The snow was falling faster out the big glass window now, starting to stick in a quickly thickening layer on the sidewalk. Marianne leaned against the counter, watching the few people still outside fighting against the wind. None of them looked like they were interested in croissants.
She shook her head and pushed herself upright to flip the sign on the door to Closed and turned the deadbolt. It was nights like these that made her glad she’d moved back into the apartment above the shop.
“I’d probably get hit by a car in all this snow,” she muttered. “I’m stuck in here till the plows come through.” She had plenty of food and supplies between the shop and the apartment. She hardly left the building most days, anyway. Most of her necessities were delivered to the shop, and she could get anything else on her weekly grocery store run. Her kids had wanted her to find someplace new when she’d sold the house. They’d said it wasn’t healthy for her to move back where she worked, especially when she could afford to buy something small in a nearby neighborhood with the revenue from the sale.
Janie especially had objected, saying Marianne would end up even more isolated and lonely. Marianne had scoffed and reminded them she’d grown up in the apartment back when her grandfather had been the one running things, and she’d been living there when she’d met their father, so how isolating could it be? Besides, she’d used the money from the old house to pay Anna’s tuition, so she really shouldn’t complain. She didn’t need to be investing in new real estate at her age. And the apartment was nice and toasty—
The lights flickered. Marianne flinched and pushed open the door to her apartment in the back of the kitchen, climbing the narrow rickety stairs. The ovens had been burning since four a.m., trays and trays of croissants and muffins and pies that had flown off the shelves until a few moments after the first flakes had fallen. Even if the power went out, the heat from the day’s baking would linger for a few hours at least. For the hundredth time, she wished she’d gotten around to installing the backup generator or switching to gas. Electric heat sounded great until the power went out. She supposed she could start baking to raise the temperature, but the idea of messing with knives and fire in the dark didn’t appeal. Besides, her body ached. She’d spent her day in and out of ovens and fridges. The last thing she wanted to do now was bake more.
The living room was dark and a little chilly, so she cranked the thermostat up to seventy-three. Might as well get a little extra heat in the apartment while she could, knowing the state of the power grid. Deep within the walls, the heat clicked on, whirring to life. She rummaged in the counter drawer nearest the door until she found the box of emergency candles, and the big green safety flashlight Kevin had gotten her for Christmas one year. Theoretically, it glowed in the dark, but not if she kept it in a dark drawer all the time. She also pulled a few logs from the rack beside the fireplace, settling them in the iron grate and stuffing newspaper and twigs into the space below.
Another gust of wind rattled the windows. Marianne shivered. Was that thunder?
A crack of wind shuddered the building. The branches of the old pine tree out front scraped against the windows. A groan outside signaled the fall of snow against the power lines, and the lights flickered again before sputtering out. With a slow groan, the heat pump stuttered and then stopped.
Marianne let out the breath she’d been holding. The dark was familiar. In the dark, with the sound of snow and wind against the windows in the air, the apartment could be fifty years in the past. With her eyes closed, her grandfather could be around the corner in the master bedroom, her father and mother in the spare room, her cousins stuffed into bunk beds in the warm little office above the bakery stove. The quiet inside broke the illusion though. Even with no one awake, the apartment had felt full, breaths and creaks and stifled giggles and cries. Even in a storm, it was louder inside than out. Now it was empty except for her.
She picked up a candle from the kitchen counter and searched around for matches. None in the junk drawer, and none above the mantle where they should be. Where—
Marianne groaned, remembering the birthday party they’d hosted earlier in the week. She’d borrowed the matches from the apartment for it, and she’d probably left them downstairs next to the cake case. It had been a lovely party, even though most of the guests had had to park in the municipal lot a block and a half away since the parking lot had been completely full of customers for the Cairo Grill next door.
Outside, the last streetlight fizzled out, leaving a blackness outside the window broken only by the distant glow from the battery-powered lights of the train station. On the table, the flashlight’s body glowed the faintest shade of green, and Marianne stumbled to it. Its beam wasn’t very bright once she flicked the switch on, but the faint light was enough to get her back to the staircase without breaking her neck. She made her way carefully to the bottom, found the matches right where she’d left them, and shook her head at her own folly. She pulled one out and struck it to light one of the candles she used for events and then tucked the box into her apron pocket.
Flashlight in one hand, candle in the other, she wended her way back through the furniture to the stairs. Not trusting the thin, wavering light, she slid a foot out until she tapped the stair’s riser with her toes and worked her way carefully up to the landing and then around the turn. Then a stair wasn’t quite where she expected, and she gasped, dropping flashlight and candle. She grabbed for the rail, slipping and landing with a thud on her rear, barely avoiding knocking her face into the bannister. She groaned and tried to lever herself back upright without falling any farther and then slid on her butt down the remaining steps. She stopped at the bottom, breathing heavily, and fumbled for the flashlight that still glowed faintly on the floor a few feet away. The candle, thank goodness, had gone out when it landed. She didn’t love the idea of trying to reach the fire department in the middle of a snowstorm.
A sound filtered through the wall. She froze and listened carefully, heart pounding in her throat.
“Hello?” called the voice again, faint through the wood and plaster. “Is everything all right?”
“Who’s there?”
A pause. “Rana. Rana Wahbi,” said her neighbor. “Ms. Windmere? Is that you?”
Marianne pushed herself upright and then froze as her ankle twinged when she put her weight on it. She gasped aloud, squeezing her eyes shut as she hopped on the other foot.
“Ms. Windmere?” The woman’s voice was pleasant and concerned, lightly accented, and low-pitched. “Are you all right?”
Could that really be the woman who’d been keeping all Marianne’s customers away for months with her parked cars? Nearly three months they’d worked on opposite sides of the building, Marianne realized, and this was the first time they’d spoken. She sounded nice. That was the strangest part. “I’m fine,” she called back.
“Are you sure? That was quite a crash. Did something fall?”
“Just me. I slipped and twisted my ankle, I think.”
There was a pause through the wall, long enough that Marianne wondered if Ms. Wahbi left.
Marianne pressed her fingers to the side of her ankle, feeling for a bump or blood or something.
“Do you need help?”
Was her parking lot nemesis really offering help?
“I’m fine,” she said. “Just need to rest for a minute.” She tried the ankle again and winced. Stupid, she thought. Stupid to be here alone, stupid to leave the matches downstairs when I knew there was a storm coming, and stupid to let my pride overwhelm my common sense. Maybe the girls were right. Maybe I’m old and frail and not safe living by myself. “This is exactly what my kids warned me about.”
“What’s that?”
“They told me if I lived alone here, I might fall and hurt myself, and no one would find me. That I need to, as Janie put it, be ‘aware of my changing body.’ I think it was revenge for my puberty talk twenty years ago.”
Ms. Wahbi laughed. “You’re no
t exactly decrepit,” she said. “Do they think you’re that old?”
“I’m not sure,” Marianne admitted. “Janie—my middle girl—she’s a nurse. She’s always fussing.”
“Well, if you called loudly enough, I would hear when I came in to start the marinades. So, you wouldn’t lay there more than a day—or two, if you fell on a Monday.”
“That’s reassuring. I’m closed Mondays, too, so at least that’s unlikely.” She tested the ankle again. Still a little sore, but much better. Good. That meant it probably wasn’t sprained, only tender. She pulled her robe closer around herself, shivering in the stairwell as the heat continued to leach from the drafty old building now that the power was out. The silence drew out longer, and she wondered if the other woman had moved elsewhere.
She didn’t even know why she was talking to her, except that the dark chilly stairs with the faint sound of snow pattering on the roof and windows was an odd sort of magical, liminal place where a disembodied voice seemed to fit right in. The fact that this woman had been a source of ire recently didn’t seem to matter when the wind whistled through the trees outside, and the shadows stood tall and ghostly. Still, she cleared her throat and tried to pull herself together.
“It must be getting cold over there,” said Ms. Wahbi. “I’ve made tea on the stove if you’d like some. At least the gas is still on.” Her voice was cautious as if she knew Marianne wasn’t likely to accept.
“No, thank you,” said Marianne. “I’m just getting a few things and settling in upstairs.” She wasn’t about to get murdered in the dark over a parking lot dispute. If the woman next door had cursed Marianne as much as Marianne had her, she couldn’t imagine that would be a good idea.
“You live above the bakery?”
“I do,” said Marianne. “I’m going to ride out the storm up there. Thanks for your concern.” She tried to make her tone sound final. Then she pulled out a fresh match and lit the candle once more, the guttering, sputtering sound of the wick catching loud in the near silence.
“Good luck,” said Ms. Wahbi. “I’m hoping there’s enough of a break in the storm I can make it home. I may have power there.”
Marianne felt her mothering instincts kick in automatically. “Driving? In this weather?” she burst out.
“Well, with no heat, I don’t think I’ll stay here in the restaurant.”
“Still.” Marianne tested the ankle again, resting her full weight on it this time. It seemed all right. She felt strange, leaning here against the wall, hands cupped around the candle as the wick steadied, speaking with the woman she’d been silently cursing for three months.
“May I ask a favor?” Ms. Wahbi’s voice was quiet through the drywall.
Marianne had the slightest moment of hesitation. What favor could this neighbor, this stranger, want from her? The whole lot? The sidewalk out front, maybe?
“Could I perhaps borrow your phone? I need to call my son back and let him know I’m all right. We were in the middle of a conversation when the power went out, and my cell phone is out of battery.”
“Of course,” said Marianne. “I was about to call my daughter. You’ll have to come around though. There’s no way through the building.”
“I think I can manage that much,” said Ms. Wahbi. “The front door? And it won’t be too much trouble, with your ankle, to come let me in?”
“It’s fine,” said Marianne. “I’m not the one walking through a blizzard.” She pushed herself upright. “You know where to go?”
Ms. Wahbi laughed. “Yes, I do. I drive past your door every morning.”
Marianne knew she did. She saw her silver Outback come around the building most mornings around nine and simmered, knowing it was likely to pull into the last available spot in the lot.
A rustling sounded from the other side of the wall. “All right,” Ms. Wahbi said. “I’ll see you in a few minutes.”
Chapter Two
Marianne limped her way back carefully through the darkened kitchen to the store’s door, trying not to put too much pressure on her sore ankle. She gave up on the flashlight as she hobbled through the customer seating to the broad wooden door that had marked the public entrance to her family’s bakery for the last century and a half. She set the candle down on Zeke’s table and stared out the steamy old glass pane, trying to see if she could discern any movement outside. The street was dark; the flickering of the candle occasionally illuminating a few swirling flakes, but not much else.
She hoped Zeke and Joe were home safe, warm in their little house down the road, and that they had power. Joe’s house was even older than the bakery, dating back to the mid-1700s. The first floor had a working wood stove that, in a pinch, could heat Joe’s bedroom and the living room. She hoped Zeke had the sense to sleep in the living room if his room was too cold.
She worried about that kid. Ever since the troubles with his parents when he was fourteen—when he’d told them he was a boy—he’d been living with Joe. And while Joe was hale for his nineties, he was beginning to slow down physically. Zeke had begun doing more and more for him as the last year had gone on. Marianne supposed, in the end, they each benefitted from having the other around the way family should even if theirs was an unconventional situation. She hoped nothing went wrong while the streets were so impassible. And if something did happen, she hoped Zeke’s mother—Joe’s granddaughter, and their only local relative—got over herself enough to come over and help. She only lived six blocks away, but she hadn’t visited since Zeke changed his name and moved in with Joe.
She pulled a chair over to the door and tucked her robe closer around herself. The thought occurred to her that she would be meeting her neighbor for the first time in her blue flannel jammies.
Still no sign of Ms. Wahbi outside. Marianne got up from the chair to stare out again, cupping her fingers around her eyes and squinting. Her breath fogged the cold glass, and her stomach soured with the tiniest burn of worry. She had just begun considering whether she should get her snow boots to go out and search when something moved outside.
She hoped the movement was Ms. Wahbi. Better her than a lost angry bear or something. As that thought crossed her mind, she realized that apart from a very general image of a Middle Eastern woman approximately her own age, she didn’t actually know what Ms. Wahbi looked like. That was sad, somehow.
The movement resolved into a vaguely human-shaped smear against the gray swirling wind and then into a woman wrapped tightly in a parka, mittens, hat, and boots. Marianne hurried to open the door and usher her inside and then closed it tightly behind her. Even the few seconds the door had been open had left a scattering of wet white snow ten feet into the store and had dropped the temperature another few degrees. “You made it,” she said as the woman pulled off her hood with shaking hands, revealing a face about Marianne’s age with round cheeks, luminous brown eyes, and soft waves of chestnut brown hair.
“I followed the wall the whole way around,” she said, her accent more pronounced when not muffled by six inches of wall. “I nearly fell into the hedge.” She shivered. “I wasn’t sure I was going to make it. Visibility is absolutely nothing out there. Not a soul on the roads, thank goodness.” White flakes of snow speckled her thick dark hair cascading around her shoulders, a flush darkening the apples of her cheeks as she shook herself and caught her breath. She stood a few inches shorter than Marianne with fine lines around her eyes and a few gray hairs at her temples.
“Here,” said Marianne, taking her coat and draping it over a chair to let the snow slide loose. Ms. Wahbi wore a thick sweater beneath it, and her soft-looking silk pants were shoved into knee-high Wellingtons that didn’t look quite snow-appropriate. They looked more like something a fisherman would wear to wade in summer surf, not warm enough for this weather. “Let me find my phone.”
She kept an old flip phone down here to use in emergencies like this one, or to lend out to visiting friends and family. Luckily, it was plugged in exactly where she’d left
it that evening, nearly fully charged. She pulled the phone from the charger and handed it to Ms. Wahbi. “Here, you can call your son back.”
“Thank you again,” her neighbor replied, taking the phone. “And I don’t think we’ve ever been introduced. It’s good to finally meet you. Please call me Rana.”
“Marianne.” Marianne smiled awkwardly. “You can borrow the phone if you’d like. And my number is the only contact in there, if you need to get in touch.”
“I brought you a gift,” said Rana. “It’s not much, but I wanted to give you a taste of my restaurant.” She pulled out a pastry bag from the outer pocket of her coat, slightly squashed. “To thank you for the use of your phone.”
“That wasn’t necessary,” said Marianne, but she took the bag.
Rana stomped her feet on the mat, shaking the slush loose from her boots. “I’ll try not to damage your hedge any further on my way back,” she said.
Marianne felt her own mother’s voice rising in her chest, the hospitality their Greek family had held sacred. She fought against it for a few long seconds and then finally said, “Would you like to come upstairs? You can make your call there. It’s probably warmer than in your store and more comfortable than down here.”
Rana gave her a long, considering look, suspicion on her face warring with what Marianne assumed was the thought of shivering in the dark, damp bakery any longer. “That’s very kind,” she said finally. “Let me call my Amir back from here and then perhaps if the storm hasn’t gotten any better. Thank you.” Her eyes didn’t leave Marianne’s, looking for something in Marianne’s gaze.
Marianne felt herself blush. She didn’t usually invite strangers up to her apartment. And she wasn’t sure why she was so easily letting go of her annoyance at the woman—but somehow it didn’t seem right, now that they were face-to-face, and Rana was cold and snow damp. Besides, she’d always had a weakness for a pretty face. That was one reason she and Kevin had stayed married as long as they had: she liked looking at him, and it weakened her resolve. Making a silent pledge not to let Rana’s long eyelashes do any more damage, Marianne did a mental inventory, trying to remember if she’d left any messes around the apartment.
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