Matches were another thing that came in when the weather was good. Rob used one to light a candle that sat on a table just inside the door. The flame gave out a dim, warm, yellow light—enough so you wouldn’t break your neck, not nearly enough to make you forget the darkness it pushed back a little. You could get candles or torches any time. He saved the battery-powered lamps for when he really needed them.
The candle also gave out a strong, hot smell. It was made from moose tallow. Someone in The Jungle—a book everyone got grossed out with in high school—said they used every bit of the pig except the squeal. Had moose squealed, some clever soul in Guilford would have found a way to get some mileage from the noise.
Lindsey fed the stove firewood. It was as much of a heater as the apartment had. Little Colin’s crib sat close to it, to get the most benefit. The baby went to bed without much bother.
Rob and Lindsey walked into the bedroom. It was a good deal chillier, though Dick Barber would have had no trouble getting through a night in it with just a Russian greatcoat. The two of them had more than a greatcoat to keep them from freezing. The bed was piled high with quilts and coverlets. Rob couldn’t imagine any bed in this part of the world that wasn’t.
He yawned as he slid under the thick layers of insulation. “Getting ready to hibernate through another winter,” he said.
“You think you’re kidding,” Lindsey said, settling in beside him.
“Who says? When it’s dark, dark, dark as soon as the sun goes down, what do you do? What can you do? You fall asleep. And you stay asleep till the sun decides to come up again, no matter how long that takes. I bet the Eskimos at the North Pole sleep six months straight.”
“Well, you can do something in the dark besides sleep,” Lindsey said. “If you couldn’t, we wouldn’t have Colin.”
“A point,” Rob admitted. “But not tonight, Josephine. I’m pooped. Shall we make a date for tomorrow?”
“Sure, if we aren’t too pooped then,” Lindsey said. When they made dates like that, they did try to keep them. If life got in the way, though, then it did, that was all. If not tomorrow, the day after. Grabbing his jollies right this minute mattered less to Rob now that he was well past thirty.
Lindsey got up before daybreak, because Colin still woke up hungry in the middle of the night. Messing about with formula in near darkness, getting it not too warm and not too cold, would have been a major pain in the ass. Breast milk was a hell of a lot more convenient.
Rob said so after Lindsey got the baby settled and came back to bed herself. “Oh, Lord, you’d better believe it!” she exclaimed.
“And it comes in much nicer packages,” he added slyly.
“Hey! Don’t handle the merchandise!” she said. “You were the one who was pooped. Well, I am, too, and I want to go back to sleep.”
Some experiments worked. Some didn’t. You never knew which were which till you tried them. Before long, not too miffed because his experiment failed, Rob was also asleep again.
In the old days, the first thing he would have done when he got up was to check the Net for news about Quebec’s hydroelectric plants. If he’d had a smartphone with a satellite connection (and, not so incidentally, some way to pay for the charges it ran up), he still might have done it. Since he owned no such critter, he didn’t spend much—or any—time worrying about it. If the lights went out from Boston down to Washington, he figured word would get here sooner or later. And if that turned out to be later rather than sooner, his life wouldn’t change one whole hell of a lot.
Back in the days when he’d enjoyed such quick, effortless connectivity, he wouldn’t have believed that for a second. You had to keep up. You had to stay informed. Right now, or you’d kick yourself for not knowing.
He shrugged, yawned, and went into the kitchen to take a look at his son.
Marshall Ferguson was still getting used to the view of a new back yard. He’d spent his freshman year in the dorms at UCSB, and the rest of his time there in the kind of ratty apartment that had had a swarm of college students in it before him and probably had yet another sophomore or junior making a mess of it right now. Other than that, he’d lived at his folks’ house—well, his dad’s house these past good many years—since he was a little kid.
So he knew what things were supposed to look like when he raised his head from the typewriter (or, when there was power, the computer) keyboard. And they didn’t look that way any more. It took some getting used to.
For one thing, he wasn’t on the second floor any more. The house Paul and Janine had had—the house he and Janine had now—was only one story. It was in Torrance, but at the north end of the town: closer to San Atanasio High than he had been in San Atanasio, in fact. It dated from some time in the 1960s, from just before the days when all the built-ins would have been harvest gold or avocado green. Paul and Janine had got it as a foreclosure, which meant the payments were as near nothing as made no difference.
The house was small. The yard was good-sized. Back then, they hadn’t believed in filling the entire lot with architecture. A big old oleander grew in one corner of the yard. There was one at Dad’s house, too. The pink flowers were pretty, but you had to be careful with kids around. Oleanders were poisonous.
Marshall typed a sentence. He frowned, used some correction fluid, and took a stab at fixing it. He nodded to himself. Yes, that was better. He frowned again, looking for an interesting way to get from where he was now to where he wanted to be.
It was, perhaps not surprisingly, a story about a man who meets a woman he used to like just at the time when her marriage is coming apart at the seams. He was having trouble doing a good job with the woman’s soon-to-be-ex. The guy kept coming out like Paul, and Paul, dammit, just wasn’t dramatically interesting.
When Janine told him to go, he’d gone. He hadn’t made much of a fuss. Hell, he hadn’t raised any fuss to speak of. Maybe getting his marching orders was as big a relief for him as giving them was for Janine. The thing was over, done, finished, finito, and they both knew it.
Which, in a way, relieved Marshall. If somebody knocked on the front door, it might be a salesman. It might be a neighbor who needed to borrow some sugar. It wouldn’t be Paul with a Glock in his hand and revenge in his heart.
Paul had moved back in with his folks and his scummy brother. He was a CPA; his brother preferred armed robbery to the kind you pulled off with the tax code. Phil was out on parole after his latest misadventure. Janine didn’t like him, but had been fond of his two little boys (though she didn’t care for their mothers).
In real life, an accountant who moved back in with his parents was reassuring. He’d be dull in a story. Marshall pondered ways to perk him up without turning him into someone who toted a Glock.
He was deep in thought and far from the real world when somebody kissed him on the back of the neck. Somebody—that was what went through his head while he jerked and jumped. Even before his butt hit the chair again, he realized the somebody wasn’t real likely to be anyone but Janine.
She giggled and ran a hand through his hair. “You looked so cute sitting there with your face all blank. You didn’t even know I’d come home.”
“Cute. Right.” Had anybody else done that to him, he would have been furious. He still was, but when the person who’d distracted you was your girlfriend-going-on-fiancée there were, or could be, compensations. He pulled her down onto his lap and kissed her. But when he started to take her back to the bedroom to finish what they’d started, she wiggled away.