“You didn’t ask if it was yours, did you?”
I stopped digging and exhaled.
“You did, didn’t you?” laughed Chuck. “You are an asshole.”
My head sagged, and I rubbed my face with one snow-encrusted glove.
“And I mean that in the best possible way, my friend.”
“Thanks,” I sighed, shaking my head, and leaned down to scoop out another shovelful of snow.
Chuck leaned through the doorway. “Don’t beat yourself up too much. She’ll forgive you. It’s Christmas.”
I grunted and threw myself into finishing the excavation. Pam had wrapped Chuck’s injury, so he had a club for one hand, making him useless for digging. Just my luck.
“You gotta stop imagining things,” added Chuck, “stop seeing things that aren’t there. That girl adores you.”
“Uh-huh,” I mumbled, unconvinced.
It was still snowing, not as hard as yesterday, but still—it was the whitest of white Christmases that New York had ever seen. Everything outside was covered, and the cars parked along Twenty-Fourth Street were the barest of lumps under the thick carpet of snow. This silent and blanketed New York was eerie.
Right after the blackout, we hadn’t seen the glow of mushroom clouds on the horizon, so we assumed the worst hadn’t happened. A few of us had gone outside and battled our way over two blocks to the Chelsea Piers, straining to see into the snowy blackness above the Hudson. I’d expected to see or hear something, a fighter aircraft battling an unseen foe, but no. After a tense couple of hours, nothing had happened except that the snow had gotten deeper.
The moment the power had gone out, Chuck had fired up his generator. Our building’s fiber-optic line from Verizon should have worked even in a blackout—assuming you could power up your own TV and cable box. When we’d tried CNN, the image and sound had been scrambled for a few hours, and then it went totally blank. It was the same on all channels. The radio stations were still broadcasting, however, and they were filled with conflicting stories. Some said that the unidentified aerial targets were enemy drones that had invaded US airspace; others said they were missiles and that whole cities had been destroyed.
Around midnight, the president had broadcast a short message saying that there’d been some kind of cyberattack. Its full extent was still being assessed, he said, and they still had no information about the unidentified aerial targets, except that they didn’t have any reports of US cities being physically attacked. He said nothing about drones. Power had been restored to many areas by then; at least, that was what the announcement said. We were still without power, however.
“You sure we need to do this?” I asked. “The power came back on yesterday after just a few hours. It’ll probably be back on by this afternoon.”
Chuck had had the idea of siphoning gas out of cars on the street. We wouldn’t take it all out of any one car, he reasoned, and they wouldn’t be going anywhere for the foreseeable future anyway. We needed more fuel for the generator. Gasoline wasn’t something he’d been allowed to store indoors, and we figured the gas stations would be closed.
“Better safe than sorry, my granddad always said,” replied Chuck.
While we were inside, this plan had sounded clever; outside, it was a different story. Just opening the back door was an adventure, with all the snow piled against it. I was barely able to squeeze out, and I’d spent twenty minutes digging the snow away from the outside of the door enough to open it properly.
“Come on, then, let’s go,” I told Chuck as I scraped away the last of it. Opening the door, he scrambled into the snow outside, and we waddled through waist-deep drifts to the nearest car. Underneath all my layers of clothing I was sweating, prickly and uncomfortable, while my hands and face and feet were numb from cold.
“Remind me to add snowshoes to my shopping list for the next disaster,” laughed Chuck.
After brushing away two feet of snow from the top of the first car, we found it had a locked gas cap, so we moved to the next one. With that one we had more luck. After five minutes of digging out a trench, we positioned the empty gas canister as low as we could and inserted a length of rubber tubing into the gas tank.
“I remember buying this medical tubing and wondering what I’d ever use it for,” mused Chuck, kneeling in the snow. “Now I know.”
I held the end of the tube up to him. “I did all the digging. I believe the sucking is your job.” I’d never siphoned anything in my life.
“Great.” He leaned down and put his lips around the tube. After every few inhalations, he’d stop to cough out the fumes, holding his thumb over the end of the tube. Finally, he hit pay dirt.
“Merry Christmas!” I teased as he doubled over, coughing and retching out a mouthful of gasoline.
He leaned down and inserted the end of the tube into the canister, releasing his thumb. The satisfying sound of running liquid echoed out from the container. It was working.
I was impressed. “Not bad.”
Wiping spittle from the side of his mouth with his club hand, he grinned at me. “By the way, congrats on getting pregnant.”
Sitting there in the snow, I had a sudden flashback of being a child, of the days my brothers and I would go out back of our small house in Pittsburgh to build snow forts after a storm. I was the youngest, and I remembered my mother coming out on the back stoop to check on us. She was really checking on me, making sure I hadn’t been buried under the snow by my roughhousing brothers.
I had my own family to protect now. Perhaps alone I could tramp off into the wilderness with a backpack, survive, and figure out whatever came my way, but with children everything became dramatically different. Taking a deep breath, I looked up into the falling snow.
“Seriously, congratulations. I know it’s what you wanted.” Chuck leaned over and put a hand on my shoulder.
I looked down into the four-gallon canister wedged into the snow. It was about a third full. “But not what she wanted.”
“What?”
How much do I want to share? But there was no sense in bottling it up. “She was going to get an abortion.”
Chuck’s hand dropped from my shoulder. Snowflakes settled around us. “An abortion?”
My cheeks flushed hot. “I don’t know. That’s what she told me. She was waiting till after the holidays.”
“How pregnant is she?”
“Maybe ten weeks. She knew when we had the Thanksgiving party, when her family was here and her dad offered that position with the firm in Boston.”
Chuck pursed his lips, not saying anything.
“You know Luke was an accident—a happy accident, but still an accident. Lauren’s father was expecting her to be the first female senator for Massachusetts or something. She was under massive pressure, and I guess I wasn’t listening.”
“And having another baby now—”
“She wasn’t going to tell anyone. She was going to Boston in the New Year.”
“You agreed to go to Boston?”
“She was going to go by herself, get a separation if I wouldn’t.”
Chuck looked away from me as a tear ran down my face. It froze halfway.
“Sorry, man.”
I straightened up and shook my head. “Anyway, all that’s over, at least for now.”
The container was almost full.
“She’s going to be thirty next month,” said Chuck. “Milestones can stir up a lot of confusion in people, about what’s important.”
“She obviously decided what was important.” I ripped the tube out of the container, and gasoline sprayed up onto me and soaked my glove. I swore and began screwing the cap onto the container to seal it. It jammed, and I swore again.
Chuck leaned over and put his gloved hand on mine, stopping me. “Take it easy, Mike. Take it easy on yourself, and more important, take it easy on her. She didn’t do anything. She just thought about doing something. I bet there are a lot of things you’ve thought of doing that people wouldn’t be too impressed with.”
“But to think about doing something like that …”
“She’s confused, and she didn’t do anything. She needs you now. Luke needs you now.” He picked up the container with his good hand and stood up, sinking back into the snow and falling sideways. Looking at me, he added, “I need you now.”
Shaking my head, I took the container from him. We started shuffling back to our building.
“Why do you think CNN didn’t come back on last night?” asked Chuck.
“Local carrier networks are probably jammed,” I speculated. “Or generators ran out of power.”
“Or CNN was bombed,” joked Chuck. “Not that I would be entirely against that.”
“Big data centers usually keep a hundred hours of fuel for backup generators. Isn’t that what Rory said?”
“I think he said the New York Times had that much.” He looked around at the deep snow on the streets. “Won’t be any refueling for a while.”
Reaching our building, we saw that snow had already drifted up against the door. We better come and clear this regularly if we want to be able to get out. Tony was still at his post at the other end of the main floor. He waved to us.
Reassuringly, we heard the rumble of a big plow coming down Ninth Avenue and saw it sweep by in the distance between the buildings. It was nearly the only evidence that the city was still operating.
When the power had gone out for the second time, the local radio stations had still been broadcasting, but this morning many of them were static. The radio stations still transmitting were now filled with wild speculation about what had happened, but they were just as much in the dark as we were. The only consistent information was that this second blackout had affected not just New England but the entire United States, and a hundred million people or more were without power. The best the radio announcers could do was report on local conditions. We had no idea what was happening in the world, or if the world even existed anymore.
It was as if New York had been disconnected from the rest of the planet and was floating alone, soundlessly, in a snowy gray cloud.