Changes of Heart (18 page)

“Maggie eased down the basement stairs in the semidarkness, clutching an armful of coats and boots. “Everything’s out upstairs,” she said. “Let’s get dressed and get outside. The living room’s like a hurricane.”

Ian covered the pile of clothing with the light, and the three of them grabbed at coats, boots, and gloves. In moments, they were dressed.

“Hey,” Ian said. “Maggie, you don’t need to—”

“Stop. Just stop. It’s going to take three of us to control this thing outside.”

Danny and Ian’s eyes met. “She’s right,” Danny said.

They hefted at the tabletop—now legless—and grunted at its weight as they rested it on an edge and then picked it up. Danny led the way to the door and the few cement
stairs to the outside, Maggie at the middle of the table and Ian at the end.

“Keep it as close to the house as you can,” Ian hollered. “We’ll have better control.”

The storm struck them like a knockout punch, and the broad table acted almost as a sail, seeking to wrench itself out of their hands. Visibility was perhaps a foot, and often less than that. The crystalline snow lashed their faces and swirled in crazed patterns around them. They dragged and carried the tabletop along the foundation of the house, following the shape of the home to the battered-in window.

Danny put a handful of nails into his mouth, with the ends jutting out from between his lips. Ian and Maggie crouched, got firm holds on the end of the table, and slid it up the wall, covering the shattered window and its frame. Danny swung the hammer hard, but the wind kept upsetting his aim so that at times he would hit the nails off center and splay them sideways, and at other times miss them completely. After an eternity, they managed to secure the table.

“Ian, can you give me a boost? I gotta get the top of this thing nailed in.”

Ian formed a U with his hands, and Danny put a boot in his friend’s hands and hefted himself upward. Ten nails later the job was done. The trio linked hands and followed the line of the house back to the basement. The flashlight, after being exposed to the power-sapping cold, was dim, its cone of light ineffectual.

Sarah and Tessa had candles going once again and had moved the coffee table away from the front of the fireplace. The fire was regenerating, licking at the fresh wood the women had added. Danny, Maggie, and Ian clumped in and stood soaking up the heat. Tessa stepped toward them, a broad smile on her face. She stopped suddenly and raised her hand to her mouth. “Danny!” she gasped.

“What?” he asked.

Maggie then noticed that his lower jaw was covered with frozen blood, with an inch-long string of frozen blood suspended from the right side of his mouth like a red fang. He raised his hand to his face. “Ouch! What’s... Oh. I had the nails in my mouth. There was nowhere else to put them. I guess my lips froze to the metal.”

“Don’t rub or scratch at your lips,” Sarah said. “I’ll get you a damp washcloth. We want that blood to melt off—not be torn off.”

“I did the same kind of thing when I was a kid,” Maggie said. “My friend and I decided to kiss our mailbox. Another girl dared us to.”

“Marcia Mott and I licked a jungle gym in the second grade. Our teacher had to get us loose,” Tessa recalled.

“Mine was the chain of a swing in a playground,” Sarah offered.

“I’ve never done anything foolish or potentially harmful in my life,” Ian said. He waited a moment. “Although I
did eat a tablespoon of Alpo once. So did my friend Julian Goldstein.”

“Ewwwww!” Tessa squealed.

Maggie wrinkled her nose. “Why in the world would anyone... ?”

“Had to,” Ian answered the unfinished question. “It was the initiation ritual for membership in our Secret Wolf Justice Association.”

“How many members?” Maggie asked.

“Well... just the two of us, actually. None of the other kids would eat the Alpo.”

They settled around the fireplace, sipping at mugs of hot chocolate from the pan at the edge of the fire. The adrenaline rush that had accompanied the tree limb episode had receded, and conversation had dwindled along with it. The storm continued to harass the old house, but the temperature in the living room had risen to a comfortable point. The limb, shoved off against the wall and forgotten, breathed the scent of fresh pine into the room as it thawed.

Sound sleep was hard to find that night. Montana nights were generally profoundly quiet, and the creaking of the Morrison house and the incessant, spirit-chilling assault of the storm were like spikes of pain that brought those who were dozing to rude consciousness. Maggie, wrapped in a luxuriously thick blanket on the floor with a throw cushion from the couch for a pillow, drifted behind her thoughts, touching sleep at times but not really losing herself to it.

When Danny or Ian loaded logs into the fireplace, the
hissing and crunching was like a circus rambling through the room. At one point Danny’s voice said, “Ouch, darn it!” when a flame licked his hand.

Maggie smiled.
A big, outdoorsy, muscular guy who spends lots of his time working on the horses and cattle of foul-mouthed cowboys says “Darn it” when he gets burned? What a great man. He cried when Dancer was born. My mom once said that sometimes it takes a very strong man to allow himself to cry
.

Maggie drifted to sleep again. A
snork
that could only be someone battling tears brought her back to the living room. She waited until she heard it again.

“Tessa? What’s the matter, honey? We’re all going to be OK. There’s no reason to cry.”

“I’m not crying! I just have... a nasal infection or something.”

Maggie’s heart hurt for a moment. “Yeah. I’ve had lots of those nasal infections at night lately. For almost a year now.” She let a half minute pass. “What’s the matter, Tess?”

Tessa tried to control her voice, but it cracked as she spoke. “My Turnip—and Dakota and Happy and Dancer and Dusty—and Sunday, locked in Danny’s mudroom. They’re waiting for us, and we can’t get to them.”

Before Maggie could respond, Danny’s voice—even though lowered—seemed to fill the room. “There’s very little my GMC can’t get through, ladies. That’s why I bought it. It’ll go anywhere through anything. I’ll get to my dog tomorrow, and I’ll get to the horses.”

“But the radio...”

“I heard it, Tessa. The same guy who tells me the stuff he
advertises can grow hair on a watermelon told me there’s a storm. I’ll get through.”

“Not alone, you won’t,” Ian’s voice added. “I’m going with you.”

Maggie heard a sigh from across the room. “Sure is a lot of testosterone in this old house tonight,” Sarah said. “Hush, everyone, and go to sleep. We’ll see how things look tomorrow.”

There was a long silence. Then Ian growled. In a heartbeat, Danny joined him, slavering and snarling like a bear pulling down prey.

Tessa giggled—and then Maggie and Sarah joined her. Before too long, all of them slept.

Maggie’s eyes opened. The light had a graininess to it—the sort of half-light that seems to struggle with the darkness. It was cooler in the room; perhaps the fire needed tending. Outside, the banshee wind howled unabated.

A log collapsed in the fireplace, and the sound caused Tessa to move in her sleep and move a bit under her blanket. After a moment the girl’s quiet breathing resumed.

One of the men was snoring lightly, in a slow, somehow comforting rhythm. She thought of the growling, macho posturing of Ian and Danny a few hours before and smiled.

They’re both important to me. They’re different men—very much separate in their personalities and their approaches to life. Logically, Ian should be the more serious of the two, the one
more inside himself, and yet he isn’t. And there’s a quiet power to Danny and an encompassing love for the creatures he treats and the people with whom he comes in contact.

I care about both of them
, Maggie admitted to herself.
I care deeply
.

She recalled one of the few conversations she and Rich had had about the dangers of his work as a test pilot. It was before they were married, when her engagement ring was still a new fixture on her finger.

“I need to say this, honey,” he’d said. “If something happens to me, I don’t want two lives to end. I don’t want to be morbid, but before we marry, I want you to promise me that if I should go down, you’ll go on and find a life with someone else. That’s the way life is supposed to be.”

“Stop, Richie—please stop!” she’d protested. “I couldn’t... I wouldn’t ever...”

“Hush, honey—don’t cry. I’m not trying to scare you. I’m an excellent pilot, and I’ve pulled out of bad situations before—flameouts, stuff like that. I lost an engine once, and brought the bird home. I’ve... well... there were other bad times, but here I am, right where I belong, with you. But I need you to promise me...”

The smell of coffee brewing pulled Maggie out of her memory. To her, the aroma of freshly brewed coffee had more wake-up- and-get-to-the-day power than the most strident of alarm clocks. She unwrapped herself from her blanket, stood, stretched, and rubbed her eyes. The coffeepot was hanging on the rod in the fireplace, the embers just below its bottom a mix of red and dirty white.

“About time,” Sarah pointed out, moving from the end of the couch to the fire and filling a mug from the still-bubbling pot. The fire was regenerating, licking at fresh wood that Maggie hadn’t heard being placed in the fireplace.

“I thought you’d never get up,” Sarah said. She handed the mug to Maggie.

Maggie sipped at her coffee; it was scalding hot and seemed strong enough to melt a steel horseshoe—and tasted simply wonderful. She took a step closer to the doctor. “Is the toilet OK? I’ll get some snow, but I need a bucket.”

“All set, Maggie. There are a couple of buckets up there, already pretty much full. I woke up early and thought I might as well do something productive. I never realized how much snow it takes to melt down to even a half bucket of water.”

“I never really thought about it, either—but I’m glad you did what you did. Very glad.” She drank some more coffee. “What’s the radio have to say today?”

Sarah’s eyes dropped from Maggie’s. “Not good at all.” Tessa unwrapped herself from her blanket, stood, and joined her mother and friend.

Maggie looked across the room to where Ian and Danny were standing in front of the largest window. They weren’t speaking and, in fact, appeared to be frozen in place, not even lifting the mugs they each held. Maggie felt a quick, sharp pain in the back of her throat. “Maybe...”

“No,” Tessa said, her voice much older than her years. “No maybes. This is the storm of the century—that’s what the National Weather station called it. I heard the broadcast
earlier when Ian turned it on.” She raised her eyes to meet her friend’s. “My Turnip and Danny’s Dakota and your Dusty and Happy and your little Dancer—they don’t have a chance. Cattle are frozen solid, Maggie. The guy on the Coldwater station said that. He said that way back in the frontier days was the last time there was a storm like this.”

“Those cattle are pastured, Tessa, out in the open, not in a good, stout barn or a mudroom that stops the wind and keeps the snow out. The coat on Sunday, honey—that’s the best insulation in the world. The animals will be cold, and they’ll be hungry and thirsty when we get to them, but they’ll be fine. You’ll see.”

Unless the horses have panicked already and hurt themselves, or broken through their stalls and gotten to the barrels of grain. If they did that, they’d eat until they dropped. It could kill them. And if the temperature is so low that Sunday goes to sleep and freezes to death, coat or no coat
...

Tessa must have seen fear in Maggie’s eyes. The girl turned away, biting her lower lip, and walked toward the kitchen. Sarah began to speak but then remained silent. Maggie glanced over to where Danny and Ian still stood at the window. She and Sarah joined them.

The window was heavily rimmed with frost, but someone had cleared a rough circle about the size of a dinner plate on it. Outside was a gray, whirling miasma of turbulent snow lashed by a wind that was relentless in its cruelty.

Maggie touched the veterinarian’s arm. When he turned to her, his face was grim and hard. “No go, at least right now, Maggie,” he said. “My truck would take the snow in
four-wheel, I’m sure of that. But I wouldn’t be able to see a foot in front of me. I wouldn’t be able to find the road, much less stay on it. It’d be suicide. I’m sorry.”