Sarah St.Vincent - Ways to Hide in Winter

Looking down, I fiddled with the bent wire hook affixed to a ceramic snowman, still absorbing what she had said. All right, I told myself. So Jerry had seen us. It didn’t matter; he probably wouldn’t think anything of it. I’d just be more careful in the future. And there was no reason to tell the stranger, who would only be needlessly worried.

Beth stuck her head back into the room. “You want to come here and tell me if these look done to you?”

I followed her and examined the tray of cookies, pressing one gently with a fingertip. “Yeah, they’re done.”

“You’re so freakin’ competent at everything. Seriously, it kills me.” Standing on her toes, she switched on the fan. “You go back in there with Dylan, and I’ll be right out. We’ll just let these cool down for a couple minutes.”

Moments later, she returned, slipping off an oven mitt and tossing it onto the sofa, where Dylan regarded it with surprise.

“So, you’re not gonna spill the beans, huh?”

“Honestly, there aren’t any to spill.”

“All right, suit yourself, but I’m going to drag it out of you sooner or later.” She extracted a long strand of red tinsel from a box with a rustling sound. “Anyway, have you thought about the thing we talked about last time?”

“What did we talk about last time?”

“Going back to school.”

Catching the loose end of the tinsel, I helped her string it onto the tree, each of us following the other in circles. “Yeah, I’ve been thinking about it,” I admitted. “But I just can’t. My grandmother…well, and the tuition, and everything.” I breathed in the smell of evergreen. “Maybe someday, when things are different.”

“Is that a dodge?”

I sucked in my upper lip, going quiet for a moment. “No.”

“Oh, really?” She raised an eyebrow. “How much is the tuition?”

“How much? I’m not sure.”

“That’s what I thought. You should call them and see what they can do.”

“Maybe,” I said, which was the word I always used when I meant “no.” She knew this, and rolled her eyes, although she didn’t fight me.

“So what did Mark have to say when he called?” I asked, trying to change the subject.

Her face took on a neutral expression, and she looked at Dylan, who looked back at her. “Not much of anything, to be honest. I know he’s always glad to see us, but…he just gets this look on his face, like he wants to get back to thinking about something else. Or nothing at all.” She wrapped a string of lights around her finger. “I mean, I understand. But I do sometimes want to point out to somebody that, well, they took my husband away, and they never told me who I’d be getting back at the end of everything. So, there’s that.” One of the lights was cracked, and she rolled it between her fingers. “Sometimes I wonder.”

Dylan grabbed a fistful of blanket and raised it to his mouth, watching us.

“I think it’s okay to wonder,” I said.

She met my eyes and touched my knee without saying anything. I was struck by the heart-shaped face, the constellation of small scars from the chicken pox she had caught when we were sixteen, the features I knew so well. We were still young, I thought, and yet astonishingly, we were also old, well past the age our parents had been in our earliest memories of them.

“Oh, shoot, I forgot the cookies. Silly me.” She pushed herself to her feet and disappeared into the kitchen, returning with a plate of sugary discs. “Although I really shouldn’t eat these things. They’ll make me fat again.”

I reached for a cookie, letting the soft dough dissolve on my tongue. “No, they won’t. You were never fat.”

“Bullshit.” She sank onto the sofa beside me and cast a look at Dylan. “I mean, bull malarkey.” Reaching out her arms in a long stretch as she chewed, she tugged at the hem of my shirt. “Where’d you get this, by the way? I like the color.”

“Yeah, I knew you would.” I looked down at the loose hem and worn buttons. “It was my mom’s, believe it or not.”

I could remember when my mother had worn this blouse. It wasn’t at Christmas—although she may have worn it then, too—but sometime later in the winter, back when I hadn’t been much older than Dylan was now. We’d had a blizzard that night, and my father was somewhere out on the road. My mother would have just come home from her office job, the one she’d had for a while, a receptionist at a doctor’s office or something, before she got fired for keeping a fifth of vodka in the filing cabinet. My brother was playing on the floor, ramming trucks into table legs, making a racket. My mother was holding me and watching the road from the window—or at least, what she could see of the road in the dark. I rested my head on her shoulder, gazing at her necklace of shiny black beads, something she’d found at Kmart or Woolworth’s. Slowly—probably without realizing she was doing it—she began to sway back and forth, her hand on the back of my head. I pretended to fall asleep, closing my eyes and keeping as still as I could while she gazed out the window.

It was a shame, I thought, that everything had later unraveled. But things just happened that way sometimes.

Outside, I heard an antique-sounding engine start and a car drive away, followed by silence.

Beth cocked her head at me. “I have trouble picturing your mom in that.”

“What? Oh—yeah, this was before the woodshop. And the denim-jacket phase.”

“You think you’ll see them tomorrow?” She stood, disentangling her feet from a pile of lights and ribbons.

“My parents?” I shrugged. “Who knows? They usually manage to stop by my grandmother’s, though, so maybe. I’ll probably make myself scarce just in case.”

“Now there’s the Christmas spirit,” she said ironically, but I heard her laugh.

“Yeah, I’m kind of the Grinch.”

“No, you’re not. You try too hard. Real grinches are just like that naturally.” Dylan coughed, and she hastened into the kitchen to retrieve a juice bottle. “Hey, there’s a radio in here. Should we put on some Christmas music?”

“Sounds wonderful.”

“Feliz Navidad” came on in mid-chorus, its long-dead singer chirruping joyously. Beth and I decorated industriously, bending and straightening. Her family used a cross instead of a star, and when we had placed it carefully at the top, we gathered the green wires of the Christmas lights and plugged them in, stepping back to admire our work. When we turned the lamps off, the tree glowed with that primal, half-hidden mystery, its pyramid of soft branches forming a veil over the points of light that shone through. It was a sight that always gave rise in me to a half-suppressed, childlike awe.

“I think we did okay,” I said.

Beth bounced to her toes and threw an arm around my shoulder. “We did more than okay. We’re amazing. What have I always told you?”

It was after midnight by the time I left. Standing alone on the smooth, paved driveway, I turned back in the darkness to gaze at the picture window, my breath rising in steam. The tree shone, majestic and solitary, seeming to hover protectively over the room before it. Rubbing my hands together and blowing on them, I regarded it, watching the string of colored lights pulse and flicker behind the ornaments.

Beth walked into the room, holding Dylan in her arms while he clung to her purple turtleneck. She kissed him on the forehead and held him out so he could reach for an ornament, her lips moving. When he had taken the shining ball from the tree, she swung him around in a circle. Through the window, I could see him chortling happily, looking up at her as her lips moved. It looked as if she were singing.