It was much too late to worry about what her life would have been like had she not walked out the door on Colin. That didn’t keep her from doing it, of course; plain and obvious truth never kept anybody from doing such things. The answer seemed plain and obvious, too. She’d have more money and fewer nagging little worries than she did now. But she’d also be emotionally dead.
This was better. She kept telling herself so. It could have been really good, if only Teo had wanted the child he’d fathered. If only. My granny could have been a bicycle, too, if only she’d had wheels, Louise thought. She shook her head. Granny would have saved a fortune on gasoline, too. In Granny’s day, though, they hadn’t cared. Well, too bad for them.
XII
Back in California, Bryce Miller had never paid that much attention to the Weather Channel even after the supervolcano eruption. When he did pause there in his channelsurfing, it was to see what Mother Nature was doing to some other part of the country, not what she had in mind for him and his friends. SoCal led a charmed life.
But he wasn’t in SoCal any more. He was smack dab in the middle of the flyover states. Back in California, he’d used the term with the light irony it deserved… if you came from one of the coasts, anyhow. They used it here, too—bitterly, angrily, hopelessly. This was the part of the country the parts of the country that made (and that spun) the news ignored. Roman citizens of the second century A.D. who lived in Spain or Pannonia or Cappadocia would have said provincial the same hangdog way American citizens who lived in Nebraska said flyover states.
And, in this part of the country, the Weather Channel had the urgency of a kick in the teeth. That had been true even before the eruption. It was truer now. Satchel Paige famously said Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you. Around here, you did need to look ahead, to see what was rolling down on you.
This particular Weather Channel talking head was a very pretty Asian woman. She was pretty enough to make Susan notice. “You don’t mind the blizzards so much when she tells you about them?” she suggested.
“I could have the mute button on, and I wouldn’t mind,” Bryce answered. Susan gave him a dirty look. He winked at her. That helped, a little.
He discovered he didn’t want the mute button on after all. The pretty weathercaster was saying, “The upper Midwest needs to brace itself for the arrival of the Siberian Express. This enormous cold front was born near the North Pole and has been rolling south like a freight train. It has already severely impacted Canada.”
Bryce made a face at the bureaucratic language. He started to say something rude about it, but Susan shushed him.
Just as well, too. The talking head went on, “Edmonton’s low night before last was minus sixty-eight. Saskatoon’s high yesterday—the high, mind you—was minus thirty-one. The storm reached Winnipeg last night. The low there was minus fifty-six.”
A screen behind her showed a handful of people bundled up like Eskimos trying to make their way through swirling white. It was labeled EDMONTON, but it could have been any place up to and including the last frozen circle of hell, the one where Dante stuck Satan. Americans were preoccupied with their own misery. The eruption itself had hurt the USA worse than Canada. The disrupted weather was doing a nastier number on the neighbor to the north.
Even back in pre-eruption days, ninety percent of the people in Canada had lived within a hundred miles of the American border. That was where the climate had been sortakinda decent: like northern Minnesota, say, only a little rougher. A little rougher than northern Minnesota now, though, was on the ragged edge of human habitability. Or, judging by that footage, maybe over it.
“This is a big storm—a big, rugged storm. Even by post-eruption standards, this storm is very bad news,” the weathercaster said seriously. “Lots of snow, strong winds, and frigid temperatures mean you should not go out in it unless you absolutely have to. And if you think you have to, think again. Staying inside may save your life.”
Susan eyed the progression of the front on the CG map. It was just roaring over the border now. That put it about a day from Wayne. Maybe a little more, but you couldn’t count on that.
“Don’t go in to class tomorrow,” she said. “You’d probably get there okay, but I don’t know about coming back to town. What I do know is, I’m afraid you’d be dumb enough to try.”
“Hey!” Bryce sounded indignant, which he was. “I don’t do anything the people around here don’t do.”
“Yeah, well, even the people from around here aren’t used to a blizzard like this,” Susan answered. “Stay here. Stay… as warm as you can, anyhow.” She couldn’t say stay warm, because the apartment wasn’t warm. But it was warmer than the outside would be, anyhow. How cold could it get here with the Siberian Express howling down? Colder than Bryce wanted to find out about, that was for sure.
He went to the Wayne State Web site. On the home page, an announcement in big red letters said DUE TO THE WEATHER EMERGENCY, CLASSES WILL NOT BE HELD FOR THE NEXT TWO DAYS. A DECISION ON REOPENING WILL BE MADE AT THAT POINT IN TIME. THANK YOU.
Susan read it over his shoulder. “There,” she said, a certain I-told-you-so in her voice. “Now you can stay home without guilt.” Since guilt was exactly what Bryce would have felt for ditching his class without official approval, he maintained a prudent silence.
Al Stewart sang a song called “Coldest Winter” about, among other things, the winter of 1709. Along with the guys in Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles, Al Stewart was one of the few pop musicians with a sense of history, or even a sense that there was such a thing as history. No surprise that a classicist and ancient historian like Bryce had a lot of him on his iPod.
When the Siberian Express blew into and blew through Wayne and did its goddamnedest to blow the town over, Bryce decided that 1709 no longer came within miles of being the coldest winter in memory. Topping it might have taken more than three centuries, but this winter of the world’s discontent froze every earlier competitor in its tracks.
The wind howled. It screamed. It wailed. The apartment had double-paned windows with shades, venetian blinds, and thick curtains. Cold seeped through them anyhow. Susan had a stuffed cat with a long, fat tail filled with sand that she used to keep chilly outside air from sliding in under the bottom of the door. That was fine, but how did you keep the chilly air from sliding past all the other cracks between the door and its frame?
For that matter, how did you keep cold from sliding in through the door, and through the walls? Yes, the walls were insulated, too. When the Siberian Express came to town, the insulation was fighting as far out of its weight as a flyweight forced into the ring against Mike Tyson.
Bryce had always been glad the apartment was on the second floor, not the first. When you had neighbors above you, you often wondered if a herd of shoes was migrating right over your head. Stereo sound you didn’t want was another delight when it came through the ceiling.
That much, he’d known as long as he’d been apartment-hunting. But what he hadn’t worried about till he got to Wayne was that heat rose. When the people down below tried to heat their place to the fifty degrees allowed by law, some of what their sorry heater pumped out also did its feeble best to warm this apartment. That feeble best might not be very good, but anything was better than nothing.