Chapter 12
The ice came in on a Tuesday night in the middle of January, the way it does in Atlanta once every few years, with no real warning and no mercy.
Amelia was still at the Foundation when it started.
She was in her office on the first floor with three candidate files for the Harlan counselor job spread across her desk, and she had told herself at five that she’d leave at six, and at six that she’d leave at seven.
At seven thirty she looked up and saw that the window had gone strange.
The rain had stopped sounding like rain.
It was ticking against the glass, sharp and small, like somebody throwing sand.
She went to the front door and looked out.
Everything was glass. The street, the cars, the power lines. The trees along the sidewalk were bent over under clear shells of ice, and as she watched, a branch on the big oak across the street cracked with a sound like a gunshot and came down across two parked cars.
The lights flickered.
She had just enough time to think oh no before they went out.
* * *
The dark was total for a second. Then the red emergency lights came on over the doors, and the exit signs, and a faint glow from the break room at the back where the old vending machine sat on its own circuit, humming. Everything else was black.
She stood in the front hall and listened. The building ticked. Somewhere upstairs the old radiators clanked once and went quiet. It was already getting colder. The cold was coming through the brick.
She found her phone and turned on the flashlight.
Twelve percent battery. She checked the roads.
Every map was red. Every road out of Midtown was glazed.
There were pictures online of cars spun sideways on the Downtown Connector, of trucks jackknifed on the bridges.
The mayor was telling everybody to stay where they were.
She was not going anywhere in a used Honda tonight.
She called Roxanne. It went straight to voicemail.
Roxanne’s crews would all be out, she thought.
Every building in the city would have alarms going off and pipes to check.
She left a message. I’m okay. I’m at the Foundation.
Power’s out. I’m staying put. Then she stood in the red light of the front hall and felt, for the first time in a long time, alone in a large building.
That was when she heard it.
A thump, from upstairs. Then another. Then footsteps on the old wooden stairs, slow and heavy, and a beam of white light swinging across the landing.
Her heart went up into her throat. She backed toward the door with the phone held out in front of her, and she was opening her mouth to say something, anything, who’s there, when the light came around the turn of the stairs and she saw who was holding it.
Lucas.
He was coming down the stairs with a flashlight in his teeth and a big cardboard box in his arms. He was wearing an old canvas jacket she didn’t recognize, and his sleeves were pushed up to the elbow, and his hair was wet and wild from the ice.
There was dust on his face. There was a long smear of something dark down the front of his shirt.
He saw her at the same moment she saw him.
He stopped dead on the stairs. The flashlight swung. He took it out of his mouth.
“Amelia?” he said. “What are you—”
“What are you—”
They both stopped.
“The alarm company called me,” he said. “The building’s on my account.
The power’s out and the heat’s gone, and the pipes up on three run right past the file room.
If they freeze and burst, everything in there’s gone.
” He shifted the box in his arms. “Nobody else could get here. I only made it because I left before the bridges went. I didn’t know you were here.
I swear to God I didn’t know you were here. ”
She looked at the box. It had her handwriting on the side, in black marker. Cohort 2. Files A–L.
“Those are the kids,” she said.
“All three years.” He shifted it again. It was heavy. “And the pilot. I’m getting them down to the first floor, away from the pipes. I’ve got six down. There’s maybe fifteen more.”
She stood there in the red light and looked at him. The dust on his face. The canvas jacket. The way he was holding the box against his chest like it was something alive.
“Give me a flashlight,” she said.
* * *
They carried boxes for an hour.
The third floor was the old attic of the warehouse, long and low under the roof beams, and it was already cold enough to see your breath.
The file room was at the end, lined with metal shelves.
The pipes ran right along the ceiling above them, old iron pipes wrapped in cracked insulation, and every few minutes one of them made a sound, a small tight tick, that made them both look up.
They didn’t talk much. They didn’t need to.
He took the heavy boxes and she took the light ones, and they went up and down the stairs in the dark with their flashlights, passing each other on the landings.
It was like the selection weekend. It was like every room they had ever split. Their hands knew how to do it.
On the fourth trip down, she stopped on the landing to get her breath and shone her flashlight up the stairs behind her, and saw him coming.
He had a box on each shoulder. His sleeves were up and his arms were straining and his face in the white light was red from the cold and the work.
There was sweat on his forehead in January.
He was breathing hard. He looked nothing at all like the man at the podium at the Waverly, nothing like the man in the good suit at the head of every table.
He looked like somebody who carried things for a living.
And she knew him.
It hit her standing on the landing with the flashlight in her hand.
She knew him from before. Not from the Buckhead house or the dinners or the lake.
From the twenty-eighth floor. From two in the morning, from those first weeks, when he used to come out of his office while she was working and pick up the other end of something heavy without asking.
When he’d carry the trash bags down to the service elevator for her.
When he’d sit on the floor of the break room with his tie off and his sleeves up and talk to her until four.
That was the man she’d fallen in love with. Not the one in the suit. This one. The one with dust on his face and his arms full.
She had forgotten he still existed. She’d thought maybe he never had. That maybe he was part of the act too, part of the bet.
He came down the stairs past her. He glanced at her face in the flashlight.
“You okay?” he said.
“Fine,” she said. “Keep going.”
* * *
By nine, every box was down.
They stacked them in the big conference room on the first floor, along the inside wall, away from the windows. Twenty-one boxes. Three years of kids. When the last one was down, Lucas stood with his hands on his hips and looked at them, breathing, and then he laughed, one short tired laugh.
“What?” she said.
“Nothing. I’m starving. I haven’t eaten since noon.”
“The vending machine’s on the backup.”
He looked at her. “Is it?”
“It’s the only thing in the building that is. Tasha’s been complaining about it for a year. It hums all night.”
They went back to the break room. The machine glowed in the dark like a little jukebox.
He dug in his pockets and she dug in her bag, and between them they had nine dollars in small bills.
They bought two egg salad sandwiches in plastic triangles, two bags of pretzels, and a Snickers bar, and carried it all back to the conference room.
There was no heat. The room was already cold. They sat on the floor with their backs against the stacked file boxes, because it was warmer there, out of the draft from the windows. Two flashlights on the floor pointed at the ceiling. Their coats on.
The sandwiches were terrible. She ate hers in six bites.
Outside, every few minutes, a branch cracked somewhere in the dark and came down with a crash. Once there was a blue flash, far off, where a transformer blew.
They sat there. Neither of them said anything.
He was two feet away on the floor. She could hear him breathing. The cold and the dust clung to him, and under them, the same soap.
“I heard about Zane,” she said finally.
He turned his head. “From who?”
“Libby Carter. Who else.” She pulled her knees up. “She called to tell me you’d had a falling out. She wanted to know if I knew why.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her to ask Zane.” She looked at the ceiling. “And your mother told me she told you. About me going to the house.”
“She did.”
“Were you angry?”
“For about a minute.” He was quiet. “Then I wasn’t. It should have been me who told you. She did the thing I couldn’t. I told her that.”
Amelia didn’t say anything. She thought about Maureen with the strand of hair loose over her ear. She thought about Good night, Marisol, which she had never mentioned to him and never would.
* * *
“Can I tell you something?” she said. “I’m not going to yell. I just want to tell you.”
“Tell me.”
She looked at the flashlight beam on the ceiling.
“When you said Deja’s name,” she said. “At the selection weekend. I didn’t sleep for two nights.
I kept going back through my whole life trying to find one thing that was mine.
One thing you hadn’t gotten to first.” She kept her voice level.
It was hard. “The marriage, the house, the table at Christmas. Those were yours. I knew that by then. But the program was supposed to be mine. It was the one thing I did. And then it turned out you’d been underneath that too, the whole time, holding it up.
” She paused. “I felt like I didn’t exist. Like I was a thing you’d built.
Like if you took your hands away, there’d be nothing there. ”
He didn’t say anything.
She waited for him to defend it. For but I only wanted you to have it. For you built it, I only paid. He’d said all of that in the conference room in October. She braced for it.
It didn’t come.