It wasn’t until Grace Tibbits saw her breath frost in front of her that she allowed herself to believe that it really was freezing in her house and not just her imagination.
Of course, she could be imagining that her breath was frosting every time she breathed out as easily as she could imagine …
Oh, stop it.
It was cold in here.
She might be a confused, disoriented, dying of end-stage CKD, chronic kidney disease, but she wasn’t completely crazy. Not yet, anyway, though she was surely on a fast track to getting there. It was cold in here. The temperature had been dropping for the past hour and a half.
Ever since she’d stopped calling out to Audrey and Mary Jo. If they’d heard her, they would have come. So obviously they couldn’t hear her. And thinking about the why to that was worse than them not coming.
Fine. She’d do this by herself.
Most tough things she’d ever done in her life she’d been alone when she’d done them. The going out of it, well, everybody died alone when you got right down to it. They might have had friends and family gathered around their beds, but in the actual moment of dying they were all by their lonesomes. Stepping out of life into … that was about as profoundly alone as it was possible to get.
And then you were in the presence of God, which meant you wouldn’t ever be alone again for all eternity. But the moment in between, yeah, that was alone on steroids.
No different now. She was here by herself in a house getting colder and colder. Alone.
Had Reece been alone, too, at the end?
Grace had convinced her oldest daughter, Audrey, to take her out to Reece’s house yesterday. Since Liam had got shot at the county meeting on Saturday, somebody needed to let Reece know his phone was on the blink, that everybody who’d tried to call had just gotten a busy signal.
She still wondered if Audrey was really so gullible that she believed that was the real reason Grace wanted to go to his house.
Probably was, come to think of it, because if she’d suspected what she was going to find when she got there she would have refused to go altogether or would at least have been prepared for what she was about to see.
They had driven down the gravel driveway toward Reece’s house and Audrey had kept up a constant babble of noise, senseless talk, wondering if this was the year the cicadas would come out of the ground because if it was she was going to have to go get herself some earplugs because wasn’t any way in the world to go to sleep with that buzzing in her ears.
Cicadas didn’t buzz at night. Audrey knew that. And there was nowhere for her to go to get earplugs either, but Audrey wasn’t paying any more attention to what she was saying than Grace was paying to listening.
Grace glanced at the girl behind the wheel only once, saw the pinched look on her face, how she gripped the wheel in white knuckles and felt a wave of sympathy wash over her, wanted to take her little girl Audrey into her arms and tell her the mean old wasps wouldn’t sting her anymore, that Reece had knocked down the wasp nest — got stung half a dozen times doing it — and had poured gasoline on it and set it on fire.
Though the woman behind the wheel clearly wasn’t that same little girl, she wore the same look of fear on her face, a kind of permeating fear that only went up and down in intensity but never went away entirely.
Mary Jo had the same look.
Surely, they hadn’t always looked like that. They only started when they found out their mother was going on dialysis. Or had Grace only noticed the look after she told them?
If it had, indeed, always been there, Grace was terribly, terribly sorry about that. She was their mother and if they lived in a state of constant fear, that had to be her fault somehow, didn’t it? Had she just been such a strong woman, too strong after Low-Life bailed — “he died at sea,” she had told the kids and they either believed it or pretended they did because they never asked about him.
She’d taken over the farm, worked it herself, only hired out the physical things she wasn’t strong enough to do. She had gotten a job in town at the savings and loan and there were years of being so busy she met herself coming and going. Kids to school, her to work, pick the kids up, do the chores, fix dinner, “family time — riiiight,” fall into bed to get some sleep to get up in the morning and do it all over again.
But she’d managed.
You’d think watching your mother do a thing like that would be inspiring, not intimidating. That it would make you a person of discipline and strong character. It hadn’t, not with any of the four of them. Well, maybe with Oliver, the youngest, the one who went his own way. He’d always been such an independent “wild hare” she didn’t know him well enough to say.
Suddenly, Audrey started screaming!
Grace was so startled she felt her own heart stop. Just stop. It hadn’t been beating regularly since the toxins began to build in her system, but it had never before just stopped.
Then it commenced to flutter in irregular beats that she knew wasn’t pumping no blood.
Grace began to get dizzy and a black frame formed around her vision and began to close in on her.
So she coughed. She’d read somewhere that if you were having a heart attack you should cough all the way to the hospital because the act of coughing squeezed the heart in a similar fashion to CPR. She coughed again, harder — as Audrey continued to scream. Again and again she coughed, every couple of seconds, regular-like, and finally felt her heart settle into a rhythm. About the speed of a hummingbird’s heart, but that was better than useless fluttering.
Only when she’d gotten her heart beating like it should did Grace follow Audrey’s gaze. She felt like screaming then, too, but she had neither the breath to scream nor the strength to do it. She heard herself make sounds, though, little sounds, whining, mewling sounds that passed for screams from the mouth of a mother who was staring at what surely was the grave of a son she didn’t know had died.
Reece’s house — where he lived with a wife and two daughters until a couple of days ago when he’d tried to blow a hole in the Jabberwock — was gone. Not gone as in vanished. Gone as in not what it had been before. It was ancient, looked like it was a century old. A shack. A derelict house that’d been left to rot by the owners.
The tree with a tire swing in the front had died and fallen onto the house, crushing the roof on the west end. There was no yard, no fence, no furniture, nothing to indicate anybody had lived in the house, had even been inside the house, in half a century.
Audrey just kept screaming, shaking her head and screaming. She’d run the car off the driveway into a bush when she saw the house and now she sat there in the driver’s seat shrieking. Grace reached over and turned off the key, got out of the car and approached the house but didn’t go inside. Couldn’t bring herself to go inside. Because Reece wasn’t there, of course, and because there was something so profoundly frightening about the place she couldn’t have been dragged inside by a team of Clydesdales and the Budweiser beer wagon.
And the house had been cold. It was a warm summer day. The same temperature it’d been every day since J-Day. But the closer she got to the house, the colder it got. She didn’t remember what happened after that. If Audrey got out of the car and got her and put her back inside, or if she had run there in terror from the cold. Her last clear memory was Audrey driving like a madwoman down the lane away from Reece’s house, her eyes wild, trailing a strange keening scream behind her like the tail on a kite.
Cold.
That’s what everybody said about the houses — and there were more of them every day — that had aged a century overnight. Some of them had withstood the “aging process” better than others. Some were almost unrecognizable piles of rubble. But they all had one thing in common. Cold.
So when Grace began to feel the temperature drop in her own home … well, duh.
As soon as Audrey helped her into her favorite chair in the living room where she could look out at the mountains through the front window, she’d begun to feel chilled. She’d dozed off then. She was always so tired, so incredibly tired, that she would fall asleep in the middle of dinner, or while she was talking. When she woke up, she’d called out to Mary Jo to bring her a blanket. Since it was clearly afternoon by now, Mary Jo had taken Audrey’s place “babysitting” Mama. That’s what Grace called it, though she knew in truth that she actually did need the girls’ help, that her progressive weakness had robbed her of the last dignity — doing for herself. They took turns looking after her.
But Mary Jo hadn’t answered.
She’d called Audrey then, louder. Well, loud for a woman who was doing well to whisper.
The house around her was silent.
And cold.
She’d called and called. They had never come and the temperature continued to drop. The view out the front window was of the mountain’s shadow, hurrying across the hollow toward the house, carrying buckets of darkness to splash under the trees and the bushes, and the light would gradually fade, the sky would go from dark blue to black. The stars would come out. The wrong stars, but Grace supposed wrong stars were better than no stars at all.
She knew then.
The cold had come. Whatever that was. It was her time. And she should be grateful it was finally going to be over. Whatever it was — oh, call it by its right name, the Jabberwock! — had taken her children and grandchildren, and Grace really didn’t want to hang around without them.
It just wasn’t right, though. It wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. She was supposed to go first, to lie in bed with them gathered around and step out of her sick, polluted, poisoned body when it was time and into the arms of God.
But she was still here and the others were gone.
Now it was her time.
She got quiet, listened.
She could hear it coming.