“I’m not allowed to have my phone on while I work.”
“That makes sense.”
“I’m also not supposed to mingle with the guests. I’ve got to get back to work.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“I hope you do.”
He smiled and walked away, disappearing back into the crowd. I replenished the table. When I got back to the kitchen, Marge said, “Who was that man you were talking to?”
“No one.”
“But you gave him your phone number.”
“Yes.”
“This is the last place I’d give anyone a phone number.”
I should have listened to her. Clive called me early the next morning. I was still in bed. We hadn’t left the party until midnight, and I hadn’t gotten to bed until half past one.
“Hello,” I said groggily.
“Rise and shine, princess,” he said.
I rubbed my eyes. “Who is this?”
“Clive, from the party last night. May I take you to breakfast?”
“What time is it?”
“Seven.”
“I was asleep. Who calls at seven?”
“Apparently I do. I couldn’t get you off my mind.”
“I don’t know if I should be flattered or scared.”
“I think you need more sleep,” he said. “Tell you what, why don’t I pick you up at noon and I’ll take you to La Caille for brunch.” La Caille was an expensive French restaurant tucked away in the canyons.
“Okay,” I said.
“I’ll see you then.”
“Wait. You don’t know where I live.”
“Actually, I do. I’ll see you at noon.”
He hung up the phone.
How does he know where I live? I was too tired to think. I rolled over and went back to sleep.
Clive showed up on time. I had brunch with him, then dinner, then breakfast. We dated for only two months before he asked me to marry him. I said yes.
Chapter Six
Some days it’s just best not to leave the bunker.
—Maggie Walther’s Diary
On the drive home I thought about what Carina had said—at least when I wasn’t worrying about sliding off the road and dying in a car accident. She was right. I knew that I needed to do something to get out of my funk. Or at least my bedroom. An undeniable part of me longed for normalcy. The idea of changing my environment and embracing Christmas made sense. The thing was, I loved Christmas. I always had.
This was one place where Clive and I were in sync. Clive was also big on Christmas. (Why can’t I say big without thinking bigamy?) Typical Clive, he went overboard. Our house wasn’t just dressed for the season, it was custom-decorated by the local commercial display company. I knew it had gotten too extreme when people began stopping in front of our house to take pictures. Our electric bill tripled during the season.
Every year got worse, and I fully expected our home to someday evolve into a Macy’s-like Christmas attraction with window displays and long lines of spectators and pretzel carts.
All this attention to the season wasn’t really for us. It was for Clive’s schmoozers—my word, not his—who came to our parties. Clive was big on parties and he kept long lists of attendees, each carefully arranged and cross-checked against each other to keep the wrong people from attending the same party. He even invited his enemies to our parties, following the admonition to keep your friends close but your enemies closer.
With the exception of the other attorneys’ wives, whom I superficially knew, I didn’t know any of the people at the parties. Our home was basically another catering job, except I was also the hostess, smiling prettily as I told people where the bathrooms were, took their coats, and put coasters under their drinks.
In a moment of weakness, I had imagined what Clive’s other wife’s home looked like at Christmas. The thought of it made my stomach hurt.
When I got home, my front walk and driveway, like the rest of the world, were covered with snow. I pulled into my garage, grabbed a snow shovel, and spent the next hour shoveling the driveway and sidewalk until my back hurt.
As I was finishing up, it started to snow again. First in wispy, pretty flakes, then increasing in density until the sky seemed to be more snow than not. Within minutes the concrete I’d cleared was covered again. Defeated, I went back inside the house and curled up in bed. This was not a day to be out. The world had it in for me.
Chapter Seven
The storm just keeps on coming—literally and figuratively.
—Maggie Walther’s Diary
The storm got worse. Wondering if the world had slipped into an ice age that I hadn’t been warned about, I actually turned on the local news. I say “actually” because it was the first time in a long time. For obvious reasons I had been avoiding the news, but I really wanted to see what they had to say about the weather. According to the annoyingly spunky weatherwoman, the storm wasn’t slackening anytime soon. Worst case, it was supposed to shut down the city. I didn’t really care. At least it made my isolation excusable.
After the news, I watched some show about a crazy woman who had killed her husband, then tried to dispose of the body by feeding it to her neighbor’s pigs. That’s the kind of mood I was in.
Around ten o’clock the power went out. I used my cell phone as a flashlight to walk around the house. I found some candles, which I lit in the kitchen. I hadn’t eaten anything all day and I was feeling it. I made myself a turkey and cheddar cheese sandwich, which even by candlelight wasn’t romantic in the least.
Then I just lay on the couch waiting for the lights to come back on. They didn’t. After an hour the power was still out and though the house was warmed by natural gas, the heater’s controls ran on electronics, so the house kept getting colder.
I raised a blind to look outside. Even though it was nearly midnight, it was eerily light out, as the blizzardscape was illuminated by a full moon. The snow on the ground was already at least two feet deep.
I began to worry about the cold. One of the problems with isolation is that your imagination begins to create its own reality. I pictured myself being the subject of one of those stories the papers always run after a major storm, where a home’s heat was shut off and the occupant is found, days later, frozen to death.
In the basement, we had an antique-looking wood-burning stove that we rarely used. Actually, never used. It had come with the house, and we had thought of it only as decoration: the polished copper firewood tub next to it had never been emptied of carefully stacked logs. Briefly, I wondered if the logs were still good or if they’d expired, which might have been the dumbest thing I’d ever thought—with the exception of believing that my husband loved only me.
I struggled with starting the fire for more than twenty minutes before shouting out, “I hate being alone!” I’m not entirely sure what being alone had to do with starting a fire, but my loneliness suddenly felt as heavy and cold as the air around me. I realized something. Marriage had changed me. I had once insisted on my alone time. Now I feared it.
As for the fire, I finally just filled the whole stove with newspapers, covered them with wood, then doused the whole thing in some lighter fluid I found in the garage. (Clive prided himself on being a barbecue “purist” and used one of those old charcoal-burning, wire-grilled barbecues.) The stove almost exploded, but the fire was going.
I got my pillow and a quilt from upstairs, then lay down on the couch in front of the crackling fire. As I watched the flickering flames, I remembered what Carina had said at the coffee shop about starting a fire when you’re lost in the wilderness. I was lost in an emotional wilderness, and I needed all the help I could get.
Chapter Eight
Why do I still miss him? Or is it just the myth of him that I miss? How much of each relationship is based on reality versus what we hope to believe about who the other person is?
—Maggie Walther’s Diary
I woke sometime around three in the morning when the power came back on and the lights and television with it. I hadn’t bothered to turn the lights on downstairs, so the room was lit only by the lamp in the stairwell and the glowing orange embers in the stove.