Chapter 5
MAPLE
My breath was visible.
That was the first thing I noticed when I woke up.
Not the silence, though the silence was there — the kind of silence that only happens when the power goes out, when the hum of the house shuts off like someone stopped breathing in the dark.
Not the cold, though the cold was there too, creeping across the back of my neck, making the quilt feel like it was made of concrete instead of down.
Not even the dark, which was almost complete except for the gray wash of snow-light coming through the window and touching nothing.
It was my breath. I was lying in my bed in my grandmother’s house in a town in Minnesota that had just gotten buried under eighteen inches of weather, and my breath was coming out in clouds, and my lungs were getting a lesson in what heating costs when the grid fails.
My breath was visible because the house had stopped being warm.
My breath was visible because I was alone.
Or I was supposed to be alone.
I was lying in my bed in the dark in my grandmother’s house in a town in Minnesota that had just gotten buried under eighteen inches of weather, and my breath was coming out in clouds, and my lungs were getting a lesson in what heating costs when the grid fails.
The clock on my nightstand was black. No time. No light. Nothing.
I sat up slowly.
The sheets were cold on my legs where they had come untucked in the night.
The radio on my dresser was off, which meant it had powered down, which meant the electricity had gone at some point while I was sleeping.
Five a.m., probably, based on the quality of the dark.
The pre-dawn dark. The dark right before the world started being visible again.
I put on three sweaters — I had learned this the hard way last winter when the pipes froze — and I went downstairs.
The house was not warm. The house was the temperature of a walk-in freezer that had not been maintained in three years.
Which was accurate, because the furnace had not been serviced in three years, and I had been telling myself I was going to get to that someday, after the foreclosure was handled, after the diner stabilized, after the town stopped needing me for every single thing.
The furnace made no sound.
I checked the thermostat. Off. Dead. No power to tell it to do the one job it had.
I went to the basement door and opened it.
The smell hit me first — cold air, rust, the particular wet-basement smell that comes right before the pipes start ticking.
The furnace was a monster from 1997. It had a small light on the front that was supposed to be green when it was working. It was not green. It was dark.
I closed the door.
I went to the kitchen.
The kitchen was the warmest room in the house, and warmest was a relative term I was going to have to learn to appreciate.
I put the kettle on the propane stove, which started immediately because propane is aggressive and does not care about electrical grids and does not care about the state of anyone’s life.
I watched the heat rise under the kettle and I told myself that I had been through worse.
Which was technically true — my parents had died, my grandmother had died, the diner was being foreclosed on — but worse and worse in a house with no heat were different categories of difficulty.
The snow outside the kitchen window was coming sideways.
I had only looked at the weather app once yesterday, right before the power started to fail, and the forecast had said eighteen inches.
The snow outside my window said we are going to exceed that, the way snow says things when it is moving horizontally and piling in drifts that are higher than the first-floor windows.
I made tea while the kettle boiled. Constant Comment. My grandmother’s brand. The smell of it was the only thing in the house that was not cold.
I drank the tea in my three sweaters while standing at the kitchen window watching the weather do its worst.
I did not, at that point, understand that I was supposed to go to the mudroom.
The mudroom — it was really just an enclosed space between the house and the garage, where coats lived and the door to the basement was and where my grandmother had kept her gardening supplies in the before-times — was not a room I had reason to visit at five-fifteen in the morning during a blizzard.
I found it because the pipes started ticking.
I went to the basement door to figure out why the pipes were ticking in a way that suggested something was about to freeze catastrophically, and the mudroom door was open, and there was a generator sitting on the far side of the space.
Not a small generator.
A generator.
A real one.
I stood in the doorway of the mudroom and looked at the generator for a long moment like it was going to explain itself. It did not. Generators do not speak. They sit and look mechanical and wait for someone to plug them in.
Next to the generator was a space heater. A new one. Not mine. Not the one from the bedroom. A different space heater with a label that still had the price sticker on it. Thirty-seven dollars. From the hardware store two towns over that had been having a sale before Christmas.
Next to the space heater were three five-gallon jugs of water.
On the washer was a pyramid of canned food.
Beans. Soup. Chili. Coffee. Matches. A flashlight. A battery-powered radio. All arranged like a Jenga tower that had been constructed by someone with an architectural degree and a very specific understanding of what would be impossible to ignore.
I did not move.
I did not breathe.
I stood in the mudroom of my grandmother’s house, in the dark, in the cold, in a blizzard, and I counted the things in front of me because Mira had taught me that counting was better than crying, and I needed to know how many ways I did not understand what was happening.
A generator.
A space heater.
Three jugs of water.
Six cans of food, arranged five on the bottom and one on top like a perfect pyramid.
Coffee.
Matches.
A flashlight.
A battery-powered radio.
The door to the side stairs of the apartment, which was closed.
And me.
Standing in the mudroom like I was the last person on Earth to understand that the man living in my grandmother’s apartment had apparently gone to the hardware store and purchased survival supplies like I was a project that needed funding.
I went back inside the house.
I sat at the kitchen table and I drank the rest of my tea and I tried very hard not to think about the fact that Knox had been here, in my house, in my mudroom, at some point yesterday, and he had put these things here.
He had violated my space. He had come into the room between my house and the garage — the room that was supposed to be the barrier — and he had put supplies there like he knew what I needed before I knew what I needed.
I did not think about the fact that he had put them in the mudroom specifically, where I could not miss them. Where the evidence of his choices was waiting for me. Where I had to walk through his intention every time I wanted to go to the basement.
I did not think about what it meant that a man who had refused pie five days ago had decided that I needed a generator. That he had gone to the hardware store. That he had purchased things. That he had spent money. That he had thought about me.
I thought about a lot of other things instead. I thought about the fact that intention was a form of trespass. That caring about someone was a violation of their boundaries. That Knox had come into my house and decided to save me without asking if I wanted saving.
I thought about all of that while sitting at my kitchen table in three sweaters, drinking cold tea, trying not to cry.
I thought about the fact that I was alone in a house with no heat and a blizzard outside the window.
I thought about the fact that the diner was closed.
I thought about the foreclosure clock, which was still ticking even though the power was out, even though the world was ending, even though nobody could remember that the diner was still supposed to be closed.
I thought about the fact that Knox had appeared in my mudroom like a very tall, very quiet Santa Claus, and I did not know if I was supposed to be grateful or humiliated or some third thing that did not have a name in English.
I finished my tea.
I got up and got my coat and my boots and I went outside in three sweaters, a coat, and a growing sense of dread.
The snow was up to my knees.
The wind was the kind of wind that makes you lean into it, that makes you question whether forward motion is actually possible.
I walked toward the street slowly, toward the sound of the wind, toward the place where the apartment’s side stairs were supposed to be.
The world had gone white. The cars parked on the street were just suggestions of cars, rounded lumps of snow that used to be vehicles.
The side stairs appeared like magic when I was five feet away.
Knox was standing in the middle of the front walk with a snow shovel, moving snow from one place to another.
He was in a long coat and no hat and snow was sitting on his shoulders like he was a statue someone had decorated.
He had cleared a path from the driveway to the front door.
He was working on clearing a path from the front door to the street.
He did not look up when I came toward him.
He just kept shoveling. One push of the snow. Another. Another. His shoulders did the work. His face did not move.
I stood at the edge of his path and I said, “What are you doing.”
He shoveled one more time. Then he looked at me.
“Clearing the walk.”
“It’s coming back down as fast as you move it.”
“I know.”
“You’re wasting effort.”
“Probably.”
He went back to shoveling.