She believed Hugh had tricked him. That Hugh had marked him and circled him and went in for the kill. That he’d never liked Malcolm nearly as much as Malcolm believed he did. She had no evidence to point to, it was just her gut that told her. But why would he have tricked Malcolm when he could have easily gotten someone else to buy the place? And Jess always asked whether he was sure about that. It was true that no one knew the Half Moon like Malcolm did, but someone else would have done research about the rest of the market, what was changing, new places opening up. Someone else would have hired a lawyer, made sure there wasn’t something big they were missing. Someone else might have gotten in touch with the various vendors to make sure that the contracts in place would carry over, and they would have found out that even if Hugh had stayed on, his contracts would have expired because one company buys another, which buys another, and next thing your supplier is not a buddy from the Bronx whom you’ve known for forty years but a global conglomerate with satellite offices in your area. Surely, Malcolm insisted, Hugh had no idea about the new place opening on Oak, how successful it would be, how the local paper would say it was exactly what Gillam needed.
Once Billy left, Malcolm called Hugh directly. He figured it would be best to face the music head-on, cut out all those middle guys. Maybe they could work out a plan, a different schedule. How many hours had they spent together at the bar, Hugh giving advice, Malcolm taking it. But the phone rang and rang. He tried Hugh’s cell. He tried his house in Gillam, in case he was in New York for some reason. He sucked up his pride and called Little Hughie, left a voicemail to say he was looking for Big Hugh.
Now, in the place where Billy had pulled his car up to the curb that day several months earlier, the snow looked to be waist high. He’d pulled a rabbit out of a hat after that visit, but he was behind again, and it had taken far less time to get there. He should be doing something. He should be solving this puzzle, but instead he was stuck in his house. Where was the plow?
Already the silence was suffocating. He looked at his phone: no texts.
And come to think of it, the house was quieter than quiet: no hum from the heating vents, no ambient vibrations. He walked downstairs. The face of the cable box was blank. The clock on the microwave dead. He flicked the hall switch up and down and up and down as if he might get better news if he just tried one more time. The couch looked different in the silence. The chairs, too. He wondered if power was out all over town. His phone was at nineteen percent. He tried to remember how much gas he had in his car. He thought of the pipes snaking through the walls of the Half Moon, of the portable generator he’d bought last winter but which was completely useless to him if he couldn’t get there to set it up.
He dressed in layers. An absurd amount of clothing. He didn’t bother with a hat but as soon as he stepped outside, the rims of his ears stung like they’d been pinched. He tromped across the yard to the shed and when he opened the door, he remembered that he left his snow shovel at the bar. He looked around for the garden spade. He found a rake. Tarps. Canisters of gasoline. His face was freezing. The Kowalski kid might shovel for twenty bucks. Mrs. Kowalski kind of liked him, Malcolm knew. She was cordial on their street when they met as neighbors, but when she came to the Half Moon, she always put her hand on his arm when she said hello.
He swept enough snow off his car to be able to open the door, and then he turned on the engine and blasted the heat. The gas tank was half-full. He put his phone on the charger. He could walk to the bar, maybe. Would be good to get his heart pumping. Or he could walk to Siobhán and Patrick’s house. It was just two blocks over. But what would they be doing, trapped inside with their three kids, everyone in pajamas, giving him concerned looks? Siobhán reminding him that Jess was still Jess, no matter what. He imagined cereal floating in milky bowls, trying to talk to them but a kid always interrupting. The car was so nice and warm. He stayed there with his eyes closed until his phone reached fifty percent.
Back inside half an hour later, he sat on a kitchen stool and made columns. What he owed, what he had, what he needed. He heard a groaning sound from above and paused for a moment to listen. Ice in the gutters, maybe. Ice in the pipes. What could he do? He opened the cabinet doors under the sink. He went down to the basement and turned off the water main. When he got back upstairs, he turned on the water in the sink to drain the pipes. He filled every pot with water and set them on the stove. He went upstairs and filled the bathtub. Then he returned to his spot at the counter and made a list of dream projects, calculated what those projects would bring in.
He did twenty push-ups.
He backed up to a kitchen chair and did two sets of dips.
He checked the junk drawer for matches to ignite the pilot on the stove, but there were no matches, only a half-empty box of trick birthday candles way in the back with the crumbs.
He walked over to the bookcase and skimmed the titles for something he’d never read, something Jess had left behind, but the silence was too distracting. He opened a box of granola bars and ate four in a row. He pounded a glass of water.
He lay on his back in the living room for a while, deciding whether to text Emma. He could phrase it in a way that implied he was checking on the whole staff, not just her. He decided against it. He noticed dust under the TV cabinet and stood to get the vacuum before he remembered it wouldn’t work. Sighing, annoyed with himself, he stepped into his boots once again and carved a path to the Colemans’, to borrow a shovel. He spent an hour shoveling, sweat soaking the layers under his coat.
When he was finished he made a bet with himself about whether the power was back on. He looked up at the heavy black lines strung overhead and decided, yes, he could sense current running there. To buy extra time he walked the shovel back to the Colemans’ even though Jon said there was no rush. He hung around Jon’s garage for a minute—clearing his throat, stomping the snow off his boots—in case Jon got the idea to invite him in for a drink. When he gave up and returned to his own door, he opened it slowly and felt genuinely surprised to be wrong, the lights still dead, the silence more silent than it ever was when there was electricity flowing through the wires.
Okay, he said to himself. Something had to be done. He couldn’t very well pace inside his house until the power returned. He went upstairs and pried open the door to the attic crawl space. He used the light from his phone to look for his skis, and as soon as the space lit up, he wanted to drag Jess back from wherever she was hiding to look at how cluttered it was up there, how she’d just been shoving stuff in willy-nilly and now he couldn’t find what he needed in an emergency. He wanted to call her to let her know that he didn’t care whom she slept with, but what had she been thinking tossing their old camp chairs on top of chafing dishes on top of Christmas decorations. How dare she ever scold him for where he threw his keys. He started picking things up at random, throwing them to the side. The sound of things crashing felt good, so he threw harder. Boxes of papers, bags of shoes, appliances he couldn’t even identify.
There was baby stuff from her girlfriends that she’d kept, oh my God, she’d kept. Slowly, he drew from the gaping mouth of a shopping bag a knit blanket and then another, and then another, how many blankets could one baby possibly need. Another bag held tiny one-piece rompers with snaps that ran from toe to neck. A half dozen. More. The bag had no bottom. He went down on his knees among these soft things and looked through all of them for a second time. He pushed his face against a green towel that had a frog’s head as a hood, and for a moment he saw a child wearing it, damp from the bath, hair dark like Jess’s, like his, pale eyes and long lashes. All the adrenaline he’d felt a moment before leaked out of him, and he dropped to both knees. He counted to ten.
He saw there were two small swings, plus a thing with a sitting basket and spinny toys attached to the rim. She’d pictured a child playing in these contraptions, he knew. He put that on one side of a scale and on the other side he put Neil Bratton, but he didn’t want to think about it long enough to see which side weighed more. No skis. He closed the crawl space door and returned to his spot at the upstairs window. No one was out, not even little kids making snowmen.