I was grateful for my her preparedness.
As we walked back into the house, I was able to appreciate that, although it was a lot cooler in there now because of the power outage, it was still warmer than the garage. Sure, my aunt’s house was heated mostly by propane, but without power, the propane did nothing, and the house had chilled quickly without it. The fire offered the only heat we’d get. We set the water on the island in the kitchen, and I peeled the plastic off the case so I could pull a bottle out. “Want one?”
Larry shrugged. “Yeah, sure.”
After handing him a bottle, I twisted the cap off the one I got for myself and guzzled it down. I hadn’t realized how thirsty I’d been until the cool liquid hit the insides of my mouth. It tasted fresh, clean, and pure, and it was exactly what I’d been craving.
As Kevin had suggested, though, coffee would have also been nice.
I walked back toward the living room, because even though it was warmer in the kitchen than in the garage, it was still cold. I wanted to warm my bones again. I walked over to the fireplace and stood in front of it, then turned my back so I could warm myself while looking out the window.
I saw Kevin standing on the deck, and it took me a few seconds to realize he was puffing on a cigarette. The white smoke was barely noticeable up against the flurries of snow behind Kevin and in front of the forest.
Vera sat up finally and looked over at me. “Did I hear you guys say the power’s out?”
“Yeah. We found some bottled water if you need something to drink.” Her expression told me more than words could. “My aunt’s place has well water and when the power goes out, the pump quits working, so no water.”
The realization showed in the way the spark faded from her eyes. “Oh.”
“What really sucks is I accidentally flushed the toilet downstairs…but there is a toilet upstairs.”
Vera’s eyes grew wide, even though she still looked sleepy. “Uh…that’s okay. The yellow can just mellow in the toilet down here.”
I forced a smile and let the air out of my lungs. Larry appeared then just as I saw Kevin throw his butt into the snow in front of the house. It disappeared into the frozen white blanket, and I could imagine the hiss the orange tip would have made as the snow had drowned it out. Larry’s face looked sour as he glanced outside. It wasn’t dark indoors, but it seemed shadowy because we had no lights to turn on. Had it not been overcast outside, I knew it would have been light and airy in the living room, because my aunt’s house had always felt sunny in the past.
Kevin came inside, stomping his boots on the doormat before walking in the rest of the way. Snow clung to his jacket and he slid it off his shoulders, hanging it on the doorknob of the closet so it could drip on the tile entryway. As he reached up and spread his hand over the top of his head, he said, “It’s a bitch out there.” He pulled the do-rag off his head.
I managed to keep my mouth shut, but, oh, how I’d remembered that hair. It was shorter now and seemed a little thinner, but there it was—brownish red and soft looking. I’d dreamed a hundred times of raking my fingers through it.
I pulled a slow breath of air into my mouth and forced myself to be calm. Fortunately, I didn’t have to say a thing so my feelings were easily hidden. Larry looked outside again and said, “What do you think, guys? This weather keeps going—should we stay one more night or leave now?” He glanced around the room, making eye contact with each of us before moving to the next. “I’m game for whatever you want.”
Vera said, “I’d love to go home.” Yeah…I was pretty sure she’d never had to rough it before—no camping trips where a visit to the facilities meant a stinky outhouse full of flies and the shit of a thousand people. One day would be all right. And I worried about the roads as well. Before I could voice my thoughts, though, Kevin spoke up.
“It’s not letting up, man, and it’s deep. Yeah, we’ve got her aunt’s key now, but I don’t know that it’s a good idea. One slick spot and that car’ll be off the road. If it was a straight shot, maybe…”
I nodded. “I agree. Maybe we should wait till tomorrow.”
Larry seemed to be processing our answers. Kevin added, “There’s plenty of wood stacked up on the other side of the house, so warmth won’t be a problem as long as we stay in this room for the most part.”
Vera finally chimed in. “Doesn’t sound that exciting.”
Larry said, “No, no, it doesn’t, but Savage makes a good point. We’d be endangering our lives if we drove in this shit. Besides, I don’t know how good an idea it would be to drive a car I’ve never driven before in these conditions.” She nodded, but she didn’t seem convinced.
“Our biggest problem is the bathroom. We can’t flush.” I was still feeling guilty and didn’t want anyone else making the same mistake.
“Or maybe we can. If we can find a bucket or a tub or something and collect some snow, we could let it melt next to the fireplace and then fill up the tank. Then we can flush.”
I cocked my head. Damn, that was smart. Larry had been full of surprises.
So we decided to hunker down and wait out the storm. We had no forecast to go by, but we were sure the nasty weather would head out soon. It seemed to have stalled over the area, but it wouldn’t stay there forever. We just had to batten down the hatches.
And so we did. I looked in the cupboards (although I knew my aunt had an amazing pantry full of lots of other goodies), deciding to keep things simple. I found two boxes of crackers, a tin of sardines, a can of Spam, and a jar of peanut butter, along with paper plates and plastic utensils. We decided to use that food, along with the twelve-pack of Pepsi in the garage, for our meals. Nothing fancy, but it worked. We also rustled around in the garage and found a metal pail. We packed it full of snow and placed it by the fireplace until it melted and then used the water to fill the toilet tank. Then we collected more snow. That had been Larry’s idea and I appreciated it because it gave us a little semblance of civility. Aside from “letting” the urine “mellow” and not flushing until there was solid waste, it almost felt normal. I reminded myself that it was temporary and we were making do.
It turned out Vera had been right. Boredom set in. I found a few books on the bottom shelf of Aunt Lou’s coffee table. One was one of those three-D pixelated art books where, if a person let her eyes go out of focus and just stared for sometimes seconds, sometimes minutes, a three-D image would appear. I’d remembered loving the hell out of those things some twenty-plus years earlier. In fact, I’d forgotten about them until that afternoon. We wound up passing the book around, but that fun only lasted so long.
I found a few other books, but the light was dim in the living room. I finally wound up napping on the couch, feeling exhausted. In the depths of sleep, I heard Kevin telling Larry he was down to three cigarettes, so he was going to make them last till the next day when we got out of there.
I was grateful that I no longer smoked. Between my aunt’s passing and the fact that I had no idea about my kids, I would have been smoking them one after another…and would have still felt no relief, no closure.
Chapter Twenty-two
Past
“In and Out of Love” – Bon Jovi
THE SUMMER AFTER graduation, I worked and played with my friends. I watched The Breakfast Club for the first time and fell in love with Judd Nelson, who reminded me of Kevin for some strange reason. I saved my money for school. I rediscovered Deep Purple.
I saw Kevin Savage once.
It was somewhere in passing—I saw him driving around town in his shiny black truck with the bad ass twin pipes. He and I had never been alone in his truck, but I’d always imagined it.
I realized that summer how pathetic I was, pining and mourning over something that would obviously never happen…but it didn’t stop me from dreaming.
I left home for college that fall, still in Colorado but hundreds of miles away where I couldn’t accidentally see him, and I kept so busy with classes that I didn’t
think of him much.
Maybe not much, but I did still think of him.
There was no avoiding it.
My high school, unlike most high schools in the country, published our yearbook every fall for the year before. The rationale was that they wanted to capture the entire school year—prom, graduation, all the things we did in April and May that were missed by other yearbooks. I don’t know how other kids arranged to get theirs, but I asked my brother, two years younger than I, to get mine for me.
He made the mistake of asking if I wanted anyone to sign it.
It was an innocent, sweet question, because he knew I had friends in all grades, thanks to theater and track and field, but there was only one signature I wanted.
And my heart swelled when he told me he’d gotten it.
When I came home for Thanksgiving break, that was one of the first things I wanted to do—not check out the pictures in the yearbook, but see what Kevin had to say.
It was simple: Nice knowing you was all he’d written, followed by the scrawl of his name, but it was all I needed to fuel my memories and my obsession.
Chapter Twenty-three
Present
“Kick in the Teeth” – Papa Roach
WHEN WE BEDDED down for the evening, we put extra wood on the fire, hoping to keep the room warmer through the night. I asked if anyone wanted to sleep in an actual bed, but we were all fine with our original arrangement. We all wanted to be near the warmth.
Larry apologized but insisted upon checking on Aunt Lou to make sure she was still a dead body. She was. He didn’t say anything about the state of her corpse, but I got the feeling that maybe nature was starting to take its course and there was no denying that she was no longer alive. She wasn’t going to reanimate—that I could sense more from what Larry didn’t say.
In spite of the fact that we didn’t have to worry about my aunt being infected, we all seemed to have trouble sleeping, and it had nothing to do with the fact that we were on furniture rather than beds. No, there was a lot of unspoken anxiety, and if they were thinking the same things I was, they were eating up their insides.
I finally got up off the couch sometime in the dead of night and walked over to the window that faced west. The sky was still light but it appeared to have finally stopped snowing. That in itself was a relief. I liked snow, but it was impeding our plans. Being by the window after a couple of minutes made me cold, because I was removed from the fire, and I could feel the chill through the glass. I walked back to the fire, wondering what time it was, but I had no doubt that my phone was dead by this point—it had been my main timekeeper nowadays. I knew too that the clock in Aunt Lou’s kitchen ran with a double A battery, but I wasn’t going to wander in there and struggle to try to read it.
The fire warmed my bones and I hoped the heat would relax me enough that I’d be able to drift off to sleep again. Vera sat up and whispered. It took me a second to realize what she was asking. “Having problems sleeping too?”
I nodded, unable to stop a yawn from escaping my mouth. “I can’t stop worrying about the kids.”
Larry kicked down the recliner’s footrest, signaling that he was about to join our conversation. Unlike the two of us women, though, his voice wasn’t quiet. “Try not to worry about ‘em, Nina. I’m sure they’re fine.”
Vera was a little more sympathetic and I could see the consternation on her face even in the low light. “That’s easy for you to say, Larry. Our son and his family are in Montana, and the virus isn’t even up there yet.”
He bent his neck to the right as if popping a joint or loosening a crick. “Might be by now for all we know.”
I didn’t say anything, but I knew we all felt that lie. At the rate the virus had been moving, it might be as far north as southern Wyoming and Nebraska now, but I doubted it was in Montana, even if the pace had progressed. Then again, I supposed it also depended upon those infected and if they traveled and spread the virus. Anything was possible…but it felt like Larry was just telling me what he knew I wanted to hear—not what reality was. I shrugged. I didn’t want to talk about it, especially if my fears were going to be brushed off.
I hadn’t realized Kevin had awakened—if he’d even gotten to sleep. “Where are your kids, Nina?”
I turned my head to look at him. “Right now, I have no idea. But before the shit hit the fan, Tanner was in Boulder and Kyleigh in Golden, both going to school. I tried texting them yesterday, but I hadn’t heard anything from them by the time we got here.”
“You think maybe the schools might have done a lockdown or something?”
That was the kind of thing I could hold out hope for. It was a long shot, but it was always a possibility. After the past year, though, I expected nothing positive. My outlook was grim. “I hope so. I just…I wish they’d texted me back so I’d know they’re all right.” Inside, I was in turmoil, and then I felt like an insensitive jerk. Vera and Larry had already admitted that their only child was likely doing okay, but I knew nothing of Kevin’s family. I knew he’d been married at one time—thanks to Facebook—but that was all I knew. I didn’t know if he had kids or grandkids or…
I knew nothing, and here I was, wallowing in my own misery without thinking of others. “What about you, Kevin? Anyone you’re worried about?”
He sucked a deep breath in through his nose. It was dark in the room, even though the flickering of the flames from the fire cast a glow on everything, but it was difficult discerning his facial expression. I could see his face, imagined I sensed pain in the expression, but it could very well have been my own emotions clouding my thoughts. “My daughter and my wife.”
A weird buzzing in my ears made me feel dizzy. Yes, I knew I’d heard him right. And my tongue ran away from me before I could even stop it. “Why aren’t you wearing a ring?”
He turned his head to look at me. Again, it was hard reading anything from him, especially since his voice was cool and neutral. “We’re separated.”
I tried to recover. I probably sounded like a jealous woman who had no reason or right to be. “Where are they?”
“Greeley.”
“Does she go to school there?”
“No. We all live there—it’s where my job is. I talked to her yesterday morning so, as of then, I know they were okay.”
Larry sat up. “Greeley? The original shit town. Friend, I don’t know how anybody could stand to live there.” I knew Larry was referring to the persistent smell of old cow manure that lingered over the town. There had been a major meat-packing plant there for as long as I could remember, and there was at least one concentrated farming operation there—so the town did smell like cow shit, lots and lots of cow shit…which was the main reason why I’d chosen to not attend the university there in my youth.
In spite of the dark, I could feel the look Kevin was giving Larry, but I doubted my neighbor could tell—or cared. “You get used to it.”
“Do you know if they were going somewhere safe?”
“Alex told me they were thinking about staying with Kim’s brother in Wyoming. I told her they needed to and that I’d be there as soon as I could.” There was a long stretch of heavy silence. I could hear the wood crackling in the fireplace, the wind howling against the house, but the silence—that was louder. Finally, he said, “That was yesterday morning.” What was unspoken…we all heard it loud and clear. If Kevin’s bike hadn’t nearly collided with Larry’s truck, he would be with his family right now, protecting them, keeping them safe.
But he didn’t say it.
Vera rested her head against the back of the chair she sat in. “Well, we’ll head back home tomorrow and then you’ll be able to track them down, I hope.”
We were quiet for a while, and my thoughts once more drifted to my children. Were they safe? Would they be smart and protect themselves? Were they staying with groups? Not knowing was worse than almost anything else. It was like the years before my husband had a diagnosis—my mind had thought of so man
y horrible possibilities, things that were even worse than the MS we finally discovered he had. Some of the things I’d imagined were far worse than the MS had turned out to be.
I figured I was, once again, alone with my thoughts, but then Kevin spoke, his voice quiet. “Where’s your husband?”
It was only fair that he ask, considering I’d grilled him moments before. “He died last year.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
I looked down at my lap, at nothing, because I couldn’t see a thing, and took a deep breath. I finally said, “It was a blessing—for him. He’d been suffering with MS for years and it finally took him. The last few years were horrible, and he was brave and strong…but I can’t imagine that he felt like he was enjoying a particular quality of life.” I thought I’d managed to bury all those feelings so deeply that I wouldn’t have to deal with them anymore, but there it was—a tiny tear that fell from my right eye. I was certain no one saw it, not that it mattered. Larry and Vera had known Darren, so they understood what the last few years had been like. Kevin…well, he’d had a spouse, so he could no doubt fathom how that loss would feel.
We settled back in after that. Vera and Larry whispered a few words between them but I couldn’t hear, nor did I want to. I was, once more, consumed by my thoughts and my worries. I sensed that my kids were okay, but my mind was working overtime, thinking of every horrible scenario that could happen—and I was helpless to save them. I felt like a failure as a mother…and no matter what I told myself, that feeling couldn’t be shaken.
But at least sleep helped me push it back, the first step to growing numb.
Chapter Twenty-four
“One Step Closer” – Linkin Park
WHETHER OR NOT you buy into astrology, I can tell you one thing: as a Leo, I have always worshipped the sun. I know it benefits the earth and humankind. I know it does wonders for our bodies (although, untempered, it can also wreak untold damage). I know it can affect mood.
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