Chapter 1 #2
She stood and looked at it for a while.
Then she got the chainsaw out of the garage and it wouldn’t start, because it was twelve degrees and the saw was an honest old thing that had never pretended to be anything else. She pulled that cord until her shoulder went hot and her fingertips stopped reporting in.
She had maybe six hours of burnable wood in the rack. Maybe eight if she let the room get down to forty and sat in her coat.
There was a kerosene heater in the mudroom, from her father’s time, and it worked, and there was no kerosene.
They sold kerosene at the Mercantile. Two miles.
She thought about it standing in the garage with her hands under her arms. She was thirty-eight years old and she had walked to the village a thousand times in her life, in summer, with sandals in her hand.
It was two miles of county road and she knew every foot of it.
It was cold and it was iced and it was two miles.
There was a moment where she did the other arithmetic.
Two miles down was the village. Two miles down was the Mercantile and the fire hall and a hundred people who would put her in a warm room inside four minutes and be glad about it for a year.
She could go down and stay down.
She turned that over and put it away, because there were forty gallons of water in that house standing in pipes in a wall, and every hour that went by was an hour closer to the north side letting go, and she was not going to be the woman who walked away from her own house and came back to it ruined.
That was hers to hold. She had held harder things.
She put on everything she had. Wool, then the barn coat, then her father’s old Carhartt over that because it was bigger and went over everything.
Two pairs of socks, boots, the hat with the ear flaps that Seth had always thought was hilarious.
She took the headlamp and a canvas bag and the ten-dollar bill from the coffee can and the keys off the hook by the door — house keys, truck keys, and the two brass ones for the Tierney House that she had never once taken off the ring in eight years.
She left at half past five and it was already dark.
* * *
Walking on glaze is not walking. It’s a thing you learn in about fifty yards.
You put your whole foot down flat and you don’t push off, and you keep your hands out of your pockets, and when there’s a slope you go into the ditch and walk in the ditch, because the ditch has grass under the ice and the grass grabs.
She went in the ditch most of the way.
The road was a thing out of a story. Every wire and every branch and every blade of dead goldenrod was inside a sleeve of clear ice, and her headlamp went into all of it and came back, so the whole world for six feet around her was lit up like something in a case, and past that was nothing.
Trees kept letting go up on the hill. She could hear them a long time before and a long time after.
Twice she went down. Neither one was bad. The second one put her on her hip in the ditch and she lay there a second with her face against ice and thought, clearly and without any drama at all: nobody knows where I am.
Then she got up, because that was not a useful thought to have while lying down.
A mile and a half in, where the road bends and comes down toward the village, the big maple on the Dunmore side was across both lanes.
It had brought a line with it. The line showed in her headlamp, black cable in a white sleeve, lying in the branches.
She stood well back and looked at it for a long minute, and then she went down into the ditch and around the root end where the wire didn’t reach, and climbed up over the trunk on her hands and knees, and got down the other side, and that was that.
On foot it was a nuisance. Nothing on wheels was getting past it until somebody came with a saw.
The first light of the village showed from the top of the last rise.
Not much. A few generators — the fire hall, and the Mercantile, and the back of the Ketch.
Yellow squares in a black hill, the smell of woodsmoke and diesel coming up at her.
Something in her chest let go by an inch.
Two miles is two miles, but she’d done it, and there was a store with light in it and a phone in the fire hall and people she had known her entire life.
She came down past the harbor lot and along the back of the buildings on the east side, because it’s shorter.
The Ketch had its lamps in the windows. They’d been doing that since the seventies — actual oil lamps, on the sills, because the first winter the Boyles had it the power went out on New Year’s and somebody had the idea and it stuck.
Half the village would be in there. She could already tell herself the shape of the next twenty minutes.
Kerosene, and somebody would drive her back as far as the maple, and Bailey would hear about it inside an hour and come up the road on foot to yell at her.
She came level with the window.
She wasn’t looking for anything. That was the thing she kept coming back to, later, when people wanted it to have been a suspicion. She wasn’t looking. She was walking past a window with a bag in her hand.
Seth was at the table by the second window with his coat over the back of his chair.
He had both hands up. He was talking. That was the first thing she understood, before the rest of it, before the woman across from him, before anything — he was talking.
Leaning in with his forearms off the table and his hands going, the way he used to at their own table when they were first married and he would come home with some ridiculous thing that had happened and take twenty minutes to tell it.
He’d stopped doing that. She had not noticed him stopping. You never do; it isn’t an event.
The woman across from him was laughing. There was a lamp between them and half a bottle of wine and two plates with almost nothing left on them, and she had her chin on her hand, and she was laughing at something he’d said, and he was already going again with both hands, building the next part of it.
Talia knew her. The name came up out of somewhere. Roche. Emerson Roche. She’d shaken her hand at the Christmas thing in the lobby and said something about the parking.
She stood on the sidewalk in the freezing rain and watched her husband tell a story.
He was two miles from her house. He was two miles up a road she would climb a tree to get down, from a woman who hadn’t been warm since Friday, and he was leaning into a table with his coat off and a lamp on it, saying something long and easy and unguarded, and there was nothing in his face that had anything to do with her at all.
She stood there until her hands started to shake, and then a while after that.