Sarah St.Vincent - Ways to Hide in Winter

“Crazy Kathleen,” he would say, stroking my cheek with his thumb. “Crazy, crazy Kathleen. You know I’ve started hearing about you from other people? Maybe you should just stay inside.”

Soon, the things Amos heard began to change. “Somebody told me they saw you at the café in Boiling Springs. What were you doing there?”

“Nothing,” I answered, taken aback by his obvious displeasure. “I went there after I picked up the groceries. You know, just for fun.”

“Boiling Springs is fifteen minutes away from the grocery store. You drove half an hour round trip just to have fun?”

“I’m sorry. I just always thought it was pretty—you know, with the lake and everything.”

“Did you meet anybody there?”

“Anybody? Like who?”

“Like your boyfriend.”

“What?” I nearly dropped the glass I was drying. “What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?”

I gaped at him.

He laughed then. “Come on, I’m just pulling your leg.” Even so, there was an edge in his tone, or so I thought. Things weren’t going well at his job. It had become hard to tell when he was actually angry and when he wasn’t. Each day, I wondered which one of him would walk in through the front door: the one who kissed me on the head and rubbed my elbow affectionately as I cooked dinner, or the one who sat sullenly on the couch for hours, seeming to watch my every move. Eventually, I came to understand that it would be better if I didn’t leave the house.

So I didn’t.

I never knew what it was that made me give in, really. He was stronger than I was—thanks to the masonry job, he was stronger than just about anyone around—but that wasn’t it. He wasn’t violent, at least not in the way most people think of violence. He was still Amos, the same man I had always known, but I began to discover that there was something deeper in him, deeper than I had ever suspected, like the water at the bottom of a marsh, dark and lurking, rushing in to fill my footprints before I even realized it was there.

This quiet and reflective person, I discovered, the one who noticed everything and kept his thoughts to himself, was someone who knew—instinctively, uncannily—how to make other people feel small. He knew how to say the thing you least wanted to hear, the thing you always suspected might be true about yourself but prayed wasn’t. He would say the thing so softly, with such an absence of anger or expression, that you knew it must be right.

“You look like a boy,” he told me one night, as we were falling asleep. “It’s like fucking a boy, every time I fuck you.”

I had turned to look at him, but he was facing the window, settling his head into the pillows, pulling the blanket over his shoulders. I curled on my side and said nothing, but later that night I got up and silently crept to the bathroom, looking in the mirror, taking in the angle of my jaw, the shape of my nose and eyes. I didn’t cry. I simply returned to bed and curled on my side again, drawing my knees to my chest, staring at the wall until the sun began to rise.

Increasingly, he would brood, sitting in an armchair in a darkened corner of the living room, the light from the TV flickering over his face. I could sometimes feel him giving me sidelong glances as I read.

“You make me feel wretched,” he said one day, fixing me with a hard, peculiar stare from his armchair as I looked down at the book in my lap. There was a hostility in his tone, an accusation, that caught me off-guard. He kept his eyes on me until I closed the book.

The moment was unnerving enough that the next day, I picked up the phone. My pride wouldn’t let me call Beth, so after some hesitation—I realized I was no longer in touch with very many people—I dialed the dentist’s office where my high-school friend Melanie was working as a receptionist.

“Wretched?” she repeated. A child was shouting in the background, and I thought I could hear the sound of her chewing something. “Is that some kind of slang, like ‘wicked’? Like, maybe he means it in a good way?”

I looked out through the window, at the sun playing over the empty fields where, as I had been made to understand, I had no reason to go walking alone.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

One day, when I was washing the dishes, he crept up behind me, pinning my arms to my sides and holding a paring knife to my throat, a sharp, silvery blade with a short handle. I was silent, motionless, stunned. For some reason, as the edge of the blade touched my skin, I kept looking at the cans of baked beans on the counter, the ones that were waiting for me to put them away. Later, that was what I remembered: cans of beans. Everything else around me seemed blurred, dark.

I could feel him breathing behind me.

After a moment, he put the knife down. He seemed to think it was funny.

“You weren’t really scared, were you?” he asked.

I reached for the dishrag, which had fallen into the water. “No,” I said softly, beginning to rub hardened lumps of tomato sauce from a plate. The water turned a pale pink.

Looking back, it would be tempting to think of that moment as the beginning of the bad things. But of course, by then the bad things had long since taken root and begun to push their hard, blind way up to the surface. Years later, I would ask myself what I could have done differently, what I could have done to prevent the disasters. The question would come to me even when I knew enough to try to force it out of my mind, when I understood that there was, in fact, nothing I could have done. People are who they are, and he was who he was. There was no point in being angry with him—no point even in thinking about it.

But the thing about moments like that, as I was to learn, was that they were never truly over. Instead, they lingered just out of sight in the forgotten spaces of our own minds, wreaking havoc invisibly no matter how long or how determinedly we put them away.

“Oh, honey, he sounds lovely ,” Beth said a few days after I saw John, hugging my shoulders as we sat on the couch. Leaning forward, she handed a cup of bright red fruit punch to Dylan, who was kneeling by the TV, idly running a toy truck back and forth over the carpet while keeping his eyes fixed on the cartoon children who sang in front of him. His lips were open in an O, as if he were hypnotized.

“It was okay,” I admitted grudgingly.

Beth was watching the back of the boy’s head, her expression momentarily pensive, but turned her attention back to me. “Don’t get me wrong—I’m not saying you should marry the guy. But you should definitely let him spoil you a little. And if it turns into something more, then great.” She sat back and crossed her legs on the cushions. “You could use something to cheer you up. You know, get you out of that rut.” I frowned at her. “What rut?”

“Don’t look at me like that. You know what I mean.” She propped her head on her hand. “Not that relationships are a magic bullet, God knows. But still—I just want to see you happy.”

I turned the toy truck upside down and spun the wheels with my thumb. “I am happy,” I said.

“Are you?”

“Yes,” I said flatly.

She looked at me and ran a hand through her hair, exposing a streak of gray that stood out startlingly against the black. I tried not to think about her uncle, his resemblance to her. “All right. I know better than to beat my head against a wall.”

On the TV, the cartoon children were exploring a river, sailing through a dream world on their flying ship.

“So what’s new with you?” I asked, trying to shift her attention away from myself.

“Oh, God, nothing. I’m in a rut, too, although of course mine’s for the good of the country, et cetera, et cetera.” She opened a soda that was sitting on the coffee table. “You know, everybody likes to run around saying it’s a Very Important Job, being a military wife. But I don’t see many of them rushing to sign up for it.” She gestured around us at her parent’s living room, the piles of toys in the corners and the heap of laundry next to us on the sofa. “I love my husband, and my kid’s my whole world, but sometimes I wonder what people must really think of me if they’re basically going to imply this is the best thing I ever could have done.” She studied the can. “Are you scandalized that I said that?”