by Cadle, Lou
Ice had fallen from the branches and covered the kitchen floor, along with bits of the wall, some torn papery stuff and powdery light-colored something or other. The ice would melt. And hurt the floor if he didn’t wipe it up.
But this was worse than a wet floor. His whole house had a hole in it.
This was bad. The shock faded, to be replaced by a helpless, horrified feeling.
And there was nothing he could do to make it better. He didn’t even know what to do. Without an ax, he couldn’t get the tree out of here. With an ax, admit it, he still couldn’t get it out of here. It was too big. And if he did have a saw and managed to saw off every branch, and take them out one by one, and somehow pull the tree trunk away on his own—which would be impossible, because look at how huge it was—what would he do about a hole left in the house? If the tree was removed, snow or sleet or rain would blow in more easily. He didn’t know a thing about construction or roofing, so even in the daylight, he couldn’t go out there and manfully do something about it.
Man? He was as useless as a pet cat in this situation.
He needed to call his mom and ask her what to do.
He returned to his bedroom, happy to be in the slightly warmer room where the outdoors and indoors were separated like normal and all the walls and the ceiling worked. But this room too would grow colder as the cold air poured in the breach in the kitchen. He checked the weather first. It was down to 23 degrees out there, way colder than it had been during the ice storm that had caused this problem in the first place. Everything in here would freeze too. Maybe in no more than a day.
Then he checked for a message from his mom. There was none.
Now the tree in the kitchen seemed the least of his worries. Was his mom okay? She should have phoned him, or texted, before she went to bed. Had she tried to come home and had a wreck? Was she sitting in her car somewhere, shivering, hidden by some snow bank? Or hurt and in the hospital? He’d told her not to try driving!
He punched the button to call her cell. There was dead silence. No connection, no busy signal, no nothing. He checked the bars on his phone. Not a one. He might as well be in the middle of the Mariana Trench holding a phone. He shook his phone, knowing as he did how stupid it was. He raised it overhead, walking around his room, but there was no signal to catch.
How could cell service be out? Did it have something to with electricity? He imagined the whole city, the whole state, every person and home and business without any power at all and no phone. Just the few people with generators would have electricity, and unless they had a whole lot of gasoline, they probably wouldn’t have it for much longer. If he was designing cellphone service, he’d make sure there were generators to keep them going. Or solar batteries or something. If cellphone systems needed electricity. Did they? Wasn’t it like radio?
Ray understood, in a brand new way, that he didn’t really know anything about anything. Not about how to fix things. Not about how cell service worked. Not about building wood fires or what to do when your house had a hole punched into it. If you handed him a snake and told him to cook it, he wouldn’t even know how to do that.
He was useless.
With no hope, knowing the message wouldn’t get to her, that the effort wouldn’t matter at all, he texted his mom anyway. A tree fell on the house. It’s cold and dark. Where are you? I’m worried about you. Come home!
Then he stared at the message. What would happen if she read that? She’d risk driving. If she was safe now, she wouldn’t be safe when she got the text.
Only great self-restraint kept him from sending it. It might not go through now, but it might go through when they fixed the cell towers or whatever was broken in the system. Sending it might get his mom hurt.
He really, really wanted to send it. He wanted, more than anything, to have his mom here and telling him what to do. But he knew her, and he knew she’d come rushing back if he asked her to. Driving on those ice-covered roads, just because he was a no-nothing idiot. No.
It was about the hardest thing he’d ever done, but he didn’t send it. He backspaced over the whole thing. He sent a second text: Good morning. I’m okay. How are you? It didn’t go when he sent it, but when the cell service came back on, it would. And it was almost the truth. He was physically okay. The tree hadn’t fallen on him.
It could have though. That sent a shiver through him. The explosion—the tree falling had to be what woke him—could have been right over him. He could have been crushed. Or skewered with a broken branch, pinned to the bed while he bled and bled. Would a person freeze to death first? Or bleed to death? How long before blood turned to ice? He was glad he hadn’t had to find out those answers firsthand.
He thought of the trees that had come down around the neighborhood—his and several others. Could whole cell towers come down like a tree from the weight of the ice?
Maybe.
It was actually a little reassuring to think that. Not that the thought itself reassured him, for it didn’t help him make a phone call to his mom, but that he could think at all logically calmed him. Maybe he didn’t know much about how to do much, but he still had a working brain. Even as afraid as he was, he had a logical thought or two.
So, brain. Quit panicking! Work! He thought again about the kitchen and the tree. Should he drape blankets around the tree to keep snow or rain from blowing in? Or shove blankets or old clothes or towels in the hole around the tree? Did they have enough blankets and old clothes? Clothes, no. Could he sacrifice half of his own blankets for that? Would that help keep the house warmer? Would it stop more damage from happening as snow drifted in? How cold was it really, and how warm would it get today?
He looked more carefully at his phone’s home page. The weather report of 23 degrees and snow had been at 11:30 p.m. yesterday, with nothing registering since. He thought it was later now, much later. Think.
Aha—the computer still had battery, would still be keeping time inside itself, even without an internet connection. He tapped at keys until it lit up. Yep. As he’d thought. It was 3:25 a.m. now. Maybe colder than 23. Probably colder because nights usually got colder until dawn. Without a working internet connection, he couldn’t tell, but probably in the teens.
He went to the linen closet, pulled out all the extra sheets and blankets in there, and carried them into the kitchen. He stared at the problem of the unwanted tree visitor, coaxing his brain to work it out.
You know, maybe the thing to do wasn’t to try and block the holes with wadded-up sheets, but to block off the room from the rest of the house. The kitchen was messed up. The ceiling and wall were beyond his ability to fix, and they needed fixing. He might be able to keep up with melting ice, but it didn’t seem to be melting very quickly. If it was only 20 degrees or less, which seemed likely, it wouldn’t be melting anytime soon. So cleaning the floor wasn’t a priority.
He took the flashlight into the garage, got a hammer and some nails, and stood on a dining table chair, nailing up sheets and blankets between the kitchen and the dining area. It was all one big room, but there were cabinets along most of the wall between the kitchen and dining area that he could drive nails into the backs of. Only in one small patch would he have to nail into the ceiling. He realized he should use sheets there—the ceiling might not hold onto a nail well, so he should put something lighter-weight there than a blanket.
Hanging blankets behind the cabinets wasn’t much of a solution, but he had to do something, even if it was the wrong thing. He wasn’t a little kid, and as much as he could feel the urge to sit on his bed and cry in frustration, that wouldn’t help a thing. His mommy wasn’t going to come and fix things for him. She shouldn’t drive—not until it was warmer and the streets were clear. He had to act on his own, to try something, even if it was wrong. The worst he would be doing was putting a few little holes in the ceiling and backs of the cabinet. At best, he might keep himself from freezing to death. Damn, but it was cold standing here.
Finally he had th
e kitchen blocked off. But he was shivering by the time he finished. He left the hammer and remaining nails on the counter—and there were a few nails rolling around on the floor that he’d dropped, but he didn’t want to crawl around looking for them or waste the flashlight battery finding them.
He used the bathroom, washed his hands in water so cold it hurt to touch, then retreated to his room and checked the time on the computer. 4:18 a.m. It seemed like hours had passed since the sound of the tree hitting the house woke him up. No cell service still. He imagined the earliest he could hope for it was 9 or 10. Give them a chance to send people out to fix it in the daylight. Maybe he’d have a working phone by noon.
He got into bed again, in the dark, and huddled up, shivering, waiting for his body to warm up the space between bed and blankets. He tucked his head under the blanket, but he couldn’t breathe for long, so he arranged the blankets so that only his nose was sticking out, and part of his forehead.
Twenty minutes later, he was warm again, even his hands, though when he touched his nose, he could tell how cold it was in his room. He should have checked the thermostat, but no way was he getting out now to look at it. Looking at it wouldn’t change it. It was as cold as it was, and he couldn’t do a thing about that.
Problem was, lying here and worrying—about his mom, but about the house too—wasn’t any fun. He needed a distraction, but without electricity or light, he couldn’t even pull a book in here to read under the covers. The flashlight was noticeably dimmer than it had been, and his phone charge wouldn’t last forever either.
So he lay in bed and worried. Even knowing he wasn’t doing himself any good, he berated himself for not being more skilled. He should be taking woodshop and not an extra AP class—at least get something useful and practical out of school. What good was the Napoleonic War doing him now?
With an effort, he slammed a lid on his self-pity and thought through how people had learned things before… before the internet. Before phones and TV. Before libraries, even.
People had probably grown up learning only what their parents knew. When what your parents knew was post-colonial literary theory (his father), and how to calm down angry bus riders (his mom), the lessons weren’t useful in a blizzard. But back when people grew up on farms, with horses pulling plows, and that kind of thing, people learned how to grow food, and how to fix things when they broke. Probably any eight-year-old kid back then would have had a better idea of what to do with the tree in the kitchen. They’d know how to breed chickens and cows and milk them and stuff. Milk the cows, not the chickens, of course. At least he knew that much that chickens weren’t mammals. Not that he had the first idea how to turn milk into cheese, but he would have known had he been born centuries before. You learned by watching your parents. And maybe you visited the blacksmith or something like that and grew interested in that trade, and instead of farming, you did that sort of thing as an adult, shoed everyone’s horses all around and banged out iron fence posts. Before farms, there was only hunting, and people knew how to make arrows and where the deer drank at dawn, so they could kill them there. They knew when berries got ripe and where to find them. They learned that from their parents.
The only place he knew where to find berries was at the Food Lion. In a sense, his mom had taught him that too.
Still, even with his frustration that he didn’t have a clue what to do about the tree in the kitchen, he wasn’t sure he wanted to live in a world like the old one. Books made it possible to learn an awful lot. So did the internet. Someone on a farm in 1720 where he lived wouldn’t have known much at all about Africa or Asia or the moon or how the brightest stars in the sky weren’t the closest ones, but really big ones billions of miles away. He liked knowing that sort of thing. He liked learning that there was a part of America called Saipan. No farmer’s kid in Virginia Colony in 1720 knew about that small island, whatever it had been called in 1720.
Would that knowledge ever do him any good? A person couldn’t fix the hole a tree left in the house by being able to name every US territory or the major battles of the Napoleonic War. But it was interesting. And it was a comfort to have knowledge. Like having money in his pocket, or having food in the refrigerator, knowledge was….
Truthfully, he wasn’t sure what it was. Not a commodity. Money could buy food. Food was food, the most important thing there was, next to water. It kept you alive. Though right now, he’d pass up food in exchange for a working furnace or a woodstove like Eve had, or even for walls without holes in them. Knowledge had value to him, but did it truly have a value? Any intrinsic value? He was pretty sure economists didn’t count it like new jobs or products made. But it was something. It wasn’t nothing.
Thinking about this sort of thing calmed him. He liked intellectual puzzles. What was knowledge, what category did it fall under? What was money, for that matter? He’d gone down that rabbit hole before, trying to figure out what money was, and worrying about how it was all a fantasy, just everybody agreeing that stupid pieces of paper meant a thing. They didn’t, not really. You could use them to light a fire, but you couldn’t eat them. Someone else had to share your delusion that they meant something and accept the paper fire-starters you handed them while you both agreed they were worth the thing you bought, the food or book.
Lighting fires with dollar bills made him think of the woodstove that Eve had. She’d said he could go over there. But he wouldn’t. He shouldn’t. She might not have even meant it anyway, just a polite thing adults say, like, “See you soon,” when they actually wanted to avoid the person they said that to for as long as possible.
That was a problem with people as you got older. When you were a kid, you knew for sure if someone liked you or not. Little kids even say, “I don’t like you.” Everything is clear. But with kids his age, or adults even more, you never knew. People would say, “That’s so sad,” about some tragic TV news tale, but they’d move right on to the next segment about puppies adopted by a mother duck and laugh, forgetting the sad story immediately. People would say, “I’ll call you later,” and then not. Omar was his friend, and then he wasn’t, and Ray still had no damned idea why.
At least he hadn’t lied. Ray would give Omar that. He didn’t say, “I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” and then not talk to him. It was obvious he was mad, but he didn’t make a promise and break it. Unless you counted friendship itself as a promise. A—what do you call it?—an implied promise to talk. To work out problems.
That was why he was angry at Omar, he saw for the first time. And he was, less hurt and more angry every day. Omar had failed in the implied promise of friendship. And if he had, was he any kind of friend at all? Had he ever been? He had been something else, Ray supposed. A gaming buddy. No different than people Ray interacted with online halfway around the globe. Ray could die, and they wouldn’t know or care if they did know.
So who were his friends, then, if not Omar or Brew?
Maybe he didn’t have any. Just his mom, and that was definitely pitiful, a kid his age having only one friend and that friend being his mom.
He sure hoped she was okay, safe and warm at work.
Now he was cold and unhappy both. And inept and friendless. But mostly, goddamn it, cold! He was hungry as well, but he didn’t want to leave his blankets even to walk over to his dresser where he’d left the cheese sandwich made with the last of the bread. It had taken longer to get his bed warm this time, and he didn’t want to give up his pocket of warmth.
His mind kept going back and forth, thinking about the meaning of things, and thinking about practical matters, like food. Would everything freeze in the refrigerator as the kitchen matched the outdoor temperature? Or would the refrigerator work to insulate food in relative warmth? There wasn’t much left in there to go bad. There wasn’t all that much food here anywhere. Two frozen dinners, but no way to warm them. A few cans in the cupboard, like the chicken noodle soup.
Finally, finally, he saw the first morning light sneaking in arou
nd the edges of his drapes. Light made all the difference. Sure, he’d still be cold, but he could see what he was doing. He could read a book and keep his mind from going down dark pathways, if he didn’t get too cold to even read. And maybe he could figure out something useful to do to address the tree situation.
Mentally, he urged the sun to rise faster. About fifteen minutes passed before he convinced himself to leave the bed. He changed clothes and put on more layers. He was down to his last pair of socks, the dress socks. He went through his hamper finding old ones—which were at least dry—and laid them on top of the hamper’s lid for use later on. In this cold, the ones in the bathroom would probably take a week to dry.
He needed to look at the outside of his house. Even if there wasn’t anything he could do about it, he needed to see what exactly had happened when the tree fell.
His room was colder than under the covers, but when he opened his bedroom door, he could feel that the rest of the house was colder than his bedroom. His own body heat must be heating the one room enough to make a difference.
The living room was frigid. He looked at the thermostat, but it wasn’t reading anything. Maybe it was on a battery and the battery had died? Maybe it was too cold to register? He didn’t know, and he couldn’t fix it, and it didn’t matter. He didn’t need a number to know the house was getting colder. He touched the sheets he’d tacked up and they felt cold. So they were keeping some of the outdoor cold out of the rest of the house, but not all of it.
He put on his jacket and shoes. He tried to open the back door, but he couldn’t get it to budge. There might be something blocking it. Or maybe the tree falling had done enough damage to that whole wall that the back door wouldn’t work.
