Alex had nearly ceased trying to direct the vehicle, focusing instead on keeping the speedometer from falling too far. From somewhere beneath, the Escape squeaked. Car words sailed through Maya’s head — carburetor, chassis, axle, suspension. Beautiful words, connected to nothing. The once-black wave of the road flung them around, whitecaps lashing the hull.
They were 3.7 miles down the shortcut — Maya was counting by tenths of a mile, surreptitiously awaiting each shift of the odometer — when the Escape’s wheels refused to take a snowed-over incline. Maya shrieked as the car slid, Max flying awake. The car remained on the bank like a slug clutched to a wall — the snow was too heavy to climb over. Little by little, it had thickened as they proceeded down the road, as if the leeward protection had ended.
Through the windows, it looked as if darkness was starting in on the sky. No, it couldn’t be time yet for darkness. But the weather had cloaked the sky so thoroughly that it was all the same thing. Max began to weep softly. Maya called to her son and asked him to hold on; Mama and Papa would fix this, and then she would climb in the back. He would have to hold on for a little bit longer.
“Alex, we have to turn around,” she said.
“We just wasted a half hour on this,” he said.
“We’ll waste another getting back. But at least that road was flat.”
“I can’t turn around!” he yelled. “Look at what’s happening out there.” Max began to wail more loudly.
“Please don’t yell,” she said.
Alex cast her a hopeless look.
“Turn it off,” Maya said.
“Turn what off?” he said.
“The car.”
“Maya. .” he said. She sat next to a defeated man. She thought he would burst into tears.
She reached forward and flicked off the ignition. The engine died and the wipers collapsed in exhaustion. When the car was rumbling, more than half a tank of gas in its hold, the possibility that they would remove themselves from this bank was alive. Now, it was gone. It seemed odd to be still — a bad idea, surely, for the engine to grow cold. It seemed like they were giving up the pretense, like they were going to hunker down and hope they didn’t get buried, slide off into some ditch, end up some animal’s winter capture. They sat in silence. In twenty seconds, the windshield was covered.
Maya opened her door. Obediently, the car started dinging. Snow slapped her face. She was ready to be swallowed by the interminable, graying whiteness around her, and actually felt herself falling, and closed her eyes in fright. But she remained in place, and opened them.
The wind was slight, and the temperature actually seemed well above freezing — the situation outside felt nothing like the unnavigable misery that had loomed from behind the windshield. The air was mellow, unconfrontational. Maya blinked rapidly as snowflakes settled on her shoulders, inside her collar, on her eyebrows, her nose. She stuck out her tongue and tasted the cold crystal. The view above her was vast. She had been shivering, but realized it had been in anticipation, not because the weather demanded it. This was the world she had been born to, snow from September through April. She had been on sabbatical for twenty-five years, but she had found it again. If it all did end here, there was no better place.
She looked into the car and waved to Alex and Max to come outside. A long moment passed during which she wondered whether Alex would attempt to coax the Escape into action so he could save himself and his son from the mad interloper among them. But after a long minute in her life, she heard one of the doors open. It was Max’s door. Then her husband emerged.
Through her parka, Maya felt her midsection, soft and sticky under her sweater, her T-shirt — she was supposed to have showered, but hadn’t; she was not supposed to have stolen a T-shirt out of Marion’s bag, and had. Down there, the last vanishing evidence of Marion Hostetler preserved just a little bit longer because of the cold. Or maybe not last. You just didn’t know. So much you just didn’t know. But it didn’t matter, if you were ready for all of it — if you were ready to call things by their name. It was comic to feel her belly three hours after he’d been inside her; this wasn’t a fairy tale, least of all her age; but she felt anyway; because she wanted, and could.
Maya had asked Alex and Max outside because she had wanted to show them that the wretched magnificence all around was innocent, and not what they thought. That they would make it: someway, somehow. They would lay down mats under the wheels, they would pirouette on the snow, they would coast back to the county road, they would inch forward. She took Alex’s hand, then her son’s, and stood with them staring at the brutal, mysterious splendor before them. She wanted them to see that it would take some doing to get out of this trouble, but the forecast was good, and the world full of wonder, and there was nothing to fear out there at all.
Acknowledgments
The original debt is to family: Anna Oder, Yakov Fishman, Arkady Oder, and in memory of Sofia Oder and Faina Fishman.
The contemporary debt is to friends and colleagues:
Alana Newhouse: I am so lucky to have your friendship.
Henry Dunow, Terry Karten, Elena Lappin: You are my golden triumvirate. Jane Beirn: You’re a miracle worker, and it’s been an honor to work with you. Special thanks also to Nikki Smith, Jillian Verrillo, and Stephanie Cooper: You’re so good at what you do.
The readers: Ben Holmes, Amy Bonnaffons, Ellen Sussman, Jules Lewis, Susan Jane Gilman. You carried me down the last leg.
Margot Knight and the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, where this novel was begun, and Wayne Hoffman, Mark Sullivan, and the Horizontal Pines Artists + Writers Haven, where it was finished.
Those who took time to share their stories and educate me: David Politzer, Sari Siegel, Laura Summerhill, Mary Cherry, Laurence Sugarman, Kiro Ivanovski, Scott Summers, Susan Wise Bauer.
The Jewish Book Council, and especially Carolyn Hessel, which does so much for literature.
The evangelists, in no order: Joe Flaherty and everyone at Writers & Books, Bonnie Sumner, Miwa Messer, David and Sally Johnston, Bruce and Julie Blackwell, John King, Vanessa Blakeslee, Yossi Gremilion, Ida and Peter Sorensen, John and Joanne Gordon, Meredith Maran, Dan Speth and Cathy Clemens, Darlene Orlov, Juliette Ponce, Ellen Kaye and Seth Goldman, Carolyn Carr Hutton, Ella Shteingart, Stewart and Susan Kampel, and the many others who’ve gone out of their way to spread word. I wouldn’t be nearly as far without you.
About the Author
BORIS FISHMAN was born in Belarus and has lived in the United States since the age of nine. He is the author of the novel A Replacement Life, which was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, and won the Sophie Brody Medal from the American Library Association and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the London Review of Books, the New Republic, and other publications. He lives in New York City.
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