Chapter 8
The wind takes the shutter off the shed first. I hear it go from the kitchen, a great tearing crack followed by a clatter like the whole world is dropping a tray of dishes.
By the time I get to the window, my grandmother’s rose trellis is leaning at an angle roses were not designed to achieve.
It hesitates for a second, then it lies down flat across the herb bed.
“Okay,” I tell the kitchen. “That’s fine.”
Rain hits the glass sideways. Not down, but sideways, like the ocean has decided it belongs up here now.
It is not fine.
The storm has been on the radio since Tuesday and has a different name depending on who’s describing it. A low-pressure system if you listen to Portland. A nor’easter if you listen to Theo. Simply weather, if you listen to Eunice Ballard, who has firm opinions about naming things.
Lucy called this morning from her sister’s house in Bangor.
“Board up,” she said. “Fill the tub. Don’t be a hero about the herbs.”
“I’m not going to be a hero about the herbs.”
“Penny.”
“They’re four-year-old rosemary plants.”
“They’re shrubs.”
“They have sentimental value.”
She sighed and made me promise to call when the power went out. I told her the power wasn’t going out.
At five twenty-three, the power goes out.
The refrigerator sighs to a stop. The clock over the stove disappears.
The little green eye of the microwave blinks out.
Suddenly the storm is enormous, filling the darkness the electricity had been holding back.
I stand in the middle of the dark kitchen with a wooden spoon in one hand and a headlamp on my forehead.
“Great,” I say into the dark. “Perfect.”
I have a gas range, which is useful. I have a well pump, which is now decorative.
I have four hundred dollars of produce, eleven quarts of stock, and a walk-in at Salt & Sage full of other people’s parties, which is tomorrow’s problem if the town still exists tomorrow.
What I do not have is a working flashlight.
I do, however, have candles. An unreasonable number of candles. Last October I ordered thirty black tapers at one in the morning and received three hundred and twelve. Lucy said I’d be lighting them at my own funeral. Tonight I consider the possibility that she may have been right.
I’m carrying a crate of candles into the front room when someone knocks on my door. Nobody knocks on my door in a nor’easter. Nobody with sense is out in this.
I freeze.
The reasonable part of my brain remembers that I live alone at the end of a lane in a two-hundred-year-old house. The unreasonable part is already at the door, and I haul it open against the wind.
Julian is on my porch.
He’s soaked. His dark hair is plastered to his forehead, with rain running off the ends of it and down the sharp line of his jaw. His coat is black with water all the way through. He looks like he has been personally delivered by the Atlantic.
“Your shutter’s gone,” he says.
“I heard.”
“There’s a tree down across Point Road. The coast road is flooding. You won’t get out tonight, and neither will anyone else.” He glances past me into the dark house. “I came to help you close the cottage before it gets worse.”
“It’s already worse.”
“It’s going to get worse than worse.”
I stand there with the wind trying to rip the door out of my hand and look at him. He came down here. Through this. For me. My mouth, naturally, chooses that moment to do what it does.
“You’re going to catch your death.”
Something flickers over his face, but it’s gone before I can name it.
“I’ll risk it.” He puts one hand on the door above mine, steadying it effortlessly against a gust that nearly takes me with it. “Let me in, Penny. Before your door does the same thing as the trellis.”
“Come in, Julian.”
Now there is a very large, very wet Julian Volkov dripping onto my grandmother’s braided rug, but I don’t have time to be strange about any part of that because the house is groaning and there’s genuine work to do.
Julian, it turns out, is very good at work.
He knows old houses—not in the way a man who has watched several renovation videos knows old houses, but like he’d been there when it was built. He goes through mine like the place has handed him instructions.
He checks every window latch and reinforces the worst one with a wedge from the junk drawer I didn’t know could be used for anything.
He rolls two towels tight and jams them under the back door where water has already started creeping across the floor.
He takes the porch chairs to the shed two at a time.
He braces the loose shutter on the north side before the wind can take that one too.
When the roof leak in the back hall turns from an occasional drip into a stream, he puts down both buckets, looks at the ceiling, and adds my largest stockpot.
“You’ve done this before.”
“I have encountered roofs.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“No.”
Of course not.
The good chair in the front room is too close to the window that’s rattling hardest. I grab one end.
“Help me move this.”
Julian takes the other. I lift. He lifts, and the chair moves with such enthusiastic speed that I nearly fall over backwards.
“Show-off.”
“I have a low center of gravity.”
“You have something.”
His mouth does that almost-smile. Then a gust slams into the north wall and somewhere outside, something cracks. Julian turns his head towards the sound.
“Stay here.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Penny.”
“It’s my house.”
“It will continue being your house if you remain inside it.”
I cross my arms. “That sounded suspiciously like an order.”
“It was a plea dressed as one.”
That stops me for half a second. Half a second is apparently enough, because he’s already gone. He comes back seven minutes later with his coat off, his dark shirt soaked through, and the loose section of trellis tied down well enough that my roses may live to judge me another year.
The shirt is plastered to him. I would like to report that I handle this like an adult. I do not.
The shirt has committed fully to the shape of the man underneath it, and there is an unreasonable amount of man. The wet cotton has gone half transparent and found every single muscle. I forget what I was going to say.
“You’re staring,” Julian says.
“I am assessing storm damage.”
“To me.”
“You’re part of the property now.”
“How rapidly I’ve advanced,” he says dryly.
I turn around before he can see my face and go light candles. All of them. By six, the cottage looks faintly medieval. Candles on the mantel. Candles on the stairs. Candles in every mismatched holder Gran collected over forty years. Four in a loaf pan, which is not ideal but is happening.
The whole downstairs goes soft and gold. Shadows sway across the walls every time the house takes a gust. Rain runs black down the windows.
Julian comes in from checking the back door and stops. For a moment, he doesn’t say anything.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
He looks around at the candles, the crooked shelves crammed with cookbooks, the jars of dried herbs, the wall of photographs beside the stairs.
“It suits you. This house.”
“It’s falling down.”
“So am I, arguably.”
It takes me three seconds. Then I laugh so hard I have to put down the candle I’m holding. Julian never pushes a joke towards you. He leaves it lying around like a coin under a cushion and waits to see if you’ll notice.
The rain gets worse.
By seven, Theo has managed to send one text before the cell tower gives up. Tree down across Point Road. Harbor road under water. Fire department turning everyone back at the Congregational church.
I read it twice, then I look at Julian.
“You’re stuck.”
“I am.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Do not be.” He glances towards the black window. “I have been stuck in considerably worse company.”
Something inside me makes a small, pleased sound. I ignore it.
“You’ll stay.”
“If that is acceptable.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not putting you out on the porch.”
“I would survive.”
“That’s not the point.”
His eyes settle on me, and I suddenly feel as though I have said something much larger than I intended. So naturally I feed him.
I know. I know he doesn’t eat. We’ve established this so thoroughly that Theo is probably taking odds on whether Julian Volkov has functioning teeth.
But the power is out and the wind is screaming and I am, at my core, a woman incapable of having someone in her house without putting something in front of them.
I heat milk on the gas stove. Cocoa, cinnamon, a little vanilla. Nothing complicated.
I pour two mugs, and I put one in front of Julian knowing perfectly well he won’t drink it. He looks down at it, then at me.
“I know,” I say. “You don’t have to.”
“I know.”
He wraps both hands around the mug. That’s all. He doesn’t lift it. He just holds it. And suddenly I understand something I should have understood weeks ago.
The untouched plates. The full wine glasses. The soup he never tasted. The chowder he never tried. They weren’t rejections. They were company. Julian Volkov doesn’t eat, but he wants to be at the table, and these polite refusals are the price he’s willing to pay.
I put my own mug down, because my hands have stopped being trustworthy.
We end up in the front room. The chairs are pulled away from the windows, and the warmest place is the braided rug in front of the hearth, so I sit on the floor with my back against the sofa and my knees under a blanket.
Julian builds a fire with astonishing speed, then sits beside me. Not close, but not far either. His long legs stretch towards the fireplace, his cocoa cooling between his hands.
We’ve been alone before, but there was always a reason for it, something we were ostensibly doing. A book to discuss. A house to tour. A basket of pastry sitting between us like evidence.
Tonight there’s nothing.
No invitation. No errand. No next thing to do and no polite point at which one of us goes home. The roads are gone, the power is out, and the whole night has narrowed to this room. Julian and me and a mug of cocoa he won’t drink.