Ice Storm

by Cadle, Lou

  Ray tried to wake her again, even risking a little pinch to her wrist. No use. She was still breathing, but her face was cooler. He reached under the covers for her arm, making sure she was still warm under the covers. For now, yes. But she’d get colder because the house was colder. The fires he’d built weren’t big enough, the wood not dense enough, to keep the living room as warm as it had been.

  What if the fire department took an hour or two to come? She’d get colder still.

  He couldn’t treat her as a paramedic or doctor could. He couldn’t give her a bigger fire in the next hour. But he could share his own body heat with her. He didn’t think he could carry her easily and didn’t want to risk dropping her, but he could move the chair with her in it a few inches at a time. Heaving at the back of it, he scooted it, inch by inch, toward the sofa. By the time he’d reached his goal, he was sweating and panting.

  Boy, he hoped she wouldn’t wake up in the middle of this and think he was some kind of pervert.

  Then he made up a nest on the sofa of his open sleeping bag. He bent over the chair and scooped her up, as carefully as he could. With a grunt, he managed to swing her body from the chair onto the sofa. He rearranged her blankets over her. Then he took off his shoes and jacket and crawled onto the sofa next to her, nudging her limp form back until he could fit next to her. He pulled his throw and then his blanket over both of them and lay next to her, trying to warm her up.

  He could feel even through the blankets that she was colder than he was. He held his breath and listened for her breathing. Had she died in the past five minutes? No, no. Don’t let her be dead. He worked a hand out of his blanket and put it in front of her face, trying to feel her breath. He felt nothing. He licked his fingers, like you might when testing air direction outside, and tried again.

  He felt the soft stir of her exhalation on his damp fingertips. He tucked his hand back under the blanket. “They’ll be here soon,” he said. “Just hang on, Eve. You’ll be in a warm bed soon.”

  He had no way of keeping time, but it seemed a long, scary while before he heard a pounding at the door. He leapt up, scattering his covers, and ran for it.

  There were three firefighters there. “Unconscious person?” one said.

  “Yes. Back here, on the sofa.” He backed up and pointed.

  The three of them pushed past him and went in. One of them examined her and barked out numbers while a second one relayed the information on a radio.

  There was a tap at the door and a fourth firefighter came in with a stretcher.

  The man examining her was done. It had taken him only five minutes, at most. “Okay, let’s get her to the truck.”

  “Where’s the truck? Where are you taking her?” Ray said.

  “It’s around the corner.” The man with the stretcher named the nearest major road. “We couldn’t get any closer than that.”

  “Can I help carry her?”

  “Nah, we got it.”

  The radio crackled, and the man who’d been examining Eve put something into her mouth. A pill? She wasn’t awake, so she couldn’t swallow. Ray almost protested that it would choke her, but they had to know what they were doing, right? He said to the man who examined her, “Will she be okay? What’s wrong with her?”

  The man with the radio said, “Are you family?”

  “Yes,” Ray said. He’d count that as a lie when he got back to his computer and tallied up these days without electricity, but he told this lie without a drop of remorse. He feared they wouldn’t tell him a thing unless he was related.

  “She may have had a minor stroke. We don’t know for sure. What medications does she take?”

  “None that I know of. Oh no, wait. She said aspirin, baby aspirin. Something for arthritis. The bathroom is down this hall, though, if you want me to check the cabinet for whatever she takes.” He pointed to the hall.

  The one with the radio trotted down the hallway, and Ray asked the one who’d examined her, “Was there anything I could have done to help her?”

  “You did. You got us here.”

  “I didn’t do anything wrong?”

  For the first time, the man really focused on him, truly saw him. “No, son. You did everything right. Did you have much heat in here?”

  “The stove. I gathered some wood yesterday, but there wasn’t much. She said not to try burning any green wood, and I could only find one tree that seemed dead. I managed to get some of the branches off and burn them to keep us warm last night.”

  “Sounds like you did more than most kids your age could have handled.”

  Ray wasn’t sure about that. He’d fumbled along the best he could. “Will she be okay?”

  “God willing,” the man said. “And with some good care in the hospital.”

  “Can I go with her, to the hospital? I want someone she knows to be there when she wakes up.”

  “Is this where you live? With her?”

  “No. My house is two doors down, but it’s unlivable. A tree fell on it. And there’s no electricity. I was staying here to keep warm.”

  “But now you won’t be able to stay warm, not until the power is back on. Where are your folks?”

  “My mom’s stuck at work. And my dad is out of the country.”

  “The problem is, I’d take you, partly to keep you warm, to be honest, but the hospital is packed with patients and visitors both. Visitors are a strain on their resources, and until the electricity is back on and the roads clear, they’re about as full as they can be.”

  Ray couldn’t muster another argument. He wanted to go, but he could see he wasn’t going to convince them to let him. “All right. I’ll be fine alone. Just… just take good care of her, would you?”

  “We will. Everyone will.” He gave Ray the name of the hospital where they were taking her. “When the roads are clear, you can visit her.”

  The man who was checking Eve’s medicines returned from the bathroom and all four of the men got Eve onto the stretcher and carried her out the door. Ray watched them from the doorway, having a childish urge to run after them. It wasn’t that he cared much about being left alone. He wanted to stay with Eve to make sure she was all right.

  He’d have to live with not knowing yet. At some level, he knew this was the adult attitude to take, but he hated it. If this was adulthood, they could keep it.

  He closed the door and looked around. It felt wrong staying here in someone else’s house. But here was a more likely place for him to stay warm. He needed to collect some more wood and get the stove going again, and he would be better off than at home. He folded Eve’s blankets, stacked them on her chair, and dragged her chair back into place.

  First, before going back outside, he listened to the weather radio. It was going to stay cold, but at least it wouldn’t snow or sleet again, and the winds were dying down to nothing by tonight.

  He was getting colder in here, but he was going to have to get colder still before he could get warm.

  He hunted for the ax, first in the basement, and then around the woodpile. He finally found it in an unlocked shed out back. It was heavy. He wasn’t all that strong, but he barely could lift it over his head. He practiced swinging it at nothing at all in her backyard until he found a way to hold it, choked up a little on the handle, so that he could safely swing it overhead. There’d been a heavy-duty pair of leather gloves near the ax, so he went back for those. At the last second, he remembered to take the tarp to drag along the wood he managed to cut off the tree. In the distance, he could hear the chainsaw still running, and again thought he might have to ask for help.

  But no. He’d do this on his own if he could. Other people had their own problems, their own trees to cut up. So did he. He did think to knock on the door of the house the tree had belonged to. He’d ask permission, which he should have done yesterday. He didn’t want to get arrested for stealing wood. Though jail would probably be warm, it still wasn’t a place he wanted to ever visit.

  He almost managed a
smile at the thought of getting arrested just to get warm. He hadn’t had much to smile about since yesterday. Still didn’t have a lot to smile about. He didn’t know if his mother was alive or dead. He was nearly out of food, though if he could get the stove loaded, at least he wouldn’t freeze to death.

  First things first. No one answered the door of the house with the dead tree. So they’d gone somewhere else, he hoped. He hoped no one was in there, frozen to death. Either way, dead or elsewhere, they wouldn’t miss a few limbs off a dead tree. Probably would be happy someone had helped them clear it.

  It wasn’t easy to chop limbs off the dead tree, but he got better as he kept using the ax. He kept his head down and just worked, getting hot enough he needed to unzip his jacket halfway. He eventually had the tarp full of branches and pulled it back to Eve’s, going around back and hauling the wood inside. He shoved some of the thinner branches in the stove and spread out the rest to dry by the fire.

  Before he settled down and started the fire for real, he needed more wood than this. What he had wouldn’t last until morning and he wanted enough to last him until at least tomorrow mid-morning when, if the electricity wasn’t on, he’d have to do this all over again.

  The work tired him out enough that he napped. Then he grabbed what food there was—not much—and went back out to get more wood.

  He’d gotten the easier branches earlier, and the second session with the heavy ax was longer and harder. He managed to not cut a hand or foot off, but by the end, he could barely raise the ax over his head. His footsteps were dragging as he hauled the second load of wood back. He went in without stacking the wood by the stove, sat on the sofa, then lay down just to rest for a second, and before he knew it he was waking up from a nap he hadn’t intended to take.

  He woke shivering. For a moment, he had no idea where he was, in a dark room that smelled wrong, that obviously wasn’t his house. Then he remembered, and he remembered he had two women to worry about—his mom and Eve, whose house he was in and whose hospitality he was taking advantage of. He found the lantern by groping around the table for it, lit it, and started to build the fire back up. But when he had loaded some of the smaller bits of wood in and waited, he realized that it wasn’t burning.

  Out the branches came, piled carefully on the hearth. He checked for sparks or embers, but saw none on them, the hearth, or the floor. So he wouldn’t set the house on fire. Worse, none were visible inside the stove. He used the poker and stirred through the ashes, but there wasn’t a single point of light.

  He’d have to start a fire from scratch. There were long matches on the hearth, to the side of the stove.

  He had no idea what he was doing, and he failed several times to get a blaze going by lighting matches. The wood was still damp, which was part of the problem. He gathered all the scrap paper he could find, and pulled some paper plates out of the trash in the kitchen, and they lit, but that wasn’t enough to get the wood burning. So he put on his jacket, went home, and there he found more paper in the trash can in his mom’s office, and the cardboard piled up for recycling, that he shoved into grocery store bags. He also dug around in the garage for wood until he found a pack of wood shims. He didn’t know what they were for, but they were dry wood, thin enough and dry enough to light easily. They weren’t painted or stained, so there’d be nothing wrong with burning them that he could imagine.

  He put those in another sack and on top of that dumped the final frozen meal. He went into his room and dug some dirty socks out of the hamper. He needed dry ones, and he didn’t much care if they were dirty or not. It was not as though he’d been tap-dancing in mud in them. Just wearing them to school. He also grabbed the two pairs that had been drying in the main bathroom. Still damp. Once he got the stove going, he could dry them out at Eve’s in next to no time.

  He tried his computer, saw the battery was really low, and left it where it sat.

  Thinking again of what supplies to take back over to Eve’s, he double-checked the refrigerator, but there was nothing but condiments in there. He took a jar of dill pickles. He also took some toiletries with the plan of washing up a little in water heated on the stove. There was quite a load by the time he was done, but he got everything back to Eve’s in one trip.

  In the light of her lantern, he tried again to light a fire. The paper and shims caught fire, so he fed in the smallest twigs he had, snapping more off the branches as he waited for the first ones to burn. They hissed when the fire touched the wet wood, but the fire didn’t go out this time. Slowly, he fed in stick after stick, until the first dozen were blazing away.

  This was ridiculous. He wasn’t getting any heat of out it, and he wasn’t really starting a fire. He fed in another crumpled handful of newspapers, which smoldered for a moment and then burst into flame. He fed in more sticks, and they starting catching fire faster. He wasn’t sure why, but he’d take it. Perhaps the little fire was growing hotter and that mattered? He scrambled to pick out the thinnest twigs to keep the fire going. He’d make sure it was good and hot before he tried putting in a medium-sized branch.

  It probably took him forty-five minutes of sitting there and babying the fire along, but finally he had several thumb-sized branches in there, all of them burning at the edges, hissing as they put out steam. But the important thing was they were putting out heat, too. He slid that damper thing to where it was open more, so the fire would catch really well, and put on a bigger branch. He’d turn it down in a few minutes. While he waited, he brought in the rest of the wood to stack, making sure no two pieces were touching each other.

  The house had grown cold in the hours without a fire, though not as cold as his own house was. His own house had been cold as the outdoors, which was plenty cold.

  He’d had very little breakfast and lunch, and it was now suppertime and he was really, really hungry. He rummaged through Eve’s cabinets, feeling vaguely guilty, but not as guilty as he was hungry, and soon he had himself a pile of tuna, vegetables, and canned fruit on a piece of foil. He wasn’t going to get an A in cooking for it, but it was food. It would fill his twisting belly. He filled the kettle again and put it on the stove. He opened the pickles and ate several out of the jar as he waited for the water to boil and food to eat. He loaded in two more bigger logs, watching to make sure the fire hadn’t gone out, and when he was sure the fire would still burn, he slid the damper closed halfway, slammed the door and let the fire take care of itself.

  Once more he listened to the weather forecast on the little crank radio. It would not warm to over freezing tomorrow, so unless the power came back on, he’d be out there again gathering wood to get through another day. He felt exhausted in advance of it. When his food was warm, he’d eat it and go to sleep. He’d go out at dawn to gather more wood.

  He’d have to wake in the middle of the night to put more fuel into the stove to keep it going, maybe more than once, and he tried to figure out how to wake up without draining his phone battery. If the fire went out entirely, he didn’t have enough paper or dry wood to get it started again. So not letting it go out was crucial.

  He thought and thought, but his brain wasn’t working very well. Chopping wood had tired him out so much he couldn’t think straight. Couldn’t even worry about Eve or his mom for long. Just too tired. He caught himself dozing off and jerked awake.

  Nope. Gotta eat. Gotta pee too. And the thought made him understand how to make sure he woke up. He’d pee now, but then drink a lot of water after supper and not use the bathroom before bedtime. The urge to go would wake him, and hopefully before the fire died out completely.

  He pulled out his phone and checked quickly for a signal—there was none—and shut it right off.

  Sleep kept threatening to overtake him, so he ate his food when it wasn’t very warm yet. It was awful but he didn’t care. It wasn’t entertainment; it was fuel for tomorrow’s work with the ax, and that was all that mattered. He loaded the stove as tightly as he could, though there were still plenty of
spaces to let air in to keep the fire going because he was loading it with irregular branches, not with split wood like Eve had been doing. He made sure the damper was shut down to make the wood last, and he crawled into his sleeping bag and went right to sleep.

  He woke in the middle of the night needing to pee, remembered the fire, and tended to it first. There were still coals enough to ignite the new wood, which had dried out a little better in the hours next to the stove. He loaded the stove to the top again and used the bathroom, then went back to sleep.

  The next time he woke, he could see the day had dawned. He hurried to the stove and fed the last few branches into the stove until he was sure there was a fire burning well again. Another hour’s sleep, and he might have had no fire. He put the kettle on the fire and tried again to find something to eat. He’d eaten all of what he’d brought originally, and some of Eve’s food. So he’d have to make breakfast and lunch from Eve’s stores, and she didn’t have much.

  He found some applesauce at the back of Eve’s refrigerator, and in the cheese drawer, an unopened packet of pepperoni. Weird breakfast, but better this than nothing. He finished them both and was still hungry. He made some broth from bullion cubes and when it was hot, drank it down. Still hungry. Well, he’d have to be hungry then. Who knew when he’d next get access to food? There were two cans of tuna left, and two cans of vegetables for lunch. He’d eat one more meal today, at least. But tomorrow was another matter.

  How long did it take a person to starve to death? Weeks. Heck, he’d be frozen to death before he starved. So he could calm down about starvation. The real worry was that he’d run out of energy to gather wood if he missed too many meals.

  He was alone, and it felt as if he’d always be alone, and he had to fight to survive every day. No games. No slacking off. If he was a hunter, when he finished gathering wood he’d be out shooting squirrels or snakes, just to survive.