Mr. Roo gave it some thought, but when he pushed himself off the table he merely smiled and reached for my bowl.
“It’s chaos,” he said, “the festival, so you can never know what you will find. Or what will find you. But sometimes the gods remember us. Go out and look. What do you have to lose?”
*
Old Man Winter had a tough ride.
I watched him coming—held up by a winding procession that spanned two city blocks or so—on a decrepit dining chair carried aloft by a team of large men. Old Man Winter was a scarecrow, but a well-crafted one, with a wry smile somehow inked across his face. He looked to be at least as tall as a normal man, and he wore a suit coat with a boutonniere sticking out from his lapel. The men transporting him wore formal top hats and had their faces painted white. I had no idea what symbolic importance the top hats or white faces played, but I was willing to go along.
I wanted to go along.
I wanted to feel myself swept up and carried along, much as Old Man Winter was carried, to some burning conclusion that would cauterize the memory of Jack from my brain once and for all. The cowbells rang with wild energy, and their sounds reverberated against the old walls of the city, and for a while they chased even the simplest thought from my head. I stood on an avenue, squeezed back into a shop door, watching the procession dance by, the hilarity and drunkenness—I smelled a vaporous tinge of alcohol, like a great wave of corn and wheat as the crowd surged and danced—exploding in small clusters as the revelers passed. When the last of the procession had tailed out into the common, I fell in behind, determined to watch the Old Man meet his fate.
That’s where things stood when I saw Jack.
Where I thought I saw Jack. Where Jack floated out of the crowd for an eyeblink, then disappeared again.
It felt like a punch to the gut. It felt like someone had taken a sharp, delicate file and tapped it with the palm of his hand into the meaty furrow between my brows. I couldn’t move. Someone jostled me and said excuse me. I assumed he said excuse me, because I couldn’t understand him. I turned and nodded. Then I returned my eyes to the patch of people where Jack had been an instant before.
Where Jack Vermont, my Jack, had been dancing in celebration, his arms raised, a beautiful woman beside him.
A gorgeous woman beside him.
But was it Jack? Had it been? I couldn’t say with certainty. On one pulse I felt absolutely positive that Jack had appeared like a specter dancing with his arms upraised, in his barn jacket, the same barn jacket he always wore. In the next instant the rational part of my brain dismissed the vision as wish fulfillment. As delusion. As the product of exhaustion and a heightened emotional state.
And was he with another woman? Is that what I had seen?
Had I seen anything at all?
Stop, I thought. Make everyone stop for a moment. I needed everyone to stop as if I had dropped a contact lens on the ground. Keep your position. Then I would pass among them, the world’s largest duck, duck, goose game, and tap one after another and ask them to leave. One by one, I would whittle them away until whatever remained, whoever remained, would be Jack, or Jack’s doppelg?nger, or a man who resembled Jack so closely that it defied rational explanation.
I hurried forward. Something in the village common roused the people into a cheer, and by the time I reached the assembly, Old Man Winter had already been ignited. He burned at the top of a large bonfire, his scarecrow body turning into a wick inside a piercing yellow flame. The crowd yelled and danced, and the cowbells, the perpetual, insistent cowbells, rang like a hellish chorus jibing at the Old Man’s suffering. Everywhere I looked, the masks changed form by catching the light from a new angle. I could no longer determine what I felt: a wild appeal to a primitive self, fear, joy, anger. Maybe that was the point, I realized, as I circled the crowd, turning this way and that to make my way between the crazed dancers. Maybe the winter that counted, the one that needed to be burned most of all, lived inside us.
I searched for an hour. Two hours. I searched until the Old Man and his throne of fire had burned down to a smoldering heap of ash and charred tree trunks. I searched until the local constabulary came and backed us away while the fire department hosed down the last of the fire. Then I watched as a backhoe scooped up the remaining ash and waste and dumped it into the bed of a blue truck.
The Old Man was gone. Jack was gone. I walked back to my room, to Mr. Roo, to the Cupid heater with the pursed lips and the breath of hot air. My lost boy was still lost.
*
I couldn’t sleep.
I couldn’t come close to sleeping. I fed the Cupid heater coins and stayed on my cot, trying my best to come up with a plan. To come up with anything. Mostly I argued for or against the proposition that I had seen Jack. One second I thought, It had to be Jack. I knew Jack’s shape, his build, his walk, down in my bones. As soon as I grew comfortable with that assertion, doubt crept in on thorny little mouse feet, nose twitching, ears flexing, whiskers rising up and down.
It was not Jack, the mouse told me in those moments. Girl, you really need to get over this guy.
And if it was Jack, and Jack had been dancing in that crowd, was it possible his new girlfriend was beside him? Was he hooking up with someone new just as he had hooked up with me? Was this his pattern? A romantic sociopath? A serial sexual predator?
No, no sleep for me.
No clear thinking, either.
Then the room suddenly began to shrink. I knew it was all in my head, but I couldn’t quite deny the evidence of my senses. I stood and did some stretching. I did at least a quarter hour of yoga. Afterward, I got out my iPad and checked for Wi-Fi. Nothing. The room continued to shrink. Finally, I grabbed my jacket and went outside. It was cold and bitter and dark. If the villagers were sending Old Man Winter back up to the mountains, or at least murdering him, they weren’t doing a good job of it. The entire town smelled of charred bonfire remnants.
I had no idea if I was safe wandering around town by myself. Now and then, a couple or a group of revelers passed me. I always nodded. I told myself to turn around, to go back to the Cupid heater and try to sleep. I also told myself that I needed to call the airport as early as I could the next day and book a flight out of Bulgaria. I even considered calling my parents, maybe my mom, just to reassure them that I had not gone completely mad. But then I realized needing to reassure my parents I wasn’t crackers sounded like a bad piece of reasoning. If you have to tell someone you’re not crackers, you probably are.