Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [39]
Inside the boys were clamoring for marshmallows. Anna had unearthed a bag of them at the back of a kitchen cabinet. Anna passed on trying one, to Joe’s amazement, and went to the kitchen to whip up a late salad, keeping the refrigerator door open for as short a time as possible, wondering as she did so how quickly an unopened refrigerator would lose its chill. She resolved to buy a couple of thermometers to find out. The information might come in useful.
Back in the living room, Charlie had finished lighting all the candles in the house, a profligacy that created a fine glow, especially when they were set around the room where the shadows from the fire congregated the most. Carrying one upstairs, Anna watched the shadows shift and flicker with her steps, and wondered if they would be warm enough up there that night; the bedrooms felt colder than the inside of the refrigerator had. She wondered briefly if a refrigerator would work to keep things from freezing in a subzero house.
“We should maybe sleep on the couches down here,” she said when she was back in the living room. “Do we have enough firewood to keep a fire going all night?”
“I think so,” Charlie said. “If the wood will burn.”
Last winter after the cold snap, there had been a period when firewood had been deemed cheaper heat than oil or gas, and all the cured firewood had been quickly bought and burned. This year green wood was almost all that was available, and it burned very poorly, as Charlie was now finding out. He threw in a paraffin-and-sawdust log from time to time, and used his massive wrought-iron fire tongs to lift the heavy recalcitrant logs over the fake ones to dry them out and keep things going.
“Remind me to buy dry wood next time.”
Anna took her bowl back into the kitchen. Water was still running, but it wouldn’t for long. She filled her pots, and a couple of five-gallon plastic jugs they had in the basement. These too would freeze eventually, unless she put them near the fire. They needed a better blackout routine, she saw. She took them out to the living room and saw the boys settling in. This must be how it had been, she thought, for generations on end; everyone huddling together at night for warmth. Probably she would have to work from home the next day, though her laptop battery was depleted. She wished laptop batteries lasted longer.
“Remind me to check the freezer in the morning. I want to see if things have started to thaw.”
“If you open it, it will lose its cool.”
“Unless the kitchen is colder than the freezer. I’ve been wondering about that.”
“Maybe we should just leave the freezer door open then.”
“Maybe we can get the fire going in it!”
They laughed at this, but Anna still felt uneasy.
They built a city on the coffee table using Joe’s blocks, then read by candlelight. Charlie and Nick hauled an old double mattress that they called the tigers’ bed up from the basement, and they laid it right before the fire, where Joe used it as a trampoline which looked like it was going to slingshot him right into the feeble blaze.
When everything was arranged, Charlie read aloud some pages from The Once and Future King, about what it was like to be a goose migrating over the Norwegian Sea—a passage that had Anna and the boys entranced. Finally they put out the candles, and fell asleep—
Only to awaken all together, surprised and disoriented, when the power came back on. It was 2 a.m., and beyond the reach of the smoldering gray coals the house was very cold, but fully lit, and buzzing with the sounds of its various machines. Anna and Charlie got up to turn the lights off. The boys were already asleep again by the time they got back downstairs.
The next day, things were back to normal, more or less, though the air was still smoky. Everyone wanted to tell stories about where they had been when the power went off, and what had happened to them.
“It was actually kind of nice,” Charlie said the next night at dinner. “A little adventure.”
Anna had to agree, though