PART THREE
1
I woke up the next morning with my jaw aching, having clenched my teeth together as I’d slept. The buggies went by on their way to somewhere. My grandmother poured herself a glass of water. I sat up slowly and pushed aside the afghans.
I’d retrieved my suitcase from the hostel the day before, slipping in and out without anyone seeing me. I hadn’t told Martin what I’d done. I hadn’t told anybody.
I showered and tied my hair into a knot, noticing that I was losing weight. The scars stood out as starkly as ever, but I ignored them, pulling on my clothes and lifting the hood of the sweatshirt over my head. I didn’t bother with a coat as I walked to Miller’s, the small grocery store that stood in a dirt patch by the Centerville intersection. The wind bit at my legs under my jeans, and the fields and pastures had a vacant look, as if the end of the world, Judgment Day, had come and gone.
The morning after the fire had been like that. When it had happened, a few months before the stranger had come, I’d been at work as usual, washing the accumulated grease from the insides of the windows and listening to the wind. It was whistling around the sides of the store in bursts, bearing leaves and twigs that brushed against the stone walls. As I’d kept listening, I’d realized there was something unusual about it, that it couldn’t seem to settle on a direction. There was an awfully strange storm coming, I’d thought.
By the time I’d smelled the smoke, looking around at the grill and the heater with increasing panic, the rangers had shown up, their tires screeching as they’d pulled into the lot. I’d left the store the way they’d demanded but found myself transfixed when I got outside, frozen by the sight of thin tongues of smoke wafting from between the trees. The rangers were already racing down toward the town’s firehouse; when I thought about it later, I realized the phone lines that connected the park to the outside world must already have gone dead. Finally turning away, I’d run as best I could to the car and begun my own drive down the slope, but the day seemed to be growing dim and it was increasingly difficult to see. The trees along the side of the road were distinct enough, but behind them was a deepening screen of gray, one that continued in a vault overhead, as if I were driving through some kind of cathedral in a grim dream. The smoke slowly began to edge across the road, a patch here, a patch there. I’d turned on my headlights and held a sleeve to my mouth, breathing through the fabric. In the rearview mirror, almost nothing was visible: just a few yards of asphalt, a curve of floating ferns and jagged boulders, and then an unearthly blankness.
All the familiar landmarks had been hidden from view, and I’d reached the valley floor suddenly, emerging from the corridor of thickening darkness to find that I was about to run the stop sign at the foot of the mountain. I’d slammed on the brakes and found myself staring at a herd of Guernsey cows that had backed up against the barbed wire on the other side of the intersection, their faces turned ominously to the sky, bellowing and stamping. A helicopter had whirred overhead and disappeared, followed by another. I’d driven home, pausing at the railroad crossing to take another look at the mountain in the rearview mirror. It was burning, all right: you could see it. The normal autumn mosaic of green and gold on the north face was overhung with thick patches of gray, billowing slowly and broadly toward the sky.
The next day, I’d driven up to find the forest like lace, untouched pockets of maples and beeches interspersed with ghostly stands of burned trunks, charred javelins surrounded by layers of smoldering ash. I’d parked and walked through the ruined terrain in my boots, the ground crackling and still smoking under my feet. Later that day, I’d heard the park buildings had been spared, but hadn’t found the news as reassuring as expected. I’d thought I’d known what this place was, thought I’d known its every rhythm, but I’d been wrong. It was so much greater, so much more powerful, than I was. And I barely understood it at all.
I strode into Miller’s and glanced around at the shelves. The shop was dark, giving off the smell of newsprint and candy and the metal of the guns they sold in the back. The woman behind the counter looked from the TV to me without changing the angle of her body.
I approached the counter.
“I need a map,” I said.
“Pennsylvania?” the woman asked without interest. “Maryland? Eastern U.S.?”
I thought about it. “Eastern U.S.,” I told her. On the TV, there was a burst of laughter. Two women in an apartment in some city, thin and elegant even in their jeans, with pretty, swingy hair, were having an argument. The camera lingered on their faces as they circled around a coffee table, pointing at one another with manicured fingers.
I put my money on the counter and left.
Back in my grandmother’s kitchen, I dug for the box of tea I knew was lurking there and put the kettle on, watching the flame dance under the metal, losing myself in my thoughts. Then, leaning against the counter, I spread out the map—Florida Keys to New Brunswick, it said on the front—and traced the roads with a finger.
For a long time, I took in the patches of green that were forests, the hard-edged gray blots of cities, the brown dots that were mid-sized towns. Sipping my tea, I traced the roads with a fingertip, thinking without any resolution.
Then I folded the map and carried it up to my room, where I slid it under the mattress.
That night, I made shepherd’s pie for dinner but found I couldn’t eat it, dissecting it with my fork while my grandmother dug in. If nothing else, she had a healthy appetite.
I watched her for a time.
“Grandma,” I said finally.
“What?”
I fiddled with the silverware next to my plate. There was something I wanted to ask her, but I didn’t know how to ask it, or even exactly what it was. It had something to do with a sense that I was being watched, tested, judged for what I did in these hours. To my surprise, it came out as “Do you believe in God?”
She glanced up, a streak of mashed potatoes trailing along one cheek. “Do I believe in God?” Her tone was suspicious, as if she smelled a trick. She was wearing the flowered dress she only wore when I forgot to do the laundry.
I decided to stick with it. “Yeah.”
She considered the question, her mouth opening slightly as she chewed. “No, I don’t think I do. Why?”
“Did you ever?”
She pinched a corner of bread from the slice on her plate, pushing it through the pool of meat juices. “I guess so. At one time.”
“But you changed your mind.”
“Yeah.” She thought about it, the powdery skin of her brow crinkling. “I must’ve.”
“Was there a reason?”
“I don’t know.”
I studied her from across the table. “You still go to mass, though.”
“Yeah.” She shrugged her thin, bird-like shoulders. “Got to go somewhere. Why?”
“I don’t know. Never mind.”
We lapsed into silence. I imagined the stranger sitting on the edge of his cot, tense and worried, afraid to leave the room but just as afraid to stay in it. Standing up, pacing, fixing his gaze on the door, waiting for someone. The police. Someone like Jerry, with his long black gun. Me.
I closed my eyes.
“Your father had a sister,” my grandmother said suddenly.
I looked up at her. “Sure,” I said, wondering what had brought this up. “Aunt Jeanine.”
“No.”
I looked at her. She blinked back at me in her tortoise-like manner.
“Different sister,” she said. “Lulu.”
I eyed her warily. “I don’t have an Aunt Lulu.”
“You did. Before you were born. Long time before that.” A streak of gravy had found its way into her hair, causing one curl to droop. “She had problems.”
“What do you mean?”
“Problems,” she said again vaguely. “She didn’t develop right. She had problems in her brain. Seizures and other things.”
I knitted my fingers
together, uncertain of what to say. “I…didn’t know that.”
She shook her head. “They talked me into giving her up. The county. They took her away. She died when she was three.” She looked down, aligning her fork and knife along the edge of her napkin. “Three years and five months. She never said a word. That’s what they told me.” Coughing, she covered her mouth. “That kind of thing used to happen back then. It’s not like now, when they can fix these things. Everything was different.” She coughed again and reached for her glass of milk.
“After they told me she died, I was just so tired. That’s when I stopped thinking about things like God, I guess. I just didn’t have the energy. It takes energy to believe in that kind of thing, that’s what I found out, and I didn’t have it. I was busy taking care of your dad by then. He was almost two.
“The priest told me my faith would come back, but it didn’t. I never told him that, though. I didn’t feel like arguing about it.” She crumbled a piece of bread.
I opened my mouth, but she went on. “I just didn’t see the point of it—living. I did everything I was supposed to do. I did what I thought was best. I thought it would help her when I gave her up and it didn’t. I thought it was the right thing.” Her eyes flicked up, and she peered at me. “You looked a bit like her, when you were little. I always thought so.”
I shifted in my chair. “Do you have a picture of her?”
“No.” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “No pictures. We didn’t have a camera back then.” She took a long sip of milk. “I’m the only one left who remembers what she looked like.” Then, with a wry look, “Me and God, I guess.”
She began to pull the dishes and silverware toward her, stacking them in a careless pile. When that was done, however, she became still.
“I did what I thought was best,” she said again. “To this day, I wonder if I was right or wrong. I never meant to hurt her. I never wanted that.” She stopped, seeming to reconsider what else she had been going to say.
The kitchen sink dripped in the silence.
“For the life of me,” she went on finally, “I don’t know how it is that we wind up doing bad things at the exact moment we think we’re doing good ones. That’s one thing I’ve never been able to figure out.”
We sat together. It seemed to me, as I absorbed her words, that the house was watching us, as if we were characters in a play.
“Can I ask you a question?” I said eventually.
She grunted, crumpling her napkin and dropping it on top of the plates.
“If you knew someone who had done something bad—I mean something really, really bad…What do you think you would do?”
She pursed her lips, eying me suspiciously. “Like who?”
“Just someone. Like a friend.”
She raised her shoulders. “I don’t know. Was it something they did to me?”
“No.”
“Well, then,” she said, bracing herself against the table and pushing herself up, “I don’t see how it would be any of my business. But I don’t know—I don’t sit around and think about these things the way you do.” She looked around. “Where’s that thing your father got me?”
I retrieved her walker from the living room, watching her as I gathered the dishes until she was safely settled onto the sofa. She turned on the television, raised the volume, and lit a cigarette.
You still think about her, I thought. Lulu. Then, abruptly, I realized that I was looking at a woman who had never stopped thinking about her, a woman for whom the past wasn’t past and never would be. Who was seized on the inside by doubt and regret.
Who was any number of things I suddenly and powerfully recognized.
“I’m sorry,” I told her that night before I went to bed.
“For what?”
“For what you told me. Aunt Lulu.”
“Yeah,” she replied, in a voice that was somehow not her voice—the voice of a younger woman, a woman who was not yet sitting before me and smoking her life away, the woman who had stood in this same place some fifty years earlier and watched her children play on the rug. “Me, too.”
2
I turned the key and pushed on the wooden door, which had begun to stick in its frame. The lights came on. The ice cream case and the grill showed their blank, shining surfaces.
I didn’t think I needed to tell the stranger what I’d done. I’d hardly given the ranger who’d taken my call anything to go on, and anyway, I doubted she’d written any of it down. Even if she had, as far as she knew, I was just a crazy person who could barely manage to string a sentence together.
Still, I felt uneasy. When I opened my book, I found I couldn’t read it and pushed it aside.
I had just unwrapped my sandwich and was gazing down at it, struggling to work up a desire to eat, when the door opened and the state troopers walked in.
There were two of them, a man and a woman. The man was lanky and awkward-looking, the woman petite and focused, her frizzy red hair pulled back in a knot.
I stood as they entered, my mouth dry.
As much as I’d been agonizing, I hadn’t truly expected them. Not here. Not in front of me.
Not at all.
“Ms. Guttshall?” the woman said, taking a step toward me. She was remarkably compact, like one of the women wrestlers they sometimes showed on TV.
I took a deep breath that I hoped they wouldn’t notice. “McElwain,” I said.
She checked some papers on a clipboard. “Ms. McElwain. We were wondering if we could talk with you.”
I rested my palms on the counter, as if to show I had nothing to hide, even though something within me had gone cold. “Sure.”
“You know Mr. Landis? Up the hill?”
She meant Martin.
“Sure,” I said again, attempting to shrug.
“You seen anything unusual going on up there lately?”
I sucked in my lower lip, trying to put on a puzzled look while my mind raced. “Unusual,” I repeated.
“Yeah. Like, anybody going in or out at odd hours, for example. People maybe you don’t know.”
“Well,” I said slowly. “I mean, it’s a hostel.”
“I’m talking about people who don’t look like hostel guests.”
I looked down at the counter, gripping my hands together and studying them for a moment. Then I looked up, my pulse thrumming in my ears.
I had to choose.
And I chose.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
“No?” The woman raised her eyebrows. “Are you sure? One of my colleagues was up there the other day, but unfortunately Mr. Landis wasn’t very cooperative. We thought you might be able to help.”
I forced myself to meet her eyes. “No, ma’am,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s a criminal offense to lie to the police, ma’am.” She said it without anger, but with firmness. “Did you know Mr. Landis spent three years in the federal penitentiary up at Lewisburg?”
I stiffened, trying not to show the surprise I could tell she wanted me to show. Her partner was watching me keenly, my discomfort apparently rousing him from his boredom.
“No,” I replied.
“He did. Aggravated assault. Heroin deal gone bad.” She paused, as if for effect. “Victim suffered severe spinal injuries. He won’t be able to walk again.”
I crossed my arms. “I didn’t know that,” I told her, keeping my voice even. “And I don’t care to know it now.”
She sighed. “Please, ma’am. Don’t make this hard. Where’s your friend?”
“My friend?”
The man spoke up for the first time, with an authority I hadn’t expected.
“Yes, your friend,” he said, his tone so dispassionate it almost gave me chills. “The Russian guy. Rangers’ve had their eye on him for weeks.”
I glanced from one face to the other. A deep, churning pit seemed to open in my chest.
“I don’t know anyone from Russia,” I
said finally.
The woman looked as if she planned to stare me down. “Do you know what ‘aiding and abetting’ means?”
“Yes, ma’am.” I set my face in a mask. “And I’ve never met anyone from Russia.”
“You haven’t?”
“No, ma’am,” I said. In a bizarre way, I was almost tempted to laugh. “I haven’t.”
“You don’t have any idea who I might be talking about?”
I had just opened my mouth to reply when the stranger himself appeared on the other side of the screen door, his expression hopeful but anxious. His lips stretching into a nervous, apologetic smile, he was glancing to the side, checking for unwanted visitors in the wrong places. Horrified, I watched him reach for the doorknob.
“I don’t know any Russian guy,” I repeated loudly, the sound of my voice so harsh and strange that the policewoman took a step back.
Behind the screen door, the stranger’s face changed as he registered my words, emptying in shock. Then he opened the door.
“I believe you are looking for me,” he said.
The two figures in uniform turned around.
“You stay here,” the tall officer barked at me as the woman reached for the stranger’s elbow.
They moved out of sight and I rushed to the door, leaning over the porch railing as they moved up the hill. The stranger’s foot slipped, and he dropped to his knee in the mud. The tall officer grabbed his sleeve and yanked him up, pushing him forward. The hostel door closed behind them.
* * *
—
“That was so foolish,” I told him.
We stood next to each other on the cold, pale sand at the edge of Fuller Lake. The moon was so full and close-looking that it seemed like it could sit in the palm of the hand. The tapering fingers of the pines jutted into the sky, reflected in the water below along with the few stars that were visible alongside the moon’s light.
The stranger carefully unscrewed the cap on the bottle he was holding, the one I had brought from the cache I’d long ago found at the back of the storage room, and took a sip. “I had to do it. You couldn’t see yourself. You looked—” He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and shook his head, handing the bottle back to me. “Besides, it was better for them to hear it from me. If I show I’m not afraid of them, maybe I can gain just a bit more time.”
Ways to Hide in Winter Page 21