Chapter 32 Chloe
CHLOE
The weather turns fast. I wake up on a Thursday to an unexpected chill in the house, and I turn the heater back on and settle into work again. By mid-afternoon, the wind starts howling, a long, sweeping moan that rattles the northern side of my house.
“Well, shit,” I say out loud.
I’m supposed to be working, although I haven’t been concentrating on it, just have the work chat pulled up on my laptop as I stare at the database, text and numbers blurring together. Honestly, I hope the power does go out. They can’t make me work if I don’t have Internet.
The wind batters against the picture window, although I can’t see much of anything with the curtains drawn. I pick up my phone and discover that my weather app’s icon has turned into a big snowflake.
There’s a text from Abi, too.
Just checking in! Did you get the wood I had sent over? The snowstorm’s supposed to hit today!
I set both my phone and my laptop aside and pull back the curtains on the picture window.
To my genuine surprise, it is, in fact, snowing.
And not a dusting, either: the air is full of the kind of thick, fluffy white flakes that I’ve always loved.
In Boston, I would go for walks in snow like this, bundling up so the flakes stuck to my jacket like white confetti and melted into water when I came back into the heat.
But I don’t feel anything, looking at the snow now. It looks like static above the lake, and Theo’s peninsula is fuzzy in the distance, wreathed in a soft white glow. I breathe out, fogging the glass.
I wonder if it’s snowing where Oliver is.
The thought hits harder than I expect, and I yank away from the window, letting the curtain fall back into place.
Sofia the social worker wouldn’t even tell me what city he’s in, although she did say he’s still in the state.
We just want what’s best for him. I think we can all agree on that, Ms. Monroe?
Agitation works under my skin, but even I’m not feeling self-destructive enough to cross the lake in this weather.
I was self-destructive enough not to do anything to really prepare, though, although Abi did in fact order a bunch of fire logs on my behalf, which were delivered yesterday.
I had been annoyed at the time, although I’m feeling grateful for it now.
I should be okay on food. Cooking hasn’t exactly been a priority the last six months, so my pantry is already full of canned soup and boxed mac-and-cheese, and my oven runs on gas in case the power goes out.
I suppose I could go fill up the bathtubs in the spare bathrooms, just in case.
It’s not like I use them for anything anyway.
Blankets. I should pull the various blankets and quilts my grandmother left behind.
My laptop dings with a work notification, which I ignore. The snow howls and swirls outside. And I start to work through the things you’re supposed to do when there’s a snowstorm. Methodically. Numbly, which is how I’ve done everything since that night in August.
After all, numbness is the only thing I really feel these days.
I jar awake, my muscles rigid.
My first thought is Theo, the way it always is when I wake up suddenly in the middle of the night, even all these months later. Theo coming to fuck me, Theo slaughtering my neighbors—it could go either way.
This time, however, I realize quickly enough that Theo has nothing to do with it. The house is dead silent, my ceiling fan unmoving.
The power went out.
I slump down and snuggle deeper into my blanket. Fuck. Abi and Penelope are never going to let me hear the end of this.
I find it hard to fall back asleep. Even when I curl up under the blankets and close my eyes, a simmering anxiety puts my whole body on a high alert.
My bed might feel warm now, but it’s not going to stay that way.
My thoughts wind around in long, complicated patterns, repeating the same things they always do.
Replaying what happened that night. Theo’s shaking hands begging me to kill him. Oliver’s sobs. The red and blue lights.
It’s worse tonight. Worse than it’s been since before Penelope came to stay with me. Everything feels bright and vivid, like it just happened.
Eventually, I manage to doze off, my winding thoughts bleeding into something like a dream: Theo’s corpse dragging across the floorboards like a worm. Me swimming across Hanging Lake to the peninsula, the water frigid. A hand wrapping around my ankle, warmer than anything else.
When I open my eyes, my room is flooded with grey-white light, and my nose is stiff with cold. My phone says it’s nearly nine in the morning. I guess I really did fall asleep.
I drag myself out of bed and start working through the things you’re supposed to do when this happens: pulling on layers of clothes, starting a fire in the fireplace, closing off all the rooms to trap the heat in my living room, which suddenly feels much too big.
I push back the curtains just enough to look outside, and my breath catches in my chest. I’ve spent so much time staring out at this view in particular: the patio, the pier, the trees across the lake.
And now they look alien and unfamiliar, buried beneath a thick layer of snow and ice.
For a moment, all I can do is stare at it, my breath warming the glass.
I wonder about Theo, if he’ll freeze beneath the ground.
Then I wonder about Oliver, if he’s seeing all this snow. Wherever he is in North Carolina, I hope his house didn’t lose power, that he’s being allowed to sled and build a snowman and throw snowballs, and that, just for a few hours, he can forget what Theo did to him, and what I allowed to happen.
I make a bowl of instant oatmeal, grateful again that I have a gas stove, and then wrap myself in blankets in front of the fireplace, watching the logs crackle and collapse and turn to embers.
It’s not so bad at first, being without power. I text Penelope and Abi, tell them I’m okay. Their responses are predictable.
Abi
Keep us posted, okay? And don’t forget to move around! It’ll help warm you up.
Penelope
Told you so.
Then, five minutes later:
Bet I could make my way out there if you really needed me, though.
I sigh at that, tap out a response.
I’ll be fine.
My hands are already cold just from getting that much out. I tell myself I’ll text my mom later.
Since I can’t work without power, I flip through the stack of old paperbacks I found shoved into the spare room when I first moved in—a bunch of Westerns and bodice rippers from the ‘70s, the pages yellowed and thin as cellophane. When it’s time to eat, I heat up a can of soup.
Honestly, things aren’t that different from how they normally are. Just colder.
A lot colder.
It pains me to put the fire out that night, but I know better than to go to sleep with it still crackling in the fireplace, even behind the mesh screen.
Once it’s out, the cold suddenly seems to flood in, seeping through my clothes and layers of blankets and distilling straight down into the marrow of my bones.
I curl up on my couch, facing the dark, scorched fireplace.
I manage to sleep a little. When I dream, it’s about death.
Not the hot, crimson death that Theo brought, but what comes after.
The absence of heat. The cold and the dark. The emptiness.
The next day is the same. I wake up to my breath frosting in the air, great white clouds of steam puffing up toward my ceiling.
It’s incongruous, seeing it inside. My hands shake as I build the fire, but it seems to take longer for its heat to permeate the room.
I feel like I can’t stop shivering, my whole body vibrating even though I’m wrapped in layers of blankets.
I think of Abi’s advice: Don’t forget to move around! So I do, first exploring the house, testing each room to see how cold they’ve gotten. The answer, to my dismay, is a lot.
Then I venture outside, my old snow boots from Boston sinking into the snow piled up on my patio. There’s not so much. Maybe three or four inches.
Somehow, the cold isn’t as bitter outside, I suppose because I expect it out here.
The wind is harsh, though, sharp and slicing, and it picks up flurries of loose snow and blows them around in little glittery tornadoes.
I pick my way down to the lake, which still isn’t anywhere close to iced over; there’s too much movement, too much depth.
The water looks black against the grey and white of the snow, though, surging like frost-tipped ichor.
Since I can’t cross the lake, I walk over to the Jenkins’ house.
I don’t know why. Punishing myself, probably.
Whoever owns it now didn’t even bother trying to make it look nice.
They just boarded over the windows with big pieces of plywood and let the yard grow wild and straggly.
The snow covers all that up, though. Even the plywood looks pretty, decorated with frost.
My breath puffs in the air, the only sound for miles. Like I’m the only living thing for miles.
I probably am.
When I go back inside, my phone is littered with alerts: another round of snow is on its way. Up to a foot expected, reads the headlines. Prepare for blizzard conditions beginning around four PM.
A dark, sick despair tugs at the pit of my stomach. Blizzard conditions? How is this happening here, in fucking North Carolina? It’s worse than what the meteorologists were predicting, at least earlier this week.
Maybe I should have gone to stay with Abi, even if the idea of leaving my house for an extended period of time makes me feel strange.
So I build the fire up higher than is strictly safe. I try to read the old pulp paperbacks, my eyes skimming over the words. I pull the blankets tighter around my shoulders.
And I wait for the storm to hit.