Glacier Season

Gladys here, fifty-two, accountant, and if you had told me three years ago I'd be white-knuckling a rental Corolla through a snow squall on the coast of Newfoundland, I'd have said you were off your head. But that's where I was last February, three years into a relationship with Celeste, who is fifty-three and who, up until that afternoon, I had believed when she said she knew this road.

Celeste is a sushi chef. She works at a little place in town that does a steady business even in the off-season, and she has hands that are steadier than mine will ever be. We met four years ago at a sushi tasting class, back when I was forty-eight and she was forty-nine, and I'll get to how that went. Three years together now, and this trip was supposed to be our quiet week. Glacier viewpoint, a fjord the guidebook said was carved clean by ice, one bed and breakfast with a wood stove, no phones. That was the plan.

The plan lasted until about four in the afternoon on a county road that had stopped being a road and started being a rumor.

"You said you knew this road," Celeste said, peering through the windshield at the wall of snow. Her voice was level, the way it always is, which somehow made it worse. She had her hand flat on the dash like she was steadying the car herself through sheer will.

"I said I knew the way," I said. "That's a different thing. Knowing the way and knowing the road are two different animals."

"Are they now."

"They are now, yes, given the circumstances."

The wipers were going full tilt and losing. The snow came sideways off the water, that's the only way I can describe it, horizontal and mean, and the headlights lit up maybe fifteen feet of nothing. I was doing twenty in second gear and the car still wandered. Somewhere on my left there was supposed to be a fjord. Somewhere on my right there was supposed to be a hill. I couldn't swear to either one, and that was the part that was making my stomach sit funny.

We'd left the city that morning with coffee and a thermos and the kind of smugness two people have when they've planned a trip well. Celeste had packed a cooler with rice and fish because she can't go two days without cutting something, she claims it's like a pianist not practicing, and I had packed the map, an actual paper map, because I don't trust the phone signal out there and I'd said so. The irony of that is not lost on me. I'd folded the map in the hotel at breakfast and traced the county road with my finger and said, confidently, that the viewpoint turnoff was maybe forty minutes past the harbor. What I had actually traced, it turned out later, sitting in a warm parlor with the map flattened out on a table, was the wrong fork entirely, and the glacier viewpoint was another twenty miles past a pass that the county closes every winter and reopens whenever it feels like it.

I didn't know that yet at four in the afternoon. What I knew was that the road got narrower, then narrower, then it ended at a chain across it with a yellow sign on it and about three feet of fresh snow drifted up behind the chain.

I stopped the car. We sat there. The engine idled and the wipers slapped and we both stayed quiet for a good half minute.

"Well," Celeste said finally. "That's a chain."

"That is a chain."

"Is that the pass?"

"That's the pass."

"Twenty miles?"

"Past it, yes!" I turned the engine off to save the gas and the silence got bigger. The snow came down without any sound at all, which was somehow worse than the wind. "I misread the map. The fork back at the harbor, the one with the sign that was bent, I took it as the through route. It wasn't. The through route is the other one."

Celeste looked at the chain, then at me, then back at the chain. She wasn't angry. She almost never gets angry, which sounds like a blessing and is mostly one, but it does mean that when she's disappointed you can't get any purchase on it. She just goes quiet and starts solving things.

"Okay," she said. "We go back and find that lodge. There was a sign, seven or eight miles back. A lodge, it said. Vacancy, it said."

"You noticed that?"

"I notice things. I'm a chef. It's the job."

So I turned the car around in a space about as large as a tennis court, with Celeste out in the snow in her boots directing me, waving her arms, snow building up on the shoulders of her coat, and after ten minutes of that we were headed back the way we came, slower if anything, the road already half-filled in behind us. I remember thinking that if it filled in much more we'd be the ones needing help, and I was right about that, though not in the way I expected.

The lodge showed up as a yellow smudge in the headlights and then as a real building, a long low thing with a pitched roof and a lit window and a hand-painted sign that said IDA'S, and a smaller sign underneath that said VACANCY, which under the circumstances felt like a personal favor. There was a graveled yard with one other car in it, snowed up to the sills, and a porch light with a moth refusing to accept the season.

The woman who opened the door was fifty-six, silver-haired, wearing a flannel shirt and an apron with flour on it, and she looked at the two of us standing in the drift on her step and said, "You came over the harbor road, didn't you. Nobody comes the harbor road in February unless they didn't know better."

"That's us," Celeste said. "We didn't know better."

"Well, come in before the yard fills in and you've made it worse." She stepped back and held the door. "Ida. This is my place. You'll want the plow, and I can tell you now the plow comes in the morning, not before."

The inside of the lodge was warm in a way that made my eyes sting. There was a long dining table down the middle of the main room with mismatched chairs, a wood stove throwing heat off to one side, and a counter along the far wall, and on that counter, next to a jar of pickled kelp that I looked at twice to make sure I'd read it right, sat an old rotary phone, black, heavy, the dial yellowed, the cord coiled like something asleep.

Ida caught me looking. "Twenty years I've been here," she said. "Came out from the city after I finished nursing. Cell service up this stretch of coast is a rumor and a promise, and the satellite phone I had died in a storm two years back. So it's the rotary or nothing. Bell still services it. I told them I'd switch to something modern and they said take a number, so I kept the rotary." She said all this while pouring coffee from a pot that had clearly been on the stove all day, and she put the cups down in front of us like she'd been expecting us, which I don't think she had, she just had that way about her.

Celeste got the plow question out of her in about four sentences. The county road over the pass was closed and would stay closed until a plow ran it in the morning, probably mid-morning, and the road back to the harbor would get the same treatment, and until then nobody was driving anywhere unless they had a very good reason and a very good truck. Ida had a snowmobile for true emergencies and made it plain she wasn't going to define our evening as one.

"So you have a room," Celeste said.

"I have three rooms and one other guest who went to bed at seven like he does every night. Rooms are up the stairs. Supper's whatever's on the stove and whatever you brought, and I hear you brought a cooler of fish, and I'll say now I haven't had proper sushi in this house since the last chef came through, so we'll talk about that." She set her hands on her hips and looked between us, and something in her face softened. "You two have been together long?"

"Three years," I said.

"Good. Long enough to argue about maps and short enough to still be glad about the room." She nodded at the stairs. "I'll make up the beds. Take your coffee to the stove."

And that's how we ended up sitting on a bench by the wood stove in a lodge at the end of a closed road, waiting for a plow that wasn't coming until morning, with a jar of pickled kelp on the counter and an old rotary phone standing by in case the world needed us. Celeste stretched her legs out and looked into the fire, and I remember thinking the getaway was ruined, and being wrong about that in a way I'd find out later that night.

Celeste lasted about ten minutes by the fire before she started in on me.

"You know you checked the weather four times in the car," she said. "I counted. Four times, and once was while you were driving, which I want noted was worse than the map thing."

"I was checking for the squall."

"You were checking for permission to relax. There's a difference." She pulled her boots off and set them by the stove, side by side, the way she does everything, precisely, like she's plating something. "You planned this trip like an audit. I kept waiting for you to produce a binder."

"I had a folder," I admitted.

"You had a folder with tabs. I saw the tabs. One of them said contingencies, Gladys. Who puts contingencies in a vacation folder?"

"Someone who got us here alive," I said, and she laughed at that, a real laugh, the kind I only get out of her maybe twice a month, and I decided I'd count the ruined road as worth it for that sound alone, though I didn't tell her so, because she'd have found some way to make it into a tease and I wasn't in the mood to lose an argument I'd already started.

The truth was I had been wound tight since we left the city. Three years of planning trips with Celeste and I still approached every one of them like something that could be failed. The glacier viewpoint was supposed to be the payoff. Twenty miles past a pass closed for winter, as it turned out, which meant the payoff was a lodge with a moth on the porch and a woman who pickled her own kelp, and I sat there by the fire feeling the whole itinerary come apart in my hands and not entirely minding, which was new for me, and worth thinking about later, when I had the spare attention for it.

Ida came back through from the kitchen around seven-thirty with a tray, and on the tray was a bottle of sake and three small cups, and she set it down on the table between our chairs like this was an ordinary Tuesday.

"Plumber brought it last fall," she said. "Never opened it. I don't drink alone, it feels like a meeting." She poured without asking, which I decided was her way all through, and the sake was warm and better than it had any right to be, sitting in a lodge nine miles from a plow. "There's a story with that bottle but I'll tell it when there's more evening to put it in."

Celeste asked her about the guest who went to bed at seven, and Ida said his name was Bo, that he'd been coming every February for eleven years, that he fished in summer and read in winter and wanted nothing from anybody, and that she considered him the ideal guest and had considered raising his rates just to see if it would scare him off, and decided against it, because perfect guests are rarer than plows on this road. We drank the first