by Chuck Dixon
M is away visiting. Funny how she fills the house somehow.
Going to work the kitchen some more.
Snow falling harder.
Wind picking up.
Two more feet by morning.
19
* * *
Nick Esposito thought his wife was crazy for wanting to come up to the lake house in the winter. He thought he was even crazier for agreeing to it.
“What’s wrong with Florida?” Nick said.
“Everybody goes to Florida when it gets cold,” Jessie said.
“You know there’s a good reason for that,” Nick said.
Here they were in deepest Maine, snowed in until Good Friday probably. Plenty of food in the freezers. Nothing for him to do but read, watch movies and, when Jessie wasn’t watching, lose money playing on-line poker.
“What are you in the mood for?” Nick said. He was standing at the shelf system packed with DVDs.
“Whatever you’d like to watch,” Jessie said, wrapped in a down quilt by the fire he’d built for them in the river stone hearth. The sweet smell of apple wood filled the room. Nick prided himself on the fires he could build.
“We have the last season of that show with the high school teacher cooking drugs on the side.” He’d long ago stopped using titles for movies and shows since Jessie could never remember them. Instead he had to give her one-sentence plot summaries.
“Oh, that show’s awful.” She winced.
He sighed.
“Pick something else,” she said.
“We haven’t watched that one with Pierce Brosnan in a while.”
“Is he James Bond in it?” She made a face.
“It’s the one you like where he’s not James Bond. He steals a famous painting. You liked the actress’s purse.”
“A Hermès bag! Okay, we’ll watch that if you want to.” She beamed.
He’d watch anything as long as he could snuggle up to the hot toddy steaming in a mug on the coffee table.
They were forty minutes in. Jessie was enjoying the movie. Pierce Brosnan was enjoying Rene Russo. Nick was enjoying his second hot toddy, a warm buzz enveloping him just like the quilt his wife was wearing like a womb.
Lights flashed across the walls of the room. Nick muted the TV. Headlights came through the windows at the front of the house. Someone pulling up the drive. A burring sound rose to overpower the voices from the television speakers.
“Who the hell’s out in this?” Nick said.
“You’d better go see,” Jessie said, taking the remote from his hand as he rose from the sofa.
A pair of snow mobiles were pulled up on the drive. Their engines rumbled and popped as they idled. Two men in black snowsuits and helmets. One dismounted and was crunching toward the front door.
“Can I help you guys?” Nick said from the open front door, eyes squinted against the pelting snow.
The dismounted man strode up the walk raising his arm, raising something in it to point at Nick Esposito.
A blinding flash wiped away the world. Nick was on the ground. He didn’t remember falling. It was getting hard to breath. He tried to speak. Something warm and thick bubbled in his mouth.
The man in the black snow suit stepped over him to walk in through the open door.
Nick tried to call out to Jessie. No sound came out. He was drowning in his own blood.
20
* * *
“Coffee or tea?” Lily said, poking her head into the utility room.
“Coffee would be great,” Nate said. He was down on his knees working in the hatch at the bottom of the fat water heater tank.
“Decaf or regular?” Lily said.
“Regular black. Between this beast and the sleepover at home I’m not getting any sleep tonight anyway.” He smiled and stood.
“Sleepover?” Lily said tilting her head. She had an accent. German, maybe?
“It’s like a party,” Nate said.
She nodded, pulling her head back and closing the door behind her.
Lily and Sascha. No last name. Funny couple. They were artists. Or at least they said they were. They never offered to show their work. Nate never saw any evidence of paints or sculpture anywhere in the house either tonight or when he was here back in the fall to introduce himself. That’s when he arrived at his snap opinion that the pair were hippies. Sascha had a pony tail and a hipster goatee. Lily’s kinky red hair always looked like she just got out of a wind tunnel. They both wore sandals with thick socks no matter what the weather was. They dressed in layers of ‘natural’ clothing. As the temps dropped they looked like they were wearing every stitch they owned. Hippies through and through. No evidence of what kind of art they worked on though. He asked just to be polite. They told him they didn’t like talking about their ‘process.’ Fine with Nate. He didn’t really want to hear about it anyway.
Nate pulled the heating elements from the floor of the tank. As he’d suspected, one of them was shot. A crack in the glass tube enclosing the corkscrew filament. Lucky for the hippies he had spares in the tool sled. A lot of the homes and guest houses were built by the same contractor. Tillottson Brothers down in Bangor. So most of the places had the same water heater. Nate kept plenty of spare parts on hand. Winters were hard on everything. The lifespan of a water heater up here was cut in half by six months of Maine’s dry cold. A new element would hold them till spring and then the tank would need to be replaced.
He walked out through the open garage door down the drive to the snow machine and tool sled. The machine and sled were covered in an inch of new snow. It was still falling thick enough to make the world feel closed in to just the area around the bungalow. Danni called it the snow globe effect. The Christophers’ old rambling Cape Cod across the road was a big gray heap. Beyond that the lake was invisible in a field of swirling white. There was no sound but his own breathing. It was as if Nate was on a space walk.
The spare elements were in one of the steel drawers on his tool sled. Nate yanked and closed, yanked and closed until he found the row of boxes of new elements resting in the bottom drawer. As he rose from a crouch to trudge back to the house he heard a noise cut through the silence.
A high whining sound. More than one sound. Check that. The same sound from multiple sources.
The snow and the trees combined to muffle and reflect the sound. The noise was coming from the north shore of the lake up near the top of the gourd’s neck. Nate walked further up the drive to the bungalow. He stood trying to see the lake beyond the obscuring mass of the Christopher place. All he saw was the dense curtain of falling snow. The sound grew in volume as he listened.
“Mr. Fenton?”
Nate turned to see Lily standing inside the open garage with a steaming mug of coffee in her hands.
“I have your new element. I just heard something out on the lake,” he said and crunched through the snow back to the garage.
“Heard something? What kind of something?” she asked.
“Sounds like snow machines. Thought it might be guys I know ice fishing. But even Dennis and Tommy aren’t crazy enough to be out in this,” he said, accepting the cup. Decorated with hand painted flowers. She tripped the button and the garage door rumbled closed.
“How long to fix the heater?” Lily said. She seemed impatient with him. Her eyes were narrow behind her glasses. Very un-hippie, he thought.
“Ten minutes to get the element back in. Give it an hour or so to get the tank filled in and back up to heat.”
“Good. That is good,” she said but didn’t sound happy about it. She popped back into the house, leaving him to his work.
He sipped the coffee.
It tasted like she put cinnamon in it.
Damn German hippies.
21
* * *
The kids finished up the game of Risk. Carl won by holding onto Afghanistan.
“He plays the same way every time. Loads up in Afghanistan and sticks to it no matter what.” Giselle sighed.
Th
e girls outvoted the boy for the next board game. Life.
The kids were in flannel pajamas. Despite the blazing fire going in the iron stove set in the fireplace there was still a chill. They also wore wooly socks under their slippers and thick robes belted tight. Danielle Fenton got in the sleepover groove in a fluffy sky-blue robe with a pattern of leaping sheep. She busied herself serving up hot chocolate and refilling the community popcorn bowl set by the playing board.
Just as Merry was choosing college as her pathway to success the lights went out. The dishwasher went silent. Giselle’s iPod dock died away in the middle of her favorite One Direction song. Near as Merry could tell they were all her favorite song.
The kids ran to the windows facing the lake. It was pitch dark but for the dull radiance of the lake surface visible through the gap between the house below them and the trees.
“All the houses are out,” Giselle announced.
“Then it’s not just us, right?” Carl said.
“That’s right, genius,” Giselle said.
Merry looked out through the haze of blowing snow. Her breath fogged the glass. The world outside looked like an underexposed photograph. The snow stood white against the black of the trees. The sky was low and dark.
Mom to the rescue. Danni appeared with candles, distributing them around the family room to make islands of light in the gloom. Carl was up and away into the dark. He came back, winding up a friction-powered camping lamp that threw the game table into high relief.
“Get that out of my eyes!” Giselle said. Carl stood on a chair and set the lamp in the curve of the hanging chandelier over the table. It cast a beam down on the table so they could keep playing.
“See how this is better than video games? The power goes out and you keep right on playing,” Danni said. Like most everyone in Bellevue the Fentons homeschooled. Like most homeschoolers, video games were verboten; too much of a distraction.
“Yes, Mom,” both Fenton kids said in near unison. They didn’t really miss not playing Supercart or Halo since they’d never played anything like a video game except for the three or four trips to Bangor to their aunt’s house in the spring and summer. There was an arcade in the back of their favorite pizza place. They did wish their mother didn’t recite the same sermon every time there was an electrical outage. And they were frequent in the winter months.
Danni picked up the old wall phone in the kitchen and looked to the contact list of lake residents for the Christopher’s guest bungalow. Almost all the houses had landline phones. Bellevue was a half hour drive from any kind of cellphone coverage. She found the number and shouldered the phone to tap out the number.
The phone was dead. That was unusual. The phones always worked during other blackouts. There must be something serious going on down the line somewhere. Danni turned to the recharger on the counter. Both walkie-talkies were there. She’d just have to wait until Nate came back to find out what he knew about the electric.
“Thank God for the propane oven. There’ll still be chocolate chip cookies,” Danni proclaimed after replacing the phone in its cradle.
“Sometimes I think Mom likes these pajama parties more than we do,” Giselle said.
The other two kids giggled at that.
Merry was pushing a carload of pink and blue pegs around the board and trying to catch up with Carl who was looking like he’d make his second board game win of the evening. He had lots of cards and play money on his side of the board. All Merry had were cards saying she owed money on her school loan. How was this game fun again?
“I have to pee,” she announced and hopped from her chair.
“But I was winning!” Carl carped.
“So go ahead and win,” Merry said. She scooped up a candle holder from an occasional table and headed back toward the home’s only bathroom.
She didn’t really need to pee. She only needed a break. In the guttering light of the candle she sat on the edge of the tub. She was bored with the game. It was making her angry at everyone and no one. Merry promised herself she wasn’t going to cry even though she could feel her eyes growing hot at the corners.
Mr. and Mrs. Fenton were so nice and she really liked Giselle and Carl. They wanted her to feel at home in their house. Seeing these people so happy and close and warm in their house only reminded her that she had no family of her own except her father. He had family in the northern part of Alabama but didn’t talk about them much. Merry’s mother passed away a long while back. Her grandma and grandpa died in some kind of accident. Daddy didn’t talk about that much except to say that it was the reason they had to leave Alabama; the reason they had to change their names and never talk about themselves. Merry wanted to ask more but wasn’t sure how much she wanted to know. At first it felt like playing real-life spies. More and more it just made her feel lonely. Having to lie to the Fentons and everyone else she met made her feel bad. Merry felt like she was hurting people that wanted to care about her, wanted to like her. And here she was hurting them with lies and they didn’t even know she was hurting them.
She stood up and flushed the toilet. The candle guttered and sparked then glowed brighter. Cold air blew in under the bathroom door. A crashing sound came through the wall. Then a high voice shouting and a long squeal. The bark of a male voice. No laughter followed.
Merry blew out the candle and pressed her ear to the bathroom door. She could hear talking. The deep voices of men speaking. Mrs. Fenton’s voice rose up above theirs. Another crash of furniture and glass breaking. The shift and fall of heavy boots shuddered the floorboards. She couldn’t hear Mrs. Fenton any more. Only the sound of men talking. She couldn’t make out the words.
The bathroom was in the interior of the house. There were no windows to the outside.
Merry turned the door knob as slowly and quietly as she could and pushed the door open only wide enough to see out through the gap with one eye. Shadows moved on the one wall she could see through the narrow slit. Shadows thrown dancing by the camping lamp set swinging in the chandelier. The men’s voices kept on. They were calling to one another as they moved through the house from room to room. Merry couldn’t make out any words. It sounded like a man giving orders and a couple of other men answering. They weren’t police. There’d been no knock at the door.
She opened the bathroom door enough to allow herself to slip through. She stepped from her slippers to move without sound on her heavy woolen socks deeper into the house away from the voices. The corridor lined either side by Giselle and Carl’s bedrooms ended in a mud room with access to the back of the house. Merry moved into the unheated room where the Fentons kept things like firewood, sleds, boots, and a big deep freezer standing silent against one wall. The cross-country skis Daddy gave her for Christmas leaned by other pairs of skis belonging to the Fentons. She searched for her boots among the neat row lined up on the concrete floor. Merry tied a quick knot in the loose ends of the laces and looped the boots over her shoulder. With the skis and poles cradled under one arm, she opened the back door off the mud room, careful not to let the long skis scrape on the floor or jamb.
She plunged off the back stoop into knee-deep snow. She made her stumbling way into the trees away from the lights glowing from within the house. Her passage left a deep furrow with a parallel groove left by the dragging end of the skis behind her. The falling snow and lateral wind would fill them in. Even now the crusted top layer lay under a constant fog of blowing crystals driven by stiff gusts off the lake. All traces of her escape would soon be invisible so long as none of the men looked out back in the next few minutes.
The burden of the skis and poles was awkward in the thick snow. Her pace was slow as she moved for the sheltering darkness of the trees. She felt like, at any moment, a voice would call out behind her to break the stillness of the night. The lowest branches at the tree line were borne down into the drifts that had blown against them. She reached their sheltering cover on her hands and knees. Merry threw the skis and poles through a sp
ace between boughs and dove in after them.
The dark within the woods was near total and she gave herself a moment to adjust to the gloom. Closed her eyes tight the way her father taught her. Safe in the shadows of the trees, she leaned her back to a tree to pull on her boots. The cold reached through the wool of her socks to chill her feet. They were still dry. Struggling and hopping, she managed to slide the boots on and lace them up tight. She stepped into the traps on the skis, using the poles for balance. Merry lifted her legs one at a time and set the fastened skis on the surface of the snow. She was careful to distribute her weight as Giselle taught her and stood upright. Her footing was good now, a solid stance. She slid one ski forward followed by the other, balancing with the poles as she moved up to a steady pace between the trees away from the Fentons’ cabin and through the absolute quiet of the woods to find her father.
22
* * *
Leandra, Lee to her friends, was busy at her laptop when the lights went out. The computer went to battery mode, going dim before recovering and washing the kitchen in blue light.
“Shit,” Lee said.
Ten seconds later the generator somewhere at the back of the house growled to life. The big sub-zero refrigerator came back on line as well as a few can lights in the ceiling. Lee went around the house cutting the lights out to conserve the gas in the generator since she had no idea how to refuel it. With the laptop held before her like a bull’s-eye lantern, she searched the kitchen and adjoining great room for an outlet that still had juice provided by the generator. No luck.
She closed the laptop to save battery life. The room turned black but for the silvery glow off the snow coming in from the windows. It was enough light to allow her to navigate. The gas stove still worked and she turned the flame on to heat water for tea.
With a steaming mug of Earl Grey she took a seat on the cushions of the vast bay window that looked out over the lake. Fingers of cold bled through the double panes. Her hands were wrapped around the warm mug she held against the front of her cable sweater.