Winter Storms (18 page)

Kelley is so fortunate to have stood at the head of such an incredible family. When he passes, he can do so knowing everyone is safe.

But enough maudlin thoughts.

The house is decorated from the floorboards to the rafters. Kelley can't enter or leave a room without hearing a merry jingle (Mitzi has hung sleigh bells from every doorknob throughout the inn). He smells the pot of beef bourguignon on the stove, ideal for this chilly night. (Because Mitzi was a non-red-meat-eater for so long, every time they eat beef, it feels like a Christmas miracle.) Bart is supposed to fly from Germany to Washington on the twenty-second and from there to Boston on the twenty-third. He will be on Nantucket Friday night, which is cutting it a little close for Mitzi's taste, but what can they do? The mere thought of seeing his son, hugging him, holding him makes Kelley almost weep. Bart has a wound on his face in the exact spot that Kelley dreamed he had a tattoo of a star. This is uncanny, so eerie that Kelley is certain that no one will understand or appreciate his prescience, so he keeps it to himself. He wonders if the cancer in his brain is, somehow, giving him a sixth sense.

The closer Bart gets to home, the more impatient to see him Kelley grows. He has waited twenty-three months, but these last three days are torture.

He won't waste a second of his holiday worrying about his health, he decides. He will simply enjoy this Christmas as though it were his last.

 

W
hen was it that Margaret said that her favorite news stories were about the weather?

On the twentieth of December, she gets the first warning from the meteorological team at CBS, and this warning is given in person by Dougie Clarence, the new, young hipster face of weather at the network. Dougie comes over and sits on Margaret's desk. He's wearing a fedora, a plaid vest, pants that reach only to his ankles, and lace-up loafers with no socks. His shirtsleeves are rolled up and he sports a goatee. Every woman in New York City under the age of thirty-five loves Dougie. Margaret loves Dougie. If Ava weren't involved with Potter, the first man Margaret would have set her up with was Dougie Clarence.

However much Margaret enjoys Dougie's company, though, finding him sitting on her desk five days before Christmas and three days before she's supposed to fly to Nantucket for her son's wedding is not good. Dougie visits Margaret only when he has an urgent weather bulletin worthy of the national news.

“To what do we owe this honor, Mr. Clarence?” she asks.

“I've been missing you,” Dougie says. He gives Margaret a hug and a kiss on the cheek.

“And I you,” Margaret says. Dougie hasn't been to see her even once this year. The weather has been virtually perfect.

“But that's not why I'm here,” Dougie says.

Margaret's spirits fall. Maybe it's the weather in the Midwest. Maybe he wants her to report on the drought in California—again. Maybe Mount St. Helens is about to blow. That would be exciting! Margaret has never reported on a good volcano story.

“I'm here because we are about to get pounded,” Dougie says.

“We?” Margaret says. “Pounded?”

“The Northeast Corridor,” Dougie says. “Blizzard.”

“When?” Margaret asks.

“Tomorrow night, Thursday, Friday,” Dougie says. “The good news is it should be mostly over by Christmas Eve. The bad news is it's I-95 from Washington to Boston.”

“And the airports,” Margaret says.

“I don't like to use the term
hundred-year storm,
” Dougie says. “But in this case…”

“Does it have a name?” Margaret asks.

“Elvira,” Dougie says.

Elvira.

Margaret looks at the briefs her new assistant, Jennifer, left her: ISIS cells suspected in the Netherlands and Denmark; the changing social landscape of Washington with the new administration (internally, Margaret groans; if there's anything she dislikes more than election news, it's postelection news); and… the eighteen surviving Marines making their way home.

Marines on their way home. Bart.

“Are we talking a C block?” Margaret asks. “B block?”

Dougie shrugs. “If you're asking me… an A block.”

“That bad?” Margaret says.

“That bad.”

Margaret understands only the rudimentary basics of the science behind snowstorms. It all starts with the sun. The sun heats the earth unequally… direct sunshine in tropical regions, and low-angle sun at the poles. Heat builds up in the tropics and creates an imbalance in temperature from tropics to poles. The atmosphere doesn't like this and tries to transport heat toward the poles.

So why do the biggest snowstorms form off the coast of North Carolina, track up to Long Island, and pound the Northeast? Because there is a perfect cocktail of weather ingredients there that's found nowhere else in America. Cold, dense Canadian air pours southward while warm, moist air carried by the Gulf Stream ocean current tracks northward. Every now and again, the jet stream, a ribbon of strong airflow, takes a dip to the south, and through very complicated thermodynamics (that extend well beyond what was covered in the “rocks for jocks” class Margaret took at the University of Michigan) creates a low-pressure system. This low-pressure system intensifies over the warm Gulf waters, and the warm, moist air rises and flows over the cold Canadian air. The winds flow counterclockwise around the low-pressure center, and this causes the northeasterly winds to push the snow back into New England. This is how we get the term
nor'easter
—it is the wind's direction during the most intense part of a storm. In winter, this storm becomes a blizzard.

“It's expected to bomb out,” Dougie says.

“Translation?” Margaret says.

“The storm will strengthen with extreme rapidity,” Dougie says. “The low-pressure center will drop like a bomb.”

They are predicting a foot of snow in Washington and up to thirty inches in Boston, sustained winds of forty-five to fifty miles per hour, and—Dougie suspects—that rarest of weather phenomena: thundersnow. Minutes after Dougie leaves Margaret's office, the National Weather Service issues a winter storm warning for the entire Northeast. Amtrak suspends service on December 22 and 23. Delta, Jet Blue, United, and American cancel six hundred flights, leaving over ten thousand passengers scrambling for alternative transportation.

Margaret is sitting at her desk at the studio on Wednesday when the snow starts to fall. She has released Raoul from his driving duties until after the holidays. Drake calls and says he's rented a Ford Expedition and volunteers to drive himself and Margaret up to Hyannis. For as long as Margaret has known Drake, she has never seen him drive. He takes taxis.

“Are you sure?” Margaret asks.

“I'm sure,” Drake says. “But you have to tell Lee you're not broadcasting tomorrow. We need to leave tonight, Margaret, as soon as you're done.”

“Oh,” Margaret says. She already asked to take off the Friday night before her usual weeklong hiatus over Christmas. Can she ask for yet
another
night off? Margaret is sixty-one years old. She has been the anchor of the
CBS Evening News
for fourteen years. She's not worried about job security as much as she's plagued by a sense of duty. Millions of Americans will, likely, have their Christmas ruined by this storm, and Margaret feels compelled to be the one in the chair reporting on it.

But Kevin is her son and he's getting married.

She feels torn in two, just as she used to when the kids were young. “What about your surgeries?” Margaret asks Drake. “Surely you can't leave a day early.”

“Jim and Terry are covering them for me,” Drake says. “They're both staying in the city.”

No more excuses,
Margaret thinks.

She calls Lee. “I need tomorrow night off too, Lee,” she says.

“Margaret,” he says.

“You can't make me feel any guiltier than I already feel,” Margaret says.

He's silent. She hates when Lee is silent.

“Kevin is getting married,” she says.

“On Saturday,” Lee says. “I gave you Friday off to accommodate you going to Kevin's wedding. That was my gift. I can't let you go Thursday. The viewers want Margaret Quinn. The advertisers want Margaret Quinn. People turn on the TV and see Julian and they change the channel.”

“Find someone who's more appealing than Julian!” Margaret says.

“That's a conversation for another day,” Lee says. “This conversation is about you taking off Thursday night and the answer is no.”

Margaret fills with fury, an emotion so foreign to her that she doesn't quite know how to process it. She is Margaret Quinn, one of the most esteemed television journalists in the nation, if not the world. And yet she still has to answer to a man, Lee Kramer, head of the network, a person she considers a friend.

Margaret takes a breath. Lee is her friend, but this is business. The advertisers pay Margaret's salary. She has to stay and do her job.

“Okay,” she says, and then she hangs up so she can call and give Drake the bad news.

 

W
hat we need is a sleigh,” Mitzi says. “And eight reindeer.”

She is standing just outside the back door of the kitchen smoking a cigarette, and Kelley is allowing it. The snow is falling slowly but relentlessly—big, fat, wet, heavy flakes, the kind you get when the temperature is hovering around
the thirty-degree mark. An apron of snow is collecting on the
floor and all the heat is escaping from the kitchen, which is strewn with hotel pans and dishes set up by the caterers in anticipation of the wedding reception. It's too chaotic to cook in. Kelley had wanted to get takeout Thai food but it's snowing so hard he can't even make it to Siam to Go.

Kelley and Mitzi are on Nantucket, and Kevin and Isabelle are on Nantucket, and the priest, Father Paul, is on Nantucket. He arrived on the noon boat that day and is staying at the church rectory.

The Beaulieus' plane has taken off; they're scheduled to land in Boston at midnight. Paddy volunteered to go get them, and in the morning, Jennifer and the boys and the Beaulieus will drive to Hyannis and put their car on the 2:45 slow boat. Paddy will stay in Boston and wait for Bart.

Bart's flight from Germany was rerouted to Reykjavik, Iceland, because Dulles was shut down due to the storm. Kelley was able to talk to Bart, but only briefly. Bart wasn't sure what the flight status was; he and the other guys were planning to hit the airport bar.

“All the chicks here are blond,” Bart said.

Kelley was cheered by the fact that Bart finally sounded like himself, but he had wanted to remind Bart that no matter how cold the beer or how beautiful the blondes, Bart needed to focus on getting home.

Margaret is in New York. Drake is going to drive her up Thursday after her broadcast, so they should be on Nantucket first thing Friday morning.

Assuming the boats go. And the planes.

Mitzi holds out the last of her cigarette. “You want?”

He does want, very much, but he has a vision of one puff hurrying his cancer along to the point where his head shatters like a glass ornament hitting the stone floor.

“No, thank you,” he says. He walks out onto the deck to look up into the sky at the thousands of descending snowflakes, no two exactly alike. If you can believe that, then why not also believe that Santa Claus and his reindeer might pick Bart up in Reykjavik and deliver him home?

He leads Mitzi inside and closes the door behind them. “Sit down,” Kelley says. “I'll make grilled cheese.”

 

S
he has a reservation for her family and their BMW X5 on the steamship leaving Hyannis at 2:45 on Thursday but then that boat gets canceled, as does the 8:15 p.m. boat, and the Beaulieus haven't arrived anyway. Their flight from Orly was rerouted to Nova Scotia.

Bart, meanwhile, is in Reykjavik, Iceland.

“I've always wanted to go to Reykjavik,” Paddy says. “Maybe we'll just blow off Kevy's wedding and I'll meet Bart there.”

“Not funny,” Jennifer says. She is presently without her sense of humor. Paddy is in the home office wearing a Santa hat. He seems perfectly relaxed. He doesn't have to worry about three rambunctious boys killing zombies in the family room or the missing parents of their soon-to-be sister-in-law or a car whose backseat and Thule carrier is crammed full of presents, compromising the crisp beauty of Jennifer's wrapping and the perfection of her bows. Jennifer had everything packed and ready to go and now she's being delayed, maybe for as long as twenty-four hours. She is going to have to run to Whole Foods to get groceries for dinner, but Beacon Hill is experiencing a whiteout. She's not sure she can make it the three blocks to Cambridge Street on foot.

She turns on the TV but that just makes things worse. NECN is showing footage of the long snake of cars on Route 3, tractor-trailers jackknifed, all of the carnage barely visible through the snow.