I was lying in my bed in the dark in my grandmother’s house in a town in Minnesota that had just gotten buried under eighteen inches of weather, and my breath was coming out in clouds, and my lungs were getting a lesson in what heating costs when the grid fails.
The clock on my nightstand was black. No time. No light. Nothing.
I sat up slowly.
The sheets were cold on my legs where they had come untucked in the night. The radio on my dresser was off, which meant it had powered down, which meant the electricity had gone at some point while I was sleeping. Five a.m., probably, based on the quality of the dark. The pre-dawn dark. The dark right before the world started being visible again.
I put on three sweaters — I had learned this the hard way last winter when the pipes froze — and I went downstairs.
The house was not warm. The house was the temperature of a walk-in freezer that had not been maintained in three years. Which was accurate, because the furnace had not been serviced in three years, and I had been telling myself I was going to get to that someday, after the foreclosure was handled, after the diner stabilized, after the town stopped needing me for every single thing.
The furnace made no sound.
I checked the thermostat. Off. Dead. No power to tell it to do the one job it had.
I went to the basement door and opened it. The smell hit me first — cold air, rust, the particular wet-basement smell that comes right before the pipes start ticking. The furnace was a monster from 1997. It had a small light on the front that was supposed to be green when it was working. It was not green. It was dark.
I closed the door.
I went to the kitchen.
The kitchen was the warmest room in the house, andwarmestwas a relative term I was going to have to learn to appreciate. I put the kettle on the propane stove, which started immediately because propane is aggressive and does not care about electrical grids and does not care about the state of anyone’s life. I watched the heat rise under the kettle and I told myself that I had been through worse. Which was technically true — my parents had died, my grandmother had died, the diner was being foreclosed on — butworseandworse in a house with no heatwere different categories of difficulty.
The snow outside the kitchen window was coming sideways.
I had only looked at the weather app once yesterday, right before the power started to fail, and the forecast had said eighteen inches. The snow outside my window saidwe are going to exceed that,the way snow says things when it is moving horizontally and piling in drifts that are higher than the first-floor windows.
I made tea while the kettle boiled. Constant Comment. My grandmother’s brand. The smell of it was the only thing in the house that was not cold.
I drank the tea in my three sweaters while standing at the kitchen window watching the weather do its worst.
I did not, at that point, understand that I was supposed to go to the mudroom.
The mudroom — it was really just an enclosed space between the house and the garage, where coats lived and the door to the basement was and where my grandmother had kept her gardening supplies in the before-times — was not a room I had reason to visit at five-fifteen in the morning during a blizzard.
I found it because the pipes started ticking.
I went to the basement door to figure out why the pipes were ticking in a way that suggested something was about to freezecatastrophically, and the mudroom door was open, and there was a generator sitting on the far side of the space.
Not a small generator.
A generator.
A real one.
I stood in the doorway of the mudroom and looked at the generator for a long moment like it was going to explain itself. It did not. Generators do not speak. They sit and look mechanical and wait for someone to plug them in.
Next to the generator was a space heater. A new one. Not mine. Not the one from the bedroom. A different space heater with a label that still had the price sticker on it. Thirty-seven dollars. From the hardware store two towns over that had been having a sale before Christmas.
Next to the space heater were three five-gallon jugs of water.
On the washer was a pyramid of canned food.
Beans. Soup. Chili. Coffee. Matches. A flashlight. A battery-powered radio. All arranged like a Jenga tower that had been constructed by someone with an architectural degree and a very specific understanding of what would be impossible to ignore.
I did not move.
I did not breathe.
