JULIA
The morning after Bonnie Blue delivered her new foal, Julia woke with a start. She opened her eyes but lay motionless, trying to figure out what had woken her from a deep sleep. For a dizzying second, she thought she was back in her room above the liquor store. Then she recognized the red brocade curtains and the mullioned windows of Blackwood Manor and remembered she was home. Her dreams had been filled with rats and secret rooms and headless women. But something else had startled her awake.
The world outside the window looked gray, and the air in the room felt cold on her face. She studied the early-morning light and tried to read what was different about it. The tree branches outside looked hazy and the house seemed quieter than normal. Too quiet. Then she realized the furnace wasn’t humming. The tips of her fingers and toes felt chilled, and the end of her nose too. She could see her breath. She sat up and immediately drew the covers up around her neck. The room was freezing.
She jumped out of bed, wrapped the goose-down comforter around her shoulders, and went over to the window. The floor was like frost against her feet and a thick layer of ice covered the window glass. Outside, the world was a blur—the trees and buildings like dark smudges on a white blanket.
Shivering, she threw the comforter back on the bed, got dressed as quickly as possible, and hurried into the dark hallway. The house felt like an icebox. She flicked a switch. Nothing happened.
“Shit,” she said.
The power was out. Which meant the furnace had quit working. Squinting in the semidarkness, she made her way down to the living room and built a fire in the fireplace. In the kitchen, she lit the burners on the gas stove, then opened the back door to look out toward the barn.
A thick layer of ice encrusted everything—the snow-covered lawn, the trees, the fences, the telephone poles and wires, the barn and outbuildings. Broken limbs and splintered branches littered the ice-covered yard, and electric wires swayed toward the earth as if pulled by a magnetic current. In the woods across the fields, tree branches snapped and crashed to the ground, as if a thousand hunters were randomly shooting off guns. Julia had never seen or heard anything like it. She leaned out farther to look around, and the grapevine arbor above the doorway suddenly snapped and cracked, then fell at her feet with an ice-shattering crash.
She gasped and shut the door, then went to the kitchen and tried the phone. The line was dead. What was she supposed to do now? And what about the horses? Were they okay? Would Claude show up to take care of them? Most of the horses would be fine without food and water for a few hours, but what about Blue and her baby? Could they take this cold?
She went into the living room, sat on the couch in front of the fireplace with an afghan around her shoulders, and tried to think. If Claude or Fletcher didn’t show up in the next few hours, she’d have to go over to the barn herself. That was all there was to it. She couldn’t let the horses, especially Blue and her filly, whom she had named Samantha Blue, fend for themselves. They were her responsibility now, and if anything happened to them, she’d never forgive herself.
Unable to stop shivering, whether from cold or nerves she wasn’t sure, she went upstairs and put on an extra sweater, then went down to the kitchen, made tea and eggs on the gas stove, and ate them at the table with the afghan around her shoulders. Afterward, she curled up on the couch and waited, getting up every ten minutes or so to look out the mudroom door and check the barn driveway for Claude’s truck. It was never there.
By noon, the crash of branches outside had lessened, but neither Claude nor Fletcher had shown up to check on the horses. She found a flashlight in a kitchen drawer and went upstairs to her parents’ bedroom to search for warmer clothes. Hopefully, she’d find a pair of her father’s flannel-lined trousers and his heavy barn coat, unless Mother had gotten rid of them.
Her parents’ bedroom was on the list of rooms she wasn’t allowed to enter as a child, so she’d only seen the inside twice: once when she knocked on their door crying after getting sick in bed, and again during a thunderstorm that shook the entire house. Both times, Mother ushered her back to her own bedroom, refusing to let her inside. Now, she couldn’t help wondering if she was about to find out why.
After two tries, she found the right key, unlocked the door, and stepped inside. Like the rest of the furniture in Blackwood Manor, the bed, dressers, and armoire were mahogany carved with scrolls, leaves, floral swags, and lions’ heads. The posts of the four-poster bed were as big around as trees, with marble finials and fluted columns. Matching brocade lamps with tasseled fringe sat on the bedside tables, and religious paintings and crucifixes adorned every flocked wall. Julia remembered the night of the thunderstorm; Mother opening the door and lightning flashing on a portrait behind her shoulder—Jesus on the cross, his eyes rolled back in his head, blood running from an open gash in his ribcage. Afterward, Julia had nightmares for weeks. And she never went to her parents’ bedroom again, no matter how sick or scared she was.
Oddly, the rest of the rooms in the house—the ones Julia used to be allowed to enter anyway—were free of religious images and crosses. Even stranger, Mother agreed with Father that the common areas, where they occasionally entertained clients, were no place for them. Father said he didn’t want the house filled with spiritual things because he didn’t want to push religion on others. But Julia always sensed his impatience—bordering on resentment—with Mother’s beliefs, especially when she insisted on turning every serious conversation into a Bible lesson and praying on the rare occasion they went out to dinner. He’d go along with it for a while; then he’d roll his eyes and change the subject. For reasons Julia never understood, it was the only time he stood up to Mother, and the only time Mother conceded.