Chapter 2
She could have gone in.
That was the fact she carried out of the village and down the road and into everything that came after.
The door was twelve feet away. It was unlocked, because the Ketch is never locked when there are people in it, and behind it there was heat and light and forty people who knew her name, and one of them was her husband.
She didn’t go in because of what she looked like.
That was the whole of it, and she would say it out loud in a cold house in July with nothing to look at, because by then she’d have run out of prettier versions.
She was soaked to the shoulders. Her hat was frozen to her hair.
She had been three days without a shower in a house at forty degrees and she smelled like woodsmoke and kerosene and the inside of a coat.
If she went through that door she would be the emergency.
Every head would come around. Somebody would get her a chair and somebody would get her a towel and her husband would stand up too fast and knock the lamp, and the woman across from him would do the correct thing, and the whole room would watch a marriage happen at a table.
Talia Tierney had been born in that village. She had put four hundred plates a night through a dining room two streets from where she was standing.
There is a thing about a small place that people from anywhere else never get right.
They think it means you are looked after.
It does mean that. It also means there is no such thing as a private twenty minutes, and that whatever happens to you on a Sunday is a story by Tuesday, told in the Mercantile in a particular voice, with the parts people liked best getting longer every time.
She had watched it done to other women her whole life. She had watched it done to a woman two streets over when her husband left, kindly, with real sympathy, for nine years.
So she stood on the sidewalk in the freezing rain and made the calculation that nearly killed her, and she made it in about four seconds, which is a number she would come to have feelings about.
She turned around and started walking home.
* * *
She got the kerosene first. That was the other thing she’d tell him in July, and she never could decide whether it made her sound sane or crazy.
She went into the Mercantile, which had a generator and one light over the register and Marla Cutter behind it doing a crossword, and she bought two gallons of kerosene and a box of kitchen matches and a bag of pretzels with a ten-dollar bill.
Marla said, “You all right up there?”
“Fine.”
“They’re saying Thursday for us. Town’s back sooner.”
“Thursday,” Talia said.
“You want Ronnie to run you up?”
“Road’s blocked at the bend. Tree came down.”
“Oh,” Marla said, and turned the page of her crossword, and that was the last conversation Talia had with anybody for nine hours.
Everyone said afterward that somebody should have made her stay. Bailey said it about six different ways over the spring. But Marla Cutter had known Talia Lassiter her whole life, and Talia Lassiter had said fine, and around here that’s a complete sentence.
* * *
Two gallons of kerosene weighs about fifteen pounds and it changes how you walk.
She knew that going out the door. She’d carried worse.
What she hadn’t accounted for was what it does to your arms — one can in each hand, held out from the body, so you can’t put your hands out when you go, and you can’t put them in your pockets, and inside of a mile they’re just two dead things hanging off you.
The rain had turned over to something meaner while she was inside. Not sleet. Freezing rain that came in flat off the water and went straight through the wool at her collar and down her back.
She got over the maple on her hands and knees again, handing the cans across ahead of her.
She was maybe half a mile past it when she started getting warm.
She remembers thinking it was funny. She remembers thinking, well, that’s the walking, you always warm up on the second mile, and unzipping her father’s coat at the throat because her neck was hot.
That is the part that scared Bailey. Not the ditch. That.
* * *
She doesn’t know where she went off.
The road there runs along a shoulder with a five-foot drop into the ditch and a fence line past that, and it’s a stretch she’d driven ten thousand times and never looked at.
She thinks she caught the edge with her right boot and went down sideways.
She knows she lost both cans, because they found one of them in the morning and never found the other one.
She came to rest on her side at the bottom with her face against ice.
She got up on one elbow. She tried the bank twice. It was a five-foot bank of frozen grass under a quarter inch of glaze, and the first time she got most of the way and came back down, and the second time she got about half.
The third time she didn’t try.
She thought: I’ll rest and then I’ll do it.
She remembers being annoyed. That’s what she told the doctor, who wrote it down. Not frightened. Annoyed, the way you’re annoyed when you drop a tray — a whole tray, in a full room, and everybody looks. She lay in the ditch on the county road she grew up on and she was embarrassed.
After a while the hill went quiet. The trees had stopped letting go. She could hear the water out past the fence line, moving under a skin of ice, and above her there was nothing at all, no light anywhere in the whole county, and stars coming out through the break in the weather.
She thought about the lamps in the window.
She thought about his hands going.
Somewhere in there she stopped thinking in sentences, and the last thing she can put a shape to is her father saying water first, then wood, then light, which was not advice that applied.
* * *
Bailey Sheehan found her at ten past six in the morning.
That’s in the county log and Bailey can recite it, and does.
Bailey had been awake for thirty-one hours running the north half of the county out of the fire hall — every oxygen concentrator, every dialysis patient, every eighty-year-old on a road that couldn’t be reached — and at five in the morning she got in the plow truck with a saw to open the county road, because the crew was two men and both of them were downstate.
She cut the maple. She came up around the bend at four miles an hour with the light bar going.
She saw the kerosene can first.
The thing Bailey could never get past, the thing she brought up every time she’d had two drinks that spring, was that the Lassiter place wasn’t on any list. There were two hundred and six names on the board in the fire hall.
Talia’s was not one of them. Bailey had written that board herself, and she had gone straight down the county road every day of that storm, past the gate, three times, because everybody in the county knew the Lassiters had a generator.
* * *
She woke up in Traverse City on Monday afternoon with her hands wrapped and a line in her arm and a nurse explaining a number to her that she didn’t take in.
The first clear thing was the heat. Not the room being warm. Her own body being warm, from the inside, which she had apparently stopped expecting.
The second clear thing was Seth standing at the end of the bed with his coat still on.
He had his hands in his pockets. He looked like a man who had been standing there for some time without deciding anything.
“Hey,” he said.
She looked at him.
“They said you’re going to be okay. Your hands, there’s — they said three fingers, there’s some tissue damage but it’s not, it’s the good kind, if there’s a good kind.” He stopped. “Talia.”
“Who called you?”
“What?”
“Who called you. To tell you.”
He didn’t want to answer it. She watched him not want to answer it, and she waited, because she had spent three nights waiting and she had gotten good at it.
“The hospital,” he said.
“The hospital.”
“I got up there at eight. The house was open. The stove was out.” His voice went somewhere he didn’t want it to go and he pulled it back. “It was forty degrees in the kitchen. I didn’t know where you were.”
“Did you look for me?”
“I called Bailey. She’d already —” He stopped again.
“She’d already had me in a truck for two hours,” Talia said.
He didn’t say anything.
She was so tired. That was the thing nobody warns you about. She had expected, if she’d expected anything, to be angry in a big way, in a way that took up a room. Instead she was tired in her bones and everything she had left was small and exact.
“Friday night the generator ran for forty minutes and quit,” she said.
“Saturday I drained the lines so the house wouldn’t come apart.
I opened every cabinet under every sink.
Sunday the shed roof came in on the dry wood and the saw wouldn’t start, so I walked to the village for kerosene, because I had about six hours of wood left. ”
“Talia —”
“I’m not done. I’m doing this once.”
He shut his mouth.
“The phone died Friday night. I couldn’t call anybody and nobody could call me.
Saturday I lit a candle in the front window like my dad used to, which was stupid, because nobody drives up that road in a storm.
” She stopped and got her breath. It cost more than it should have.
“Nobody came, Seth. Not one truck. Three days.”
“I thought you had heat.”
“Why?”
“Because —” He took a hand out of his pocket and then didn’t do anything with it. “I asked. On Saturday I told Ian to get somebody up there. And he — it came back that the house had been checked and the generator was running and you’d said you didn’t want to come down.”
The room did something. It didn’t spin. It went clear, the way it had gone in the ditch.
“Who checked it?”
“I don’t know. Somebody from the office, I assumed —”
“Who told you, Seth.”