Exit Channel

By Lily Vonderheide

On a sweltering summer night in the rundown town of Niagara Falls, New York, the power flickers and goes out. Within 48 hours, the blackout has cascaded across North America. 
For Jimmy Ledanski, reluctant manager of a tourist-trap motel, wounded and reeling from a recent suicide attempt, the outage at first barely registers. For his friend Anna Eisenberg, trapped in Maine at a nursing conference, the minor inconvenience rapidly spirals into a struggle to save her patients in a world without 911, X-rays, or even running water. 
As Anna battles unwinnable odds, her husband and Jimmy join forces to find her. But as society unravels, Anna's heroism and Jimmy's courage begin to fail them…
Drawn from real-world reports by FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security, as well as Lights Outby Ted Koppel,Exit Channel is the story of ordinary people swept up in an all-too-possible catastrophe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lily Vonderheide
• Release date: Feb 4, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386540984

Lily Vonderheide

Lily Vonderheide, originally hailing from Cincinnati, OH, has worked in seven states and two countries as an EFL and creative writing teacher, boat captain, light bulb assembler, tour guide, and most recently as a ranger for the National Park Service. She is currently at work on her second novel, a thriller set in Yellowstone National Park.

Book preview

1

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 22   

THE LAST DAY that Jimmy Ledanski meant to live began like any other. He arrived at the Cataract Inn at 7 a.m. sharp to take over the front desk from Ray the overnight guy, a nephew of the assistant manager, Mrs. DiAngelo. Lately, Jimmy had given all the hiring decisions to Mrs. DiAngelo, trying to prepare her for the day, this day in fact, when she would have to take over.

Ray brushed past Jimmy with a muttered Morning, boss, and went off down the street moving like a sackful of spiders. He seemed bent on no good, although it was hard to imagine what kind of small, nasty crimes a person could commit at 7 o’clock on a murky June morning.

Jimmy put on a pot of coffee to start the day. A few guests stumbled into the dining area and helped themselves. Jimmy checked on the supply of instant oatmeal packets, the stack of Styrofoam bowls, the basket of waxy fruit. On weekends he did a bigger breakfast with waffles, but today was Wednesday, so oranges and oatmeal it was.

Perhaps in some mythical heyday of the American family vacation, maybe the ‘50s, the Cataract Inn had been a destination spot, the place to stay if you wanted to see Niagara Falls. But now even Jimmy, the proprietor, had to admit that it was a dive, albeit with no bed-bugs and hardly any hookers. The motel’s real meat and drink these days were the stragglers, people too lost or cheap to find more upscale lodgings.  They would start wandering in around 6 p.m., with the biggest rush between 8 and 11.

But by then it wouldn’t be Jimmy’s problem anymore.

He returned to his desk and started the remits and night audits, a job he still didn’t trust to Ray, although they’d been training. Hopefully the kid had the hang of it by now. Would he filch from the till when Jimmy wasn’t around to look over his shoulder? His aunt swore that he wouldn’t, but Jimmy knew it didn’t matter anyway. There was really no money to steal.

At 8:17 the morning housekeeper came in. She was another of Mrs. DiAngelo’s nepotistic hires, her late husband’s stepdaughter. Jimmy looked at the clock, looked at her, raised an eyebrow.

Sorry, Jimmy, she said. Traffic.

A blithe and obvious lie, but he let it slide for once. The beds would get made.

By ten thirty he had finished the audits, so he headed out for a smoke.  The Cataract squatted low and U-shaped on a narrow lot, jostled on one side by a check-cashing business and on the other by the carcass of an extinct strip mall.  Jimmy looked up and saw that several bulbs in the sign—Cataract Inn: Hot Breakfast, Free Wi-Fi, Family-Owned Since 1947— were burned out. Every other Ledanski had been dead for at least ten years, stretching the definition of family-owned, but he had never been able to think of anything to go in its place.

The weatherman had been babbling about the incipient heat wave for days, and a fug of car exhaust and humidity had already begun to shimmer over the pavement. Jimmy inhaled ozone and cigarette smoke, wishing for a violent thunderstorm.

His khaki pants sagged on his hips when he dropped the lighter in his pocket. His shirt was baggy and his belt buckle was on the last hole. He had an uneasy sense that at one time he had taken up more space in the world.

When was he was eighteen, freckled and cowlicked, he had looked too young to buy cigarettes, let alone inherit a motel, but he had been a complete person. Ten years on, he had sloughed so many pieces of himself that he could have just stepped back and evaporated into the haze rising all around him.

Jimmy stubbed out the cigarette and went back inside.

By 3:30 the motel was deserted. Everybody who was going to check out had done so many hours before. The housekeepers were on breaks or lying low in the heat. Mrs. DiAngelo would come in to take over for him at 4:30. It was not one of those hectic days when he would be obliged to stay late and sort things out.  He took a ladder out to the parking lot and replaced the blown fuse in the sign, did a room inspection, and aimlessly surfed the Internet until the doorbell chimed. He looked up expecting Mrs. DiAngelo, but it was a family.

They were typical customers, the children whiny, smudgy-faced, the parents white-eyed and ragged.

Welcome to the Cataract, Jimmy said. Do you have reservations?

No, the woman said. Don, I told you—

We need a good room, the man said. A good clean family room, no smoking, no funny business. He sported a baseball cap proclaiming I’m Your Huckleberry! over a cartoon of a smirking black bear. His wife wore a rumpled t-shirt with the slogan Virginia is for Lovers.

Jimmy saw into the future: he saw them shuffling through Niagara Falls, Ontario, the kids slurping ice cream cones, hot and bored, riding the boat, snapping selfies in front of the water, looming up in awe-inspiring imbecility.

A room, buddy? the man said. Sometime today? And where can we find good pizza in this town?

Of course, Jimmy said. He booted up the reservation system and took down their information.

Here are your keys, the room number is on the envelope. You can get pizza at Pizza Hut three blocks down. Checkout is at 10:30 a.m. Enjoy your stay.

The family straggled away to the parking lot. Jimmy looked back at the computer but the page blurred into pixels and he could make no sense of it. 

Twenty minutes later, the door opened again with a gust like hot bad breath and Mrs. DiAngelo sailed in. She was a hefty woman who always had Jesus in her heart and fresh linens in every room.

Hey, Mrs. D. He made his voice sound bored and easy. How’s it going?

Hot as blazes, Mrs. DiAngelo said. My Lord, and the AC is broken in Maurice’s car, it was just so hot in there...

Too bad we don’t have a pool, Jimmy said. It’d be good for business today. Listen, I have to go. Everything’s set here, it’s been dead all afternoon. The reservations sheet says six evening arrivals, so it shouldn’t get too busy for you.

Sure thing, Jimmy. She studied him. What’s the rush? Got a date?

She was always trying to set him up with one of her nieces.

Not really, Jimmy said. Take care, Mrs. D.

She was already turning away to boot up her computer as he walked out the door to his car.

He had a condo in a less blighted neighborhood off the boulevard, but rather than going home, he got on the Robert Moses Parkway and joined the stream of traffic funneling towards the state park. The river stretched wide and calm to the left, and he caught occasional glimpses of the mist over the Falls farther down. The tourist season was in full swing and there were cars with out-of-state plates crawling everywhere. Of course, all of them would eventually take their money to Canada, where they could squander it on amusement rides and tacky souvenirs.

The last time he’d gone downtown on the American side, he’d found a wasteland, stray tourists roaming through blocks of boarded-up businesses, a junkie sagged in a doorway, litter blowing through crumbling streets. The whole area looked like three days past the end of the world.

He skirted downtown and entered the park, heading for the less crowded area by Three Sisters Islands, home turf to anyone who had ever been a teenager in Niagara Falls, anyone who had ever gone roaming in the private night.

He left his car unlocked and crossed the bridges to the farthest island, out in the mainstream of the mighty Niagara, with the falls just a few hundred yards downstream, and skirted a small fence with a sign that said DANGER: NO WATER ENTRY to walk out to the river’s edge. The rapids were running but the Falls were invisible from his angle except as a boil of mist and a thin line dropping into nothing. Looking straight down at the water lapping against the island, shallow and sandy, it could have been any old river. It took a moment to find perspective, to look downstream and grasp the way the little ripples ran together into a crescendo of force and violence.

Jimmy sat on the rocks, took his shoes off, and put his feet in the water.

His feet, submerged, were ugly shades of white and veiny blue, like a corpse’s feet. The more he studied them, the more they looked dead. He could just about see the toe tag. It gave him a kind of physical shock. He had been thinking about it for so long, he’d thought that he had his head wrapped around it, but it was only now, looking at his feet, looking at the Falls, that he got it, got it all the way down to his bones.

He could still walk away. Mrs. DiAngelo wouldn’t find the note he’d left until she went on dinner break at 6:30. He’d also left his cell phone as a plausible excuse to return to the motel, go in the back room, and pocket the note with no one any the wiser. Even up to four thirty, he hadn’t been sure he wouldn’t chicken out.

Jimmy lit a cigarette and damned if it wasn’t the best cigarette he’d ever had. It tasted fucking amazing. How many times over the years had people said, You know those things are going to kill you someday? Well, they were wrong.

He made no effort to smoke either slowly or hastily. He just enjoyed his cigarette. When it was done he threw the butt into midstream and went in behind it.

The water felt good after the heat of the day. He left the lee of the island and had one moment to look downstream before the river found him.  It knocked him off his feet, dragged him under, and swallowed him whole. Swept up in 700,000 gallons of water, Jimmy Ledanski went over the Falls.

2

ANNA SILVEIRA EISENBERG went off shift at three thirty on Wednesday. As she drove, she ground the events of the day in the mill of her mind. It had been a difficult day, nine hours of scheduling headaches and red tape, broken by rounds with cranky and ungrateful patients. What Murphy’s Law dictated that the worst ones always needed the most help? It never ceased to perplex her.

She felt hot and testy as she made the short trip home from the medical center. It was almost a relief to find that her family wasn’t around. The house was hers. Embracing calm and quiet, she started peeling off her scrubs in the living room, not something she ever would have done if her mother-in-law or twin toddlers had been present.

By the time she reached the shower in the master bedroom, she was stark naked. She stood under the cold pouring water for an unconscionably long time, given their utility bill, only emerging when she heard the distant slam of the front door that announced someone else’s homecoming.

She wrapped herself in a towel and stepped out into the bedroom. Her bad mood had been sluiced away. She felt infinitely better.

Footsteps made the floorboards creak on the other side of the door.

Dave? Is that you?

The female of the species, feeling secure in her home territory, sheds her baggy green pelt—

It was unmistakably her husband’s dry and croaky voice, doing a perfect imitation of a BBC nature documentary.

Pining for the return of her mate, she—

Shut up. Come in here.

Dave came into their bedroom. He looked beaten by the heat: his shirt was damp, clinging to his lanky frame, and his glasses, as always, were sliding down his nose. He pushed them up and looked at her.

How was work? he said in his own voice.

Rough, Anna said. It was a long day. What about you?

You know. Normal. He unbuttoned his shirt. You have to give it to product labels, they never code blue on you. You look good though.

He kissed her wet hair. Oh, your head is so nice and cold. Can I get some of that?

You can take a shower, Anna said.

Well, I could, but that’s no fun.

Anna let her towel slip to the floor.

What are you doing, woman? Dave said. I want to be cooled off, don’t you understand?

You’ll just have to suffer, Anna said. She tugged at his unbuttoned shirt. Get rid of that, you’ll feel better.

He took his shirt off and kissed her, and then reached up and removed his glasses. Blindly, he said in the BBC voice, the bipedal bat gropes toward—

Anna giggled. Oh my God, you’re such a freak.

And you love it, Dave said.

Gently, he pushed her backward onto the bed. She took his shoulders and pulled him down with her.

They had sex, not the crazy sex they had once shared as undergrads at Buffalo State, sex in the library, sex in the quad, sex in a room with a sock on a doorknob, but it gave Anna the same frisson of getting away with something; they never had the house to themselves in the middle of the day. They finished almost together and flopped back on the bed, totally content.

It was entirely possible that the sex they had now was even better. If she had to articulate the difference, it was like the contrast between a three-course meal and Chinese takeout, both delicious, but one filled you up while one left you hungry an hour later.

She snuggled her head into the crook of Dave’s arm. He nuzzled his face into her hair.

What are you thinking about?

Chinese food, Anna said. As a metaphor for sex.

And you think I’m weird.

I know you’re weird. C’mere again.

After a few minutes he begged for mercy, saying it was too hot to make out anymore, and got up to take a shower.

Anna put clothes on, not without reluctance, and opened her laptop.

Have you heard from your mom? she said when he came out.

She took the kids to that reading at the library, Dave said. She should be back soon.

Good, Anna said. I booked the flight for Sunday. But the rental place in Portland called again and said they couldn’t find us a car with hand controls after all.

Dave wound his arm around her, hooked his chin over her shoulder, and peered at the laptop screen. So you’ll have to chauffer her around? I’m sorry.

I don’t mind that, Anna said. It’s just too bad that she has to hang around all day while I’m at the conference.

Hang around? Dave said. She won’t hang around. She’ll call up Pat or Bob or Mindy or Rachel and they’ll go out sailing and have more fun than you will. You’ll get back to the hotel and she won’t even be there.

There are still seats on our flight. You’re sure you can’t drive up until next week?

I nagged Jones again this afternoon and he swears that if we don’t finish this commission by the 27th the free market will grind to a halt. The streets will run with blood, birds will fall out of the sky—

Actual blood? Anna said.

That was the gist, anyway.

Did you ever hear from Jimmy?

He finally texted me back this morning, said he has too much to do. Dave shook his head. "It wouldn’t be the Second Coming if he took a few days off. What kind of masochist passes up an invitation to get the hell out of Niagara Falls in a heat wave?"

You couldn’t talk him into it? Not even for the 4th of July?

I’ll see him at Poker Friday, Dave said. I’ll browbeat him.

The front door banged and they heard the clatter of Karen Eisenberg’s wheeled walker on the hardwood floor. Behind it, like small echoes, came the pattering