The wind pushed against the east-facing windows and the house answered with a low, structural groan.
“Wade,” I said.
He did not answer, but I felt him attending.
I looked at the table. I let out a breath through my nose. “There was a blizzard,” I said. “Like this one.” My voice had the particular flat quality of something I had organized too many times to let inflection anywhere near it. “The Hargroves, our neighbors, two miles east, had a fence come down. Their cattle were loose near the highway.” I pressed my thumbs against the back of the chair. “Ethan got the call. He said he would be an hour.”
Cole had gone still at the counter. Rhett had not moved from where he stood near the door, his hat still on, the lantern sitting between us.
“The snow was bad when he left,” I said. “Getting worse.” I kept my eyes on the table. “I stood at this window and watched his tail lights go down the drive.” I paused because my throat was doing something I had not given it permission to do, and I waited until it stopped. “The road that runs along the ridge above Hargrove’s property. East side.” The words came out one at a time, evenly spaced. “No guardrail.”
The wind found the south windows.
“The sheriff came at two in the morning.” My sentences had shortened to the length of single facts. “He went off the cliff.” I stopped. “They said it was instant.”
My knuckles were white on the back of the chair. I was not crying. I had not cried at the telling of it, not once in all the time of telling it to people who needed to know, and I was not crying now. My jaw was set and my eyes were dry and there was a rigid, full-body stillness to me that I could feel in the backs of my thighs and in my shoulders and in every joint from my hands down to my feet on the cold floor. Whatever crying was made of, I had been past it for a long time.
Cole set his gloves down on the table.
He did it without sound, without looking for my eyes, without the particular gentle urgency of a man who needed to do something about what he had just heard. He simply set them down and left his hands where they were on the table, open and still.
Rhett’s expression had changed in the way his face changed when the humor went out of it entirely, not grief, exactly, not the managed expression of a person performing feeling. Something quieter. The laugh lines around his mouth had gone to something else.
Wade did not look away from my face. Not once, through the whole of it. His arms had uncrossed and his hands were at his sides and he was looking at me the way he looked at things he intended to keep looking at, without the relief of glancing away.
The wind hit the house in a long, sustained gust that rattled every window in its frame. The old cottonwoods creaked. The loose shutter knocked again on the east side, patient and persistent.
My hands were still on the back of the chair. I could feel the grain of the old wood against my palms, its particular roughness, the specific topography of something worn by years of being held just like this. I did not let go.
***
The power went at seven o’clock, or close enough to it that the exactness didn’t matter, two flickers, the lights brightening briefly like a caught breath before going out entirely, and then the kitchen was dark except for the fire in the sitting room doorway and the cold blue light of the blizzard pressing through every window it could find. Cole was already moving. I heard him before I saw him. He came through the kitchen first,a lantern in each hand, and lit them on the table and the counter with the unhurried efficiency of a man who had been anticipating this for the last two hours. He carried the rest of them one at a time through to the sitting room, lining them along the mantle and the low shelf beside the door, and the house changed under their light in the way houses changed when the ordinary electric light was replaced by something older and warmer and less certain, the shadows moving at the edges of each room, the walls going amber, the ceiling going dark above the small circles of warmth they threw.
Outside, the wind was loud in a way that required something from the voice. Not shouting, but intention, the specific effort of pitching words across a room when the old window frames were flexing in their casings and the eaves were making a sustained, low sound of pressure. The house creaked and popped under it, the structural commentary of old timber responding to a force it had responded to for a hundred years and had opinions about.
We ended up in the sitting room. It was the room with the fire and the most lanterns and the windows that faced away from the worst of it, which was the south and the west, and the four of us arrived there over the course of the next hour the way people arrived at the warmest place in a cold house: gradually, without announcement. I sat on the floor with my back against the front of the sofa, the heavy wool blanket pulled across my lap and my knees drawn up to the angle Hope allowed, which was not far. The fire was burning properly now, Cole having built it up to the steady, committed level it needed to be at for a long night, and the heat of it reached my face and the fronts of my hands and went no further, the back of the room holding its cold regardless.
Wade settled beside me on the floor.
He lowered himself, his back against the sofa base the same as mine, and the warmth of his shoulder came against mine and stayed. Cole took the armchair nearest the fire. He had not stopped tending it since he’d built it up, a log added, adjusted, the poker run along the grate when the logs needed redistributing, steady and methodical and absorbed by the task in the way he was absorbed by physical work that had a clear purpose. Rhett sat on the sofa behind me, playing with my hair and giving me a shoulder massage. I took a long, deep breath, relaxing into his hands.
The wind pushed hard against the house. The lanterns responded to it, the flames tilting inside their glass housings in the drafts that moved through the old walls, throwing the shadows sideways and back again. The sitting room smelled of woodsmoke and the wool blanket across my lap and the faint cedar of the old furniture, the particular close warmth of a room that had been occupied by four people for several hours. I watched the fire and I listened to the blizzard beyond the walls and I felt Hope shift once beneath my hands and settle.
At some point, I had stopped tracking the time after the power went, Rhett reached down from the sofa again, and rested one hand on my shoulder.
He settled his hand there the way he settled into things that mattered to him, without making an occasion of the settling. His palm was warm through the fabric of my sweater. I did not move away from it.
The fire popped. Cole fed it another log. The wind outside reorganized itself into a sustained, high sound that the house answered with its full range of structural vocabulary, every old board and joint offering its response.
I looked at the fire for a while.
“I’m scared,” I said.
My voice came out smaller than I intended. It came out in the register I used only when something had gotten past the part of me that managed registers, and the room received it without any of the usual social machinery, no one moving to meet it with reassurance or to smooth it down to something more manageable.
“Not of the storm,” I said. My hand had gone to Hope, palm flat, the way it always ended up when I was trying to say something true. “I’ve been through blizzards. I know what they are.” I looked at the fire. “I’m scared because now I have three people I could watch go out in one.”
The words sat in the warm air of the sitting room and the storm pushed against the walls and nobody said anything for a moment.
