The Spinning Arrow

I'm forty-four years old and I still own a wooden spinning arrow from a drinking game. That's the kind of fact I don't lead with at dinner parties, but it's true, so there we are.

It sits in a drawer in my nightstand, back home, wrapped in an old dish towel. It's a cheap little thing, pine probably, with a nail through the middle so the arrow spins on a splinter. You flick it and whoever the point lands on drinks. Somebody made it at a house party in the summer I was twenty-two, and I kept it, because that was the night Elias Tuttlehill kissed me for the first time, and apparently my brain filed both events under the same heading and has refused to separate them for twenty-two years.

Grief counselors are supposed to be good at letting go. I tell people that every working day. Closure, I say, isn't a door slamming, it's a window you learn to leave open without shivering. And then I go home and open a drawer and look at a broken party game like it's a relic from a saint.

So when my boss asked who wanted to represent our practice at the grape-stomping contest in Misungwi, I said yes before I'd thought it through. Then I remembered who runs the logistics for that contest, and I spent a week composing emails I never sent. Elias had found me online back in March. One message. Hey stranger, it said. Hope life's kind to you. I'd read it maybe four hundred times and answered it twice, both times with the enthusiasm of a woman dictating a will.

The trouble is I know exactly why I kept the arrow. And I know exactly why I answered a message I'd been dodging for months, then booked a flight to the town where he lives.

Denial, they'd call that, in my line of work. Pot, meet kettle.

Misungwi in the cold season is all gray sky and wet stone and steam coming off other people's coffee. I got up before dawn on contest day because as a visiting judge I had to inspect the course, which sounds official but mostly means standing around with a clipboard while your toes die. The hibernal avalanche chute is this narrow concrete corridor carved into the hillside, and they line it with wooden planks every year for the foot races and the cold-foot challenge, where people run barefoot on frozen planks while the crowd screams at them. Local tradition. Locals are strange.

I was sitting on the viewing platform at the top of the chute, barefoot, because I wanted to know what the contestants would feel, and what they would feel was pain. My feet had gone from cold to that deep aching stage and I'd pulled my knees up to my chest and was questioning every decision that brought me to this hillside when I heard footsteps behind me.

"Kirsten?"

That voice. Twenty-two years and one skipped heartbeat later, it still did the same thing to me, which is frankly humiliating.

I turned around and there he was. Forty-five now, a bit grayer than the boy I remembered, same crooked smile, wearing a festival volunteer jacket about two sizes too big for him. Elias Tuttlehill, accountant, the most sensible man I have ever known, standing in the frozen dawn holding a folded blanket.

"You're barefoot," he said. "In the chute. Before sunrise."

"It's for research," I said. "Professional curiosity."

"It's for frostbite." He came over and draped the blanket around my shoulders before I could argue, and his hands hesitated half a second at my shoulders, like he wasn't sure he was allowed. His voice had gone hesitant, careful. "I'd offer my jacket too, but I only brought the one blanket and my dignity."

"Your dignity is safe. I'd never take a man's dignity, it's all most of them have left." God, I was doing the thing where I talk fast when I'm terrified. "Hi, Elias."

"Hi, Kirsten." He sat down next to me, a careful arm's length away. "You came."

"You said you'd be here. You sent me the judge's itinerary. Twice."

"I wasn't sure you'd actually get on the plane."

Neither was I, frankly. "Well, here I am. Freezing my feet off for tourism."

He laughed, and the sound of it undid about a decade of my careful emotional housekeeping. We sat there a minute, watching the light come up gray over the hillside, and I was intensely aware of every inch of blanket he'd given me.

"The planks need laying before the contestants show up," he said at last, nodding down the chute. "I could use help, if your research allows."

"Research is ongoing," I said, and got up, and we climbed down into the chute together.

Laying planks is not romantic work. It's heavy, splintery, damp work, and the concrete under the planks was wet from the slope, and by the third plank I had a streak of mud across my sleeve and Elias had one across his forehead where he'd pushed his hair back with a dirty hand. But it was work we could do side by side, and somewhere around plank fourteen, passing one back and forth between us, our fingers touched on the wood and neither of us pulled away fast enough.

That old pull. I'd spent years telling myself I'd buried it. It wasn't buried, it was hibernating, like the avalanche in the chute's name, just waiting for weight on the slope.

"So," he said, too casual, eyes on the plank. "The arrow."

My hands stopped moving. "What about the arrow?"

"You still have it. You mentioned it, that night in June, before you stopped answering."

"That was one conversation we didn't finish."

"Kirsten. We've never finished a single conversation. Not one, in twenty-two years. We just keep starting new ones with the old one still running underneath."

I set the plank down harder than I needed to. "That's a very accountant thing to say."

"Thank you, I practice."

And I laughed, damn him, laughed out loud in a frozen concrete chute at six in the morning, and he grinned at me like he'd won something, and I thought, oh no. Oh no, I'm still in trouble with this man.

"Tell me about the arrow," he said quietly.

"What's to tell? It's a broken party game in a dish towel."

"It's from the night we first kissed. That's what's to tell."

I looked down the chute instead of at him. "It landed on you," I said. "The arrow. Everybody was flicking it for sips, and it spun forever, it wobbled around like it couldn't decide, and then it stopped pointing at you, and you leaned over and kissed me, and everyone at that party screamed like a goal had been scored."

"You flicked it," he said. "You held it and flicked it, and you were looking at me when it stopped."

"I was not."

"You were absolutely looking at me. I've replayed that night maybe nine thousand times, Kirsten, I know where you were looking."

"Well." I picked up another plank. "So do I, actually. That's the embarrassing part."

Plank fifteen went down. Plank sixteen. His shoulder brushed mine on the carry and my whole arm lit up like a bad wiring job. Twenty-two years, I thought. Twenty-two years and he still smells like cedar and cheap coffee and he still walks slightly ahead of me because he's always worried about what's coming down a slope, and I still want to put my cold hands under his shirt.

"You know what I was afraid of?" I said, mostly to the plank. "Not the cold-foot challenge. Coming here. Seeing you. Because I've done the math on us, Elias, professionally, and the math says unfinished business this old doesn't reopen quietly."

"Good," he said.

"Good?"

"I don't want it quiet. I've had twenty-two years of quiet. I planned this whole contest around getting you into a chute, Kirsten, that's how little quiet I want." He said it fast, like he'd been holding it in a locked drawer and the key had finally turned. "Not that I'm, I mean, the contest would exist without me, but the chute was my idea for the venue change, and yes, that's a terrible confession to make to a woman holding a plank."

I stared at him. "You moved the festival venue to trap me in a corridor."

"To host you in a corridor. Trapping would be a different form."

"You're an accountant."

"I'm a man with a spreadsheet and a dream," he said, and that set me off laughing again, and this time he laughed too, bent over a plank with his muddy forehead, and the morning got a little less cold, or maybe that was just me.

We finished the last section of planks and stood back at the bottom of the chute, looking up at our work, and it looked decent, honestly, straight lines, no gaps, a thing two people built together in one morning.

"Your feet are blue," Elias said.

"They're research-grade blue."

"Kirsten." He turned to face me, and his voice did the hesitant thing again, the careful thing. "Can I say the thing I've been not saying since March?"

I wrapped the blanket tighter. My pulse was doing something unprofessional. "You can say it."

He opened his mouth, and from up at the top of the chute came a whistle and a shout, volunteers arriving, the first contestants stomping around on the platform above us, and the moment cracked right down the middle like one of our planks laid badly.

"Later," he said. "There's a later. There will be a later, won't there?"

"There's a whole contest," I said. "Eight hours of grapes and frozen feet. I'm judging. You're logistics. We will be in the same valley all day."

"That's not what I asked."

And he was right, it wasn't, and we both knew it, and I looked up the slope at him with my blue feet and my borrowed blanket and said, "Yes, Elias. There's a later!"

From above, somebody yelled down the chute that the grape bins were being unloaded, and the day started, whether either of us was ready for what it might finish or not.

The eight hours went by the way eight hours go when you're pretending not to watch one specific man.

Grapes, mostly. Buckets and buckets of them. Contestants stomped, judges judged, I scored twelve people on juice yield and one man on what he later insisted was "technique" but what I scored as flailing. My feet thawed around hour two and then refroze around hour five, and every time Elias walked past the judging table with his clipboard, my stomach did the thing it used to do in our twenties, which is drop like an elevator with a bad cable.

"Judge Barnett," he'd say, professional as anything. "How's the yield?"

"Abundant," I'd say. Abundant. Like a normal person.

The volunteers loved him. Some woman named Dot kept bringing him coffee he never drank because he was too busy, and I caught myself being irrationally annoyed by Dot and her coffee, which is ridiculous, because Dot is probably sixty-five and lovely. Grief counselor, remember? I know what displacement is. I teach