I have to stop this, Lydia told herself. The lights would come back on any minute now.
She got up and walked slowly to the kitchen. There was a box of kitchen matches in the second drawer from the top of the counter, and there might be a candle in there as well. She found the drawer handle, pulled out the drawer, and found the box of matches. Leaning against the counter, she opened the box and struck a match.
The tiny flame danced, a spark against the darkness, but her hand and the match she held were invisible to her. Her hand shook. She blew out the flame and dropped the match on the countertop.
She shuffled back to the living room and sat down, then pulled on the sweater she had shed earlier. The living room felt cold for this time of year, and without any power, they could not turn on their furnace.
Matt was certainly taking his time looking for the radio; it felt as though he had been downstairs forever. There was no reason they had to sit here doing nothing just because of a blackout. They could drive to someplace where the power was still on and stay overnight at a hotel. She could always call in sick tomorrow, since she had some days off coming to her. If they stayed anywhere near downtown, she could even walk to work.
“Matt?” she called out, in case he had come back upstairs and she just hadn’t heard him. “Matt?” The air seemed thicker, harder to breathe, but that had to be her imagination. She waited silently for a few more moments. “Matt?”
“Found the radio,” he said from the direction of the dining room. “Couldn’t hear anything downstairs, though. Maybe we can pick up something up here.” There was doubt in his voice.
“I’m over here,” she said, worrying that he might lose his way even along the short distance to the front of the house.
He thumped down next to her, at her right this time. “I know it’s on,” he said, “and I found the tuner dial, but nothing’s coming in.”
“Maybe the battery’s dead.”
“I know it’s not dead, because I put in a new battery just the other day.”
“I went to the kitchen again,” she said, “and lit a match, and even…” She sighed. “Even the flame wasn’t acting right.”
“What do you mean?”
“I could see the flame, but nothing else, not even the match.”
“What’s so strange about that? You’re not going to get much light from a match anyway. You’re too suggestible. The flashlight doesn’t work, so now you’re imagining that fire doesn’t, either.”
She wanted to accept that. She always had been suggestible, even gullible at times.
“I mean, you’re too damn suggestible.” He seemed intent on establishing that fact, an assumption that would cut off other possible theorizing about their situation. “Damn radio.” She heard him sigh. “Maybe there’s nobody on the air,” he continued, “because this is a really big outage, like the one that knocked out the whole East Coast a while back.”
It isn’t just an outage, she thought; she knew that and was sure Matt knew it, too, deep down, however much he resisted the fact. Flashlights that cast no light, a darkness so pervasive that nothing was visible, even the feeling that air was beginning to congeal around her—this was more than just a power failure.
“Matt,” she whispered, “I was thinking. We don’t have to stay here, you know. Let’s go somewhere else.”
“We’d feel awfully stupid when the power comes back on, driving around and wasting time and gas when we could just be patient.” Matt had always been practical. Living in this house gave them more space for less cost than they’d had in the city, even with the second car; keeping their old furniture and making use of old appliances like the radio was economical; and there was no point in going on a vacation somewhere else this year when they could enjoy their own back yard. Of course Matt had wanted to leave the city, she thought. The house gave him even more of an excuse to keep to himself, to anchor himself to one place, to surround himself with certainty, to become almost immovable.
“I’ll keep fiddling with the radio,” he said. “Think you can make it to the front door, see if anything’s going on outside?”
“Sure.” The power would come back on any second now. The world would become continuous again.
She got up and inched toward the front door, hands out, until her fingers found a surface. She pressed her palms against the door, found the doorknob, and pulled the door open.
She stepped outside; the darkness took her, starless, cold. She wrapped her arms around herself. As she turned to go back inside, she glimpsed a faint glow to her right. The glow became two globes of light; there was the sound of a motor. A car was coming down the small hill at the end of the cul-de-sac, and it seemed to be moving very slowly, maybe no more than five miles an hour.
She retreated inside, closed the door, and shuffled back to the sofa. “It’s still just as dark,” she said, “but somebody was driving down the hill at the end of our street. The headlights—they were doing the same thing as our flashlight. I mean, I could see them, but I don’t know how the driver could see the road or anything else.” They wouldn’t be able to drive out of here, with no way to see where they were going.
“Nothing,” Matt said, and she knew that he was referring to the radio. “Everything’s out.”
She sat down. Maybe they should get out of here, whatever the risks. Anything would be better than sitting helplessly, passive victims of whatever was going on outside. Maybe the blackout, or whatever it was, had taken out the whole country this time. Maybe all of North America was dark and cold. Maybe terrorists had finally managed to knock out the entire grid. Maybe somebody had finally started a nuclear war. Thoughts of terrorists and nuclear war didn’t frighten her as much as they might have. At least they were familiar possible causes of potential disasters.
“Hey!” That was a woman’s voice, and very faint. “Hey!”
“Did you hear that?” Matt asked.
“Yes.” Lydia was already up, shuffling toward the door. She pulled the door open and leaned outside. “Hello?”
“I’m here,” the voice said. Lydia guessed that the woman had to be somewhere near the edge of their lawn. “In my car.”
“I’m Lydia Polgrave,” Lydia said. “My husband Matt and I live in the two-story brick house next to the white Colonial at the bottom of the hill.” It suddenly seemed ludicrous to be introducing herself to someone she could not see.
“I know the house. My name’s Gretchen Duhamel, and I live in that gray shingled job with the screened-in porch at the end of the road.” The alto voice was strong, almost reassuring. Lydia tried to visualize this woman she had never seen. She sounded like a tall woman, maybe somewhat overweight, with a short, no-nonsense haircut. “Can’t see a darned thing, so it probably isn’t a good idea to keep driving. Only trouble is, I don’t know if I could even find my way home now, in the car or on foot.”
Lydia thought of asking her inside. Under the circumstances,