I turned the toy truck upside down and spun the wheels with my thumb. “I am happy,” I said.
“Are you?”
“Yes,” I said flatly.
She looked at me and ran a hand through her hair, exposing a streak of gray that stood out startlingly against the black. I tried not to think about her uncle, his resemblance to her. “All right. I know better than to beat my head against a wall.”
On the TV, the cartoon children were exploring a river, sailing through a dream world on their flying ship.
“So what’s new with you?” I asked, trying to shift her attention away from myself.
“Oh, God, nothing. I’m in a rut, too, although of course mine’s for the good of the country, et cetera, et cetera.” She opened a soda that was sitting on the coffee table. “You know, everybody likes to run around saying it’s a Very Important Job, being a military wife. But I don’t see many of them rushing to sign up for it.” She gestured around us at her parent’s living room, the piles of toys in the corners and the heap of laundry next to us on the sofa. “I love my husband, and my kid’s my whole world, but sometimes I wonder what people must really think of me if they’re basically going to imply this is the best thing I ever could have done.” She studied the can. “Are you scandalized that I said that?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, good.” She smiled. “But probably, you shouldn’t listen to me—this poor guy was up three times last night and I’m just full of sour grapes today.” Reaching across the table, she ruffled her son’s hair. “Really, though, I think you should go on another date with what’s-his-name. What do you have to lose?”
The characters on the screen held hands and began another song.
“I don’t know. I just don’t think it would work.” The tune was beginning to annoy me slightly, although I tried not to show it. “Besides, I find it hard to believe he’s anything more than a curiosity-seeker. I’m not sure what else he would actually want with me.”
“Bullshit. He obviously likes—wait.” Her eyes moved from the TV to me. “‘Curiosity-seeker’?”
“Yeah.” Internally, I scolded myself for having said it so openly. Deep down, I wasn’t sure I really meant it, and anyway there was no need to go digging up things we both so carefully left unexpressed.
“What are you talking about?” she asked. “Curious about what?”
I gave a small laugh. “You know,” I replied awkwardly.
“No, I don’t know. What are you, a carnival? Why would you be drawing curiosity-seekers?”
I didn’t understand why she was pretending not to know what I meant. But she was still waiting for me to go on.
“Because of what happened.”
She still looked perplexed.
I searched for the right words. “Because people think I was…involved. You know that. I’m sure you do.”
“Involved?”
“Well, I mean obviously I was ‘involved.’ But they think I’m responsible.”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“You know.” I couldn’t bring myself to say for the accident, but I knew I didn’t need to.
She was staring at me.
“I don’t think they’ve decided exactly why or how,” I admitted. “I’m not totally self-centered; I know they don’t just sit around thinking about something that happened all those years ago to somebody else. But they have an idea that it’s my fault. That I did it. You know…on purpose. It’s not very fair, but it is what it is. I don’t blame them, but that doesn’t mean I have to let them hang around and make a fool out of me.”
“Kathleen,” she said, and I was surprised by how upset she sounded. “That’s crazy. Where did you hear this?”
“Nowhere, exactly. I just know. It’s all right—I don’t really care.”
“But it’s not true.” Her words were almost breathless.
I put the toy truck down on the table. We both looked at it.
“Honey,” she said. “I mean it. Go get the Bible from my parents’ room, and I’ll swear it to you. I see the same people you do, and I have never—never, never—heard anyone say anything even remotely like that.”
“They don’t have to say it. But like I said, it’s okay. Really, I don’t care.”
She sat back and looked at me.
“Is that what you think?” she asked finally.
“What?”
“Do you think you’re responsible for what happened?”
For a moment, I was left speechless. “Of course not. Why would I think that?”
She leaned toward me, folding her hands on her knees. “Because it would explain a lot.”
I drew back. “I have no idea what you mean.”
It was her turn to search for words that would somehow say what she wanted to say without actually saying it.
“You think I feel guilty about the crash?” My voice was higher than usual, incredulous. “Or the things that came before it?”
“It’s occurred to me to wonder.”
I sat still, feeling short of breath.
“The most frustrating thing,” she said slowly, “for me, as your friend, as someone who loves you and thinks you’re the smartest person she knows, is the way you’ve just sat back and let things happen to you ever since that time. That stupid store that takes advantage of you. Your parents who run around doing God knows what while you take care of your grandmother. All of it. You just let it happen and don’t fight it. It kills me. And I do ask myself why that’s happening.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, shocked and with rising anger.
She gave me a look that had miles of unspoken thought behind it. “I have trouble believing that.”
“The only thing I feel,” I replied forcefully, “is anger at that man. You have no idea how much. It burns me. It keeps me awake at night.” Even saying these things made a feeling rush to my head, something swift and blinding. “It’s the only thing I’ve ever felt and the only thing I ever will. I don’t have room for anything else. I’m sure I’d be a better person if I did, but I don’t. You don’t know what I’d do to him if I ever saw him again.” All those things I thought about at night, that I knew I shouldn’t think about, that I imagined happening to him. The ways I would make him plead for forgiveness that I would never give. The ways I would make him suffer. “I’ve never felt guilty—not for a second. Because I’m not. He is.”
She paused, clearly choosing her words carefully. “I know you say those things,” she said. “Or rather, I know you think them. But you loved him. At one time. You did. I remember it.” She searched my face, looking into my eyes. “And it was a loss, when everything fell apart. When he turned around and started doing all those things you think I don’t know about. You were devastated. You are devastated. But somehow, he made you think it was all your fault. And somewhere at the bottom of all that sadness you’re pretending isn’t there, I think you still think that. That’s what’s so hard.” She rubbed her eyes. “Sometimes, I think you still believe everything he ever said about you. And that you’ll stay where you are, day after day, year after year, just burning yourself up, because of it.”
The fury was so powerful I thought I would choke. “There’s not a thing,” I told her, “not a thing that man said that I believe. I hope he’s in a place where he’s paying for every word of it. I chose this. Everything you see me doing is my decision. I’m taking care of my grandmother because that’s what a good person does. I’m working because I have to work. And I’m out doing what I have to do and what makes me happy. It’s not for you to question that. It’s not for anyone to say I’m such an idiot that I’m still under that—” There was no word for him. “—That asshole’s spell.”
“Take it easy,” she said, reaching for my hands. “I’m not calling you an idiot. I’m just worried. I feel like I sit here watching you set yourself on fire day after day. You’re too proud to admit you’re in pain, so you’re doing more
damage instead. Like some kind of—well, penance, almost. Something that only hurts you over and over. How am I supposed to stand back and watch that?”
I pulled my hands away, scowling even as my body cringed away from her, as if it feared what she was saying.
“You have no right,” I began, “no right—”
As I sputtered, trying to get the sounds out without losing control, Dylan upended his cup. The lid came loose, sending a wave of red juice over his arms and legs, the white carpet. Looking at it, and at us, he began to wail.
“Oh, shit,” Beth sighed. “Shit, shit, shit. Sorry, hon.” She touched my shoulder. “Just wait here, okay?”
But I didn’t wait. As she hurried into the kitchen, I stood up and walked out the door.
* * *
—
It was inventory time at the store. I spent my days in the back room, holding a clipboard as I counted the boxes, making note of what had expired, what needed to be ordered, what we had somehow accumulated too much of, like gummy worms. Although I wouldn’t have said so to anyone else, it was almost soothing, this responsibility for categories and numbers, for imposing order on the universe. I kept my mind fixed on the columns of handwritten figures, as if I were holding my breath, thinking about this task and only this task.
Most days, the stranger would invite me up to the game room to play chess during my lunch hour, and in that, too, I was brisk and resolute. I still lost, but my moves were crisp and decisive, and that counted for something, I thought.
Twice, I came home to find the light on the answering machine blinking. The first time I pressed the button, John’s voice emerged, steady and cheerful, telling me he’d gotten the horses, two mares, and he’d be glad if I came over to try them out.
The second time, it was Beth. She was sorry; these things had been on her mind for a long time; she’d wanted to help; obviously the words had come out wrong. After I listened, I stood there for a moment, then erased the message. When I’d hung up, I could sense my grandmother hovering behind me like an owl, blinking, watching me with her watery eyes while she leaned on the walker my father had forced her to get. I turned away and ignored her.
In the store, I combed through the shelves, homing in on dented cans and torn packets, hauling them out to the dumpster until my hip ached and my face was covered with dust. First Loretta Lynn, then Patsy Cline sang out of the cassette player. I warbled loudly along with Patsy as I dragged boxes toward the door, refusing to acknowledge the stinging in my shoulder.
Eventually, I emerged to find Martin standing by the dumpster, eyeing the boxes and trash bags. “Dispensing justice with an even hand, I see.”
“As always.” I wiped the dust from my eyes with the back of my wrist.
“Mind if I bring some stuff down and work on the porch?”
I hefted a box into the metal bin and shrugged. “Do what you want.”
I’ve got your memory…Patsy sang woefully. Or…has it got me? I hit the fast-forward button impatiently; sometimes, the woman sounded like she’d never had a moment of happiness in her life.
Martin’s “stuff,” it turned out, was a bag full of parts for the mystery machine. I paused on my way out the door with a full garbage bag, looking down at the jumble of metal.
“It’s a bicycle,” I said.
He moved down into a squat, holding a washer up to the light. “I’m not saying anything. You’ll just have to wait and see.” Reaching into his back pocket, he pulled out a pair of reading glasses I had never seen, pushing them onto his nose. They made him look worldlier, I thought, almost sage-like.
After watching him for a moment, I sighed and sat down, propping the bag against the wall.
It was the first time I had truly been still all week. I folded my hands and felt my back relax.
The stranger had found a guitar in the game room a few days earlier, and the sound of it drifted down the hill. I didn’t want to tell him he could be heard, although I knew I probably should. The meandering tunes always made me imagine him as a student, just like any other, sitting outside a bar or café in his mysterious city and picking out a tune, surrounded by laughing friends, an admiring future wife, people smoking and drinking merrily around him, beckoning to passersby on the street. There was something about the vision that left me unable to shake the feeling that it was real, that this really had been him in earlier and happier days, the plucked notes floating through the night air, soft and invisible, like seeds from a dandelion.
“What are we going to do about him?”
Martin was glancing over the parts that surrounded him, looking contentedly mystified. “Who?”
I nodded toward the hostel. “Him.”
He followed my gaze, then looked at me over the rims of the glasses. Picking up a bolt, he rolled it between his thumb and forefinger. “You know, I worked in a pet shop once, before everything. We didn’t name the animals, because the theory was that that way we wouldn’t get attached to them.” He seemed to wait for me to answer. When I didn’t, he said, “It didn’t work, in case you were wondering.”
I let this pass, partly because I was still taking in the words “before everything.” Everyone knew about the stretch of years when Martin had left, although no one had ever asked him directly where he had gone during that time. I had been young then, too young to hear more than mutterings or understand what they meant. If anyone had ever tried to press him for details, he hadn’t given any, and he and I had certainly never talked about it.
“I sometimes wish you weren’t so smart,” I said instead.
“And I,” he replied, “am grateful every day that you are.” Reaching for two hollow bars, he held their flattened ends together to see if the bolt would fit through the hole, but it didn’t. He scratched his head and put the bars back down.
“I’m sorry,” I said, looking down into my palms. “I feel like I haven’t been as kind to you lately as you are to me.”
“Well, I tend to agree with you, to be honest. But it’s okay. We all have our rough times, I know.” He sat back on his heels. “Anything you want to talk about?”
“No, I’m okay. But I do want to figure out what we should do about—”
“Danya. Yes, I know.” He found a washer that matched the bolt, but closed his hand around it. “I don’t think there’s anything to be done,” he said after a moment. “He’s an adult, so it’s not like anybody can force him to go anywhere. And I’m not going to kick him out. As far as I’m concerned, there’ll always be a room here for someone who needs it. He’s not much of a burden, and he’s good about helping me out.” He sat back and stretched out his legs. “Sometimes, I’m tempted to ask if he wants to take over the place so I can go riding off into the sunset.”
“I’m serious.”
“Yeah, I know. I just don’t know what else to tell you. Wish I did.” He folded his legs back under him. “We’re all trying to do what we think is best.”
The isolated notes continued to reach us, sliding by as the invisible presence uphill felt around for the tune. I imagined his bowed head and lowered eyelids, the concentration in his face. The pictures, the ones from my searching about Uzbekistan, appeared in my memory, and I found myself looking over my shoulder toward the hill that led to the road, the one that ran past the prison camp. A thought came into my mind, and I turned it over, pondering it without fully understanding its shape yet.
“Did you ever hear,” I said eventually, “anything about a sweat box?”
Martin had resumed trying to fit metal pieces together. “A what?”
“A sweat box. Up at the old camp. Like…some kind of shed where they put people in the summer to punish them. To make them too hot.”
“You mean that POW camp they had during the war? No, I’ve never heard anything like that.” He thought about it, his expression puzzled. “Actually, I almost never hear anything at all about that place. Why?”
I looked down at the toe of my shoe as it swung above the boards. “Do y
ou think it could be true?”
He scooped up a handful of screws and began sorting them into piles with a finger. “Well, I don’t think I could say without knowing more about it.” I watched him look up and think of something else. “Also, you know, this is America.”
“And?”
“Oh, don’t be so cynical. I mean, I’m as clearheaded as the next guy about some of the stuff we’ve done. My uncles were all in the ’Nam. But no, I’m not sure I could believe we brought a bunch of guys back here so we could stick them in some kind of torture device.” Still holding the screws, he began arranging the bars around him, like a skeleton. “Doesn’t that seem a little inefficient to you?”
“I heard there was one. And I think people will do just about anything if they think they have a right to do it.”
He shook his head.
“I prefer,” he said, “to have some faith in my fellow man. I assume people are good until I have a reason to believe otherwise.
I kicked a toe against the floorboards. “You must deal with a lot of disappointment.”
“Nope—almost never. In fact, I’ve found it’s not at all a bad way to go through life.” Picking up a bar, he seemed to hesitate. “You know, I know sometimes things happen that—I understand life gets tough sometimes. Believe me, I get that. But no matter what happens, I think it’s best to be able to trust other people. Without that…well, you lose yourself. You wind up doing things you regret. And I wouldn’t want to see that happen to someone like you.” His forehead wrinkled. “I think it would be something of a tragedy, actually.”
He put the bar back down, and I walked to the dumpster, the bag dangling from my hand. Heaving it into the yawning gap, I stood there, knowing I should thank him, unable to repress a shudder.
* * *
—
One day, not long before the end, I’d lost my mind.
Things hadn’t been so bad in the preceding weeks; it was early summer, warm, and the red, white, and blue bunting was still hanging in Carlisle where we’d gone to the Memorial Day parade a few days before. We’d sat on the sidewalk, watching the fire trucks and knots of Little League players and Girl Scouts go by, Amos holding my hand, people jabbering away happily in lawn chairs behind us, jumbo cups of iced tea in their hands. Some men in army and navy uniforms had gone by, waving, and Amos had waved back; they were his friends. “No one’s ever gonna throw me a parade,” he’d sighed, but when I’d glanced at him warily, he’d been smiling.
Ways to Hide in Winter Page 16