chest, and when the phone buzzed he sat straight up as if somebody had pulled a string in his spine, said "Yeah," and "Yeah," and "On my way," and was gone.
"Did you eat?" Gudrun had called after him from the hallway, in her robe, her hair flat on one side from the pillow.
"I'll get something at the yard."
"You won't."
"I'll get something." And the door, and the cold coming in under it, and the sound of the truck backing down the long driveway with its tires crunching on the old snow.
That was Tuesday. On Wednesday the rain started, and the rain froze where it landed, and by Wednesday night every branch of every birch tree on Larch Hill was wearing a sleeve of clear ice an inch thick and bending toward the ground like it was trying to bow. Dell lay in bed and listened to it. It was a sound he had never heard before, a kind of crackling and ticking all through the woods, like the whole forest was a fire that had decided to burn very slowly, and every few minutes there would be a crack like a rifle shot and a long tearing crash as a limb came down somewhere in the dark. Around two in the morning the power went out. He knew because the furnace stopped. You did not notice how much noise the furnace made until it stopped, and then the silence came into the house and sat down on everything.
There was no school on Thursday. Nobody even had to call. The roads were glass.
Gudrun got home from the Birchwood at nine in the morning instead of seven-thirty, white in the face, because she had driven the twenty miles from Silver Bay at fifteen miles an hour behind a sand truck with her hazards on. She came in through the mudroom stamping and shaking ice off her parka and the first thing she said was, "Is the stove going?"
"Pekka did it," Dell said.
The stove was the woodstove in the living room, a black cast iron Jøtul that his father had put in the year before Dell was born, and it was the only thing between them and the inside of the house becoming the same temperature as the outside. Pekka had got it going at about four in the morning. Dell had come downstairs and found him crouched in front of it in his long underwear, feeding it kindling one stick at a time, his face orange in the light from the