thirty-seven
Lapeer County, December
I woke sometime before dawn feeling as though I had fallen. The last echoes of some unnamed disaster rang in my ears. The cat was gone before I could even open my eyes, but he’d left some claw marks on my chest to remember him by. A solitary orange ember glowed in the fireplace, and the room was cold as the grave. I hurried down the front staircase in the dark to Nora’s room and opened the door just as she was opening it, nearly knocking her over.
“Oh! I’m sorry! I thought I heard a crash.”
“So did I.”
“You’re okay though?”
“Yes, except for the heart attack you just gave me.”
“I’m so sorry. What was it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Give me your flashlight and I’ll check.”
Nora passed it to me with a shaking hand.
“Stay here. I’ll be right back.”
I crept around the parlor and the dining room and the kitchen, shining my light across every surface. I looked upstairs, in the attic, in the basement. Nothing was out of order.
“I don’t know,” I said to her as I handed her the flashlight. “It must have been outside. Maybe a transformer blew or something.”
I built up her fire again to warm the room. With nothing left to do and with the adrenaline rush wearing off, I fed my own fire and crawled back into bed. Matthew remained in hiding.
The fire was dead again when I woke up. I pulled back my hair, which was grimy from two days with no shower, and went outside to see if I could locate the source of the noise from the night. There were a number of branches down in front of the house. One had narrowly missed the porch, another rested uncomfortably close to my car. The snow had stuck to the ice-covered branches, piling on more weight, flake by delicate flake, until it was just too much.
I walked around to the backyard. Then I saw it. The two great trunks of the catalpa tree had finally parted ways for all time. One leaned at an odd angle, the other lay on its side, its topmost branches reaching into the herb garden. Part of the fence had been smashed. A few broken branches lay scattered around the space, some stuck in the rosebushes, others flattening the oregano and the lavender.
All of my hard work lay beneath the wreckage of the tree Nora could do nothing to save.
The whine of a chainsaw echoed across the open field as Tyrese dismantled the fallen catalpa. When I had broken the news to Nora about her devastated tree, I’d expected her to grieve for the loss. She only said, “Tell William. He’ll take care of it.” Then she got back to work. I began to wonder whether I should be marking the frequency of her slips on a calendar.
Now Tyrese was replenishing our diminished woodpile with the real William’s tree. “Most of this has been dead for some time,” he said, “so it should already be dry enough to burn. But I wouldn’t keep stockpiles of it in the house if I were you. Dead trees are favorite homes for carpenter ants and termites. The cold will keep them dormant, but when the wood warms up inside, they’ll wake up. So just bring in what you’ll put in the fireplace right away. It’ll mean a lot more trips in and out, but you don’t want those in the house.”
I nodded and imagined with some distaste the last sizzling moments of all the tiny bodies I would be feeding into the fireplaces. Did carpenter ants scream?
“Been pretty busy?” I said.
“Yeah. It’s a mess out there. News is saying half the Lower Peninsula is without power. Says it’ll be a week for some people. Do you two need somewhere to stay?”
“Do you have power?”
“No. But there are a couple churches that already have it back on, and they’re taking people in.”
“I doubt Nora would be interested. She’s been obsessed with a sewing project. I don’t think I could get her to drop it for even a day.”
He went back to his chainsaw. I stacked the smaller logs and gathered sticks into bundles for kindling. Another hour went by before Tyrese had done all he could do. I was exhausted and my toes and nose were numb. I followed him back to his truck to see him off when it occurred to me that this special service was probably not included in the landscaping package Mr. Rich had devised for Nora.
“What do I owe you?”
He shook his head. “C’mon. Nothing.”
“This isn’t mowing the lawn.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’m happy to do it for you.”
He was looking at me with such kindness in his eyes I wanted to cry. “Okay.”
I shook my head.
He put a gloved hand on my shoulder. “Don’t say nothing. Because I know something’s wrong.”
Of course something was wrong, but I couldn’t say what it was. How do you put into words the feeling that you’re an adult and yet you are utterly lost and confused? How do you say that you don’t know what to do with your life? That it feels like everything you’ve worked for is worthless and yet you don’t know what else to do but more of the same? How do you explain the feeling that your life is over when there’s nothing wrong beyond the fact that you lost a job? How do you say that out loud when innocent people are shot and killers go free and it feels like the very fabric of society is unraveling?
So I didn’t say anything. We just stood there in the snow surrounded by sawdust, and a tear froze on my face.
“Let me take you out for breakfast tomorrow morning,” he said. “Will Nora be all right on her own for a bit?”
I nodded and rubbed my raw cheeks. “Yes.”
“Okay then. You meet me at the Roadhouse Diner—they do have power—at eight o’clock. And let’s talk this out. Whatever this is. Okay?”
“Okay.”
As I watched him drive away, I decided to tell him everything—about Nora, about Mr. Rich, about the camera and the photos, about Vic Sharpe, about the interview at the Beat—everything. And maybe if I could just say it all out loud, I’d know what to do with it.