Christine

Abruptly she went to the telephone again, found the phone book, and as Arnie had done on an evening some two weeks before, she called Libertyville Community Hospital. A pleasant-voiced receptionist told her that Mr Guilder had been checked out that morning. Leigh thanked her and hung up.

She stood thoughtful in the empty living room, looking at the small tree, the presents, the manger in the corner. Then she looked up the Guilders” number in the phone book and dialled it.

“Leigh,” Dennis said, happily pleased.

The phone in her hand felt cold. “Dennis, can I come over and talk to you?”

“Today?” he asked, surprised.

Confused thoughts tumbled through her mind. The ham in the oven. She had to turn the oven off at five. Her parents would be home. It was Christmas Eve. The snow. And… and she didn’t think it would be safe to be out tonight. Out walking on the sidewalks, when anything might come looming out of the snow. Anything at all. Not tonight, that was the worst. She didn’t think it would be safe to be out tonight.

“Leigh?”

“Not tonight,” she said. “I’m house-sitting for my folks.

They’re at a cocktail party.”

“Yeah, mine too,” Dennis said, amused. “My sister and I are playing Parcheesi. She cheats.”

Faintly: “I do not!”

At another time it might have been funny. It wasn’t now.

After Christmas. Maybe on Tuesday. The twenty-sixth. Would that be all right?”

“Sure,” he said. “Leigh, is it about Arnie?”

“No,” she said, clutching the telephone so tightly that her hand felt numb. She had to struggle with her voice. “No—not Arnie. I want to talk to you about Christine.”

42 THE STORM BREAKS

Well she’s a hot-steppin hemi with a four on the floor,

She’s a Roadrunner engine in a ’32 Ford,

Yeah, late at night when I’m dead on the line,

I swear I think of your pretty face when I let her wind.

Well look over yonder, see those city lights?

Come on, little darlin, go ramroddin tonight.

— Bruce Springsteen

By five o’clock that evening the storm had blanketed Pennsylvania; it screamed across the state from border to border its howling throat full of snow. There was no final Christmas Eve rush, and most of the weary and shell-shocked clerks and salespeople were grateful to mother nature in spite of the missed overtime. There would, they told each other over Christmas Eve drinks in front of freshly kindled fires, be plenty of that when returns started on Tuesday.

Mother nature didn’t seem all that motherly that evening as early dusk gave way to full dark and then to blizzardy night. She was a pagan, fearsome old witch that night, a harridan on the wind, and Christmas meant nothing to her; she ripped down Chamber of Commerce tinsel and sent it gusting high into the black sky, she blew the large nativity scene in front of the police station into a snowbank where the sheep, the goats, the Holy Mother and Child were not found until a late January thaw uncovered them. And as a final spit in the eye of the holiday season, she tipped over the forty-foot tree that had stood in front of the Libertyville Municipal Building And sent it through a big window and into the town Tax Assessor’s office. A good place for it, many said later.

By seven o’clock the ploughs had begun to fall behind. A Trailways bus bulled its way up Main Street at quarter past seven, a short line of cars dogging its silvery rump like puppies behind their mother, and then the street was empty except for a few slant-parked cars that had already been buried to the bumpers by the passing ploughs. By morning, most of them would be buried entirely. At the intersection of Main Street and Basin Drive, a stop-and-go light that directed no one at all twisted and danced from its power cable in the wind. There was a sudden electrical fizzing noise and the light went dark. Two or three passengers from the last city bus of the day were crossing the street at the time; they glanced up and then hurried on.

By eight o’clock, when Mr and Mrs Cabot finally arrived home (to Leigh’s great but unspoken relief), the local radio stations were broadcasting a plea from the Pennsylvania State Police for everyone to stay off the roads.

By nine o’clock, as Michael, Regina, and Arnie Cunningham, equipped with hot rum punches (Uncle Steve’s avowed Speciality of the Season), were gathering around the television with Uncle Steve and Aunt Vicky to watch Alastair Sim in A Christmas Carol, a forty-mile stretch of the Pennsylvania Turnpike had been closed by drifting snow. By midnight almost all of it would be closed.