But his favorite photographs were not of the storms themselves. The ones about which he felt the most passionate, and perhaps not coincidentally the ones he had sold for quite a bit of money, were pictures of the mornings after. When the sky had cleared and the sun had returned and, despite whatever damage the storm had left behind, everything looked clean and pure and somehow renewed …
He never saw Isaac in the snap of the lens when he took those pictures.
Those were the moments he lived for.
SIX
A knock at the door got Allie Schapiro up out of her chair. She’d been sitting beside a window in her living room, reading by the wan gray daylight that filtered through the storm and drinking a glass of red wine. One finger holding her place in the book, she went out into the little foyer and put her hand on the doorknob.
“Who’s there?” she called.
TJ Farrelly identified himself and she pulled open the door. Scruffy and blond, midthirties, he stood on the stoop in the swirl of snow and greeted her with a kind smile and tired eyes. His hair was too long and he needed a shave, but that unkempt quality made him more handsome instead of less.
“Oh, thank God,” she said. “And thank
you
so much for coming out today.”
Allie stood back to let TJ enter. He stamped snow off his boots on the little rug in the foyer and his eyes found the book in her hand.
“Sorry to interrupt your reading.”
“Oh, not at all,” she said with a nervous laugh, closing the door. “Honestly, I kept rereading the same section over and over. I haven’t been able to focus on it at all.”
TJ adjusted the heavy tool belt on his waist in that unconscious, get-the-job-done way she had always loved to see in men. It gave an aura of confidence that was contagious.
“No worries, Ms. Schapiro,” he said. “I’ll take care of you.”
Though he seemed a bit wary of her, Allie gave a little inward chuckle at the sexy-handyman clichés that popped into her mind. As a younger woman she would have blushed, but once she had passed fifty something had changed in her. Yes, she kept her hair dyed an attractive auburn and had it styled regularly, and she chose her clothes carefully, but those were things she did for herself and not for others. She no longer cared quite as much about what other people thought. Once it had bothered her that she had a reputation as being a bit of an uptight bitch. People ought to have understood, given the losses in her life, or that was the way she’d rationalized it. Now she understood that life was all about loss, that everyone suffered in his own way. She just wasn’t ever going to be able to be the kind of person who pretended to be happy when she wasn’t.
“Please, TJ,” she said, “I’m not your daughter’s teacher anymore. You can call me Allie.”
The man looked surprised. “All right, Allie. Lead the way.”
She picked up the heavy-duty flashlight from the little table in the foyer and clicked it on. TJ unclipped a small but powerful light of his own from his belt and followed her down the short hall to the kitchen, through the cellar door; and down the steps into the basement. Even less of that gray light filtered through small box windows close to the ceiling, the glass rectangles half covered by the newfallen snow outside, making the flashlights helpful but not entirely necessary. Not until nightfall, at least.
“The fuse box is over there,” she said, shining her flashlight on it.
“Gotcha.” He went over and opened the panel, moving the light over the circuit breakers.
“It really does mean the world, you coming out in the storm.”
“I couldn’t leave you in the dark,” he said, almost casually clicking the breakers and snapping them back into place. “Not with the snow…”
He trailed off, pausing as if rooted to the spot, one hand on the metal door of the fuse box. The flashlight wavered in his hand.
Allie’s chest hurt. She had forgotten to breathe.
“I’m sorry,” he said, turning toward her, the beams of their flashlights throwing ovals of illumination on opposite walls.
She wet her lips. “It’s okay. After all this time I’d better be able to talk about a little snow without letting it get the better of me. Besides, you lost someone in the storm, too. I’m sure you’re happy to talk about your mother, to remember her.”
“Most of the time,” TJ allowed. “Though for some reason it’s harder to talk about her when it snows. It always feels wrong, somehow.”
“I know the feeling. But it’s okay. If you and I can’t understand each other, who could?”
He didn’t quite manage to smile, but nodded and turned his light back to the electrical panel.
Allie had first met TJ at a memorial for those killed or lost in that blizzard on the one-year anniversary of the storm. At that point, he and his wife, Ella, had been married less than a month and already had a little girl at home. Many years later, at a parent-teacher conference, Ella had lightheartedly revealed that their daughter, Grace, had been conceived during that storm.
So at least one good thing came out of it,
TJ had said.
The couple had exchanged an ugly sort of look, then. One she had seen all too often in her years as a teacher. That particular look never boded well for marriages. Allie had thought then and still believed that it would be a shame if the Farrellys’ relationship hit the skids. Pint-size Grace—copper-eyed and tiny and always buzzing with positive energy—had two parents who obviously loved her very much. A separation or divorce would dim or destroy the little girl’s smile, and it saddened Allie to think of it. The Farrellys were a nice family, but over the past few years she and the rest of the staff at the Trumbull School had seen a lot of nice families buckle under the stresses of the times.
Allie knew a little something about the ruination of nice families. After the death of her husband she had thought she would never find happiness again, and then she’d met Niko Ristani and she had allowed herself to believe, had built a little nest in her heart for hope to grow and take flight. The storm had taken all that away from her, had killed her Isaac and had swallowed Niko up, never to be seen again. How a grown man could vanish from the face of the Earth in the twenty-first century boggled her mind, but it had happened. And Niko wasn’t the only one.
Something popped on the electrical panel and TJ swore, jumping back. Thin tendrils of black smoke rose behind one of the breakers with a sizzling, snapping sound.
“Oh no!” she said, focusing her flashlight on the panel for a moment before TJ’s body blocked the beam.
“Son of a bitch.” He growled, throwing switches and shining his own flash across the board. “You have a fire extinguisher?”
“Under the kitchen sink.”
“Get it!”
Allie ran, her mind awhirl with fear of her house burning down, wondering if she would have time to fetch the photo albums on the floor of her bedroom closet, the only things in the house she thought could not live without. All those pictures of Isaac and Jake when they were young—the only pictures there would ever be of Isaac. Losing those … She couldn’t even conceive of it.
Moments later she hustled back down into the cellar, her flashlight beam bouncing on the steps before her, with no recollection at all of actually fetching the fire extinguisher.
“I’ve got—”
“We’re good,” TJ interrupted.
Allie stood at the bottom of the cellar steps, her heart thumping in her chest. She watched him for a second as he used his flashlight to examine the wiring that went into and came out of the electrical box.
“My house isn’t burning down?” she said.
“Not at the moment. At least I don’t think so,” he said, turning toward her. “But I can’t promise it won’t. I guess you know the wiring in this house is pretty ancient. Truth is, you need to get all the wiring replaced. What’s here is not really meant to meet modern needs and even if it could, the breakers can’t meet the strain.”
Her heart sank further with every word and she felt a little sick. “I can’t afford all that.”
“You might have to figure out a way, Allie. I’m sorry. Could be it won’t cost as much as you think it will, but look—that’s a conversation for another day. Right now we need to get your electricity running and that’s something I can do. The main breaker is totally fried, which is why the whole house was affected. I can replace that and the damaged wiring—I’ve got everything I need in the truck—and be out of here in a couple of hours, max. It won’t solve your problems long term but at least it’ll give you light and heat for tonight.”
The mention of heat made her blink. Allie wore a thick, green wool sweater with a little hood and deep pockets. When it had begun to get cold she had slipped it on, assuming that the heat wouldn’t be off for very long. But if TJ hadn’t been able to fix it, she would have had to find somewhere else to spend the night, and she really had nowhere to go. It wasn’t that she had no friends—her friends Mark and Charles would have let her sleep at their place, and her best teacher-friend, Phoebe Ridgley, would have loved the chance at a girls’ night—but Allie didn’t like to sleep away from home. And she didn’t like going out in a storm.
TJ was right: somehow she was going to have to put together the money to rewire the house. But at least she didn’t have to figure it all out today.
“Thanks so much,” she said, hoping he felt her sincerity. “I’m so grateful that you were willing to come out on a Saturday. What a lifesaver.”
“My pleasure,” he said, hiking up his belt as he approached, then passed her and started up the stairs. “It’s what I do.”
Allie heard the defeated edge to his voice, a tinge of sadness. Over the years since they had first met, she had been fortunate enough to see him perform at The Vault several times and thought he had a wonderful singing voice and a lovely way with the guitar.
“If you mean rescuing no-longer-quite-damsels in distress, then okay,” she replied. “But I hope you’re not giving up the music.”
TJ stopped on the steps, bent slightly to crane back down toward her. “If we can’t get customers into the restaurant, there’s no money to pay either of us. Waiters and cooks come first. I’ve got to make money elsewhere, but in this economy, even being an electrician isn’t pulling in the income it used to.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said quietly.
He chuckled darkly. “Me too. But don’t be sorry you called. I can use the work. And anyway, Ella closed the restaurant for the storm. We don’t share space very well these days, so I’m just grateful to be out of the house.”
TJ hustled up the stairs. Allie stood in the dim basement, flashlight hanging at her side, searching for some words that might bring him comfort. For long minutes she waited while he fetched what he needed from his truck, and by the time he returned she still had not been able to think of anything she might say that could help him. For a couple of minutes she watched him work and then she excused herself to go back upstairs, intending to get stuck back in the book she was reading.
Whatever solace TJ Farrelly sought, he would have to find it on his own. She had racked her brain until she had realized the truth: she had none to give.
Late that afternoon TJ drove home with his hands so tight on the wheel that his knuckles hurt. He never shied away from going out in a storm, never let inclement weather keep him from his destination. Not since the night he’d left his mother home alone after he’d promised to see her through the blizzard. He had never learned what it was that had made her wander out into the night and had learned to live with the fact that he’d never know, but he still had nightmares about the morning the police had brought him to the morgue to identify her body. The corpse had been wide-eyed and rigid and bleached pale by the nine days that had passed before an old woman who worked at Saint James rectory had seen his mother’s arm sticking out of the melting snowbank that had been plowed up against the side of the building.
TJ would rather end up in a snowbank himself than let the weather keep him away from people who were waiting for him—people he loved. And he did still love Ella, no matter how tense things had become. No matter that they sometimes snapped at each other when they spoke, as if they were angry at the words leaving their lips instead of the way their life together had begun to fray.
Fray,
he thought now, reaching out to turn the windshield wipers up to high.
We’ve been fraying for years. This isn’t fraying, it’s unraveling.
The wipers thumped their insistent rhythm, not clearing as much of the glass as he wanted. Rolling down the window, he reached out and bent forward as he drove, digging his fingers into the now-slushy buildup at the edge of the wipers’ span, scraping it away. Headlights loomed ahead and he sat up straighter, raising the window as he nudged the car to the right to give a wide berth to the plow headed in the other direction.
As he hit the button to raise the window he realized that the darkness of the storm had given way to nightfall. At this time of year, evening didn’t even have the courtesy to wait for afternoon to end before moving in, but with a thick blanket of storm like this, the day never properly arrived. Now it was over before it had really begun.
He turned his truck onto Calewood Drive, snow slushing around the tires, and came in view of his home. Once upon a time the warm yellow light of the lamppost would have gladdened his heart but tonight the sight weighed him down. It hardly ever felt like home to him anymore. Instead it was a boxing ring, frozen in the held-breath moment before either of the fighters had thrown their first punch. And when that punch came … man, he knew it was going to be a doozy.
Pulling into the driveway, he killed the engine and climbed out of the truck. He hadn’t made it halfway up the front walk before the front door opened, the light from within silhouetting his daughter, Grace, who stood with one hand on her hip. With her slender build, long legs, and wavy brown hair, she looked like a miniature version of her mother.
“Get in here, mister!” the eleven-year-old playfully demanded. “This beef stew I made isn’t gonna eat itself.”