Chapter Twenty – Lila.138 #2
Outside, the wind was loud in a way that required something from the voice.
Not shouting, but intention, the specific effort of pitching words across a room when the old window frames were flexing in their casings and the eaves were making a sustained, low sound of pressure.
The house creaked and popped under it, the structural commentary of old timber responding to a force it had responded to for a hundred years and had opinions about.
We ended up in the sitting room. It was the room with the fire and the most lanterns and the windows that faced away from the worst of it, which was the south and the west, and the four of us arrived there over the course of the next hour the way people arrived at the warmest place in a cold house: gradually, without announcement.
I sat on the floor with my back against the front of the sofa, the heavy wool blanket pulled across my lap and my knees drawn up to the angle Hope allowed, which was not far.
The fire was burning properly now, Cole having built it up to the steady, committed level it needed to be at for a long night, and the heat of it reached my face and the fronts of my hands and went no further, the back of the room holding its cold regardless.
Wade settled beside me on the floor.
He lowered himself, his back against the sofa base the same as mine, and the warmth of his shoulder came against mine and stayed.
Cole took the armchair nearest the fire.
He had not stopped tending it since he’d built it up, a log added, adjusted, the poker run along the grate when the logs needed redistributing, steady and methodical and absorbed by the task in the way he was absorbed by physical work that had a clear purpose.
Rhett sat on the sofa behind me, playing with my hair and giving me a shoulder massage.
I took a long, deep breath, relaxing into his hands.
The wind pushed hard against the house. The lanterns responded to it, the flames tilting inside their glass housings in the drafts that moved through the old walls, throwing the shadows sideways and back again.
The sitting room smelled of woodsmoke and the wool blanket across my lap and the faint cedar of the old furniture, the particular close warmth of a room that had been occupied by four people for several hours.
I watched the fire and I listened to the blizzard beyond the walls and I felt Hope shift once beneath my hands and settle.
At some point, I had stopped tracking the time after the power went, Rhett reached down from the sofa again, and rested one hand on my shoulder.
He settled his hand there the way he settled into things that mattered to him, without making an occasion of the settling. His palm was warm through the fabric of my sweater. I did not move away from it.
The fire popped. Cole fed it another log. The wind outside reorganized itself into a sustained, high sound that the house answered with its full range of structural vocabulary, every old board and joint offering its response.
I looked at the fire for a while.
“I’m scared,” I said.
My voice came out smaller than I intended.
It came out in the register I used only when something had gotten past the part of me that managed registers, and the room received it without any of the usual social machinery, no one moving to meet it with reassurance or to smooth it down to something more manageable.
“Not of the storm,” I said. My hand had gone to Hope, palm flat, the way it always ended up when I was trying to say something true. “I’ve been through blizzards. I know what they are.” I looked at the fire. “I’m scared because now I have three people I could watch go out in one.”
The words sat in the warm air of the sitting room and the storm pushed against the walls and nobody said anything for a moment.
Cole spoke first.
“We’re not going anywhere tonight.” His voice was plain and certain, no elaboration offered, no promise dressed up beyond the fact of it. It had the quality his words had when he had already examined them from every angle and found them accurate.
Rhett’s hand pressed slightly firmer on my shoulder.
“None of us are moving an inch,” he said.
The drawl was in it, but nothing else that usually accompanied the drawl, no angle, no self-deprecating edge, no exit built into the sentence.
Just the statement, given to the room without a joke to follow it.
Wade did not speak.
He moved his hand from where it had been resting on his own knee and turned it palm-up on the floor between us. His fingers were slightly open, his palm broad and still in the amber light of the nearest lantern, the gesture saying precisely what it said without requiring anything further.
I looked at it.
The fire breathed in the hearth. A gust hit the south wall and the house answered it with the low, full-body sound of a structure being tested, and the lantern flames tilted west and straightened again.
I looked at Wade’s open hand for a long moment, at the familiar topography of it, the steadiness of it, just sitting there with no demand attached.
Then I placed my hand in his.
His fingers closed around mine, unhurried and complete, and the warmth of his grip traveled up through my wrist and into the cold that had settled in my forearm without my noticing. His thumb moved once across my knuckles, barely a movement, and went still.
The storm howled.
It found every gap in the old house and used it, the draft running along the baseboards and the cold pressing through the glass in its patient, indifferent way, and the fire pushed back against it with the steady orange authority of something that had made its own decision about the night.
The lanterns held their warm, unsteady circles.
Cole fed the fire. Rhett’s hand stayed on my shoulder. Wade’s grip stayed in mine.
Nobody slept.
The hours went the way hours went in a blizzard, without their ordinary markers, the dark outside undifferentiated from midnight to three to five, the storm making its own time.
The house creaked and the lanterns moved in the drafts and the fire worked its long, slow work, and the four of us stayed where we were on the floor and in the chair and against the sofa while the snow piled against the windows and the wind made its sustained, enormous noise, and the sitting room held its warmth against all of it, and we held ours.
Outside, the mountains were somewhere in the white.
They were there, as they had been before any of this and would be after, patient and enormous in the dark behind the blizzard.
I could not see them. I knew them anyway, the specific jagged outline of the Sawtooth range that I had been looking at my whole life, and I thought of the road above Hargrove’s property with no guardrail on the east side, and I thought of Cole’s words settling in the warm air of the room like something set down and left, and I pressed my hand flat against Hope and I held onto Wade’s hand and I watched the fire burn.
The storm did not relent.
But the lanterns held, every one of them, their small flames enduring in the old glass housings, the amber light steady on the walls and the ceiling and the four faces turned toward the fire, and the night went on around us in its cold and furious way, and none of us were going anywhere.