“Oh my God!”
She dragged my dripping body inside and began tugging off layers as my limbs went from numb to freezing, and then back to a burning numbness that felt permanent and frightening. Eventually, I was naked, drying on the floor in the entryway. Pia threw a blanket around me and we both massaged my moist, pink body to restore circulation. When I began to feel like a living human again, Pia ran to get her first-aid supplies to patch the shallow puncture wound and salve the aching bruises on my face.
“Have they found August?” I asked.
Pia nodded. “His parents have him. The cops just called. He walked all three miles back here a few hours ago—before it got really bad outside—so I guess they’re going to just let him stay. They don’t really have a choice at this point. Crazy.”
“Jesus.” I shook my head, intensely relieved to know that August was alive. It wasn’t good that he would be trapped inside with his awful parents for the storm. But he was found, and that was good.
Pia didn’t ask right away about how Peg was or what I’d done at her house or why I’d felt so strongly about going. As the primary initiator of erratic behavior in our family, those weren’t questions that would have occurred to her. My guess was she didn’t really care by then either. And I was back now, so she could play the role of doting nurse until her own obsessions forced their way between us again.
When finally I was clothed and wrapped in blankets, Pia and I sat together at two ends of the couch sipping tea again quietly. I appreciated her attentiveness at that moment. I didn’t have to convince her of how terrified I’d been; it was all over my battered face. And it thrilled her more than a little.
I took a deep breath in and exhaled loudly, letting my head fall back onto a pillow.
“So,” she said, eyes wide. “Tell me everything.”
TWENTY-TWO
WE WOKE UP the next morning to what sounded like an explosion in the guest room. I jumped out of bed and felt my numb toes hit our icy floors. The power had gone out hours before and, even with four blankets and a winter hat, we had been shivering for a long time. I ran to the next room and found that a fat branch of a large tree had gone straight through the boarded-up window, sending wet, shattered glass in every direction. Sleet was coming in at an alarming rate and the temperature in the room was just high enough to melt it into massive puddles on the hardwood floor.
“It’s bad! Put some shoes on—we need to fix this now!” I yelled to the bedroom, but Pia was already behind me.
“I’ll go get a tarp,” she said. “Let’s just get the window covered.”
For someone who had had as many tumblers of cabernet as she had the night before, she was impressively alert. But of course, these were her moments to shine.
I pulled rain boots on over my woolly socks and ran downstairs to search for duct tape. There were several rolls of varying widths for me to choose from, duct tape being one of the more obvious items in the prepper’s tool kit. We met back upstairs at the broken window; with the hard, stinging sleet blowing in our faces, we coordinated our actions to hold the tarp in place over the opening and tape it to the wall. We went around and around the perimeter of the tarp and then just stretched the tape vertically and horizontally across the window. I slid an empty dresser across the room to stand in front of the flimsy setup. The dresser only covered the bottom half, but it kept the tarp from billowing too violently.
“Should we try to clean up? Mop or sweep or something?” I asked, looking down at the glass shards submerged in water around our feet and splayed across the bed that no one ever used.
“What good would that do?” Pia spat, ending our collaborative moment.
We shut the door to the guest room and jammed towels in the crack between the floor and the door in an effort to contain the cold air that was pouring into the rest of the house. The entire episode had lasted only about five minutes, but we were both heaving with exhaustion. As we walked away from the door, we realized that there were still hours and hours of frigid, powerless daylight ahead together.
“Let’s just make coffee,” I said, walking down the stairs.
The woodstove was cold to the touch as I threw split logs into its belly and fired it up. Thank God for this stove, I thought. There was nothing else to huddle around and nowhere to be comfortable in our house. On those cold mornings, the only difference between the indoors and the outside world was the absence of accumulation in our living room. The winter air was everywhere and we moved like ghosts enveloped in a cloud of our own condensing breath. When finally heat was detectable, we pushed our bodies as close to the stove as possible without catching on fire. Pia poured water into an old iron kettle that sat right on top of the stove and worked as efficiently as any modern appliance we owned. (Later, after The Storm had completed its punishment, that indestructible kettle would be one of the few items from our former life that remained intact.)
When she was warm enough, Pia went back to the kitchen and began pulling items from our cabinets, which overflowed with nonperishable goods. Canned beans and vegetables, pasta, rice, quinoa, wheat berry, peanut butter, almond butter, cashew butter, whole wheat flour, chickpea flour, rice flour, tamari sauce, olive oil, truffle oil... She was rearranging, creating a new system and order for the rationing of our sustenance. I didn’t recognize it at that moment, but this would be her primary obsession for our remaining days in that cold, dark house. With no end to The Storm in sight and a finite amount of food in the house, Pia was devising a system for meals that would utilize the most immediately perishable of the nonperishable items while factoring questions of nutritional balance, digestion and—I hoped—taste.
“Can you leave the peanut butter out?” I yelled.
“No peanut butter yet,” Pia said without looking up. “That’s for later. You can use the cream cheese in the fridge. That will be bad by tomorrow.”
I didn’t want to argue, so I walked past her to pull a sweating tub of cream cheese from our powerless refrigerator and got to work on my disappointing breakfast. I watched two pieces of bread warm on the top of the woodstove, where my wet gloves normally rested, and tried to imagine other culinary possibilities for the days ahead. I wasn’t particularly hungry, but this seemed a comfortingly simple project to focus on.
I returned to my post under the visible strip of window to observe the day’s weather while I ate my toast. The wind was as strong as the day before, but the precipitation alternated between sleet and heavy, wet snow. It was trying to accumulate on the ground, but there was so much rushing water on the oversaturated earth that it sloshed around when it landed before melting into the mess. This was a troubling development. If the water levels continued to rise at that pace, I knew it wouldn’t be long before it reached our doorsill and eventually even our windows.
I stood up and turned the radio on, hoping for cooler heads to inform me that my fears were unwarranted.
“What we know right now,” started the familiar male voice of an NPR host, “is that all five boroughs in New York City are underwater. That includes Manhattan, which was evacuated two days ago. Unfortunately, not everyone is heeding these evacuation orders and there are a dozen confirmed dead as of this morning. That number will likely rise as temperatures continue to drop and rescue opportunities diminish. The next phase of this storm is snow, so things are about to get significantly more difficult.”
The voice was hoarse and rushed. I could hear the sound of papers being shuffled and murmuring voices in the studio.
“We’re getting new information now from Boston, as well,” he went on. “I’m...I’m just going to provide the confirmed reports as we receive them, so please bear with us as we skip around a bit this morning. We’re working hard to report on everything as it comes in. For now, we’ll turn to our colleagues in Cape Cod, who are operating at low power thanks to a satellite feed from WGBH in Bost
on. They have a correspondent on the ground with the latest from The Storm. Let’s go now to Roger Stearns in Barnstable. Roger, are you there?”
The sound went dead for a moment, clicked twice, then connected with a distant voice in the rain. “Yes, this is Roger. I’m standing about three hundred feet from the shore, which is as close as I can get to the water without being knocked off my feet by the wind.”
Roger on the cape in Barnstable was barely audible above the roaring ambient noise, but his terror was apparent.
“Roger, what can you see?”
“What I’m looking at now... I’ve never seen anything like this... What I’m looking at is a dark, almost black sky—at ten o’clock in the morning. There are low clouds moving quickly and the rain seems to be turning to snow. There isn’t another soul on the beach and we can’t stay much longer. It appears that most people have followed the governor’s evacuation order. Yesterday, you could actually see the hurricane moving toward us from the southwest, and today the dark clouds are approaching from the north. When those two fronts meet—which could be very soon—the beach will be a deadly place. Already, you can see small boats that have gotten loose from the harbor and are being tossed around like toys in a bathtub. The vacation homes behind me all have broken windows and collapsed decks. And earlier I saw two cars floating down a flooded side road about a half mile away. This is no place for humans. And something seems to be...”
There was a pause and then a thunderous crash.
“Roger, what’s going on now?”
“I can’t hear anything... I’m going to have to sign off now!” Roger yelled. “The rain has turned to hail! As big as baseballs! I have to get back to the van...”
There was a loud commotion as a microphone smashed against something and the NPR switchboard turned back to the serene sounds of a dry man in a sound booth.
“Thank you, Roger, and stay safe,” the voice said.
I looked back to find Pia standing only a few feet from me, listening to the radio with wide eyes.
“Whoa,” I said.
Pia shook her head back and forth. “No, no, no, no, no. This just can’t be happening,” she said. “I need more time to start filtering the water. If the worst of it is already in Boston, it will be here by the end of the day! We aren’t ready for this yet.”
She went to the kitchen, but instead of beginning work on whatever water filtration project she had lined up, she poured chardonnay into a beige mug from her ten-year high school reunion and took a long gulp. Reunion Regatta & Clambake was written in delicate cursive on the side of the mug.
“We need to make good use of the daylight,” she said, like some sort of pioneer wife.
“Fine, so what do you want me to do?” I asked. I was almost relieved to be put to work.
“We need more wood, Ash! You know that we need more wood and you’re just stalling because it’s a shitty job. Do it now, before the path to the shed is completely underwater.”
I couldn’t argue with any of those points, so I stormed to the front door and pulled on as much winter clothing as I could before going out to demonstrate that I wasn’t afraid of a little weather.
Once outside, the sleet found its way under my thick collar, into my boots, through my gloves and around the edges of my hat so quickly that I may as well have walked out naked. It had been nearly twelve hours since my injurious trip to Peg’s house, but the frigid wetness felt too familiar. I carried one armload after another into the house, each heavier and more waterlogged with each trip. I stacked them neatly against the wall for a while and then began dropping the piles in heaps around the living room. It was enough wood to keep us dry for a week, which I hoped would drive the point home to Pia that I was as committed to this survival shit as anyone.
After hauling the wood, I wanted nothing more than a hot shower, but when Pia reminded me that we needed to conserve the last of the hot water, I was forced to simply peel layer after wet layer off and jump quickly into a new set of warm, dry clothes. It was fine, for now, but what would happen when we ran out of dry clothes? How would anything dry now in the cold air? I decided to ration my clothes for the time being, doubling days on underwear and T-shirts. That reminded me that there were bigger indignities ahead as I had been avoiding a pending bowel movement for nearly two hours. (The water pressure would be enough to keep the toilet working for a while, but eventually the water tank, which was attached to our private well, would get too low.)
“Where do you think everyone went?” I asked Pia as I returned to the living room in dry clothes.
“What do you mean?” She didn’t want to talk to me. She was busy.
But I had too many questions to stay quiet, so I went on. “They’re evacuating entire cities—New York, Boston, everywhere—but where are they all going to go? The Storm’s path covers the entire eastern seaboard. It’s not like they can send them all to Ohio today.”
Pia stopped moving for a moment and considered the question.
Before we’d arrived at an answer, the sound of another loud, sharp crackle sent us running to the kitchen. Everything looked the same.
“Over here!” Pia yelled, pointing to a window above the sink.
The enormous maple that stood only a few feet from our house—the one that we could touch and smell as we washed dishes in the summer—had split about six feet up from its ancient trunk and fallen to a ninety-degree angle beside the house. We could see little else around its wreckage of broken branches. The center of the trunk was hollow in places, apparently dead for a long time. This was the sort of thing I should have anticipated as a homeowner, but I was still learning such skills. The Storm hadn’t given me time to get smart about country living. Large branches of the fallen tree were sinking into the accumulating puddles, joining sloughed-off bark and decomposing leaves. The north side of our house would look different without this great shade, I lamented. But of course, everything was going to look different.
“I don’t think anyone takes them anywhere,” Pia said as she returned to her food-labeling project at the table.
“What?”
“All those people who’ve been evacuated from the cities,” she said. “I think the government just tells them that they have to leave, and then they’re on their own. You just get in your car and drive for as far as you can until The Storm catches you... If you have a car.”
This seemed too grim a possibility to consider at the moment, but Pia’s theory would prove largely right. People of means and foresight left the cities early on their own—before the ice and snow made roads impassable. They fled to second homes, family members’ houses and the couches of distant friends and relatives. But the majority of urban dwellers sat for hours in bottlenecks of traffic, finally driving as far west as they could get before fatigue overtook them. There were stories of entire highways filling with water or snow as drivers sat immobilized for hours, praying for the precipitation to end. On Route 76 in Pennsylvania, an old couple was found dead in their car near Harrisburg after the heat stopped and the temperature dropped. And two college students who had abandoned their truck on Interstate 80 and attempted to walk the rest of the way to Cleveland were crushed when a flooded bus tipped over onto them. We knew none of this then, as we bickered in our cold house.
“They probably have some system for getting people out,” I said weakly.
We spent the rest of that wet day alternately drinking coffee and wine. (Alcohol was apparently the exception to Pia’s inflexible food rationing system.) I fed the fire regularly and we dragged the kitchen table into the living room, which had become the only habitable part of the house. Pia talked nervously to herself a lot. She talked aloud through her meal plans, methods for staying warm through the night and an emergency bathroom strategy that involved a hole in the back deck and suspended tarp above. I spoke only when one of her ideas warranted discussion.
“We’ll need to seal off the upstairs to retain the heat,” Pia said knowingly.
“But the downstairs is going to flood eventually,” I interjected. “Shouldn’t we be moving this operation upstairs instead?”
“Sure,” she said sarcastically. “That would actually save us a lot of hassle because we’ll die of hypothermia before things really get bad.”
We hated everything: the relentless cold, the smell of our ripening bodies beneath layers of dirty clothes, the knowledge that it was every household for itself at that point. Most of all, we hated the boredom. Hour after long hour went by with little to do but argue and stare out the window. We drank to stay warm and pass the time, but it only made us more morose.
The hailstorm that we’d heard reported from Cape Cod reached us that evening, rapping on the house like an angry lunatic demanding to be let in. By then, in my drunken haze, I could drift fuzzily into a childlike trance and watch the enormous ice balls outside with wonder. I didn’t know nature was capable of creating such a weapon. I wanted to hold one in my hand, maybe keep it in our freezer for a while and take it out in the summer to impress August. I sat at the window, thinking these hazy thoughts and intermittently snapping back to reality, suddenly aware of the immeasurable damage the ice balls were invariably imposing on homes, businesses, cars, livestock, infrastructure...people. What was the world going to look like when we all got out of this, I wondered. Would we get out of this?
We fell into bed around eight, simultaneously disliking one another and grateful for the body warmth that each provided. With a winter hat, woolly socks and a heap of blankets, sleep was more comfortable than the alternative.
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