Glamour
Page 20
“Honey buns! Look!” Grandma said. “This lady…” She peered over her bifocals at the phone book. “This Julie Dubrovnik. She could be just the one. That name checks out, and look at all these leaves!” Grandma held up her iPad to show off the family tree of yet another woman whom I’d never met and had no plans to meet.
“Christ. Not this again.”
“Yes, this again! How are we going to retake our lands without an heir and a spare?”
I doubled my scotch and ran my hand down my jaw, scraping my stubble, extra thick because it was a Sunday. “I’m not dating a woman you picked at random and who might be my distant cousin. We’ve been through this.”
“Shh! This one might still be single. And she’s cute! Kinda. Maybe a big forehead and a gummy smile, but that’s okay.” Grandma scrolled through Google, using her ergonomic stylus to flip through the search results. “Goddamn it. No. Married! Why are they all married?”
The timer dinged behind me, and I crouched down to look at the roast in the oven. If there was one thing Grandma loved more than revolution and trying to match me up with total strangers, it was a roast leg of lamb. I grabbed the thermometer and stuck it in the thickest part of the roast and then shut the oven door. As I watched the temperature climb out of rare and head toward medium, I told her, “You need a new hobby, Grams. I’ll buy you a Segway. Fuck, I’ll buy you a Tesla. Just knock this off.”
Grandma broke her bifocals in two at the magnet in the nose, and each half flopped down like glass ears onto Che Guevara’s portrait, making a weird Mr. Potato Head thing happen. “I’m telling you, you’re a natural! Bribery, honey! That’s the key! Long may he reign!”
I gave her an only half-joking glare. “Listen, Baroness…”
Completely unfazed, she snapped her bifocals back together, went back to her phone book, and crossed off Julie Dubrovnik.
Using silicone hot pads, I pulled the roast from the oven and put it on a rack to cool. Then I tented it with a piece of foil while I listened to Grandma pound out the name of yet another unsuspecting stranger into Ancestry.com. And not for the first time, I thought, Maybe I should buy her another parrot.
Grandma didn’t live with me. She lived about ten miles away, in a 55-and-over retirement community where everybody did water aerobics together and where all the widows flirted shamelessly with widowers over games of Cards Against Humanity. No shit. I saw it with my own eyes. She absolutely loved it there. They called her Hurricane, as in Hurricane Katrina. Fucking perfect.
She came over every Sunday for lamb, and that Sunday was no exception in spite of the weather. “No way is some pansy-assed winter storm named Lola gonna stop me from practicing my God-given right as a Moravian princess. Give me lamb, or give me death!” But as I turned off the oven and started dealing with the salad, I realized Winter Storm Lola might not be just a storm. The conditions outside were fucking awful, and then there was even more proof of something out of the ordinary happening: On the muted TV was Grandma’s other obsession—The Weather Channel. A red bar flashed across the bottom that said, STATE OF EMERGENCY / TRAVEL BAN / SHELTER IN PLACE ORDER FOR THE FOLLOWING COUNTIES: PASSAIC, BERGEN, MORRIS, HUDSON, UNION, ESSEX…
“Turn that up, would you?” I asked her.
“How do you feel about cougars?”
“Christ.” I ditched my hot pads and grabbed the remote to turn up the volume. The weather guy, who looked weirdly like Al Roker and yet weirdly not, read from a printout. “We’ve just received word from the National Weather Service that Winter Storm Lola has been upgraded to a major blizzard, but that’s not all.” On the screen flashed a new version of the radar map that had been repeating on a loop all night. The regular rotation seemed to…stall out, almost. Like it was running into an invisible wall. All the clouds and precipitation behind the line smashed into the invisible space. I’d never seen anything like it. And believe me, thanks to Grandma, I knew my shit when it came to weather.
Not-Al-Roker could barely contain his excitement and was actually clasping his hands together, just about one move away from Here’s the church, here’s the steeple. “Blizzard Lola is currently experiencing a rare weather phenomenon, known as explosive cyclogenesis. For those armchair weathermen out there, bombogenesis. Some of you may remember the storm that inspired The Perfect Storm, and Blizzard Lola is behaving in very much the same way. However, because conditions are so cold, we are looking not at nine to ten inches of rain, but instead ninety to one hundred inches of snow.”
Grandma looked up from her iPad with her stylus perched in midair. “Holy shitballs,” she said as the map shifted from a swirl of blue and white to what looked like a mess of finger paint flung onto the screen with a motherfucking vengeance. But all of it seemed focused on one county in particular. Not-Al-Roker zoomed in on the graphic, and I saw that the eye of the storm hovered just about exactly on top of my property.
The weatherman put one hand to his forehead, because now, even he seemed worried. And then he looked straight into the camera and said, “Hold on tight, Essex County. It’s going to be one hell of a night.”
Holy shitballs, indeed.
2
Lisa
The snow was coming down so hard that my headlights made me snow-blind and I had to pull over. I maneuvered my Wagoneer off to the side of the road and brought it to a stop. Rubbing the fog from my window with my mitten, I peered out onto the deserted, rural country road. It looked like one of those sorts of places where people from Hollywood would come to film a headless horseman scene. The trees were gnarled together over the top of the road in an arch, and the road snaked in a spooky, old-fashioned way. But that wasn’t slowing down the storm. The snow was coming from everywhere, and the wind was so intense that gust after gust shook my Jeep on its axles, same as if a whole line of eighteen-wheelers were passing me at eighty miles an hour. The road, already thick with new-fallen snow, shimmered in my headlights as snow snakes curled into the lights from the dark.
From my purse, my phone started to make a noise that it had never made before—a raa-raa-raa warning sound accompanied by a violent buzz. Like an Amber Alert, but more urgent. Tugging off my mitten with my teeth, I grabbed the phone from my bag. On the lock screen was a red-bordered warning from the National Weather Service, telling all travelers in PASSAIC, BERGEN, MORRIS, HUDSON, UNION, and ESSEX to “cease all travel and await help from the New Jersey National Guard.”
Awaiting help wasn’t my jam, but I also had no clue where I was. The day had started normally enough—at a bakers and candy-makers trade show in Philadelphia. And yes, of course, I knew there was a storm, but I also knew that weathermen in the Northeast sometimes got a little…excited about storms, which then fizzled out with all the glory of a soggy taco collapsing on a plate. So I’d hedged my bets and gotten on the highway after the show, heading home to Providence with a pounding headache from sampling so many kinds of frosting.
But I’d seriously misjudged Winter Storm Lola. A slowly disintegrating wet taco, she was not.
I’d gotten on this road because the highways were almost impassable, but I soon found out that the side roads were even worse, and there I was in Sleepy Hollow. Opening up my map, I unpinched my fingers over the dot where I was. And saw I was smack dab in the middle of the mess. The map was blinking red, too—slightly pixelated on one side because my signal was so weak. My battery was, as usual, a thin strip of red. Plunging my hand into my purse, I pulled out my spare battery and plugged it into my phone, turning it on with a freezing finger.
Dead.
A new set of alerts popped up. I saw the phrase snowfall at nine to ten inches an hour and also some word I’d never seen before, bombogenesis.
I dropped my phone in my lap and looked out at the flakes. The wind made an eerie whistle through the trees, and at the end of the branch-tunnel I saw that the sky along the horizon was a strange pinkish color. It looked like I was heading for a different planet. And here I was, stuck in a 1997 Jeep Wagoneer with a d
ying cell phone, half a bottle of water, and nothing but… I looked in my purse again. A snack pack of almonds to eat. And a smooshed Tootsie Roll.
I knew that I was, in a word, screwed. But suddenly I remembered that ages ago, I’d picked up one of those chargers that plugs into the lighter. I dug around in the glove box, through a stack of insurance cards—I never knew if I should throw them out or not—and found it. A little bright green thing shaped like an open frog’s mouth that I’d gotten at a gas station.
I plugged it into the lighter and hooked up my phone, praying that the lightning icon would appear in the corner of my screen. I jostled the plug, I blew into the lighter, I revved the engine.
Nothing.
I rubbed my fingers along the wooly edge of my hat on my forehead, the itchy strip where the yarn touched my bare skin. I was already freezing—my Jeep had never been very dependable, even in simple matters like heat. The snow was coming down at nine inches an hour. And the temperature was dropping.
Two words: totally screwed.
But there was no way in hell I was just going to sit there and wait for help. There was no way I was just going to bide my time and hope someone found me before I got buried. There was no way in the world I was about to shelter in place. So I put my Wagoneer in drive and got back on the road, heading north toward the glow of Newark. I cut my lights to give myself half a chance of seeing where I was going, and it helped a lot. The flakes no longer blinded me, and I made some good progress, keeping my eyes on the edge of the road and gripping the wheel at nine and three, like an old lady driving home from bingo. I could do it, I knew I could do it. All I had to do was keep moving, and one way or another, I’d get out of this thing. All I had to do was stay on the road, take it slow, and I’d make it out of this spooky, desolate place. But then I saw maybe it wasn’t so desolate. Out of the corner of my eye, something caught my attention. It was a big stone pillar with a mailbox set in the middle. My heart leapt. It meant I wasn’t all alone out here—that mailbox meant that there had to be a house nearby. And judging from the stonework, a big one. A fancy one. Maybe one that would take me in for the night before I got buried under ten feet of snow and Blizzard Lola turned me into a pudding pop.
While I was distracted by the mailbox, my Jeep hit something, and the whole cab rose and fell. Instinctively, I turned my lights back on, and my view was nothing but a wall of white. But then, through the snow emerged something dark. And craggy. And getting bigger every instant. It was a huge tree trunk coming straight at me. I slammed on my brakes.
And then everything went black.
3
Dave
A knocking woke me. I sat up in bed and listened. At first, all I heard was the roar of the storm and the whistle of the wind through the forest, but then there it was again. Thump-thump…thump. My first instinct was that one of the shutters had come loose and was banging on a window downstairs. But then I heard the doorbell.
I jumped out of bed, put on my flannel pajama pants and then hustled down the steps. I wasn’t concerned about waking Grandma Katrina—she’d been out cold for three hours, and without her hearing aids in she was stone-deaf, a fact she often used to her advantage when someone started talking about something she didn’t want to hear. So I wasn’t worried about waking her—all my attention was, instead, focused on whoever the hell was at my door in the middle of the worst blizzard in New Jersey’s history. From the landing, I could see a shadow outside. Without an instant of hesitation, I switched off the security system and flung open the door.
A blast of cold air and blowing snow pelted my bare chest. When it cleared, I saw that there was someone there—I knew immediately it had to be a woman from her height, barely taller than my shoulders. She was bundled up in a big puffy parka, with fur around the hood. I couldn’t make out her face because it was in shadow from the porch light. “I’m so sorry to bother you,” she said, her voice weak and raspy, “But I was in an accident and…”
She took one step toward me, but it was as if her knees went out from under her, and she began to fall. I reached out for her, catching her before she fainted to the floor. I hooked my arms around her body just in time, and though she’d begun to sink to her knees, I had her. I scooped her up and carried her inside, slamming the door shut with my shoulder, one arm under her shoulders and the other under her knees, newlywed style. But it was dark, and I still couldn’t make out her face. What I knew for sure, from the feel of her hips on my bare arm, was that she was frozen damn near solid. I carried her into the living room and laid her on the big leather couch in front of the fireplace. Her boots and pants were crusted in snow, and clumps of ice stuck to her leggings all the way up to her thighs. The fire I’d lit earlier was still burning, low but bright, and when I unsnapped her hood, I finally saw her face.
She was stunning. Her cheeks were a raw, tender red from the wind, and her nose, too. But that just made her somehow even more beautiful. I put my fingers to her neck and felt for a pulse, just to be sure she was still with me. Her heartbeat was steady but not very strong. She was shivering hard, and I noticed that the curly tendrils near the nape of her neck were damp. I pulled off her hat and found that her lovely dark brown hair was damp with sweat and melted snow. I pieced it together in an instant—she must have gotten in a wreck and trekked through the storm for help. But it was below zero and dropping. She’d slogged through at least a mile of snow, so she’d gotten sweaty in spite of the cold. Somehow, I flashed back to some survival show I’d seen once. It’s not the cold that’ll kill you. It’s the sweat.
I turned on the reading lamp on the side table and saw then that there was a thin trickle of blood from a cut on her forehead. As gently as I could, I checked to see if there was any more damage. The cut was surrounded by a bump, like maybe she’d smacked her head on a steering wheel. Not a windshield though, I guessed. The damage wasn’t bad enough to have been caused by a pane of glass, and thank God for that.
Crouching beside her, I pulled her up to sitting, supporting her with my arm. I unzipped her parka and pulled one sleeve off and then the other. She slumped against my body, and by keeping her close to me, I was able to get the parka all the way off. Underneath, she was in a gray hoodie, with what looked like… I squinted. A cupcake on the front? Definitely a cupcake, and under that a logo that said:
PRINCESS PASTRIES
Gently, I laid her back down and positioned a pillow behind her head. I’d never been so grateful that I hired an interior designer. Since I’d moved in, I’d cursed all the damned throw pillows, but now they came in handy. When I was sure that her head was supported, I pulled off her snow-crusted boots and put them aside. I grabbed a blanket from the back of the couch and another from the wingback by the fireplace, wrapping her up tight. When I did, I noticed that her hoodie was damp with sweat, too, and her shivers were getting more and more violent.
Fuck.
I stood up and thought about what the hell to do next. I wasn’t a guy who’d had a shitload of experience with extreme weather situations—like I said, I’m from motherfucking Newark—but I knew I had to get her warmed up, and fast. I put three more logs on the fire, and a couple of Firestarter sticks just to get it all roaring as quickly as possible. With the increased amount of light, I could see she was actually starting to turn blue around the lips.
Fucking fuck, fuck, fuck.
Getting an ambulance to come was out of the question in this weather, and asking Google about hypothermia would eat up time she didn’t have to spare. I knew there was only one thing I could do in that moment, only one thing that I could do fast enough to make a difference. I had to get her out of her damp, cold clothes before it was too late. I had to get her warmed up. In order to save her life, I was going to have to undress her.
I busted ass back up to my bedroom and turned on my closet light. I grabbed two of my hoodies and one pair of flannel pajama pants. I snagged a pair of socks and the heavy down comforter off my bed. Then I bolted back down the sta
irs.
She was still unconscious on the couch. I pulled off the throw blankets, taking a deep breath as I considered where to start. I peeled off her wet socks first, revealing a pair of small, delicate, and ice-cold feet. Next, I pulled off her pants, doing my goddamned best to disregard the lacy panties, the creamy white thighs, the small birthmark on the side of her left leg, and the smoothness of her skin. I tossed her snow-caked leggings aside and pulled my spare PJ bottoms onto her. She was swimming in them, tiny compared to me, but still—it was something. I cinched up the tie and then put a pair of my athletic socks on her, giving her feet a couple of rubs to warm them up with friction.
I wrapped her bottom half in the comforter, bracing her limp body with my hand to her back. I unzipped her hoodie and then pulled her slightly sweaty thermal shirt off over her head. Underneath, she was in a light pink bra, and for one second I thought, You can’t take that off, man. You gotta leave it. She’s a total stranger. You can’t be taking off her goddamned lingerie, you douchebag. But as I had her up against my chest, I could feel that even that was damp with sweat, the slightly padded cups wet and cold. So I fucking bit the bullet. I held her close, unhooked her bra at the clasp on her back, and cradled her in my arms, pulling it away from her without tipping her body backward. I didn’t look at her breasts, even though I could have, because that was way the fuck over the line.
But goddamn, was she beautiful. The light from the fire sent long shadows over her face, over her full lips. I pulled her right up against me and rubbed her back to warm her up. Using my free hand, I grabbed one of my hoodies and put it on her. I didn’t bother with putting her arms through the sleeves. There was no time for that. As I zipped it up, I did see her breasts, but I willed myself to ignore how full they were and how perfect and the very faint tan line that was still there, probably left over from summer. I took the second hoodie and wrapped that around her, too, zipping it up all the way to the delicate hollow of her neck. Her head slumped back limply as I laid her back down gently on the throw pillows. She looked like a little girl, almost, wearing my too-big clothes. Tiny and frail and well and truly in the danger zone. Still, she shivered, an unconscious and involuntary chatter that made her teeth clack against each other.