Shifting the Trail

The trail was quiet the way it only gets in the off-season, when the snow stops being something people pay to ride through and goes back to being just weather. I remember thinking, that night, that the job was easy but the cold was honest about being miserable. I liked that about it. Ross Martinez, thirty-three years old, night security for the skijoring trail outside Peniche, walking a loop around a snowy field at one in the morning because somebody had to.

The field itself was mostly empty. The course markers stood in their lines like they were waiting for horses that weren't coming until spring. There was one dog left on the grounds, a big black thing named Tack that belonged to one of the riders and stayed behind when the season ended, and usually he slept in the maintenance shed by the stove. That night he wasn't there, which I noticed but didn't think much of. Dogs wander. I figured he was curled up somewhere smarter than me.

I was halfway back to the gate when my radio crackled. Dispatch, in the flat voice they use for everything from lost tourists to actual disasters, told me the district heating line was down. The whole western loop, including the shed I was supposed to shelter in between patrols. Repair crew was coming but the storm had slowed them on the road, so call it two hours, maybe three.

Great. I stood there in the snow and did the math. The shed had a stove but no fuel that night because the delivery had been pushed to Thursday. The gatehouse had heat but was a twenty minute walk, and the heating line failure meant the gatehouse was losing warmth too, since it ran off the same line. So really my options were to walk fast in a storm or stand still in one. I grumbled something the radio probably recorded and headed for the shed anyway, because at least it had a roof and it was closer.

I got a small fire going with what scrap wood was in there and settled in to wait. That's when I heard the knock. Or more of a pounding, actually, wind-distorted, and I opened the door expecting the repair crew way early or a lost snowboarder, and got neither.

It was a woman, thirty-one or so, bundled in a coat so thick she looked like she was wearing a mattress. Snow in her hair, a dog lead in one hand with no dog on the other end of it. She had the kind of face that was already halfway to an apology.

"Sorry, sorry, I know it's late. Is Tack here? He got out when the storm picked up. He runs this trail, he knows it, but he's never out in weather like this."

"Tack's the black one?" I said. "Haven't seen him since about eleven. Come in, you're letting the cold in and honestly the cold is beating me tonight anyway."

She stepped in and I shut the door behind her and the shed got about ten degrees warmer just from having two people in it who hated the weather. I gave her the stool by the fire and she took it, pulling off wet gloves finger by finger, and told me her name was Randi. Randi Calloway. She owned the bit and spur workshop in town, the little one with the forge, and Tack belonged to her cousin's horse partner, and somehow that had turned into Randi being the one out in a blizzard at one in the morning looking for a dog that was smarter than both of us.

"He'll turn up," she said. "He always does. Usually somewhere warm with food involved."

"Then he's probably in town already, asleep on your workshop floor, laughing at us."

She laughed at that, a real laugh, and I liked it more than I expected to. I made coffee on the stove, the kind from a tin that tastes like the tin, and we drank it and talked about nothing. The storm. The trail. How the off-season made the whole town feel suspended in anticipation. She'd been here six years, I'd been here four, and we had only ever exchanged a few words, which she found funnier than I did.

"You're the night guy," she said. "I've heard about you. Someone said you once talked a drunk tourist down off the viewing platform in February."

"I talked him down to a lower part of the platform. He was fine. Mostly cold."

"Mostly cold is the local condition," she said, and we both drank our bad coffee.

It was maybe forty minutes into the wait when I noticed the bag. She'd set it by her feet when she came in, and I had taken it for a tool bag or a purse, but in the firelight I got a proper look at it. It was a gros point tapestry bag, the old kind, needlepoint in reds and golds worked over every inch of it, with a wooden handle that had been worn smooth by somebody's hand a long time before hers. It looked like it had survived three houses and two wars.

"That's a hell of a bag," I said.

She looked down at it like she'd forgotten it was there, then smiled in a way that had a secret folded into it. "It was my grandmother's. Well, the bag is hers. What's in it is hers too, sort of. From her estate."

"Estate?"

"Go on, look, if you want. Everyone asks eventually." She lifted it onto her lap and unsnapped a clasp and pulled out a fold of fabric that caught the firelight and kept it. Silk. Actual silk, in a pale cream, with lace at the edge that was finer than anything I had ever seen outside of a museum or a movie.

"There's a whole collection in there," she said, turning the fold over so I could see more lace, a ribbon, a small satin bow the color of champagne. "When my grandmother died we cleared out her house and found a trunk in the attic. Sixty years of lingerie, all of it kept like it was church vestments. Slips, chemises, tap pants, corset covers, stockings in boxes with tissue paper. Some of it she wore, some of it she never wore, some of it was her mother's. I couldn't sell it. I couldn't wear most of it either, it's built for a smaller frame than mine. So I keep it in the bag and I carry it around like a lunatic and I show people when the mood strikes."

"Why carry it around?"

"Because it seemed wrong to leave it in a trunk again. Things like this want to be seen. They were made to be seen, even if only by one person, once, in a lamplit room." She smoothed the silk with her thumb. "Anyway. Now you know my strange thing. What's yours?"

And here is where I have to be honest about myself, because the whole night turns on it and I refuse to tell it slant. I have always wanted to wear things like that. Women's things. Lace and silk and the small engineering of it, the straps and the hooks, the way it's built for a body. Not because I want to be a woman, I'd worked that out years ago, but because I wanted to know how it felt on my skin, wanted it badly, for as long as I could remember wanting anything. I had never told another living person. Not at twenty-two with the coworker I dated for a season, not to anyone since. It sat in me like a stone in a boot.

I could have said nothing. I could have said my strange thing was bad coffee. Instead I looked at the fire, and then at the lace in her hands, and I heard the words leave my mouth out loud for the first time in thirty-three years.

"I've always wanted to try on something like that."

The storm hit the side of the shed and the fire popped and Randi looked at me, and to her enormous credit she didn't laugh, didn't flinch, didn't do any of the hundred things I had spent my whole life bracing for.

"Well," she said slowly, laying the silk flat on her knee. "It happens I have a bag full."

I won't pretend I handled it well. The truth is I panicked. You say a thing out loud for the first time in thirty-three years and then the room has to do something with it, and the room was a maintenance shed with a dying fire and a woman I'd spoken to maybe nine times in four years.

She didn't make it worse. She picked the cream silk back up and held it against the light like she was pricing it at an estate sale, and she said, "This one would suit you. It's a chemise, technically. Or a camisole, if you're being fussy about it. My grandmother called everything a camisole when she was feeling lazy."

"I'd look ridiculous," I said. That was reflex. That was thirty-three years of reflex talking.

"Probably," she agreed, and that threw me more than an argument would have. "At first. Everybody looks ridiculous the first time they put on something that wasn't made for them. The trick is you keep it on for ten minutes and then you look like a person wearing silk, which is not ridiculous at all. It's just a person in silk." She tilted her head at me. "Unless you'd rather not. Say so and we drink coffee and talk about the heating line, and this never happened."

I thought about the heating line. The heating line was a safe subject. I had thoughts about