Chapter 2: The Blizzard
It came in on a Tuesday, which felt personal. Monday had been lying weather — blue sky, no wind, the kind of bright cold that makes you careless — and by Tuesday noon the sky had gone the color of wet newspaper and the radio in the diner was saying words like *bomb cyclone* in the voice announcers save for disasters.
Pearl closed the Starlite at one. In eleven months I had never seen her close early for anything, including the day the grill caught fire and she cooked the lunch rush on the flat-top's surviving corner. "Roads'll go first," she said, locking the register. "Then the power. You get on home, Wren." She did not ask where home was. She put four meatloaf sandwiches in a bag and would not take money, which under our treaty meant the situation was serious. I argued for form's sake. She won for fact's sake. I took the bag.
The town bus stopped running at two, by which time the snow was coming sideways in a solid white argument. Gord at the truck wash offered to drive me the mile in his plow truck, an offer he made hoping I'd refuse, because Gord's generosity is a performance he stages for his own conscience. I refused. We were both relieved. That is also a functional relationship.
The lot behind the truck wash is one mile from the diner — one mile of Route 87 frontage road, a drainage cut, and the long fence of the feed store. I have walked it in rain, in heat, in the dark with a flashlight between my teeth. I walked it that day with the meatloaf sandwiches inside my coat against my stomach, like a kangaroo with provisions, and my hood tied so tight only my eyes were out.
Walking is free. That is the thing people with cars never understand about walking. It does not need gas, it does not need the wagon to feel like starting, it does not need Gord's jump box or Gord's opinions. Pride is a fuel, and I have excellent mileage.
Halfway there the world went down to a ten-foot circle of blowing white with me in the middle of it. The frontage road vanished under drifts that grew while I watched. Snow got into my boots at the top and melted down into my socks in the particular way that makes a person philosophical, and I navigated by the feed-store fence on my left and the sound of the highway off to my right, where nothing was moving, which told me more than the radio had.
I counted fence posts. I have counted things all my life to get through them — laps of a track, ceiling tiles in a courtroom, dollars in an envelope. A hundred and twelve fence posts to the drainage cut. I said the checklist out loud into my scarf, because a list is a rope and you can haul yourself along one. *Stable housing. Steady income. Clean record.* Two ticked. One growing in the tire well. *Stable housing* is a lot easier to say at a hundred and twelve posts than it is at post forty, with the wind trying to take your hood off and your sandwiches getting cold against your ribs.
At the drainage cut the fence ended and the world got honest. The cut is where the frontage road dips and the wind funnels through like it is being squeezed out of a tube, and I went down into it half sliding, using the guardrail, and that is where I would have turned — the lot is two hundred yards past the cut, Gord's yard light visible on a clear night like a small mean star.
There was no yard light. There was no anything. The power was already out along the route, and the snow was coming down in the afternoon so thick that the sky and the ground had stopped being different things.
I stood in the drainage cut with my back to the wind and did the math I do. Two hundred yards. Fence posts done; from here it was the culvert, then the gravel apron, then my door handle, which I could find with gloves on, blind, in my sleep. Twice, actually, coming off doubles in August.
I was not scared. I want that understood. I was annoyed — at the weather, at the meteorologist, at myself for light socks. Fear is a luxury for people whose plans have room in them. Mine did not. Mine had a wagon, a foam pad, two sleeping bags, and meatloaf sandwiches, and every one of those things was two hundred yards away, exactly where I had left them.
I put my head down and started across the open ground toward where my life was parked, and that is when I heard it, under the wind, from the highway side of the cut — a sound that did not belong to the storm.