Chapter 35
— Chapter 35 —
The roads are already icing over. We drive slowly, keeping distance from each other, but it’s comforting to see Bee’s headlights in my rearview and Hans’s tail lights ahead. There aren’t many cars on the road, and I wonder if it’s because people knew about the storm and went home early, or they’re about to get stranded wherever they are. Bee splits off when we get to the cemetery, flashing her lights at me before heading toward her condo. Hans makes the turn we do, but then turns again, driving off toward the neighborhood where all the kids in my class whose parents were doctors and lawyers and investment bankers lived.
It takes me twenty minutes to drive two miles. The sand truck hasn’t been by. I’m afraid to use my brakes, so I barely hit the gas.
I expect Aubrey to be annoyed by my caution. It’s the kind of thing other people always tease me about, but when we get to the driveway, she exhales hard, like she’d been holding her breath. “Thank you for driving slow,” she says. “That was scary.”
She pulls a garage door opener from her backpack and opens the door. “Park in there,” she says. She points to the big old maple that hangs over the driveway. “In case the tree falls.”
Since there’s only room for one car, we park Step’s wagon right in front of the garage, to get it as far from the tree as possible.
“Alright,” I say. “I’m going to fill up the bathtub. You start filling pots, and then we’ll plug the sinks and fill them too.”
“Why?” Aubrey asks, looking at me like I’ve lost my mind.
“We have a well. The pump is electric. If the power goes out, we won’t have water.”
“For real?”
“Do your parents have municipal water?” I wasn’t sure any part of Somers did.
Aubrey shakes her head. “I don’t know. But they have a generator.”
“Oh, man. This isn’t going to be fun, kid.” I comfort myself by thinking that if our situation becomes dire, I’ll find a way to get her to Steena’s house.
By nightfall, the rain sounds like wire brushes on a snare drum. We’ve filled every vessel that will hold water and hauled in firewood from the part of Step’s wood pile that’s covered with a tarp. Aubrey even found Coriolanus, wet and crabby, crouched under the shrubs by the toolshed. He let her carry him inside and doesn’t fight me when I dry him with a bath towel.
“I think he’s relieved,” Aubrey says, scratching his chin. He purrs loudly but nips at her hand. “You little shit!” She laughs and bares her teeth at him, but he goes right back to purring.
We find flashlights and candles and books of matches from restaurants that have been closed longer than Aubrey has been alive. We set up by the fireplace, drag in all the pillows and blankets in the house, and bring Lenny Juice’s cage into the living room so we don’t have to try to carry it in the dark. We grab towels to cover his cage if we need to keep him warm, and Aubrey gives Lenny one of Step’s old sheepskin slippers to sleep in. He chatters happily, looking inside the slipper and back to Aubrey, like he’s thanking her.
I don’t think there’s anything else we can do except hope that the roof holds and all the trees hold too.
The last time Aubrey and Shray went to the junk shop in Danbury, Aubrey picked up a box of random VHS movies for three dollars. We heat up some of the food Sam and Carlos gave us and watch Romancing the Stone , sitting cross-legged on the floor with our backs against the couch and Steena’s old comforter over our shoulders. If I weren’t worried about the storm, it would be the perfect night.
“This movie is ridiculous,” Aubrey says. “But I also kind of love it?”
“I think that’s what they were going for.” I remember watching it at one of Bee’s sleepover parties, but at nine or ten I didn’t understand that the melodrama was on purpose.
“Why is this spaghetti black?” Aubrey asks, picking at her take-out container.
“It’s made with squid ink.”
She wrinkles her nose. “I want to say that’s gross, but it’s good . What’s the rest of it? Tell me all the fancy words.”
“You are dining on a monkfish scampi made with hand-churned double cream butter and paper-thin Villafranca lemon slices, served over house-made squid-ink tagliatelle and garnished with a Hamburg parsley chiffonade.”
“It’s unreal that this food comes from that little restaurant out in Brewster. It’s like, New York City good.” She passes her tray to me and takes my chanterelle and Crottin de Chavignol polenta.
“You’ll have to tell Sam the next time you come in,” I say, and gulp down a forkful of pasta. It is incredible. The Aster is finally hitting some semblance of stride. Carlos nudged Sam toward less-expensive ingredients, and to Sam’s credit, he listened. Since they’re making heartier meals at a lower price, I’m getting better at selling our regulars on dishes outside of their comfort zone. The other day Shorty ordered Cornish hen coq au vin and liked it.
“I hope we get to eat all this food before the power goes out,” Aubrey says. There are still five more take-out tins in the fridge. “I’m getting full, but I don’t want to waste any of it.”
The decadence of our dinner does a pretty good job of distracting us from the storm, until the wind picks up. There’s a sudden crack and a crash. It sounds like it’s out on the road, not too close. The power doesn’t even flicker. But it reminds us of the outside world. We look through the window, but it’s dark and there’s nothing to see.
Aubrey tenses and doesn’t relax again, even though she tries to act like she’s fine. “So, that guy is the dad of the Mighty Ducks guy, right?” I hear the wobble in her voice.
“No, that’s Michael Douglas. You’re thinking of Martin Sheen.”
“Oh,” she says, nodding, but I can tell she’s not processing any of it.
“It’s okay to be scared. You don’t have to pretend you’re not.”
She flashes me a nervous smile.
“We’ll be fine,” I say. “We have firewood and water and a lifetime supply of ramen noodles.”
“What if a tree falls on us?”
“I don’t think we have any that would hit the house if they fell,” I say, imagining all the big trees around us, trying to visualize potential trajectories. “And even then, it might hurt the house and be really loud and scary, but we’ll get through it. This isn’t a hurricane. It’s just an ice storm. So, we’re worried about branches getting heavy and breaking, not high-force winds turning them into projectiles.” Running through all of this to calm Aubrey makes me feel less panicked too.
We go into the kitchen to peek through the take-out containers, and just as we find two slices of salted caramel apple galette, there’s another crack somewhere in the distance. Everything goes dark. My hands shake as I reach for the counter to put the take-out tin down.
“I feel like reality just shifted,” Aubrey says.
“It kinda did.” I catch myself before I spiral. “But we’ll be okay.” I pull a pen flashlight from my pocket. It’s white with Arnalds Insurance: We Protect You! printed in blue ink. “Let’s go start a fire in the fireplace. You’ll feel better once we do.”
Aubrey follows me into the living room, staying so close I worry she’ll trip on me if I stop quickly. I light the crumpled newspaper we stuffed under the stacked wood. The room starts to get smoky before I remember to open the flue. I’ve never actually made a fire by myself. We only used this fireplace when the power went out.
Once the fire is going, Aubrey feels better, but I start worrying about debris in the chimney or cracks I don’t know about, sparks that could fly up into the air and somehow ignite the entire ice-covered woods. I know I can’t let her see me panic, so I tell her I have to pee and then sit on the side of the bathtub with my head resting on my knees, trying to calm down enough to make Aubrey believe I’m not scared.
I wouldn’t be scared if I were alone in this storm. In Maine, I drove home from work in a whiteout on roads that had been officially closed by the state. I ran out of food in a blizzard and didn’t eat for two days. I stood on the beach and watched a nor’easter churning toward shore as the barometric pressure felt like it might push my heart into my stomach. The stakes never felt very high. I’d be okay or I wouldn’t, and I didn’t care much, because no one else did either. But Aubrey has to be okay, which means I have to be okay too. Not because I’m the only person in the world who can keep her safe, but because I matter to her. I have value and purpose because she cares about me, but that raises the stakes, and it feels like every nerve in my body has a ragged edge. It takes many deep breaths to pull myself together.
“Why does the fire smell weird?” Aubrey shouts when I finally open the bathroom door. “Is it the wood?”
I worry that we may be singeing a dead squirrel up in the chimney, but as I run back in the room, I get a whiff of stale ammonia and understand what she’s talking about.
“No, it’s not the wood. My parents had the fireplace refaced when they put the addition on the house, and legend has it our cat, Tibby, peed in the mortar sand.”
“Ew! And they used the sand anyway?”
“No one noticed until after the fact. It only reeks like that when it’s damp or the fire heats it up. But it’s definitely cat pee, and it never faded.”
“This house is terrible,” Aubrey says, shaking her head. “But I love it so much.”
Out of the corner of my eye I see a flash of light shining through the kitchen. It’s quick, like one headlight passing, except there’s nothing but woods behind the house.
“Did you see that?” Aubrey whispers.
“Shit. You saw it too?”
She grabs my hand.
“It’s okay,” I whisper. “Do you know where the little fireplace shovel and poker are?”
“I sold them. Sorry.” She squeezes my fingers.
I’m trying to remember what’s around us in the dark. There are tools in the basement, but I watched too many horror movies in the eighties to think it’s a good idea to go down there.
There’s a knock on the back door—the clear, sharp crack of knuckles hitting glass five times.
We are frozen.
Two more raps.
I let go of Aubrey’s hand. Grab one of the kindling sticks from the pile next to the fireplace and hold it in the flames.
Four raps this time. The fourth disjointed from the others, like a question.
“Stay here,” I whisper and carry my flaming stick through the kitchen to the sunroom, holding my hand under the flame because I don’t fully understand how the fire will act.
Jam is standing on the back patio, perfectly framed in the glass door, flashlight under his chin like he’s telling a scary story at a campfire.
I scream even though I know it’s him, because it takes a moment for my brain to catch up with my fear.
I hear Aubrey murmur, “Oh god.”
“It’s Jam!” I shout as I unlock the door. “It’s just Jam.”
“Why are you holding fire?” he asks.
“Move!” I yell, pushing past him to lob the stick onto the patio, where the freezing rain makes it hiss and crackle before it dies out completely. Now, Jam’s flashlight is the only light. He’s still shining it on his face, making his eyebrows glow and the bridge of his nose disappear.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I ask. “Why are you knocking on the back door?”
“I’m not climbing your broke-ass stone steps in an ice storm.” He’s dripping water on the floor, like he’s his own weather system.
“But how did you even get here?” I’m ranting and I don’t mean to be. I can’t control it. “How did you get down the hill? It must be a sheet of ice now!”
“I walked on the dirt on the side of the road,” Jam says. “It’s amazing how far you can get when you don’t care if you fall.”
“ Did you fall?” Aubrey asks, joining us in the sunroom, holding one of Step’s pen flashlights.
Jam shakes his head. “Just barreled on through.”
“You could have called,” I say.
“I forgot to charge my phone. And I couldn’t call from the house because your number is… in my phone. Are you mad at me? Because I can go out in the raging storm and get pelted with ice again if you want me to go.”
“No.” I’m relieved to see him, but there’s too much adrenaline coursing through my body and it’s making me crabby. “I thought you were a murderer.”
“I don’t think a murderer would bother in this weather,” Jam says. Then he starts laughing. “You came at me with a torch.”
“Shut up.”
“You were holding your hand under it. Like you didn’t want to spill fire. But it would have spilled on you.”
“Why are you here?” I ask, because I don’t want to think about the ways my instincts have failed at self-protection.
“I was worried about you. And it was weird being alone in the storm. My dad is at his woman’s house.”
Aubrey has been quiet. When I look over, her shoulders are shaking, but I can’t see her face.
“Are you laughing or crying?” I ask.
“Both?” she says, her voice cracking.
“It’s okay.” I hug her. She clings to me. I understand the way she’s feeling. When terror crashes into relief, it creates more energy than a body can hold.
Jam makes eye contact with me over Aubrey’s shoulder and mouths, “I’m so sorry.”
“You can say that out loud,” I say.
“Hey, Aubrey. I’m really sorry I scared you.”
Aubrey pulls away from me and hugs Jam. “It’s okay,” she says. “I’m glad you’re here—oh god, you’re soaked. Bad idea.” This time when she laughs it sounds like laughing.
Aubrey braves the upstairs to get Jam one of her enormous hoodies and a pair of Step’s old sweatpants.
We sit in front of the fire with our feet pressed against the warm hearth stones, eating cola and crab apple braised short ribs while we attempt to heat up a foil take-out tin of seared scallion mashed potatoes.
“Shouldn’t you be watching your house?” Aubrey asks Jam. “In case something happens?” She licks sauce off her fingers one at a time.
“What am I going to do if something happens?” Jam asks, talking with his mouth full. “Anyway, if my dad’s not going to care about our house, why should I?”
I want to point out that maybe his dad feels okay leaving the house because he thinks Jam is there to keep an eye on it, but Jam has the air of an abandoned child right now. He also doesn’t seem like he’s high, and I can imagine that made it extra hard to get stuck with his feelings all alone in a storm.
“I’ll help you check on it as soon as it’s safe,” I tell him.
“Thanks,” Jam says, leaning against me.
“I am happy you’re here,” I say, and he leans into me harder. “But you gotta be more careful, man! Don’t make me torch you!” I laugh and it gets them going again too.
“You looked like an angry villager!” Aubrey says, doubled over, voice squeaking, definitely all laughter this time.
I don’t know when we fall asleep. I remember resting my head on my pillow while Jam and Aubrey were counting sheep and naming each one.
“Twenty-four is Morton. He’s kind of a dick,” Jam said.
“Twenty-five is Betty. She has the softest wool, but it smells like farm,” Aubrey said.
“Twenty-six is Justine. She does not believe the cow jumped over the moon.”
They sounded so awake and giggly that I worried Aubrey would never settle down. But when I wake up, they’re both fast asleep and don’t budge even when I add more logs to the fire. Jam has his arm hooked over his face, as if the firelight was too bright for him. Aubrey has her index finger curled around her nose, and even though she’s not actually sucking her thumb, it reminds me of when she did.
The next time I wake up, it’s daylight. Still gray, but bright. Aubrey isn’t in her nest of blankets. Jam is cuddled up with Coriolanus, even though he’s allergic to cats; both of them are snoring. I’m about to get up to look for Aubrey when she comes bounding in.
“Bee says they sanded the roads and the bagel place has power, so she’s bringing us coffee.”
Jam’s head jolts up. He stares at her.
“Bee’s coming over?” I say.
“Yeah,” she says. “She got bagels and lox cream cheese too.”
“I should get going,” Jam says.
“She got enough for you,” Aubrey tells him. “I told her you were here.”
Jam looks at me and shakes his head. In high school, Bee dated a kid from Jam’s class who had picked on him like a wounded chicken all through grade school.
“You should stay,” I say. “It’s fine. She’s—we’re all grown ups now.”
Aubrey laughs, blissfully unaware of Jam’s baggage. “I wouldn’t go that far,” she says, looking to Jam for a reaction.
Jam looks like someone just knocked the ice cream off his cone, and I realize that it’s not my place to tell him what he’s supposed to get over. His childhood would have been hard enough if everyone was nice to him.