Verglas by Margaret Gracie
Verglas
Claudie stared out the window as the bus jerked onto the off-ramp and entered the city. It looked like scenes from the TV news. A ghost-like quiet. Empty streets. Evacuated buildings.
The passengers stopped talking, mesmerized by the ice that layered the city. Worn like a mask by the trees and buildings, it transformed concrete into lace, branches into filigree. Montreal was a study in white, from the dense clouds that hovered overhead to the sheet metal under their wheels.
The bus stopped at the depot, and the passengers filed out. Not a single taxi waited to take them home. Claudie shouldered her backpack and started the trek up de Maisonneuve. The sidewalks had been salted, and she ground her heels for traction. Within a block she found herself alone. Even birds had fled the city.
Her apartment building was deserted. She opened the door and flicked the switch. A reflex. She knew there would be no light, no heat in her apartment. But she’d expected to find Gilles here. She searched the hall table for a note, directions on where to find him. Nothing. When she picked up the phone to call his mother in St. Joseph, the line was dead.
Claudie surveyed the living room for signs of him. Instead she noticed how the thick ice outside the window absorbed the light rather than reflected it like snow. She wanted to record these images for later, when she’d be able to step back and paint the scene.
Suddenly, she felt a chill. Claudie turned the key in the lock and left without writing a note. Her backpack in the hall a silent witness.
She walked for blocks. Nothing was open. No depanneur. No restaurant. No Provigo or Jean Coutu. Not even the cheap movie theatres downtown with their all-day matinees. Claudie continued down Ste. Catherine. The boarded up storefronts dressed in healing gauze.
Near the end of her usual route, she saw light. Electricity. She started to laugh. The gay village was aglow. Claudie found a small diner and ordered a bowl of soup and a hot chocolate.
Patrons talked, in French and English, about the storm. Claudie listened as they shared their eyewitness accounts of roofs collapsing under the weight of all that ice, cars slipping off the road in slow motion. At least the weatherman finally predicted an end to the verglas.
Claudie rolled the word over her tongue. There was something bleak about even the sound. Hardly French, it seemed rooted in her own language. Close to another word that hung on the edges of memory.
She wondered how long she could sit at the table, warming herself, waiting. If they’d let her, she would stay at the diner until the power came back on. She’d heard a woman at another table say it could be two or three days.
Outside, the dim light faded. Claudie ordered more food and ate her fries while trying to work out a plan.
An elderly man asked if he could sit at her table.
“Bien sûr.”
“English?” he asked.
“Kind of.” Claudie had learned that there were only two options in Quebec. The fact that she was German-Canadian, that her parents had immigrated to Pickering in the ’70s, changed nothing. She wasn’t French, so that made her English.
“You live Montreal long time?”
“A few years.” Was it five or six now?
“Ah, bon. Me, I am born here. Live Montreal all my life. First time I see the verglas so thick, so…how you say, méchant?”
“Bad,” Claudie told him.
“More than that,” the old man corrected her. They both considered this.
“Where are you staying? Is there a shelter around here?”
“No. My friend, he is smart. Wood fire in salon and stove in sous-sol.” He tapped his head. “Pas con.”
“You’re lucky.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “We are 18 in his house. I sleep in one room with my wife and my girl. My girl is like you. Not young, but not old.” He studied his cup of coffee.
“My boyfriend is still in the Beauce.” Claudie saw a glimmer of hope and had to follow it to its end. “Our apartment has no power. I’m not sure where I can go.”
“Maybe your chum, he is there now.”
On the walk back to the apartment, Claudie felt ice pellets sting her cheeks and legs. The wind drove the missiles deeper into her skin.
Her footsteps echoed in the apartment. “Hello,” she called. “Gilles, are you there?”
Without lights, she fumbled around furniture and into doorways. She found the flashlight under the sink and thanked God when the batteries weren’t dead. The warmth of her breath thawing her nostrils.
Like a stranger, she walked through the four small rooms, looking for traces of their lives. In the bathroom a bare shelf where Gilles’ razor and shaving cream had been. In the bedroom a few empty drawers. She checked the hall. He’d taken three pairs of shoes and his boots. Two warm coats, all his toques, mittens and gloves. His basketball.
Claudie wondered over this a long time.
They’d agreed to spend Christmas apart. Two weeks of family time. A break from the bickering. They’d only spoken on the phone on Christmas Day, New Year’s and January 4. The first day of the storm. He had told her he was heading back to the city. She said she’d join him today.
Cold crept along her fingers and up her legs. She went back to the bedroom and took off her coat. She pulled Gilles’ brown wool sweater over her layers and wrapped another sweater over her head, tying it under her chin. She found a pair of his fishing socks and pulled them over her boots, stretching and staining them. She bundled back into the coat and piled the bed with every blanket in the apartment then lay under the covers and shivered. There was no escaping the feeling of ice in her veins.
Yet she must have slept. She awoke in daylight. She was hungry and needed to pee. “I wish you were here,” she said out loud. “I wish you would come back, Gilles.”
Her skin stuck to the toilet rim. Her fingers were numb as she tried to wipe herself. Afraid to flush, she closed the lid and backed away.
January 8, 1998. Four years and two months since they met. Three years, seven months since they’d moved in together. Five months since it started to fall apart. The arguments, followed by silence. Blank stares. He’d been freezing her out since the fall. Numbing her to the discord.
Claudie curled under the blankets and nibbled on frozen crackers. If he really cared about her, he would have come back. His absence filled her head with volumes. Stories of how things could have been.
Last Christmas they’d been stranded in Seattle. Another storm. Then, they’d marveled at their circumstances. A year on the wet coast was supposed to mean no more snow. They found it hilarious that their one Christmas away from Quebec had been during a freak snowstorm on the Pacific Coast.
The lightweights in Seattle hadn’t had a clue how to deal with a couple feet of snow. The city had ground to a stop. Even crime was forced to take a break.
Claudie and Gilles had snuggled together and watched the world slow down around them. The day after the storm, they’d tramped through the crunchy snow at the base of the Space Needle. They joked about a moon landing.
When they returned to Quebec in May, they brought back a few things. Coffee culture, grunge music and English. Before Seattle they’d spoken only French, in spite of her lousy accent and scattered vocabulary. Seattle had been “English time.” A habit they didn’t fall out of.
Was that their crucial mistake?
In June Gilles got a job. Account executive at Bell. Claudie had never expected him to go corporate. Until then he’d been a happy, struggling musician who sidelined in retail.
Is that when their paths diverged?
In the summer Claudie had started to think seriously about kids. She felt ready. With Gilles’ steady income, they could afford to think about the future. But Gilles shrugged when she talked about their plans. They still made love, but less often.
Had she missed a telltale sign?
A crack outside the window. Thick ice suspended like daggers from power lines. Down the street, she saw a branch on the ground. As she stood in the window, more limbs snapped, fell and broke into pieces.
If she cried, would her tears turn into icicles?
A man walked down the street. Her heart beat surged. If it were Gilles, she’d throw her arms around him. Kiss his stubbled cheek.
But the man on the street wasn’t Gilles. She knew it wouldn’t be. He had left her alone to weather the storm. The German words came easily now. Verglassen, to glaze. Verlassen. Abandon.
