Free Blessings by Anna Quindlen Page B

and gravel, Skip realized that it was less than a mile from the Boatwrights to Blessings. And for a moment he was afraid that his wet engine would stall and he would be caught in the Boatwright world forever, the way a lot of the guys he knew had been, since Boatwright girls would sleep with anyone, and sleeping with a Boatwright girl just about guaranteed a pregnancy. For one terrible moment he imagined that his baby was a Boatwright. But he knew it couldn’t be true. She was too plump, too pink, her nose and chin too distinct. Besides, there was no such thing as an unwanted child among the Boatwrights, just as there was no such thing as a wanted one. Babies just happened.
    “Lance Cuddy,” he said to himself. “Lance goddamn Cuddy.”
    He almost missed the turnoff into the driveway, as many times as he’d taken it, would have missed it if the birch trees had not made a ghostly show just before the fence curved in. At first he thought it was because of the rain, which was impenetrable, nearly as deep as the night, dark gray on black. But as he came down the long drive and around the big circle, the back of the house on one side of him and the front of the garage on the other, no lights came on to illuminate the truck, and from inside the house he could hear a high thin screaming sound. He threw the truck into park and ran up the back steps to the big house, and then realized that what he was hearing was the sound of the alarm. He knocked and knocked at the back door, cursing Nadine, who had refused to give him the alarm code, or even show him how it worked. “Youdon’t need,” she’d said, looking at him as though he had one hand on the strap to her purse.
    Upstairs in the apartment over the garage the rain made a hard heavy noise on the roof. There were no lights there, either, not even the red glow of the clock on the stove in the kitchen. He felt his way to the drawer by the refrigerator and took out the flashlight. Outside the kitchen window, that looked back over the fields and then the long tangle of forest, he could see nothing but the rain. His work boots sounded of wet as he squeaked down the worn wooden hallway floor.
    Like the birches that had been beacons on the road, there were two small columns of white in the living room, two candles burning on the old steamer trunk. Slowly he swung the the flashlight up, and saw Mrs. Blessing sitting on the sagging chair, holding a light-colored raincoat to her throat, two feet of wet white cotton hanging from beneath its folds. A scarf with some pattern of flowers was tied over her hair.
    “Jesus Christ,” Skip breathed. “You scared the hell out of me.”
    “Don’t speak to me about being frightened,” Mrs. Blessing said. “I’ve been here all alone, no electricity, no power, no light, for who knows how long. And that hideous alarm sound.”
    “Did you call the alarm people?”
    “The phone’s gone, too, everything’s down, and then there’s a terrible smell of burning and I don’t know where it’s coming from. And I had no idea where you had gone.”
    “How did you get in?” Skip said.
    “I have a key, of course. What sort of a question is that?”
    He was catching his breath now, his heart trying to slow down from the drive, the bridge, the alarm, and above all from the sight of Mrs. Blessing in the small room. He felt funny, shining the flashlight right at her like that, illuminating all the lines in her face and the fear in the set of her mouth and the wild glare in her light eyes.
    “You have to do something,” she said.
    “I will.”
    “Right this minute. The entire house could be burned to the ground while you fiddle about.”
    “Not in this rain it won’t.”
    There was no smell of fire in the apartment, only the smell of rain and mothballs, maybe from Mrs. Blessing’s raincoat, and the smell of powder and the sweet smell of baby wipes, that Chris had scented with his nose for secrets and weakness. Skip shone the flashlight onto the