Last Rock by Obsessia

 The draw for the Kessick & District Curling Club's New Year's Day Fun Spiel was random, the way everything Doris Lamontagne did was random. That is to say, by the time Ellie Koski dropped her name into the toque, she had already been on Danny Gauthier's team for about a week.

She knew it the moment she walked in. It was in the way the lounge went quiet for a second and a half and then got very loud, the way a room does when forty people decide at once to be interested in the coffee urn. It was in the way Doris, eighty-four years old and four foot eleven in her purple parka, held the toque out to her with both hands like a collection plate and did not quite meet her eyes.

"Just pop it in, dear. All random this year."

"Doris."

"Mixed doubles. I saw it on the Olympics. Two to a team, one boy and one girl, six rocks an end. Very modern." Doris gave the toque a shake. Nothing in it rattled. Ellie suspected there was nothing in it at all. "You only need two people who can stand each other."

Ellie wrote her name on a slip of paper and dropped it in. Doris folded the toque shut with the efficiency of a woman who had run the draw board since 1971 and had never once, in fifty-six years, left anything to chance. Doris did not believe in random. Doris believed in eventually.

The draw board hung by the lounge door, a sheet of painted steel with magnetic name tags arranged in pairs under the sheet numbers. Ellie found her name under Sheet Two. Beside it, in the same faded label-maker font that had been printing his name since he was twelve, was GAUTHIER, D.

"Small town," said a voice behind her.

He had the decency to look embarrassed. He had always had the decency to look embarrassed; it started at his ears and worked forward. In eleven years in Toronto, Ellie had not met a single man who did it as well.

"Hi, Danny."

"Hi, Ellie." He nodded at the board. "I want it on the record that I had nothing to do with that."

"Doris is eighty-four," she said. "She should be using her powers for good."

"She thinks she is."

He looked older, which was fair, because he was. There was grey coming in at his temples a decade early, the way it had come in early on his father. His hands, when he took his toque off and turned it around in them, were the hands of a man who had spent eleven years lifting bags of road salt and fixing other people's furnaces on weekends. But he still stood like he was waiting for someone to tell him he could sit down. He still smelled faintly of the hardware store, cut keys and birdseed and two-stroke oil, and Ellie was annoyed to find she could have picked that smell out of a lineup.

"How's your mom's hip?" he asked.

"Better. She's on the walker. She hates the walker. She named it."

"What'd she name it?"

"Brian Mulroney."

Danny laughed, the real one, the one that went up at the end like a question. Three people at the coffee urn turned to look, then pretended very hard that they hadn't.

They drew the Harju brothers in the first game. The Harjus were the only team in the Fun Spiel allowed to break Doris's one-boy-one-girl rule, a concession to the family's long-standing refusal to be paired with anyone who wasn't a Harju. Pekka and Mikko were sixty-one and fifty-eight. They had not agreed about anything since the Clinton administration, and they curled together like a single animal with two heads, one of which was always swearing.

Ellie hadn't thrown a stone in four years. Her first one went through the house like it had a bus to catch. Her second stopped short of the hog line in the middle of the sheet, as if it had changed its mind about the whole thing.

"Wow," said Danny, leaning on his broom.

"Don't."

"I said wow."

"You said it like a review."

But in the third end she came out of the hack and felt it come back: the long slide, the weight of the granite riding her palm, the half turn of the handle as she let go. Danny was moving before the stone had left her hand, because Danny had always been moving before the stone left her hand.

"Line's good," he said. "Weight's good. Weight's... no, okay, hurry..."

"Hurry hard!"

"I'm hurrying..."

"Then hurry harder, Gauthier!"

The stone curled in, kissed a Harju rock out of the four-foot and came to rest on the button. The two of them stood at the far end breathing hard and grinning at it like it was something they'd made together, which it was. From the lounge window above the sheets came a sound like a hockey crowd.

They lost 7–2 anyway. Nobody minded. Nobody behind the lounge glass had been watching the stones.

After the first draw, the whole club crowded into the lounge for the potluck, which was the real reason anyone came to the Fun Spiel. There was Mrs. Tremblay's tourtière, cut into wedges the size of a hand. There were butter tarts from three schools of thought: runny, set, and Lindqvist, which meant raisins and which some people considered a provocation. There were pickled beets and devilled eggs and the Legion's chili in a slow cooker held together with electrical tape.

And there was Ellie's mother's pulla, a braided loaf of cardamom bread the length of a forearm, glazed and scattered with pearl sugar. Marja Koski had made it every New Year's Day for forty years. This year she had made it from a kitchen chair, directing Ellie through every step like an air traffic controller.

Marja sat at the table nearest the window with Brian Mulroney parked beside her and her bad leg up on a stacking chair, receiving visitors. She was seventy-three and had been a widow for eighteen years. She had the bright, bossy, unembarrassable face of a woman who had stopped caring what people thought of her sometime around the first Trudeau government.

"You two looked good out there," she said when Ellie brought her a plate.

"We lost seven–two."

"That isn't what I said."

"Mom."

"I'm only saying. I have eyes." Marja took a butter tart, runny school, and examined it. "Doris says he reshingled the Legion roof by himself in August. By himself. In that heat."

"I'm sure Doris says a lot of things."

"Doris says he isn't seeing anyone. Not since the girl from Wawa."

"I'm not having this conversation in front of the beets."

Ellie looked out the window instead. The lounge sat at the back of the club on the second floor, and its long wall of windows looked out over the old ball diamond behind the building. It was a white field that ran a couple of hundred yards to a line of black spruce, and beyond the spruce lay the highway. Past that was Superior, which you couldn't see from here but could always feel, the way you can feel someone standing behind you.

The sky over the spruce was the wrong colour, a dense yellowish grey, like a bruise on its third day.

"That's coming in," said Gord Pelletier from behind the bar.

Gord was the fire chief, a volunteer position he had held for twenty-two years, and he was the size and roughly the shape of a chest freezer. He also drove the township's plow and sat on council. He had been struck by lightning twice, once on the ninth green at the golf course and once, inexplicably, in his own basement.

"That's a big one," Gord said. "That's coming right in off the lake."

It came a little after three, the way the big ones did, as a wall. One minute the spruce were there and the next they weren't. Then the ball diamond was gone too, and the windows were solid white, as if someone had papered them over from outside. Snow hit the glass with a sound like thrown sand. Overhead the building creaked, the long, settling creak of an old roof taking on weight.

At quarter to four, the whole sky turned pink.

It wasn't a bolt. There was no fork, no line, nothing to point at. The whole white world outside the windows simply went pink at once, the colour of the inside of a seashell, and then went grey again. Every phone in the lounge buzzed in the same instant. Somebody said thundersnow in the voice you'd use for a bird you had only ever read about.

The thunder came a few seconds later. Thunder in a snowstorm doesn't boom, because the snow eats it. What came through sounded like a stone dropped at the far end of a sheet, a flat, heavy knock you felt in your back teeth more than heard.

"Right," said Gord, and put down his dishcloth.

Kessick does not wait around to see what a sky intends. Within ten minutes the potluck had been wrapped in tinfoil and parcelled out to the people most likely to return the dishes, the slow cooker had been unplugged, and the lot was emptying in a convoy of taillights behind the yellow flashers of Gord's plow.

Ellie got her mother into her parka, the old red one with the hood trim matted flat, and into her boots. She got her down the stairs one step at a time with Brian Mulroney bumping ahead of them, and out through the front doors into snow so thick it was like walking into a pillow.

Gord had the plow's passenger door open. Doris was already up in the cab, tiny in the big bench seat, her purple parka zipped to her nose.

"Danny's driving you, dear," Doris called down over the wind. "He has to shut down the ice plant. Twenty minutes. Your mother's coming with us."

"Doris, I can just..."

"There isn't room," said Doris, in the tone of a woman who had measured.

Between them, Gord and Ellie got Marja up into the cab, which involved a certain amount of lifting and a certain amount of swearing in Finnish. When she was settled, Marja reached down out of the high door and laid her gloved hand on Ellie's cheek, the way she used to at the school bus.

"I'll put the kettle on," she said.

"I'll be twenty minutes behind you."

"Take your time," said her mother. She smiled, and Gord shut the door.

Ellie stood in the lot and watched the plow's flashers go yellow, yellow, yellow into the white until she couldn't tell them from the snow. Then she went back inside, stamping off her boots, and found Danny waiting at the bottom of the stairs with his arms folded.

"She's good," he said.

"She's a menace."

"Those aren't different things up here."

The ice plant lived in a cinderblock room off the end of the curling shed, behind a steel door with a sign that said AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY in red and, underneath, in Sharpie, this means you Mikko. Danny had been the club's volunteer ice tech since he was twenty, when old Lorne Beaudry's knees went, and he did his shutdown the way he did everything: slowly, and in the same order every time.

Ellie followed him for a while, because it was something to do. He checked the brine temperature and wrote it on a clipboard that hung from a nail. He shut down the compressor, and the hum she hadn't noticed all afternoon went out of the building like a long breath let go. Then he walked the length of the shed turning off the lights over the sheets, one bank at a time, from Sheet Four back toward Sheet One, so the darkness came down the ice toward them.

"You don't have to do it in order," she said.

"I know."

"You could just hit them all at the panel."

"I know." He switched off Sheet Two. "I like to see it go."

She left him to it and went upstairs for her mother's broom.

The club hadn't changed. That was the thing about Kessick: it didn't change, it only subtracted. The same wood panelling, gone the colour of strong tea. The same trophy case, with the same tarnished cups. The same photograph of the 1978 Northern Ontario women's champions, four women in matching cardigans. The smallest of them, the skip, broom planted like a flag, was a thirty-five-year-old Doris Lamontagne, wearing an expression that suggested the other three had better not let her down.

Further along hung the club champions board, a little brass plate for every year back to 1952. Ellie found her father without trying. 2005 and 2006, back to back: KOSKI, T. — LEAD. He had been a terrible skip and a wonderful lead, and he used to say that was the story of his life and he'd made his peace with it. Ellie touched the plate with one finger, the way you'd touch a sleeping animal, and moved on.

The broom rack stood at the top of the stairs down to the ice, a long wooden frame hung with fifty years of brooms: the old corn brooms nobody used anymore, the modern push brooms with their synthetic heads, everyone's name on a strip of hockey tape wound around the handle. Her mother's was easy to find. It had a duct-taped head and MARJA K. in her mother's angular capitals.

Beside it, on the end of the rack, in the same spot it had hung when Ellie was nineteen, was her own broom.

The same green head, faded now. The same strip of white hockey tape around the handle, and on the tape, E. KOSKI in black marker.

The marker wasn't faded.

The tape wasn't old, either. It was clean and white, its edges still sharp. Someone had redone it, and not years ago. Ellie turned the handle toward the window and saw, under the new tape, the ridges of older tape, and older tape under that, layer on layer like the rings of a tree. Someone had been retaping her broom. Possibly every year. Possibly every fall.

She was standing there holding it when the sky dropped the biggest rock yet, right on top of them.

The building jumped. That was the only way she could describe it afterward. It didn't shake. It jumped, the whole of it, like a startled animal, and the floor came up under her feet and went down again. The lights didn't flicker. They were simply no longer there. And overhead, somewhere above the ceiling tiles, something huge let out a long groan, the drawn-out complaint of a ship's hull, of a great deal of weight moving a great distance.

A fine white powder sifted down out of the dark and settled in her hair. Then she was flat on her back on the lounge carpet with a hundred and eighty pounds of hardware store owner on top of her.

For a while neither of them moved. The groaning overhead went on and on, and then, slowly, it stopped. Snow hissed against the windows. Somewhere down in the shed, something heavy shifted, and then came a long, slow clatter, like a whole row of stones tumbling off the back of a sheet.

"Did you just tackle me?" Ellie said.

"I tripped."

"You were downstairs. You came up the stairs to trip on me."

"I came up the stairs," Danny said, into the carpet beside her ear, "and then I tripped."

"On top of me."

"I tripped protectively."

She started to laugh. She couldn't help it. It was the word protectively, the dignity of it, the way he said it into the carpet. She laughed until she couldn't breathe, and then he was laughing too, his whole weight shaking on top of her. For a long time they lay there in the dark on carpet that had smelled of spilled Labatt's since 1979, laughing like idiots.

It felt like being nineteen again. It felt like the nights they'd snuck in at two in the morning with his dad's keys to throw stones in the dark, drink warm Canadian from the honour bar, and leave a five in the jar they couldn't afford.

Eventually he rolled off her. They lay side by side looking up at a ceiling they couldn't see.

"What was that?" she said.

"Lightning." He said it with total certainty. "That one hit us. Probably the flagpole. Or the chimney on the old boiler room."

"It sounded like the roof."

"Roof's fine. Roof's always groaned, you remember. Every time it snows, the trusses settle." He sat up. "We lost the power, is all."

The Molson clock over the bar had stopped. In the dim grey light from the windows she could just make out its face, the second hand frozen at the top. Twelve minutes past four.

"Same circuit as the beer fridge," Danny said. "Only thing in this building anybody ever fixes on time. It'll be back."

The exit signs over the doors were dark too. They were supposed to run on batteries. Danny regarded them for a moment with the expression of a man composing a strongly worded letter to the board.

The front doors wouldn't open. They went down together, feeling their way along the wall, and Danny put his shoulder to the push bar. The door moved perhaps half an inch and then stopped as if it had met a wall. Outside the glass, the snow had packed so tight and smooth it looked like plaster, blank and white, as though it had been told to.

The fire exit by the change rooms gave a full inch and then stopped dead, wedged by something heavy on the other side. Danny pushed until the veins stood out in his neck, and it didn't give another hair.

"Huh," he said.

Both their phones were black. His was a phone from 2014 in a rubber case thick enough to stop a bullet, so nobody was surprised. But hers had been at sixty percent when she'd last looked at it, at the potluck, reading the weather alert. She held the button down for a long time and watched nothing happen.

"Cold killed it," Danny said. "Batteries hate the cold."

"It isn't that cold."

"Landline," he said, and went to the beige phone on the wall by the bar. It had survived the ice storm of '98, the blackout of '03 and the time Mikko Harju threw a chair at it. He lifted the receiver and listened. He put it back.

"Nothing?"

"Not a thing. Not even the hum." He shrugged. "Line's down. Tree on it, probably, out by the highway." He leaned on the bar and looked at her across the dark. "Gord'll plow us out by supper. Worst case, we sleep in the lounge and Doris gets her wedding."

"Don't."

"Little bit funny."

"A tiny bit," Ellie said.

He poured two rye-and-gingers from the honour bar, finding the bottles in the dark by their shapes. Then he took out his wallet and put a five in the jar. Even locked in, even in a blackout, even in a storm that had just put a lightning bolt through the flagpole, Danny Gauthier paid for his rye. Ellie had forgotten how much she loved that about him, and she was furious to remember it.

They carried their drinks to the long windows and sat down in two stacking chairs side by side, the way you'd sit at a drive-in. The snow had thinned a little. Through the dark she could make out the shape of the ball diamond again: a pale field going away into grey, the backstop a crooked black lattice half buried in drift, and beyond it the darker line of the spruce. There were no lights anywhere. Not on the highway, not over the trees where the town should have been glowing.

"Whole grid's down," Danny said. "That's why we can't see town."

Once, off toward the highway, she thought she saw a faint pulse of red through the snow, there and gone, there and gone. Danny said it was the light on top of the radio tower, which ran on its own battery. She let him say it.

With the plant off and the furnace off, the club should have been getting cold. It was a curling club in Northern Ontario on the first of January. Even on a good day you could see your breath in the shed, and nobody had ever called the lounge warm. Ellie kept waiting for the chill to creep in under the doors and up through the floor. She kept waiting to see her breath.

It never came. She decided it was the rye.

The pulla sat on the table behind them, still in its tinfoil, the half loaf her mother had insisted on leaving "for the volunteers," by which Marja had meant Danny. Ellie tore off a piece and ate it. She had eaten her mother's pulla every New Year's Day of her life, and for the first time it tasted of nothing at all. Not the cardamom, not the pearl sugar, not the butter. It was soft and warm and blank, like bread in a dream.

She put that down to the rye too.

"So," Danny said.

"So."

"This is nice."

"This is a hostage situation."

"It's not a hostage situation. It's weather."

The sky lit.

It was a long one. The whole field went pink and held there for a full second, so she could see everything at once: the backstop, the drifts, the spruce standing up out of the snow like a row of men. And out in the field, maybe forty yards off, alone in the middle of all that pink, a man stood in the snow, facing the building.

Orange toque. Shoulders like a chest freezer.

Then dark.

Ellie leaned forward. "Was that Gord?"

"Nobody else is that shape."

"What's he doing?"

"Standing."

"In a lightning storm."

"Gord's been hit twice," Danny said. "He thinks they've got an arrangement."

The thunder knocked. A long dark followed, long enough that Ellie started to wonder if she'd imagined him. Then the field went pink again.

Gord was still there, in exactly the same spot, arms at his sides. And beside him, small and purple in her parka, stood Doris Lamontagne.

Neither of them moved. Both of them faced the club.

Then dark.

Ellie set her glass down very carefully on the windowsill.

"Oh my God."

"What?"

"They locked us in."

Danny laughed. Then he stopped laughing, which was worse.

"Danny."

"Okay," he said. "Okay. In fairness."

"In fairness?"

"Remember when the Harju boys stopped speaking? Over their dad's Ski-Doo?"

"No."

"You were in Toronto. Their dad passes and leaves them one Ski-Doo, a 1989 Formula Plus, and they both want it, so they stop speaking. Fourteen months. Pekka starts driving to the Lutheran church in Wawa so he won't have to sit in the same pew. So Doris gets them both down to the Legion, says it's about the Remembrance Day wreaths, walks them into the walk-in cooler and leans on the door."

"She leans on the door?"

"Twenty minutes. They came out with a handshake and joint custody. There's a calendar on the fridge at the Legion. Pekka gets it odd weekends."

Ellie stared at him through the dark.

"And the Robbie Burns Supper," Danny went on, warming to it. "Every year, Doris does the seating plan. She put Renée and Phil next to each other three years running, and now they've got two kids and a timeshare in Myrtle Beach. The Lindqvists, she got them at the Fun Spiel in 2009, same draw board, same toque..."

"She's done this before?"

"She's done this to us before. Grade Twelve, the Rotary hayride. Who do you think assigned the wagons?"

Ellie opened her mouth, then closed it.

"Also," Danny said, a little more quietly, "the Legion still has us penciled in for June 2017."

"No."

"In the bookings ledger. Doris put a hold on the hall. Koski–Gauthier, tentative. Gary showed me. He's never had the heart to rub it out."

"That's the most humiliating thing I've ever heard."

"I know."

"That's..." She started laughing again and put her hands over her face. "That's actually really sweet, which is the worst part."

"I know," Danny said. "That's how they get you."

She looked at the window, at the dark, at the place where Gord and Doris were standing out there in the snow.

"So they waited till we were alone and shovelled the doors shut? And wedged the fire exit?"

"Gord's got the plow. A pile of snow against those doors takes two minutes."

"And the power."

"Could just be the storm."

"And the landline."

Danny considered. "Gord's on council. He knows a guy at Bell."

"This is insane."

"It's a Kessick situation."

The sky lit again. There were three of them now: Gord, and Doris, and to Doris's left, standing a little apart with his feet planted in the snow as if he were waiting for a bus, a stooped old man in a plaid hunting jacket.

"Is that Mr. Aho?"

"Mr. Aho from the Foodland," Danny confirmed. "He's in it too."

"He's ninety."

"Eighty-eight. He'd be offended."

In the brief pink light, Mr. Aho had his cap off. He was holding it against his chest with both hands, in the snow and the wind, his thin white hair standing straight up off his head.

Then dark.

"He took his hat off," Ellie said. "Why would he take his hat off?"

"Old school," said Danny. "He's very respectful."

"Of what?"

He thought about it. "Of the institution of love."

"You're making that up."

"I'm making that up," Danny admitted.

Ellie got up and went right to the glass.

"If they want a show," she said, "I'll give them a show."

She breathed on the window to fog it, the way she used to on the school bus, meaning to write something across it backwards in big letters for the field to read. NICE TRY DORIS was what she had in mind. Maybe a heart, sarcastically.

Her breath left nothing on the glass. Not a smudge. She breathed again, harder, her mouth almost touching it, and the glass stayed as clear and black as before. She wrote NICE TRY with one finger anyway. Nothing showed. She let her hand drop.

"Window's too warm," Danny said.

"It's January."

"Double glazing. We did it in '19, grant from the Trillium Foundation." He held out her glass. "Come sit. They can't see in anyway. It's pitch black in here."

"Then get us a light."

"There's a flashlight in the plant room." He set his drink down. "Don't let them do anything interesting while I'm gone."

She heard him go down the stairs in the dark, one careful step at a time, and then she couldn't hear him at all.

It was very quiet. She hadn't noticed how quiet until she was alone in it. There was no hum from the beer fridge, no tick from the baseboard heaters, no wind sound in the walls. The roof had stopped its groaning. Even the snow against the glass seemed to have gone soft, a hiss so faint she could have been imagining it. It was the kind of quiet you only got in the middle of a field at three in the morning, a long way from anyone.

"Danny?"

"Here." His voice came up from the shed, and for a second it sounded much farther away than the bottom of the stairs. "Just here."

The sky lit. There were four now. Reverend Whitfield from St. Luke's had come to stand beside Mr. Aho, her white collar a notch at her throat above the black of her coat. She was a tall woman, from Sudbury originally, and she had been the Anglican priest in Kessick for twelve years. She stood in the snow the way she stood at the front of the church, hands folded, perfectly still.

Then dark, and Danny's footsteps on the stairs, and his shape coming back across the lounge holding something long and heavy.

"Found it," he said, and clicked the switch. Nothing happened. He clicked it again. "It takes D batteries. I think they've been dead since the Chrétien years."

"The Reverend's out there now."

"Is she?" He sat down and peered out. "She did the Harju counselling. Before the cooler."

"Okay," said Ellie. "Okay. Fine. If we're doing this, we need rules."

"Rules."

"Ground rules. For the hostage negotiation." She held up a finger. "One. Nobody says it's fine."

"That's half of what I say."

"I know. Two. Nobody talks about the weather."

"Ellie, we're in Northern Ontario. What else is there?"

"Three." She held up a third finger. "Nobody lies. Not even the little ones. Not even the polite ones."

Danny was quiet for a moment.

"That's a big one," he said.

"It's the big one."

"Okay." He held out his hand. In the dark she found it, and they shook on it, his hand big and dry and callused and warm around hers. He didn't let go right away, and she didn't make him.

The sky lit. Five. Pekka Harju, the elder, in a black Ski-Doo jacket with a yellow stripe down the sleeve, his cap in his hands.

A long dark. The snow hissing.

The sky lit. Six. Mikko Harju, the younger, beside his brother in a matching jacket, his cap in his hands too, their shoulders not quite touching.

"Look at that," Danny said softly. "Same patch of snow. Doris'd be proud."

They stood in a loose line now, all six of them, in the falling snow, facing the building. Every one of the men had taken his hat off and was holding it against his chest in both hands.

"Rule three," Ellie said. "No lying." She took a breath. "Who's going first?"

"You're the one who made the rules."

"Which is why you go first. House rules."

"It's not your house."

"Danny."

He took a drink of his rye and set the glass on the floor between his boots. She watched his shoulders rise and fall in the grey, and she thought, He's going to say it's fine.

He didn't.

"I got as far as the Petro-Can," he said.

She'd known. Of course she'd known. She'd known it sitting in the bus station in the Sault that day with her two duffel bags and her mother's cooler full of sandwiches, watching every coach that came in from the north and every man who stepped off one. She had watched for two hours, until the last bus of the day, and then she'd taken it anyway. She'd known it for eleven years. But nobody had ever said it out loud.

"I had the bag on the seat," Danny said. "I had the ticket in my jacket. I was going to leave the truck at the Petro-Can, Kevin said he'd watch it for me, and get on when the bus stopped for gas. And I sat in the truck and watched it pull in. I watched everybody get off for a smoke, and I watched them all get back on. And I watched it pull out."

The sky lit. Seven. A gangly man in a red Petro-Canada parka had come to stand at the end of the line. He had his hands jammed in his pockets, and then he pulled them out and took off his toque.

"Speak of the devil," Danny said. "That's Kevin."

"Kevin's in this?"

"Kevin's in everything. Kevin's worked every shift at that Petro-Can since 2010. Kevin watched me not get on the bus. Kevin has opinions." Danny looked at the dark where Kevin had been. "He came out after and knocked on my window. I rolled it down, and he said, You want a coffee, bud? I said yeah. He brought me one. And he never said another word about it. Eleven years. That's Kevin."

Ellie didn't say anything.

"The mill closed that April," Danny said. "You remember. And Dad's store was the last thing on Main Street with its lights on past six. Every month somebody else's porch light went off for good. The Bergs. The Fortins. The Pellerins went to Alberta, the whole family, all six kids. You'd drive home at night and there'd be another dark house. And I thought..." He stopped. He picked his glass up off the floor. "I thought, if everybody goes, who stays? Who stays to turn the lights off properly? Who makes sure it's done right, at the end?"

He turned the glass around and around in his hands.

"That's not a good reason," he said. "It's just the one I had."

Ellie looked out at the dark field and the seven people she couldn't see standing in it.

"It's a very Kessick reason," she said.

"Yeah."

"Was your dad... was it his..."

"He was fine. That's the thing. He was fine then. I'd like to say it was his heart, or the store, or something. It wasn't. He'd have managed. He told me to go. He drove me to the Petro-Can himself." Danny laughed, and it wasn't the real one. "He went to his grave thinking I missed it because of a flat."

"Danny."

"His heart went two years ago. In March. I was there for it, at least. So." He set the glass down again. "That's mine. That's the lie I've been telling everybody for eleven years. I told you I couldn't. The truth is I could have, and I didn't."

The snow ticked against the glass.

"I hated you," Ellie said, "for about four years."

"That seems fair."

"Really hated you. Made-a-playlist hated you."

"What was on the playlist?"

"Mostly Alanis."

"That does seem fair."

"And then I stopped hating you," she said, "and I just missed you. Which was worse. Hating someone has a direction. You can point it at something. Missing someone doesn't go anywhere. It just sits there in your apartment like..." She searched for it. "Like a dog you aren't allowed to have."

The sky lit. Eight. A slight woman in a long camel coat, grey hair under a knit beret, standing very straight.

"Oh no," Ellie said. "Mrs. Tremblay."

"She was always going to be in it."

Mrs. Tremblay had taught Grade Nine and Grade Twelve English at Kessick District High School for thirty-one years. In Grade Twelve she had kept Ellie back after class and told her she had a gift, and that the worst thing she could do with it was stay. You get out, Ellie Koski, she had said. You get out and you don't come back here except at Christmas. Ellie had written that on a sticky note and stuck it to the bathroom mirror of her first apartment in Toronto, and she'd left it there until the steam ate the glue.

In the pink light, Mrs. Tremblay held her beret against her chest with both hands.

"She told me to get out," Ellie said. "She told me never to come back."

"She tells everyone that."

"She said I had a gift."

"She tells everyone that too," said Danny. "But with you, she meant it."

Then dark.

"So what'd you do with it?" he asked. "The gift."

"I write the words on the side of the carton for an oat milk company."

He waited.

"Like, Good morning! I'm oat milk. I'm creamy and I love you. That kind of thing. Talking cartons. It's a whole tone. We have a style guide." She covered her face. "I won an award last year for a yogurt."

"What did the yogurt say?"

"I'm not telling you what the yogurt said."

"Rule three."

"Rule three doesn't apply to the yogurt." But she was laughing, and so was he, and she took her hands down from her face. "What about you? Rule three. Eleven years. There was the girl from Wawa."

"Kristen."

"Kristen."

"Two years," Danny said. "She was a paramedic. She was great. She was really great." He shrugged in the dark. "She said I was married to a building."

"Which building?"

He made a broad gesture that took in the dark lounge, the shed below, the broom rack, the trophy case and, somehow, the whole town beyond the windows.

"Oh, Danny."

"She wasn't wrong."

Ellie turned her glass in her hands. "You retape my broom," she said.

He went still.

"I saw it. Right before the power went. There must be forty layers of tape on that handle."

"Not forty."

"How many?"

"Eleven," Danny said. "Every October. When I put the ice in."

"Danny."

"Doris won't let anyone use the spot. I won't let anyone use the spot. Somebody hung a junior broom there in 2018, and Doris moved it to the lost and found." He spread his hands. "It's a two-person conspiracy. Three, if you count your mom. She checks on it. She asks me at the store. How's the broom, Danny? Like it's a person."

The sky lit. Nine. Ellie didn't know the woman at first, a woman in a navy parka and a toque with a pompom, a tall bearded man with his arm around her. Then she did. The jaw. The way she stood with her weight on one hip.

"That's Renée," Danny said, and something went strange in his voice. "That's my sister. She..." He stopped. "She told me this morning to be nice to you. That's all she said. Be nice to Ellie."

In the pink light, Renée Gauthier had her face pressed into her husband's coat.

Then dark.

"She's really into this," Ellie said, uncertainly.

It took Danny a moment to answer. "She's always been dramatic," he said.

The sky lit, and this time the light came from behind them too.

The viewing window behind the bar looked down onto the ice, the long, dark shed with its four sheets. For one second the flash caught it, and Ellie saw the shed below lit pink from above.

It was snowing in there.

Not drifting in through a vent, the way it sometimes did in a hard north wind, a little skiff of white along the boards. It was coming straight down, fat and slow and steady, over the far end of the shed, over Sheet Four, settling on the far house as if it had every right to be there. And above the falling snow, the dark wasn't the dark of a ceiling. It was a paler dark. A sky dark.

Then the flash was gone.

"Is it snowing on the ice?"

"Roof vents," Danny said, without turning around. "North wind. Every winter."

"It didn't look like the vents."

"It's always worse on Four. That end sits lower. I've been telling the board for years."

She kept looking at the dark glass. Now that she thought about it, she could smell it. Under the old-carpet, old-beer smell of the lounge there was something clean and cold and enormous, like standing at the end of a dock at night. Like outside.

She looked back at Danny, at the line of his shoulders against the grey, and thought about telling him. Then she couldn't work out what she would be telling him. That it was snowing. That it smelled like outside. That her breath wouldn't fog and the pulla had no taste and her phone had died at sixty percent. Each thing on its own was nothing. Each thing on its own had a reason.

"Rule three," she said instead. "My turn."

"Okay."

"You know about Mom's fall. In March."

"Doris found her."

"Doris found her because Doris comes for coffee at nine every morning, and Mom had been on the kitchen floor since three. Six hours, Danny. Six hours on the linoleum with her hip broken, and the phone on the counter, and she couldn't reach it. And when Doris called me, I was in a meeting about a smoothie." Ellie stared out at the dark. "I drove up that night. Fourteen hours. I didn't stop except for gas, and the whole way I kept doing the math. Twelve hundred kilometres. Six hours on the floor. If it had been her heart instead of her hip, I'd have been in a meeting about a smoothie when it happened."

Danny didn't say anything. He just listened, the way he used to, his whole body turned toward her.

"Three days ago," she said, "I turned down a promotion. Director of Brand Voice. It came with a parking space." She took a breath. "And I gave notice on my apartment. And I called a guy about the space over the old Royal Bank, the one with the bay window, because I think you could put a little office in there. Freelance. You can write talking cartons from anywhere." She looked down at her hands. "I haven't told anyone. Not Mom. Not anyone. I wanted to tell you first. That's... honestly, that's the only reason I put my name in Doris's toque at all."

He was quiet for so long she thought he hadn't heard.

"You're staying," he said.

"I'm home."

He reached over in the dark and took her hand, and held it, and they sat like that. Outside, the sky lit and went dark and lit again. Neither of them turned to count.

The sky lit, and her mother was in the field.

Ellie was on her feet before she knew she'd stood.

Marja Koski, who had not taken a single step unaided since her hip in March, was standing in the snow at the end of the line with no walker. Doris was holding her up by one elbow. She wasn't wearing the old red parka with the matted hood that Ellie had zipped her into an hour ago. She was wearing her good black wool coat, the long one with the jet buttons, which lived in a garment bag at the back of her closet and came out for exactly one kind of occasion.

No hat. Her grey hair blowing loose. Her face turned up toward the windows. In the long pink light Ellie could see that her mother's mouth was open, and that her face was doing what it had done at Dad's funeral, everything at once.

"She changed," Ellie said. "Why would she change her coat?"

"She's dressed up," Danny said. "She dressed up for your prom. She cried at your prom."

"She doesn't have her walker. Danny, she doesn't have her walker..."

Then dark, and Ellie was already running.

She went down the stairs in the black with one hand on the rail, past the broom rack, along the hallway, and threw her whole weight against the front doors. The doors did not care. She hit them with her fists. She hit the push bar and the glass and the steel frame.

"Mom! Mom! Go home! Go home, you'll freeze..."

She hit them until her hands should have been screaming, until she should have split her knuckles open on the frame.

They didn't hurt.

She noticed that. She stood there with her fists against the glass, breathing hard, and noticed it. She opened her hands and turned them over in the faint grey light that came through the snow. Her knuckles were smooth and whole. There was no sting, no throb, nothing. She had hit a steel door frame as hard as she could, a dozen times, and her hands felt the way hands feel in a dream, there and not there, like gloves with nobody in them.

Then Danny's arms came around her from behind.

"Hey," he said. "Hey. Hey. Doris has her."

"Her hip..."

"Doris has her. Doris has everybody. You know that. Doris has had everybody since 1971." He held on. "She's okay. She's right there. She's okay."

"She's crying."

"Course she's crying," Danny said into her hair. "She's been waiting eleven years for this. Let her have it."

Ellie laughed, wet and stupid, against the cold glass that wasn't cold. Then she closed her hands, and put them away in his, and turned around in his arms.

"We should probably give them something," she said.

"Probably."

So they climbed back up to the lounge in the dark, holding hands on the stairs, and went to stand at the long windows, right up against the glass, like the couple on top of a wedding cake. When he kissed her, it was exactly as good as she remembered, which was annoying, and exactly as good as she'd been afraid of, which was worse. The sky lit up over both of them like a flashbulb.

Every flash had shown them one more. They hadn't looked in a while.

This one showed them all.

The whole of Kessick was standing in the ball field.

There were hundreds of them. Every soul in town, and from the look of it people from Wawa and White River too, standing in rows that weren't quite rows, the way people stand when nobody has told them where to stand. Ellie saw the Lindqvists, all five of them. She saw Gary from the Legion. She saw Dr. Okafor from the clinic, still in her scrubs under her parka, and old Mr. Salo who had taught her piano, and the twins who ran the chip wagon, and the whole bench of the Kessick Kodiaks peewee team in their matching jackets.

Gord's plow idled on the shoulder of the highway, its flashers turning yellow. The volunteer fire truck sat behind it with its lights going red and white and red and white, and no siren at all. Behind the fire truck was an ambulance from Wawa with its back doors open and nobody inside. A woman in a paramedic's jacket stood beside it with her arms wrapped around herself.

"That's Kristen," Danny said, wondering. "Even Kristen came. That's big of her."

From the road, someone had dug a trench across the field toward the club. It was a long straight cut through snow drifted chest-high, wide enough for two people to walk side by side. It had been shovelled by hand, and shovelled fast, by a great many people, from the look of its walls. It came about two-thirds of the way across the field.

Then it stopped.

At its end stood a row of shovels, planted upright in the snow, blade down, all in a line.

Every hat in the field was off.

"Whole town came out," Danny said softly. "Look at that."

Ellie looked at it.

She had been thirteen the night the digester blew at the mill. She remembered the sound of it, a deep cough that rattled the dishes in every cupboard in town, and her mother standing in the kitchen with a tea towel in her hands, not moving, listening to the sirens start. She remembered the mill lot afterward: the whole town standing in the snow under the sodium lights all night long, nobody talking, waiting for the men to come out. She remembered holding her mother's hand inside her mother's coat pocket.

She remembered the moment, just before dawn, when the fire chief came out through the gate. Not Gord; old Bernie Sauvé, who'd had the job before Gord. He stopped in the middle of the lot under the lights, and he took off his helmet, and he held it against his chest with both hands.

She remembered how the hats came off after that, one by one across the lot, all the way back to the road, like a wave going out.

And she remembered that after the hats, people started going home.

Kessick had been saying goodbye one porch light at a time for as long as Ellie had been alive. It knew how. It had had a great deal of practice.

In the next flash, they were going.

Not all at once. Mr. Aho went first, settling his cap back on his head with both hands and turning, very slowly, toward the road. Then the Harju brothers, Mikko with a hand on Pekka's back, which was the first time in her life Ellie had ever seen one of them touch the other. Mrs. Tremblay, putting her beret back on, standing a moment longer, then turning. Kevin from the Petro-Can, wiping his face on his sleeve. Renée, held up by her husband. Kristen, climbing into the back of the empty ambulance and pulling the doors shut behind her.

Reverend Whitfield made a small motion in the air in front of her, a little cross you'd miss if you didn't know to look for it. Then she turned too.

They went back down the trench in ones and twos, toward the road and the trucks and the dark town beyond the spruce. Behind them the snow came down on the places where they'd stood and began, softly, to fill in their footprints.

Gord stood the longest of anyone, except two. He stood with his toque in his hands until nearly everyone else had reached the road. Then he put it on, the orange toque, and pulled it down over his ears, and walked back down the trench alone, and climbed up into the plow.

"Look at that," Danny said. "They're giving us some privacy."

"Yeah," said Ellie.

Her mother went last.

Doris had to turn her. She did it gently, with both her small hands on Marja's shoulders, the way you'd turn someone away from a window. They went down the trench together, slowly, the two old women, Doris taking most of the weight. At the end of the trench, by the road, Marja Koski stopped and looked back once at the dark building, at the long windows on the second floor.

Ellie lifted her hand and held it flat against the glass.

In the dark between the flashes, she had no way of knowing whether her mother saw.

For a long time after the last pair of taillights had gone, they stood at the window and watched the dark.

The lightning came less often now, and softer, the storm moving off east over the spruce toward wherever storms go when they're finished with a place. Each flash showed a little less. The field. The backstop. The trench with its row of shovels. The snow filling everything in, patiently, the way it had filled in every other thing in Kessick that people had stopped tending.

"Throw one with me," Ellie said.

Danny looked at her. "In the dark?"

"We always threw in the dark."

So they went down to the ice.

Her broom was on the carpet at the top of the stairs, where she'd dropped it at twelve minutes past four. She picked it up and found the handle by feel, the ridges of eleven years of tape under her palm. Danny took his own off the rack. They went down the stairs together, slowly, and out through the gate in the boards.

It was black down there, the good kind of black, smelling of brine and old wood and the inside of winter. Somewhere ahead of them the stones lay where they'd tumbled off the back of the sheet, and Danny found one with his foot, and then with his hands, and slid it back toward the hack. At the far end of the shed, out past where she could see, the snow was still coming down. She could hear it now, a soft, endless hush, like someone saying shh to a child.

She walked out onto the pebble.

It should have gone straight through her shoes. The ice in a curling shed holds its cold for hours after the plant goes off; it should have bitten up through her soles and into her bones. It didn't. She stood on Sheet Two and let it not.

Danny had noticed too. She watched him do it. She saw him take in the silence where the compressor should have been ticking as it cooled. She saw him look at the clear air in front of his own mouth in the faint grey light from the far end, and not find his breath there. She watched him look up toward Sheet Four, where the snow was getting in, and stare for a long moment at the pale dark above it.

Then she watched him decide, the way he decided most things, slowly and all the way down, that it could wait until after the end.

"It's not cold," he said.

"No."

"Huh." He was quiet a while. "Your mom's going to be okay," he said at last. "Doris has her."

"Doris has everybody," said Ellie.

"Yeah." He turned and looked back toward the stairs, up toward the dark lounge, and past it, she knew, toward the dark town. "Somebody should make sure the lights are off," he said. "Properly."

"They are," she said. "Everybody did it right. You can let it go."

He stood there a moment longer. Then he nodded, once, and tapped his broom on the ice twice, the way he always had.

"Okay," he said. "Your rock."

She set her foot in the hack and her hand on the stone, forty-two pounds of granite that had come all the way from an island off the coast of Scotland only to end up in Kessick, Ontario, like a lot of things. The far house was gone under the falling white. She didn't need to see it. She'd thrown this sheet a thousand times. Her father had taught her on it, crouched behind her in the hack with his big hand over hers on the handle, saying, Easy, easy. Let it go when it wants to go.

She pushed off and let it go.

The stone slid away from her down the dark ice with the low granite purr she had missed for eleven years without knowing she missed it. Danny went with it, sweeping, not shouting, just sweeping, the broom whispering on the pebble. Ellie got up off her knee and followed them both toward the snow.

Nobody called hurry hard. There was no one left to hurry for.

Somewhere ahead of them the stone kept going, out of the dark and into the soft white falling through the place where the roof had been. They walked after it, hand in hand. They never did hear it stop.

-The End? 

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