you’re ready. It might be a while.”
Her eyes swiveled up to meet mine.
“I don’t think it’s going to be tonight,” I said. “It’s already late. How are you feeling?”
She gestured dismissively. “Old.”
A light was pulsing on the machine next to her, in time with some unknowable part of the forces that were keeping her alive. The thought crawled into my mind that there might be something that interested me somewhere in the vicinity—a box of samples, maybe, or even a prescription pad lying around. With a grimace, I pushed the idea out of my mind. I was here for my grandmother, not myself.
“Do you want to go back to sleep?” I said. “I can go.”
“I don’t care. You do what you want.”
I reached out and fixed her pillow. She let me do it, still looking at the window.
The light on the machine continued its pulsing. Drops of some unknown substance trickled from an IV bag into the needle on the back of her hand.
“I killed him, you know,” she mumbled finally.
“What?” I started, looking down at her. “Killed who?”
She coughed, irritated. “Him. You know.” An edge of defiance crept into her tone.
“Who? Grandpa?”
“Yes.”
I stared at her, baffled. “No, you didn’t. He had a heart attack on Thanksgiving, after dinner. Dad found him. Don’t you remember?”
She glanced around her, confused. “Well, I wanted to kill him.”
I sat back, rubbing my forehead, wondering if there could possibly be a good response to this. “That’s not the same thing,” I said eventually. “We’ve all had thoughts like that at times.”
“You haven’t.”
I looked at her. For a disturbing moment, I thought she was alluding to the rumors, challenging me. Then, with an even bigger jolt, I realized she was sincere. It had never in my life occurred to me that she might look up to me, and I dismissed the thought immediately. It was simply too strange.
I straightened the blanket and pulled the sheet up to her chest. She lifted her arms compliantly, looking up at me.
“Never mind about that,” I said.
I sat by her side, glancing up at the clock as the minutes ticked by. The thought of returning to the house alone, waking up there in the stillness in the morning, gave me a hollow feeling in my chest, a sensation I hadn’t felt for a long time.
“I’ve never seen the ocean,” my grandmother said abruptly. Her gray curls had fallen onto her forehead.
It sounded like a line from a movie, and maybe it was, but it gave me pause. “Well, neither have I.” I forced myself to smile and shrugged. The farthest I’d ever been from home was to visit my aunt Jeanine in Pittsburgh, years earlier, when I was a child. “Not much chance of that in Pennsylvania, I guess.”
Turning her head, she squinted and gave me a hard look. “You say that like this is the only place there is. Like they’ll come and lock you up if you try to leave.”
I closed my eyes. “I don’t think that.”
“Well, you must. Why else are you still here?”
I looked down at her, her meager form under the blanket, the needle in her hand, the cloudy eyes that shifted back and forth, unable to bring my face into focus even though I was no more than two feet away.
“Let’s talk about this some other time,” I said.
“You think I can’t take care of myself?” she rasped. “Phuh. You’re just stubborn.”
“Some other time,” I said again.
“I don’t need anyone to take care of me. You think I got through seventy-five years of life without figuring out how to clean up after myself? You’re just afraid of going anywhere. You’re afraid of everything.”
“No, that’s not fair. And I’m sorry you’re sick, but—”
“And another thing.” She inhaled, evidently preparing to deliver the knockout blow, but was seized by coughing. Her face reddened as she hacked, glaring at me. I stood and watched her as she caught her breath, and thought that it was remarkably difficult to tell the difference between when she was irate and when she was frightened. Maybe, as I would understa
nd much later, there was no real difference.
A nurse passing by in the hallway leaned her head into the room.
“Visiting time is over,” she told us in a sing-song voice.
Outside the room, the nurses were beginning to dim the lights, rolling carts away with a clattering sound. I wandered slowly toward the elevator, turning corners, watching the white walls pass by beside me, the nurses’ desk appearing and disappearing like an island in the sea. The place smelled the way hospitals always smell, the sharp scent of iodine and sickness, and I quickened my pace, wanting nothing more than to be home.
After a few minutes, I passed the nurses’ desk again, unable to remember whether it had been on my right or left when I’d seen it before. Trying a different corridor, I did my best to pay more attention, peering around me, soon reaching a dimly lit row of rooms that had curtains instead of doors. Increasingly confused—I couldn’t remember having passed this part of the ward on my way in—I approached a rectangle of light where one of the curtains was drawn back, thinking I might find a doctor who could tell me where to go.
Instead, I found an empty bed, a jumble of cardboard packaging, a glass cabinet filled with small white boxes and bottles. I almost turned around and walked back out, but something—probably no more than the working drudge’s instinctive curiosity about places she isn’t supposed to be—made me linger.
The labels on the boxes were small but distinct, black against white. As I read them, my eyes widened. Without realizing it, I raised a hand to my mouth.
It wasn’t possible, I thought. This was some kind of joke. A trap.
There was no sound from the corridor. The glass panes of the cabinet reflected the fluorescent lights, bright and blank.
Reaching out tentatively, I touched the glass. The bottles that interested me were right in front of me, just above eye level, plain as day.
A strange sensation ran through me, cold and unsettling. For a moment, I had a feeling of suspension, of being genuinely unsure whether I was dreaming or awake.
I touched the lock with a fingertip, tracing it, tapping it gently with a nail.
The square of darkness behind me remained dark.
Looking around, I slipped my hand into my pocket and found a hairpin, straight and smooth against my fingertips. I closed my fist over it and drew it out, my stomach jolting. I was just testing, I thought, feeling the rough edge of the slot. It was almost like a game. After all, they couldn’t really have left something like this where somebody could get at it. Not even in a two-bit town like this one.
I pinched the hairpin between my fingers, turning my body so my hip nearly rested against the lock, bowing my head so my hair shielded my face. The tip of the pin scratched the coppery surface; it wasn’t an easy fit, but the thing was narrow, narrow enough to—
“Ma’am?”
I whirled around to find the blond nurse glowering at me, her clipboard dangling at her side, her mouth a straight line.
I yanked my arm back.
“Oh,” I said, my voice strangely thin. “I was just—I was just looking. I thought you might have some Tylenol. I have a headache.”
The obviousness of the lie seemed to irritate her further. “You can get Tylenol at the drugstore,” she said flatly. Brushing past me, she rattled the door until the panes shook, making sure it didn’t open. “There are police on the ground floor around the clock, ma’am. Don’t do something you’re going to regret.”
I looked at her, swallowing, not knowing how to respond.
She turned and marched toward a staircase, and with a sick feeling I understood that I should follow her. That I had to. That she was escorting me out of the building.
When we reached the entrance, I turned to say something to her, my face flushing, but by then she was gone.
When I pulled into the driveway, it was profoundly dark, not a single light shining in the neighborhood except the bulb on my grandmother’s porch. I cut the engine and sat, listening to the cooling motor tick in the silence, feeling the air around me lose its warmth.
Finally, I climbed out and leaned back against the Jeep. The stars were brilliant, piercingly white. I tipped my head back, feeling the cold metal against my scalp. My arm and hip ached, and the skin over my cheekbones seemed to draw tighter. I could see my coat collar tremble as my heart beat.
At last, I walked into the empty house, the same person I always had been, the same person I always would be. I sank into a chair by the dining room table, looking down at my hands. Minutes passed, and then hours, as I willed myself to dissolve into the darkness around me, to become simply part of the night.
2
The stranger and I were sitting together on the porch when the cars suddenly appeared, four of them, pulling into the park one after another. I had been fretting about my grandmother, who had come home with a shining gray oxygen canister in tow. My father had driven her, and when he’d attempted to carry her from the van to the house, she’d smacked his arm and waddled to the front door herself, looking from behind like an angry duck. She’d promptly settled into her usual place on the couch and, for the past two days, had been refusing to speak to anyone.
A small crowd of men came toward us across the parking lot, eight or nine of them, talking and laughing, pointing out over the view. Before I could even turn toward the stranger, he had slipped under the railing and disappeared around the corner of the building.
“Well, this is quaint, isn’t it?” one of the men said as they came onto the porch, their steps heavy on the boards. They were a range of ages but all dressed similarly, in jeans and tough but expensive-looking coats, sturdy boots with logos on them. They moved the same way, too, arms crossed or hands on hips, as if they were evaluating the things around them, ready to recommend changes to anything that wasn’t up to standard. Two had ponytails; several had wire-rimmed glasses that made them look like professors, or like the computer salesman in Carlisle who had acted as if he couldn’t quite bring himself to notice me, years earlier, when I’d stopped in to see if I could afford to buy something.
“Yeah, I’ve always thought this would be a pretty comfortable place to do a dig,” another one said. “It’s got some great amenities. There’s a campsite right over there with hot showers and electric hookups.” He knocked the snow off his shoes, making loud thumping noises against the edge of the step.
“Hot showers on a dig site? I’m guessing the roads are paved with gold, too?” a third one said. He was older than most of the rest, and balding. His coat was a sleek, shiny gray-blue, and his feet were planted on the porch casually but firmly, as if no one had ever questioned his right to stand wherever he chose. When he spotted me, his smile widened.
“What do you think, girl? Look like a good day to be out in the woods to you?”
I turned toward him, too surprised at being addressed to react right away. Without replying, I moved automatically toward the door.
“Oh, you work here?” the same man said. “Maybe you could whip us up some burgers. You guys hungry?”
“I’m always hungry,” one of the ponytailed ones said.
“Okay. Got any burgers here, girl?”
They milled around on the porch as I stood there, asking myself fleetingly if I could refuse, if they would drive away if I did. They weren’t the cops, I could see that much, but something about them—the nice clothes, the colorless accents—gave off an authority that made me nervous.
“Yeah,” I said, trying to sound neutral.
“Listen to that,” the man in the gray-blue coat said. “‘Yeah.’ We’re in luck, gentlemen.”
I narrowed my eyes, fixing him with a silent, even look, but he didn’t seem to notice. I had no choice but to go in.
“I’ve heard the site’s almost untouched,” the same man, who seemed to be the leader, said. “Which is pretty remarkable, when you think about it. It got turned into a church camp after the government was done with it, but nobody’s really set foot in it since the seventies.�
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He was talking about the prison camp, I realized as I bent to pull pink rounds of meat from the freezer. It was just down the road, a collection of collapsed, rotted roofs and broken slabs of cement scattered through the forest, connected by a thin footpath that dwindled by an old swimming hole choked with branches. I sometimes went there to think, to gather myself, usually after some out-of-town hiker had started asking too many questions. I had never seen it in winter, but in the summer it was like a jungle, its ruins melancholy and mysterious, like some lost temple to a pagan god.
One of the men who hadn’t spoken yet piped up as I put the meat on the hot surface, watching the ice crystals slowly break down. “I still can’t believe it—it’s so bizarre to think this happened, the War Department shipping a bunch of Axis guys off to some random place in Pennsylvania.”
“I know,” another one said behind me. “Eric tell you about the sweat box yet?”
“Yeah, I couldn’t believe that, either—that’s some straight-up Bridge on the River Kwai shit. I had no idea we did that.”
“Well, you can do anything if nobody knows you’re doing it. Look at those Abu Ghraib bastards.”
My back stiffened, but I was careful to move normally, as if I weren’t listening.
“Yeah, well, digital cameras. They should’ve known that would get out,” the leader remarked.
“Still, though. Kind of sickening, the whole thing.”
“What—that they did it, or that they took photos?”
“Well, both, obviously.” The speaker’s voice momentarily became louder. “Hey, could I get some onion rings with that? You got onion rings?”
I opened a bag and slipped them into the hot oil without speaking.
“Well, thank you very much, my lady,” the leader chimed in. I could feel him watching my back. “You ever hear of an archaeologist? You know what that is?”
I remained quiet at first, hoping the others would start a different conversation so I wouldn’t have to answer. But they didn’t. They all seemed to be waiting.
Ways to Hide in Winter Page 11