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SIXTEEN
Soheila helped Phoenix downstairs while Elizabeth and I helped Diana. Although Phoenix was bleeding and screaming, I was more concerned about Diana. She was barely conscious. Elizabeth and I had to practically carry her to the living room couch.
“I shouldn’t have let her get so close to so much iron,” Elizabeth said, stroking Diana’s limp hair back from her damp forehead. The freckles on her face stood out like spots of blood.
“Is there anything that we can give her…an antidote?”
“Do you have any rosemary in the kitchen?”
“I think Phoenix bought some for the stuffing.”
“Boil some water then, and steep the rosemary in it along with some black tea and mint. And bring a dishcloth. We can make a compress with the tea until she’s able to drink it.”
In the kitchen Soheila was cleaning Phoenix’s wound and murmuring a steady stream of soothing reassurances. “It’s all over. There’s nothing to be afraid of. No, you’re not going crazy.”
“You saw it too, didn’t you, Cal?” Phoenix asked when she saw me. “You heard the wind and saw the candles blow out and the mice explode, right?”
“Yes,” I answered, putting the kettle on the stove to boil. “It’s all over now…right?” I tried to catch Soheila’s eye. Phoenix wasn’t the only one who needed reassurances.
“Yes, it’s all over,” Soheila said, but she was too busy bandagingPhoenix’s forehead to look at me when she said it. At least I hoped that was the reason she wouldn’t make eye contact.
When the water boiled I made a pot of the rosemary-mint tea and put it on a tray with a shallow bowl and a checked dishcloth, which I then brought into the living room. Diana was unconscious. I sat on the opposite loveseat while Elizabeth steeped the cloth in the tea and then swabbed Diana’s forehead with it, all the time murmuring soft words of endearment. I felt like I was intruding, but I couldn’t budge until I knew Diana was okay. This had all been my fault. If I’d been sterner with the incubus maybe he would have left sooner. Or if I had asked for help sooner…The recriminations swirled around in my head, but Elizabeth’s soft voice combined with the splash of water and the soothing aroma of mint and rosemary soon lulled me to sleep.
I must have slept for a few hours because when I awoke the first rays of dawn, muted by the ice-coated windows, were spilling across the floor. Elizabeth Book was standing by my chair, her usually immaculate coif a rat’s nest, her face in the cold morning light lined and drawn. She was holding a phone in her hand.
“It’s your boyfriend, Paul,” she said, handing me the phone.
I took the phone from her but covered it with my hand and asked how Diana was.
“I think the worst is over.” She glanced at the couch where Diana lay motionless under Elizabeth’s fur coat so that it looked as if a giant bear was snoozing there. I noticed that one of the alpaca throws was over me. Elizabeth must have covered both of us in the night. “But we’ve got some other problems. Take your call and we’ll talk when you’re done.”
“Paul?” I said into the phone. “Is everything okay? Where are you?”
“I’m in Buffalo!” he cried, his voice more excited than I’d heard it since the Yankees won the Series. “My plane almostcrashed! A freak storm came up out of nowhere! The pilot made an emergency landing in a cornfield. Everyone’s saying that it’s a miracle we all survived!”
“I’m so sorry…” A freak storm? Could it be …?
“No, don’t be sorry!” Paul started talking so fast and excitedly that I had trouble following what he was saying. I was also distracted by the possibility that I had caused the storm that had almost killed him. When I started focusing I heard him say: “It was the most amazing experience of my life. You should have seen the lightning! They say the windspeed was a hundred and fifty miles per hour. I really thought I was going to die, but then I didn’t. It justclarifies things.”
“Wow,” I said, wondering what exactly Paul’s near-death experience had clarified. “That’s great, I guess. I can’t wait to hear all about it. Can you get a plane from Buffalo? Or maybe drive from there? I think it’s about a five-hour drive…”
“Oh my God! You haven’t been outside or watched the news yet, have you? Take a look out your window.”
I was staring at my window but the panes were coated with ice. I got up and walked through the kitchen to the back door, not wanting to disturb Diana by opening the front door.
“They’re calling Fairwick, New York, the epicenter of the storm,” Paul was saying as I opened the door. “The roads are blocked in all directions in a twenty-mile radius of the town. It’s the largest ice storm ever recorded. What does it look like there?”
“It looks…” I tried to think of a word to describe what I was looking at. A sheet of clear ice, shimmering like melted opals in the first rays of the rising sun, spread across my backyard up to the edge of the woods. As the sun climbed up the trees they too began to glow—every branch, many of which were broken, twig, pine needle, and stray brown leaf had been encased in a sheet of clear ice that burst into fiery brilliance at the touch of the sun. “It looks,” I finally said to Paul, “like a fairyland.”
Paul told me he was going to the hotel provided by the airline for him and his fellow “survivors,” as he called them, to try to catch a few hours of sleep, and then would call me when he found out anything more about his travel options. After I got off the phone, I went back into the kitchen. Elizabeth and Soheila were at the table drinking coffee and watching CNN on my little portable TV. I poured myself a mug from the coffee-maker and sat down to watch.
“The Thanksgiving ice storm came out of nowhere,” a female reporter in a heavy fur-trimmed down parka was saying. She stood in front of a line of stalled cars at an exit sign for Fairwick. “Stranding motorists everywhere. Curiously, this is not the first time that the town of Fairwick has been the victim of freak weather. In the summer of 1893 the town was hit by hailstones carrying live frogs…”
“One of Casper’s chemistry experiments gone awry,” Soheila said, rolling her eyes. “I tell him not to mess with the weather.”
“And in 1923 a sandstorm covered the town.”
“The Ferrishyn Wars?” Elizabeth asked.
