Blackberry Winter

Chapter 2




CLAIRE ALDRIDGE

Seattle, May 2, present day

My eyes shot open and I pressed my hand against my belly. There, that tugging pain in my abdomen again. What had Dr. Jensen called it? Yes, a phantom pain—something about my body’s memory of the trauma. Phantom or not, I lay there feeling the familiar, lonely ache that had greeted me each morning for the past year. I paused to acknowledge the memory, wondering, the way I did every day when the alarm clock sounded, how I could bring myself to get up, to get dressed—to act like a normal human being, when I only wanted to curl up into a ball and take Tylenol PM to obliterate all feeling.

I rubbed my eyes and squinted at the clock: 5:14 a.m. I lay still and listened as the wind unleashed its rage against the exterior of our fourteenth-floor apartment. I shivered and pulled the duvet up around my neck. Even Siberian down couldn’t cut the chill. Why is it so cold? Ethan must have turned down the thermostat—again.

“Ethan?” I whispered, reaching my arm out to his side of the king-size bed, but the sheets were cold and stiff. He’d gone to work early, again.

I stood up and retrieved my robe from the upholstered blue-and-white-striped chair next to the bed. The phone rang persistently, and I made my way out to the living room. The apartment’s wraparound windows provided views of Seattle’s Pike Place Market below, and of Elliott Bay, with its steady stream of incoming and outgoing ferries. The day we toured the apartment, four years ago, I’d told Ethan it felt like we were floating in the air. “Your castle in the sky,” he had said three weeks later, handing me a shiny silver key.

But it wasn’t the familiar view that captivated me that morning. In fact, there was no view. It was all…white. I rubbed my eyes to get a closer look at the scene outside the double-paned glass. Snow. And not just a few flurries—a genuine blizzard. I looked at the calendar on the wall near my desk, shaking my head in confusion. A snowstorm on May 2? Unbelievable.

“Hello,” I muttered into the phone, finally silencing its ring.

“Claire!”

“Frank.” My boss at the newspaper, yes, but at this early hour, my greeting lacked polite professionalism.

“Are you looking out your window?” A dedicated editor, Frank was often at his desk before sunrise, while I usually stumbled into the office around nine. And that was on a good day. The features department didn’t foster the same sense of urgency that the news desk did, and yet Frank behaved as if profiles of local gardeners and reviews of children’s theater productions were pressing, vital matters. His staff, including me, could hardly object. Frank’s wife had died three years ago, and ever since, he’d thrown himself into his work with such intensity, I sometimes suspected that he slept in his office.

“You mean the snow, right?”

“Yes, the snow! Can you believe this?”

“I know,” I said, examining the balcony, where the wrought-iron table and chairs were dusted in white. “I guess the forecasters missed this one.”

“They sure did,” Frank said. I could hear him thumbing through papers on his desk. “Here it is—the forecast, as printed in today’s paper: ‘Cloudy, high of fifty-nine, chance of light rain.’”

I shook my head. “How can this even happen? It’s almost summer—at least, last I checked it was.”

“I’m not a meteorologist, but I know it’s rare. We’ve got to cover it.” Frank’s voice had all the hallmarks of an editor hot on the trail of a story.

I yawned. “Don’t you think it’s more of news’s beat? Wait, unless you want me to do a piece on the city’s snowmen.”

“No, no,” Frank continued. “It’s a much bigger story. Claire, I’ve been going through old files, and you’ll never believe what I found.”

“Frank,” I said, fumbling with the thermostat. I turned it up to seventy-five. Ethan hated wasting energy. “It’s not even six a.m. How long have you been in the office?”

He ignored my question. “This isn’t the first time Seattle’s seen a storm like this.”

I rolled my eyes. “Right, it snowed in January, didn’t it?”

“Claire,” he continued, “no, listen. A late-season snowstorm hit on this very same date in 1933.” I heard more paper shuffling. “The timing is uncanny. Some eighty years ago, an identical storm—a massive blizzard—completely shut down the city.”

“It’s interesting,” I said, feeling the urge to make a cup of hot cocoa and head back to bed. “But I still don’t understand why this is a feature story. Shouldn’t Debbie in news be covering this? Remember, she covered last year’s freak tornado in South Seattle?”

“Because it’s bigger than that,” he said. “Think about it. Two snowstorms, sharing one calendar date, separated by nearly a century? If you don’t call that feature-worthy, I don’t know what is, Claire.”

I could detect the boss tone creeping into his voice, so I relented. “Word count and deadline?”

“You’re right about news,” he said. “They’ll tackle today and tomorrow, but I’d like a bigger piece, an exposé of the storm then and now. We’ll devote the entire section to it. I can give you six thousand words, and I’d like it by Friday.”

“Friday?” I protested.

“You won’t have to look hard for sources,” he continued. “I’m sure there’s a trove of material in the archives. Your angle can be: ‘The storm’s great return.’”

I smirked. “You make it sound like it’s a living thing.”

“Who knows?” Frank said. “Maybe it’s a prompt to look back in time. To see what we missed….” His voice trailed off.

“Frank,” I said, sighing, “your sentimentality about weather is adorable, but don’t get too excited. I’m still wondering how I’m going to write six thousand words on snowmen.”

“Blackberry winter,” he muttered.

“I’m sorry?”

“The storm,” he continued. “It’s called a blackberry winter. It’s what meteorologists call a late-season cold snap. Interesting, isn’t it?”

“I guess,” I said, flipping the wall switch to the gas fireplace. Frank’s weather lesson had me craving a slice of warm blackberry pie. “If nothing else, we’ll have a great headline.”

“And hopefully a great story, too,” he said. “See you in the office.”

“Frank, wait—have you seen Ethan this morning?” My husband, the paper’s managing editor, beat me to work most days, but he had been starting his mornings progressively earlier.

“Not yet,” he said. “It’s just me here, and a few folks in news. Why?”

“Oh, nothing,” I said, trying to hide the emotion I felt. “I was just worried about him getting in all right, with the snow and all.”

“Well, you be careful out there,” he said. “Fifth Avenue is an ice skating rink.”

I hung up the phone and looked down to the street below, squinting to make out two figures, a father and his young child, engaged in a snowball fight.

I pressed my nose against the window, feeling the cold glass against my skin. I smiled, taking in the scene before my breath fogged up the pane. A blackberry winter.