“Um, yeah, my wife,” I said, remembering Pia. “She’s there, so I will have some help.”
This was a hopeful lie, but it sounded nice to me.
“Good. You really shouldn’t try to do too much with that cast.” Maggie was all business now. The flirtatious tone in her voice had vanished with the mention of Pia. “One minute it will feel like you can hop around on it no problem, and the next minute it will be throbbing. Just stay off it.”
She spoke like someone who had sustained a lot of injuries, which impressed me. I broke my arm when I fell off a jungle gym in fourth grade, but aside from that, my only injuries had been the long-term stresses of distance running in high school, which lacked the drama of ski collisions.
“I’m just up the way, in the little cape around the bend,” Maggie said. “It’s me and my dog, Badger. He loves a snowstorm.”
She looked wistful about the idea of being snowed in with her dog. I imagined them snuggling in front of a crackling fire, Badger sleeping while she read a fat novel. I wished that I could join them instead of returning to my stinky, worm-infested house with my unpredictable wife.
This was it. The snow was still coming down heavily. Maybe this really was the big snowstorm, and Pia and I would be trapped together for days. Did we have enough food? Probably not. Neither of us had bothered to think that piece through, which meant that we’d be eating canned soup and whatever else we could find. We had enough wine. I knew that Pia would have been diligent about the wine. We were about to be trapped together, arguing about August or avoiding the subject altogether, and fearing what the storm might portend. This drop-off could be my last interaction with the civilized world, I thought to myself. Worse, it could be my last interaction with Maggie.
My foot started to throb and I reached down to itch a portion of my shin that was now encased and unreachable. Damn, it hurt. Suddenly, it was all too much. I felt the hot tears burn in my eyes first. I looked out my window to the right, working hard to quietly halt a wellspring of sadness, but it was too late. I let out a burst of sound—a cry that I tried to mask as a cough, which just made it sound tortured and strange. I could feel Maggie looking at me. There was no going back now. I put my face in my hands and took five seconds to collect myself before wiping my eyes and looking up.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, trying to sound more baffled than apologetic. “It must be these drugs. I feel crazy. I’m just not myself. This is embarrassing.”
I had cried more in those past two weeks than in the previous five years combined.
Maggie was unflappable, “Ash, I get it. This is a lot.”
She pulled gently up to the edge of my impassable driveway and stopped the car. We both sat there for a moment.
I didn’t want to get out of the car, not only because I liked Maggie, but also because the logistical question of how exactly I would get to my house was too humiliating to consider. Would Maggie help drag me past the overturned snowblower, along the plowed path and up the front steps to my wife? The last piece was the scariest because it was becoming more and more difficult to anticipate the mood I might find Pia in.
“It’s just snow,” Maggie said after a silence. “It seems so scary right now—because of the superstorm predictions—but it melts. It’s nature’s most temporary creation. That’s what I tell my kids at school. It’s temporary.”
I appreciated her effort, but I wasn’t afraid of the snow. I was afraid of the aloneness...the aloneness of finding myself mauled by a snowblower with no one to call, and the aloneness of being left unwanted at an empty hospital and the aloneness of being stuck inside my own house with someone I understood less and less each day. But the snow was our captor, so I guess, in a way, I was scared of the snow.
I looked at Maggie and smiled. There was nothing at all left to say. I was married and it was snowing so hard that we couldn’t see the hood of her car. I needed to get out.
“Thank you,” I said. “Please be safe getting home. Maybe I’ll see you after the snow.”
“I hope so,” Maggie said.
As I reached for the handle, the door swung away, revealing Pia standing before me. She was shivering in long johns, oversize boots and a parka. She had a relieved look on her face that seemed only half-genuine.
“Are you okay?” she shrieked and leaned into the car to hug me, noticing the cast.
I was startled and embarrassed.
“Thank you so much for getting him home,” Pia said to Maggie.
She was working to pull my much larger body out to lean on her, which I knew would never work. Everything about the situation felt awkward and needed to end fast. I steadied myself in the snow and smiled again at Maggie. Pia slammed the door without another word and we waited in silence as the car drove away.
“So what the hell happened?” Pia said. She was referring to the accident, but maybe also to the pretty woman who had driven me home.
I started hobbling along the narrow path and ignored her questioning. The snowblower peeked out from under a mound of snow to our left. Despite my throbbing foot, it felt like a very long time ago that I had been run over. Since then, I had dramatically increased the number of people I could count as Isole acquaintances and developed an intense crush on the woman up the road. She lives just over the hill, I thought to myself, so torturously close.
It took nearly five minutes for Pia and me to drag my gimpy body back to our house and, although I was relieved to sit, I found no comfort in my arrival. The wet worm smell was creeping into the kitchen and our breakfast dishes were still stacked in the sink. Pia hadn’t washed a dish in weeks. She hadn’t eaten a proper meal in about that time either, so it was mostly just small plates littered with toast crumbs, coffee mugs and glassware of every size stamped with the dried remains of red wine. I noticed that she was growing thinner, which made her large eyes and full lips bulge disturbingly.
We hadn’t spoken as I stumbled to the house. I didn’t have the energy to limp and argue simultaneously, but her strange greeting suggested that we were already in a fight. Once I was lying horizontal on the couch, with my bad foot elevated and a beer on the floor beside me, I decided to engage again with Pia. I felt the same tingling, alive sensation that had been passing over me more and more recently, and I wanted a release from the tension.
“I’ll tell you ‘what the hell,’ Pia,” I said, looking directly at her across the room. She had one hand on her cocked hip over tight long underwear. “I broke my foot in a million places and you weren’t there for me. Apparently, you weren’t even nervous about where I’d been or why there was an overturned piece of machinery in our driveway. Does that seem like normal marriage behavior to you?” I was just picking up steam, finding an anger that went much deeper than the day’s accident. “A perfect stranger had to drive me home while I made up some bullshit about why my own wife couldn’t do it. I should have told everyone the truth: that you were probably out with the other paranoid doomsdayers, that you are too busy indulging your many neuroses and that you don’t care about anyone other than yourself. That’s what I should have said!”
Pia started pacing in front of me, twisting and tugging her long blond hair with both hands.
“You like me like this!” she shrieked. “You want me to be a little damaged because it keeps me needy and you love needy.”
There may have been a grain of truth to this once, but not now.
She went on, “Don’t blame my compulsive tendencies for your naïveté and your unwillingness to address the threat we’re facing. This is about The Storm. Everything is. You and your orderly little friends can try to control how this goes, but it’s not a controllable situation. When The Storm comes, all we’ll have are our own preparations. We’re all alone when The Storm comes.”
That moment should have been a clarion answer to the question of my aloneness, a therapeutic breakthrough. There it was: Pi
a operated as one. She liked me a lot, but she didn’t need me the way I wanted to be needed; the way I needed her. And I don’t think she had ever intentionally misled me on this point. But I had been working hard not to see it because I wanted to believe in the parity of our neediness. Our physical desire may have been matched, but not our emotional desire. Need it be? Maybe not, I considered. I was devastated, but confused, too.
I sat up and nodded, which she misinterpreted as assent, but I didn’t care. There was no argument left in me. She must have recognized that her point had been adequately made because she didn’t pursue it any further. We were silent. I felt an overwhelming urge to walk to the front door, step out into the cold air and run. I hadn’t been running since we’d moved to Isole, but I imagined striding effortlessly over the snow for miles and miles, along snowy farms and fields, until the choking tightness in my chest was replaced by sweet exhaustion. But my foot was in a cast, and the snow was becoming dangerously deep. I had no choice but to stay there, with her, for as long as nature decided to keep us.
FOURTEEN
AFTER A LONG sleep and another foot of accumulation, the snow stopped and Pia and I were contrite. We were both still mad, but also aware of our own unreasonable behavior. Without ever saying it, we agreed to just move on. I was devastated about August, but working to forgive her. I couldn’t force someone to want a child. A storm was coming—or The Storm—and it didn’t feel right to be at war with each other as a shared enemy approached.
I had spoken to Bev The Social Worker earlier that morning, explaining why we couldn’t take August. She seemed genuinely disappointed but said that she had another family in mind just a few miles away. It was going to take a few more weeks to finalize the paperwork for his move, so we would have some more time together. I was confused about the process but couldn’t form the proper questions while I had Bev on the line.
As I sat across the kitchen table from Pia, watching her spread peach-cardamom jam slowly on toast, I wondered how much of this had been explained to August. I was confident that he didn’t—and wouldn’t ever—know that I had passed on the chance to take him in. The possibility of his knowing this felt like a knife in my chest. But what did he know? I dreaded the idea of helplessly discussing the coming changes with August, trying to be upbeat and optimistic. I didn’t have that in me.
Everything in the immediate future seemed fucking terrible all of a sudden.
“Let’s build a snowman!” Pia exclaimed, drawing my attention back to the present.
I looked up at her and shrugged. “Sure.”
It hurt to walk, but I could hobble in the interest of domestic peace. And why the hell not? I was out of ideas and this was an idea. It was also vintage Pia: a spontaneous break from reality, which I needed desperately. We ate the last of our breakfasts without a word and got up to put on hats, coats and mittens. I wrapped a garbage bag around the medical boot on my left foot and took my morning painkiller. It was dumb, but this snowman could be just what the doctor ordered, we thought to ourselves.
When I limped out the front door, the cold air shot up my nostrils and into my eyes. It was clarifying, medicinal even. I was proud to feel my winter toughness returning after years away from mountain winds.
“Over here,” Pia said, pointing to a flat location for our snowman.
I packed a hard ball between my hands, then added snow around it until it was large enough to roll along the ground in front of me. Pia did the same a few feet away. We were both crouched, pushing our little growing balls along the snow as they gained volume. We weren’t talking, but there was a sweetness in our silence. Each of us wanted to feel the way we used to. We were trying, and I loved her for that.
When finally my ball seemed large and heavy enough to serve as the body, I rolled it back to the spot Pia had picked and went over to help her with her ball. We stopped before it got too large and then hoisted it together atop the first one.
“I’ll work on the head,” I said, “if you find some eyes for this guy.”
Pia looked around thoughtfully, searching for makeshift features. Finally, she walked to the porch and began selecting large rocks from under the stairs. She made a neat pile with them and then ducked inside while I mounted the faceless head.
When the door swung open again, Pia smiled and held up an old scarf and a hat from our basket of mismatched winter gear.
I created a face with the rocks while she wrapped a blue tartan scarf around where his neck should be. Pia had worn that scarf daily for one entire winter back in the city, but I hadn’t seen it since. I wondered if it still smelled like the lavender perfume she was wearing in those days. Next she pulled a French beret from under her arm—a misguided Christmas present from my mother from years before—and placed it at a jaunty angle on his round head.
We stepped back to appreciate our creation. At four feet tall, he was more of a snow boy than a snow man. He had a little of each of us in him but bore no resemblance. The beret made him look particularly cartoonish.
“He’s French?” I asked.
“Quebecois,” Pia corrected.
“Ah, oui.”
I put my arm around Pia’s shoulders and pulled her in. She rested her head on my chest for three seconds, then started back toward the door.
It wasn’t there. We were trying, with our little French snow boy and our forced witty banter, but it wasn’t there. And our cute creation couldn’t fix that. I followed her slowly to the door and we left him outside where he belonged. The snow had started up again.
FIFTEEN
IT SNOWED ON and off for four straight days, accumulating faster than even the fearless snowplowers of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom could keep up with. Commerce from Montreal to Manhattan came to a halt and millions of people had no choice but to stay inside, nervously consuming television news and social media gossip for something concrete about their fates. At first, we just wanted to know if this was the start of The Storm, the big one. That was the real fear. No one felt ready for that; we all needed one more trip to the picked-over grocery store and a few more batteries and another jug of water. There were also all the things we didn’t want to tell each other we were afraid of going without: things like beer and porn and pills. This storm had come too quickly for us to feel ready, which was something we still believed was attainable.
When the last snowflake finally fell, there was almost seven feet of snow lying on the ground. Weather experts told us this wouldn’t be The Storm, but it didn’t matter anymore. That amount of snow inflicted such immediate and costly damage that we couldn’t concern ourselves with what came next. It was like something out of a science fiction movie—an endless, blinding cloud that threatened to suffocate us all. It blocked our front doors and came up over our first-floor windows. The child in me was awed.
At Salty’s recommendation, I hobbled outside with my long-handled snow shovel a couple times a day to clear a small path around our house and help the heavy sheets of snow slide off our slanted roof. It wasn’t an elegant system, but our home was intact in the end, even as many others were not.
Country people fared better in the blizzard: we knew how to stay ahead of the accumulations, improvise tools and anticipate problems. Certainly old barns collapsed, trees fell on cars and a handful of helpless people had to move into shelters after their aging homes became uninhabitable. But most of us in the country were okay. Some of our luck was purely a virtue of space and population density. Weather was granted a wide berth in the Northeast Kingdom. By contrast, in New York and Boston, cars were crushed under falling snow; stubborn fools who refused to begin their afternoon commutes early on the first snowy day found themselves stuck in tunnels and on bridges for hours; and a few people with health problems froze to death waiting to be rescued. Rolling power outages across the Northeast claimed the lives of several dozen elderly and sick people who could
n’t live without heat for long.
Still, the flooding was worse than the snow. “It always is,” Salty had said to me as an undisputable fact the week before. Almost as soon as The Storm stopped, the sun appeared and our brilliant, glistening world dissolved into an unstoppable puddle the size of a state. The puddle seeped into our basements and our cars. It caused electrical problems and toxic mold. There were pictures in the Burlington Free Press—when delivery finally resumed—of multimillion-dollar homes on Lake Champlain that had begun sliding into the water with the runoff. And it was dirty. Manure, pesticides, long-dormant materials in industrial buildings across the region were pouring into our water table. Every region had its own set of problems: oceanside communities had been washed away, urban ghettos went without fresh food or trash pickup for days and the rural poor were forgotten entirely.
In all, seventy-six people died and the US economy lost three hundred billion dollars. But those statistics didn’t mean as much to us as they used to. We weren’t relying on the national news to define our experiences any longer—it had come to our doorsteps. So while it was sad that seventy-six people had died, I could only be upset about the losses before me: August’s bike had been crushed by a falling sheet of ice, and my useless foot that was healing too slow. I no longer cared about our tanking stock market or the GDP. Those once-revered measures of progress seemed utterly irrelevant in the more primal existence we’d been thrust into. A simpler life, just like we wanted, in Vermont!
Throughout the storm and the subsequent melting, Pia and I kept our distance. She buzzed around the house, tending to her preparations, always with a sloshing glass of wine in one hand. I, in turn, became part of the furniture. I could get around okay, but my injury was an excuse for immobility. I was moping. I watched television until the reception was lost, then listened to my imaginary friends at Vermont Public Radio and drank beer after beer. Eventually, I stopped noticing the smell of the worms and the dankness and the film of dirt that had begun accumulating on our floors. It was disgusting, but I didn’t care enough to change it.
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