Cormorant Lake by Faith Merino

Author:Faith Merino [Merino, Faith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 2020-12-03T21:20:02+00:00

The next day, Nan watched Evelyn as she moved with brisk, purposeful strides through the house, got old sheets out of the linen closet and carried them outside to pack around the pipes. The freezing rain hadn’t stopped since the previous night.

Evelyn had already shut off the water. She’d opened all the taps and faucets. She went out to the garage and filled buckets with the water left in the water heater. She lugged each one—ten in all—to the back porch so the girls wouldn’t fall in them and get stuck. Nan watched her, blanched white under the gray gasp of sky, as she lined the buckets against the wall of the house and then covered each one with a plastic lid to keep debris out.

They’d already filled the pots and pitchers and serving bowls with water. Before Evelyn shut the water off, Nan had suggested they fill up the bathtub, but Evelyn barked, “No,” in a loud, abrupt voice that made Nan jump. Evelyn shook her head, hands flapping awkwardly as if not knowing what to do with them before she rubbed her eyes and said, “It’s—” She shook her head again before finishing. “It wouldn’t make a difference. We’d have to heat the water to wash up anyway,” she said. And then she walked past Nan to tuck sheets in the gap under the door.

By midmorning, ice was slicking the porch steps and the mud road outside. The wire fence that divided Nan’s property from that of Jim Sandoval was swinging in a two-inch-thick cylinder of ice.

Now, Evelyn was splitting wood in her thick ski jacket with the ripped seam, tufts of fluff sticking out. Raising her arms over her head, her back opened and she brought the ax down on the wood so that the trees echoed with the cracking of the logs. She was twiny, but she could make herself big when she had to.

The wood was wet and Evelyn piled it on the back porch to keep it out of the rain, saving it for when they really needed it.

After dinner, the power went out, leaving them in darkened silence.

Evelyn built a fire, constructing a scaffolding of kindling in the woodstove and topping it with a large, wet, green log that would produce a cloud of smoke.

“We gotta watch Mora around the woodstove,” she said, standing up and wiping her hands on her jeans. In another moment, she was gone, reappearing minutes later dragging the queen mattress from her bedroom.

It didn’t take long for the cold to settle in, creeping along the floor and exhaling from the corners of the house. Rosie lay asleep on the rug, but sat up suddenly, sniffed at her own crotch, and moved to another spot on the rug because she’d been refusing to go out in the cold to pee and was now leaking in her sleep.

The last time Cormorant Lake had an ice storm was in 1961.

“Remind me to caulk the windows after this,” Evelyn said as she fed another green log to the fire.

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