The door is locked. Father twists the knob and leans with his other hand and his shoulder and it cracks and splinters a little as it swings open.
"Take off your shoes, Caroline," he says. "Be careful not to track anything in."
It is darker and the kitchen is just inside the door. The refrigerator's cord is unplugged and it's open. Father turns on the faucet and nothing comes out. He kicks the small rug aside then and pulls on a ring in the floor he knows is there and then he pulls open a trapdoor and with the headlamp on he goes down there.
"Just have to turn everything on," he says with his face looking up. "It's all turned off so it won't freeze."
There's a photograph stuck to the refrigerator. A woman with red hair wears a bikini and a little girl has a thick orange life preserver strapped around her. A fat man with a mustache is the father. They stand on a dock next to a white boat and they are all smiling and squinting against the sun.
"What are their names?" I say.
"Who?" Father says.
"Your friends."
"Roy and Sylvia," he says.
"And they have a little girl?" I say.
"Probably," he says. "I haven't seen them in a while."
There is a black metal woodstove and firewood which we do not burn since we don't want to make any smoke. If we had to we would but there is a round plastic thermostat on the walls and electric baseboard heaters along the walls. Our frozen clothes are thawing and dripping so we put them in the bathtub and find blankets. There are smart secret drawers everywhere. The washer and dryer fit in the closet and are stacked on top of each other. Up a ladder is a bedroom with one big bed and one small bed. There's a clock with blinking red numbers that say 12:00 and a shelf full of books. Even if the electricity is on we don't turn on the lights. We keep the curtains closed and light candles. It is all right that we are here but we don't want to have to explain it to someone who might not understand. We keep all our things close to the door in case we have to leave quickly.
I am just happy to be getting warm with my damp socks, my feet pressed against the smooth metal of the baseboard heaters. I look up at the sharp angle of the roof that is blocking out all the snow and wind.
Father spreads maps he's found across the table. "The thing is," he says, "I know this country pretty well. I've been around here before."
"Which is why you have friends here," I say.
"Right."
"Are we still going to Bend?" I say.
"No," Father says. He laughs. "Actually we were never going to Bend. I just bought those tickets to throw the people off."
"Which people?"
"The followers," he says.
"But we weren't planning to come here," I say.
"Not exactly," he says. "We're close, though. Tomorrow."
There's pea soup in the cupboard and also saltine crackers that are not too stale. This we eat and also macaroni and cheese even though we don't have milk or butter. Upstairs the dark green sheets are flannel and the down comforter is so warm and the bed is soft. I can't even think about last night and this is better than the hotel too which is probably all gone and in rubble now, demolished. This is better than our house on the farm since Mr. Walters isn't close and watching us and better than the forest park since no one expects us to be here.
"I wish we could stay," I say.
"Not even the people who own this place can live here all the time," Father says.
Still my toes go numb and back and forth but they are not exactly cold. Father snores and I poke him until he rolls over. We are so tired.
Father fixes the doorknob in the morning. He puts a new rubber washer in the sink's faucet. There are many ways to pay someone back and be a good friend.
When he goes down under the house to split the logs in the woodpile I have our clothes and the sheets in the washer. I'm vacuuming upstairs to make the lines in the carpet like they were.
The girl's name is Melody. It is painted, her name on the small wooden bed and also written in some of her books which are some coloring books and then some others that I recognize. They are Golden Nature Guides: Fishes, Flowers, Birds, Whales and Other Marine Animals, Mammals. I had all these and also Insects and Fossils, a long time ago in my bedroom in the house with my foster parents. That is a very long time ago. I carried these books around. I liked nature then but I didn't know anything about it.
I remember the Mammals book especially, the drawing of the animals exactly like they were before. My favorites are the ones who can change colors with the seasons so they can hide better. The snowshoe hare is white in the winter and brown in the summer. In the spring and fall it is somewhere in between.