Tim studied the walls, running his fingers across the plane as if tracing the lines in a drawing, and only when she stood beside him and aped the tilt of his head could Holly see what he had divined. In the paint ran a raised design, a water stain, but dry to the touch. With the palms of their hands, they rubbed against the marks on the wall, which left a powdery residue on their skin.
“Feels like sand,” Tim said.
“Salt.” She licked her fingertips. “Salt water.”
He smoothed out a fragment of the stain and then inspected the dust on his hand. The watermark spread in all directions from the ceiling to the floor. On the edge of the trim and the bit of wooden floor beneath the desk and dresser, the bookcase and the toy box, traces of salt remained. He toed the rug and dried flakes rose and dissipated. “How in the world did salt water get up into this room?”
“Boys, put on some dry clothes and tell us what happened.”
When the shock of the cold hit them, they hollered and danced across the floor, their bare skin mottled red and blue, and just as quickly, they dashed into fresh clothes, luxuriating in the warmth of thick socks and corduroys and the bulk of wool sweaters. Tim measured the breadth of the damage, feeling his way along the wall. He clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth as he calculated the meager possibilities of cause and remedy. After she had helped her son dress, Holly sat on the bed and took each boy by an arm and pulled them to her. “Tell me.”
“It still seems like a dream,” said Nick. “Jack Peter was over there by the window, and I was on the floor. All of a sudden, I am sitting in wet. My legs are cold like when you sit down in the grass and don’t know the ground is wet and it creeps up on you and goes through your pants, and you don’t realize what’s happening till it’s too late.”
“Don’t worry,” Jack Peter said. “I tore up the picture.”
“Please don’t interrupt. Would you please let Nicholas tell his story?”
“When I stood up that’s when I noticed Jack Peter staring at the walls. Water was coming in, not gushing, but…”
“Seeping,” Jack Peter said.
“Slow, same as when you get a cut and it’s coming out and won’t stop, but not so fast that there’s blood all over the place. We tried to hold it back, but the water just seeped onto us till we were all wet.”
Inching closer to his mother, Jack Peter said, “Inside a wave. If the ocean came in and tried to drown the whole house.”
Holly and Tim looked up at the ceiling. The salt left a swirling line as pronounced as the mark that waves leave upon the sand.
“I was afraid,” Nick said.
“That he would drown,” said Jack Peter.
“But just like that the water stopped. Just like ebb tide, when everything gets dry again. But cold and dark in the room. The ice came on the windows fast as paint, and that’s when we thought to yell for Mr. Keenan, but he never answered.”
Upon hearing his name, Tim stopped examining the filigree of salt upon the ceiling and faced the others with a blank expression. Holly raised her eyebrows at him. “And what were you doing this whole time? Where were you?”
“I never heard a thing—”
Nick joined the defense. “We couldn’t wake him. We tried, but at first, he didn’t ever move, like he was dead, and then when I shook him by the shoulder, he moaned in an awful way, and I thought he might be sick.”
“I don’t remember any of this,” Tim said. “I had just closed my eyes for a minute, and the next thing I know, you’re waking us all up. From a dream.”
“To a nightmare,” she said. Far below in the basement, the furnace roared and the blowers breathed to life. Slowly, the heat returned. For the rest of the day, Tim went to check on the thaw. They spent the night camped out in the living room by a roaring fire, huddled in blankets with the television on all night, afraid of their own house.
Five