We Are Unprepared (15 page)

We hadn't spoken as I stumbled to the house. I didn't have the energy to limp and argue simultaneously, but her strange greeting suggested that we were already in a fight. Once I was lying horizontal on the couch, with my bad foot elevated and a beer on the floor beside me, I decided to engage again with Pia. I felt the same tingling, alive sensation that had been passing over me more and more recently, and I wanted a release from the tension.

“I'll tell you ‘what the hell,' Pia,” I said, looking directly at her across the room. She had one hand on her cocked hip over tight long underwear. “I broke my foot in a million places and you weren't there for me. Apparently, you weren't even nervous about where I'd been or why there was an overturned piece of machinery in our driveway. Does that seem like normal marriage behavior to you?” I was just picking up steam, finding an anger that went much deeper than the day's accident. “A perfect stranger had to drive me home while I made up some bullshit about why my own wife couldn't do it. I should have told everyone the truth: that you were probably out with the other paranoid doomsdayers, that you are too busy indulging your many neuroses and that you don't care about anyone other than yourself. That's what I should have said!”

Pia started pacing in front of me, twisting and tugging her long blond hair with both hands.

“You like me like this!” she shrieked. “You want me to be a little damaged because it keeps me needy and you love needy.”

There may have been a grain of truth to this once, but not now.

She went on, “Don't blame my compulsive tendencies for your naïveté and your unwillingness to address the threat we're facing. This is about The Storm. Everything is. You and your orderly little friends can try to control how this goes, but it's not a controllable situation. When The Storm comes, all we'll have are our own preparations. We're all alone when The Storm comes.”

That moment should have been a clarion answer to the question of my aloneness, a therapeutic breakthrough. There it was: Pia operated as one. She liked me a lot, but she didn't need me the way I wanted to be needed; the way I needed her. And I don't think she had ever intentionally misled me on this point. But I had been working hard not to see it because I wanted to believe in the parity of our neediness. Our physical desire may have been matched, but not our emotional desire. Need it be? Maybe not, I considered. I was devastated, but confused, too.

I sat up and nodded, which she misinterpreted as assent, but I didn't care. There was no argument left in me. She must have recognized that her point had been adequately made because she didn't pursue it any further. We were silent. I felt an overwhelming urge to walk to the front door, step out into the cold air and run. I hadn't been running since we'd moved to Isole, but I imagined striding effortlessly over the snow for miles and miles, along snowy farms and fields, until the choking tightness in my chest was replaced by sweet exhaustion. But my foot was in a cast, and the snow was becoming dangerously deep. I had no choice but to stay there, with her, for as long as nature decided to keep us.

FOURTEEN

AFTER A LONG
sleep and another foot of accumulation, the snow stopped and Pia and I were contrite. We were both still mad, but also aware of our own unreasonable behavior. Without ever saying it, we agreed to just move on. I was devastated about August, but working to forgive her. I couldn't force someone to want a child. A storm was coming—or
The
Storm—and it didn't feel right to be at war with each other as a shared enemy approached.

I had spoken to Bev The Social Worker earlier that morning, explaining why we couldn't take August. She seemed genuinely disappointed but said that she had another family in mind just a few miles away. It was going to take a few more weeks to finalize the paperwork for his move, so we would have some more time together. I was confused about the process but couldn't form the proper questions while I had Bev on the line.

As I sat across the kitchen table from Pia, watching her spread peach-cardamom jam slowly on toast, I wondered how much of this had been explained to August. I was confident that he didn't—and wouldn't ever—know that I had passed on the chance to take him in. The possibility of his knowing this felt like a knife in my chest. But what
did
he know? I dreaded the idea of helplessly discussing the coming changes with August, trying to be upbeat and optimistic. I didn't have that in me.

Everything in the immediate future seemed fucking terrible all of a sudden.

“Let's build a snowman!” Pia exclaimed, drawing my attention back to the present.

I looked up at her and shrugged. “Sure.”

It hurt to walk, but I could hobble in the interest of domestic peace. And why the hell not? I was out of ideas and this was an idea. It was also vintage Pia: a spontaneous break from reality, which I needed desperately. We ate the last of our breakfasts without a word and got up to put on hats, coats and mittens. I wrapped a garbage bag around the medical boot on my left foot and took my morning painkiller. It was dumb, but this snowman could be just what the doctor ordered, we thought to ourselves.

When I limped out the front door, the cold air shot up my nostrils and into my eyes. It was clarifying, medicinal even. I was proud to feel my winter toughness returning after years away from mountain winds.

“Over here,” Pia said, pointing to a flat location for our snowman.

I packed a hard ball between my hands, then added snow around it until it was large enough to roll along the ground in front of me. Pia did the same a few feet away. We were both crouched, pushing our little growing balls along the snow as they gained volume. We weren't talking, but there was a sweetness in our silence. Each of us wanted to feel the way we used to. We were trying, and I loved her for that.

When finally my ball seemed large and heavy enough to serve as the body, I rolled it back to the spot Pia had picked and went over to help her with her ball. We stopped before it got too large and then hoisted it together atop the first one.

“I'll work on the head,” I said, “if you find some eyes for this guy.”

Pia looked around thoughtfully, searching for makeshift features. Finally, she walked to the porch and began selecting large rocks from under the stairs. She made a neat pile with them and then ducked inside while I mounted the faceless head.

When the door swung open again, Pia smiled and held up an old scarf and a hat from our basket of mismatched winter gear.

I created a face with the rocks while she wrapped a blue tartan scarf around where his neck should be. Pia had worn that scarf daily for one entire winter back in the city, but I hadn't seen it since. I wondered if it still smelled like the lavender perfume she was wearing in those days. Next she pulled a French beret from under her arm—a misguided Christmas present from my mother from years before—and placed it at a jaunty angle on his round head.

We stepped back to appreciate our creation. At four feet tall, he was more of a snow boy than a snow man. He had a little of each of us in him but bore no resemblance. The beret made him look particularly cartoonish.

“He's French?” I asked.

“Quebecois,” Pia corrected.

“Ah,
oui
.”

I put my arm around Pia's shoulders and pulled her in. She rested her head on my chest for three seconds, then started back toward the door.

It wasn't there. We were trying, with our little French snow boy and our forced witty banter, but it wasn't there. And our cute creation couldn't fix that. I followed her slowly to the door and we left him outside where he belonged. The snow had started up again.

FIFTEEN

IT SNOWED ON
and off for four straight days, accumulating faster than even the fearless snowplowers of Vermont's Northeast Kingdom could keep up with. Commerce from Montreal to Manhattan came to a halt and millions of people had no choice but to stay inside, nervously consuming television news and social media gossip for something concrete about their fates. At first, we just wanted to know if this was the start of The Storm, the big one. That was the real fear. No one felt ready for that; we all needed one more trip to the picked-over grocery store and a few more batteries and another jug of water. There were also all the things we didn't want to tell each other we were afraid of going without: things like beer and porn and pills. This storm had come too quickly for us to feel
ready
, which was something we still believed was attainable.

When the last snowflake finally fell, there was almost seven feet of snow lying on the ground. Weather experts told us this wouldn't be The Storm, but it didn't matter anymore. That amount of snow inflicted such immediate and costly damage that we couldn't concern ourselves with what came next. It was like something out of a science fiction movie—an endless, blinding cloud that threatened to suffocate us all. It blocked our front doors and came up over our first-floor windows. The child in me was awed.

At Salty's recommendation, I hobbled outside with my long-handled snow shovel a couple times a day to clear a small path around our house and help the heavy sheets of snow slide off our slanted roof. It wasn't an elegant system, but our home was intact in the end, even as many others were not.

Country people fared better in the blizzard: we knew how to stay ahead of the accumulations, improvise tools and anticipate problems. Certainly old barns collapsed, trees fell on cars and a handful of helpless people had to move into shelters after their aging homes became uninhabitable. But most of us in the country were okay. Some of our luck was purely a virtue of space and population density. Weather was granted a wide berth in the Northeast Kingdom. By contrast, in New York and Boston, cars were crushed under falling snow; stubborn fools who refused to begin their afternoon commutes early on the first snowy day found themselves stuck in tunnels and on bridges for hours; and a few people with health problems froze to death waiting to be rescued. Rolling power outages across the Northeast claimed the lives of several dozen elderly and sick people who couldn't live without heat for long.

Still, the flooding was worse than the snow. “It always is,” Salty had said to me as an undisputable fact the week before. Almost as soon as The Storm stopped, the sun appeared and our brilliant, glistening world dissolved into an unstoppable puddle the size of a state. The puddle seeped into our basements and our cars. It caused electrical problems and toxic mold. There were pictures in the
Burlington Free Press
—when delivery finally resumed—of multimillion-dollar homes on Lake Champlain that had begun sliding into the water with the runoff. And it was dirty. Manure, pesticides, long-dormant materials in industrial buildings across the region were pouring into our water table. Every region had its own set of problems: oceanside communities had been washed away, urban ghettos went without fresh food or trash pickup for days and the rural poor were forgotten entirely.

In all, seventy-six people died and the US economy lost three hundred billion dollars. But those statistics didn't mean as much to us as they used to. We weren't relying on the national news to define our experiences any longer—it had come to our doorsteps. So while it was sad that seventy-six people had died, I could only be upset about the losses before me: August's bike had been crushed by a falling sheet of ice, and my useless foot that was healing too slow. I no longer cared about our tanking stock market or the GDP. Those once-revered measures of progress seemed utterly irrelevant in the more primal existence we'd been thrust into. A simpler life, just like we wanted, in Vermont!

Throughout the storm and the subsequent melting, Pia and I kept our distance. She buzzed around the house, tending to her preparations, always with a sloshing glass of wine in one hand. I, in turn, became part of the furniture. I could get around okay, but my injury was an excuse for immobility. I was moping. I watched television until the reception was lost, then listened to my imaginary friends at Vermont Public Radio and drank beer after beer. Eventually, I stopped noticing the smell of the worms and the dankness and the film of dirt that had begun accumulating on our floors. It was disgusting, but I didn't care enough to change it.

When the flooding finally subsided and we emerged from our homes to start the rebuilding, there was a shared sense of relief. So much damage was around us that it was easy to believe the universe couldn't possibly muster something bigger and meaner. Surely the gods weren't that cruel. Perhaps, we thought, we'd been spared the big storm. The damage before us was bad, but it wasn't catastrophic. We were cautiously hopeful.

Among the Subcommittee members, there was measured excitement. The melting snow meant that we had been given another chance to move forward with our runoff route plans. The Isole Creek had flooded just enough to demonstrate the urgent point we were trying to make, and it compelled several more affected landowners to consent to the plan. We were very close to getting agreement from everyone, which meant there was a possibility that digging could start by the time the waters dried. The remaining holdouts were Crow, two other preppers and an unoccupied estate that was managed through a trust in Connecticut. Salty was in charge of navigating the legal labyrinth of the estate, while Peg and I were tasked with turning the preppers.

As soon as the roads seemed passable again, I called Peg to ask when we would resume our home visits.

“Does tomorrow at four work for you?” she said, sounding distracted. “I've got a full day of classes to teach and I'm afraid I can't find time before that.”

“Yes, that works fine. See you then!” I was looking for a reason to leave my house at that very moment, but it would have to wait. The people around me had full, busy lives.

What I should have been doing was the work I was still being paid for, but that wasn't going to happen. Over the previous week, my work performance had gone from barely passable to obviously inadequate. My coworkers in New York had lived through the storm and subsequent flooding, too, but they all seemed to bounce right back into productivity when the office reopened. Not me. When I opened my laptop that morning and tried to write a memo for a new ad campaign, nothing came. The job itself felt futile. No, it felt stupid—utterly meaningless. I was beginning to hate myself for having worked for so long at something so insignificant. I knew how dangerous this thinking was to our survival and tried to talk myself out of it, but logic was losing out to my fatalism.

On the last day of January, I stepped out into a bright, warm sun to see the water on our lawn still four inches deep. It was uninviting, but I needed to get out, so I put on one rain boot and a fresh plastic bag over the medical boot and hobbled through the path in the woods to August's house. We hadn't seen each other in two days and I was eager to hear his voice.

“Hey, buddy,” I said as he opened the door in soccer shorts. “Put some clothes on and we'll go exploring.”

August looked nervously over his shoulder to where his mother sat reading at the kitchen table. She was wearing a bathrobe and a colorful turban of vaguely ethnic origin wrapped around her head.

“I can't,” August whispered.

His mother stood up and walked toward us in the doorway. Liz, that was her name. I remembered it now.

“Hello, Ash,” she said coldly. “How'd you guys fare in the storm?”

It was a neighborly question, though she didn't seem interested in my answer.

“Look—” she put her hand out to interrupt me and went on “—I know you think you're doing a good thing here by looking after August, but we're just fine. And I don't like what I'm hearing about these aggressive government tactics that you're involved with.”

“What?” I asked. I was dumbfounded.

“You think you can take my son away and dig trenches through everyone's backyard. You and John Salting and the rest of them think you know what's best for everyone, don't you.”

It wasn't a question. At first, I didn't understand why she was conflating August with the runoff plan, but it came to me slowly: she thought I was the enemy. The Storm was drawing lines through the community and I had been assigned to a different faction. She was an individualist and I was a paternalist. No one could be trusted.

She began to close the front door, edging me back out to the stoop. August's eyes watched me for as long as they could before he was sealed off inside with his terrible parents. But he didn't really know they were terrible. They were his parents and he was seven, so they defined reality for him. It made me sick to think that August may have believed what they said about me.

I waded back along the submerged path to our house and down the driveway toward our car, confused and fuming. I needed to get out, to go somewhere and get my mind off what had just happened. I couldn't discuss it with Pia.

I needed a distraction but dreaded seeing what damage might have been done to our car over the course of the recent storm. On the night the snow began, while I was at the hospital, Pia had pulled the car off to the side of the road to be buried and possibly ruined by town plows, fallen trees and any number of variables she hadn't bothered to consider. It had become a new source of simmering rage I suppressed, like the worms but more financially consequential.

To my great surprise, the Volvo seemed to be okay. The floor had flooded and its wet odor would later turn into a moldy, immutable stench, but for now it smelled like freedom. I turned the key in the ignition, considering too late the possibility that I might be electrocuted. Mercifully, I was not. It ignited and with a few aggressive thrusts to the gas pedal, I pulled the car out of our ditch and onto the muddy, wrecked dirt road. I had heard all the radio reports of stuck cars and knew that going out was probably ill-advised. But staying in that house was not an option. I was anxious and angry after the confrontation with August's mother.

When I finally reached the main, paved road, I realized that I had no particular destination in mind, so I headed toward downtown and decided that my first task would be grocery shopping. Few vehicles were on the road and most looked significantly more equipped for treacherous terrain than mine. We raised our hands from our steering wheels to say gracious hellos and crept past one another. Despite the efforts of state highway crews, which were out in full force, large branches were scattered across the road, along with the occasional car part. I nearly drove into an oncoming truck to avoid a dismembered bumper at the crest of one hill. A grim obstacle course juxtaposed the cheery blue sky. Strangest of all were the dead animals: a fisher, two white-tailed deer and something so small that it may have been a field mouse. It wasn't roadkill; there were no signs of collision. These were just dead animals lying in and around the road. After the first two, I worked to avert my gaze from their eyes. They looked stunned, terrified. I thought of the birds, fallen dead on our roof in the previous snowstorm. They'd had the same expression on their tiny bird faces. All the wildlife around me seemed confused, afraid. I considered that this was a fabrication of my own mind, projecting anxieties onto thoughtless creatures. But did it matter either way? This
was
terrifying, whether they knew it or not.

As I turned the corner for the main road, I passed the run-down old church that sat on the corner. I had never seen anyone come or go from that church, but they must have had a congregation of some size because there was a large sign out front—the kind that cheap steak houses use to advertise specials—with a message that changed regularly. I noticed that there was a new message blaring at me in uppercase letters on that day: THE
REAL
STORM IS COMING. WE HAVE NOT FELT HIS FULL WRATH YET. This was, more or less, what the meteorologists on the radio were saying, too.

When I pulled into the food co-op, I saw the rusty BMW always parked there along with a few other cars. I was grateful to return to all the familiar and ordinary aspects of my daily life. I also realized that I was hungry—really, really hungry. Maybe they'd have the lemon blueberry scones, I thought. I could forget about August and the dead animals and focus on the scones.

I always felt a swell of affection when I walked into the crowded little co-op with its funky smell and aloof earth-girl cashiers. This was why we lived here! I pulled back the creaky door to find that the floor was still wet there, too. It was disgusting, but everything was kind of disgusting that week as North America dried out. Reggaeton music was playing faintly in the background and a few other people milled around. Most of the shelves had yet to be replenished, but there was plenty to choose from for someone with no particular needs. Lucky for me, the baker had arrived that morning and a sensuous pile of nubby muffins and scones was stacked on the counter. I took a few pastries and then walked around slowly with no place to be. I gathered almond milk, cereal, tortilla chips and salsa. Nonperishables were better because you never know.

I stood in front of the frozen-food case for a while, considering which variety of microwave burrito was worth investing in when I heard a muffled sniffle. A woman was crying behind me. I didn't turn around, but I could see her reflection in the glass case in front of me. She looked about fifty, petite in knee-high rain boots and a purple windbreaker. She was crying into a tissue in front of the frozen edamame and broccoli florets. If she noticed me, she didn't show it.

“Frozen peas. Green beans. Who cares?” she said to herself. “Why am I still pretending like any of this still matters?”