CHAPTER TEN
The Long Night
The power failed for good sometime after nine that evening, the generator sputtering twice in warning before it finally gave out entirely under a load it had never been built to carry for this many days running, and the full pavilion plunged, in the space of a single held breath, into a darkness so total it took my eyes a long moment to adjust even to the faint, flickering light still thrown by the two wood stoves at either end of the room.
"Everybody stay put," Denny called out, calm despite the sudden chaos of thirty odd people all reacting at once, his voice carrying clear and steady through the dark.
"Nobody move around blind, you'll trip over a piece of it and hurt yourself worse than any storm's going to.
Gil, grab the lanterns from the supply closet. We planned for this."
We had planned for it, or thought we had, and within a few minutes the pavilion glowed again in the warm, uneven light of a dozen battery lanterns and a scattering of candles Marion produced from somewhere, the room settling back into something approximating calm even as the wind outside seemed to redouble its efforts against the walls, howling with a fury that made the whole structure groan faintly on its beams. The temperature, robbed of the generator's heaters, began dropping almost immediately despite the stoves' best efforts, and I found myself, helping Marion and Vivian distribute extra blankets through the crowded room, grateful all over again for Denny's stubborn insistence, weeks earlier, on stockpiling considerably more firewood than anybody had thought we'd realistically need.
The Pruitt children, initially delighted by the sudden adventure of lantern light and huddled blankets, had been coaxed into an uneasy sleep by midnight, curled together in a single nest of sleeping bags near the nearest stove, and the rest of the pavilion settled, slowly, into the certain hushed, watchful still of a large group of people trying to rest through weather that refused to let anybody rest easily.
I lay curled against Sam's chest sometime past one in the morning, half asleep, half listening to the wind's relentless assault on the windows, when a low, urgent voice cut through the dark from somewhere near the far stove, and something in its tone had me sitting upright before I'd even fully registered the words.
"Somebody get Marion. Please, someone get Marion, right now."
It was Walt's voice, and some part of it in it, some raw, frightened edge I'd almost never heard from my father in my complete life, had me on my feet and moving before Sam had even finished untangling himself from the blankets beside me.
I found Walt kneeling beside Everett Boyle's cot near the far stove, a lantern held with trembling hands, and Everett lying very still beneath it, his face gone the wrong color even in the warm, uneven light, his breathing shallow and labored in a way that turned my stomach cold the instant I registered it.
"He was fine an hour ago," Walt said, his voice cracking around the words. "I checked on him before I turned in, he was fine, and then I heard him make a sound, this terrible sound, and I came over and he wasn't answering me thoroughly."
Marion arrived within seconds, dropping to her knees beside Everett with the swift, focused calm of the nursing training she'd carried quietly with her for decades, pressing two fingers to his wrist, leaning close to check his breathing, her expression, in the lantern light, going grim in a way I'd rarely seen from her.
"His pulse is weak and irregular," she said, low, urgent.
"Everett. Everett, can you hear me?" His eyes fluttered, unfocused, a faint, pained sound escaping him that wasn't quite words, and Marion's hands moved fast and sure to his chest, checking, pressing, her jaw set tight with concentration.
"I think it's his heart. Somebody find out if he's got medication, check his camper records, anything. "
"I'll check the office files," I said, already moving, my own hands shaking despite my best efforts to keep them steady, and it was Sam who caught my arm a half second later, steering me instead toward a woman I barely recognized, one of the diner's young staff who'd been swept up in the storm along with Carla and Dot two nights before.
"Reagan's an EMT," Sam said, fast. "Off duty, but she's had the training. Reagan, we need you."
Reagan Hollis, a young woman I'd exchanged perhaps three words with over the past two days, was already moving before Sam finished the sentence, dropping to her knees on Everett's other side with a competence that cut cleanly through the panic gathering thick in the room around us. "How long has he been like this?"
"Ten minutes, maybe less," Walt said, desperate.
"Any known heart conditions? Medication?"
"I don't know," I admitted, my voice thin. "I'll find out, I'll check his registration file, he might have listed something."
"Go," Reagan said, already tilting Everett's head back, checking his airway with swift, practiced hands, Marion working beside her in a rhythm the two women fell into almost wordlessly, the particular fluent partnership of two people who both knew precisely what needed doing even without having worked together before.
I ran for the office through a pavilion gone eerily hushed, every eye in the room following the small, desperate scene by the far stove, Deloris risen half out of her cot with one hand pressed to her mouth, Otis standing frozen with his notebook forgotten at his feet, Nina gripping Jared's arm so tight her knuckles had gone white, and found Everett's file exactly where it should have been, a folded sheet listing an emergency contact long since deceased, a note about a heart condition he'd mentioned in passing at check in, medication for it that he'd have carried with him, and I ran back through the dark and cold with the paper clutched tight in my hand, my breath coming ragged from more than just the running.
By the time I made it back, Reagan and Marion were working in earnest, counting compressions in low, steady voices, taking turns without a word passing between them, the whole crowded room holding its breath in a silence broken only by the storm still howling outside and the terrible, rhythmic count of two women fighting for a man's life with nothing but their own hands and years of training between him and whatever was happening inside his chest.
I don't know how long it went on. Time had gone strange and thick in that moment, minutes stretching and compressing in ways that made no sense afterward, Sam's arm coming around my shoulders at some point, Walt kneeling frozen and silent a few feet away, his face gone gray, Theo appearing somewhere near my elbow in his pajamas, small and frightened and utterly still, watching with the specific wide, uncomprehending horror of a child witnessing something he had no framework yet to properly understand.
Reagan at last sat back on her heels, her chest heaving, and looked at Marion, and a piece of it passed between the two women that needed no words at all, and Marion's hands went still on Everett's chest, and the entire room seemed to understand, all at once, just what that stillness meant even before anybody said it aloud.
"I'm sorry," Reagan said, quiet, devastated, her voice cracking around the words in a way that told me she'd hoped, right up until the very last moment, that this was going to end differently.
"I'm so sorry. There wasn't anything more we could have done.
His heart just... it was too much, too fast. I'm sorry. "
Marion reached out and gently closed Everett's eyes, her own face wet with tears she made no effort to hide, and the sound that came out of Walt then was one I will carry with me the rest of my life, low and broken and completely unlike any sound I'd ever heard my steady, unshakeable father make, and I sank down beside him without thinking, wrapping my arms around him while he wept for a man he'd known barely two days and loved, by the end of them, like an old and dear friend.
The whole pavilion had gone silent around us, thirty people holding their breath together in the dark, the storm still raging outside utterly indifferent to what had just happened within these walls, and I looked across the room and found Sylvie Marchetti crying quietly into Gil's shoulder, and Deloris Vance standing rigid and pale near her cot with one hand pressed hard against her mouth, and Otis Rowe sitting frozen with his glasses fogged and his notebook forgotten entirely at his feet, and the Pruitt children, woken by the commotion despite everyone's best efforts, being gathered fast and gentle into their parents' arms and carried toward the far end of the room, spared, at least, from seeing the worst of it directly.
"We can't move him," Sam said, low, some time later, once the first raw wave of grief had ebbed enough for anybody to think in practical terms at all, his voice deliberate and gentle in a way that made the words no easier to hear.
"Not fully, not until the roads clear and someone can come out for him the right way.
We'll need to keep him somewhere cold, somewhere separate, and treat it with every bit of respect and care we'd want for anybody we loved, until help can actually reach us. "
Nobody argued. Nobody had it in them to argue about anything just then, and Denny and Gil moved quietly to prepare the small equipment shed at the pavilion's far end, lining it as best they could, while Marion and I gathered blankets to wrap Everett with the same careful, tender attention we'd have given anyone in our own family, and Walt stood watching the full grim process with his jaw set tight against fresh tears, murmuring something too low for me to catch, though I suspected, watching his lips move, that it was some kind of soft, private goodbye.
I thought, standing in that cold, dark pavilion sometime near dawn, watching the storm still churning unbroken outside the windows with no sign whatsoever of relenting, of Everett Boyle's gentle, unhurried dignity, his quiet grief over a wife two years gone, the warm, easy stories he'd traded with Walt and Theo over a checkerboard not twenty four hours earlier, his voice telling Theo that grief didn't get lighter, only that you got stronger for carrying it, and felt a fresh wave of tears rise up fully without permission, grieving a man I'd known only a handful of days and had somehow, in that short time, come to love the way you loved the best and gentlest people who crossed your path too briefly.
And beneath the grief, hushed and unwelcome and impossible entirely to ignore, sat a small, cold dread that had nothing to do with sorrow and everything to do with the storm still raging outside, the roads buried under feet of snow with no end in sight, the phones and radio gone totally silent, thirty one people snowed into a single building with a man's body that couldn't even be properly carried out to those who might help us grieve him right, and no way whatsoever, for however many days this weather intended to hold us hostage, to reach the outside world at all.
We were, I understood then, with a clarity that settled cold and certain in my chest, entirely and completely on our own.