By NINA SEMCZUK
That morning Irina Pychenko found herself in the ditch, again. It was the fourth time in a month.
“Third time this week I’ve found someone right here,” said the gentleman outside of her window, who was hooking a chain to the tow hitch under the back bumper. She had barely finished mashing her grill into the snow when he’d pulled over. “You wouldn’t believe how many people haven’t got their snow tires on yet.” His words made white puffs in the air, holding his speech like cartoon captions. “You neither,” he said, kicking her half bald Buick tires.
Irina shrugged invisibly in her old, oversized wool coat. It was already February and new tires would cost what the car was worth. With what she made as a traveling folk arts teacher, she barely had enough to sublet a place in this remote town plus gas. Fortunately, the school nurse had cut her a deal on the loft above her garage. “You can keep an eye on my toys,” Jen, the nurse, had said. Irina’s downstairs neighbors, Jen’s toys, were quiet: an old fishing boat, a snowmobile, and a four-wheeler. “Best part of the divorce was getting his mistresses,” Jen had laughed in her hoarse, cigarette-shredded voice. “And the kids, I guess.”
Irina had said nothing. She could have mentioned her own divorce, but why should she? She’d be in Plugerville for only a few months. Ever since leaving that claustrophobic Southern life and her husband (so rigid in his ideas of what a family should be, and how she should be and act, namely not foreign) she had found herself moving north, district by district, following grants and teaching gigs. When she thought about why, which wasn’t often, she felt instinct more than anything. Gathering as much distance between her and him, as if miles could erase his imprint on her life.
The man in the truck pulled her car back onto the road. He unhooked her and waved her on her way, driving off when she tried to hand him a twenty for his trouble. Feeling generous and buoyed by relief, she drove to work.
All grades in the Plugerville School district were housed in a low-slung brick building fronted by a stand of sixty-foot pines. The district was the only in the county, one of the least populated in the state, shoehorned between two of the most mountainous regions within the Adirondack Park. Years before, logging and mining—garnet, granite, and iron ore—bumped up the population, along with the tuberculosis clinics, but those industries had left long ago.
It was not so dissimilar to Irina’s hometown, a mill city a hundred miles south, blighted from overseas outsourcing. Returning to the place for her mother’s funeral last year had shocked her. The factories her parents had labored in mostly still stood, but barely, yawning their broken glass teeth.
Irina stopped by the staff room, blessedly empty now that it was half past eight. She wrapped a powdered donut in a napkin and strode toward the storeroom the principal had given her as an office.
“What’s that you got there,” Lon, a twenty-two-year-old senior asked, looking at her napkin. “You got me a treat Ms. P?” He had a long, blue-jeaned leg propped against the wall behind him. Irina had to tilt her head to meet Lon’s lidded gaze, half-hidden behind a dark fringe of hair. The hair of a future bum, she heard in her ex’s awful drawl.
“Not for you,” Irina said, tucking her breakfast deeper into her hand. She swept her ex from her thoughts. It was easier than usual, perhaps because Lon made her nervous, crowding away other thoughts. His repeated flunkings had proved to be advantageous: he could buy booze for his classmates and often did, at a nice markup. Lon seemed latently dangerous, something about his sharp good looks and tightly roped forearms. And those sleepy eyes. She couldn’t tell if he was always high, or what. Jen had mentioned lithium once, but Irina had changed the subject. Most of the staff and faculty centered their idle chatter on the students and their parents, which made Irina uncomfortable. She had grown up with a strict sense of privacy. Wary Ukrainian refugees, all those stories of disappeared relatives.
Lon shrugged and walked away from her. A few months ago, she would have asked to see his hall pass. But she would be gone soon with the end of the winter quarter, and any strictness she enforced would be for naught. Besides, she had found herself softening the farther she was from her former husband, as if a layer of rigid scaffolding was falling off, bit by bit.
Her windowless storeroom still smelled like old mop water despite the bowls of rose potpourri she had placed on her folding table desk. Laid out on the table were a series of models to show her students. Irina taught vytynanky. When she had taken up the folk art, as a way to keep her hands engaged, cheaply, in the waning days of her marriage, she hadn’t cut paper since she was thirteen, in Saturday school at the Uke club at the end of her block. Irina’s turn to folk arts teaching surprised her. She wondered if her heritage was asserting itself after a long dormancy, perhaps because she was now the only Pychenko, at least in spirit. The paperwork approving her return to her maiden name would come through soon, she hoped. She reminded herself that even if her ex had agreed to adopt, he would have turned their child into a Davis.
In retrospect, intricate papercutting, which used small knives and scissors and took patience and planning, was probably the worst craft to try and foist on these rough handed, backwoods children. Most lived on venison and turkey and fish. They had chest freezers full of meat and garages with cement floors bloodstained by dripping carcasses. They were long and lean and, when school started in September, as brown as the deer they’d hunt a month later during muzzleloading season.
It was a far cry from the suburban kids at her previous job. Soft, indoors types who reminded her of packaged dinner rolls, like her husband, her ex. He would hate this town, its people, the glorious, freeing isolation.
Irina gathered up her latest design, one that incorporated mountains, the sun, and pine trees. It was asymmetrical, which would make it somewhat easier—no folds and mirroring to account for. The first project had been a disaster. Irina had had the foolish notion that she needed to prove the legitimacy of the craft, and had constructed a fifteen-by-twenty panel depicting an entire folkloric scene. It was a mistake she wanted to put behind her. This design would be nice and simple, perhaps something the students could gift to a parent. Her stomach turned at that thought. A year after her mother’s death, she still felt the sting of severance, of being the last Pychenko standing.
The late bell rang and Irina picked up her supplies and walked to the classroom. A few students nodded their heads at Irina in the hall, but for the most part they ignored her. She was fine with that. She was a teacher, not their friend.
In the room she set up the example design, passed out the supplies, and gave instructions on autopilot before sinking into the chair at the front of the room. The seventh graders got to work, chattering amongst themselves like a flock of sparrows. Outside the sky was still gray, as it seemed to stay from sun up to sun down these winter months.
As a child, Irina had feared school, where the teachers would call her and her few Uke club friends dirty, and yell if they spoke their language. She came to want nothing more than to blend in fully with her other classmates, whose parents spoke English and didn’t perpetually smell of cabbage and onions. Her husband had prompted that same sense of fear, she had realized. He hated hearing her speak to her mother, her last real tie to the language and culture, and so she had stopped answering her calls early into the marriage. When Irina’s womb failed to produce the child her ex so adamantly insisted upon, she called her mother out of desperation, and the fight it engendered when he came home and heard Ukrainian pouring from her lips was horrific. It was the last time she had spoken to her before her death.
Eveline had finished first, as was typical. A skinny child, like the rest of them, but with added indignities: her yellow spotted teeth jutted every which way. She could hear the jokes her ex-husband would make in her head (she must eat rock sandwiches, a hearty chuckle). She hated how he could still pollinate her thoughts.
“What do you think Ms. P?” The look on Eveline’s face hurt Irina with its hope. Of course, it’d be perfect. Perfect, meaning she had traced Irina’s sample and hadn’t deviated at all, no personal touch. How do you teach a child to explore beyond the provided parameters? The other students had shown a sense of humor at the very least, if not originality, creating designs ripe with penises and breasts in subsequent classes.
Irina pasted an approving look on her face. “Good work, Eveline.” She stilled her hands that wanted to shoo her away. There was something about needy children that had always unfortunately repulsed her. Horribly, that had corresponded with her husband’s view of her: that if she couldn’t naturally produce children, she shouldn’t ever be a mother. Eveline waited a few more moments then drifted back to her desk. Who knew the crafting she had hated would become her bread and butter? Certainly not her or her community, which had practiced the old arts simply to keep the culture alive in a grim, diasporic way. She still shuddered to think about the converted room in the basement of the Club that was used as an ad hoc museum and memorial. The place smelled like mossy concrete and Mrs. Kroczyk’s neat Cyrillic script captions for various remnants saved from the Old Country had curled from the unmitigated humidity.
Irina saw someone at the door. It was Lon, lurking at the threshold. She caught his eye and a wave of annoyance flooded her.
“Go to class, Lon” she said, loud enough for him to hear.
Lon shoved his hands in his back pockets, “It’s my free period,” he said.
“Then go. Be free.”
“Maybe I don’t want to.”
The class was now more interested in them than their work. She thought she knew how to deal with him. “Come and be useful,” she said.
He looked over his shoulder and then swaggered into the room, aware that a gaggle of seventh graders was observing him while busily cutting and pasting.
“What can I do you for,” Lon asked, drawing out the do.
Irina handed over a stack of blue paper. “Cut these in half.” He cast around and grabbed a pair of scissors.
“Use the paper cutter,” she said. She didn’t trust the young ones around it because of course there wasn’t a finger guard—not at this school, which had little money to deal with safety precautions, let alone the fact it was likely insulated with asbestos. Many of them regularly handled much more dangerous tools, most heating their homes with wood stoves that required woodchopping every season, but she withheld herself from adjusting to these standards, because what would happen when she rejoined the world of soft suburbanites? She’d get fired, that’s what, if she treated them as these students could be treated.
All this was still running through her head when Lon shouted, “FUCK.”
Blood coated his hand, the paper, and the blade. He clutched his hand to himself, his eyes squeezed all the way shut, tears at the sides of his eyes.
Chairs were scraping at the linoleum as the class tried to get a better look. Robbie was shouting for the nurse, Amanda giggled hysterically, and Eveline moaned “Oh no, oh no,” and everyone clambered over one another asking what had happened. Irina shoved a chair into the back of Lon’s knees. He sank down, deflated. Irina shushed the rioting class who ignored her and sat down herself, hands finding paper that she started to twist into a paper rope that slowly pulled apart.
Jen arrived, butterfly bandages at the ready. “Oh boy,” she said, kneeling next to Lon, his hand in hers. “You really took a chunk off.”
Irina saw that the only child who looked queasy was Eveline. The rest hovered like turkey vultures, circling. Jen barked them away from her.
“Is he okay?” inquired Irina, unsure what else to say.
“He’ll be fine! Won’t ya Lon? You didn’t need that fingertip anyway did you?”
Lon’s dark eyebrows and shaggy dark hair contrasted sharply with his sudden pallor. He opened his mouth to speak, Adam’s apple jerking, thought better of it and nodded instead.
Irina shuffled papers away from the blood and stacked them with quick, sharp movements.
“You’d better drive him home,” Jen said. “He needs to lie down, and I already got two stomach bugs taking up my couches.”
Irina shook her head. “We should call his parents.”
Without opening his eyes, Lon said, “No.” A look passed between Jen and Lon and then Jen looked at Irina with a small shake of her head.
“Well, I can take him to the clinic at least,” Irina said. She gathered her purse.
“Just take me home,” Lon said. Irina nodded to keep him quiet.
At the clinic, after she had checked him and waved off their insurance questions, she sat in the waiting room folding and refolding a scrap of paper in her purse. Her stomach clenched at how pale Lon had been, how his eyes had opened wide when she insisted on a doctor. He had looked like a child, not a man.
Her nail caught on an edge of paper and her breath hissed inward. Irina had always felt as if she were masquerading as an expert in these forgotten crafts. Of course someone was injured under her watch. She shunted her mind away from Lon.
It was funny, wasn’t it. What a relief it had been when he had finally made the decision—when it was clear she wouldn’t be joining her circle of so-called friends in motherhood, couldn’t do her duty and produce a child, and would have that dreaded taint of divorce—and she began to get frozen out. No invitation to one after another baby shower, book club, coffee date. She had always suspected the Southerners had only conditionally accepted her, but now it was fact. At least in Plugerville—in lots of the towns she’d been in moving north—people were blunt, none of the two-facedness that was normal down there.
She checked her watch and shifted in the hard-bottomed chair. She did not like medical establishments. You go there to die, her father always said, and sure enough, after a heart attack when Irina was fourteen, he was pronounced dead at the hospital.
A door swung outward into the waiting room and a doctor walked out in front of Lon whose hand was bandaged. “Your son’s going to be just fine,” he said.
Irina’s jaw opened to correct him, but Lon was already walking past her, toward the front door. “You’ll need to check out with the desk, but he’ll be right as rain in a few weeks.”
Irina waited until the doctor walked out of sight before she left the clinic. Lon stood waiting outside of her car, shivering. “Where should I bring you?” Irina asked. They sat in the car waiting for the motor to warm up.
Lonnie looked out the window. “I guess home.” He gave her an address.
“Where’s that?” Irina knew the route to school, home, the store, and the main highway, but beyond that it was a warren of old logging trails, private lanes, and homemade dirt paths.
“I’ll tell you how to get there.” He pointed right. The trees loomed with snow and no cars were on the road. A few miles passed. Irina prickled with the quiet. A shakiness had descended after the flurry of a day and it needed an outlet. “So where are you headed after graduation?”
Lon snorted.
Irina burned with her idiocy. “What about community college?”
“Yeah sure,” he said, fiddling with the fraying cuff of his sweatshirt. “Who knows if I’ll graduate high school.” He leaned back. “Hasn’t happened yet.”
“You could learn a trade.” He nodded, eyes closed. Neither of Irina’s parents went to college. They had arrived with nothing and died with nothing. She had taken out loans she had not yet repaid for college. Why was she pushing that on anyone?
Lon touched his bandaged hand with his free one. Without thinking, Irina reached out to stop him. “Leave it alone!” she said. “Let it heal.”
Lon let her touch him, and then placed his hands in his lap. “It’s fine. I’ve had worse.” He snorted at some memory and leaned his head against the seat rest. Irina gripped the wheel with both hands and drove.
“Hang a left there.” Lon’s eyes were at half-mast as he pointed to a dirt trail between two posts. Irina eased the Buick onto the trail and bumped along the deep divots from past frost heaves. On either side, ice crusted ditches glinted a warning. There would be no rescue here, far from the main roads. Irina glanced at Lon but his lids were closed again, his hurt hand crossed across his body. “At the end of the road,” he said, seemingly guessing what was on her mind.
The end of the road was a dilapidated trailer with three car shells to the right side of it, like an ellipsis. Snow piled gray and dirty around an area cleared for parking. She put the car in park and sighed.
“I’m sorry,” Irina said. Her toes curled inside of her boots.
“My fault,” Lon said, staring out of the window. He drummed his good hand against the door. Irina waited. She wanted him out of her car, far away from her. Something about him still made her nervous. But how could she tell him that. She picked at the stitching on the wheel.
Suddenly, Lon swiveled and grabbed her arm pulling her in and leaned his head toward hers. For a moment Irina did not resist, wondering what would happen if she let him kiss her, what he was clearly trying to do. A small part of her felt thrilled by the attention, yawned wide with want. His small eyebrow ring touched her forehead at the same moment a draft of cold wind seeped through the car, righting her inner compass. She pulled back sharply. “What are you doing?” she asked. “Who do you think you are?”
Lon unfurled straighter and opened the door. He swung his legs out and extricated himself from the car. “Nobody,” he said, and slammed the door. She watched him let himself into the trailer. A light turned on inside and Irina touched her face, feeling the warmth that flushed her skin. The sky was darkening, and Irina saw only Lon’s long frame moving from window to window. Piles of trash leaned against a shed, a line of empty cans forming a trail from a ripped bag.
She pushed her fingertips into her eyebrows. In a swift yank she unbuckled her seatbelt and stepped into the tracks Lon made in the snow. At the trailer door she paused, and looked back at her car. She should leave.
Before she could move, Lon opened the door. “Forget something?” An orange dot glowed where he sucked at a cigarette. Something in her longed to hold him, to feel another body pressed against hers. She took a half step closer. Lon moved into the shadows and she saw what was behind him. Utter neglect and despair. Plastic and foil and wrappers, like a snowbank had melted and revealed the detritus from the season prior.
She recoiled into her winter jacket. Lon’s eyes searched her face, she could feel them but let hers fuzz out without meeting his. He tossed the cigarette behind her and moved closer. Irina wrapped her arms around herself, compacting her want, her feelings, her guilt. Her legs should have been moving her backward but she was inert and unable to escape this impossible place, this child.
Lon reached his arm out, the one with the mangled finger, and they both recoiled slightly at the stiff sight of the bandage. He dropped it by his side and wrapped his other hand around the back of her neck and pulled her forward. He tilted his head towards hers, more expertly this time, but Irina moved her head and instead drew him into an embrace. For a moment, they sagged into each other, making the shape of an uppercase A. Then her legs found motion and she withdrew back outside, which was somehow warmer than the trailer. She wanted him to follow, and that thought made her flee.
She hopped and crunched through the snow back into the car. The metallic door slammed and echoed into the woods. Her breath misted the inside of the windshield and she pressed her thighs together for warmth before splitting them for the accelerator. She saw motion behind the trailer windows again, and the shame came swiftly and fully. She wanted nothing more than to flee to warmth, the south, the soft anonymity and comfort of a dull middle class. Not this cold, forsaken town, a place of hard lives and abbreviated childhood, and a boy who felt like a man. The day, the blood, the being a teacher in the middle of nowhere. It was finally catching up to her.
She drove to Jen’s loft without thinking, her mind raw and reeling. The evening passed quickly with her rituals—tea, book, bed. That night she dreamed of Lon. He was in her arms, like a child, not a lover. It was the first time she felt like a mother, like a protector. She awoke trying to clasp the shreds of the dream back, as if she could capture that feeling and hold it, fix it to something.
A few weeks later it happens again, as she knew it inevitably would. The same bend, the same pernicious black ice. This time she doesn’t fight the wheel nor hit the brakes. Her boat of a car slides into the open-armed ditch. Irina is prepared for this. She has bought sand from the farm and feed store. The problem is, she has left it in the garage. Her trunk is empty save for a pile of art paper to resupply the next class. She recalls advice printed in the Reader’s Digest she has next to her toilet. An ice road trucker had invented a cheaper, easier method for chaining tires that involved wrapping fabric around the wheels for grip.
Irina divides the stack of craft paper in two piles and wedges them against the front tires, digging out snow. Inside the car, she slides into drive and whispers the accelerator. The tires seem to grip. The car lurches forward, then halts. She presses the pedal firmly and feels the tires freewheeling in the snow. Stuck.
Outside the car, paper speckles the snow with blue, green, and yellow. It is beautiful. It is as if spring has arrived early and has fallen to the ground in reverie. Irina climbs out again and realizes there is nothing to be done but wait. She picks up a blue sheet and begins folding, imagining the intricate snowflake design she will create with the scissors she keeps in her pocketbook. If she freezes to death, she thinks, at least she will have color, style. She thinks about Lon as her hand moves. She thinks about him as she digs her scissors in.
Nina Semczuk’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Post Road, the Los Angeles Review, The Offing, Sinking City Literary Journal, Coal Hill Review, and elsewhere. Nina is Ukrainian American and grew up in the rural foothills of the Adirondack Mountains. Before moving downstate, she served as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army. Visit her website at https://www.ninasemczuk.com/.
