Ice

The storm came up the lake from the south a little before nine on Tuesday night. Camille watched it from the cottage window with a basket of Tilly’s laundry on her hip.

Tilly was in Vergennes, in the small bed at Mill Lane, as she was every Tuesday. The cottage was too quiet without her. Camille had been folding pyjamas to give her hands something to do. The first thunder rolled across the water, and the rain came down all at once, hard, like gravel on the roof.

At nine o’clock the lamp beside her went out.

So did the porch light and the hum of the refrigerator. She looked up the flagstones at the inn. It had been a row of yellow windows. Now it was a black shape against a blacker sky, and she said a word in French and dropped the laundry.

She had fourteen blocks of laminated dough in the walk-in. She had made them yesterday and today, forty hours of folding and resting, because Saturday’s window needed three times what it had needed last year and Marguerite Roy’s first order was two weeks off. She had a hundred and eighty pounds of butter and sixty quarts of cream in there besides.

She took the flashlight off its nail and ran. She was wet through before she reached the kitchen porch.

The pastry kitchen was dark and already too quiet. The compressor had stopped. She found the telephone by feel and dialled the power company, and a recorded woman told her there was a tree across the line on the Saxby Point road. Crews were on their way. Service was expected by six in the morning.

“Six,” Camille said to the recording. “That’s nine hours.”

A walk-in with its door shut would hold butter safely for nine hours. It would not hold dough. Laminated dough began to proof at forty-five degrees, and once it had proofed in the block it was finished. All she could do with it then was make very expensive bread.

A second flashlight came through the door from the corridor. Winnie was behind it in a dressing gown and her cardigan, with a storm lantern in the other hand.

“I’ve three rooms in and they’re all in the lobby with candles, having the time of their lives,” Winnie said. “What do you need?”

“A generator.”

“I asked Northeast Heritage for one in 2016. What do you need that I’ve got?”

“Ice. All of it. And the wedding coolers out of the cellar.”

“The bar machine was full at six. The coolers are down the bulkhead, and I’m not going down the bulkhead in my slippers.”

“I’ll go,” said a voice from the porch.

He was in the doorway with rain pouring off his jacket and a flashlight in his fist. He must have seen the inn go dark from the boathouse and come straight up the lawn. He was breathing hard. He looked at the walk-in door and then at Camille.

“Tell me what to carry,” he said.

She did not waste time being surprised.

“There are eight coolers in the cellar, the big white ones. The bulkhead door’s outside, round by the lilacs, and I’m coming with you, because two of them leak and I know which. After that it’s ice from the bar in the grey bus tubs. Winnie, put the lantern on the bench and go back to your guests.”

“Put a generator in that plan of yours,” Winnie told him, and went.

The bulkhead was a pair of slanting wooden doors with a hasp. The rain was coming sideways. He heaved the doors up and she went down the stone steps first with the light. The cellar smelled of earth and old apples. She pointed, and he lifted. They made three trips, and each time the coolers came up through the rain two at a time with him at one end and her at the other. Water ran down her neck and into her clogs. On the last trip a crack of thunder went off directly overhead and they both ducked, and she heard him laugh, once, in the dark.

“Bar,” she said, when the six good ones stood in a row on the kitchen floor.

The ice machine was behind the bar off the lobby. Winnie’s three rooms sat round the unlit fire with candles and a bottle of something, and they watched the owner of Hallett Hotels go past with a bus tub of ice on each hip. He made the trip nine times. Camille stayed in the kitchen and built.

She worked by the lantern and gave him orders over her shoulder.

“Four inches in the bottom of each. More than that. Now leave it.”

She laid a sheet pan on the ice. She brought the dough out of the walk-in two blocks at a time, opening the door for no more than three seconds, and laid the blocks flat on the pan in their plastic. A second pan went on top, and more ice on that.

“Pack the sides. Don’t press down on it, you’ll crush the layers. Push it in at the edges with your hand.”

He packed the sides. His hands were red with cold.

“Cream next. The quarts stand up. Ice to the shoulders and none over the caps.”

“What about the butter?”

“The butter stays in the walk-in with the door shut. It’ll hold till morning if nobody opens it. I only want the forty pounds I’ve already shaped for laminating, because that has to stay at exactly fifty-five. That goes in the last cooler with half the ice. Half, Gideon. I want it cold. I don’t want it hard.”

“Half.”

She put a probe thermometer into each cooler and shut the lids. Then she took every side towel in the kitchen, forty of them, clean from the morning’s linen, and wrapped the coolers in them like babies. When she had finished she looked at the oven clock, out of habit. It was dark. She looked at her watch.

“Ten o’clock,” she said. “An hour.”

“Will it keep?”

She opened the first lid a crack and read the probe. “Thirty-four. It’ll keep till noon if it has to.” She sat back on her heels. Her knees hurt and her T-shirt was stuck to her back, and her bandana had gone somewhere in the cellar. “That’s three thousand dollars of Saturday in those boxes, and I couldn’t have got the coolers up by myself.”

“You’d have found a way.”

“I’d have found a worse one.” She looked up at him. He was soaked to the skin, hair flat, with cellar dirt on his jaw. Water was dripping steadily off the hem of his jacket onto her floor. She had not minded once in an hour that he was in her kitchen. “You’re shivering.”

“So are you.”

She was. Now that she had stopped moving, the cold had got right into her. She looked for a towel, and saw forty of them wrapped round six coolers, and began to laugh.

“I’ve used every towel in the building.”

“I have dry ones at the boathouse,” he said. “A stack of them. Winnie sent down far too many.”

He said it lightly. Then she saw him hear it himself, and he went still.

There were towels in her cottage, sixty yards away. They both knew that. She had a linen cupboard and a hot-water tank that would stay warm till morning, and a dry bed with nobody in the next room.

The rain drummed on the porch roof. She thought about the back door on Saturday night, and the tea going cold, and the lamp she had watched until it went out.

“Then you’d better run,” Camille said.

They ran. The lawn was a sheet of water and the dark was total, and he had the flashlight and she had hold of his sleeve. The lightning showed her the boathouse twice, white and close. She took the outside stair behind him and stepped over the fourth tread from the top without thinking about it. He noticed, and looked back at her, and then he pushed the door open.

The room was as she had known it would be. He lit a storm lantern on the table and the yellow light came up slowly over the iron bed and the faded quilt, the two windows running with rain. It smelled of cedar and lamp oil. She had been twenty-five in this room. She stood dripping on the same floorboards with her heart banging and found that she was not sad at all.

He took a towel from the shelf and held it out at arm’s length. When she had it he stepped back, two full paces, until his shoulders were against the door.

“I want to say this once, so you never have to wonder,” he said. “I’m not going to touch you unless you tell me to. That goes for tonight and for after. You can dry your hair and go back up that lawn and nothing will be different on Saturday. I’d carry ice for you again tomorrow either way.”

She pressed the towel to her face. It was rough and dry and warm from the shelf. When she lowered it he was still against the door with his hands open at his sides, and water running out of his hair, and so much plain want in his face that it steadied her.

“I’m telling you to,” she said. “I’ve wanted to since the cold pantry.”

He let out a breath as if someone had hit him. “Since the pantry.”

“Since I had my hand an inch off your sweater and Arlo wanted butter. Come here, Gideon. I’m cold and I’m tired of deciding not to.”

He crossed the room. He took her face in both hands first, carefully, and looked at her, and then he kissed her, slowly and thoroughly. She got her fingers into his wet hair and kissed him back until neither of them had any breath.

“Wait,” she said, against his mouth. “We weren’t careful in this room once.”

“I know. There’s a box in my bag. I bought it in Burlington the day after the breakwater, and I’ve felt like a presumptuous idiot ever since.”

She laughed out loud. “Good. Stay presumptuous. I love her more than my life, and she’s exact enough for two.”

She pushed the jacket off his shoulders herself. His shirt was plastered to him and the buttons were slippery, and he stood and let her fight them, and that was nearly the end of her patience. He was broader than he had been at twenty-seven. There was more weight in his chest and arms, and a few grey hairs among the dark ones over his heart. She put her palm there and felt how fast it was going.

“What’s this from?” She touched the white line through his eyebrow.

“A scaffold clamp in Boston, four years ago. I was looking up at a cornice and I should have been looking where I was going.”

“That sounds like you.”

He drew her T-shirt up and she raised her arms for it. The cold air touched her wet skin and then his hands did, warm, moving up her back. He unfastened what was left and looked at her in the lantern light for a long moment without saying anything. She had fed a child with these breasts and they were not a girl’s. She did not cover them, and when he bent his head and put his mouth there she heard herself say his name.

He took her left hand and turned her arm to the light. The scar lay across the inside of her forearm, pink and smooth, as wide as two fingers.

“You asked me once,” she said. “It was November of 2022. She was eight months old and teething, and I’d had three hours’ sleep. I reached past a rack at four hundred and fifty degrees to get a tray I could have waited for. I finished the service with it wrapped in a wet cloth, because there wasn’t anyone else.”

He did not tell her he was sorry. He bent and laid his lips against the scar, at one end and then the other. It was the oldest, loneliest place on her body and it felt his mouth all the way to her shoulder.

They got the rest of the wet things off between them, clumsily, laughing once when her jeans would not come over her heel. The sheets were cold and the springs sang out under their weight exactly as they always had. She pulled him down beside her. For a while they only lay face to face with the quilt dragged up, getting warm, his thigh between hers and his hand travelling slowly from her shoulder to her hip and back again.

“You’re different,” he said.

“I’m thirty-one.”

“You’re stronger. Here, and here.” His thumb moved over the muscle of her arm, her waist. Then his hand came to rest low on her belly and stopped.

She knew what he had found. Tilly had left a fan of fine silver lines there, below her navel and out toward each hip, where the skin had stretched to hold her. Camille had stopped noticing them years ago. She noticed them now, under his palm.

“She did that,” she said. “She weighed eight pounds one ounce and she was two days late. She has never been late for anything since.”

He moved down the bed. He kissed the marks one after another, slowly, the whole width of her, and his breath was not steady. She put her hand in his hair and held on. Outside the thunder was moving off up the lake. When he lifted his head his eyes were wet, and he did not hide it, and she pulled him up to her and kissed him hard.

After that there was not much talking. He remembered a good deal and so did she. He remembered the place under her ear, and she remembered that the small of his back made him shudder. But they were not the same two people, and they took their time over learning that. He was more patient than he had been at twenty-seven, and she was a great deal less shy. She told him what she wanted, in plain words, and he did it, and watched her face while he did. When she could not wait any longer she said so. He reached for the box, and there was a moment of fumbling that made them both smile, and then he came into her slowly, with his forehead against hers and her name in his mouth the soft way.

She held his hips with her knees and moved with him. The bed kept time. She had forgotten that her body could feel like this, as though it belonged to her and not to a child or a kitchen. The pleasure built gradually, and when it broke she cried out against his shoulder, and felt him follow her a moment later with a sound that was almost pain.

They lay tangled and breathing. The rain had dropped to a patter. He turned on his side and drew the old quilt over both of them, up to her chin, and she laid her head in the hollow of his shoulder, where it had always fitted.

The lantern guttered and went out, and neither of them got up to light it.

“Are you all right?” he said into the dark.

“I’m better than all right. Don’t ask me again or I’ll start thinking about it.”

His chest moved under her cheek. After a while he said, “On Saturday she told twelve people my eye was like hers. I’ve thought about it every hour since. I wanted to say it back to her so much my teeth hurt.”

“I know. I watched you not do it.”

“Four more.”

“Four more, and then you wait for me to say so.” She found his hand under the quilt and turned it over and ran her thumb along the old rope burn. “I have to tell you something, and I need you to hear it properly. It’s the same thing I told you on the breakwater, only it’s bigger now.”

“Go on.”

“This is mine. This bed, tonight, what I just did. It belongs to me, apart from her. I didn’t do it because you stood in the lake. It doesn’t make you her father any sooner, and it won’t be why if I say you can be. If you miss a Saturday, I’ll still watch her tip the jar out, whatever happened in this room on the Tuesday.”

“Yes.”

“And it goes the other way. You could be the best father on this lake and I might still decide I can’t have you. You have to earn her from her, on the dock. You have to earn me from me, and I haven’t worked out what that costs. I won’t have one paying for the other. I’ve seen what happens to a child when her mother’s happiness is tied to a man staying.”

He was quiet. She could feel him thinking it through.

“Two accounts,” he said at last. “Nothing moves between them.”

“Yes. That’s the way to put it.”

“Then I’ll tell you where the second one stands, so that you have true numbers. I’m not going to be easy to send away, Camille. I’ll go if you tell me to. But I won’t drift off, and I won’t take a hint, and you’d have to say it to my face.”

She did not answer that. She turned her face into his neck, and he seemed to understand that it was the most she could do tonight.

They slept a little. At ten past three the lamp on the table came on by itself, and the space heater ticked, and she woke with a start and said, “Dough.”

“Thirty-four degrees,” he mumbled. “You checked.”

“The walk-in will be coming back down. I’ll move it all at five.” She reached over him and switched the lamp off, and stayed where she had landed.

At half past four she got up. Her jeans were still damp and her T-shirt was worse, and he handed her his grey sweater without a word. It came halfway down her thighs and smelled of him. She rolled the sleeves and sat on the edge of the bed to work her feet into wet clogs.

He was sitting up against the iron rail, watching her. The window behind him had gone from black to the darkest blue.

“I’ll get the sweater back to you,” she said.

“Keep it.” He hesitated. In six summers he had never once asked what he asked next. She had always gone up the stair to him and come down it alone, laughing, before the kitchen woke. “May I walk you up?”

She looked at him. He had not said that he would walk her up. He had asked whether he might.

There was nobody in the cottage this morning. Arlo would not be in until twenty past five. She thought of the kitchen she ran, and the nineteen people in it, and the fact that every one of them had looked at two faces on Saturday and passed the bread.

“As far as the flagstones,” Camille said. “And you carry the flashlight.”
***