RECOGNIZING PEOPLE WAS ONE OF AMANDA’S SKILLS. SHE bought cocktails for the apparatchiks from Minneapolis and Columbus and St. Louis who paid her. She remembered who was who and asked after their families. This was a point of pride. She looked at the man and saw only a black man she had never seen before.
“You know one another!” Clay was reassured. The breeze raised the hair on his legs.
“We’ve not had the pleasure of meeting face-to-face.” The man had the practice of a salesman which was, ultimately, what he was. “I’m G. H.”
The letters meant nothing to her. Amanda couldn’t figure whether he was trying to spell something.
“George.” The woman thought the name more gentle than the initials, and this was a moment when they needed to seem human. You never knew who had guns and was ready to stand their ground. “He’s George.”
He thought of himself as George. He spoke of himself as G. H. “—George, right, I’m George. This is our house.”
Possession was some fraction of the law, and Amanda had deluded herself. She’d been pretending that this was their house! “I’m sorry?”
“This is our house,” he said again. “We emailed back and forth—about the house?” He tried to sound firm but also gentle.
Amanda remembered, then: GHW@washingtongroupfund.com—the formal opacity of those initials. The place was comfortable but sufficiently anonymous that she had not bothered to try to picture its owners, and now, seeing them, she knew that if she had bothered to picture them, her picture would have been incorrect. This didn’t seem to her like the sort of house where black people lived. But what did she mean by that? “This is—your house?”
Clay was disappointed. They were paying for the illusion of ownership. They were on vacation. He closed the door, leaving the world out there, where it belonged.
“We’re so sorry to bother you.” Ruth still had her hand on George’s shoulder. Well, they were inside; they’d accomplished something.
Why had Clay closed the door, invited these people in? It was so like him. He always wanted to handle the business of life but was not fully prepared to do so. Amanda wanted proof. She wanted to inspect the mortgage, a photo ID. These people and their disheveled clothes could be—well, they looked more like evangelists than criminals, hopeful pamphleteers come to witness Jehovah.
“You gave us a bit of a fright!” Clay didn’t mind confessing his own cowardice, since it had passed. A bit barely counted, and it was, importantly, their fault. “Goodness, it’s cold out all of a sudden.”
“It is.” G. H. was as good as anyone at predicting how other people would behave. But it took time. They were inside. That was what mattered. “Summer storm? Maybe it’ll pass.”
They were four adults standing about awkwardly as in those last anticipatory moments at an orgy.
Amanda was furious at everyone, Clay most of all. She twitched, certain one of these people would produce a gun, a knife, a demand. She wished she’d still been holding the telephone, though who could say how long it would take for the local precinct to get to their beautiful house in the deep of the woods. She didn’t even say anything.
G. H. was ready. He had prepared, tried to guess how these people might react. “I understand how strange it must be for you, us turning up like this unannounced.”
“Unannounced.” Amanda inspected the word, and it didn’t hold up to scrutiny.
“We’d have called, you see, but the phones—”
They’d have called? Did these people have her number?
“I’m Ruth.” She extended a hand. Every couple apportioned labor by strength, even or especially at such moments. Her role was to shake hands and make nice and put these people at ease so they could get what they wanted.
“Clay.” He shook her hand.
“And you’re Amanda.” Ruth smiled.
Amanda took the stranger’s manicured hand. If calluses meant honest labor, did softness imply dishonesty? “Yes,” she said.
“And I’m G. H., again. Clay, nice to meet you.”
Clay applied more pressure than he normally might have, as he had a point to prove.
“And Amanda, it’s nice to meet face-to-face.”
Amanda crossed arms over her chest. “Yes. Though I have to admit that I wasn’t expecting to meet you at all.”
“No, of course not.”
“Maybe we should—sit?” It was their house, what was Clay supposed to do?
“That would be lovely.” Ruth had the smile of a politician’s wife.
“Sit? Yes. Fine.” Amanda tried to communicate something to her husband, but one look couldn’t contain it. “Maybe in the kitchen. We’ll have to be quiet, though, the children are sleeping.”
“The children. Of course. I hope we didn’t wake them.” G. H. should have guessed there would be children, but maybe that helped the situation.
“Archie could sleep through a nuclear bomb. I’m sure they’re fine.” Clay was his usual joking self.
“I think I’ll just go check on them.” Amanda was icy, and tried to imply that it was her habit to peer in at her sleeping children every so often.
“They’re fine.” Clay couldn’t understand what she was up to.
“I’m just going to go check on them. Why don’t you—” She didn’t know how to complete the thought, and so she did not bother.
“Let’s sit.” Clay gestured at the stools at the kitchen island.
“Clay, I should explain.” G. H. took this on as a masculine burden, like arranging rental cars for trips out of town. He thought another husband might understand. “As I said, I would have called. We tried to, actually, but there’s no service.”
“We stayed not far from here a couple of summers ago.” Clay wanted to establish that he had some hold on this geography. That he knew what it was like to have a house in the country. “Impossible to get a signal most of the time.”
“That’s true,” G. H. said. He had sat, put elbows on marble, leaned forward. “But I’m not sure if that’s what’s happening at the moment.”
“How’s that?” Clay felt he should offer them something. Weren’t they guests? Or was he the guest? “Can I get you some water?”
Down the dark hall, Amanda used her cell phone as a light. Having confirmed that Archie and Rose still existed, lost in the unworried sleep of children, she tarried just out of sight, straining to hear what was being discussed while trying to get her phone to engage. She gazed at it as if it were a mirror, but it did not recognize her—maybe the hallway was too dark—and did not come to life. Amanda pressed the home button, and it lit up, showing her a news alert, the barely legible T of the New York Times and only a few words: “Major blackout reported on the East Coast of the United States.” She jabbed at it, but the application did not open, just the white screen of the thinking machine. This was a specific flavor of irritation. She couldn’t be mad, but she was.
“Tonight we were at the symphony.” G. H. was in the middle of his explanation. “In the Bronx.”
“He’s on the board of the Philharmonic—” Connubial pride, it couldn’t be helped. She and George believed in giving back. “It’s to encourage people to take an interest in classical music . . .” Ruth was overexplaining.
Amanda came into the room.
“The kids are okay?” Clay did not understand that this had been only pretense.
“They’re fine.” Amanda wanted to show her husband her phone. She didn’t have any news beyond those eleven words, but it was something, and represented some advantage over these people.
“We were driving back to the city. Home. Then something happened.” He wasn’t trying to be vague. Even in the car he and Ruth hadn’t spoken of it, because they were afraid.
“A blackout.” Amanda produced this, triumphant.
“How did you know?” G. H. was surprised. He had expected to have to explain. They’d seen nothing but darkness all the way out, and then, through the trees, the glow of their own house. They couldn’t believe it because it didn’t make sense, but they didn’t care to make sense. The relief of light and its safety.
“A blackout?” Clay was expecting something worse.
“I got a news alert.” Amanda took her phone from her pocket and put it on the counter.
“What did it say?” Ruth wanted more information. She’d seen it with her own eyes but knew nothing. “Did it say why?”
“Just that. There was a blackout on the East Coast.” She looked at the phone again, but the alert was gone, and she didn’t know how to return to it.
“It is windy outside.” Clay felt that the cause and effect was clear.
“It’s hurricane season. Wasn’t there news about a hurricane?” Amanda couldn’t recall.
“A blackout.” G. H. nodded. “So we thought. Well, we live on the fourteenth floor.”
“The traffic lights would have all gone out. It would have been chaos.” Ruth didn’t want to bother explaining in more detail. The city was as unnatural as it was possible to be, accretion of steel and glass and capital, and light was fundamental to its existence. A city without power was like a flightless bird, an accident of evolution.
“A blackout?” Clay felt like he was simply offering the word to someone who had forgotten it. “There’s been a blackout. That doesn’t seem so bad.”
Amanda didn’t buy it. It didn’t seem true. “The lights seem to be working here.”
She was right, of course. Still, everyone looked at the pendants over the kitchen island, like four people seeking hypnosis. You couldn’t explain electricity at all, neither its presence nor its absence. Were her words an act of hubris? There was the sound of the wind against the window over the sink. Immediately thereafter, the lights flickered. Not once nor twice; four times, like a message in Morse that they had to decipher, like a succession of flashbulbs, but it held steady, it held course, the light held the night at bay. The four of them had breathed in sharply; all four of them exhaled.