The Coming Storm

by Paul Russell

  Surely it was only the storm—a limb down across the lines, a power outage somewhere that mattered. Dialing the Fallones’ number, she realized she was trembling. Please don’t let this happen, she thought. As a girl she had once watched, with wonder and anxiety, acrobats from a traveling circus entertain the crowd from on high. Take your eyes off them for an instant, she had warned herself, and they will plummet to the ground. But she had not looked away. She had kept them aloft—and Libby as well. For all these years, her watchfulness had looked very much like love.

  A recorded voice informed her, politely, that all circuits were busy, and that she should please try her call again later. That meant the storm was indeed to blame, didn’t it? And yet she was not reassured. All evening she had felt unsettled, the result, she’d told herself, of her conversation with Tracy Parker. But she had known, deep down, that those revelations alone could not account for the pervasive unease she’d felt, really, ever since Lux’s death. She hardly believed in omens; still, it disturbed her how Lux had slipped away in the middle of the night when no one was watching.

  She dialed Libby’s number again, and once more the pleasant recorded voice asked her to try later. Later, she wanted to explain in frustration, might well mean too late. But of course one did not explain life and death to a machine. Resolute in what she must do, she pulled on winter boots, an overcoat, her gloves, the woollen hat she’d knitted years and years ago, back when she still tried to fill her life with the more obvious tasks.

  The automatic garage door rose to reveal Louis and his snow shovel at the bottom of the driveway; already a half inch of snow had retaken the asphalt nearest the garage. In the rearview mirror she saw him look up in surprise as the Audi backed toward him. “Claire,” he said as she came to a stop beside him. He’d stepped off onto the ridge of shoveled snow that lined the asphalt. “What on earth are you doing?”

  “I think Libby’s in trouble,” she told him. “I have to go out there. I’ll explain later.”

  He leaned in close, grimacing. He’d never liked Libby. Some wounds, Claire supposed, simply never healed. She spoke as authoritatively as possible, the way she might announce a lecture at which attendance was mandatory. “You know how she gets sometimes. Her power’s out, and that’s spooked her.”

  “The roads will be quite impassable,” he said. “And where’s Reid? Isn’t he out there with her?”

  “Reid,” she improvised, though she had not the slightest idea where he might be, “is stuck in New York. With this weather, he called to say he’d decided to spend the night.”

  “At least someone’s got some sense. Now Libby will be all right, I’m sure. It’s madness to try to drive in this.”

  “Louis,” she said impatiently, “the Audi’s fine in the snow. I’ll drive carefully. I’m sure the main roads aren’t even that bad yet. I’ll call when I get there.”

  “I don’t like this,” he told her. “I’m coming with you.”

  “No,” she said, releasing the brakes and easing the car into the street. “Just keep the driveway clear for me,” she called out the open window before raising it with the touch of a button. Shovel in hand, he followed her several steps down the driveway but saw it was no use. His foolish, impetuous wife. He stood watching her, this sad anxious man she loved. Cautiously she depressed the accelerator; the wheels balked for an instant, then seized the road, and in absurd slow motion she began her journey down the snowpadded street.

  You never had demons, Libby had said. The only person I know who never had demons. Was it possible she might have meant the observation to sting exactly as much as it had? You were once my demon, Claire told her absent friend, but the confession fell surprisingly flat. Once, perhaps, that had been true—but no longer. Not, in fact, for a very long time. With a shock Claire saw how the exquisite flame had flickered and gone out. How she had allowed it to go out.

  For years she had refused to let herself feel a thing.

  But surely that wasn’t true? she thought fiercely. The possibility ate at her as she steered the car onto Academy Avenue. Beneath her mildness, her civility, was it possible there was simply nothing? For years she had told herself she kept them all afloat: husband, friends, even her students. Had she neglected, in the process, something vital to her own soul? Had she allowed the flame to burn so low it was now in danger of complete extinction?

  Louis had been right about the main roads. No plows had been through, and in the intersections the stoplights flashed red. Power was out all over—only their block, for some reason, had been spared. Still, she would not turn back. You have me always, she had told her friend, and she meant, now more than ever, to keep her word. Razor blade, rope, Reid’s pistol, beautiful blue pills. There were so many lethal possibilities. Libby could be deep into the woods by now. Coatless, in only her bath slippers and thin robe, she could be settling, at this very moment, into a patch of scrub, behind the camouflage of a fallen log, seeking and finding the warm, inviting, gently numbing bed of snow.

  She had let her guard down; she had not been alert to the creeping darkness.

  “Tell me love matters,” Tracy Parker had urged her forlornly, and from her vantage point on the sidelines she had willingly obliged him. But what did she know of all that tumult? Life, happening all around her, had in the end left her oddly untouched. But how had that happened? All at once, the ordinary years of her life, on whose quiet steadiness she had secretly congratulated herself, looked like nothing so much as a series of small surrenders, each so negligible as to have counted for nothing at the time, but all leading here, to this rather unnerving absence of demons.

  The storm demanded the utmost from car and driver alike, but the Audi drove like a dream. Fierce winds buffeted the car, gusts of snow spilled across the road, but nothing could touch her. She had left the edges of Middle Forge’s lamentable sprawl, and was heading into the bleak countryside. For company, she switched on the radio. It took her only a moment to realize that the desolate melody was Schubert. Some wag at the classical radio station had seen fit to reinforce the blizzard with Die Winterreise or at least its opening song. How her husband loved this music, Claire told herself wistfully; though it was a young man’s music in so many ways, it spoke to him still.

  She, on the other hand, had never exactly tramped through the snow for anyone. The duties of friendship hardly approached a young man’s passionate love-grief, and she felt a shameful pang of resentment that she had been called out into a night like this when everyone else, supplies prudently laid in, remained snugly at home.

  Like a weathervane, the mood of the music shifted. The piano asserted itself in fitful strokes. And suddenly, without warning, in the road ahead, a great white presence loomed. Had wind and snow intensified into something palpable, a great leaping beast? Before she could even think, it flared and was upon her. She drove her foot hard into the brake pedal. The tires locked, the car continued straight ahead just as the road curved inopportunely to the left. She looked past her headlights for the stationary tree rushing out of the darkness to meet her but found only a sudden dip, a jolting bank of snow, the shallow resting place of the ditch that ran alongside the road. Then everything was completely still. It took her an instant to realize that the radio was still playing Schubert, the motor still humming, the car and herself superbly intact. Of the apparition in the darkness that had so startled her there was not a trace. Or had it been nothing more before her than a fierce squall of snow punching across the road?

  She flicked off the radio; the piano’s clatter, that lovelorn voice, only made her bad nerves worse. Putting the car in reverse, she tried to urge it back up the gentle slope, but the tires only spun. She turned on the hazard lights and climbed out of the car to survey her predicament. Auto Maintenance for Women hadn’t quite prepared her for this. Off in the distance she saw what might be the lights of a house. She figured she was about midway between home and Libby’s: six of one, half a dozen of the other, as her mother used to say. She co
nsidered heading out toward the light flickering in the distance but could hear Louis saying, “Don’t be ridiculous.” It was best, she imagined, to stay with the car, keep the heater running, and wait for help.

  Well, Libby, she told her friend as she eased herself back into the Audi’s snug compartment, looks like you’re on your own tonight. For once, it seemed, everybody would be on their own. She was surprised to find how easy it was to relinquish them all. Let Libby go, wherever her doom called her, let Louis go (and yet she worried about him out there shoveling; she worried about his heart, that magnificent muscle that one day must stop in its tracks). Reid Fallone and Tracy Parker and Arthur Branson. Let them all go. She turned the radio back on; the lullaby of “Der Lindenbaum” had commenced. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, as her yoga class had taught her. My body is a temple, she told herself. My body is the dwelling place of God. She continued to breathe deeply, slowly, evenly. It could be hours before help arrived. Why hadn’t she ever gotten around to buying a car phone, as she’d long intended? But then there was so much she’d never gotten around to doing (she had earned a Ph.D., she reminded herself; a prestigious journal had published “Pocahontas at the Masque”). Still, for all that, her life had lacked passion. The demons had never come for her, and she had mistakenly been glad of that. That was what, in the end, she would stand accused of.

  “Der Lindenbaum’s” sweet suggestive song faded in and out of her consciousness. She felt, suddenly, quite exhausted, and, leaning her head against the headrest, she closed her eyes. All day Tracy Parker’s tale of events long past had haunted her. How much of what he had told her was true? The thought of Louis keeping from everyone, for all those years, Jack Emmerich’s secret shame both stirred and depressed her. Oh Louis, she thought. And poor Arthur Branson, too, whose whole subsequent life, she could not help but think, had been set in motion by that sad episode. What might have happened had Louis not then turned his back—in shame or repugnance or regret—on the boy he had rescued? She tried to comprehend her husband’s long-ago actions, no doubt undertaken with the best of motives, and yet what unforeseen consequences might they not have had? The damage love does when love goes astray. And did it ever, given half a chance, fail to wander?

  She had closed her eyes for only a moment, she thought, but then she must have opened them again because she found herself staring intently—for how long now, she wasn’t sure—at a most curious sight. Beyond her windshield, a splendid creature sat on its haunches and stared back at her. “Lux,” she said, for though his fur had gone snow white and his eyes glowed gold, she knew with certainty that it was he. She must have fallen asleep, she thought—and for hours rather than minutes. The dark was beginning to lift; a pale dawn was on its way. The forecasters, she saw, had been entirely wrong. The snow had stopped; indeed, it had melted nearly away. Lux sat in a field blooming with delicate white wildflowers, their blossoms like tiny pricks of starlight. She had the urge to reach out and lay her palm soothingly on the top of the noble creature’s head, but her arm felt so heavy, and motionlessness so sweet, that she could not bring herself to stir a muscle. In the gray distance she saw a building of some kind, much closer than she’d thought the lights of the farmhouse had been through the storm; for a moment she thought it must be a power substation, perhaps the very one that had caused the lights of Middle Forge and Castel Fallone to fail, but then she saw that it was no power substation at all. It was a temple. Stony, austere columns rose skyward. There seemed to be an altar in there, and figures moving about. Was that Louis? And Tracy Parker? And it was impossible, wasn’t it? For there, dressed in that black blazer he always used to wear, and smiling that charming, dangerous smile, stood Jack Emmerich. For many years he had lived here in seclusion, in this ruined temple on the edge of town. And no one told me, she thought—but that omission did not so much irritate as quietly awe her. They had all known, and out of deference or pity or sadness had kept it from her. But now she understood. She watched from a distance as Louis and Tracy and Jack, never glancing once in her direction, began to dance, slowly and formally, to the music of Schubert, a grave and courtly masque as snow or flower petals or stars fell all around them. And it was incredible—she would not have believed it had she not seen with her own eyes—but snow-white, golden-eyed Lux danced the masque as well.

  So, she thought with some degree of satisfaction. But what, exactly, had been solved that her heart hadn’t solved years ago? she wondered as she became aware of a persistent knocking next to her ear, a voice saying, “Hey, Ms. Tremper.”

  For a moment she did not remember where she was. A figure stood outside the car window peering in. She had been stranded; she had been waiting for help. She lowered the window. “Ms. Tremper,” Tim Veeder asked with concern, “are you okay in there?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I must have, I don’t know…I must have dozed off. What are you doing out here?”

  “I could ask you the same thing. I plow for the town.” She could see his pickup truck, the lowered blade of its snowplow. “You could have gotten yourself in real trouble,” he told her seriously. “It’s a good thing I came along. But don’t worry. We’ll get you out of there in no time.”

  “What do I do?” she asked him.

  “Nothing,” he told her. “With me, you’re in excellent hands.”

  She had to grant him that. With admirable efficiency he went about hooking the slack cable from his winch to her bumper, and in no time had pulled the Audi from the ditch. “I’m very obliged to you,” she told him, though the irony was hardly lost on her.

  “Where were you coming from?” he asked. “Were you trying to get home?”

  “Yes,” she said, still a bit disoriented from it all, “trying to get home.”

  “Isn’t home that way?” He pointed in the direction from which she had come.

  “Yes,” she agreed, “it is.”

  “I’m going that way,” he said. “You should follow behind me. I’ll clear a way.”

  He would lead her directly to her driveway, she thought; he knew exactly where she lived. How many times had he cruised past, watching, longing in whatever way someone like Tim Veeder longed? But he eased her mind immediately. “The famous Forge School,” he told her. “Everybody knows where that is. Are you close by?”

  “Off Academy Avenue,” she told him as the realization sank in. “What she’d fervently hoped for all fall had indeed come to pass: he’d lost interest in her, as mysteriously as he’d been afflicted in the first place.

  And why not? She should feel relieved, she thought, to set that little episode behind her. And she did, she told herself. She did feel relieved.

  She followed his truck in silence. Had her little vision in the snow been a touch of carbon monoxide, perhaps? She wondered if she should have the exhaust checked out. And in any event, the music to a courtly masque would have sounded nothing like Schubert. How, in fact, did one even begin to dance to the remarkably un-dance-like rhythms of a Lied? The whole thing had been preposterous, dull, absurd.

  She had to admit it made her feel safer to be following in the wake of Tim’s snowplow. What had he thought of the C-minus she’d given him for the course? Even now she wasn’t sure whether she’d been punitive or generous.

  He had turned on his blinker, indicating Academy Avenue. She followed suit, and he gave her a thumbs-up out the window of his truck cab. It was just like him, wasn’t it, to be driving in a blizzard with the window down.

  Having made one full sweep of the driveway, Louis had begun another. The sight of her Audi elicited a joyous wave. He planted his snow shovel in a drift and motioned her into the drive while Tim idled his truck alongside the curb.

  “Well?” he said as she pulled up beside him.

  She wanted to tell him how very happy she was to see him, but instead observed, with a sigh, “You were right. The roads are impassable. I didn’t make it much past the edge of town.”

  “I shouldn’t have let you go,” he t
old her. “I don’t know what I was thinking.

  “All’s well that ends well,” she assured him, aware with a surge of icy anxiety that she did not, in fact, know whether all had ended well. Even now Libby was lying unconscious in a pool of vomit, basking in the warm embrace of hypothermia, submerged in a bath crimson with her own blood. “Has Libby called, by any chance?” she asked her husband.

  “I’ve been out here the entire time,” Louis told her apologetically. “I won’t have heard a thing.”

  For an instant she had to stifle a sense of peevish frustration, but then she reminded herself how Louis, dutifully keeping the drive clear, could have no idea how dire things really might be. Easing the Audi up the drive and into the garage, she hurried into the house. In the hallway the answering machine was ablaze with messages. She punched the Play button with some trepidation, but her relief was instant, the way an unresolved cadence, cruelly suspended in the orchestra, will suddenly melt into the bliss of the tonic. “Claire, where are you?” Libby’s voice asked anxiously. “I’m worried. Our phone went out for a bit. Please call me as soon as you get this.” One after another the messages streamed forth, each echoing the first. Claire took several deep, deep breaths. There had been no reason to charge forth into the storm after all. Libby was fine. The demons—hadn’t she proved it conclusively?—were entirely in her own head this evening.

  Lifting the receiver, she dialed. Libby answered at once.

  “Oh, Claire,” she said, “I’m so glad it’s you. I was starting to panic. Where were you?”

  “Not to worry,” Claire told her friend. “I was outside with Louis. I couldn’t hear the phone. But I take it you’re reconnected.”

  “We’ve even got power,” Libby said. “Things are looking up all around.”