Since dawn Marlise had not ventured downstairs. As the storm advanced, not even the birds visited her sills, and when she could no longer see past the squall to the river she’d taken two long, hot, consecutive baths. As always, she took care not to rub too hard on the inside of her wrist, where Silas had drawn a small birdcage with a laundry marker the night they’d said goodbye, weeks ago now, back in another world. A blizzard of minutes ago. The scribbles on her arms and thighs had faded, and now Silas’s drawing was disappearing, too. Her wrists burned.
Soaking in the scalding water, Marlise could not get warm. She sat afterwards on the toilet, wrapped in a blanket and steam, and tried to pee. As the room cooled she saw on the window opposite what appeared to be letters. She stood to better see. Her small spill of urine in the bowl was the color of wet brick. Like first menstrual blood, though Marlise hadn’t had a period for almost a year. On a lower pane of the room’s one window, someone had written on the steamed-up glass “HELP ME.” But had written it backwards, as if to be read from without. Who had written this? Was it Marlise herself who had done so? When? And for whom? She could not remember. Perhaps she was just imagining things. What day was it? She’d been trying to keep track, since she knew her birthday was coming. Fifteen. On the fifteenth. The Ides. Would anyone remember? Would she?
It was snowing heavily by then, the window white with gusting curtains of flake, the road below already erased. Back in her bed, she piled on top of her bones all of the bedding, towels, and clothing she could find. She had already slipped into unconsciousness when evening fell. She was dreaming of nothing when somewhere, a power line went down, and the bulb she’d left burning beside the cot sparked out, the furnace stories below guttered, and the water hissing in the large ornate radiator across the room went still, then gradually, decidedly, grew cold.
*
The storm had not knocked out power at the marina as it had up at the big house, but after securing the tarps and the beached outboard, feeding the one-winged owl, cloistered and ruffled in her pen of chicken wire, the dead mice from two traps, and checking on the chickens flustered in their loft, and the old turtle, and after bringing in some extra wood, Ida had pulled down and climbed up early into the Murphy bed. She lay a while, smoking her pipe. What about the strange thin girl alone up in the big house? Earlier in the week, the box from the week before was mostly untouched. What would Beatrice think of her sick little girl left alone with just Old Ida to watch over her, and not very well at that? All that time she’d spent with Beatrice in this very kitchen, talking, as though she were her very own daughter. “You’ll be all right,” Ida said aloud, as though the girl could hear her. Plenty of heat, food for a week or more. Still. Maybe I should have brought you back here, she thought. Might try to get over there in the morning, when the storm lets up. Pull out the old snowshoes I used to wear to walk to school in such weather. If they were still in one piece, if their cross-hatch threads still held. If I can even get to the shed. Not as young as I used to be. How old am I now, anyhow?
From the room’s one window Ida couldn’t see a thing. Not the sky. No light from Windy Bill’s shack. Not the crick. She wondered about the old umbrella maker. Otto. Years since she’d seen him to talk to him, though she knew he walked out to the road to catch the bus to Riverside now and then. Errands. Groceries. I’d know it, if he had died, she thought. Windy would have known and told me. Otto’s ancient uncle was long gone, of course. Ida was too tired, she thought, to be in charge of anything, not any of them, especially not with this smothering tick of snow, coming down harder now, with strong wind. An old-fashioned storm, Biblical, and odd for its being almost spring by the calendar, and the likes of which she hadn’t seen in years.
Ida was drifting into a dream of her brother Stanley, alive again, pulling a sledge behind unsaddled Bucky, flattening out a path so she and Beatrice’s mother Lena could pass along the creek road to school, Ida with her funny Indian paddle shoes, gift of one of her father’s friends, a man from out west who lived now in Philadelphia and came over to gun sometimes in the Close woods in winter. Like tennis or badminton rackets they were, strapped onto her high-buttoned boots, and as the snow piled up above the horse’s shoulders on either side of the sledge, steam plumed from Bucky’s nostrils, and all three children laughed, giddy in the sun-brilliant dare of a new world suddenly everywhere.
*
Through the woods behind the marina and up beyond the old vineyard, Otto was also having trouble drifting off to sleep, though in general he enjoyed a snow storm. He had plenty of food laid by. The shovel was in the house. Lights, heat. Woodstove if the electricity failed, and seasoned wood cut and inside too.
I’m dying, he thought. He was not afraid. He’d had a good life. Losses, yes, sacrifices, sure. But also this place to live in, and work to do.
And he’d had his great adventure, the beautiful Beatrice, their summer of transport. How lucky he’d been to have had that time with her, and, after having had the privilege of consoling her as a child, to have had the great good luck to love her so completely as a woman. Not every person alive is allowed that. That kind of pleasure, that privilege, that kind of time.
After Beatrice had gone, it’s true that he’d had a difficult spell. Desire and jealousy tortured him. As had a sadness deeper than any he’d ever known. Guilt, too. Had he been wrong to love her so, married as she was to another man? Sorrow that she had drowned. At other times, self-pity got the best of him. One night, after some wine, angry, he’d made a fire in an oil can out back and burned the fairy house, the pavilion, all the silly umbrellas. He watched the grapevine, the twine, the cork, the silks and damask and bamboo meld into a neon crucible. Sparks of that enchantment snapped and flickered high into the darkness, like fireflies or stars. The constellations of freckles on Beatrice’s back. He grabbed at a spark and trapped it in his blistering hand. He wouldn’t open it again until the light extinguished.