Chapter Twenty – Lila.138
Chapter Twenty – Lila
The tea had gone cold while I wasn’t paying attention to it, the ceramic still warm in my hands from habit rather than heat, the pale amber surface of it motionless while I watched the sky over the Sawtooth range make its decision.
It had been making it for the better part of an hour, the light going from the ordinary flat grey of January to something darker, the specific pewter of a sky that had weight behind it.
The wind came across the fields in visible sheets, lifting the surface snow and sending it skimming low and fast over the frozen ground, and the bare cottonwoods along the fence line whipped sideways in the gusts, their branches making a sound I could hear through the old glass even with the stove going.
I set the mug on the counter without drinking from it.
Cole was visible through the window, moving between the barn and the supply shed with the purposeful, ground-eating stride he used when there was real work to do and a finite amount of time to do it.
He was hauling sandbags, clamping the storm shutters on the outbuildings closed, his breath coming in hard white bursts that the wind took the moment they left his mouth.
On the porch, Rhett moved along the railing testing each lantern, lifting and shaking each one to check the fuel, the cold turning the skin across his cheekbones deep red.
His hat was pulled low and his usual easy set to his shoulders had been replaced by something economical and focused.
Wade appeared in the kitchen doorway.
Snow dusted his shoulders and the front of his coat, already beginning to melt against the kitchen warmth.
He looked at me first before he said anything, the way he always did, that full, unhurried assessment, reading the room before he added anything to it.
“Animals are secured,” he said, his voice low and even. “Barn doors are double-latched.”
I nodded. My eyes had already gone back to the window.
My free hand had moved to Hope without my deciding to move it, palm flat against the weight of her, the familiar pressure of her settled and present beneath my palm.
She was quiet this afternoon, the way she sometimes went quiet when I was standing still and the house was loud around me.
Outside, the wind gusted hard enough that a loose shutter somewhere on the east side of the house knocked twice against its frame.
The first serious snow started to fall.
It came in driving curtains rather than the ordinary fall of individual flakes, thick and horizontal, cutting visibility across the fields down to nothing within thirty seconds.
The mountains disappeared behind it. The cottonwood trees became grey suggestions.
My breathing changed without my telling it to, something in my chest pulling inward and tightening, going shallower by degrees.
I pressed my fingers flat against the glass.
The cold bled through immediately, sharp and clean and particular, spreading up through my knuckle joints in the way cold moved through old glass.
Ethan’s coat moved, I looked at it for a moment.
Ethan would always be part of me, part of my history, Hopes history.
I was lucky that Cole, Rhett and Wade saw him as part of my past, the past that shaped me and bought our beautiful baby girl into our lives.
We would keep Ethan alive for Hope, make sure she knew her daddy.
Make sure she knows all her daddy’s. We’d bring him to life with memories, photographs, old videos.
He’d have life, even if it weren’t in a physical sense anymore.
I moved to the kitchen table and sat down. Outside the window the snow was solid white now, the kind of snowfall that erased the landscape in sections. I got up again, went to the counter, stood there with my back to the room, and came back to the table.
Wade had not moved from where he’d settled against the counter, arms loosely crossed, his eyes on me.
Not managing me, not preparing a correction for whatever I was doing wrong.
Just watching, with the particular quality of attention he brought to things that hadn’t asked for his intervention yet.
I could feel it across the room the way you felt a fixed point when everything else was moving.
The back door opened.
Cole came in first, the cold coming with him in a wall.
He pulled his work gloves off in three deliberate tugs and dropped them on the counter, his face reddened from the wind.
Rhett came in behind him, snow across the brim of his hat, and set one of the lanterns on the kitchen table with a solid, final sound.
Neither of them spoke immediately. The kitchen contracted with the four of us in it, warm and close, the windows rattling in their frames against the pressure of the wind outside.
I had stopped moving. I was standing with both hands gripping the back of one of the kitchen chairs, my knuckles pale against the wood, staring at the pattern of wear on the table’s surface.
The chair had belonged to Ethan’s grandmother.
I had sanded it twice. I knew every mark in it.
I looked out of the window again, the snow was getting worse, wind picking up.
Wade said, quietly, “You want to talk about it?”
“No,” I said, trying to calm my
The wind pushed against the east-facing windows and the house answered with a low, structural groan.
“Wade,” I said.
He did not answer, but I felt him attending.
I looked at the table. I let out a breath through my nose.
“There was a blizzard,” I said. “Like this one.” My voice had the particular flat quality of something I had organized too many times to let inflection anywhere near it.
“The Hargroves, our neighbors, two miles east, had a fence come down. Their cattle were loose near the highway.” I pressed my thumbs against the back of the chair.
“Ethan got the call. He said he would be an hour.”
Cole had gone still at the counter. Rhett had not moved from where he stood near the door, his hat still on, the lantern sitting between us.
“The snow was bad when he left,” I said.
“Getting worse.” I kept my eyes on the table.
“I stood at this window and watched his tail lights go down the drive.” I paused because my throat was doing something I had not given it permission to do, and I waited until it stopped.
“The road that runs along the ridge above Hargrove’s property.
East side.” The words came out one at a time, evenly spaced. “No guardrail.”
The wind found the south windows.
“The sheriff came at two in the morning.” My sentences had shortened to the length of single facts. “He went off the cliff.” I stopped. “They said it was instant.”
My knuckles were white on the back of the chair.
I was not crying. I had not cried at the telling of it, not once in all the time of telling it to people who needed to know, and I was not crying now.
My jaw was set and my eyes were dry and there was a rigid, full-body stillness to me that I could feel in the backs of my thighs and in my shoulders and in every joint from my hands down to my feet on the cold floor.
Whatever crying was made of, I had been past it for a long time.
Cole set his gloves down on the table.
He did it without sound, without looking for my eyes, without the particular gentle urgency of a man who needed to do something about what he had just heard. He simply set them down and left his hands where they were on the table, open and still.
Rhett’s expression had changed in the way his face changed when the humor went out of it entirely, not grief, exactly, not the managed expression of a person performing feeling. Something quieter. The laugh lines around his mouth had gone to something else.
Wade did not look away from my face. Not once, through the whole of it. His arms had uncrossed and his hands were at his sides and he was looking at me the way he looked at things he intended to keep looking at, without the relief of glancing away.
The wind hit the house in a long, sustained gust that rattled every window in its frame. The old cottonwoods creaked. The loose shutter knocked again on the east side, patient and persistent.
My hands were still on the back of the chair. I could feel the grain of the old wood against my palms, its particular roughness, the specific topography of something worn by years of being held just like this. I did not let go.
***
The power went at seven o’clock, or close enough to it that the exactness didn’t matter, two flickers, the lights brightening briefly like a caught breath before going out entirely, and then the kitchen was dark except for the fire in the sitting room doorway and the cold blue light of the blizzard pressing through every window it could find.
Cole was already moving. I heard him before I saw him.
He came through the kitchen first, a lantern in each hand, and lit them on the table and the counter with the unhurried efficiency of a man who had been anticipating this for the last two hours.
He carried the rest of them one at a time through to the sitting room, lining them along the mantle and the low shelf beside the door, and the house changed under their light in the way houses changed when the ordinary electric light was replaced by something older and warmer and less certain, the shadows moving at the edges of each room, the walls going amber, the ceiling going dark above the small circles of warmth they threw.