We Are Unprepared (24 page)

As I considered the lives that might be extinguished in the coming days—human and animal—my eyes caught something moving far away. It was near Peg's house, in the woods between us. I couldn't make out the form, but the bright primary colors of winter clothing were unmistakable. It moved a little and then got still, repeating the pattern twice.

“Pia, there's someone out here!” I yelled from the living room.

“What? No. Who would be out there?” she said as she hurried over to join me at my lookout post on the floor.

“It's Peg,” she said through squinting eyes.

“How can you tell?”

“She wears a blue-and-red coat. I'm pretty sure it's her.”

Pia got up and walked back to the kitchen, where she was throwing pieces of a shriveled red pepper into her pasta sauce.

“And you think
my
friends are crazy, Ash?” she yelled from the other room. “That's a strange bird out there.”

Sure enough, the longer I watched the form, the more it came into focus. It
was
Peg. Was she walking toward us? No. She seemed to be moving from tree to tree, though she was too far away for me to know for sure. She would have to be completely soaked and freezing. No normal person had outdoor apparel to match this rain. She was apparently just walking around outside, likely catching hypothermia, communing with the trees.

I needed to talk to her.

“Some people lose their grip on reality in times of crisis,” Pia said knowingly from the kitchen.

“Thanks, doctor,” I mumbled.

I sat and watched the figure for another five minutes, quietly urging it to go back inside and get warm. Peg was older than my mother, but heartier than August and certainly more knowledgeable about nature's power than any of us. That was what made her behavior seem so reckless and strange, as if she wanted The Storm to take her. She stood mostly still out in the rain, but I never considered looking away. Finally, her figure disappeared into its safe cottage. I wanted to call her, to ask why she was out there and hear her rational explanation. She would tell me that she was gathering wood or some other ordinary task and we would laugh about the little scare she'd given me.

“Food's done,” Pia announced.

I could hear a drink being refilled and her fork already moving around on the plate. I pushed up onto my good leg and went to meet her in the kitchen. Nothing else to do, really.

TWENTY-ONE

PIA AND I
sat at the kitchen table drinking tea after dinner and looking past each other at the boarded windows that promised protection from The Storm. It felt like the middle of the night, but it was probably only about seven. We rarely did that—sat at the dinner table like contented partners with nowhere else to be. It was the sort of small but critical ritual that I wanted more of in our marriage, one of the things I didn't think I needed at the start. Pia wasn't as attached to such conventions; I'd always known that. And I liked that she wanted to rewrite the rules of domesticity. Still, I sometimes longed for some of the rituals of our parents.

In my childhood home, the kitchen table served as the nucleus for all familial activity. It was where we ate all of our meals but also where we carved Halloween pumpkins and colored Easter eggs. It never moved or changed, just acquired new blemishes that enhanced its familiarity. For all I knew, that gently treated pine table hadn't been delivered to our home from a nearby furniture store years before, but had grown straight up through the floorboards. That was how rooted it was in our lives.

No such stability was present as Pia and I sat across from one another that night. She was jumpy and excited.

“Are you happy to be here with me?” I asked. I wasn't looking for a fight, but some evidence of closeness that I could hold on to as The Storm gained momentum.

“I'm not
happy
about any of this, Ash.” She sounded annoyed, but her eyes twinkled. She was crackling with energy in anticipation of potential catastrophe. She could barely suppress her enthusiasm.

“Not
happy
,” I corrected myself. “I mean, are you grateful that we have each other? That it's me you're trapped inside with?”

“Sure. Yes.”

“What do you think other people are doing in their houses right now?” It was a dumb question, but I needed a new angle to break through to her. She wasn't there with me.

“Jesus, Ash, I don't know! What does it matter?”

Pia looked around impatiently and I knew it would only be a matter of minutes before dinnertime ended. That brief silence was interrupted by the sharp crack of a small tree breaking outside. She jumped slightly at the sound.

“I was just wondering,” I said. It felt pathetic, to ramble on while Pia stared at me silently. I wanted desperately to hold on to her attention while I had her there, but I knew deep down that I didn't have her at all. She was looking through me, waiting for the conversation to end. The weather made me feel needier than ever, but it was having the opposite effect on her. Her mind was adrift.

The wind's roar grew louder around us. Angry rain changed to sleet as I watched a thin visible strip of window blur under a new layer of ice that seemed to be enveloping the house. I wondered if it was possible to suffocate under a coating of ice. The temperature had dropped dramatically in less than an hour. Perhaps we would just freeze in a perfect house-shaped form, neatly preserved until the next thaw, when we'd be discovered intact like woolly mammoths of the Pleistocene age. My heart began to race and, despite the cold air in our kitchen, I was sweating through my shirt. My body seemed to be catching up with my mind, realizing that The Storm was upon us and we were trapped there together.

Weather events in the modern age test our faith in the almighty power of civilization. Sure, recent years had brought floods and earthquakes and fires of a terrifying new breadth and frequency, but still, Western technology had always prevailed. Until that storm, we could all trust that our electricity would eventually be restored and our delayed flights would run again. Even at the height of the disastrous events we'd already lived through before, many aspects of our lives chugged on obliviously. Our paychecks still appeared automatically in our bank accounts, utility bills still accrued and emails still bounced back and forth among us. Always, we believed then, we would trump nature. Remembering this fallacy is crucial for understanding why I did the reckless thing I did next.

“I have to get out,” I said, pushing my chair back with a screech. I don't remember deciding this, only doing it.

“What? No. No one leaves,” Pia said firmly.

I shook my head and began pulling on ski pants, boots, another sweater. By my reasoning, it was bad outside, but not so bad yet that the right gear couldn't protect me.

“I have to get out,” I said again.

Pia jumped up in a weak attempt to stop me, which I was grateful for, but I wasn't acting: I needed to get the fuck out. All of a sudden, every minute that passed felt like time lost to The Storm. It was getting stronger, and soon—we didn't know how soon—it would force us to succumb, cowering inside in waiting. I needed one last breath of fresh air and human contact before that happened, and I was afraid that I would lose my nerve if I hesitated. I was going to Peg's house.

I pulled down the earflaps of my red trapper hat and nodded decisively at Pia. She had her hands on her hips and a puzzled look on her face, but she didn't protest further. As I left, the door slammed behind me, sucked back into place by a swirling gust of wind. I ignored the wave of panic that swept over me. Sleet was stinging the small strip of exposed skin around my eyes and testing the resistance of my winter layers. Visibility was almost nonexistent, just a wall of whirling black, but I reassured myself that Peg's house was only a few minutes' walk (under normal conditions) through the woods, a straight line if I watched my footing and followed the dim glow of her porch light. I was outside and there was no turning back.

Almost immediately, I tripped over a fallen branch and fell to my knees. My gloved hands sank wrist-deep in icy water, which seeped in toward my fingers and up my forearms. The water was deeper than I expected and hiding a messy bed of fallen branches, twigs and decomposing leaves. Already, parts of my body were soaked and freezing.

I stood back up and took slow, deliberate steps, holding my arms out in front to catch unexpected tree branches before they impaled me. On three occasions, a waterlogged foot fell so deep into the slush that I had to use my hands to yank it back out without toppling over entirely. My cheeks burned, but my still-dry midsection sweated as I huffed my way through the woods. The sleet was coming down hard and I figured that it would be a few inches deeper by the time I made the trip back. It wouldn't be fun, but it would be manageable if I had some time to dry off at Peg's first. The biggest challenge was trying not to fall over. A headlamp would have been smart. It seemed as if everything in the forest—every leaf and branch and rock—had come unattached over the course of the past few hours and was swirling in a cyclone around my head. If there was a word for whatever weather effect was occurring, I didn't know it.

Finally, I drew close enough to the light on Peg's porch to see her shadowy form moving around inside the cottage. There was no chance of her being anywhere else on that night, but I was still overcome with relief to know she was there.

“Ash, my goodness! What on earth are you doing?” Peg said as she opened the door and hustled me inside.

I began peeling off layers, starting with the top of my body and moving down.

“I just had to get out,” I panted. It was alarming to hear my own frightened voice aloud. “I hope it's okay that I came. I just had to get out.”

“Of course, of course,” she said, running my wet gloves and hat to the woodstove in the living room, where they could bake on top.

Modesty seemed a luxury by then, so I opted to take off my jeans, leaving only a pair of wet navy long johns between my bare bottom half and Peg's kitchen. I was as close to comfort as I could reasonably get.

“Sorry.” I shrugged with a smile.

Peg laughed a big wonderful laugh and waved her hand as though she hadn't noticed that I was in my underwear. She was wearing what appeared to be an old pair of men's sweatpants with the fading crest of a school on the lower left leg and a red flannel shirt that thinned at the elbows. She looked older and softer than I'd ever seen her.

“Something hot?” she asked.

“Sure. Um, coffee, I guess. I'm not going to sleep tonight anyhow.”

I noticed that Peg's house looked spotless. The kitchen countertops were gleaming and the area rug in the living room showed the undisturbed tracks of a vacuum cleaner. It seemed an odd time to be tidy. The only item out of place was a large basket filled with dirty root vegetables sitting right in the middle of the kitchen, where we now stood. It was an impressive cornucopia of oranges, reds, browns and beiges, still wearing the drying earth from the ground from which they were pulled. Peg saw me looking.

“The remains of my autumn harvest,” she said. “I thought I'd cut them all up and roast them today before the power goes out.”

“You could feed a dozen people with that!”

“Well, there's just me—and now, you. They won't do any good rotting in the basement. C'mon, let's get started.”

Peg filled the kitchen sink with warm water and we stood side by side, gently rubbing tubers clean and piling them in the dish rack, one after another. It felt good to have something specific to do with my hands. We didn't say much, which was just fine. In the background, I heard the low voices of an AM radio station providing an endless stream of detailed weather information. It was one long, breathless report in an unfeeling male voice: “...wintry mix...accumulations are expected to exceed several feet in just the next twenty-four hours...unprecedented wind speeds wreaking havoc on property and roads...watch for falling trees and large branches across the state if you must travel outside...the National Weather Service in Vermont has issued flood warnings for every county...the National Weather Service has issued additional winter storm warnings in every county...evacuations are beginning in Windham County, Bennington County, Rutland County and Windsor County...several weather-related deaths in the southern part of the state already reported...unprecedented...historic levels...”

I watched the sleet come down in front of us and realized that Peg hadn't boarded up her windows, but there was nothing to be done about it now. I could tell the speed at which The Storm was coming and wondered how long I would be away from my home. There was no plan or purpose for my visit, but I couldn't fathom going back to Pia just yet, even as the space between our two houses seemed to disappear into a blur of raging sleet.

Peg patted the final sweet potato clean and announced that we would be moving to the kitchen table for the chopping portion of our project. She gave me a cutting board and a sharp knife and showed me the size that she preferred for each variety. As I settled into my new assignment, she put a mug of steaming coffee beside me and gave my shoulder a light squeeze. We were both just pushing through the motions of normal, busy behavior, pretending to feel okay as the world closed in on us. I knew that Pia would come up in conversation only if I brought her up, which I almost never did around Peg.

“I can't stop thinking about August,” I said.

“I know,” Peg replied, unable to offer promises of his safety. “Keep a close watch on that boy, Ash.”

I sliced a purple carrot slowly and pushed the disks aside with my knife.

“Also, Crow,” I added. “I can't get him out of my mind.”

Peg sat up in her chair: “I went to see him,” she said as if it had been on the tip of her tongue all along. “I was thinking about him, too. I just thought I should see him one more time before The Storm.”

“Really? When did you see him? Did you talk about the runoff plan?”

“No, I didn't bring it up.” Peg took a dainty sip of coffee. “I still hate him for it, but it's too late now. I went to see him last night because I had to know if he was right about all this...all his preparations. His approach has seemed so wrong to me for so long, but as The Storm got closer...I just had to know if he was right and we were wrong.”

“And?”

Peg shook her head and frowned. “I don't know,” she said. “He told me that his ex-wife and their daughter needed a safe place to stay and she asked if they could stay with him. They live down in Putney. He was obviously conflicted about it when we talked—going on about how there aren't enough provisions in that hideaway of his for three people and it wasn't part of his plan. He never intended on sharing it, but he seems still to care for them. He was undecided when I left... I don't know what he ended up doing.”

“That bunker was definitely only made for one man's survival.”

“Yes, well, I guess he has to decide if his survival alone is enough.”

I took a long sip of coffee.

“I didn't know he had an ex-wife or a daughter,” I said.

“It's not his biological daughter,” Peg explained, “but he raised her from a little girl and he makes no distinction. He's been good to her, I think. They divorced about seven years ago.”

It was hard to imagine this family-man version of Crow, but I shouldn't have been surprised. All of us had taken long, winding roads to get to where The Storm found us. Certainly none of us wanted to be defined by our response to that moment. I thought about Pia back home, no doubt bustling around the house with her own preoccupations of survival. It wasn't right that I had gone, or that she had let me go so easily. We were really just cohabitants living parallel lives in the same space by then.

“I don't want to go back home,” I confessed to Peg. “Back to Pia.”

“I know,” she said softly. “But where would you rather be?”

My answer came quickly, though I had never voiced it before. “With Maggie Chase. I don't have any idea whether she thinks the same about me, but I can't stop thinking about her... That's so bad.”

I had forgotten about the potato in front of me and the knife in my hand. Peg didn't have any response just yet, so I went on.