Lila had come down off the stairs. She stood beside him in her pajamas, not touching him. "Mama," she said. "Are you going to come back?"
Nora knelt and took her daughter's face in both hands.
"Yes," she said. "I'm going to the office with the big screens, where it's dry, and I'm going to look at numbers and tell people which roads to close. I'm going to be careful. And I'm going to come back. Okay?"
Lila nodded. Her eyes were enormous. Nora kissed her on the forehead, once, hard, and went out into the rain.
* * *
The power went out at 11:06.
Tom had been sitting in the dark already, more or less, in the armchair in the living room with only the little lamp on, listening to the house. It was an old house, and it talked. The wind found every gap in the window frames, and somewhere a loose gutter strap went tap, tap, tap. When the lamp went out and the refrigerator stopped and the silence came down all at once, he heard her, upstairs, a small rising whimper, the sound of somebody waking into the wrong dark.
He was at the drawer by the stove before she called him. He took two flashlights. He went up the stairs.
She was sitting up in bed with the covers pulled to her chin. The fish night-light was dead. He clicked a flashlight on and pointed it at the ceiling so it wouldn't be in her eyes, and the room came up in a soft, bounced gray: the dresser, the blue cookie tin, the drawing of the solar system pinned to the wall with Saturn purple.
"The power went out," he said. "It's just the storm. It'll come back."
"Where's Mama?"
"At work. Remember? At the place with the big screens."
"Are the big screens out?"
"No. They've got a generator. It's a big building. They planned for this."
Lila looked at the window, where the rain was coming down the glass in sheets, lit now and then by a flicker of lightning far off over the hills across the river.
"What if she doesn't come home," she said.
Tom sat down on the floor beside the bed, his back against the wall. He set one flashlight upright on the rug so it made a column of light on the ceiling, and he handed the other one to her. She took it in both hands.