Finally, I drew close enough to the light on Peg’s porch to see her shadowy form moving around inside the cottage. There was no chance of her being anywhere else on that night, but I was still overcome with relief to know she was there.
“Ash, my goodness! What on earth are you doing?” Peg said as she opened the door and hustled me inside.
I began peeling off layers, starting with the top of my body and moving down.
“I just had to get out,” I panted. It was alarming to hear my own frightened voice aloud. “I hope it’s okay that I came. I just had to get out.”
“Of course, of course,” she said, running my wet gloves and hat to the woodstove in the living room, where they could bake on top.
Modesty seemed a luxury by then, so I opted to take off my jeans, leaving only a pair of wet navy long johns between my bare bottom half and Peg’s kitchen. I was as close to comfort as I could reasonably get.
“Sorry.” I shrugged with a smile.
Peg laughed a big wonderful laugh and waved her hand as though she hadn’t noticed that I was in my underwear. She was wearing what appeared to be an old pair of men’s sweatpants with the fading crest of a school on the lower left leg and a red flannel shirt that thinned at the elbows. She looked older and softer than I’d ever seen her.
“Something hot?” she asked.
“Sure. Um, coffee, I guess. I’m not going to sleep tonight anyhow.”
I noticed that Peg’s house looked spotless. The kitchen countertops were gleaming and the area rug in the living room showed the undisturbed tracks of a vacuum cleaner. It seemed an odd time to be tidy. The only item out of place was a large basket filled with dirty root vegetables sitting right in the middle of the kitchen, where we now stood. It was an impressive cornucopia of oranges, reds, browns and beiges, still wearing the drying earth from the ground from which they were pulled. Peg saw me looking.
“The remains of my autumn harvest,” she said. “I thought I’d cut them all up and roast them today before the power goes out.”
“You could feed a dozen people with that!”
“Well, there’s just me—and now, you. They won’t do any good rotting in the basement. C’mon, let’s get started.”
Peg filled the kitchen sink with warm water and we stood side by side, gently rubbing tubers clean and piling them in the dish rack, one after another. It felt good to have something specific to do with my hands. We didn’t say much, which was just fine. In the background, I heard the low voices of an AM radio station providing an endless stream of detailed weather information. It was one long, breathless report in an unfeeling male voice: “...wintry mix...accumulations are expected to exceed several feet in just the next twenty-four hours...unprecedented wind speeds wreaking havoc on property and roads...watch for falling trees and large branches across the state if you must travel outside...the National Weather Service in Vermont has issued flood warnings for every county...the National Weather Service has issued additional winter storm warnings in every county...evacuations are beginning in Windham County, Bennington County, Rutland County and Windsor County...several weather-related deaths in the southern part of the state already reported...unprecedented...historic levels...”
I watched the sleet come down in front of us and realized that Peg hadn’t boarded up her windows, but there was nothing to be done about it now. I could tell the speed at which The Storm was coming and wondered how long I would be away from my home. There was no plan or purpose for my visit, but I couldn’t fathom going back to Pia just yet, even as the space between our two houses seemed to disappear into a blur of raging sleet.
Peg patted the final sweet potato clean and announced that we would be moving to the kitchen table for the chopping portion of our project. She gave me a cutting board and a sharp knife and showed me the size that she preferred for each variety. As I settled into my new assignment, she put a mug of steaming coffee beside me and gave my shoulder a light squeeze. We were both just pushing through the motions of normal, busy behavior, pretending to feel okay as the world closed in on us. I knew that Pia would come up in conversation only if I brought her up, which I almost never did around Peg.
“I can’t stop thinking about August,” I said.
“I know,” Peg replied, unable to offer promises of his safety. “Keep a close watch on that boy, Ash.”
I sliced a purple carrot slowly and pushed the disks aside with my knife.
“Also, Crow,” I added. “I can’t get him out of my mind.”
Peg sat up in her chair: “I went to see him,” she said as if it had been on the tip of her tongue all along. “I was thinking about him, too. I just thought I should see him one more time before The Storm.”
“Really? When did you see him? Did you talk about the runoff plan?”
“No, I didn’t bring it up.” Peg took a dainty sip of coffee. “I still hate him for it, but it’s too late now. I went to see him last night because I had to know if he was right about all this...all his preparations. His approach has seemed so wrong to me for so long, but as The Storm got closer...I just had to know if he was right and we were wrong.”
“And?”
Peg shook her head and frowned. “I don’t know,” she said. “He told me that his ex-wife and their daughter needed a safe place to stay and she asked if they could stay with him. They live down in Putney. He was obviously conflicted about it when we talked—going on about how there aren’t enough provisions in that hideaway of his for three people and it wasn’t part of his plan. He never intended on sharing it, but he seems still to care for them. He was undecided when I left... I don’t know what he ended up doing.”
“That bunker was definitely only made for one man’s survival.”
“Yes, well, I guess he has to decide if his survival alone is enough.”
I took a long sip of coffee.
“I didn’t know he had an ex-wife or a daughter,” I said.
“It’s not his biological daughter,” Peg explained, “but he raised her from a little girl and he makes no distinction. He’s been good to her, I think. They divorced about seven years ago.”
It was hard to imagine this family-man version of Crow, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. All of us had taken long, winding roads to get to where The Storm found us. Certainly none of us wanted to be defined by our response to that moment. I thought about Pia back home, no doubt bustling around the house with her own preoccupations of survival. It wasn’t right that I had gone, or that she had let me go so easily. We were really just cohabitants living parallel lives in the same space by then.
“I don’t want to go back home,” I confessed to Peg. “Back to Pia.”
“I know,” she said softly. “But where would you rather be?”
My answer came quickly, though I had never voiced it before. “With Maggie Chase. I don’t have any idea whether she thinks the same about me, but I can’t stop thinking about her... That’s so bad.”
I had forgotten about the potato in front of me and the knife in my hand. Peg didn’t have any response just yet, so I went on.
“Maybe this is all The Storm. Pia’s anxious and I’m feeling alone. I know I still love her. When this is all over and everyone is themselves again, maybe we can start to repair things. I don’t trust that I know what I want right now. You should probably forget that I said that thing about Maggie. It’s not real.”
The wind howled outside and I was reminded that, with every additional minute I sat at Peg’s table, my walk back home got more treacherous.
“Be careful about blaming everything on The Storm, Ash,” she said. “It’s the catalyst for a lot of this malcontent, but it’s not the cause. If there’s something rotten in your marriage, it won’t leave with The Storm. Fix things between you and Pia, or don’t, but don’t explain your problems away with The Storm. You’
re not that cowardly.”
It was alarming to hear the state of my relationship summarized so coldly, and embarrassing to be so transparent. I knew that everything she said was true, but I didn’t have the energy for self-examination. The world was closing in on us and it wasn’t clear that we would live through The Storm, let alone thrive on the other side. I didn’t want to hear what Peg was saying, not then.
“I think all I have is survival right now,” I said with a tinge of anger in my voice. Peg should have known this. “I’ll have to worry about becoming a courageous person later, if there is a later.”
“Yes, of course,” she said quickly, recognizing my hurt feelings.
The conversation was over, and I felt stupid for sitting there in front of Peg’s vegetables in my long underwear all of a sudden, so I started to get up. As I did, she let out a sigh and I remembered the purpose for my visit.
I sat back down and looked across the table. “Peg, why were you outside earlier?”
“No reason, exactly. Taking it all in. Saying goodbye.”
“Goodbye to what?”
“To these woods,” she said. “There’s a lot of loss ahead, Ash. Nothing is going to be like it was before. Your generation will experience the brunt of these changes. You’ll see.”
It wasn’t the answer I wanted. The sadness that I’d seen flashing behind Peg’s eyes in recent weeks now seemed to weigh down her whole body.
“Peg, are you going to be okay here?”
She smiled slightly. “You mean, will I be okay all alone? Yes, I’ll be okay. And thank you. This isn’t the way I envisioned things unfolding, but I’ll be okay.”
“Why are you alone?” I asked gently.
She took a deep breath and paused for a moment. “This may sound strange, but I’ve never felt alone in my life, not even recently. I’ve been in love twice, with wonderful men who made me very happy. Ultimately, they wanted things that I didn’t need—marriage and children, primarily—and we parted both times, but I have only great memories of those relationships. I’ve had a very full life thanks to my travels and my studies and all the friends I’ve made along the way. Most of all, wherever I was, I felt loved and protected by the natural world. I know it sounds strange and maybe even antisocial, but that’s the truth. The woods have been my greatest love.”
It was the kind of sentiment one might read in a book and laugh at it for its poetic naïveté, but Peg said it with such conviction that I didn’t question her. She got something from nature that most of us could not, or would not, be open to receiving. It would have been fairer for her to have been born an animal, to live outside, without boundaries. She was wiser than most of us, but still not quite fit for this confined human life. Maybe, I considered for a fleeting moment, she had been one of those animals before, or would be in another life. All of a sudden, Peg’s aloneness seemed bigger than my own.
“But these woods are changing.” I nodded quietly. I understood what she was telling me: the most consistent thread of her life was vanishing.
“Yes,” she said into the table. “Irreparably and permanently.”
I wanted to hug her and tell her that this was just one storm, that it would end, but I knew that wasn’t true. This storm would change our world forever and, more important, so would every weather event—dramatic and subtle—that came after it. A transformation had been set into motion years before that was bigger than my optimism or Peg’s love. There was nothing to say.
In the silence we listened to the dim crank-radio voice coming from the other room: “Most of the state of Vermont has lost electrical power at this time, with the remaining northern parts expected to go dark in the next few hours. Emergency management is warning everyone to shelter in place for now and avoid travel of any kind. If you are in immediate danger, 911 operators are working around the clock, but response vehicles are in high demand and emergency shelters are filling up quickly. A priority is being placed on people in buildings that have collapsed under fallen trees, anyone near exposed electrical wires and areas at a high risk for both flooding and hypothermia cases. I repeat—all others are encouraged to stay where they are and conserve heat. This is just the start of what is expected to be a very long and destructive weather event...”
“You should go,” Peg said.
I nodded and walked to the entryway to begin pulling on layers. Peg brought my wet gloves, hat, scarf and pants from the woodstove, which were hot, but still soggy. I dreaded going back outside, fighting through the sleet and then hunkering down with Pia and the worms. I wanted to stay there with Peg and eat roasted root vegetables for days.
Her phone rang while I was pulling on my mittens and Peg excused herself to answer it.
“Jesus!” I heard her say to the person on the line, but it sounded like “jay-sus” in her accent. She said it again and then something I couldn’t hear and then hung up.
“August is missing,” Peg said from the doorway. “He sneaked out of his foster home and they can’t find him. There’s a search team out now. That was a social worker. She apparently tried you at home.”
“Oh my God, I gotta go,” I said.
Peg nodded. “Get home first. Don’t do anything crazy.”
I yanked the door open to break through a layer of ice that had been forming around its perimeter, allowing a blast of wet air to spray inside. For a moment, I couldn’t remember where I was supposed to be going or why I was standing there. Peg handed me my hat. Get home, find August. Or do I go out looking for August now? I had no idea where to start.
“Thank you, Peg. Good luck,” I said.
“You, too, Ash.” She gave my arm a little squeeze and then sealed the door behind me.
Visibility had somehow worsened and the ice balls falling from the sky were noticeably larger. They came down as if pitched by a furious god, aiming directly at the exposed patches of my face.
I stepped from Peg’s porch into a foot of slush that was just the right mix of rain and ice to be more uncomfortable than either on their own. I couldn’t think about the wet, numbing sensation that crept around my ankles and up my shins or the pain of my still-healing foot as I forced it to work. To consider any of the frightening variables around me would have made that short trip impossible. So I heaved one leg after the other, swinging my arms for momentum and pushing forward. Every few steps, I closed my eyes against the stinging ice-rain, which made it difficult to see even when they were open. “Don’t stop, don’t stop, keep walking,” I chanted. My thighs were burning from the sheer athleticism each step required and my heavy breaths were almost audible amid the howling wind.
How long could August survive in this, I wondered. Not long. Even in the screaming weather chaos around me, I had to fight to keep the frightening images of August alone in those woods out of my brain. Just get home and call the police to find out what’s going on.
I had nothing to guide my steps but the faintest porch light coming from our house, which blurred into spots and danced away from me as my eyes—or my mind—lost focus. I knew I was roughly halfway there when my groin smashed into the fallen tree trunk I had climbed over earlier that night that crossed the path. It had a slick casing of ice around it by then and I realized our whole world was being enveloped in the same deadly cast.
I hoisted my weaker leg up and over the trunk, straddling it momentarily before putting all my weight down on the other side as I attempted to dismount. At that moment, my throbbing foot slipped on something beneath the slush, causing my knee to crumple and my entire body to fall on top of the useless limb. I put my arms out to prevent myself from submerging into the water entirely, which left my face exposed to a sharp branch that stabbed directly into my right cheek, just below the eye. The pain was acute, but the panic that burst from my heart and raced through my veins was worse. At first, I thought I had been blinded. I squeezed my eyes tight and
imagined having to crawl the rest of the way, my face in the icy stew below. When I finally attempted to open each eye, blindness was ruled out, but my face was too numb to gauge what exactly had happened and how fast I might be losing blood.
I pulled myself up and forged on, each step more frantic and inefficient than the previous one. I had to get home before I died of hypothermia or blood loss or cardiac arrest—any of which seemed possible to my panicked mind. All of a sudden, I became aware of the countless branches and rocks that threatened to take me down, swarming forest tentacles, eager to pull me apart as punishment for doubting nature’s absolute power.
My hat had come loose and was wet; cold wind screamed into one ear, which I didn’t attempt to correct because I was afraid to use my hands for anything other than steadying myself and clearing a safe path. Pull up, step long, push down. I talked myself through each labored step in the slush, working to ignore the fatigue, the cold and the terrifying numbness that had now reached my upper thighs. It seemed impossible that everything hadn’t frozen entirely, given the low temperatures, but the speed at which it all moved—in no discernible direction—must have allowed it to persist as a liquid.
Finally, my left boot hit something hard and, as I considered freaking the fuck out again, I realized it was the first step of our front porch. The light glowed in front of me and I could make out the handle of our front door. I crawled up the stairs on hands and knees, relieved to surrender to the pain, and banged on the door three times until it cracked just enough for Pia to peek through.
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