16. Marcus
MARCUS
By the time the wind had a voice, I was already counting the ways the house could lose.
Storm had been the wrong word for it. Storms announce themselves and take their time.
This came over the ridge like something with a grudge, no buildup, the temperature gone in one breath and the first hard pellets of ice rattling the porch boards like buckshot.
I knew this kind. Born high, born mean, dropping out of October to remind everyone who actually owned the mountain.
It would dump a foot before midnight and close every road off this ridge by the time it was done.
And the house was wide open to it.
I knew every wound in her. The open soffit on the north side.
The turret with its bad cone. The window on the landing that had never seated right since the day it was hung.
A sound house sheds a night like this. A house with this many holes invites it in and lets it do as it pleases, and I had spent every dark morning since Sully died keeping the worst of them from being found.
"Inside," I said. "Now."
She didn't argue, which told me she'd already felt it too.
We got the door shut behind us and the dog accounted for, Dozer wedged under the parlor stairs where he rides out anything he doesn't like, and then I stood in the dark hall and listened to my house the way you listen to an engine you're worried about.
I heard it before she did. High up. A flat hard cracking, fast, like a flag gone to war with its own pole.
"The turret," I said.
"What about it?"
"Tarp's letting go." I was moving for the carriage house and the long ladder.
"That cone roof's been open underneath for years.
Sully kept the rain off it with canvas and a prayer.
The wind gets under a loose corner, it'll peel the whole sheet in one pull, and then we've got the sky coming straight into the third floor and down through every wall in the place by morning. "
"So we stop it." She grabbed her jacket off the hook. "Tell me what I'm doing."
I should have told her to stay inside. The words were right there. I looked at her face in the dark, already set, already mine in every way that counted, and I knew telling her to sit this out would be the same as telling the storm to take the night off.
"You're holding the ladder and the light," I said. "And the rope. And when I tell you to move back, you move back without asking why."
"Deal. What's the rope for?"
"Me."
She didn't like that. I watched her not like it. Then she nodded once, because she's not a fool, and we went out into it.
The yard had gone white and sideways. The work-lamp she carried threw a cone of driving snow and not much else, and the wind hit like a shove from a big man with no manners, trying the whole time to take the ladder out of my hands and pitch it into the dark.
I got it footed against the east wall under the turret and leaned my weight into the base.
"Foot of the rail," I shouted. "Both hands. All your weight. If it kicks, you let go of everything but this."
"Got it!" The wind tore the word half off her mouth.
I went up.
A ladder in a gale is a conversation with physics you can lose.
Every gust turned the rungs to ice under my gloves and tried to fold me off the wall.
The tarp was worse than I'd feared, one corner grommet already blown, the canvas cracking like a whip with each pass of the wind, the next big gust going to take it.
I got a hand on the loose corner and nearly went with it when the wind filled the sheet like a sail.
For one bad second the canvas had me, my boots skating off the rung, my whole weight swinging out over nothing on a rope tied to a woman half my size and soaked to the bone.
The rope held. She held. I felt her take the load through the line and lean back into it with everything she had, and it pulled tight and caught me, and I dragged my feet back onto the rung and the wall.
"Marcus!" Pure fear in it.
"Not yet!" I got the corner pinned under my forearm and hauled it down. "Light, up here, hold it steady!"
The beam swung up and found my hands, and held, dead steady, and I knew what that cost her down there with her whole body fighting the ladder.
I trusted it. That was the strange part, up in the worst of it.
I had handed my whole weight to a woman I'd known a handful of weeks, and I did not think twice about it.
The cold had stopped being weather and turned into a problem with my hands.
They were going numb on me, the fingers slow to answer, and thirty feet up in a black gale stupid hands are how a man ends his story.
I shut them around the rung by main force and made them keep working.
You learn that doing roofs in country like this.
The body wants to quit at the exact moment quitting kills you, and the whole job is knowing tired from done.
"Batten!" I shouted down. "Side pocket of the bag. Yellow handle."
"Saw it!"
"Tie it to the rope. I'll haul it up."
She had it knotted and rising inside ten seconds, the strapping I needed coming up hand over hand through the snow, and I lashed the corner down to the eave cleat Sully had set there for exactly this, the old man reaching up through thirty years to hand me the thing I needed.
A gust came in broadside and the ladder skipped a half inch on the wall, and I heard her swear and dig in below me.
"Still with me?" I called down, not taking my hands off the cleat.
"Don't worry about me," she yelled back.
"Tie the stupid roof down." So I did. I ran the strap, cinched it, threw a second line over the cone and made it fast on the far side, and the cracking quit.
The tarp went taut and stopped trying to leave. The house held its hat on.
"Done!" I yelled. "Coming down. Clear the base!"
She moved back without asking why.
I came off the last rungs into snow to my shins, and we stood there a second in the screaming dark and the swinging light and just looked at each other, both of us soaked through and breathing like we'd run miles, and something came up off the two of us that had nothing to do with the cold.
Then the porch light over the door buzzed once and died, and the dark got bigger, and from inside I heard the heater's fan spin down to nothing.
"That's the power," I said. "Lines are down. They won't have a crew up here till the road's clear, and the road won't clear till this quits."
"So we're stuck." She was grinning, mad and bright, ice in her eyelashes. "On the mountain. In a blizzard. With no power."
"You sound thrilled about it."
"I just helped a grumpy man wrestle a roof in a hurricane and won. I'm a little thrilled about everything right now."
"We're going to be cold, and hungry, and very stuck," I said.
"Marcus." She swiped snow off her face with a soaked sleeve, which did exactly nothing, still grinning. "I have never in my life been less sorry to be going nowhere."
We fought our way back to the door and shouldered inside, and the quiet of indoors landed hard after the roar. Just the storm muffled now, throwing itself at the windows, and Dozer's tags as he came out from under the stairs to make sure we'd both lived.
Inside wasn't dry either. The storm had found the gaps the way water always does, a dark stain spreading down the front-hall plaster where something up high had let go, a steady tick of it onto the floor.
I shoved a bucket under it before I'd got my gloves off.
She was moving before I said a word, dragging the good drop cloths over the stacked trim and the tool chests, and the two of us worked the dark house in a shorthand we hadn't owned a month back, no instructions passing between us, each one covering what the other left bare.
We got ahead of it. Barely. Then there was nothing left to save that couldn't wait for the morning.
Two years I had held this place up alone, out of love for a dead man and no better answer for what to do with my hands at five in the morning.
Tonight I had not held it up alone. That was the thing knocking around in me louder than the cold.
I'd gone up that ladder certain I was the only thing standing between the house and ruin, and somewhere in the dark I learned I wasn't. There were two of us now.
The place had quietly stopped being only mine.
The house was already going cold without the heater.
I found the work-lamp's spare battery and the propane heater I keep for jobs like this, the one that doesn't care about the grid, and got it lit in the parlor, and the orange bar of it threw the only light in the world.
We were both shaking. Not from nerves. From the wet and the cold, soaked to the skin and starting to feel it now that the fight was over.
There was no signal, no grid, no plowed road, no diner to drive to, no half mile of dark between her place and mine to lose a feeling in.
The world had shrunk to one warm room and the two people standing in it, and the storm had done in an hour what neither of us had managed since the day she drove up.
It had run us clean out of anywhere else to be.
"You have to get out of those clothes," I said. "Both of us do. Wet is how the mountain kills you after it's done trying the loud way."
"Romantic."
"I'm serious."
"I know you are. You're always serious. It's one of the things." She had her soaked jacket half off, fingers clumsy with cold. "There's one dry blanket. It's in the dry bag by the cot. I waterproofed exactly one thing in this house and it was bedding, which tells you where my priorities sit."
I got the wood stove going, the one piece of heat in that house older than the wiring, while she dug out the blanket.
When I turned back she had peeled down to the dry layer under the wet, arms wrapped around herself, hair streaming, lit up orange by the stove and the heater, shivering hard and watching me with a look I had spent weeks refusing to let myself read.
I read it now.
There was nowhere left to put my eyes that wasn't her.
No camera between us. No chicken, no dog wedged in, no almost-anything left to hide behind.
We'd spent the whole autumn building walls out of busywork and bad history, and the storm had just torn the roof off all of them at once, and in the orange dark there was simply nothing left standing between what I felt and her face.
We saved the house in the dark and the wind, and then I stopped saving myself.
"Marcus." She said my name like it was the only dry thing she had left. "If you're going to make some speech about distance, about how this is a bad idea, about all the ways I could hurt you, you should make it now. Right now. Before."
"Before what?"
"Before I cross this room. Because if you wait until after, I'm not going to believe a word of it."
I have spent my whole life finding the careful thing to say. The wall to stand behind. The reason to drive back down the mountain alone and call it sense. I went looking for it one last time, out of pure habit, like a tongue finding the gap where a tooth used to be.
It wasn't there. She'd been right about that for a while now. I'd built the desk over its grave and never put a new one up.
For three years the wall had been the whole of my safety. She had named it a cell, on a porch, over chili, and I had not once been able to unsee it since. I was done living in it.
"I'm not going to make the speech," I said.
"No?"
"No." My voice came out rough, and not from the cold. "I'm out of distance. Ran out somewhere up that ladder, if you want the truth, with you holding the only rope I had."
The wind slammed the window hard enough to flex the old glass.
She didn't move yet. She stood there in the orange light with the dry blanket forgotten in one hand, reading my face the way I read a board for the soft spot under the paint, slow and certain, making sure of me.
Whatever she found there, it was enough.
She crossed the room.
She stepped into me the way she does everything, all at once and without flinching, and I did the thing I had not let myself do for a woman in three years and had never once done like this. I didn't brace. I didn't measure the cost. I reached for her.
The kiss landed like the end of a long fall, starving and long overdue, every almost we'd walked away from finally collecting what it was owed.
My hands went into her wet hair and her back found the wall and I followed her into it, and there was nothing careful left in me, nothing held back, nothing measured.
She made a sound against my mouth that I felt in my chest and my hands and the soles of my feet.
Outside the storm kept on tearing at the house we'd saved.
In here, for once in my life, I wasn't saving anything.
And neither of us was stopping it.