Sarah St.Vincent - Ways to Hide in Winter

“Yes, I suppose,” he replied uncertainly.

I watched him as he looked down at his feet.

“It’s kind of a secret trail,” I told him, somehow guessing the cause of his reluctance. “No one’s going to see us. I can’t remember the last time I saw anyone else up there.”

He peered behind the car at the state road and the steep rise of the mountain beyond. “Are you sure?”

“Well.” I shifted into park and cracked my knuckles, looking down at a cut on my palm. “I can’t make any promises, I guess. But if anyone does see us, it’ll be some guy out walking his dog who’ll forget us as soon as we’re gone. Nobody really goes there. It’s just too hard to find.”

It wasn’t hard to find, of course, if you knew to look for it. But nobody did. An unmarked trail on private land, it didn’t appear on any maps, not even old ones. Amos had shown it to me, long ago, maybe six months after we’d met. It had been spring then, the mountain laurels and rhododendrons blooming and the stream running. I had been stunned by it, thought it was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen, although at the time I hadn’t made note of where it was. I was with Amos, my first serious boyfriend, the man with the quiet eyes and work-lined hands who said he loved me. It was hard to pay attention to anything else.

The truth was that much later I’d had to call Amos’s mother to figure out where it was. Amos was dead. I had just left the hospital with a shattered hip and arm that had each been bolted back together through a month of surgery, two fractured ribs, and a disorienting double vision I hadn’t mentioned to anyone, since it seemed impolite to have something else go wrong when I was the center of so much effort already. The morphine floated me along like a great white balloon. Everyone was very nice. They didn’t talk about Amos, although they knew I knew, and gradually it came to seem as if he had been washed away by this month of stillness, of a small, hushed television in a corner, nurses making notes, pills in cups, meals on trays. When Beth visited, I cried, but I didn’t know why. The rest of the time, I wasn’t really sad. Just floating along, anchored only by the persistent pain of bones held together by metal.

I had called Cindy when I was home, even though I was still months away from being able to walk properly, let alone drive. “Cindy,” I had said into the phone, sitting in my grandmother’s dining room, and had instantly forgotten why I’d called.

“Kathleen,” she had breathed on the other end. Then, with difficulty, “How are you? I was glad to hear you were out of the hospital.”

“I’m fine,” I’d replied dreamily. The two white pills I took every four hours were powerful stuff, making me feel as if I were miles away from my own body. Every so often, they made me giggle unreasonably, which always seemed to unnerve whoever was within earshot. I had no idea, at the time, that they would stay with me for so long. “How are you?”

“We’re all right,” she said, although she meant, of course, that her world was chaos, a whirlwind of sadness and despair, and that she would never know a moment of happiness ever again.

“I’m so sorry,” I told her.

“It’s not your fault,” she replied, as if she had rehearsed saying this. Although she didn’t know it, and never would, she was right. It wasn’t.

“I was just wondering,” I began, and then paused, struggling to remember what I had intended to ask her.

“Kathleen?” she’d said after a long moment had passed.

“Yes. I’m sorry. I was wondering,” I’d said slowly, the thought gradually coming back to me, “if you know where Tumbling Run is. I’d like to go there, when I’m better. But I can’t seem to remember.”

“Tumbling Run?” she had echoed, surprised and perhaps beginning to grow angry, a combination of confusion and grief.

“We used to go there,” I’d said, suddenly feeling very tired, as if I were climbing a long spiral staircase whose top I couldn’t see. “A long time ago. Before we were married.”

“Oh.” She had reflected on this for a moment. I could picture her standing in her neat living room, looking stricken. She was a psychologist, one of the only professionals I had ever known, and everything in her house seemed somehow consoling but impersonal: dried bouquets on the mantel, needlepoint pillows on the couch. Amos, with his drawl and his dusty hands and boots, had always seemed out of place there. I probably had, too; maybe that was one of the reasons she hadn’t wanted him to marry me.

“It’s on South Mountain,” she had said finally. “Right before the county line. There’s a row of rocks. A semicircle. That’s the entrance.” She drew a deep breath. “We used to take the boys there when they were little.”

“Yes. Thank you. I’m very sorry,” I had said, and carefully returned the receiver to its cradle. A few minutes later, it had become difficult to remember who I’d been talking to.

The following day, I’d been surprised to find a card from her in the mailbox, small and white with violets on the front. “Please don’t call again,” it said on the inside in her rounded cursive, although it said other things as well that were meant to sound nicer. I had looked at it and then, for some reason, put it in a drawer. It was probably still hidden in my grandmother’s house somewhere, gathering dust.

Six months later, when I could drive, I had gone up to the trail in all its solitary beauty, passing the state park and the general store on the way. While driving back, I had stopped at the store and spoken to the owner, my mother’s second cousin’s husband, an older man named Herman. The next day, I had found myself with a job that didn’t require me to talk or move much, and that allowed me to rest for long periods on the porch when my pelvis began to ache, as it often did. The hikers were friendly but had little interest in prying into the life of the woman who was cooking their hamburgers. After a time, I was happy, especially when I had grown strong enough to walk down to one of the lakes in the evening, watching people wade and swim in the last of the fall light.

I had found a place where I could be at peace.

The stranger walked around the front of the car and opened the passenger door, bringing me back to the present. His expression was doubtful.

“Come on,” I said. “It’ll be fine. I think you’ll like it.”

He climbed in, his limbs bending stiffly, as if he were made of wire. I pulled away from the hostel and drove us west through the long corridor of trees. Sitting there, I had an unsettling sense of his nearness, but shook the feeling off.

“Where does this road go?” he asked, as I steered us around the bends. Small brooks of melted snow were running across the asphalt, shining in the light.

“Go?”

“I mean, if you were to keep driving for a long time.”

I gave him a sidelong look. So much for the idea that he was some kind of hitchhiker, I thought. “Well, it runs along the mountain for quite a while. Eventually you’d wind up close to Gettysburg.”

“Gettysburg?” He looked at me quizzically. “I’ve heard of that. There’s something there.”

“Yeah, that’s where the battlefields are. From the Civil War. Aside from that, it’s really just a tourist town. It’s pretty small.”

“Oh.” Watching the trees and empty summer cabins pass by outside the window, he was quiet, knitting his hands together in his lap. A squirrel darted across the road, its tail a gray plume, and I swerved to miss it. Light and shade played on the windshield, passing over our faces.

“Do you ever think about it? The war?” he asked.

I looked at him. “My brother’s in it. Of course I think about it.”