Acts of God (20 page)

“I know,” Nick said with a laugh, “to have an adult evening.”

“Well, yes, that's what I was thinking.”

In the end Danielle came out of her room, looking sullen as she had when I first laid eyes on her. Obediently she helped her mother set the table. “Can I do anything? Can I give you a hand?” I asked.

“Oh, you can come talk to me,” Margaret said. “I want to know everything. Let's get caught up.”

I followed her into the kitchen while Vicky sat by the fire that Nick had built, legs up, reading a magazine. “It's so good to have you here.”

“You seem to have done quite well for yourselves.”

“We've done well enough, but not spectacular. Nothing spectacular, you know.”

I looked out toward the window in the living room and saw that the snow was coming down hard. “Look at that,” I said.

Nick, who had followed us into the kitchen, peered out toward the lake. The wind was howling around the house and a purple darkness fell around us. “Yes, it does look like a storm.”

From the living room, Vicky glanced up as well. “What is it with those weathermen? They never get anything right.”

“Maybe we should get going. I don't want to get stuck here.”

“From the look of it,” Nick said, taking a sip of his bourbon, “you already are. We may as well eat. Then see what's happening.”

I was anxious and wanted to get going, but they all made me see that the blizzard was coming down from the north now and there wasn't really anywhere to go. But the thought of being trapped didn't appeal to me. I peered out at the blizzard and found myself wanting to be anywhere else but where I was. I longed for my ramshackle house and wondered what had conspired to bring me here. Margaret looked nervously outside. “It is coming down awfully hard.” Then suddenly she seemed excited, as if this were a great adventure we were embarking on. “It won't be so bad.”

“Really,” I said to Margaret and Nick, “I should get going.”

In the living room Vicky was peering out through the curtain at the swirling snow. “You can't see a thing,” she said.

“But I just can't—”

“It's much too dangerous to go anywhere on a night like this. We have plenty of room,” Margaret said. “I won't hear anything of it. You'll both sleep here. It will be fun. Just like when we were girls.” She was still drinking bourbon, though I had switched to white wine.

Nick gave me an odd look, as if he was uncomfortable with this arrangement. I shrugged, mouthed, “Sorry.” Then I glanced outside again. There was nothing but whiteness. “It's so strange,” Margaret said. “We hardly see you for years, Tessie. Now you seem to be around all the time.”

“Just twice,” I told her. “I don't think I'll be back again in winter.”

“But there's always spring and summer,” Margaret said with an almost angry voice now. “So perhaps we will see more of you?” Her words slurred a little.

“Perhaps.”

“Well, I'd like that,” Nick said. Margaret shot a glance his way.

We sat down and ate the roast chicken, salad with Thousand Island dressing from a jar, green beans, and a side dish of spaghetti with meat sauce, all of which Nick had prepared. It was tasty and Nick served a nice California Chardonnay that made me groggy and homesick. Margaret only had a few pieces of lettuce and a chicken wing on her plate. She didn't eat the wing, but she drank glass after glass of wine.

Danielle again made a brief appearance during which her father coaxed her to eat, but she disappeared soon afterward without saying good-bye to either her mother or her father. Nick shook his head as if to apologize. “Funny kid,” he said. “She gets moody. She acts weird when people she doesn't know are around.” I found her a strange, reclusive child, and seeing the way Nick watched over her made me think that he did as well.

Afterward we cleaned the kitchen and decided to call it a night. “We should get some rest,” Nick said. In the unlikely eventuality that the storm stopped, we'd have to dig ourselves out in the morning.

“Oh, let's stay up and play charades or Scrabble,” Margaret said. “Who wants to go to bed now?” Margaret began making charade signs—three words, first word, sounds like.

I yawned. “I guess I'm tired from my adventure in the ravines.”

Vicky said she wanted to turn in as well, but Margaret put her foot down. “Nobody wants to have any fun. I don't understand it.”

“They do want to have fun; they're just tired,” Nick offered.

“Well, we could stay up and talk awhile,” Vicky said. We agreed to polish off a bottle of wine in the sunken living room, discussing old times. What had happened to whom, what hadn't happened to so-and-so. Margaret wanted to know who was married to whom, who had children, who was divorced. She wanted to know about people who seemed irrelevant to me, people she hardly knew. Margaret appeared to be oddly out of touch, considering she lived in Winonah. Vicky told her about everyone she asked about. With almost every word we said, Margaret tossed her head back and laughed until it became annoying. Even when Vicky told her about someone who had died, she laughed. When she dropped her glass, it occurred to me that she was drunk.

Suddenly Margaret stood up and went to the window again. The light from the room reflected on the whirling snow. “I hate being trapped,” Margaret said. She shuddered as if the wind that was blowing outside had come right into the room. “You know, when there's no way out.”

“No one likes that,” Nick said.

“You don't have to remind me,” Margaret said, snapping at him. Then she turned to us. “What was that room in a house called when there's only one exit?” We looked at her, perplexed. “You remember, when you guys went door to door with the Firefighters of America?”

Vicky and I looked at each other, not quite remembering. Then I did. “It's a dead man's room,” I said flatly.

“That's right; that's what this reminds me of. A dead man's room. There's no way out.” Margaret kept staring out at the snow, still as a statue, as if she could not move. She let the curtain drop. “I'm tired.” She covered her mouth as she yawned.

We agreed we were all tired. Margaret offered Vicky an extra bedroom on the floor where they slept and gave me a small guest room off a wing of the main floor. Then we went to bed.

*   *   *

I couldn't sleep that night as the storm settled in. From somewhere in the house I thought I heard shouting. It seemed as if loud voices had woken me, but perhaps it was the wind. I've never been very good at sleeping in unfamiliar places—I wake at the slightest creak of the walls, the sigh of an unknown bed—but now it was especially hard. The guest room was drafty, and no matter how deeply I huddled under the covers I couldn't get warm. Everywhere around me were noises of rattling, branches flailing about. First the wind seemed to come from the north and then from the west. I could hear Lake Michigan pounding the shore, and the force of its arctic gale sent shivers through me.

From time to time I gazed out the window by my bed and saw the blinding white. I thought how in blizzards like this cows freeze standing up. It brought back all the frigid winters of my youth and I knew that when the storm was over, we could be trapped for days.

I'm not sure what time it was when I got up, threw a robe over my shoulders, and made my way through the house. Besides the wind, the house was oddly quiet as I followed the long corridor that led toward the living room and the kitchen. I was suddenly hungry, though I didn't know what I wanted. Sometimes I wake up in the night with these unspecified needs. Hot fudge sundaes, granola, Stolichnaya.

Tiptoeing down the corridor I passed Danielle's bedroom with the door ajar. Peering in, I saw the child asleep. The light from the hallway illuminated her face, which wore a scowl. I wondered what could make a child look that angry. Her room barely seemed like that of a child. There were a few stuffed animals, a unicorn poster on the wall, but other than that the room seemed barren, not the kid's room overflowing with things I was used to.

I made my way to the kitchen, which was dark, the linoleum cold on my bare feet. Outside the wind howled like a crying child and something in it frightened me. Liberty was asleep in his makeshift bed in the corner and he looked up at me with sleepy eyes, yawned, and went back to sleep.

Though I wasn't comfortable snooping around someone else's kitchen, I wanted to eat something. I opened the refrigerator door. There were a few old pieces of orange cheese, two eggs, some milk. Celery stalks. If we were stuck here in the storm, I wondered how we'd survive.

I poked around in the dark, illuminated only by the whiteness of the snow. Outside the moon peeked through. The storm was breaking up. Liberty got up suddenly and pattered across the kitchen floor. “Well, look who's here.” Nick laughed as I jumped, pulling my robe, which was too big, tightly around me.

“I got hungry,” I said. “I couldn't sleep.”

“Let's find something.” He was still dressed in his jeans and sweat-shirt and looked as if he hadn't been to bed.

Peering into the refrigerator, he shook his head sadly as if its emptiness reminded him of something he preferred to forget. “Why don't we have a drink instead.” He began producing tea bags, honey, cinnamon sticks, and a bottle of bourbon. “I'll make toddies.”

“Toddies?” I smiled and then I knew that that was what I wanted. Nick boiled the water, prepared the tea, put in the honey, a splash of bourbon, and capped it with a cinnamon stick. Handing me a mug, I warmed my fingers around it. I sniffed and took a sip. “This is good,” I told him.

He nodded. “Just what you need on a night like this.”

He sat across the Formica table from me, both of us with steaming cups in our hands. Liberty went back to his bed, satisfied that nothing was amiss. “So,” Nick said, “isn't it strange? I've been thinking about you all the time, almost willing you back into my life, and here you are.”

“Yes,” I said, “here I am. It was just an accident really that I wound up here at all.”

“Fate,” he said, “Though Margaret doesn't seem to think so. She seems to think you came here on purpose and there's something going on between us.”

“I thought I heard angry voices.”

“She has a temper. So is there?”

“Is there what?”

“Something going on between us?”

I shook my head. “I don't know.” The steam warmed my face. “And I don't think this is the time to talk about it.”

He stared down into his cup. “You're right. It probably isn't.”

I gazed around, changing the subject. “You've done well for yourself.”

He made a face as if none of it mattered. “I haven't done much at all, to tell you the truth.”

“But you have this.…” I waved my hand around the room.

He grinned bitterly. “I have nothing, in fact. I wanted to go to medical school. Do you remember that?”

I shook my head. “Is that why you thought I'd be a nurse?”

“Maybe. I wanted to make something of my life. Now I'm just running these businesses I inherited, living in this house I inherited. I've accomplished nothing.”

“That's not how it appears from the outside. It looks as if you've accomplished a great deal.”

“Not what I would have liked.” Nick paused to listen to the wind. “You know what I remember about you once? You know what you did? We, me and Jeb, were playing ball and you wanted to play. We were maybe twelve or thirteen. We didn't want you to so we decided to play rough with you. We threw the ball hard into your stomach. You caught it and threw it back just as hard. I aimed one at your head. I know it wasn't very nice, but you caught it. Then you came right up to me, right in front of me. You threw the ball on the ground and walked away. It was like you just wanted to prove you could play with us. You wanted to show us. I always thought you were a pretty tough kid.”

“It hurt like hell,” I said. He gave me an odd look. “Catching those balls you threw. It hurt.”

“But you had guts. I admired that. Will you accept my apology?”

I took a sip of my toddy. “I'll think about it.”

Except for the wind swirling outside it was quiet in the house. Everything was still inside and raging outside. We sat in silence for a few moments, listening to the storm. Nick reached over and touched my hand. “Now you're here and I don't know what to do.”

“Don't do anything,” I said. Then I got up. “I'm going back to bed.” Nick rose as well and walked toward me as if he were going to put his mug in the sink. Instead, he stopped right in front of me. “Tess,” he said, then, “Tessie…”

“Go back to bed,” I told him.

He hesitated. Then he gave me a pat on the head as if that was what he'd intended in the first place. “You too. Get some sleep.” As he walked to his room, he gave me a backward wave. When he was gone, I went into the living room and watched an eerie purplish light spread across the sky.

24

My secret was growing inside
me. I was surprised at how big it grew, at how much room it could occupy. Whenever I saw Margaret or thought about her, I thought about the pact I'd made with my father. It seemed as if it could take up all the space that was not filled with history dates or algebra or phone numbers.

When my mother came into my room and opened my shutters in the morning, I thought, There is something I know but I can't tell you. My mother always wanted the truth. “Don't tell stories,” she told me once. “Don't tell fibs.”

When she kissed me good night and I smelled her minty breath, I thought, There's something I know that you don't know.

It wasn't that I wanted to tell her. It was that not telling her was getting harder and harder. It wasn't anything, of course. It hardly mattered at all. The previous summer my father had stopped to sell insurance to Clarice on a Thursday afternoon before he headed home. It was nothing more than that, and it only mattered to my father and me. It was the thing we had between us now. That was what I told myself.