Sarah St.Vincent - Ways to Hide in Winter

I felt a pang of a feeling I couldn’t name, remembering the dreams I’d had when Amos and I had bought our own house, the scenes I’d imagined would take place there.

But it doesn’t matter , I thought. I’m happy. I don’t mind.

I don’t mind.

After a few minutes, I lowered my eyes and strolled away, back to the solitude of my car, humming the song from the radio quietly, trying to remember the words.

The store was closed between Christmas and New Year’s, a decision I disagreed with but that wasn’t mine to make. There was a snowstorm the day after Christmas, and for two days my grandmother and I stayed in, her dozing in front of her game shows, me curled up on the sofa or by the window in my room, reading. The book unsettled me, the way it made me sympathize with the ragged Raskolnikov, the killer, and hope he would escape. I hadn’t believed it was possible to feel such a thing.

When I’d turned the last page, I puttered around uselessly for a while, thinking, then drove into Carlisle. The town was a slippery grid of gray slush, low and gloomy. There was one nice street, however, that had old brick townhouses with shops on the ground floors. I parked and walked into one of the antique stores, keeping my hands out so they wouldn’t think I was shoplifting, knowing I smelled like my grandmother’s cigarette smoke and the bottoms of my jeans were frayed.

The first store didn’t have the right thing, and the second and third ones didn’t, either—just a bunch of heavy-looking brass and tarnished silver. I didn’t even know what I was trying to find until I saw it: a glass bird, an open-beaked sparrow poised on a branch, its wings raised and tensed, caught in the moment just before it pushed off and lifted itself into the air. It should have been tacky, and maybe it was, but there was something in the energy of it, the sense of movement that saved it. Its neck was stretched, its white breast pushed forward, the wings strong and pointed.

I knew I couldn’t afford to pay for it, but I did, cradling it carefully as I walked out.

Up on the mountain, surrounded by the fog that had descended as evening drew near, I knocked on the hostel’s front door, lifting the heavy brass ring and tapping it against the wood. My other hand held the bird against my chest, trying not to put any pressure on the wings.

Martin must have been out, because after a minute had passed, I saw the curtains twitch in the breakfast room and the stranger himself opened the door.

“Oh, hello!” he said. “I didn’t expect to see you today. How was your holiday?” He was wearing a different sweater, I noticed, cream-colored, probably something Martin had spotted at a church basement sale.

“Good, thanks. Here, this is for you.” Pushing the bird into his startled hands, I took a step back and waved. “I’ll see you.”

“Oh,” he said, surprised. “Yes, but wait—won’t you come in?”

“Sorry, I can’t. I have to go back and make dinner. Maybe next time.” The car engine was still running, the Jeep spinning out a white thread of exhaust that blended with the gray fog. “I hope you like it.”

“Yes, of course! It’s lovely. I—I had no idea—I really wasn’t expecting—” His expression suddenly turned to one of regret. “I’m sorry I have nothing to give you, myself.”

“It doesn’t matter—I don’t want anything.” I turned back and climbed into the car. “See you later.”

He took a step forward, half raising a hand.

“Happy New Year,” he called. His voice echoed in the valley, and he covered his mouth, his eyes wide.

I couldn’t help but laugh. On an impulse, I rolled the window down. “Happy New Year,” I called back, letting my voice echo as well.

It was one of the moments I thought about later, when they told me who he really was, or who they thought he really was. At the time, I simply watched him in my rearview mirror, a slender white apparition holding the glass figure to his chest and waving his hand, gradually growing thinner and smaller, evaporating into the fog that had spun its web around the mountain.

January always showed us the faults in our memory. There would be a week, or even two, of unexpected warmth, the sun shining and the snow melting, people wandering around looking half-blind and dazzled. It wasn’t exactly pretty—brightly illuminated mud was still mud—and it was dangerous for the trees, tricking them into leafing and budding long before the winter had actually passed. Still, there was something about it, something that drew all of us outside, pointing at one another’s light jackets, wondering if this had ever happened before. Of course it had; it happened nearly every year. And yet it worked its magic, the notes of it reaching into us like the Pied Piper’s tune. It was enough to make a person wonder how much of human life still hinged on accidents of the weather.

I began spending my mornings on the porch, dragging a chair into a patch of sunlight and looking out over the mountains, shorn now of both leaves and snow. Sometimes, as I held a book in my lap, I found myself thinking about Amos. Not deliberately, of course—I never thought about him deliberately—but in brief snatches, like flickers of interference in a radio program, a strange signal cutting in when you’re not expecting it. A look on his face, a phrase he had used, a fragment of a scene between us. I would glance up from the book and stare out at the trees, my mind momentarily caught up in these trailing wisps of the past.

I still had dreams about him at times, dreams that weren’t quite nightmares but weren’t exactly pleasant, either. Dreams in which we sat across a table from each other and I found I couldn’t bring myself to leave. Dreams in which I opened a door with a sense of dread, knowing he would be in the room behind it. As in life, he never said much. For the most part he just seemed to stare, sometimes with an expression of sadness, sometimes without any emotion at all, as if he’d been drained of himself, like one of those decorative eggs that’s pricked with a pin and eventually becomes hollow.

They said, after the accident, that I might not remember things, that there might be gaps in my memory big enough to swallow months or even years. They were wrong: I remembered everything. Nothing had become blurred, nothing was gone. Maybe I should have told them that, should have turned my face up to them when they were standing around my hospital bed and said: I remember every hour of every day. It might almost have been fun to spook them like that.

The way we met was so ordinary that later I was annoyed with myself for thinking there was anything special about it. It was a Saturday in September, just after I had turned fifteen. I had spent the night at Beth’s house, and the two of us were perched on the couch in our pajamas, our feet propped up on the coffee table, watching a soap opera that I had always secretly found boring but Beth loved. Her older brothers were in the backyard with some friends, trying to train a basset hound they’d found by the side of the road and named, optimistically, Hunter.

Laughing and jostling one another, the boys came inside, Amos among them. He had a round face, sandy hair that fell over his forehead, blue eyes I noticed right away. Tall and ruddy, he looked at once older and more boyish than the rest, glancing around him with a thoughtful expression and saying little. When he did speak, it was with a deliberate drawl, scratching his face as if speaking were something unnatural to him, but I noticed that his eyes darted from person to person, object to object, as if he would someday be quizzed on everything in the house. “Hello,” he said when I edged past him to take my bowl to the sink, and then seemed to lose interest when, surprised and shy, I mumbled a hello in return.