“Maybe it will miss us,” Cici decided, stirring rum into the eggnog with a wire whisk. “Or fizzle out before it gets here.”
“Maybe,” Lindsay agreed, looking uneasy. “But just in case, I think I’ll go ahead and put Bambi in the barn.”
“Maybe I’d better get the sheep in, too,” Bridget said, going for her coat. “Just in case.”
Twenty minutes later Lindsay returned, her cheeks red with cold and her hair tangled by the wind. She shivered and stomped her feet as she shrugged out of her coat. “The temperature is really dropping,” she told Cici, warming her hands before the flames of the kitchen fireplace. “The thermometer on the porch says twenty degrees.”
“Where’s Bridget?” Cici had become quite adept at folding one-handed, and she looked up from the stack of napkins she had almost completed.
“Oh, that stupid dog. I guess he was mad because Bridget wanted to bring the sheep in early. Every time one of them would try to go through the gate he’d chase it off. We finally got all the sheep in the barn but then the dog ran off. She’s out there calling him.”
Cici looked at Ida Mae, who was rolling out piecrust dough into a big circle. “If it does get below zero, like they say, and with the wind and all, do you think the sheep will be all right in the barn? They won’t freeze, will they?”
Ida Mae sniffed. “What’re you going to do? Bring ’em in the house? It wouldn’t surprise me none, come to think of it.” She dusted a cookie cutter in flour and began to cut Christmas tree shapes in the piecrust. “Sheep don’t freeze, but people do. If I was you, I’d bring in some more firewood before the wind blows snow all over it.”
Resignedly, Lindsay reached for her coat again. “You’re probably right.”
“I’ll help you,” Cici volunteered. “I can’t carry it, but I can stack it.”
Lindsay filled the rolling cart with firewood from the shed and pushed it across the yard to the cellar door, fighting the wind all the way, where she dumped it for Cici to stack inside by the furnace. With the third load, she caught Cici’s good arm and, shouting a little to be heard above the rising wind, said, “You’ve got to see this.”
She pulled Cici outside and pointed toward the mountains—except that there were no mountains. There was only a solid sheet of blackish gray as far as the eye could see.
“Good God,” Cici said, astonished. “There
is
a storm.”
They hurried to finish stacking the last load of firewood, but an early dusk enveloped them before they were halfway through. They had to turn on the overhead light to see the furnace as Lindsay added fresh logs and opened the damper for more heat. They locked the outer door against the storm and hurried upstairs.
“Can you believe it?” Lindsay demanded, stripping off her gloves as they came upstairs. Ida Mae had already turned on the lamps and the overhead chandelier, and the Christmas tree glittered like a sky alive with starlight. “I mean, can you
believe
it? It’s Christmas, for Pete’s sake! We give one party a year. We’ve worked twenty-four/seven for almost a month. We have two tons of food that’s going to go bad. Everyone we know is supposed to be here and we’re in the middle of a freakin’ blizzard!”
“Come on,” Cici said. “The roads could be fine by tomorrow afternoon. I’m sure they have snowplows here.” She started toward the kitchen. “Bridget?”
Ida Mae was taking two bubbling fruit pies with Christmas tree crusts out of the oven as they came in. “For heaven’s sake, Ida Mae, stop cooking,” Lindsay said irritably. “There’s a blizzard coming. No one is going to make it to the party.”
Cici said, “Where’s Bridget?”
“Ain’t here.” Ida Mae took a handful of sugar and sprinkled it over the tops of the hot pies, forming a glistening crystal glaze.
“What do you mean, she’s not here?” Cici’s voice was tight with alarm. “She didn’t come in?”
“Came in,” replied Ida Mae, not looking around, “put on her boots, went out again. Looking for that dog.”
The annoyance faded from Lindsay’s face as she looked at Cici, and then at Ida Mae. “How long ago?” she demanded.
Ida Mae shrugged, carefully transferring the pies, one by one, to a cooling rack. “Fifteen, twenty minutes ago.”
Cici looked out the window, but saw only her own tense, scared features reflected back against the black windowpane. “Did she take a flashlight?”
Ida Mae turned to look at them, and understanding slowly began to kindle in her eyes. “Not that I saw,” she said.
Lindsay turned without a word and left the room.
When she returned, bundled in her hooded parka, knit cap, Burberry scarf, fleece-lined boots and gloves, and carrying a heavy flashlight, Cici was similarly attired, holding a flashlight of her own. Lindsay said, “Cici, stay here. It’s starting to snow. You could fall. I’ll find her.”
“If you think I’m going to sit here and wait you’re crazy,” Cici replied curtly. “And the longer we stand here arguing about it the longer Bridget’s out there in the cold. No one goes alone. Are you ready?”
So they plunged out into the cold, holding onto each other for support against the icy, gusting wind, following the path their crisscrossing flashlight beams traced across the yard. They reached the fence of the sheep meadow and shouted, “Bridget!”
They tasted snow on their tongues, and felt it pelting their faces. Their flashlights picked up fat, swirling flakes against the stark night landscape.
Cici leaned close to Lindsay and gestured with her flashlight. Lindsay nodded, huddled down inside her downy jacket, and plodded onward, following the fence line, shouting for Bridget.
The snow fell harder, slanting in sheets, then whirling and spinning in the vortex formed by their flashlights, blinding and disorienting them. It drifted across the ground with the vicious wind, dragging down their boots. To get their bearings, they had to stop frequently and look back at the house, which glowed like a beacon through the fog of snow. Cici’s half-healed ribs stung with the effort of every gasping breath, and the clumsiness of her plaster-encased arm made the constant struggle for balance even more difficult. She cursed her infirmity even as she felt a thread of panic begin to wind itself through her. What if they couldn’t find Bridget? What if she were hurt, lying broken at the bottom of a ravine somewhere? What if she couldn’t even hear them call? What if . . .
“Wait!” Lindsay clutched her arm and stood still. “Listen!”
The snow had a voice, spinning and hissing and spitting in their faces. The wind had a voice, low and rumbling. Even the trees had a voice as they groaned in the storm. And yet, intermingled with all these voices, almost but not quite a part of them, was another voice: small, distant, half swallowed by the night. And it was human.
“Bridget!”
screamed Cici, and Lindsay joined in with all the power in her lungs.
“Bridget!!!”
Another sound, words indistinguishable, whipped by the wind, seeming to come from the depths of the woods.
“We’re here!” Cici cried. “We’re coming!”
Lindsay caught hold of Cici’s jacket, pulling her forward, and they stumbled into the woodline. The scant shelter offered by the trees buffered the wind and offered a measure of relief from the driving snow, and this time when they called out they could hear the reply, faint but definitely Bridget’s voice. Lindsay wanted to surge forward but Cici held her still.
“Wait!” she cried, clearing the snow from her lashes with a swipe of her hand. “Stand still, keep calling. We don’t know where she is, but she can see our flashlights. Bridget!” she shouted, and held her flashlight straight out into the darkness. “Follow our lights! We’re here!”
And still faint, but now distinguishable, “Stay there! I see you!”
They stood still, clinging to each other, shouting until their voices were hoarse and the beams of their flashlights trembled with their cold and exertion, until at last a form materialized in the swirling sea of snow. They stumbled toward her as she fought her way to them and they fell into each others’ arms, gasping, shaking, clinging to each other.
“Oh my God, I was so scared!” Bridget sobbed. “It got dark and I couldn’t see anything. I lost the path—”
“It’s okay, Bridge, we’re here, it’s okay—”
“Thank you, thank you for coming for me—”
“Look Bridget.” Cici had to practically shout in Bridget’s ear over a sudden roaring blast of wind, and she grasped her shoulder and pulled her around. “You’re almost home! We can see the house from here!” Sure enough, winking in and out with the motion of waving tree limbs and driving snow, were the lighted windows of Ladybug Farm. “Just hold on to my coat. The storm is getting worse. We have to get back!”
Lindsay wound her arm through Cici’s, and Bridget twisted her fingers into the belt of Cici’s coat. Their flashlights barely penetrated the tornado of twisting, spinning snow as they plunged forward, heads bent to the wind, eyes narrowed against the stinging snow and the winking, glittering promise that was home.
And suddenly, like a mirage that disappeared just when it was within reach, the house was gone.
They stumbled to a stop, disoriented, three lone figures on an endless plane of floating white, feeling, for a moment, almost weightless in the depth of their isolation. Then the wind roared again, buffeting them against one another, and Lindsay shouted, “The power must be out!”
Cici nodded, trying to shield her eyes from the sting of the snow with her hand. “We’re not that far from home!” she replied. “We just have to keep going straight!”
“How do we know what straight is?” Bridget cried.
But they knew they had to keep moving, and move they did, clinging tightly to each other and fighting the wind step by infinitesimal step. The flashlights were almost useless, unable to penetrate more than a few inches in front of them and revealing nothing but driving sheets of snow, which, in certain terrifying moments and with no other reference points, actually seemed to be falling upside down. They were lost in a valley of white noise and white air, air so thick with snow it was hard to breathe, air that clung to their clothes and their exposed skin and weighed them down, yet they pushed forward, unable to talk, unable even to think, swimming through the thick white night and holding on to each other, just holding on.
Cici swung her flashlight before her like a blind man with a cane, and suddenly something knocked the light from her hand. Her cry was swallowed up by the wind like her light was swallowed up by the snow and she stumbled forward, hitting something solid. Lindsay caught the collar of Cici’s jacket and shouted something Cici couldn’t hear. Bridget wrapped her arm around Cici’s and, flattening herself against the solid plane, began to inch along its surface. Suddenly the plane gave way and they fell, as one, out of the white and roaring vortex into peace.
Cici literally fell to her knees while Lindsay and Bridget struggled to close the door on the violence of the night. When the other two sank to the straw-covered floor beside her, the shaking beam of Lindsay’s flashlight picked out the details of their own barn.
Weathered gray walls and plank floor. A deer munching hay in one of the stalls. A corral of sheep at the far end of the barn and there, just across from them, curled up in a nest of hay, a peacefully sleeping sheepdog.
For a long time, there was nothing but the sound of their ragged breathing, the shuffling and soft
baaing
of the sheep in their corral, and the whistle of the wind, sounding tame and far away now, outside their walls.
Then Cici gasped, “Is everyone—okay?”
Bridget just nodded, and Lindsay gulped for air. “How about you?”
“I don’t think,” she managed, “I’ve ever been so scared in all my life.”
Bridget grasped a handful of straw and flung it furiously across the room, where it dissipated harmlessly in midair. “You
stupid
dog!” she cried.
The other two, still gasping for breath, stared at her in shock. Bridget covered her face with her hands, her shoulders shaking and her voice choked. “I’m so sorry,” she sobbed. “I’m—so sorry!”
They both moved to her with words of comfort, and she lifted her chapped, tear-streaked face to them, fending off their reassurance. “Not just about tonight. I was stupid and you could have frozen to death coming out there looking for me. You didn’t have to do that but you did, but it’s not just that—it’s everything.” She started sobbing again, and the words were difficult to understand. “You wouldn’t even be here, either of you, if it weren’t for me. I know you agreed to buy this house because of me . . .” She scrubbed at her eyes with a gloved hand, but that only seemed to make the tears flow faster. “You had good jobs, you had lives, and now you’re stuck out here freezing to death on Christmas Eve in a blizzard with a bunch of sheep and a st-st-stupid dog and you’ve lost all your money and Cici has a broken arm and . . .”
“Bridget.” The astonishment in Cici’s voice was absolute. “Bridget, are you kidding me? Is that what you really think?”
“Nothing worked out the way we planned, nothing,” Bridget gulped. “We were supposed to make our dreams come true and we didn’t even come close. We didn’t even get started. All we did was mortgage our future and waste a year of our lives!”
Lindsay gazed at her in disbelief. “I don’t know about you, but the last thing I feel is that I’ve wasted anything this past year. In fact . . . it was probably the best year of my whole life. I wouldn’t change a thing.”
Bridget choked a little on her sobs, looking at Lindsay through wet, swollen eyes. “But—what about Shep, and your new job?”
For a moment Lindsay looked confused, and then she shook her head. “I called Shep to turn it down the day after Cici came home from the hospital.” She hesitated and added honestly, “It’s not that I didn’t think about it. He painted a pretty picture. But . . . somehow I just couldn’t see myself in it.”
“Don’t you see, Bridge?” Cici said earnestly, gripping Bridget’s gloved hand in her own. “Maybe our dreams didn’t come true, but we got better ones. How can you say this year was wasted? Do you know what I was thinking the whole time I was in the hospital? I was thinking what might have happened to me if you hadn’t been there. I could have fallen off a roof anywhere, any time, and what I was thinking was how lucky I was that it happened here, and now, with you two to take care of me. You guys . . .” She squeezed Bridget’s hand, and then Lindsay’s. “You’re my family. And if we hadn’t bought this house together, I don’t think I ever would have realized that.”