The next morning when Lars awoke, he found Tanner sitting in bed. The fire was blazing, and the windows were frosted, but the cabin was cozy and warm. Tanner was flipping through an old Goosebumps book and grinning and Lars appreciated the youthful look on his twenty-eight-year-old face.

“Which one?” He murmured, and Tanner flashed him the cover with a creepy looking dummy on the cover. “Classic.” He grinned up at him. Tanner did something that seemed to surprise them both. He began reading the story out loud, and Lars fell into a stupor listening to the sound of his voice. He couldn’t help but think that somehow, the monsters in the book had it easy. So, did the fated kids. Real life monsters were somehow worse to deal with, and he could think of one real life dummy who had to start atoning for the hate and discontent he caused.

It was well after reading through the first book that Lars’ stomach began to growl. He had missed eating yesterday and had whiled away the morning reading and going over some of the old goodies and then brining up new adult titles to scare the bejesus out of one another. Next snow day they decided to give Stephen King a try as a hail to the man from Maine.

It was just after brunch that Tanner’s cellphone rang. The blast from the outside world trumpeted into the tiny cabin and made them both jump. Lars glared at the thing, wishing he could throw it out into the deep snow for disturbing their time of peace and rekindling together. Tanner picked it up on a “Hallo?” and then followed with a few “Ayuh, yessa. Uh huh.” And then he hung up the phone.

“Gotta go. A couple out sailing around the lighthouse never made it back.”

“Are you serious? With those winds,” he nodded to the window where the wind was howling past. “The chances of finding them, the swells are going to be at least ten to fifteen feet!”

“I know the conditions are dangerous. No more so than the hurricanes in Florida. It’s the job Lars.” Tanner said. “They need my help.”

“I’m coming with you.” He stood, getting dressed.

“The hell you are. You aren’t trained for it.” Tanner got right in his face. Somehow, this felt like another instance when Tanner would offer him an ultimatum, and he hated the idea of it, given how the last one went.

“Tanner.” He begged. Tanner drew him into a fierce hug.

“Come on, come sit with Gram until I get back. She’ll be worried sick and you know how she gets. Can you do that for me?” Tanner asked. He wanted to make him promise to come back, he hated the idea of letting him leave again, but he knew he couldn’t reasonably promise that. Not with how dangerous his job could be. He nodded and got dressed. They bundled up and braced for the cold, yet it was always shocking to walk out into it.

“We’ll take the snowmobile and come back to shovel out your truck when the storms over!” Tanner yelled above the howling wind.

“Alright!” Lars hollered back. It took a few moments of pulling on the starting cord for the engine to ignite and for them to climb on it and steadily work through the drifts down the path to the back of Gram’s house. When they got there, they were shivering, and wind burnt on their faces where the wind and whipped at their bare skin.

Gram opened the door as Sparkle let out a racket of barks and they stumbled into the house.

“Oh, my goodness!” she cried as she saw them snow and ice encrusted on their jackets and boots. They’d brought hats and gloves to the cabin, any Mainer knew better than to travel without those things in a snowstorm, but it didn’t stop the cold from cutting through their clothes.

“I’ve got to go out Gram.” Tanner told her.

“In this? Are you insane?” She asked. She looked ghostly white and Lars noticed her clutch her chest again. He wondered if there was something she was keeping from them about her heart health.

“Yeah, probably. But there’s a couple of yuppies out there somewhere, lost.”

“What are the chances of finding them?” She asked. Tanner looked at her sadly but said nothing. He didn’t need to. She nodded and pinned one of her pink foam curlers back into place and snapped at Sparkle.

“Quiet you. It’s Tanner and Lars you silly mutt!” The dog shut up immediately and snorted her displeasure but went to lay in her basket by the fire immediately. She lay there, glowering over the top of the rim at them, and Lars was fairly certain Gram would never need to purchase an in-home security system with that poofy alarm dog.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can.” Tanner told her. He kissed her forehead, careful not to disrupt her curlers in any way. “Lars has agreed to sit with you until I get back. You can fatten him up.”

Lars raised an eyebrow at him, but his friend grinned at him and then stooped as he opened the hall closet and grabbed a duffel bag full of gear. Gram waited as the two men looked at each other then seemed to catch on. She hugged Tanner once more and whispered,

“Be careful and come back soon this time!” Then she turned and shuffled in her house coat and slippers to the kitchen to make coffee.

“What she said.” Lars whispered as he and Tanner leaned into one another, touching foreheads. Tanner gave him a quick kiss on the lips and whispered,

“I swear, I will be back as soon as I find them.” And Lars nodded. He wasn’t so sure he would find them, but he had to think positively that he would.

Tanner turned and left which caused Sparkle to go off into another fit of barking when the door closed. Lars walked to the kitchen where Gram was sitting at the table with a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in another. She looked at it and then looked at him and raised a bushy white eyebrow.

“I can count on one hand the amount of times I’ve had one of these in the last decade. The day he left for Florida, the day he came back from Florida and just now. Don’t you deny an old lady when she’s stressed out and worried for her baby.”

Lars sat at the kitchen table and nodded. He wasn’t going to take it away from her. She was eighty and could do whatever the hell she wanted. He had tried them once when they were in middle school and he had vomited the scrambled eggs she had made them for breakfast, all over a Queen Anne’s Lace flower that was growing by the cabin. He never felt the urge to try them again.

“Have anything strong to add a dash to this cup of coffee?” He asked instead. She nodded and pointed to the cabinet above the fridge where it was hard to reach. He rose and opened the cabinet to discover a half empty bottle of liquor. It was dusty which suggested she partook of that guilty pleasure about as much as the cigarettes, but he knew she could hold her liquor against the best of them.

He poured a dash into his cup and then one into hers when she nodded to it and they both took a sip, trying to calm the nerves of what was sure to be an afternoon and night packed full of worry and anxiety. If Tanner found the couple alive, they were sure to be in seriously bad shape. More likely than not, he was sure to not find them alive, if he found them at all, and that didn’t bode well for his morale or that of anyone in the town. Maine’s winters were harsh and unforgiving and her coastal waters even less so, especially in the center of a late spring storm. Frostbite was the mild ailment of these storms, hypothermia and shock the worst.

April was always a tricky month for tourists, because the sixty-degree temperatures could fool anyone into thinking all was well, only for Mother Nature, the bitch, to turn around and dump another foot of snow on them on a whim.

Lars sat at the table staring at Gram’s shirt. She didn’t offer cookies, or brownies or cake. Now wasn’t the time for those things. Now was the time for cigarettes, coffee and alcohol while they waited. Her shirt didn’t make him laugh either. It was the picture of a saggy, dumpy old woman saying, “Be the kind of woman that when your feet hit the floor each morning, the devil says, “Oh crap, she’s up!”

Normally Lars would find this amusing, but today it seemed like the devil himself was working to take Tanner away after he had just found himself. By the time he and Gram downed the bottle, he was feeling woozy and in no shape to drag himself up to Tanner’s room to go to bed. Gram passed out in her chair when she decided the kitchen table was too hard to sit on, and they spent endless hours pouring over the latest weather reports and dire warnings on the t.v. The lights flickered only once, but Gram was prepared and said,

“’S’not my firs’ rodeo son. I been through a storm ‘efore you were even a twinkle in yer Daddie’s eye. Blizzard o’62 it was. One helluva bitch that one was.” She slurred. That’s when Lars decided Gram had enough to drink that night.

“Gram.” He grunted taking the bottle away from her. He downed the rest of it in one gulp, causing the room to spin in a funny way. That was a bad idea. Gram liked the good stuff that could set a black bear on it’s ass. “We all survived the ice storm of ‘98” He countered. She seemed to think this over then nodded.

“’At’s right sonny. You did. But you were a whelp then. I had to cook and boil water so you two could take a bath every few days. All on the stove out there. Had that stove since my Gerald put it in. Yep, she’s a beaut. she is. You were teenagers then. You stunk t’high heaven.” She proclaimed, and Lars nodded in agreement, glassy eyed. No point in arguing with her now. Teenage boys were pretty stinky.

“Did you walk to the store uphill both ways too?” He’d heard the line so many times from the natives it was almost ingrained in the collective responses whenever there was any question about snowstorms of blizzards past. So, it wasn’t unheard of to get the reply,

“Yep, with a chord of wood on my back.” She hiccupped.

He nodded, sitting in the middle of the living room floor in front of her, petting the dog that was wagging it’s puffy tail and going in between them because in their state of inebriation, they were more docile and willing to give her potato chips made from Maine potatoes from “up in the County” as Aroostook County was called. It is impossible to carry a chord of wood all by one’s self, but he vaguely wondered if that was how she got that weird lump on her back that made her look like Quasimodo from the Hunchback of Notre Dame, or if that was just the arthritis. He grinned at the thought and gave the dog another potato chip. He thought maybe he should let the dog out, and he stumbled getting up to go do so. It gave him the chance to scan the darkness for signs of Tanner’s pickup truck to see if he was returning, but it was to no avail.

The dog hurried through her business, not wanting to spend any more time than necessary out in the snow. And she shook it off her fur as she came inside and hopped into Gram’s lap, causing the old lady to curse because she was cold and wet. The chill sobered Lars up a bit. He knew the storm was going to be bad. He had texted Jesse earlier to tell him they would be closed and to be safe, and he had been assured that the people he cared about would be just that, but not anymore. Not with Tanner out there in the dangerous conditions looking for tourists who had no business being as ignorant of the weather as they probably were boating in these waters. Lars was angry, but he felt for their plight too, knowing their slim chances. He closed the door on the darkness and returned to the living room where Gram’s had dozed off in her chair.

He grabbed the afghan on the floor beside her and tucked it up under her chin and then curled onto the couch himself, watching images of the severity of the weather pass by on the screen. When the coastal towns were shown, and the wake crashed into the shore, he closed his eyes to the screen, already knowing but not wanting to know just how bad it was. He couldn’t help but imagine that Tanner had walked out the door on him again, and this time he wasn’t coming back.

The next morning, he woke to find Gram’s chair empty. It had stopped snowing outside, but that didn’t calm his nerves any less. He jumped up from the couch, clutching his skull and the pounding headache and went to the kitchen where he found Gram sitting at the table in the same clothes she had been in yesterday. She was on the phone with the police chief,

“Ayuh, Ok Earl, you let me know as soon as you hear, you hear?” She demanded. She nodded into the phone, not that Police Chief Earl could see it, more that it was an automatic response. She looked up when she heard Lars enter and shook her head no and the crushing weight of anxiety fell back on him. When she hung up the phone, she tapped the cordless receiver on the table a minute and then in a quavering voice that sounded as old as time itself she said,

“That was Earl down at the station. They lost contact with Tanner last night at around two in the morning. There has been radio silence since, and they’ve sent another boat out to search for him, but the swells haven’t gone down much since the storm blew out, so they aren’t sure how far they’ll be able to search. They said it could be another day or two before the swells calm down before they can search properly and find my baby.” Her voice broke on the last word. Despite being her grandson, Tanner had been raised by her. He was hers and that was that. Lars felt mechanical as he nodded. Then he calmly walked over to the sink and proceeded to empty the contents of his stomach from the night before until all that was left was a gnawing ache and the sheer terror that rolled around in his gut, convincing him that his worst fear had come true, and Tanner, his Tanner, was not coming home again.