The Stars Are Fire(44)
She has children.
The onset of evening begins well enough—the snow has been steady—but by seven o’clock, the wind picks up again, and shortly after that, the electricity stops. A tree, perhaps weakened by the fire, has fallen onto an electric wire.
“We’re in it now,” her mother says.
Grace tucks Claire into a soft armchair and sees apprehension in her daughter’s face. “Mommy, stay next to me.” Grace kneels on the floor to rub her daughter’s back until she falls asleep. Grace has made a nest for Tom and herself with a pile of rugs on the floor in front of the fire screen. She makes up a bed for her mother on the sofa. The high upholstered back will help to capture the heat.
“There’s a fair amount of wood on the back porch,” her mother says. “I hope it outlasts the power outage.”
“It has to.”
Grace then remembers the water pipes. In the kitchen, she turns on the tap at the sink, running as little water as possible, but keeping the flow steady. She doesn’t want the pipes to burst in what will shortly become a frozen house. She does a similar thing with all the faucets in the bathrooms, making sure there are no stoppers in the sinks and tubs, and when she ventures down into the basement, candle in hand, she discovers a large sink with a faucet.
“We have the stove for warmth when we need it,” Grace says to her mother. “Refrigeration won’t be a problem—at least not yet.”
“Wish we’d listened to the radio before the power went out. Then we might know how long it will snow for.”
What good would that have done? Grace asks herself. It’s not as though they have somewhere else to go. She remembers the families in the tin houses. Electricity only, and when that went…She hopes the people were evacuated before the storm got rough.
Despite exhaustion, Grace periodically untangles herself from the nest, lights a candle, and brings a pile of wood into the sitting room via a red wagon her mother found in the nursery. Because the journey is cold, she works fast to build up a good fire. When she’s done, she holds the top blanket close to the fire screen and then lays it over Tom and herself.
The four eat in the kitchen, their hats and jackets on, the warmth from the stove saving the room from being intolerably cold. Marjorie prepares oatmeal, determined to get a hot breakfast into them. She warms the maple syrup, which is as thick as sludge from the cold, and pours it over the cereal. Marjorie urges Grace to eat an entire bowl. “This is no time to be fussy about food.”
Grace wants to tell her mother that her lack of appetite has nothing to do with fussiness.
“I have an idea,” Marjorie announces to Grace. “The sitting room is massive, and the heat dissipates. We could move into the library instead, which is smaller. There’s a fireplace and a bed. You could sleep there with both the children, and we could bring in the sofa and put it against the wall, and I’ll sleep there. If we shut the door, we’ll be fine.”
Grace experiences her mother’s proposition as a gift. To sleep in Aidan’s bed is to stay connected to him, if only for a few more days.
“I’ll find some clean sheets,” her mother burbles happily, “and we have plenty of blankets. We’d better bring in toys for the children and books to read by candlelight.”
In the library, Grace starts a fire in the grate. She and her mother drag the sofa in. Her mother makes up the two beds, so that they are ready for evening, though it is only ten in the morning. After Grace gathers her small family into the library, she wants to lie on the bed and think of Aidan.
She changes the children’s clothing, and then enters the frigid bathroom just off the library to change her own. It’s so cold, she doesn’t want to sit on the toilet seat. She has brought from Merle’s closet a wool sweater, pants, and a scarf. After she wraps her coat around her and puts on her gloves, she places Merle’s mink turban on her head; there’s a great deal of wood to bring in and to store just outside the library door. From her mother-in-law’s closet, she’s taken the warmest and smallest items she could find for her mother. Marjorie swims in the mink jacket but doesn’t refuse it.
Before Grace leaves the bathroom, she opens the medicine cabinet to see if Aidan left anything behind. But the metal shelves are empty.
By eleven o’clock in the morning, Grace, Claire, and Tom have made a fort out of all the pillows and cushions; they play in it in woolen coats, as if they were outside and making an igloo. Marjorie has braved the frigid kitchen to bring spoons and small plates, so that Grace and Claire can delineate the “kitchen” from the “living room.” Tom, delighted to be playing with his mother’s and sister’s full attention, crawls and rolls and delivers deep belly laughs. He sits on plates and knocks over cushions, eliciting his sister’s fury. When it’s time for their naps, Grace crawls into the fort, her legs sticking out, and reads them stories. She, too, falls asleep with her head in the kitchen.
Grace stumbles, snow blind, outside. She squints in the bright sun. The world is covered in white, which seems, with its crusty surface, to be a heavy blanket of sparks stretching as far as she can see. Even the ocean has frozen near the shoreline, and she can see blue water only a hundred feet out to sea. These blasts from nature that make it so hard to live are sometimes beautiful. The fire, in its essence, was sublime; the quiet world around her covered in snow is as still as glass.