By the afternoon of the first day without power the house had settled into a kind of camp. Gudrun woke up at one and heated a pot of water on the top of the woodstove and made instant oatmeal for all three of them, and they ate it out of mugs sitting on the floor. She checked her phone, which had twelve percent left, and said the Birchwood had a generator and they were managing and her supervisor had told her not to try the road tonight. She checked the weather radio, which ran on batteries. More freezing rain overnight, it said. Widespread outages. Crews from three states en route.
"Your dad's going to be out a long time," she said. "Days, maybe."
Dell nodded.
"You should put on something warmer than that," she said, and looked at the hoodie.
"I'm okay."
"You're not okay, you're blue. Go put on two sweatshirts. Put on your dad's long johns, they're in the bottom drawer."
He went upstairs. His room was cold enough that he could see his breath, and the window had grown a skin of ice on the inside, feathery and white. He put on a second T-shirt and a flannel shirt and the old fleece he had outgrown in fourth grade, which only came to his wrists, and he put the gray hoodie on over all of it and clipped it shut with the binder clips, and when he came back down Gudrun looked at him and opened her mouth and then shut it again.
Pekka opened the box at around four.
It was getting dark already. In December on the North Shore the dark comes down at four-thirty like a lid, and with the power out there was nothing to push it back but the little orange window of the stove and a camping lantern that Gudrun had found in the garage, which threw a cold white light up at the ceiling. Pekka got up off the floor and went into the mudroom and came back with the box and sat down with it on his knees and looked at it for a while. Then he took his pocketknife out and slit the tape.
The coat inside was black. It was long, longer than Dell's green coat had been, down to the middle of the thigh, with a deep hood and a heavy two-way zipper and a little logo of the mountain on the chest in gray thread. It was the kind of coat that people in Duluth wore when they wanted you to know they had money but did not want you to think they cared. There was a packing slip folded on top of it. Pekka unfolded the slip and read it, and Dell watched his face in the lantern light, and his face did nothing at all.