little door, and Pekka had looked up and said, "Get more wood," which was a full sentence for Pekka, and Dell had gone out to the woodpile in the dark in his hoodie with three binder clips on it and come back with his arms full and his eyelashes freezing together.
They had been taking turns since. The living room was almost warm if you sat close. The rest of the house was going cold room by room, like lights going out down a hallway.
Gudrun looked at the stove and nodded once. Then she looked at Dell, at the hoodie and the clips, and something passed across her face that he could not read. It was there and then it was gone.
"Your dad call?" she said.
"No."
"He won't. They'll have him out till this is done." She hung up her parka on the hook. Under it she was still in her scrubs, the purple ones with the little cartoon cats on them that the residents liked. "I'm going to sleep in here by the stove for a couple hours. Keep it going. Don't open the fridge, it'll hold cold longer. There's peanut butter and there's bread. If a line comes down in the yard, you do not go near it. You understand me? You do not go near it, you do not let your brother go near it, you come wake me up. Lines don't look dangerous. That's how they get you."
"I know," Dell said. He did know. His father had told him about a hundred times. A downed line can look dead and be carrying seven thousand volts. The ground around it can be charged. If you are ever near one, you shuffle away with your feet together and never take a step. He could have recited it in his sleep.
"I know you know," Gudrun said. "I'm telling you anyway." She lay down on the couch in her scrubs and pulled the afghan over herself, the brown and orange one that Dell's grandmother had crocheted, and she was asleep in less than a minute.
There was a box by the door.
Dell had noticed it when she came in. She had carried it in under one arm and set it down on the bench in the mudroom, and it was a long flat cardboard box with a shipping label on it, and it had obviously been sitting at the Birchwood for a few days because the label had a coffee ring on it. Mail did not come up Larch Hill Road in the winter; the carrier left anything big at the post office, and Gudrun had the Birchwood as her delivery