The Blizzard

Dess

January came in on a freezing wind and stayed, and in the long gray weeks of it, without any of them having quite decided to, the three buildings of Ives Street became a village.

It started with the ten minutes. Ten minutes on his floor, she'd said, in December, in a pair of sneakers with her pride in her fists; and then it was twenty, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, because the radiator at number 14 had a better knock than hers. By the second week of January it was a thing that happened every day at six in the evening, as regular as the tide: she would cross the street in her coat, climb three flights, knock, hear come in, and sit down on the pine boards with her back to the radiator and her feet stretched out and the blue notebook on her knee, while Theron Wexcombe worked at the card table and said nothing. It was the single most restful thing she had ever done. She did her ledger. He did his spreadsheets. Now and then he would say, without looking up, Mrs. Ferreira informs me the canary has a cold, and she would say, Poor Pavarotti, and they would be silent again, and the lamp would hum, and the world would be the right size.

On New Year's Eve, Mrs. Ferreira cooked for fourteen.

She had a nephew who played the accordion and a cousin with a golden retriever and a gentleman from the Cape Verdean social club who wore a white suit and proposed to her over the codfish. There were twelve kinds of dessert. There was a bottle of port that Theron, to Dess's private delight, had been unable to refuse, and a card game involving a great deal of shouting, and at midnight Dess had stood on the porch of number 14 with a cup of non-alcoholic cider and watched the fireworks go up over the harbor, silent at first and then thundering, great chrysanthemums of gold and green and white, and felt something at her ribs go pop, faint and bright as a soap bubble.

She'd thought it was the cider.

"What is it?" said Theron, beside her.

"Nothing. A bubble."

"Where?"

"In me. Low. Just there." She touched her stomach through the coat. "It's gone."

"A flutter?"

"It's too early. It's nineteen weeks, I think, before—" She stopped. She hadn't meant to say it. They stood on the porch, side by side, in the cold, with the sky exploding over the rooftops, and she felt him go very still beside her, and she thought: The kick.

Term five.

"It was nothing," she said.

"Of course."

"It's probably gas."

"Of course," said Theron.

He did not say anything else. But when the finale burst over the water in a rain of white sparks, she turned her head to look at him, and found that he was not watching the fireworks at all. He was looking at her, in the colored light, with a face so naked and so stricken that she looked away.

…

The storm came on the twenty-sixth.

It was announced, as such things are, three days in advance, by a man in a blue suit on the television who spoke in tones of holy dread about a "bomb cyclone" and showed a map in which the whole of New England was swallowed by a purple smear. Joelle called to say she had put two weeks of food in her freezer and was not coming out. Colleen called to say Ray had bought a generator. Peg sent an email to the department at four in the afternoon on Monday, with the subject line EVERYONE GO HOME, which she had never in thirty-four years been known to do. Dess took the 4:40 bus. The sky above Providence was the color of pewter, and low, and very still, and the first flakes began to fall as she climbed the steps of number 13, big and soft and slow.

By midnight, a foot had fallen.

By four in the morning, the wind had risen to a howl, and the snow was coming sideways, in horizontal sheets, and the whole old wooden house shook on its foundations like a ship in a gale. The window glass bellied in its frames. The radiators clanked, and rumbled, and stopped.

She woke in the dark.

For a moment she lay in bed under three blankets, listening. It was dead quiet inside the room. No hum from the refrigerator. No tick from the clock. The red numbers on her bedside radio, which had glowed there every night for seven years, were gone.

"Oh, no," she said, aloud.

She got up. She put on her robe, and her slippers, and the thickest cardigan she owned, and shuffled to the window in the pitch dark. The street was gone. There was no street. There was only a blind white churning void, lit from within by a faint ghostly gray, and in it, dimly, the shapes of buried cars, like sleeping animals under a quilt. Every light on Ives Street was out. Every streetlamp. Every window. The whole neighborhood lay silent and black under the roaring snow.

She tried the light switch. Nothing.

She stood in the dark and felt the cold begin to come in through the walls.

Okay, she told herself. Okay. Don't panic. It's a blackout. It happens. You've got blankets and a flashlight and a half-full gas can for the stove. You are twenty-two weeks pregnant—

Nineteen, said the dry voice. Nineteen weeks and five days. You can't even count.

—and you are going to be fine.

A fist hammered on the door.

…

"Dess!"

It was a bellow. It came through the wood like a hammer, hoarse and frantic, over the howl of the storm. "Dess! Dess, open the door! Are you there? It is I! Dess—"

She was across the apartment before she knew it. She fumbled the deadbolt. She threw back the chain. The door swung open, and in the thin gray glimmer of the stairwell, lit by a single flashlight clamped in someone's fist, stood a figure so completely coated in snow that for a moment she took it for a drift.

It was a very tall drift. It wore a long dark coat, and a wool cap pulled to its eyebrows, and a scarf wound three times around its neck, and its eyelashes were white. It held a flashlight in one hand and, in the other, by a rope handle, a large red metal object that appeared to be an engine.

"Theron," said Dess.

"You are well."

"I'm— Yes. I'm fine. What on earth—"

"The power failed at three-forty. The substation at Wickenden Street is on fire." He was breathing hard. He spoke in short clipped gasps, as if he had been running. "I have been to see Mrs. Ferreira. She is well. She has a wood stove in her kitchen and has already made coffee. I have been to the second floor. The Pereiras are in the cellar with a space heater. There is one other tenant in your building, a Mr. Dwyer, on the first floor, whom I have not met, but who appears to have gone to Florida."

"Theron—"

"I came to you last." He drew a long breath. "I wished to be sure that everyone else was safe. And then I could—" He stopped. His face crumpled. For a moment she saw the whole terrified length of the last half hour pass across it. "I could not get the door open. The snow was against it. I had to dig. I dug with my hands, and then with a saucepan."

"A saucepan."

"It was the only thing I had."

"Oh, my God. Your hands."

"They are quite all right."

"They're blue."

"It is the lighting."

"It's frostbite." She grabbed his sleeve and hauled him inside, shut the door with her hip, and in the dark of the hall began pulling off his wet gloves. His fingers were white and stiff and shaking, and the left one was bleeding at the knuckle. "You idiot. You utter, impossible fool. You could have called."

"The lines are down."

"You could have waited!"

"I could not," said Theron, in a voice she had never heard from him. "I could not wait. I thought of you in the dark. Alone. With the baby. In the cold. I thought—" He stopped again. He closed his eyes. "I have lost one person to a road in the snow."

She went still.

It was a single sentence, quiet, almost inaudible. But it went through her like a blade. She stood in her dark hall with his ruined hands cupped in hers and the whole house groaning around them, and understood, with perfect clarity, what it was she was looking at.

It was not a man making a gesture.

It was a man who had been standing at a window for three months, in dread, waiting for the exact thing that had just happened, and who had gone out to meet it with a saucepan.

"Come in," she said, very gently.

"I am in."

"Come all the way in." She drew him down the hall. "Sit. Take off your boots. I'm going to find you a towel."

"The generator—"

"What generator?"

"This." He lifted the red thing with an air of faint surprise, as though he'd forgotten it. "Dell drove it down from Newport. Last night. He foresaw the storm. It runs on gasoline. I have placed it in the lee of the porch. It will give you power for the refrigerator and a heater for approximately nine hours."

"You brought me a generator."

"I ask—" His eyes opened. They went wide. "I— Dess. I did not ask first."

"No."

"I am so sorry. I— In the circumstances, I— It did not occur to me— I have—"

"Theron."

"Yes."

"It's four in the morning. There's a blizzard. You dug through a snowdrift with a saucepan to bring me a generator." Her voice shook. "I think we can call this one an emergency."

"The terms of the napkin do not—"

"The napkin has an emergency clause."

"It does not."

"It does now," said Dess. "I'm adding it. Initial here."

She pressed a finger to his chest.

For a moment he stared at her. Then, slowly, helplessly, like a man giving way under a great weight, he began to laugh. It rolled out of him in hoarse silent heaves, bent double in her hallway with snow melting off his coat onto her mat. And she was laughing, too, with tears running down her face, in the dark, with the blizzard shrieking at the windows, and the two of them holding each other upright by the elbows like a pair of drunks.

…

By seven, they had moved the whole building into Mrs. Ferreira's kitchen.

It was the only warm room on Ives Street. It had been built, in 1912, around a black iron stove the size of a small piano, with a flue that went up through the ceiling and a tin pipe that jogged across the wall, and it radiated a deep, steady, orange heat that made the air shimmer. Mrs. Ferreira presided over it in a quilted dressing gown and a pair of fur-lined boots, stirring a pot of porridge with a spoon the length of an oar. The Pereiras, a young couple from the second floor with a toddler named Beatriz, sat on a bench along the wall wrapped in blankets. The canary, in its cage on top of the refrigerator, had been given a small woolen hat. Mr. Biscuit lay on the warmest corner of the stove-top, in defiance of all safety regulations, and radiated contentment.

"Sit," ordered Mrs. Ferreira. "Eat. Everyone eat. This is a storm, not a funeral."

They ate.

They ate porridge, with brown sugar and cinnamon and a pat of butter that Mrs. Ferreira cut from a block as large as a brick. They ate toast, charred on the stove-top with a fork. Beatriz, in the Pereiras' lap, got porridge in her hair, and on her nose, and on Theron, who had been assigned the task of holding her while her mother fetched the bottle and who sat with the toddler on his knee, bolt upright, in an attitude of such stiff, horrified, unblinking concentration that Dess nearly choked on her tea.

"You are doing it wrong," said Mrs. Ferreira.

"I am aware."

"Hold her close. She is not a document."

"She is extremely mobile."

"She is a baby. They move. You hold." Mrs. Ferreira waved the spoon. "You practice. You will have one."

The room went quiet.

It was the smallest silence. It lasted perhaps a second and a half. But Dess saw it pass across the kitchen like a shadow across a field: the Pereiras glancing at one another; Mrs. Ferreira stiffening, appalled at herself; Theron, with the toddler in his lap, going absolutely white.

"I mean to say," said Mrs. Ferreira, hastily, "that it is an excellent thing to know. For an uncle."

"Of course," said Theron.

"A very good thing."

"Yes."

Beatriz, oblivious, reached up a sticky hand, grabbed a fistful of his collar, and said, in a clear, ringing voice, "Ba."

"Ba," agreed Theron, faintly.

"Ba!"

"Yes. I— That is very—" He looked at Dess across the kitchen, over the child's dark curls, and she saw that his eyes were wet. "I believe she is saying something to me."

"She's saying you've got porridge on your tie," said Dess, and went to help him.

…

It was past midnight when the others slept.

The storm had blown itself out around nine, in a last gust and a long, ringing, enormous silence, and the sky had cleared. The moon came out: a hard white coin over a buried world. The Pereiras had gone to bed on the kitchen floor, in a heap of quilts, with Beatriz between them. Mrs. Ferreira had retired to her bedroom with a rosary and an Agatha Christie. The generator had run out of gas at six. The power was still out, and would be, a radio voice said, for another two days.

Dess sat on the floor before the black iron stove.

She had a blanket round her shoulders and a cup of cocoa in her hands, and her back propped against a sack of potatoes, and she was looking at the little mica window in the stove door, where the coals glowed red and gold and pulsed softly, like the heart of an animal. The room smelled of woodsmoke and cinnamon and wet wool. Overhead the old pipe ticked as it cooled. Somewhere in the walls, a mouse scrabbled and stopped.

The kitchen door opened.

"I thought you were asleep," said Theron, in a whisper.

"I can't."

"The cocoa?"

"Mrs. Ferreira said it's decaf."

"She lied."

"She always lies about decaf. It's a point of honor." Dess patted the floor beside her. "Come here. I'm not going to bite."

He crossed the room in his stocking feet. He had changed his clothes, borrowing a gray sweater of Mr. Pereira's two sizes too small, and the cuffs ended halfway up his forearms. His hair was disordered. His hands were bandaged, the left in a white gauze mitten, the right with a few strips of tape, which Mrs. Ferreira had applied with a ferocity of purpose and a bottle of aguardente. He lowered himself onto the floor, on the other side of the potato sack, and drew up his knees, and the firelight painted the planes of his face in gold.

"How are your hands?"

"They are an inconvenience."

"They hurt."

"They do not hurt. They are merely very loud."

She smiled. For a long while they sat in silence, watching the coals. The warmth lay on her face like a hand. She could feel the heat of him at her side, a foot away, a steady dry radiance; and she realized that in all the weeks of the radiator and the floor and the card table, this was the first time she'd seen him without a barrier of some kind between them. No table. No window. No napkin. Only a sack of potatoes, and the red breathing dark.

"Dess," he said.

"Mm."

"I wish to say something."

"Is it a direct question?"

"It is an apology."

She turned her head. He was not looking at her. He was looking at the stove, with his bandaged hand pressed flat on his knee, and the line of his throat was working.

"I did not ask," he said, "before I came to your door."

"I know."

"I did not ask before I brought the generator. I did not ask before I stood in your hall. I did not ask before I— before I said what I said." His voice was very low. "I have, I think, a defect. When I am afraid, I cannot ask. I merely act. It was a way of surviving, in my father's house. If you waited for a permission, it was withdrawn."

"I know."

"It is not an excuse."

"I know." She set down the cocoa. "Theron. Listen."

"Yes."

"I'm going to tell you something, and I want you to hear it all the way to the end."

"I shall."

"It was the right thing." She said it quietly. "Tonight. The door. The saucepan. All of it. It was the right thing, and I'd have wanted it, and if you'd asked me, in the dark, at four in the morning, I would have said yes, please, come. I'm only saying that because I know you. You're going to lie awake all night with it. You're going to count the number of times you didn't ask. And I want you to know that I'm not keeping that count."

He turned.

The firelight lay across his eyes. They were very gray, and very wide, and wet.

"I am not accustomed," he said, "to being forgiven."

"Get used to it."

"I do not think I can."

"You can." She put out her hand, and laid it, palm up, on the blanket between them. "Practice. It's like holding a baby. You hold."

He stared at her hand.

He took it.

His bandaged fingers closed over hers, awkward and clumsy and warm. They sat there, side by side on the kitchen floor, in the glow of the stove, with the snow-light blue at the window and the old iron ticking, and for a long time neither of them said anything at all.

…

It happened at a quarter to two.

She was almost asleep. She had put her head back against the sack, and her eyes had drifted shut, and the heat of the stove had made her limbs loose and heavy. The room swam gently. Her hand lay in his. She was thinking of nothing at all: of snow, and porridge, and the sound of a child saying ba.

And then something moved.

It was not a bubble. It was not a flutter, like the one on the porch. It was a small, distinct, definite thump, low and to the right, like a knuckle rapping on the inside of a door.

Her eyes flew open.

She sat bolt upright.

"What?" said Theron. "What is it? Are you in pain?"

"Shh."

"Dess—"

"Shh."

She put her free hand flat on her stomach. She held her breath. The kitchen was silent, but for the creak of cooling iron and the soft rhythm of the sleepers on the floor. She waited. One second. Five. Ten. Her heart pounded in her ears.

Nothing.

It was gas, she thought, with a slow crumbling disappointment. It was a muscle. It was—

Thump.

A small, firm, unmistakable tap, against the heel of her palm.

"Oh," she whispered.

"Dess."

"Oh. Oh, my God. Oh, there. There. There."

"What?"

"It's— Oh, it's kicking. It's kicking, Theron. It's actually— I can feel it. It's right under my—" She was laughing and crying at once, soundlessly, her whole body shaking. "Oh. It's real. It's there. It's in there, and it's knocking."

He had gone absolutely rigid.

He sat beside her, motionless, with his bandaged hand still in hers, and she saw his face change. She saw it go, in an instant, from alarm to comprehension to something she had never seen in a human countenance: a sort of terrible, silent, shining awe, as of a man watching a door open on an entire second world.

"May I?" he said.

It came out as a breath.

"Yes."

"May I— Dess, may I— I would like very much to— Please. I am asking."

"Yes."

She took his hand. She lifted the blanket and the cardigan and the nightshirt, and set his palm, in its gauze, against the warm bare curve of her belly.

He did not breathe.

The coals ticked. A log shifted in the stove with a sigh. Somewhere in the walls, a mouse ran and was still. And under his palm, in the red dark, there was a long moment of nothing, a blank and terrible suspension, in which she saw him begin to believe that it would not come.

Thump.

He made a sound.

It was a very small sound. It was the sound a man makes when he has been struck in the chest by something gentle. His whole arm shook. His fingers spread, instinctively, on her skin, as if to hold the thing in place; and she covered them with her own.

Thump-thump.

"Oh," said Theron.

"Did you feel—"

"Yes."

"That was a foot."

"It was a foot. It was— Dess, it was a foot. It struck my hand. It— It is looking for me."

"It's saying hello."

"It is saying—" His voice cracked. "I do not know what it is saying. I do not have the language. I have only—" He bent his head. He pressed his forehead against the back of their joined hands, with his eyes shut tight and tears running down his cheeks, in great silent drops, falling on her wrist. "Thank you. Thank you. Thank you."

She wrapped her free arm around his head.

She held him there, against her, bent in the firelight, a tall man folded over on a kitchen floor with his bandaged hand pressed to a child, and rocked him, slowly, and murmured nonsense, and felt his body shake. It went on a long time. The baby kicked. Again, and again, a slow, sleepy, steady rapping. She felt every one go through his arm.

And somewhere in the middle of it, with a small sharp pang, she remembered.

Before the first kick.

Term five.

She went still.

She had written it herself. In capitals, on a napkin, with a pencil that snapped. T. tells D. THE THING before first kick. She had put it there because she was afraid; because she had known in her bones that there was a thing, large, cold, and unspoken, standing in the corner of every room they entered. She had given him until the kick.

And here was the kick.

She felt it. She felt him feel it, too. His shoulders stiffened. His breathing changed. She felt him lift his head, very slowly, as one lifts a head toward a sound, and he looked up at her with his face wet and his eyes huge, and in the glow of the coals she saw it arrive in him, whole and cold, like the recollection of a crime.

"Dess," he said.

"I know."

"The terms—"

"I know."

"I— I must tell you. I swore. Before the— It has come. It has come tonight. I am under an obligation, and I—" He took a breath. His voice shook with terror. "There is a thing. It concerns a document. It concerns my brother's—"

She put her hand over his mouth.

He stopped.

She looked at him, over her own fingers, in the red light. She saw the fear in him, white and naked and absolute. She saw a man preparing to hand her something that would break her heart, and doing it because he had been told to, because he had given his word on a mug.

And she thought: No.

She did not know where it came from. It rose in her from some deep dark place under all her careful arithmetic, a clear, simple, stubborn voice. Not tonight. Not now. Not with your hand on the baby. Whatever it is, it can wait one night.

"I'm waiving it," she said.

His eyes widened above her fingers.

"Term five. I'm waiving it. It was my term. It's my kick." She took her hand away. "I'm entitled. I wrote it. I'm saying: tell me when you're ready. Not tonight. I don't want it tonight. I want this."

"Dess, I cannot—"

"You can."

"I gave my word."

"And I am releasing you from it. That's how a word works. It has two people." Her voice was very gentle. "You'll tell me. I know you will. I trust you. I'd just like to have this first. Just this one night. Is that all right?"

For a long moment he did not answer.

"Why?" he said, hoarsely.

"Because it's the first time it's kicked."

"That is not a reason."

"It's the only one I've got." She smiled at him, wetly, through tears. "I don't want to remember the first kick as the night I got bad news. I want to remember it as the night you put your hand on it and cried."

He was looking at her as though she had struck him.

"You are," said Theron slowly, "the most generous person who has ever lived."

"I'm a fool."

"You are not."

"I'm a cheap date." She laughed. "A bowl of cocoa and a saucepan."

"Dess—"

"Hush."

"I wish—"

"Hush."

And she did not know who moved first. She would turn it over for weeks afterward, in the dark, in the long gray hours, with the ledger open before her and a pencil stilled in her hand, and never be certain. There was no moment of decision. There was only the heat of the stove, and the tears on his face, and the nearness of his mouth. There was the sense, dizzying, of a great dam creaking in the dark. His hand lifted, bandaged, trembling, and cupped her cheek. She felt his thumb brush the corner of her eye. She felt his breath on her lips, warm and unsteady, smelling of cinnamon and woodsmoke.

Their foreheads touched.

"May I?" said Theron, so low she felt it more than heard it.

Yes, said every cell in her body. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

She opened her mouth to say it.

And she saw the kitchen.

She saw it in a flash, as if lightning had struck: the sleeping Pereiras on the floor; the toddler with her fist in her mouth; the tiny gold glow of the rosary on Mrs. Ferreira's door. The potatoes. The porridge pot. The ordinary, fragile, borrowed warmth of a place that was not hers. She saw her own hand on her own stomach, round now, unmistakable. She saw a lease, a napkin, a rented flat. She saw a man with a secret, kneeling on a floor, who was asking her for something that she had not the slightest idea how to give back.

I need him.

It was a flat, clear, appalling thought. It had the force of a physical blow.

I need him. God help me. I need him already. I need him in the room. I need his hand. I need the sound of him on the stairs. And I swore I'd never need anyone. I swore it on a stair with a green suitcase.

She pulled back.

She did it so quickly that she nearly cracked her head on the stove door. She scrambled away across the boards, with the blanket tangling round her knees and her heart slamming against her ribs, and sat huddled against the wall with her arms clutched round her middle.

"No," she said. "No. Wait. I can't."

He had not moved.

He knelt on the kitchen floor with his bandaged hand held out in the air where her face had been, and his expression was so quiet, so entirely without reproach, that it hurt more than a blow.

"Of course," he said.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. It isn't— I do. I want to. You must know I want to. I'm just—" She pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth. "I can't need you. Do you understand? I can't. I've never needed anyone. It's the only thing I have. It's the whole structure. If I need you, and you leave, or you—" Her voice cracked. "Or you turn out to be a man who keeps a secret from me for months and I find out by accident—"

"Dess."

"Don't make me need you."

It was barely a whisper.

He looked at her for a long, long moment. Then, very slowly, he lowered his hand. He laid it on his knee, with its white gauze, and bowed his head.

"I shall do my best," he said.

"That's not a promise."

"No. It is merely the truth."

"I'm sorry."

"You need not be." He raised his eyes. They were infinitely gentle. "I told you, in the beginning. I will wait. I am excellent at it."

"I know."

"I shall be here."

"I know."

"In the morning, and in the evening, and when the power returns. Whenever you wish to ask me anything, or tell me to go, or nothing at all." He drew a long unsteady breath. "I will not make you need me, Dess. But I cannot promise I won't try to be worth needing."

She laughed, a small broken sound, and put her face on her knees.

The stove ticked. Snow-light lay blue across the floor. And in the dark curve of her stomach, a small round heel pushed once, twice, against the inside of her hand, patient and steady and utterly unconcerned with the arrangements of adults.

She did not sleep that night.

She lay curled on the kitchen floor, in a blanket, with her back to the stove, and watched him keep watch across the room. He sat against the wall with his knees up and his bandaged hands on them, and did not close his eyes. At some point toward dawn she saw his head begin to nod. She saw him jerk upright. She saw him straighten his shoulders, with a small dry movement of the will, and fix his gaze on the door.

He is on guard, she thought.

He's going to sit there till morning.

And in the long invisible ledger, in the place where she kept the things she could not afford, she wrote a line in a hand that shook.

Dess gave: a "no." A "not tonight."

Dess received: a hand on a kick. A man who stayed.

Balance:

She could not finish it.

She lay in the firelight and looked at the blank, and understood, with a slow cold sinking, that there was no number for it. There was no column. There was only a kitchen, and a sleeping child, and a man keeping watch against the dark, and a sentence she had said out loud that she could never, now, unsay.

Don't make me need you.

She had said it. And what she had meant, what she had never in her life said to a living soul, was the thing underneath, which was this:

Too late.