Freeze

Tessa Marie! You close your eyes. Right now!

She did. She squeezed them tight and counted to ten. The fire crackled and blazed. Fresh waves of heat billowed out.

When she opened her eyes—first one and then the other—the icicle was gone and Bub had calmed down. Somewhat anyway. He still faced the kitchen, and he still had that tenseness in his back, but he’d stopped growling. When she put a hesitant hand on his back, he turned around and (instead of biting it off) gave it a quick lick.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It was nothing. I’m sorry if I scared you.”

Bub turned back to her, licked her hand again, and dropped onto the doggy bed between the two chairs. He let out a stinky little fart and closed his eyes.

When Warren came into the room, Tess blew out a long breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

“Is everything okay?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” She thought maybe that was the most honest answer she’d ever given.

He dropped a bag of cotton balls, a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, a small bottle of liquid bandaid, and a pair of tweezers onto the chair beside her apron and gave her a concerned look.

“I’m just…freaked out,” she said.

He nodded. “Of course. Taking a broken window to the face is definitely freak-out worthy.” He bent down to pet Bub but then turned and headed for the kitchen instead.

For a second, Tess wanted to scream at him to stop, to stay out of there. But what was she afraid of? Ringing sounds? Imaginary icicles? Even if what she’d seen had been real, it was nothing to be afraid of. An icicle in the middle of the house was weird, but nothing to freak out about. There was a blizzard outside, after all. There was ice all over the place.

Yeah, but growing horizontally out of the doorframe so quickly she could actually see it forming?

It doesn’t matter. It wasn’t real. You were imagining it.

Warren had disappeared into the kitchen. “I’ll have to cover this,” he said from around the corner. “Not that there’s a lot of heat in here to get out, but this place will be an icebox when we get back if I don’t at least tape a trash bag over the hole.”

“Yeah,” she said. But she wasn’t thinking about the heat. She was thinking about the shape smacking the glass, cracking it, and about the icicle growing out of the doorframe like some sort of twisted, Tim Burtonesque stop motion.

Quit it. You’re going to drive yourself crazy.

Warren came back into the room, kneeled beside her chair, and put his hand on her chin. His skin was rough, calloused, but his touch was as soft and caring as ever. He turned her head to the left and the right and then grabbed the tweezers.

“Again,” he said, “this is my one-hundred-percent-non-medically-trained self talking, but I really think you got off lucky. There’s one piece here.”

He lifted the tweezers to her cheek, pinched them together, and pulled out a small chunk of glass. The extraction hurt just a little bit, like getting stung by a bee in reverse.

“And here.”

He pulled the second piece from her jaw and one more from just beneath her left ear. None of the shards were any bigger than a fingernail clipping.

Warren patted her leg. “There might be more beneath the skin, but that’s all I can see.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

He used a peroxide-soaked cotton ball to dab at her face, wiped a few spots a second time, and then sealed some (but not all) of the cuts with the liquid bandaid.

“No point in getting any but the deepest ones.” He chewed his lip and squinted as he brushed the liquid into her cuts, like a painter adding the last fine details to a canvas. He spent the most time on a single wound that ran down from her forehead and must have been several inches long at least.

“The rest have stopped bleeding,” he said. “For the most part anyway.” He closed the liquid bandaid and tossed it back onto the other chair. “I’ll get you a fresh towel. In case any of these others start dripping again.”

“Okay. But not one of the good ones.”

He smiled, took her hand in both of his, looked her in the eye, and said, “I love you.”

She opened her mouth to respond but couldn’t find the words. Warren was a caring, loving man, and a fantastic husband, but he rarely let the “L” word pass his lips.

“I…love you, too.” She said.

He smiled, gave her a quick kiss, and stood up.

“I’ll be back in a sec.”

She nodded. When he was gone, she stared back into the fire and tried to think of anything but broken glass, ice, and shadowy, smacking hands.

4

He grabbed her a fresh towel (one of the least grungy-looking rags from the drawer beside the sink) and stoked the fire. When he was sure she was comfortable—at least for the moment and as much as you could expect given the circumstances—Warren left Tess in her chair and hunted down his keys.

After the power went out, they’d talked about driving out of the mountains and into town, but in the end they’d decided against it. They didn’t have money for a hotel, and they didn’t know any of the townies well enough to ask for a spare room. They’d have ended up sleeping in their car or some kind of homeless shelter, which wasn’t any better than making due in their own home, power or not. They had enough food to last them several weeks and wood to keep themselves warm, so they’d agreed to hunker down and wait out the storm. After all, it couldn’t snow forever, right?

Warren found the keys on the dresser in their bedroom and stuffed them into one of his snowsuit’s side pockets. He found a snow shovel and an ice-scraper in the hall closet and brought them into the living room. There was probably already a scraper in the truck, but he couldn’t remember for sure and didn’t want to trudge all the way out there only to come up empty. And he’d need the shovel for sure. The truck was half buried in the snow. He’d have to do plenty of digging before he’d have any kind of chance of driving it farther than a couple of inches.

You really think you can get it down the mountain anyway? Seriously?

He wasn’t sure. Although Tess seemed to be okay, there was a chance she wasn’t. Scary, unfair, but true. He couldn’t just sit here and hope there weren’t shards of broken glass shredding her innards to pieces.

That’s probably an exaggeration and definitely a little morbid.

Maybe, but sometimes life is a little morbid. Like it or not.

He retrieved his scarf from the kitchen floor and wrapped it back around his face. When he told Tess to sit tight and moved to the front door, Bub started to get up off his doggy bed.

“No,” Warren said. “You stay here.” He said it in his most masterly voice, and Bub dropped back onto his belly with a huff that was eerily human.

Warren stuck the scraper in his pocket, took a long breath of semi-warm air, opened the door, and stepped back out into the storm.

The wind and snow surged when he moved through the doorway, as if it had been waiting for him. For a second, he couldn’t breathe—the wind had jerked the breath right out of him. He lowered his head and gasped.

They hadn’t used the front door in a couple of days. If it had opened outward, or if there had been a storm door or a screen door that did, he might not have been able to get out that way. The snow hadn’t drifted against this side of the house as badly as it had in the back, but it was still at least a foot and a half deep. Snow spilled in through the entryway and onto the hardwood. He used the shovel like a walking stick to help himself climb out onto the snow and pulled the door closed.

The truck sat in the driveway beside the house. Not that you could see the driveway. Or much of the truck, for that matter. The snow had drifted against the cab and the tailgate and left only a few bare patches of paint and