Sarah St.Vincent - Ways to Hide in Winter

We sat down, and I reached into my coat pocket, pulling out two oranges. “Want one?”

“Oh—yes. Thank you.” He took the fruit from my hands and held it, looking perplexed. “So the place where I’ve been staying, it isn’t at the top of the mountain? I’d thought it was.”

“Yeah, mountains are deceptive like that. You think you’re at the top, and then you realize you’re nowhere near it.”

He settled back onto the rock and began peeling his orange. “Apparently so.” There was some graffiti on a boulder near us, and he looked over at it curiously. “What’s it called, this mountain?”

“This one?” I looked around us. “I don’t think it has a particular name. We call this whole chain South Mountain. And the chain on the other side of the valley is North Mountain. That’s all I’ve ever heard anyone call them.”

“Oh.” He considered this for a moment. “But what if you go south of South Mountain? Or north of North Mountain?”

I arranged my face in a serious expression. “You can’t.”

“What? Why not?”

“That’s where the world drops off.”

He smiled.

Sitting next to one another, we ate in silence for a while, juice dripping from our fingers onto the stone.

“You never seem to mention your husband,” he said after a time.

I gave a start, but did my best to keep my expression blank. “No, I suppose I don’t. There isn’t much to say.”

He smiled almost indulgently. “That can’t be true. After all, you’re married to him. I assume he’s an interesting person. Does he work in the park as well?”

“Nope.” I brushed dirt from my jeans with my palm. “He’s dead.”

The stranger flinched. “Oh. Oh, dear. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. It was four years ago. We were in a car accident.” A cold breeze picked up, and I hunched my shoulders. “Although I do think it’s odd that Martin would have told you I was married, but not that my husband was—” I paused, reflecting that “dead” sounded unfeeling. “—Gone. I’m assuming it was Martin who mentioned it.”

“Yes,” he replied thoughtfully. “I suppose I find it odd, too. In any case, I’m sorry I brought it up.”

“It’s all right,” I repeated. Then, to my own surprise, I told him the thing I had never acknowledged, never said out loud. “People here think I killed him. It’s very strange.”

“What?” He looked at me, shocked.

“It’s all right. I don’t mind.”

“But how could they think that?” he asked, still looking stunned. “People think all sorts of things.” I shrugged. “It’s just how they are. There isn’t really much point in trying to figure out why.”

“But—but you’re so kind.”

The words were so unforced, so full of genuine distress, that for a moment I didn’t know how to respond. “I’m just ordinary,” I told him finally. “And anyway, it doesn’t matter. They can think whatever they like.”

“Well,” he said, still sounding unsettled, but he didn’t seem to know what else to say.

We perched beside each other, the only humans, it seemed, for miles in any direction. Our faces turned up, we watched the sun as it slowly traced the arc of one of the shortest days of the year.

When it touched the tips of the trees, I looked at him. A pink tinge was beginning to appear on his nose and cheekbones, probably from the sunlight. At last, I broke the silence. “Are you glad we came here?”

“What? Oh, yes, very. You were right—it’s good to have the chance to do these things.” There was something vaguely wistful in his tone, almost melancholy, but he laughed as he went on. “Although it does make me realize I should perhaps get more exercise.”

“Well, this is a hard climb for anyone.” I glanced back down the rocky path behind us. “But I’m glad you like it. It’s one of my favorite places.”

We resumed our silence for a while, watching the colors of the forest change as the sun began to set. When the cold became too much to bear, I stood up, shaking leaves and twigs from my clothes. The stranger did the same.

“Could I ask,” I said as we stood next to each other, taking a last look at the valley before turning to go, “what you’re doing here? I mean, what you’re really doing?”

He exhaled and looked down at his hands. A short silence followed. “Yes, I suppose you would wonder.”

“I do, sometimes. Although you don’t need to answer.”

He fingered the fraying end of his scarf and was quiet. Beneath our feet, the rock glittered with fragments of quartz, all but invisible except at this time of day.

“I did a bad thing,” he said finally. “In Uzbekistan.”

“A bad thing?” I looked up at him.

“Yes. That’s why I can’t go back.”

For a moment, neither of us spoke. He scuffed at the rock with his shoe. “I would rather not talk about it just now, if that’s all right with you.”

“Of course. I’m sorry I brought it up.”

“It’s okay.” He glanced at me and attempted a lighter tone. “Now we’ve both accidentally mentioned things. I suppose we’re even.”

“I suppose we are.” I was still trying to read his face, but he smiled and I gave it up, tucking his words away in my mind where I could ponder them later. “All right, let’s get down from here.”

I hopped off the rock, landing heavily on the trail, the nerves in my leg burning all the way to my toes. The stranger lowered himself carefully after me, and we made our way down the mountain, leaning back and grasping at branches to keep our balance. Together, we raced against the diminishing light, arriving at the car just as the last of it drew back into a deepening blue.

When I dropped him off at the hostel, he turned to wave. I nodded and, belatedly, when he had already turned away, waved back.

On Christmas Eve, my grandmother and I drove to the church in Orrtanna for the candlelight mass. My grandmother was bundled into the stiff wool coat she seldom wore, her hands in the fur muff she had bought during some long-ago trip to Pittsburgh to visit my aunt, before I was born. Resembling a misshapen package, she hunched forward in her seat, seeming to stare watchfully through the windshield as we drove up over the mountains, passing the old apple orchards and the canning factories. What she thought she was watching for, I couldn’t have said.

We arrived and squeezed into the last parking spot beside the church, a fading pile of red brick with a modest bell tower. Inside, the pews were garlanded with pine boughs, topped with rings of tall white candles at the ends. The altar, too, was festooned with dark green pine, the branches hung with shining white and gold ornaments. I didn’t really believe in any of it—the actual Christmas stuff—but something in me always responded to the music and candlelight. I’d done my best to give a nod to the occasion, pulling on a red silk blouse that had once belonged to my mother and that I’d found at the back of a closet. At least I’d match the clusters of fake berries.

The priest, who was very old and braced himself against the altar as he spoke, delivered the mass in a quavering tone, facing out over the rows of flickering candles. As he recited the words, I helped my grandmother stand and kneel. For a long time—after the things that happened—it had been hard to look at him without anger, but those days had passed. I didn’t know what he saw when he looked at me, but when I looked at him, I saw nothing in particular. He was just a man, an old man, like any other.

Afterward, before we all surged back into the cold, there was a reception in the vestibule, plates of gingersnaps and sugar cookies arranged on folding tables. I was piling some of the cookies onto a napkin—two for me, two for my grandmother, who was chatting with a former neighbor—when I heard a voice behind me.