The Wife Abandoned in the Dark

Chapter 1

The ice started a little after four, and by five Talia could hear the trees.

It wasn’t a sound she could have explained to anyone who hadn’t grown up here.

Not cracking, not yet. A kind of ticking, all across the hill behind the house, as every branch on every maple took on weight it was never built to carry.

She stood on the back step with an armload of wood and listened to it.

Thirty years in this county and she still stopped to listen.

She carried the wood in and stacked it by the stove in the back room, then went out for another load, and another.

The weather people had been saying half an inch of glaze since Wednesday.

Half an inch didn’t sound like anything.

Half an inch meant you couldn’t stand up in your own driveway, and it meant the lines came down, and it meant the plows were useless because there was nothing to push.

She filled the wood rack, then filled the kitchen sink, then filled the two five-gallon buckets she kept in the mudroom for this. Her father had taught her that. Water first, then wood, then light.

At six she called Seth.

He picked up on the fifth ring, which meant he was looking at the screen and deciding. “Hey.”

“It’s starting up here. You should come now if you’re coming.”

There was a pause with people in it. Voices behind him, a door, the particular echo of a room with hard floors. “Yeah, it’s bad down here too. I think I’m going to stay in town tonight.”

“Okay.”

“The roads are already garbage.”

“I know. That’s what I’m telling you.”

Another pause. She looked out the kitchen window at the lake, which had gone the color of a nickel. She could hear him deciding whether this was a conversation.

“I’ll come up tomorrow,” he said. “First thing.”

“Okay.”

“You all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“You’ve got the generator.”

“I’ve got the generator.”

After she hung up she stood there a minute with her hand still on the phone, and then she put it in her pocket and went and turned the thermostat down, because there was no sense heating nine rooms for one person.

They’d stopped eating dinner together sometime around Thanksgiving.

It hadn’t been a decision. He was in town, or he had something, or he’d already eaten, and she would make something anyway out of habit and then eat it standing at the counter with the radio on.

She’d gotten good at not minding. That was the part she’d think about later, in the dark — how much work she had put into not minding.

* * *

The power went at nine.

It didn’t flicker first. It just stopped, and the house went from warm and lit to a shape she was standing inside of.

She counted. The generator was supposed to come on at twelve seconds.

It came on at ten, which made her laugh, alone in her own kitchen. The lights came up brown and then steadied. The furnace kicked. Somewhere under the floor the whole house started breathing again.

She made tea. She got out the headlamp and put it on the counter where she could find it. She thought about calling him back and decided against it, and that was a decision she would take apart a hundred times before spring.

At twenty to ten the generator quit.

She heard it go — a cough, then a second cough, then nothing — and she was out the mudroom door and down the steps before she’d thought about it, headlamp in her hand, and she nearly went down on the second step because the glaze was already there.

The generator sat in its housing at the corner of the house, a gray box the size of a chest freezer.

She got the cover up. Nothing looked wrong.

Nothing ever looked wrong with it; that was the whole point of it.

It had run every fall test for eight years and it had run through the July storm that took out the whole peninsula, and the company that serviced it came in the spring and in the fall, and she signed the ticket and gave the man coffee.

She hit the reset. It turned over and caught and ran for about ten seconds and stopped.

She tried three more times. The fourth time it didn’t turn over at all.

She stood in the freezing rain in her husband’s barn coat and looked at a gray box, and then she closed the cover and went inside, because there was nothing else to do about it at ten o’clock at night.

It was fine. It was annoying, and it was going to cost something, and it was fine.

She had wood and she had water and she had a stove and she had done this before, sort of.

Not for this long. But the power would be back tomorrow and Seth would be up in the morning and the man would come and look at the generator and it would be a story she told in the spring.

She got the stove going in the back room and shut every door in the house behind her.

* * *

The text came at half past ten.

Power’s out everywhere. Got Mom set up at the Park Place, she’s fine. Dan’s on call if you want to come down — 231-555-0164. Don’t drive yourself.

She read it in the dark with the screen lighting up her hands.

She read it again.

Something moved in her chest and she put it down before it got its feet. He’d thought of his mother. That was good. Cheryl was seventy and had no business sitting in a cold house, and somebody had picked up a phone and made a call and gotten her into a warm hotel room with a bed and a light.

And then somebody had sent his wife a phone number.

She typed ok and watched it fail to send. The bars were gone. She held the phone up toward the window the way everyone does, and got nothing, and then the screen told her she was at eight percent, and she turned it off to save it and set it on the arm of the chair.

It never came back on. She didn’t know that yet.

* * *

Saturday was the long one.

The cold in a house doesn’t arrive. It takes the house apart room by room, and it starts with the ones no one is standing in. By noon on Saturday she could feel the difference between the back room and the hall, and by four she could feel it between the back room and the doorway of the back room.

She worked. It was what she knew how to do.

She went through the whole house with the headlamp and opened cabinet doors under every sink and left every faucet running at a thread, and then she went down the cellar stairs and found the shutoff and drained what she could drain, and cracked the boiler drain into a bucket and hauled the bucket up and poured it out the back door and went down and did it again.

Nine rooms. She’d never counted them until that day.

At four she lit a candle in the front window because her father had always done it, and she couldn’t have said who she thought would see it.

Nobody came up the county road. No one had any reason to.

Everybody on that road who had somewhere warm to go had gone to it, and the three houses past their gate were old people who’d have gone to their kids in town, and anyway — anyway everyone in Leland knew the Lassiter place had a generator.

Half the village had heard about it. It got mentioned.

It was the kind of thing that got mentioned.

That was the part she could never make anyone understand afterward, including herself. Nobody came because everybody knew she was fine.

The cold got into the hall by two and into the doorway of the back room by four, and after that it stopped being weather and started being a thing in the house with her.

She kept the door shut. She hung a blanket over it with two nails and the hammer from the junk drawer, which her father would have done in about ninety seconds and which took her twenty minutes because she kept dropping the nails.

She thought about Bailey twice.

Once at about noon, holding the dead phone, working out whether the landline in the front hall was on the same poles as everything else, which it was.

And once at four, standing in the window with the candle, thinking about the fire hall and the board she knew was up on the wall because she had stood in front of it herself at a township meeting in November and read the whole thing while somebody talked about culverts.

Two hundred and six names. She could picture the marker and the tape.

She did not go through the possibility that her own was not on it. It did not occur to her. It would not have occurred to anybody. There was no failure anywhere in that county that night, only a sensible assumption that four hundred people had made at the same time.

She ate cold beans out of the can and told herself it was funny.

What she thought about, eating them, was the last time she had eaten dinner in the same room as her husband.

She went at it the way you go at a stuck lid.

Not Christmas — Christmas had been at Cheryl’s and he had taken two calls.

Not the Friday before Christmas. Somewhere in November, then, and she could not get closer than that, and the fact that she could not get closer than that sat down beside her in a cold room and stayed all night.

Seth didn’t come.

She wasn’t angry about it Saturday. The roads were gone; she knew what the roads were. She lay in the back room on the couch under three blankets and the dog quilt and listened to the trees coming down on the hill, one at a time, all night, like something working its way closer.

* * *

Sunday she started talking to herself.

Not in a bad way. Out loud, the way you do in a kitchen.

All right. Wood. Water. The water was still running at a thread, which was a small triumph and she said so.

The stove was eating wood faster than it should because the back room had gotten cold enough that the stove was heating the walls and not her.

He’ll be up today, she thought, at about ten in the morning.

He’ll be up by tonight, she thought, at about three.

At four o’clock, when the light started going, she went out to the woodshed for the rest of the dry wood, and found that a limb had come off the big maple and gone through the shed roof, and the shed was full of ice and broken shingles and everything under it was welded into one piece.