Jonah was there. He had been staying with me for a week by then, too weak to make the walk back to his cabin every day. His hands shook so badly he could barely hold a nail, but he held them and I hammered them, and together, in the howling dark, we sealed the seam that was trying to kill us.
When we crawled back into the cabin, I looked at the thermometer on the wall. 41 degrees. The system had held.
Martha Pell came first. She arrived on the 20th day carrying her youngest wrapped in every quilt she owned. Her face was gaunt. Her hands were shaking. She could not meet my eyes.
“My husband’s too proud to come,” she said. “But my boy can’t stop shivering. Please.”
I opened the door wider. “Bring him in.”
I did not make her beg. I did not remind her of what she had said at the mercantile that day. She had told me I could not live off a hole in the cliff. I did not mention the ungodly cold and the ungodly warm and the way she had made the word ungodly sound like a curse. I only said yes.
She came back the next day with her neighbor. The day after that, 6 families came. By the end of the week, my cabin was full, people sleeping in the corridor, children huddled in the storage alcove, bodies pressed together for warmth that they did not need as badly as they thought, because the cave was breathing and the mountain was holding and the system was doing exactly what Silas Ren had designed it to do.
I gave space to the Klenes, who had been kind to me when kindness was rare. I gave space to June Harace and her 2 daughters, who had never been anything but polite. I gave space to the Bickles, who had sent me away years before for reading by lantern light. They did not recognize me at first. When they did, they could not look at me.
