Sarah St.Vincent - Ways to Hide in Winter

“Look, I don’t want to pry into your affairs. But I do want to help you.” I pushed hair out of my face. “I may not know exactly what you’re doing here, but I know that whatever the plan was, it’s clearly gone wrong. You didn’t mean to be here, or if you did, you never thought you’d stay for more than a day or two. And this may look like the ends of the earth to you, but it isn’t. You’re not invisible. I don’t know what you’re hiding from, but…this isn’t the place for you. You’re not safe here.” I balled my hands in my coat pockets. “And if you can’t see that, then you’re not nearly as smart as I’ve been giving you credit for.”

While I was speaking, he had lowered his eyes, seeming to draw himself inward. When I stopped, he squinted silently into the cold, looking off into the trees.

“All right,” I told him finally, “I’ve said my piece. Your business is your business. If you need me, you know where I am.”

I turned back toward the store and walked briskly down the hill, keeping my head high and my back straight. I had almost reached the porch before I heard his voice behind me. “Wait.”

I looked over my shoulder. He was still hunched forward, and for once, he looked small.

“They’re not,” he said.

“What?”

“They’re not coming back.”

I regarded him evenly. “Why not?”

He seemed to be speaking to the ground. “I don’t know.”

“Were they supposed to?”

He swallowed. “Yes.”

Slowly, stiffly, I began climbing the hill again.

“Let me help you,” I said when I reached him, making every word clear. “Tell me what you need. I can’t make any promises, but between Martin and me, I’m sure—”

“You do help me,” he said. “You help me every day.”

I shook my head impatiently. “That’s not what I’m talking about. Tell me where you need to go, and one of us will get you there.”

As I said the words, I felt a twinge of something unexpected, a grain of reluctance that chafed under my skin like sand. But I ignored it and kept my eyes on him until he answered.

He looked up at me, taking a long breath. “No,” he said at last. “There’s nowhere for me to go.”

I studied him. “What about New York? I’ve never been there, but if you really want to disappear for some reason, I’m sure that’s a much better place. I could get you there in a few hours.” I thought about it. “Okay, more than a few. But I could take you.”

“You’re a lovely woman.” His eyes fell on the ruins of the furnace stack. “But I can’t let you do something like that.”

“What do you mean, you can’t let me?”

For a moment, he said nothing, his face still turned toward the collapsed stones.

“You’re very smart, of course,” he said finally. “But you don’t understand what you’re offering.”

Something in the way he said it —of course —made me step back.

“Oh?” I said, surprised and stung. “And what is it that I don’t understand, exactly?”

“I can’t explain it.”

“Try,” I said sharply.

He sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to make you angry. And anyway, it doesn’t matter. As I said, there’s nowhere for me to go.”

Scowling, I scuffed a shoe against the ground and spat contemptuously to the side, the way I’d seen so many men do. “So,” I said, “what’s the plan, then?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, that seems obvious.”

We faced each other. He twisted his hands together, the knuckles cracking.

“What happened to you, there?” I asked.

“Sorry?”

“In your country. What happened?”

He gave me a long look, as if trying to read what was behind my eyes. But his face was carefully expressionless, and he said nothing.

“All right,” I said at last. “Have it your way.” Turning on my heel, I walked down to the store without looking back. This time, he didn’t stop me.

Inside the store, I scraped the already-pristine grill, and then, restless, stalked back outside. The Jeep needed to be cleaned, I decided, and went at it, dragging out the floor mats and striking them with a stick. When the worst of the mud was gone, I gripped the pieces of carpet in my hands and shook them hard, until my back ached and my shoulder burned. I saw myself reflected in the windows, with disheveled hair and a face set like stone, and turned away impatiently.

As soon as closing time came, I drove off, uncertain of where I was going but not caring as long as it wasn’t home. I knew I shouldn’t leave my grandmother alone for much longer, but, I thought, if she wanted so badly to be independent, she could survive by herself for another hour.

On an impulse, as I neared the plaque marking the site of the former POW camp, I pulled over and tramped up the path to the entrance. There was a lot of dead undergrowth, but I fought through it, my boots crashing through the bracken. The old cement foundations began to appear, ghostlike, about half a mile in, long blank patches that invited curious—or, perhaps, sinister—minds to imagine what the buildings that had once stood there had been used for.

I sat on the cracking ledge by the former swimming hole and wrapped my arms around my knees, staring down at the ice, its impenetrable mottled gray.

The forest was so quiet my ears rang. I imagined the swimming hole as it would have been sixty years earlier, when very different people would have sat in this spot, sunning themselves where I now shivered. American soldiers, men who would have swum here when not keeping watch over the prisoners, splashing one another, stripped to the waist. Young guards who were now old men. It was so easy to picture them, square-jawed and smooth-skinned, their blue eyes untroubled.

I hugged my knees tighter as a vision of Jerry’s face and dangling rifle crowded the soldiers out of my mind. Who ever knew, really, the things we were willing to do to each other when no one else was watching?

The darkness was falling, turning the trees into black nerves that stood out against the sky. In truth, I thought, I had yet to find out what happened if you went south of South Mountain or north of North Mountain. I hadn’t managed to get myself out of this place, even when I’d tried—even when my life had, in a very real sense, depended on it. I had failed. And now I was watching someone else fail as well.

But he wasn’t failing, I reminded myself. He was refusing. Which was what made it all the more infuriating, all the more incomprehensible. It was true, I allowed grudgingly, that life had been more interesting since he’d arrived. But this was no place for him.

Why wouldn’t he leave if he could?

I stood up, brushing myself off, and plunged back through the woods again. By the time I reached home, it was late, and I stood at the counter chopping onions, the knife knocking dully against the cutting board. You are a lovely woman. But you don’t understand.

Bullshit, I thought. You think I’m dumb? Is that what you’ve thought all along?

The phone rang.

When I didn’t pick up, it rang again. I wiped my hands irritably, threw the towel down, and grabbed the receiver.

“Hello,” the guttural voice at the other end of the line said. “May I speak to Kathleen Guttshall, please?”

“Kathleen McElwain,” I said bluntly. I had dropped my married name as soon as they’d let me. “Speaking.”

“Oh, hi, Kathleen,” the voice replied pleasantly. “This is John.”

I was still absorbed in my thoughts. “John?”

“John McCullough. We saw each other—”

“Oh.” I paused. “Yes. Hey.”

“Am I interrupting something?”

“No, it’s fine.” I crossed my arms and waited for him to continue, staring through the window into the darkness.