by Cadle, Lou
What about the front door? Wouldn’t that be something, if he were locked inside here in a slowly freezing house. His mom would come home and have to kick her way in, only to find a corpsicle.
But to his relief, the front door opened normally, and he emerged into a world that was less gray than it had been. The sun wasn’t out, but the snow seemed to have stopped for now. There were a lot of deep drifts, but patches where the ice was visible too. The wind was still blowing hard, but not howling. If it had only slowed down twelve hours earlier, maybe the tree wouldn’t have fallen. It was his bad luck that the weather hadn’t improved last night.
He backed out to the empty street and looked at the house. The tree was down, obviously, and some of it was on the roof, visible even from the front side. He could almost see the ghostly shape of it where it used to stand tall. He worked his way around to the back of the house until the fallen branches stopped him. The tree had snapped halfway up the main trunk, and there would be about a twenty-foot piece still standing when the top of it was cleared away. Maybe it could even re-grow from that stump, but he didn’t know. Maybe it would die. Another real-world thing he knew zero about.
He went back out to the street and looked around. No one was out here except him. Maybe when someone saw his tree was down, they’d come over and give him advice, or bring a chainsaw and remove it for him. But he didn’t think so. Probably not a lot of people had chainsaws in the city. They’d just call a tree service if they needed help. If they did have a chainsaw, from what he could see looking up and down the street, they would also have their own fallen branches and trees to take care of. Hardly a house had been spared. Not every one had a tree on the roof, but one other had a huge limb on the roof, and shingles had been torn off. Some had a car crushed. One had a big front window smashed in. Another had a tree leaning against the house in such a way that if there were more wind, it might just crash through their wall.
From Eve’s house, a thin stream of smoke still emerged. It would be warm over there. He stared at it, thought about asking to come inside to get warm, and then realized he had a better reason than the selfish desire for warmth to ask to come in, at least for a few minutes. She said she had a landline. Maybe he could get through to his mother from Eve’s landline to her work landline, bypassing whatever was wrong with their cellphone service. He didn’t have her work number on the phone, but at worst he could call directory assistance for the complaints number and maybe get through to her—or leave a message on a recording and wait for her to call back to Eve’s. He grabbed the last of the box of hot chocolate from the kitchen cabinet. It still sat there despite the ruin all around it. Cabinets on one wall had been knocked askew, and the food cabinets’ doors had popped open, but they were all still attached to the walls.
He kicked the snow off her front steps and, by grabbing onto her ice-covered railing, made it up the icy steps to her front door. He knocked softly. Then he knocked harder. After a minute, he was pretty sure she wasn’t going to answer, and he was debating, knock even harder and longer? Or just go home? And the door opened. “Get inside,” Eve said. “Don’t let the heat out.”
He followed her to the living room with its woodstove and unzipped his jacket. “Feels good in here.”
“Sit down and stay a while then.”
“I brought hot chocolate.” He raised the box.
“Not a fan of my coffee, are you?”
“I thought you might like some too.” Then he remembered how he was just thinking how adult politeness was a way of lying. “No, I didn’t like the coffee much, and I’m sorry.”
“It’s an acquired taste,” she said.
“Like snakes and insects,” he suggested.
“Indeed. Sit down. Take off your jacket.”
He didn’t do either. “I was hoping I could use your landline. My cellphone isn’t working.”
“You can check it. If power lines are down, probably phone lines are too.”
“Oh,” he said, disappointed. He hadn’t thought that through very well.
“It’s in the kitchen, on the counter. I’ll check to see if it’s working and get a tea kettle to heat up water for your chocolate.”
“Do you have a gas stove?”
“No, just the woodstove, but it’s great for heating water or soup. It’s even possible to fry a steak on it. I wouldn’t want to try and fix a four-course dinner on it, but people do.”
She left the room and came back a minute later. “My phone isn’t working either, I’m afraid.”
“Shoot.” He sat down hard on the sofa. He hadn’t meant to put so much hope into the idea, but being able to reach his mother was a hope that had lit him up for a few minutes. She might know what to do about the tree. But even if she didn’t, he’d have felt better for hearing her voice. And now the hope was gone.
“Who were you going to call?”
“My mom, at work. At least I hope she’s still at work. If she’s stuck on the road somewhere, or had a wreck and is in the hospital….” Idiotically, he felt tears welling up. “I’m worried,” he said.
“I’m sure she’s fine. If she’s smart, she stayed at work. Is she? Smart?”
“Very.” She had been mostly through her Master’s degree program and had quit when she had him. She told him she would much rather have him than any old degree, but sometimes he wondered if she regretted not finishing grad school. “She worries about me. She knew I was alone, without electricity, and I’m afraid she’d get stupid from worry, you know? Temporarily stupid?”
“I’ve been that more than a few times in my life. For now, keep me company while I make my coffee, and we’ll drink our warm caffeine drinks together.” She puttered around with things on the coffee table and said, “Did you sleep okay in the cold?”
“Until the tree fell on the house,” he said.
Chapter 10
“What?” She stared at him, looking shocked. “Your house? When did this happen?”
“About 3:30, I think. I thought something had exploded, it was so loud.”
“I’m surprised it didn’t wake me. Or maybe it did, and I went right back to sleep. Is it bad?”
“It came through the kitchen wall. I didn’t know what to do.” Again, tears threatened. “I don’t think I ever knew until this week how little I do know. I’m good at school, but that’s not helping me much this week.” Again, he had to swallow back tears. He fiddled with his thumb, worrying at a rough bit of cuticle, not wanting to meet her eyes, afraid that’d send him over the edge into crying like a baby.
“You’re only a teenager.”
“Yeah, but teenagers can do things. I can’t run a chainsaw—not that we have one—or fix walls or replace roofs or anything like that.”
“All that can be learned,” she said. “And shingling a roof is pretty simple. It’d only take you a few minutes to learn how to do that.”
He explained what he’d done putting up sheets and blankets. “But it’s not keeping the heat in. Not that there’s much heat left with the electricity off.”
“Then you need to come over here. I’m nearly out of wood, but this room should stay warm through one more night. And your mom might get home today. It looks like the snow has stopped.”
“I don’t want to impose.”
“It’s not an imposition. I’ll appreciate the company.”
“Okay. Then I do kind of want to impose. It’s so warm here. It feels great.”
She chuckled. “It’s not that warm. It’s 57 degrees is all, according to my thermometer.”
“Feels like an oven compared to our house.”
They sat in silence while the water boiled on the woodstove. She was a comfortable person to sit with and not talk. She didn’t seem at all nervous, or anxious to entertain him. It let him get control of himself, and he felt the tears recede farther. He couldn’t fix the house. He couldn’t get in touch with his mom. But he could be warm for a day. Things could be worse.
She poured him water in
a mug and gave him a spoon. He put a package and a half of chocolate mix in his mug and stirred it until it was mostly dissolved. The stuff never fully dissolved. There was always gritty mix at the bottom of a cup.
“I’m thinking.”
He looked over at her, waiting for her to continue. It took several seconds.
“Here’s what I think we should do. You should go get some stuff from your house and bring it here. A change of clothes. A sleeping bag if you have one, and a pile of blankets if you don’t. I don’t have extras. You should leave a note for your mother—or two notes, where she can find them. Tell her you’re here and fine. I don’t want her worrying if she comes home and can’t find you, especially with the tree down. She might think you were hurt by it.”
“I’m sure she’d appreciate you’re letting me stay here for a night. And so do I.” Being warm without having to huddle in bed sounded great. And he could imagine curling up right in front of the woodstove on the floor in a bundle of blankets, its warmth pouring over him all night. She even had a lantern to read by.
“I was also thinking you should turn off your house water supply. Do you know how to do that?”
“No, ma’am,” he said.
“It’s simple, once you know where the shut-off is. Do you have a basement?”
“No. A crawl space. I don’t ever go down there.”
“I don’t blame you for that, but it won’t be there, I shouldn’t think. Do you know where your hot water heater is?”
“It’s in the garage, by the attic door.” He didn’t go up into the attic much either.
“It’s probably by that or in your laundry room. To the side, or behind equipment. Look for a valve, a regular faucet like an outdoor faucet, more than likely. Turn it.” She mimed doing that. “Until it’s tightly closed. Then go into the kitchen or bathroom and turn on the cold faucet. It should run slower and slower until it stops. Leave it on, so that if water is in the line and freezes, the ice has a way to squeeze out.”
He saw why. “Water expands when it freezes.” Finally, something he did know.
“Exactly. So if it expands, and it doesn’t have a way out, you might have pipes burst and water come in from the city supply and flood your crawl space. That’s not good. Leaving open a tap or two will help prevent that damage.”
“The tree through the wall is bad enough.”
“Exactly. So hunt for that shut-off. It might look like a normal faucet—usually does in houses this old. Or it might be a lever jutting out if it was updated. It’ll probably be on an outside wall on the street side, and quite low.”
“Oh, right, so it’s like where the water comes in from the street.”
“Yes, lines are buried underground, then come up and into your house. Then from there to the hot water heater and to everything else in your house.”
“That sounds simple.”
“Most things are, once someone explains them to you.”
He gulped his chocolate. “I’ll go home and do that. And get a sleeping bag.”
“Come right back. If you have problems finding the water shut-off, I can come over and help you hunt for it.”
He didn’t want the old lady walking out there and falling because he didn’t know how to do anything of use. That made him determined to do this right. “I’ll find it. It might take me fifteen or twenty minutes, but I’ll figure it out. And another ten minutes to gather things to bring.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Do you need more wood?” There was still several logs on the hearth from last night’s haul. She hadn’t used all of them.
“Probably not until lunch time, to bring it inside to dry it. But that’ll be the last of it, one more pile brought in, and I’ll be out of wood.”
“Okay. I’ll be back soon.”
He went home and hunted around for the water valve. He found it in five minutes, in the garage, using the flashlight to spot it. It led into an area where he realized there must have been a washer and dryer years ago. His mom had that inside now, with a dryer on top of a washer, but there was a place for bigger ones out here, he saw. He hadn’t seen it the whole time they’d lived here, but then he’d never paid attention to such things. He shut the handle off, as tightly as he could, and went into the bathroom to use it, as he’d always rather use his own bathroom than someone else’s. He washed his hands in water that was so cold it hurt, left the cold tap on, and just as Eve had promised, the water ran less and less. He waited until there were just a few drops coming out.
The house might be damaged on one side, but at least this wouldn’t go wrong too. He knew his mom had insurance, but he wasn’t sure if it would really pay for things like this. Sometimes insurance cheated you.
He went into the frigid kitchen and mopped up some of the ice on the floor with dishtowels, leaving them in the sink with ice still sticking to them. He grabbed some grocery store plastic bags his mom kept stashed under the sink and filled them up with most of the food that didn’t need to be refrigerated. He also took the rest of the cheese from the refrigerator, just a small chunk, enough for a snack. He left the meals in the freezer, in case he and his mom needed to eat for a day, but if she could get home, they could probably make it to a grocery store or restaurant, so he took almost everything else so that Eve didn’t have to use her food on him.
He hoped he wouldn’t be over there that long, but just in case, he packed his backpack with a change of clothes, his English book and a notebook to take notes on what he read, and his phone and charger. It wasn’t good for anything right now, not at his house and not at Eve’s, but it would be again at some point.
He hoped. It wasn’t the end of the world, right? Though from how it felt in the cold house, it could be. The whole world could have quit working outside this block, it could have all been sucked up into an alien spaceship, and without TV or internet or a cell signal, he’d be the last to know.
A silly thought. But a scary one too. It was strange being this isolated from everything he knew. And he thought too of how much he took for granted. Hot food. Communications. Heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer. His mom coming home every night. Even going to school was better than sitting alone during freezing weather and thinking about terrifying futures. Every schoolteacher, everyone who nodded at him when he came into a classroom was someone, maybe not a friend, but with the potential to be a friend.
It struck Ray for the first time that maybe it was his own fault he didn’t have more friends. He could talk to more people than Omar and Brew. He could do more things than just game and do homework. He did okay talking with that girl, Julia. She talked back to him and didn’t seem to hate it. Maybe he could, like… make more of an effort. Not be fake-friendly. Just be himself but talk with people more often. Like he was with Eve, who he’d never thought to have a conversation with before two days ago. And then he wouldn’t be so lonely. And if one friend quit speaking to him in the future, there might be five more remaining, or ten more, so it wouldn’t hurt so much to lose one.
He left notes for his mom on the dining table, taped to the TV, in the main bathroom, and on her bed. There was no way she wouldn’t see at least one of them. He had a big load to haul over to Eve’s, but he could manage it in one trip. Backpack on, a grocery store bag hanging off his arm, one hand holding his pillow, an old sleeping bag rolled up around an extra blanket and stuck under his arm, he was ready. He had to drop half of it to get the front door locked, but then he was on his way.
To warmth. And someone to talk with. Things might totally suck right now, but there were two good things to hang onto. Warmth and a nice neighbor. He hated that he was taking advantage of her. And he hated even more that he couldn’t solve all his problems on his own.
Chapter 11
He settled in at Eve’s in the lantern light, him on the sofa, and her on a heavy chair that he helped pull nearer to the stove. At lunch, she cooked and he went out to get more wood—there wasn’t much left at all, j
ust the lowest layer of a few damp logs—and set that to dry by the woodstove, as she’d showed him, stacking it this way and then that. He felt almost competent, doing that on his own while she cooked.
She had his chicken noodle soup, with a can of a different kind of chicken soup she had mixed in, and rolls in foil, both warmed on the woodstove. It took longer to cook than a microwave would have taken, but it tasted really good, and that it was hot made it taste all the better. At her insistence, he ate two bowls of soup. They had apples he’d brought over for dessert.
“Tell me more about other places you’ve lived,” he said. “I think I’d like that. To travel more, if I could, or to live someplace entirely different one day.”
“It takes a year or more to really understand a place,” she said. “I’ve not had that experience often.”
“Because of learning the language?”
“Partly that. But it’s more the culture. The nuances. People are so different, even though we’re all the same in many ways. Something like…” she frowned as she thought about it “…body distance, or eye contact. When you meet someone’s eyes, it might mean different things than you automatically assume. Is avoiding looking at them deference, respect, or dislike, or mistrust, or does it mean to them that you’re telling a lie? All that kind of thing you think is automatic because of how you grew up, but it really isn’t. Every culture picks its own rules.”
“How, do you think? How does it end up different every place?”
“Just happens that way for the most part, I would imagine. An accident. A few times, it must have to do with some deep history, how things happened way back when. Maybe a thousand years ago. Or not so far back, sometimes, like when people have lived under a brutal dictatorship for the last generation. They learn different ways. Ways to survive that might include who you can look directly at, and for how long. It might be dangerous to make eye contact.”
“That’s hard to imagine.”
“It’s impossible, I think, unless you’ve lived it. In my work, I might be in a place like that for three months, or six, but I could always leave. I wasn’t like them, stuck in a system I had no ability to change. Not that we have much ability to change any system,” she said. “So I guess we’d best be born into a decent one.”
