5. Blizzard
BLIZZARD
ANDERS
Two Years Back
Parker comes into the laundry room still half-wrapped in his winter coat. His dark hair has a few snowflakes that stick to his ends, and his face is flushed from the cold. He stops when he sees me and pauses.
Outside, the snow keeps coming down in sheets that seem to get thicker and thicker by the hour. Probably not a good time to come over and do my laundry, but I’m down to my last pair of briefs and I’m all out of quarters.
“Saw your car parked on the street. I put your windshield wipers up for you.”
“Oh, I just came to do laundry,” I explain, holding up a dirty sock.
“Yeah, I gathered.” His eyes flick to the machine, then back to me, and something in his expression softens in a way I don’t know what to do with. The relief is small, but I notice it anyway.
“You saw the weather report?” he asks.
I nod. “It’s bad.”
“It’s worse outside the city,” he says, already pulling off his gloves. “I’m glad you’re here, though. I was literally about to call you and ask if you’d wanna come and hunker down with me.”
It lands so simply that my brain doesn’t immediately know where to place it. I hear myself try to make it complicated and internally scream.
“A kidnapping,” I retort.
“I have two generators and ice cream on standby.”
My mouth pulls into a grin. “Victim came willingly.”
Parker laughs under his breath and disappears into the kitchen for a moment.
He returns a moment later, roughing my hair as he brushes past me. I join him on the couch, immediately reaching for his fresh, cold beer before he can stop me.
“You little gremlin,” he mutters flatly. “That’s mine.”
“Can you go get me my own then?” I smirk, bringing the bottle to my lips and taking a few sips.
“No…” He scrunches his nose. “Just keep it.”
He slips off into the kitchen and returns a few moments later with two more beers.
“Both for you?” I ask.
He gives me a look, biting back a grin. “I miss when you were little enough to be my beer mule. Getting up to get my own is just too much effort.”
“Yeah. Well, maybe if you paid me more than a dollar…”
“Paying a six year old a dollar per beer is a very generous wage.”
“Only a true millionaire would say that,” I laugh.
We then fall into a heated discussion on why my brother’s new haircut looks like shit. Parker argues it’s because he goes to Great Clips, while I maintain my strong belief that it’s because he’s balding.
I realize I’ve stopped keeping track of anything except the fact that I keep wanting him to stay exactly where he is. Situated close, but still barely out of reach. At some point that becomes its own problem.
I don’t fully register it when he’s saying “come on.” I follow him outside without protest because I don’t think I’ve ever seen him look so animated.
The cold hits immediately, my face both stinging and numbing at the exact same time. The snow is coming down hard enough now that it absorbs most of the sound, making the world feel a little more silent than it usually is.
I think that’s what I like most about blizzards. The world actually shuts up for a day.
Parker leans against the railing like he’s used to this. The quiet, the cold, the snow…
“It’s insane out here,” I say. “Haven’t seen snow this much in D.C. since that blizzard in 2009.”
“It used to snow like this back home all the time.”
I turn my head to look at him just as he speaks. “In Russia?”
“Yeah.” My breath clouds in front of me as I exhale.
“My papa used to take us outside every hour to measure how deep the snow had gotten,” he tells me. “He always said that if the world was going to stop, you should at least be there to see it while it happens.”
I smile without meaning to.
His attention stays on the snow like he’s still caught in the memory.
“There was one winter,” Parker continues, “we got snowed in for over a week. Everything just shut down. No school. No work. Nothing.” There’s a faint shift in his voice that’s so subtle I almost don’t catch it.
“He was happy,” Parker kept recounting, swallowing hard.
“I think that was the last time I remember him being…just glad to be there with us.”
Something in my chest tightens in a way I don’t immediately understand. He sounds far away now, even though he’s standing right next to me.
“That was the last snow we had before he passed,” he reveals.
“It was a stroke. Then pneumonia. Then he just…gave up. His body was too weak to keep fighting.” The way he says it feels like he’s at peace with it, but something still feels different.
There’s a kind of vulnerability in him right now that feels unintentional.
“I’m so sorry,” I murmur.
He purses his lips and gives me a soft look.
“It happened,” he kind of shrugs. “I’m just glad he went out with the memory of all of us together as a family. Katya and I running through the snow, my mom yelling at us from the front of the apartment building slinging a bottle of vodka in her hand.”
“Sounds like your mom,” I chuckle softly. And maybe it’s because this is the first time he’s ever opened up to me like this, or maybe it’s the six beers…
“Crap.” Parker swipes his back hand over the side of my cheek. “You’re freezing.”
He looks at me like I’m some sort of rare specimen, rattling me in every possible way. I genuinely pause dead in my tracks for a moment.
“I’m horrible,” he jokes, slinging his arm around my shoulder. “Holding you captive. Forcing you to stand outside in the middle of a blizzard.”
“I think I can already hear the police sirens,” I snort. “World’s worst kidnapper.”
Parker laughs, dragging me back inside. “When did you get so funny?”
The warm air hits me like a flame. Immediately warm on the outside, but I can still feel a coldness in my bones. I walk past him, straight over to the couch to grab a blanket.
“I have a heated blanket,” Parker tells me, then quickly disappearing upstairs for a few beats before returning with a massive American flag-printed blanket.
“Sochi Olympics,” I say without even thinking the moment he throws it to me. “Did you get this in your little Team USA bag?”
“How do you know?”
I look up at him and shake my head. “It was, like, 2014. I was fully sentient back then.”
Parker snorts.
“And why else would you have a massive heated blanket with a bunch of little flags on it?” I pause briefly, pressing my lips together. “Besides the fact that you’re a Republican.”
He takes a few steps closer to me without even thinking. “I’m not a fucking Republican, you goof.”
I just smirk at him.
“You’re impossible,” he sighs, giving me a look that lingers for a second longer than it should.
Later into the night, we had more beers than we could even count.
Parker sits at one end of the couch with his legs kicked onto the coffee table. His arm rests on the cushions, outstretched and in dangerous proximity to my end of the couch.
“So you ran over a bear…brought it back to your cabin…and you cooked it?” I say to him, the tone in my voice making it clear how unbelievable the story is.
“Your brother ran over the bear,” Parker clarifies before laughing. His face brightens immediately, illuminated by his own amusement. “We called the ranger and he just told us to bring him some bear loin.”
“I don’t believe that.”
He just laughs again, bringing his bottle to his lips and taking another sip.
“Mm.” He holds a finger up to me and sets his bottle back down on its coaster.
“So we used the bungie jumpers…right?” He gives himself a moment to catch up while dying of laughter.
“And we had the smart idea to sorta tie them together and hoist the bear up in the air, like, over a trash can…” Parker then goes into extreme graphic detail.
“And Luca—your brother—” he squeezes my shoulder twice like it means nothing.
“Oh my God. This fucking dumbass. He googled a tutorial on how to skin a bear…with a pocket knife.”
I know it’s completely subconscious the way he brushes his fingers over the back of my head, threading them through my hair. I know that…but my body still reacts like it was deliberate.
Parker snorts like it’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard. My heart buzzes like it’s the most beautiful face he’s ever made.
“The snow was way too deep to drive in by then, so we had to put on our skis and walk through the two feet of snow to get to the snow mobile, drive it to the ranger station, borrow his butcher knife—”
“And you guys brought it all the way back?”
“No,” Parker shakes his head. “We somehow convinced the ranger to leave his post and ride back with us to the cabin so he could do the whole thing for us.”
It’s not the first time I’ve heard this story. It’s not even the first time I’ve heard Parker retell it. But it’s the first time he’s telling it to me. In a way, it feels like it’s all mine. Like the memory belongs to me and no one else.
My eyes widen like it’s my best performance. “You watched him skin a bear?”
“I did…Luca’s stomach couldn’t handle it. Fucker hid in his room with his head in a bucket.”
I cling onto every word that leaves his mouth like they’re tiny specs of gold.
“Sounds like Luca,” I snort.
“Right?” he laughs.
All of a sudden it hits me all at once. We’re sitting so close to each other that I can feel the warmth coming off his body. We both must’ve scooted towards the middle without even realizing it. Our heads are angled with not much space between them.
“He used to be so fun,” Parker murmurs, softening his expression. It’s like he suddenly remembers who he’s talking to. He freezes for a moment and gives me a weird look.
“I wish I could’ve seen that side of him,” I remarked.
“He was great,” Parker says with a tender look in his eyes.
What he doesn’t seem to remember is the fact that I was probably five or six then. I was home with Emelie while he and my own brother were off fucking around on a ski trip.
“You know—you really do look just like him.” And then he playfully taps my cheek in a way I’ve seen him do to Luca millions of times.