From the white tomb of what used to be her home, Lori Simmons pulled the soft colorless blanket closer to her and curled her white tipped fingers around a cup of hot tea. In the half light of a dying fire she could barely see her hands. The cold came through the floor, through the sofa cushion she sat upon and into her bones. Today began weeks ago with the weather forecast of "few light snow flurries.”
That weather forecast was probably going to be the worst weather prediction in history,Lori thought as she pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders.
David had braved the strong winds to get back to town on Tuesday. He told Lori to stay home that day. He’s always so thoughtful, she thought. “How many Tuesdays ago was that?” she said aloud, her voice as hollow as a reed. She had no way of knowing that winter's latest gift completely covered the northwestern front of her house, drifting over her roof to deposit and spill into her back yard seven feet high. She had tried to push the back door open, but it was impossible. She knew help would come soon. David would come looking for her. He was very forgiving. He was worldly. He was educated. He was successful. Unlike her, who was given everything all her life.
The heavy snowstorm raged with ninety mile an hour winds throughout those first days and through the endless nights. She felt like she was on a ship sinking into a relentless, anonymous white sea as the drifts rose higher and higher up her windows. The snow knocked down trees and power lines. Her phone was out. As one day drifted into another, she would try to conjure it back to life by picking up the receiver willing David to call her. The phone remained dead.
She had electricity for the first eighteen hours of the storm…and then…darkness. She had listened to the reports on her battery-operated radio that more than thirty-seven people were dead and hundreds were injured. “Three-hundred people are jammed inside a dance hall, two-thousand others are marooned in hotels plus four hundred and fifty people are stranded on trains at the railway station,” the reporter said. A supply of bread made it to a village five miles distance from her little house after it had been trucked from Springfield to Smithsville. The last leg of the trip was made by sleigh.
Right about that time, she stopped feeling her toes. She looked at the wedding portrait lying on the floor before the fireplace. David was so handsome. She looked at her own smiling face. She looked too thin, even in the designer gown that Daddy had bought her. All her sorority sisters loved him. They were shocked when he asked her to marry him. “I look so plain next to him,” Lori said.
In between official reports of what to do and where to go for help, the emergency radio station reported personal messages gotten to them by the phones that still worked, by emergency workers, and by ham radio workers. Lori couldn’t think why it was taking David so long to find her.
“Helen Brown, your husband is safely deposited at Paddy’s pub. Joyce Perkins, Mrs. Miller…5 doors down from you, has Beth-Ann and the new puppy safely tucked away in her house. David Sims, your wife is safe at her mother’s house,” the reporter said.
She was sleeping too much and the voices came from a long distance. “David Simmons…your wife is not at her mother’s house…she’s here…waiting for you to rescue her."
In six days, the area was hopelessly paralyzed in the bleak beauty. Blinding wind-driven snow completely blocked roads and railways. After about a week, for want of a battery, her only link with the outside world was as silent as the snow. Lori could only imagine the still, hopeless picture of snowbound stretches of roads with stranded cars and trucks hibernating in the drifts .
“How many others…like me? Trapped in their homes or offices with no word of their loved ones?” Her aloneness was complete. If I'd known what was to come that morning, she thought, “I would have just given him the money. Even mad, I should have made a point of kissing David good-bye,” she said. Funny how we always think the sun will come up tomorrow. But not for her.
Lori drifted into unconsciousness. She was doing that more and more now, ever since the back half of the house had caved in. In the first days, the heat that she was generating from the living room fireplace had warmed most of the house. But the old house was poorly insulated - and the warming temperatures melted the base of that big blanket of snow. It flowed to the unheated eaves and froze, blocking the snow's escape. When the weight was too great…the roof caved in. There was no hall door, so before her legs became so stiff, she upended a loveseat to block the cold. She took the cushions off the chairs and stuffed them in the cracks to keep out most of the cold.
How long? she thought. How long have I slept. If there was another snowstorm, she thought, the roads might not be opened again until the spring thaw. Maybe by then David wouldn’t be mad at me about the money. I could sleep till spring and then David will find me.”
The water was gone. She had made her tea from the packing water used in a can of green beans. She couldn’t manage the manual can-opener any more. Her fingers were too stiff. She put another book on the fire. It smoldered a bit because she forgot to stand it on its end. She righted the book to let the fire catch the pages. In the sudden bright glow, she struggled to raise herself off her cushion. She made her way to the back of the house barking her chin on an upended chair. She looked up to the small arched window over the door and climbed the step ladder on feet she could no longer feel. Her breath froze against the glass.
One small slice of glass, high in the corner of the window was thinly veiled by frost above the wall of white that surrounded her. She painfully stretched herself, seeking the red light atop a water tower several fields away. Flashing high into another frozen night…it beat…Red…white. Red…white. Red…white. It seemed to synchronize with the slow beating of her heart. That distant red beacon was all she knew of the outside world…no bird sang, no dog barked, no voice spoke.
Lori hobbled back to her cushion in front of the fire. She curled into a ball to preserve what little heat her body could muster and watched the book’s binding catch fire. The flames tickled up the outside edge and spread inward to eat the words on the cover…Thinner by Stephen King.
Lori Simmons closed her eyes and dreamed of spring. David, happy to come home. She smiled sweetly as the fire slowly died.
End