I’ve spent the month of December writing 48 pages worth of final papers, and I’ve been intensely looking forward to vacation. Vacation! Whenever I got stressed out about all the presentations I had to do and the papers I had to write, I would daydream about everything I would do when my work was done. I was going to read Water for Elephants! Eat gummi bears! Rent The Sopranos and watch every season in one sitting! It was going to be great!
Here’s what I did instead.
Monday
My mom calls. She’s at a checkup at the podiatrist’s for the foot she broke in February. He has spontaneously decided to “perform a minor surgery.” It’s nothing big, he’s just going to “nick a tendon.” She drives herself home and hobbles into the house.
As she’s taking off her coat, her cell phone rings. We got an offer on our house.
Tuesday
I wake up. It’s cold. The furnace stopped working in the night.
Since my mom’s still in pain from her “minor surgery,” I sub for her class. Kids are bad, yadda yadda. Meanwhile, my mom rushes to Timbuktu and back, and then to Timbuktu and back again, trying to get documentation and file a police report because some dummy has identity frauded her and we apparently owe $650 in electricity on some house an hour and a half away on a street we’ve never heard of.
My mom and sister pick me up at 3:30 and we race to the power company, which is an hour away and closes at 4:30. Alan helpfully provides directions over the phone, and we think we might be able to make it. Suddenly, traffic on the expressway stops. It’s 4:16, and we’re 5 miles away from our exit. We get off on the first available exit, and Alan magically modifies the directions for us for our new route. (Who needs GPS when you have Alan? He even used satellite imagery to describe the location to us!) We stop at every light, staring at the clock. 4:19. 4:21. 4:23. Finally, we get to the power company at 4:26. My mom jumps out of the car and races toward the building while my sister and I pump nickels and quarters into the parking meter. We get in!
We wait 20 minutes for a free clerk, and when the receptionist calls my mom’s name, my sister and I get up to join her. The security guard comes over and tells us that “Just one person will be fine.” We sit back down and get chatted up by some dude.
My mom supplies all the documentation, and now it’s up to the power company to figure out what to do about it. Interesting (yet unsurprising) fact: if you ever experience identity fraud, it’s up to you to prove residency for 5 years, present multiple forms of ID, file police reports, and take days off from work because of the power company’s unaccommodating business hours and very distant location.
We rush back home so we don’t miss the furnace guy, who’s coming out to take a look.
Shortly before the furnace guy arrives, we figure out the problem. The water’s cold and the stove won’t turn on. We haven’t been checking the propane pig, and we’re out of gas. We call the furnace guy and tell him not to come.
It’s 8:00 pm. We call the propane company to find out about how we can get some fuel so we can have some damn heat again. They can come tonight, but it’ll cost an extra $125. We decide to tough it out for the night. It’s 50 degrees inside. It’ll be like camping! I don a fleece shirt, fleece pants, and fleece socks.
Wednesday
I wake up to see if my mom needs me to sub for her again, and as I leave my room, I smell fumes. My mom and stepdad are in the kitchen, warming themselves by a propane heater. Remembering the article I read about carbon monoxide poisonings in Seattle, I get paranoid and tell them that they should crack a window. My mom leaves early to take a shower at our old house, which, among its various other amenities, has the lure of hot water.
I try to go back to bed, but I’m worried about my sister, so I go in to check on her. I don’t want to make her paranoid about CO poisoning, so I pretend I’m checking if she’s warm enough. As I open the door, the kitten, who is a notorious electrical cord chewer, leaps into the room. I lean down in the dark to catch the cat, not seeing the wooden chair that’s between the kitten and me, and I get smacked in the chin and the chest by a piece of furniture. I kind of fall over in pain, which freaks my half-asleep sister out, who jumps out of bed to check on me. I mumble something about propane heater and possible carbon monoxide and does she feel okay?, which stresses her out more. “My chest is feeling tight,” she says. “I’m having trouble breathing.”
She stumbles out of her room, and ends up collapsing. “Oh my god, are you all right?!” I exclaim. She doesn’t really reply. I try to heave her up by the armpits, but she’s like a sack of potatoes: dead weight. I call to my stepdad, who upon coming upstairs, can finally smell the fumes. “Wow, even I’m feeling woozy up here,” he says, as he and I struggle to pick up my sister.
We awkwardly carry/drag her downstairs and lay her on the couch, where she perks up a little. I open a window and start obsessively googling “carbon monoxide symptoms.” She’s tired and wants to go to bed, but obviously she doesn’t want to go back to her room until we can get a carbon monoxide detector. The three of us set off for the grocery store at 7:00 am.
We buy a carbon monoxide detector, and it doesn’t go off when we set it up in my sister’s room. She goes back to sleep, but my stepdad and I are worried about her, as is my mom, who keeps calling us to check on our status. I make an appointment for her to see the doctor at 9:30, and my stepdad calls the propane company to arrange for a delivery.
We go to the doctor’s, and my sister receives a clean bill of health. The doctor doesn’t think she had carbon monoxide poisoning, and just that with all the stress in the morning, her heart had been beating too fast or something vague like that, but that we should get the propane heater out of the kitchen.
We come home, and shortly thereafter the propane guy comes. He fills up the empty tank, and very kindly takes the time to look at our furnace while he’s here. We turn on the stove’s burners to flush the air out of the gas line, and we spend forever trying to get the pilot light on the furnace to stay on. For about an hour or so, we keep trying to coax the pilot light on, and the burners on the stove aren’t really burning that much, either. There’s a LOT of air in the gas line, apparently.
Finally we realize that the gas had been shut off on the propane pig. A simple turn of the faucet, and the pilot light stays on. The furnace starts blowing, the water heater starts heating, and the damn stove works again. The propane guy, bless his sweet golden heart, does not point out the obvious: that we had just wasted an hour of his time. He even (very politely!) says, “You know, I never thought to check the pig.” Embarrassed, we walk him back to his truck.
Finally we have heat! Except now I can’t find the kitten. I hadn’t seen her since we left for the doctor’s.
I begin searching the house in earnest, looking in every cupboard, in every closet, under every bed, in every room, in every laundry basket. She’s nowhere to be found. I start worrying that she got outside, and I circle our property a handful of times, calling for her. Now that we live in the woods, I’m sure there are predators out there, and it gets so cold at night that I worry that she could freeze overnight. Where is she?
For the next three hours, I search everywhere for her. She doesn’t seem to be inside, she doesn’t seem to be outside, she doesn’t seem to be anywhere. I alternate between optimism and despair. Most of the time I can handle the situation, but occasionally I get overwhelmed with worry. Where is she?!
I try to find a recent picture of her so I can start making LOST CAT signs, and I’m saddened that so many of my pictures are blurry. She’s such a livewire that she never stands in one place long enough to be photographed. She’s elusive, like the Loch Ness monster. No photographic proof can document her existence. I may never see her again, and I don’t even have a good picture of her. I cry a little. I settle on two bad pictures and print off some copies.
I tape up my signs, and it feels like I’m giving up on her. I search a little more, but I’m too overwhelmed. I need to take a break. I lay down on my bed and start crying.
As I reach for a Kleenex, I feel something hard shift beneath me. I jump off the bed and begin feeling around, trying to find the hard lump. It’s not under my duvet, but in it, trapped inside the cover. The blankets are so twisted up, and I’m scared to death of what I might find. Is it her? Can she breathe in there? Could she have asphyxiated? Did I crush her? I finally find the little tan body I’d been searching for, on and off, from 8:00 am to 3:17 pm. She’s limp in my arms as I hold her against me, crying and kissing her soft brown fur. I set her down and she crawls under my bed, in that flattened, skulky way only a cat can do. I cry and call everyone to tell them the news, ripping down the LOST signs I had taped by the road.
My mom calls. Our counteroffer was accepted. We sold our house.
My little joy and despair, returning to the scene of the crime.
All in all, I think it had a happy ending. I’m still too stressed out to feel relieved, so I’m not sure. All I know is I can’t wait for this vacation to be over so I can take a break.
