12 Days Before the Storm
There’s a rare spike in temperature that I feel the next morning even before the sun hits the house. The bit of recent snow is melted, the earth heating again, and I can throw open the windows to keep the air fresh while I apply paint. I’d primed the downstairs walls the night before and started with fresh coats of paint first thing after breakfast.
Nadia sits with her colouring books and markers “painting like Mommy”, and we’re both going to need baths later. Her fingers are smudged in a rainbow and I’m really out of practice painting, apparently, because I’ve got Driftscape Tan streaked on my left arm and, from what I can see on my clothes, I figure there’s more elsewhere.
I like the neutral—it has almost a rosy lavender undertone. I’d worried originally it would be that sickly brownish-beige kind of neutral that turns my stomach, but it’s much warmer. The guy at the counter suggested a matching cream for the trim and a grey-blue for an accent wall, and I just blindly agreed because I’d wanted to get to Janelle’s, but now I think it’s going to work.
Nick would like it, I think.
He preferred cooler, steely neutrals; I prefer colour. Any colour, really, just bright and solid. We compromised often, and I think we might’ve settled on these current living room colours if he’d been here. The fireplace wall will be the accent one and the focal point of the living room, and eventually the mantel will have a couple of framed photographs and some of Nick’s smaller wood-carved sculptures once I dig them out of storage.
I’ve checked Montgomery’s site again and there’s no new post. I even combed the archive all night but couldn’t find anything about me. There’s a locked section for members, which requires real names and a monthly membership fee paid via credit card; I’m not about to hand over that kind of info, so I’ve managed with what I can find publicly available. And despite Owen saying Montgomery planned to speak to Nick’s friends, I checked again with Janelle and neither she nor her husbands have heard a word from the reporter.
Part of me wishes I’d taken Janelle up on the offer to stay with her, even if only for Nadia’s sake. She seems quite content with her colouring, and this afternoon we’ll play some games while we wait for the paint to dry prior to the next coat, but I know how much she loves Janelle’s house and the twins.
When we decided on this house, it was never supposed to be just me as a single mom with my daughter. There was supposed to be Nick, supposed to be a family, supposed to be warmth and voices and laughter. Is there enough laughter, just with me? Is there enough warmth? Is she happy—as happy as she’d be with Nick here?
Will she even remember one day that she’d had a Dada?
I lose time just staring out the rear windows at the woods beyond. Woods Nick could’ve been lost in last year. The authorities came out with dogs, people from Red Fox Lake came out to search as well. The dogs couldn’t even pick up a scent, there was too much snow during the storm. Even late spring when things had thawed, there no sign of anything. Nick just...vanished. The woods are vast—for him, it was part of the draw, as he liked the idea of walking trails out here in the summer. He wanted to get a dog.
It would be so easy to get lost out there. I’d thought for sure that he left the house, for whatever reason, and just got turned around when the snow hit. Especially with a blizzard, visibility was nonexistent and someone could die of hypothermia just a few metres from home.
I should come up with some kind of system, some way of marking paths out there. Just in case, always just in case—I can’t stop thinking “just in case”. In case I somehow end up out there in winter.
In case Nick has somehow, magically, been wandering for a year and needs to find his way home.
If the warmth keeps for a few more days, it’ll delay the ground freezing up.