He imagined being interrogated. All of his answers would be right there, adjacent to the truth. Such a strange set of days, all the rules were different until the power came back on.
They took Maureen Ryan’s car. Jess drove with her mouth pinched into a straight line. As they passed each house, he understood what she meant about people hunkering down, looking only to themselves and the people they were stranded with. No one was thinking past getting salt on their own driveways, a way to get a hot meal into their kids. There was chimney smoke coming from a few houses, not many. The roar of generators churned up the silence. Driving through town, Jess cruised by the bar as if it didn’t mean anything to her and parked a block away. They entered through the alley door, out of range of the camera trained on the front door. Once inside, he was relieved that she didn’t go directly to the stairs.
“You want a drink?” she asked.
“Now?” he asked.
“Sure. Fifteen minutes won’t make much difference.”
“Okay,” he said. One drink and then they’d begin the plan. One drink and then he’d put one foot in front of another, and then again, again, come what may. But for now the bar was still standing, he’d done nothing wrong, he was just there with Jess, company in hard weather. She moved seamlessly as she made them each a Manhattan, her slender hands. She placed the napkin down in front of him first, then the glass on top. She would have made a great bartender.
He drank slowly, small sips, long pauses, but he reached the bottom anyway. He said he’d go move the generator while she moved the space heater downstairs, but told her to take her time, finish her drink. He took a detour on his way outside to jog up the back stairs and check the second story, to make sure whoever had been crashing there hadn’t come back. But it was still empty, and he stood by the window for a moment to watch the street fill with snow. When he returned downstairs and carried the generator around to the back, he knocked on the basement window from outside. She had to hammer it with the butt end of a screwdriver to get it to pop open. For a second he thought it was all over, the plan wouldn’t work if they couldn’t get the window open, and he couldn’t decide whether he was disappointed or relieved. But then she shimmied it open a crack, just enough to snake the cord through.
“What are you going to do after this?” he asked when he joined her in the basement. He didn’t know how to frame the question except to simply ask.
“Go to my mom’s I guess.”
“No, I mean what are you going to do, Jess? What am I going to do?”
It was darker outside now, the snow coming down harder.
“I don’t know.”
They both walked to the window, stood on tiptoe and looked out. The second canister of gas was at Malcolm’s feet.
“You want to do it?” she asked, holding out a book of matches.
“No way,” he said. “This was your idea.”
She seemed to have expected that. He watched her light a match. He watched her crouch down and hold it to a corner of the bottom box. Malcolm’s heart was beating very fast. He wanted to warn someone that this was happening, someone who could manage the next steps without putting anyone in danger but who wouldn’t rat them out. But who? The flame grew brighter for a few moments but then burned out, leaving only a wan curl of smoke. Jess rearranged the boxes and reached for a second match. But she hesitated for just a second, and Malcolm felt something tighten in his chest. He thought of Emma’s cardigan on a hanger in the broom closet. He thought of the picture of Scotty’s kids that was taped to the side of the microwave. He thought of the framed photo of Gephardt’s that he hung over the bar when he took over: 1982. His father standing under the sign with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, the blur of a yellow cab as it sped out of the frame.
“Hang on,” he said, staying her hand. “Hang on a sec.”
He knelt down beside her on the packed dirt floor. “We need to think for just a minute.”
She dropped the book of matches into her pocket and let out a long breath.
Was she relieved? He couldn’t tell. It was harder to read her than it used to be. She’d always been a doer, that was one of the things he loved about her. She was a worker, a problem solver. If someone got dumped, then she set them up with someone new. If someone needed a job, then she asked around until that person got one. She paid attention to how things were done so that she’d know how to do them herself. When they bought their house and had zero money to spare after the down payment, she took classes at Home Depot to learn how to tile, how to grout. When they were short on food at Siobhán’s baby shower, it was Jess who took everything to the kitchen, cut what they had in half, and rearranged it on more platters so it seemed as if it had doubled. “It was just like the loaves and the fishes,” Siobhán said when she recounted it for Malcolm later. “A miracle.” She felt stuck in her job, so she left. She felt stuck in her marriage, apparently, so she left that, too.
They sat in silence for a while.
“I’m out of ideas,” she said eventually.
“I know,” he said. “I just have to talk to Hugh. I have to make him talk to me. I’ve called and called but—” He shrugged. “Listen. Let’s just go, okay? The snow must be coming down hard by now.”
“This is our chance. We won’t get another. You need to be sure.”
“I’m sure.” Malcolm unplugged the power cord, pushed it back through the window. He told her he’d move the generator back to the original spot, and asked her if she wouldn’t mind carrying the heater upstairs.
* * *
“I can’t move,” she said. “What’s wrong with me. I can’t move. It’s like I’m stuck.” She was sitting there hugging her knees in the dark. So he carried the heater upstairs, set everything up as it had been. He filled the motor with gas and started it up.
“Jess,” he said when he returned to the basement. “Time to go. Come on.” She held out her hand and he took it, gently pulled her forward.
Outside, the snow was pounding hard. Malcolm used his sleeve to clear the windows.
Jess stood there without helping. She kept rubbing her face with her cold-reddened hand. “Jess?” he asked, and then he reached into her coat pocket and fished out her mother’s key. He opened the passenger door for her and guided her in. He went around to the driver’s side and started the car.
“You’re fine.” He looked over at her. “Nothing happened. We’re fine.”
“We’re fine,” she repeated. She had her forehead pressed against the cold glass. The rear wheels fishtailed a little and then found traction.
“Malcolm,” she said. “Do you ever think about what would have happened if I hadn’t gotten pregnant?”
Somehow, he knew that she meant the first time. At twenty-five. If they hadn’t rushed into marriage. If they hadn’t been so giddy as they applied for the license without telling a soul, Malcolm stuck in traffic coming from Gillam and Jess glazed with sweat after a short walk from the subway, unseasonably warm for May. He caught sight of her crossing the street that day and tried to decide whether she looked pregnant yet. There was a blank on the application where she had to write her new name, if she chose to change it. “Oh,” she said. “I have to decide right now?”
“You can always change it later on,” the woman behind the desk said.
“I haven’t thought about this,” she said, the pen still poised above the blank.
“I like your name,” Malcolm said. His way of telling her that it didn’t matter to him either way.
“And I like yours. And we’re getting married,” Jess said, and quickly wrote Jessica Lee Gephardt in the blank space.
“Holy shit,” she said when the woman collected the forms, told them where to wait. She threw her arms around him and squealed.
They drove to Gillam together after, riding a wave of momentum, of raucous joy.
* * *
When they finally got back to the house, the wipers barely able to keep up with the snow, Jess said, “I’m coming in.”
It felt as right and natural as anything that had happened in four months.