Ways to Hide in Winter

by Sarah St. Vincent

  Amos grasped my wrist, turned, and marched out. I followed him, my steps stuttering, emerging into the night air behind his broad back.

  Outside the house, as if in a dream, my parents were sitting in their truck, staring at Amos, at me. They looked confused, frightened. They got out, their mouths open, but they seemed to have lost their voices.

  Amos passed by them, not turning his head, dragging me after him as his fingers dug into my arm. I glanced back over my shoulder and saw them standing there like statues, my mother’s hair fluttering in the night breeze, both of them pressed back against their truck as if pinned there.

  They let me go.

  Amos’s pickup rumbled down the mountain, bearing us back, back to the house where the rag I’d dropped still lay in the yard. Later, all I would remember about the ride would be the sharp smell that seemed to rise from my own body, a mingling of sweat and fear.

  “I’m sorry,” I said as he turned off the engine. He nodded and opened his door, getting out with the solid sound of steel-toed boots against asphalt. I looked quietly through the windshield as he made his way to my side. The door next to me opened with a creak.

  He helped me down. I looked up at him, but he turned away and walked into the house.

  In the kitchen, there was a cup of coffee on the table, cold, next to the cordless phone. The creamer had formed a skin on top. The chair in front of the cup was pushed back, and I pictured Amos sitting there, hunched over, staring at the phone, waiting for it to light up.

  He sat down heavily and unlaced his boots. I stood by the sink, waiting without being sure what I was waiting for. A dim, grayish glow was beginning to appear on the horizon. The grass outside was wet with dew.

  Finally, with a sigh, he stood, pressing his knuckles into the table. Rubbing his face with his hands, he moved toward me, seeming to look past me, through the window. Then, with a gentleness that surprised me, he took my elbow, turning me and steering me back toward the door. We walked into the garage, the empty, oil-stained space where the truck was usually parked. As my eyes adjusted to the dark—taking in the same rows of shelves and boxes as usual, the saws and wrenches hanging on the wall, a bag of nails on the workbench—he released my elbow. I felt him look down at me. Then he walked back into the house, closing the door behind him.

  I stood still for a moment, bewildered. There didn’t seem to be anything I needed to clean up, any boxes to pack or unpack. In my confusion, I almost forgot my exhaustion, my throbbing feet.

  Glancing around, still finding nothing unusual, I approached the door and turned the knob.

  It was locked.

  “Amos?” I whispered.

  There was no answer.

  Outside, far away, I heard a rooster crow on one of the Mennonite farms, its sound in the distance a thin wail.

  I rattled the knob again, harder this time. Gathering my courage, I called more loudly. “Amos?”

  I heard his footsteps as he left the kitchen and mounted the stairs.

  Just then, I looked up at where the automatic garage door opener should have been. Instead, I saw only a splaying set of wires, jutting into space.

  Fear rising in my throat, I stepped backward, lifting the doormat, looking for the house key, feeling for it in the dark.

  It was gone.

  I stood there alone, disbelieving, miles from anyone.

  Locked in.

  7

  My assault on the disorder of the storage room continued. I tracked the mud of midwinter in and out, swabbing it away every evening, restoring it with stamping boots every morning. With a sponge and a ladder, I washed the walls, ignoring the possibility of slipping. I let my humming fill the cavern-like space until I was making enough sound for two people, sometimes drumming my hands against the metal safe that stood in one corner as I passed.

  The stranger watched my movements from the hostel porch, his eyes peering out above his scarf. Finally, he came down.

  “You know,” I told him, “you’re not making yourself any less conspicuous, standing around up there all bug-eyed. Especially with the scarf.”

  “You have a very pretty singing voice,” he said.

  I looked at him and snorted, flinging a box into the dumpster.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Penance,” I replied, striding back into the dusty cave. “Apparently.”

  He followed me to the doorway, concerned. “What?”

  “Nothing. Never mind. It was a joke.” I wiped my face, feeling a passing tightness in my chest. “Sort of.”

  With a carpet knife, I ripped open another box, rifled through its contents, and hauled it off the pile.

  “What’s in there?” he asked.

  “These?” I looked down. “Swedish Fish.”

  “Do Swedish Fish actually go bad?”

  I sighed. “That’s not the point.”

  “I see.”

  I threw the box away, but somehow, as I hoisted it into the bin, I felt the energy begin to drain out of me. I wiped my palms on my jeans and looked at him. He had turned to take in the view of the park, the endless swells of rock and tree, the bare limbs that almost looked as if they’d given up, given in, turned to stone.

  It was still beautiful, in its way.

  I walked over and stood beside him.

  “If this were the last thing you ever saw,” he asked, “would you be happy?”

  I was quiet for a moment, wondering what had prompted him to ask. Whether he somehow knew that I had once stood here asking myself the same thing.

  “It’s not like that,” I said at length.

  “What do you mean?”

  “When something actually happens. When you think the end is coming. You don’t even notice what you see.”

  He looked at me. I returned to the dumpster and pulled out the box I’d just tossed in.

  “Have some Swedish Fish,” I said.

  He took a packet from my hands. Before he could say anything, I launched myself back into the storeroom, tearing into another box, and by the time I came back out, he was gone.

  It had been almost three months since I’d gotten a postcard from my brother.

  On a Sunday, I finally called John back, holding the phone for a long moment before pushing the buttons. When he picked up, his voice had the same pleasant tone it always seemed to have.

  “You said something about riding?” I asked.

  He laughed. “I reckon I did. You want to come over?”

  When I got there, I followed him up the hill to his barn, where we saddled up. Dust and bits of hay filtered down from the loft above, floating in the cold, bright light as I helped tighten the girths. They were good horses, not too old and not too young, trotting effortlessly over the swells of the fields to the line of trees where we picked up a trail. John sat heavily in the saddle but held himself straight, one hand on the pommel and the other on his hat. I tucked the reins between my fingers the way I’d been taught when I was little, feeling the horse’s sides under my legs as she exhaled and snorted, smelling the unmistakably animal odor of her sweat, listening to the creaking and clanking of the leather and stirrups.

  On our way back to the barn, she started to canter and I let her, nervously at first, but then holding myself up so I was taut, poised above her, flying. She picked up speed, stretching her head forward. I’d forgotten what it was like to move so quickly, to feel so weightless, hooves pounding under me and a mane whipping my lowered face. Clods of mud flew up behind us, but the horse’s legs were steady, her fixation on the food and warmth to come giving her a certainty that carried us both. When she finally slowed, we were both panting. I let myself fall forward and patted her neck.

  John trotted up behind me, bumping along instead of posting.

  “I didn’t know you were gonna do that,” he said.

  “Me either.” I knotted my fingers into my sweaty hair, pulling until it felt good, then dropping them.

  We looked over the land. From here, the fa
rm looked immense, the fields stretching away, interrupted by looming oak and elm trees. I preferred being on the mountain to this sense of space, but, I thought, this wasn’t so bad.

  I closed my eyes and then opened them, feeling as if a heavy hand had removed itself from my head.

  John was watching me.

  “Thanks,” I told him, twisting around to look him in the face. “Really.”

  He smiled widely, resettling his hat on his head.

  “Any time,” he said.

  On my way home, I sang along with the radio, tapping the wheel, cracking the window so my hair blew in the wind even though it was cold. At a convenience store, I reached up with my good arm and piled things into the basket, my clothes smelling of horse sweat, my muscles satisfyingly weary. When I swung my things onto the counter, I did it as if they weighed nothing.

  As I approached my grandmother’s house, though, I saw a strange car parked in the drive. Its purple hood glinted in the sun, the fields of patchy snow and broken cornstalks reflected in its windows. Cradling the groceries in one arm, I pushed through the door to find my aunt Jeanine—the one from Pittsburgh—sitting at the dining room table with my grandmother and my parents.

  My stomach sank.

  “Oh,” I said, looking from one face to another.

  Except for my grandmother, they looked startled, as if they’d forgotten I lived there. Two tall, clear bottles sat at the center of the table like shrunken monuments, and my parents and Jeanine had shot glasses in front of them. Jeanine’s face was brown and battered-looking, her hair a neglected gray pulled back in a bandanna. My father was leaning forward on his elbows, half-slumped; my mother, I noticed, looked pink and disheveled, as if she had just come in after walking very far in a brisk wind.

  “Kathleen!” she crowed, focusing vaguely in the direction of my face and blinking. My grandmother glanced away and smirked.

  Sighing through my nose, I left the bag of groceries at the bottom of the stairs and trudged up to my room. At the bottom of the closet, there was an old cardboard suitcase that had once been my grandfather’s, olive-green and smelling of cigar smoke. I had nearly filled it when I heard my grandmother’s slow, labored step on the stairs.

  “You’re not staying?” she asked, not sounding surprised in the least.

  “Nope.” I shoved a last pair of socks into the suitcase and closed it.

  “Suit yourself,” she said, a phrase she had learned from TV. A thin, shining line of mucus on her upper lip showed where she had recently been connected to the oxygen tank, which I assumed was downstairs by the table, near her cup of cooling tea. Tea, too, was something she had lately been inspired to take up by the television. Apparently all the older women on there—all the contented ones, anyway—drank it. In my grandmother’s hands, it was like a wish for a happier fate.

  I bent down to search for an extra pair of sneakers under the bed, and she clumped away toward her own bedroom, a place she had rarely gone since she’d begun sleeping downstairs on the couch. A few minutes later, she returned, clasping a faded piece of paper and holding it out to me. It was a twenty-dollar bill.

  “What’s this?” I asked, staring at the note as she forced it into my palm with fingers that were surprisingly strong.

  “What does it look like?” She turned toward the stairs.

  I stared at her retreating back, the crooked coral dress she had gotten at a yard sale. “I don’t need your money, Grandma.”

  “So?” She began lowering herself down the stairs, back toward the sounds of the party in the dining room, where glass was clinking and thumping against wood. “Go leave and do something fun. It’ll serve them right.”

  I left with a nod goodbye to my aunt, who watched me with surprise and seemed to be asking a question of my grandmother. My father looked up at me, a pack of cards in his hands, and we held each other’s gaze for a moment. Then his eyes flitted away uncomfortably and he began to deal.

  “Make sure she takes her meds,” I ordered the table in general, pointing at my grandmother. “If anything goes wrong, it’s on you and I’ll never forget it.”

  The door closed solidly behind me as I walked to the car.

  At the hostel, Martin looked at me quizzically. I dropped my suitcase on the floor in front of the reception desk and reached for my wallet.

  “Are you crazy? You’re not paying for anything.” He pushed my money back at me. “It’s not like we’ve got any big crowds tonight, anyway. We’re still just the Two Musketeers up here, me and him.”

  “Thanks. I’ll just need some sheets and stuff then, I guess.”

  He examined me before turning to the linen closet, my mud-spattered jeans and tired posture. “Everything okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s fine.”

  He handed me a room key, and I accepted it with a gratitude I was torn between expressing and hiding. Then he handed me something else, a white card that had been sitting on the polished wood of the desk.

  Tyler MacDougal, it said. Pennsylvania State Police.

  I turned it over; the edges of the card felt sharp in my palm. “What’s this?”

  “They were here earlier today. I thought you should know.”

  I stared at him. “What for?”

  “I’m sure you can guess.”

  “What did they say? Why didn’t you tell me right away?”

  “Well, you weren’t here, and I didn’t see any sense in worrying you.” He closed the ledger. “Someone,” he said, “thinks I might be harboring an illegal immigrant, it seems.”

  I looked at him and swallowed, the specter of Jerry’s face passing through my mind.

  “I’m sure it’s one of the rangers,” he added. “I don’t know who else would know or care what I do up here. I could be running the biggest murder-for-hire operation east of the Mississippi and nobody’d be the wiser.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Well, nothing, in the end. They came, they asked a couple of questions, and they left. Which is exactly as it should be, since nobody’s doing anything wrong.”

  “What kind of questions? Was he here?”

  “He was down in the game room. They didn’t see him.” He toyed with his pencil. “They wanted to know if he was working for me. I said no, I hadn’t paid him a dime, he just helped me out with chores sometimes. They then very kindly explained to me what ‘harboring’ means.” He scratched the back of his arm. “I reminded them that I’m running a hostel. Harboring people is what I do.”

  “That’s it? They didn’t go looking for him?”

  “They didn’t have a warrant. I’m not as dumb as I look—I know how these guys work. I asked them to leave, and they did.”

  I imagined Martin face-to-face with the police, saying those words, and was struck with a mixture of awe and apprehension. “You said that?”

  “You bet I did. If you let them mess with you once, they get the idea they can do it forever. It’s a gamble—if they decide to come back at you, they’re probably gonna do it pretty hard. But I don’t see how they have any kind of leg to stand on—they’re just doing something somebody told them to do. And at the end of the day, I’m willing to bet they have better things to do than drive all the way up here again to chase some rumor. Nobody gets promoted over something like this.”

  I was still watching the scene in my mind with amazement. “I would never have known to do what you did.”

  “Yeah, well. One of the many things I learned in my misspent youth.” He smiled lopsidedly. “Anyway, I don’t think there’s any call to panic. Besides, panicking is how bad decisions get made. No sense in doing that here.”

  “Does he know?” I lifted my chin to indicate the floor above us, where the stranger’s room was.

  “Yeah, it would’ve been pretty hard not to hear the guy stomping around here like he owned the place. I think Danya’s upstairs now, if you want to talk to him. Here, let me carry that suitcase for you.”

  “No, I’ve got it.”
>
  I climbed the stairs as quickly as I could and made my way down the darkened corridor.

  There was no response when I knocked.

  “It’s Kathleen,” I called.

  There was a pause, and then a sound like the shuffling of papers. The door opened a crack, showing a cautious eye and wet hair. He must have just showered.

  “Oh,” he said. “Yes, it is.” He opened the door until I could see his face perched on its white neck. “I thought you had gone home?”

  “I did go home.” I put the suitcase down. “Now I’m back. Are you okay?”

  “Yes, of course. Come in,” he urged, opening the door to reveal a darkened room lit by a single lamp. I saw that he was naked from the waist up, a towel clutched around his hips. Averting my eyes, I saw a book on the bed, a pile of papers, a pen. His shoes were aligned by the dented folding table that was meant to serve as a desk, his clothing folded neatly and stacked on the broad windowsill, the guitar propped in a corner. He raised the blind, but the room became no brighter, late as it was. There were long pink lines on his back, I noticed, faint but discernible against the pale skin, like the creases that come from sleeping on a wrinkled sheet, but deeper and darker. Embarrassed, I looked at the floor.

  He turned to face me, and I caught a glimpse of other pink marks on the inside of his arm as he reached for a sweater. These were small and round, not much bigger than a dime, and quickly disappeared from view as he pulled the shirt over his head, catching the towel awkwardly with one hand before it dropped. “Please sit,” he said, gesturing toward the metal chair by the desk, then caught sight of the suitcase in the hall. His eyes widening, he looked back at me. “Are you staying here?”

  “Yes. I mean, not here in this room, obviously. In another one.”

  “But you live very close to here. Or at least, that’s what I’ve always thought.” He remained standing, looking like an absurd scarecrow in his sweater and towel. Close up, I could see that he looked fatigued, but there was nothing in his face of the shock or terror I had expected to find.

  “Yeah, I do,” I said. “My grandmother’s just having guests, so I decided to clear out for a while.”