Eric Dimbleby: White Out

It hadn’t happened. She was sure of it.

It was only in her imagination, that moment of weakness and terror. How had he reached into her mind like that? Was he some sort of goddamned psychic? It hadn’t happened. It hadn’t happened. Not in this world. Not ever. She whispered, barely audible to the asshole across from her, pinching her eyes shut as not to look at him directly, “It was a lapse in my usually good judgment. Rest assured, it won’t happen again, whether we get out of this mess or not. Please forget it ever happened. I beg of you.” She regretted using the word “beg.” Tony was the kind of guy who took cues from misused verbiage.

He flipped one of the ski poles over in his hands, studying it as he spoke. “Hell of a way to treat somebody that’s trying to save your life, isn’t it?”

“Enough of this. Let’s get home to our families and forget any of this ever happened.”

Tony was jammed up in an unhappy marriage. So he said.

He claimed that it had been that way since the day they exchanged vows. He once admitted to Annie that he only married Amber, seven years his junior, because she got knocked up , as he so eloquently phrased it. He’d have never married her otherwise.

So he said.

They’d only gone on three or four dates before his happy accident (now in the form of a seven-year-old named Todd and a six-year-old named Amanda) had changed his life forever.

So he said.

He spoke of Amber as if she had a terminal disease, as though she was clutching the sheets on her deathbed. When he mentioned her name, deadness filled his eyes and mouth. Annie couldn’t relate to the feeling, not with Christian. Her husband was a genuinely good man, and she was quite undeserving of his ways. She’d made that one mistake only a few nights ago, but it felt like it happened another lifetime ago. And now she felt like things would never be the same with Christian, not without a lot of work on both their parts.

Behind seeing Paulie and hugging him to death, that was what drove her mounting desire to get back home most of all. To look into his eyes, to tell him what she’d done, to declare her horrible nature for him to judge, and to beg that they would make things work again, if they had ever worked in the first place. He might not forgive her, but that was a chance she was willing to take. All the snow and ice in the world couldn’t keep her from returning to her baby, and from pulling out her heart and handing it over to Christian. It would be his decision when all was said and done, but she trusted he would be compassionate with her. She didn’t deserve it, but she would take it if she could get it.

Annie’s stomach felt like it was full of cold spaghetti whenever she thought of his face, and the way Christian’s features would melt into nothing when he found out what she’d done with Tony. Even though it was a single lapse in judgment, it was enough to break his damn heart. It might be easier, she realized, just to be a viper towards him once she saw him again, to drive him away by any means necessary. Much easier than telling the truth and exposing her weakness. But she couldn’t do that to Paulie; he loved his father too much. She’d never live with herself if she ruined the kid’s life. Truth be told, she also loved Christian too damn much. Eventually, it would break all of their hearts, one by one.

Tony brought her out of a woozy daze as he slammed his hand against the side of his contraption. “Let’s not just go back to the way things were. I know you’re thinking that, but you can’t. I love you, Annie. Can’t you see that?”

The way he smiled at her when he said that—the L word, dripping with sticky rot—made her skin prickle. The guy was slime, and that was something she’d known from the moment they met each other in the lunchroom room three years previous. He was classically handsome and an up-and-coming ladder climber on their staff, but he didn’t have half the heart that Christian did. If Christian was a lion, then Tony was a slug.

“You don’t love anything.”

“Of course I do,” he replied, looking a little hurt. His hurt, like his proclamation of true love, was ninety percent feigned. There was a nugget of truth in every lie he told himself and others, just enough to be convincing. He loved himself, but little else. The way he stared at himself in the mirror said all that needed saying about Tony.

“Just get me home to my son.”

Paulie and Christian found normalcy where they could. The electric was flickering on and off now, so they were happy with popping a DVD into the player when they had an hour or two of electricity. It was staying dark for longer and longer. Christian was sure that it would give out for good—or at least until the storm ceased—any day now. He was getting pretty sick of watching the damn puppet movie that Paulie was so infatuated with.

And when the electric returned, Christian would blast all four burners on the stovetop and get the stove’s temperature blasting up to five hundred degrees, both for warming a meal, even if they weren’t hungry for one, and to give them a place to sit, huddled around the stove, Paulie sitting comfortably on Christian’s lap. They would tell stories to each other, basking in the fleeting heat. Almost all of Paulie’s stories began and ended with a monster that was either very happy or not happy at all. They didn’t have the most intricate plots, but the boy worked at it.

Christian’s stories always had the same formula: a little boy gets lost in some place scary, and then he meets something or somebody magical (a fairy, a troll, a unicorn, a wizard), and the boy eventually finds his way home to his Mommy and Daddy. Christian had a very explainable urge to leave the Mommy out of the story, to have the little boy return only to his father. It was petty, but he couldn’t help but feel that she had purposefully stranded herself with Tony, no matter what her real story was.

Life was about as normal as it was going to be in their home, given the circumstances.

Normal, except for the layers of frost, building up on the walls like plaque. The house had descended into a deep freeze since the oil tank gave its last spurt, but the well-insulated house was retaining its inner warmth. In the last few hours, the icy death grip of the outdoors was reaching into the walls. The thermometer in the porch window was reading negative forty-five degrees.

A thickening frost had developed on the downstairs bedroom’s walls. That was where Paulie’s bedroom was, but they weren’t using that room anymore. Instead, Paulie slept in Christian’s bed with him, conserving warmth beneath a bevy of blankets and afghans, so Christian had cordoned off Paulie’s room. They slept in the upstairs bedroom, in his and Annie’s bed, where they had once conceived the child. Logic told Christian that heat rises, so the upstairs would be most ideal. That same rule didn’t really apply when there was no heat to be found, but he figured it was as warm a bed as they were going to find.

One thing he’d noticed, was that the basement wasn’t nearly as cold as the first floor. When he’d been retrieving canned goods earlier in the day, he was surprised by the relative warmth of the basement, being below ground level. In all likelihood, he’d move his mattress and all their blankets down to the basement if the temperature didn’t let up soon.

Christian rubbed his hands together, looking over a drawing that Paulie had finished off earlier in the day. It was a picture of their house, with crooked walls and an obtuse roof. Inside, he drew Christian and Paulie. They were both smiling, though it was hard to decipher with the childish interpretation. Underneath it, he wrote his name, but he gave it double A’s accidentally: PAAULIE.