Fully Loaded - Blake Crouch [61]
He sat beside her on the steps. Cool and he could smell warm hay carried on the breeze.
Said, “In the winters, I seek out ice storms and blizzards. Tornadoes and hurricanes in the summertime. I was in Charleston when Hugo roared ashore in ’89. I was in Florida for Andrew in ’92. The Lower Ninth Ward last summer when the levies broke. I’ve spent winters at Paradise Lodge on the south slope of Rainier just to watch it dump nine hundred inches of snow. A couple years ago I stayed a month at the observatory on Mount Washington. Stood in a hundred and forty mile-per-hour wind that almost blew me off the mountain. I feel…dead…all the time, except when I’m in the middle of some storm, watching the clouds swirl, feeling the snow or rain pelt my face. It doesn’t make sense, I know, but this is what I do, and I’ve been doing it for twenty years, and I came to Hoxie to do it, and then I met you, and for a minute—I don’t know why—I wanted to share it with you.”
“Do you have family, Peter?”
The question caused him to flinch. “I don’t have anyone. Look, I’m sorry. I’ve got nothing to offer you. I know that. I just want you to understand that it’s not your fault. Has nothing to do with you. The reason it turned out like it did today is ’cause I—”
“You have issues.”
“Yeah.”
“A lot of them.”
“Now why are you crying?”
“’Cause you hurt my feelings, dummy.” She wiped her face, got up, and hurried into the house, the door slamming after her. He could hear her crying through the thin walls.
Pushed himself onto his feet and climbed the two flimsy steps to the stoop, where he pulled open the screened door and knocked on the wood of the inner door.
“Melanie, come on. Can we talk please?”
The cries more distant now, lost inside the house.
“I’m coming in, all right?” He tried the door. The knob turned, hinges creaking as he let it swing open. “Melanie?”
He stepped into a foyer, the air redolent of cardboard.
There were boxes everywhere—stacked to the ceiling on either side of the hallway that ran past the stairs into the kitchen, leaving the walkway so tight he would’ve had to sidestep to pass through. At first, he thought Melanie must be in the process of moving, wondered why she hadn’t mentioned it before, but then his eyes fell on the living room.
He’d never seen anything like it.
Four television sets, three DVD players, what probably would have formed a cubic yard of DVDs had they not been spread across the room.
A leather couch buried beneath stacks of National Geographic and The New Yorker.
A coffee table caved in under the weight of several full sets of encyclopedias.
Out from under the couch, a gray cat darted over a pile of clothes that still bore their price tags, disappearing into a dining room paralyzed for the stacks of newspapers, eight grills, still in their boxes, and what he estimated to be over five hundred unopened packages of plastic utensils monopolizing every square inch of table space.
He made his way through the cramped hall, and as he neared the kitchen the smell of rotting food became overpowering. He held the side of his arm across his nose and mouth, and standing in the doorway, wondered how Melanie even made use of the Fridge and the sink and the oven range what with the linoleum buried under hundreds of pounds of canned food and sacks of flour and sugar, thirty cereal boxes, and on the countertops, a component of the stench—clusters of bananas and apples and what might have been oranges, all shriveled and glazed with blue mold.
“What are you doing?”
He spun around.
Melanie stood at the foot of the stairs, her face red.
“I knocked on the door, I—”
“Did you hear me say come in?”
“No.”
“Get out.”
“Melanie—”
“Get out of my house!” Tears ran down the sides of her face and she breathed so hard he could see her chest billowing under her button-down shirt.
“All right,” he said.
He started down the hallway between the walls of cardboard boxes, Melanie backing toward the stairs as he approached the foyer. She collapsed on a lower step and buried her head between her knees, her shoulders