Day Five. Ice: one and three-quarter inches.
It snowed in the night without a sound, and in the morning the world had come in close.
Six inches on the window seat ledge outside, I could see it through the glass, a clean square loaf of it. Six on the porch rail. The lake was gone. Where the black ice had been there was a white field running out flat into white air, and no far shore, and no landing, and no yard light. Just white, and then more white, and then the gray where the white stopped and the sky started, and I couldn't have told you how far off that was. A hundred yards. A mile. The pines along the island shore stood with snow on every branch and didn't move.
It was still coming down. Big, slow flakes, straight down, no wind. When I opened the kitchen door the quiet came in with the cold and stood in the kitchen with me.
I went out to measure because that's the job. I swept the dock with the broom from the back porch and pushed the ladder out over the snow on the ice and went out on my belly, and the snow came up around the rails and into my sleeves, and at the foot of the ladder I swept a circle clear with my mitten. Under the snow the ice was dark and wet on top, a skin of slush where the weight had pushed water up through some crack I couldn't see. I drilled through it. One and three-quarters.
"One and three-quarters, Teddy. Snow's a blanket. It'll slow."
It would. Snow keeps the cold off the ice like a quilt keeps it off you. I'd learned that the year after, reading everything I could find, the way you learn the name of the disease after.
I sent the number from the north window. Just the number. Then I propped the pantry door open with a sack of potatoes so the stove heat would get in there, because the pantry was on the cold side of the house and I didn't want the canned stuff to freeze, and I put the coffee on.
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Wade's text rattled the tin shelf before the coffee was done.
Memorial is Saturday the fourteenth at St. Olaf's. Pastor wants a picture for the program. The one in the hall, the two of them on the dock. Can you take a photo of it for me.
I read it out. No question mark on the end. He never used them when he was asking for something he expected to get.
I went into the hall. The boxes were on the porch now; through the front door glass I could see them, six white humps of snow. The picture was where it had always been. I took it down off its nail and carried it to the kitchen, where the light was better, and propped it against the coffee can on the oilcloth, and took the picture of the picture. It came out with a glare across the woman's face. I tilted it and took it again. The second one was good. The two of them squinting up at me out of the phone, the red hat, the mittens on their string.
I sent it.
Thank you.
I read that out too. Then I put the picture back on its nail and straightened it.
First the clothes to the church, and now the picture to the pastor. Three weeks gone and he was setting up the funeral already. I figured that was how a man in a town like Ossian got through it. You do the things people can see. You put on the service so they'll see you put it on. I'd watched a lot of people do grief for an audience, on the other end of a phone. Some of them meant it and some of them didn't, and it's not your job to tell.
He wrote again while I was still standing in the hall.
Knocking last night?
I'd forgotten. I'd sent him the ice and nothing else. It was the first morning I hadn't given him the night.
I typed it at the window and read it out, all of it, because he'd asked, and because I'm honest in the log even when I'd rather not be.
"Two knocks, same place, twenty-three fifty. I knocked back. Sorry. Habit."
Under a minute.
Don't knock back. Pipes don't answer. Just log it.
I read it out to the window and then I didn't say anything for a while.
Pipes don't answer.
I'd thought that. In the dark on the second night, with my hand on the wall, the bang below and the knocks beside me, I'd thought almost exactly that, in almost those words, and I hadn't said it out loud to anybody. Not to the phone. Not to the log. It had been in my head.
I stood at the north window with the snow coming down past it and the phone in my hand. A man six-tenths of a mile away, in a house I'd never seen, had just said the thing I'd been thinking. Like he'd been in the room.
The phone was cold. My hand was colder.
I put it back on the tin shelf and stood by the stove until I could feel my fingers.
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I lasted till two in the afternoon.
I counted the jars of applesauce in the pantry, all four. I didn't know why I did it until I was done, and then I knew, and I went and stood in the kitchen with my back to the stove.
The snow kept coming. There was nothing to do. I'd swept the dock and filled the woodbox and washed the cup and the pan, and the radiators ticked and the stove ticked and the house sat in the middle of all that white like something wrapped up for mailing. And upstairs, behind the radiator, in the cold, was the rest of the book.
I took it out. I didn't even pretend I wasn't going to.
I sat on the window seat with my back against the frame and the snow-light coming in gray on the page. Day One. Day Four. Day Nine. I turned past them. There was one more page with writing on it, and then blank paper to the middle of the book, where the spelling lists came back the other way up.
> Day Nineteen. Mama says I can write about the sherifs now. HE took the pantry wall apart. Two sherifs came first. They walked on the rocks and we were mice.
I read it out loud. I got to the end and read it again.
"Sherifs," I said. "One f."
Four years I fixed that word in other people's reports. Deputies are the worst for it. One f, two r's, every possible way. I used to go through the night's reports with a pen and fix it, and somebody would always say, Edie, it's a sheriff's department, we know what it means. One f.
HE. In capitals, pressed hard, so the pencil had gone dark and shiny. Not Dad. HE. I saw that, and put it to one side, because the rest of it was worse.
Two sheriffs came first. They walked on the rocks.
That was the search. Gil had said it. Deputies came out next morning and walked the whole shore. That was the day after the canoe. And then: HE took the pantry wall apart. Tore that pantry wall out after, the day the deputies left. Gil had told me when. I'd stood in that pantry. I'd smelled the plywood.
So the deputies walked the rocks, and after they left he tore out the pantry, and the girl wrote it down. She wrote it after. Mama says I can write about it now. Now. On her Day Nineteen.
I counted it on my fingers on the window seat. Her Day One was the sixth of November. Her Day Nineteen was the twenty-fourth. A Sunday. Last Sunday.
A week ago today, somebody sat somewhere with a pencil and wrote, We were mice.
I went downstairs. I don't remember the stairs. I was in the pantry doorway with the book in my hand, looking at the plywood. Three raw sheets, the shiny screw heads, the split along the grain at the top where a screw had gone in too close. The newest thing in the house.
I didn't go any further with it than that. I stood there in the doorway with the potatoes against my boot and the book in my hand and the thought standing in front of me, and I didn't go around it. I turned and went and put the book on the oilcloth and filled the kettle. I needed to do something with my hands. I washed the clean cup again. I went to get wood.
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I'd washed my hair that morning in the claw tub, after the ice, to get warm, and it had never really dried. It doesn't, in a house at fifty-five. I went out the kitchen door to the woodpile without a hat, in the snow, and stood there loading my arms with birch, and when I came in my hair had frozen.
Not cold. Frozen. A rope of it down my back had frozen solid to the collar of Teddy's coat. I put the wood down and reached back and it wouldn't come. It was stuck to the canvas in a lump of ice. I pulled and it pulled my head back and hurt, and I stood there in the kitchen in my brother's coat with my head tipped back, stuck to him, and I couldn't get loose.
I got the coat off. I got it off over my head with my hair still frozen to it and the coat hanging off the back of my head like a cape, which was funny, I knew it was funny, and I stood at the stove and held the coat and my hair to the heat until the ice let go. My hair came loose wet and stringy and cold as weed.
The big scissors were in the drawer by the sink. Orange handles, long blades, the kind you cut a chicken with. I'd seen them the first night.
I took them out.
I stood at the sink and gathered up my hair in one hand at the back of my neck and cut it off at the jaw. It took four cuts. The scissors were dull and chewed through it more than cut it, a sound like walking on snow. Long hanks of it went in the sink and some of it went on the floor, dark blond, wet, lying there in curls on the linoleum around my socks. I cut the sides to match the back, more or less. I didn't have a mirror. I did it by feel, the way I'd cut it myself since I was nineteen.
Then I was standing there with the scissors in my hand and the hair on the floor, and I was crying.
Not about hair. I didn't care about the hair. I don't know about what. About the coat, and the ice, and the hood standing up on its own, and a girl writing We were mice, and a man who knew what I'd been thinking, and the white out every window, and the stove, and the cup I'd washed twice. I stood at the sink with my mouth open and cried like a kid, out loud, with the noise coming out of me, and nobody to hear it on this whole island. I put the scissors down on the drainboard because my hand was shaking.
"Teddy," I said.
Just the once. Out loud, to nobody. To the sink.
Then I stopped. It stopped. I stood there a while longer with my hands on the edge of the sink, breathing, and then I got the broom from the back porch.
I swept the hair up off the floor into the dustpan, all of it, the wet curls and the little bits, and got the hanks out of the sink, and opened the stove door and dumped it in.
It stank. Lord, it stank. Burning hair is the worst smell there is, and it came out of the stove in a gray curl and filled the whole kitchen, and I had to open the back door and stand in it waving a dish towel, and I started to laugh. I stood in the open door in the snow in my long johns with my hair chopped off at the jaw, flapping a towel at a stove, and laughed till I had to sit down on the woodbox.
When I'd stopped, I went in and put the scissors back in the drawer. I put the book back in the slot. I didn't take the potatoes away from the pantry door. I didn't think about it.
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That night nothing came.
I lay under the geese in the dark with my short hair cold on my neck and waited for it. Eleven thirty. Eleven forty. The time it came the first night. Eleven fifty, the time it came the second. Midnight. The radiator ticked. The snow had stopped, and there was no wind, and the lake under its six inches of white made no sound at all, not a ping, not a groan.
I didn't knock. Don't knock back, he'd said, and I hadn't been asked. There was nothing to knock back to.
Twelve thirty. One.
It was the first night there hadn't been any. I'd thought it would be better. It was worse. Before, the wall had knocked and I'd answered and it had gone still and then gone on. Now it was just still. All of it. The house ticking, the sawdust settling, the long dry whisper in the boards, all going on as if nothing was different, and in the middle of it, by my head, a foot of painted pine that didn't make a sound.
I lay facing it with my eyes open.
It's a thing you learn on a console. A line goes quiet, it isn't empty. Somebody's on it, not talking. You can feel them there. You can feel them listening to you not talk.
I listened to the wall. The wall listened to me.
At two I turned on the lamp and logged it, because you log the nothing, too. That's the rule. You write down what happened, and if nothing happened you write that.
All night. My room, chimney wall. No knocks. Nothing.
I looked at it there on the page. It was true. I turned off the lamp and lay back down, and didn't sleep, and the wall didn't knock, and in the morning it was still true.