At three in the morning I awoke, aching and shivering. The sheet beside me was empty. He’d slept in the music room. When I went to the bathroom to vomit, flakes of snow were floating down the window, silver on one side, dark on the other. By their speed and size I could tell it was the kind of snowfall that sticks.

For two days I could do nothing but lie flat and be sick. Reading was out of the question; so was watching television or listening to music. My body was not my own; it did what it had to do, and I took a grim pleasure in kneeling to hug the cold toilet bowl, in the stink and the release. No one ever talks about the pleasures of throwing up. Rose and Walter stayed away, not wanting to catch anything before the holidays. Cloud stood by me. Robin spoke of foreign germs and recirculated cabin air and brought me what I needed with the remoteness of a private nurse.

“What’s going to happen?” I asked on the third day, sitting up to drink tomato soup from a mug.

“I don’t know.”

“Are we still going to the lake? Everyone’s counting on it.”

The suspension of time and the absence of a follow-up conversation gave our fight a dreamlike quality. Whenever I saw Robin’s face I knew I hadn’t dreamt it. I went downstairs in my bathrobe; the letter holder was still on the top shelf of the hutch. The storm had stopped, but the Eastern Seaboard remained in the grip of a freeze, and the plow drifts along the roads were intact though increasingly filthy.

“We have to,” he said at last, with great reluctance. “I’ve got something to show you.”

“What is it?”

“Mind your own business.”

I rushed to ingratiate myself: “I still like the beard . . .” But he was halfway to the door and either had not heard or chose not to turn around.

38

Packed snow could be as slick as ice, the difference being that on snow the tires had a chance of digging in and finding purchase. We turned left at the country store and started the climb up through the National Park.

“Not too slippery, is it?”

Robin tapped the brakes. “Fine for the moment.”

I turned to smile at Alison, roly-poly in her gray ski jacket in the backseat. Black, gray, and white were the only colors she ever wore. She was scowling out the window. Robin and I were putting on a good show, but surely she sensed the tension, and anyway, the ease that had developed between Alison and me in London would take time to re-create.

“I’m glad you could come.” Just having her in the car was a small victory. Robin would indulge her; Rose and Walter would cheer her up.

Alison always ignored pleasantries. “Will the lake be frozen solid?”