Ways to Hide in Winter

  Fighting a sense of sickness, I closed the browser.

  I was taken in for questioning, I heard the stranger say.

  Not the ordinary police, but a kind of special police. The police who do these things.

  One year, when my brother and I had been very young, we’d sat at the Thanksgiving table and listened to my grandmother’s brother babble. He’d looked even older than he was, white-haired and sallow, picked up and brought over from the hospital or wherever it was he normally lived. Over the pie, his run-on talk had turned to something that had happened forty years earlier, something on a grassy hill on an island, a kneeling Japanese prisoner with his hands tied behind his back, a knife between someone else’s fingers, the cutting off of ears and nose, blood everywhere. Someone had gotten him to shut up, my great-uncle; the war hadn’t been like that, as we all knew. It was sailors kissing pretty nurses, it was old men with medals sitting in the review stand at the town parades.

  Lost ears, lost noses, burns, whippings.

  I stood up, leaning against the back of the chair until the nausea had passed. The librarians turned to watch me as I walked out the door.

  At the Joyride with Beth that night, I couldn’t shake the sense that the world had spun off its axis into an alternate version of itself. Your uncle, I wanted to say, is walking around with a .45-70 out of season. And I’ve spent the past five hours thinking about what people look like when they’re boiled.

  We started a game of darts, but I kept getting lost in thought, standing in a shadow with my drink. The photographs seemed to hover in front of me.

  I couldn’t be sure this was what the stranger was afraid of, but something told me it was. Maybe it wasn’t the whole story, but some part of what I had just seen was hanging in the background, I thought.

  Beth, too, was unusually quiet. When I finally roused myself to ask her what was wrong, she shook her head. “Oh, you know. Just—the situation. Being without Mark; single parenting. That’s all. I’m just feeling bad for myself, really.”

  I looked at her, and the images that were floating in my vision cleared for a moment. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah.” Smiling lopsidedly, she reached for my hand and led me to an empty space. “Be my date? Maybe we’ll both feel better.”

  We danced a few steps as we sometimes did when the bar wasn’t crowded, leading one another through spins in a way that was mostly ironic, but our hearts weren’t in it. I came to a stop, leaning against the pool table. When I focused again, she had already reached the other end of the floor. Tilting her head back, her soda spilling over her fingers, she swayed wistfully by herself, drifting away.

  “You know,” she said when she came back, “sometimes I’m not so sure about all this.”

  “All what?”

  She leaned her head on my shoulder. “I don’t know. All of it.” She raised her hand in a helpless gesture. “The things we do. The way life takes hold of us. We think we’ve got it all figured out, and then—” I felt her sigh. “You know?”

  The pictures still floated in front of me. I took a long sip from my glass, feeling the liquid burn on the way down.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

  4

  For two days, the stranger didn’t leave his room. Every few hours, I would find an excuse to wander onto the porch, dusting the tables and chairs, glancing up at the darkened window I thought was his. As far as I could see, there was no movement behind the curtain. I pictured him stretched out on his cot in the wan gray light, his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling, imagining the things he feared most. Or maybe remembering them.

  I waited, respecting his anxiety. There was no reason, I reminded myself, to think the situation—whatever it was—had changed. Jerry had just figured out that he could take advantage of me; I certainly wasn’t happy about it and had no idea what I was going to do, but it had nothing to do with anybody else. All he would have seen when he’d walked into the store was two people playing a game, even if one of them was unusually jumpy.

  I understood fright, though, especially fright that was rooted in the past and therefore harder to get rid of. And if there was one thing I truly grasped, it was the desire to shut out the world.

  Finally, however, I began to lose patience. No matter what this deeply odd person was doing here, he couldn’t possibly think he could stay hidden in some hole in the backwoods of Pennsylvania forever. It just wasn’t practical. He was more intelligent than that—and, I told myself, so was I.

  The next morning, I climbed out of the car with a newspaper under my arm, noticing that Martin’s red station wagon was parked behind the hostel. I dropped the things I was carrying onto the hood of the Jeep and bent down to grab a handful of gravel. Mounting the hill, I positioned myself where the stranger could see me and cocked my arm back. The stones made a clicking sound against the second-story window, quiet but insistent. I kept flinging them at the glass pane until I ran out, then stuffed my hands into my coat pockets and waited.

  Nothing happened. Cursing quietly and biting a nail, I turned to go.

  I was halfway down the hill before the door creaked open behind me and the stranger stepped out, walking toward me, glancing out over the landscape. When we met, he pressed his arms to his sides, as if to gather himself, then looked away.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve been rather ill, I’m afraid. I would have liked to come visit you, but of course I didn’t want you to become sick as well. Fortunately, I think I’m better today, but—”

  I cut him off.

  “The people who brought you here,” I said, looking him in the face. “Are they ever coming back?”

  He drew a breath.

  “Nobody brought me here,” he said finally. “I walked.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Because that’s not what you said at the time.”

  For a long moment, he was silent.

  “Come on,” I said. “Don’t try to pull this stuff on me. I thought we gave that up weeks ago.”

  He shifted his weight, rubbing one of his shoes against the other. “Yes,” he murmured, clearing his throat. “I suppose we did. I’m sorry.”

  “Look, I don’t want to pry into your affairs. But I do want to help you.” I pushed hair out of my face. “I may not know exactly what you’re doing here, but I know that whatever the plan was, it’s clearly gone wrong. You didn’t mean to be here, or if you did, you never thought you’d stay for more than a day or two. And this may look like the ends of the earth to you, but it isn’t. You’re not invisible. I don’t know what you’re hiding from, but…this isn’t the place for you. You’re not safe here.” I balled my hands in my coat pockets. “And if you can’t see that, then you’re not nearly as smart as I’ve been giving you credit for.”

  While I was speaking, he had lowered his eyes, seeming to draw himself inward. When I stopped, he squinted silently into the cold, looking off into the trees.

  “All right,” I told him finally, “I’ve said my piece. Your business is your business. If you need me, you know where I am.”

  I turned back toward the store and walked briskly down the hill, keeping my head high and my back straight. I had almost reached the porch before I heard his voice behind me. “Wait.”

  I looked over my shoulder. He was still hunched forward, and for once, he looked small.

  “They’re not,” he said.

  “What?”

  “They’re not coming back.”

  I regarded him evenly. “Why not?”

  He seemed to be speaking to the ground. “I don’t know.”

  “Were they supposed to?”

  He swallowed. “Yes.”

  Slowly, stiffly, I began climbing the hill again.

  “Let me help you,” I said when I reached him, making every word clear. “Tell me what you need. I can’t make any promises, but between Martin and me, I’m sure—”

  “You do help me,” he said. “You h
elp me every day.”

  I shook my head impatiently. “That’s not what I’m talking about. Tell me where you need to go, and one of us will get you there.”

  As I said the words, I felt a twinge of something unexpected, a grain of reluctance that chafed under my skin like sand. But I ignored it and kept my eyes on him until he answered.

  He looked up at me, taking a long breath. “No,” he said at last. “There’s nowhere for me to go.”

  I studied him. “What about New York? I’ve never been there, but if you really want to disappear for some reason, I’m sure that’s a much better place. I could get you there in a few hours.” I thought about it. “Okay, more than a few. But I could take you.”

  “You’re a lovely woman.” His eyes fell on the ruins of the furnace stack. “But I can’t let you do something like that.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t let me?”

  For a moment, he said nothing, his face still turned toward the collapsed stones.

  “You’re very smart, of course,” he said finally. “But you don’t understand what you’re offering.”

  Something in the way he said it—of course—made me step back.

  “Oh?” I said, surprised and stung. “And what is it that I don’t understand, exactly?”

  “I can’t explain it.”

  “Try,” I said sharply.

  He sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to make you angry. And anyway, it doesn’t matter. As I said, there’s nowhere for me to go.”

  Scowling, I scuffed a shoe against the ground and spat contemptuously to the side, the way I’d seen so many men do. “So,” I said, “what’s the plan, then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, that seems obvious.”

  We faced each other. He twisted his hands together, the knuckles cracking.

  “What happened to you, there?” I asked.

  “Sorry?”

  “In your country. What happened?”

  He gave me a long look, as if trying to read what was behind my eyes. But his face was carefully expressionless, and he said nothing.

  “All right,” I said at last. “Have it your way.” Turning on my heel, I walked down to the store without looking back. This time, he didn’t stop me.

  Inside the store, I scraped the already-pristine grill, and then, restless, stalked back outside. The Jeep needed to be cleaned, I decided, and went at it, dragging out the floor mats and striking them with a stick. When the worst of the mud was gone, I gripped the pieces of carpet in my hands and shook them hard, until my back ached and my shoulder burned. I saw myself reflected in the windows, with disheveled hair and a face set like stone, and turned away impatiently.

  As soon as closing time came, I drove off, uncertain of where I was going but not caring as long as it wasn’t home. I knew I shouldn’t leave my grandmother alone for much longer, but, I thought, if she wanted so badly to be independent, she could survive by herself for another hour.

  On an impulse, as I neared the plaque marking the site of the former POW camp, I pulled over and tramped up the path to the entrance. There was a lot of dead undergrowth, but I fought through it, my boots crashing through the bracken. The old cement foundations began to appear, ghostlike, about half a mile in, long blank patches that invited curious—or, perhaps, sinister—minds to imagine what the buildings that had once stood there had been used for.

  I sat on the cracking ledge by the former swimming hole and wrapped my arms around my knees, staring down at the ice, its impenetrable mottled gray.

  The forest was so quiet my ears rang. I imagined the swimming hole as it would have been sixty years earlier, when very different people would have sat in this spot, sunning themselves where I now shivered. American soldiers, men who would have swum here when not keeping watch over the prisoners, splashing one another, stripped to the waist. Young guards who were now old men. It was so easy to picture them, square-jawed and smooth-skinned, their blue eyes untroubled.

  I hugged my knees tighter as a vision of Jerry’s face and dangling rifle crowded the soldiers out of my mind. Who ever knew, really, the things we were willing to do to each other when no one else was watching?

  The darkness was falling, turning the trees into black nerves that stood out against the sky. In truth, I thought, I had yet to find out what happened if you went south of South Mountain or north of North Mountain. I hadn’t managed to get myself out of this place, even when I’d tried—even when my life had, in a very real sense, depended on it. I had failed. And now I was watching someone else fail as well.

  But he wasn’t failing, I reminded myself. He was refusing. Which was what made it all the more infuriating, all the more incomprehensible. It was true, I allowed grudgingly, that life had been more interesting since he’d arrived. But this was no place for him.

  Why wouldn’t he leave if he could?

  I stood up, brushing myself off, and plunged back through the woods again. By the time I reached home, it was late, and I stood at the counter chopping onions, the knife knocking dully against the cutting board. You are a lovely woman. But you don’t understand.

  Bullshit, I thought. You think I’m dumb? Is that what you’ve thought all along?

  The phone rang.

  When I didn’t pick up, it rang again. I wiped my hands irritably, threw the towel down, and grabbed the receiver.

  “Hello,” the guttural voice at the other end of the line said. “May I speak to Kathleen Guttshall, please?”

  “Kathleen McElwain,” I said bluntly. I had dropped my married name as soon as they’d let me. “Speaking.”

  “Oh, hi, Kathleen,” the voice replied pleasantly. “This is John.”

  I was still absorbed in my thoughts. “John?”

  “John McCullough. We saw each other—”

  “Oh.” I paused. “Yes. Hey.”

  “Am I interrupting something?”

  “No, it’s fine.” I crossed my arms and waited for him to continue, staring through the window into the darkness.

  “Not sure if you remember, but we’d talked about you coming over for dinner sometime. I was wondering if you might like to come down on Sunday. I gotta get my engine fixed, but after that, I’m around. I’d love to show you the place.”

  I held the phone against my shoulder, picturing him as he had been that evening, standing there solidly in his jeans and flannel shirt.

  “Well,” I said.

  The stranger’s face appeared in my mind, wearing that expression that was almost too patient, too compassionate, as if I were the one to be pitied and helped. You are very smart. But not smart enough.

  My stomach tightened.

  “Sure,” I said into the phone. “Sure, I’d like that. What time?”

  * * *

  —

  The face in the rearview mirror was one I both avoided and couldn’t stop looking at. Beth had made me up in pinks: blush, lipstick, a blue shirt with pink trim she’d brought over to my grandmother’s house.

  “Ugh,” I’d said as she’d perched on the bathroom counter upstairs, dusting my face with various brushes. “I’m really not a pink person.”

  “Baloney. It looks great,” she’d said, her hands moving in swoops and circles as a large brush tickled my face. “You wouldn’t want anything darker—it would wash you out.”

  My grandmother’s voice had reached us from the living room. “Kathleen!”

  Beth had jumped, and we’d looked at each other and laughed.

  “How does she do it?” Beth had whispered. “I could be a drill sergeant and she’d still scare the crap out of me.”

  “Yeah, I know. Don’t ask me how she can yell like that when she’s on oxygen.”

  My grandmother had bellowed again. “Why isn’t the remote working?”

  I’d sighed, and Beth had smiled. Despite the expression on her face, I’d noticed, there were deep circles under her eyes and her skin looked strangely dull, although her voice was as cheerful as ever. Some
thing was wrong, I’d thought, something beyond Mark’s absence. I’d remembered something she’d once told me about one of his furloughs, how he’d spent every night in the car with the engine off and the radio on, staring out into the dark. She could hear the station changing, scanning from talk radio to music, over and over, as if he didn’t know or care what he was hearing. Just voices.

  “Remind me what I’m supposed to call your grandmother these days, again?” she’d asked me under her breath.

  “Oh, who even knows?” We’d descended the stairs and I’d gently taken the remote from my grandmother’s grip. “You’re holding it upside down,” I’d told her.

  She’d taken it back in her claw-like fingers and looked me up and down. “Johnny McCullough,” she’d said after a moment, and I hadn’t been sure if it was a question or an accusation.

  “Yes.” I’d told her earlier where I was going and had somehow managed to fend off a longer interrogation. “Don’t forget to take your prednisone. And there’s leftover chicken in the fridge. I’ll be back before too long.”

  “I’ll be fine. I’m always fine. You go on.”

  The farm where John lived was close to Shippensburg, in a wide stretch of rocky cornfields and winding roads known as Quarry Hill. As I drove, I pulled on a sweatshirt, covering the thin fabric that showed a keyhole of flesh at the throat. I didn’t want him to get the wrong impression—that I normally looked like this, which I definitely didn’t.

  Besides, I told myself, he was probably drawn by curiosity more than anything. If I showed up looking as if I were actually taking the whole thing seriously, he would probably just laugh about it later. I would give him the benefit of the doubt, I thought, but I wasn’t going to let him think I was a fool.

  There was no town to speak of in Quarry Hill, just a scattering of farmhouses and trailers that were all distant from one another, most of them as worn-out looking as everything else in the valley. But when I found the mailbox with John’s address and turned up a long, rutted driveway, I was startled to see a small but comfortable-looking house, its outside done in a modern-cabin style and its windows glowing.