Seventy-seven percent of a cartridge for a house I do not own

At 8:50 this morning I walked the 60 m to her house to give back a wind-up torch I had held since Day 0. Her kitchen curtain was still shut. It had been open by 7:30 every morning for two weeks.

Six things I could have checked on day 13

I knocked twice. Her storm door opened. The kitchen was 3 °C and the front room 4 °C. She was in the kitchen chair with her coat on and a blanket over her knees. I had seen that coat on Day 12 and thought nothing of it.

She had two cartridges left and was running the heater 90 minutes a morning. "I have two." I did not ask what she was saving them for.

Her thermometer was in the red bag. I did the checks in the booklet's order.

• Temperature, under the tongue, three minutes: 35.4 °C. Normal is about 37.
• Thumb to little finger: she could not make them touch.
• The day: I asked what day it was. She said "the ninth." The card in my coat says fifteen.
• Urine: 200 mL in the commode since the night before, and dark.
• Skin: I pinched the back of her hand and it stayed up about three seconds. Her fingers were mottled to the wrist.
• Drink: a 2 L jug, down 0.4 L in twenty-four hours.

Pulse 96. By the number she was stage one. By the thumb and the day of the week she was stage two, the confused one. The two lists do not agree and I wrote both down.

Then she told me why. She had stopped drinking so she would not have to ask me to carry the commode out. She said it as a courtesy to me. "I didn't want you carrying that."

I asked her on Day 13 and again on Day 14. She said she was fine, both times, and I wrote fine on the card. That is the mistake. Fine is a word. Six numbers were available and I took the word.

Her first name is on the pill bottle by the sink. I have lived two doors from her for eleven years.

The booklet has an infants page: temperature, feeding, wet nappies, and a soft spot on the head I could not check. Two children at number 14 and I do not know how old they are.

The booklet's answer for stage two is to call an ambulance. The hospital is 40 km. The car has 9 L and is furniture.

Two loads of snow, one of them hers

The front room is 6 m from her kitchen chair. I did not take her the 60 m to my house.

The Red Cross line is to treat a cold person gently and get them out of the cold. I read that as not walking an unsteady woman across ice. The sidewalk is ice. And my warm room is 12 to 14 °C with two adults and a 30 kg dog in it.

So I moved her 6 m and brought the heat to her. Chair beside hers. Stand, turn, sit. Right hand on my forearm, left on the wall. Four minutes, two stops. I did not lift her. She walked.

Then my partner got her out of the coat and the wet socks. Blanket over the doorway, door shut, heater on, hat on her head. Two 1 L bottles of hot water in a tea towel, one on her chest, one under her arm. No rubbing, which the Red Cross is explicit about.

The water came out of the snow. It was not a decision about water. It was about the cartridge.

The day started at 7 L. I melted 144 L of snow: 21.2 L for 336 g, at the 16 g a litre from Day 11. I boiled one load for one minute, not ten, for 12 g. Then I carried 10.6 L to her house in three trips.

The cartridge weighed 384 g at 8:05 a.m. and 36 g at 5:40 p.m. That is 348 g, 77 percent of the 450 g cylinder, $6.96, or nine and a half of the Day 11 rice-and-lentil meals.

My burn rate is $6.43 a day. I spent more than a day's money on a house I do not own, in nine hours, and I would do it again.

She drank 900 mL that afternoon, because I filled the mug, put it in her hand, and stood there until she did. What it bought: 36.1 °C at 6 p.m., 250 mL of urine at six and lighter, and a thumb that could reach the little finger. She slept fourteen hours after that.

The dog did more than the bottles. He put his chin on her knee at eleven and she put her hand flat on his back and left it there for four minutes. It was the first thing she had done all morning that was not answering a question.

The second thing I got wrong was the tea. I put sugar in it, because sugar is what I remembered from something. She has been diabetic since 2011. The booklet has a page for cold and a page for sugar and no page where they meet. I read both after she had drunk it.

Her heater cartridge ran out at 3:10 p.m., so she has one left. Her rain barrel read 3 L on a stick and the last of it had grit in the bottom. The water she had was water she did not want, which is part of why she was not drinking.

Water at the end of the day: 9 L. Seven, plus 21.2 melted, minus 10.6 carried to her house, minus the 8.6 this house drinks and cooks with.

The middle of the road at 11:20

I went back at 11:20. 36.0 °C, breathing, asleep with her mouth open. My partner stayed in the chair by the bed and I walked out to the middle of the road, 6 m from the curb.

The middle of the road is the one place on this street with no wall between me and anybody. It is where I ended up.

I started with a list, which is how I pray when I am tired. Her. The eight tablets and Day 17. The water. The pipes. I got to the pipes and heard myself taking inventory.

Then it turned into a trade. The roof in the spring, the gutters, a Sunday in April, and the thing I am still not doing about the man who took the can. Three offers in, I noticed I was setting the terms, and stopped mid-sentence.

The church is two blocks up. The clock face has no light in it and the bell has not rung since the storm. Fifteen days. I have started looking at it on the walk home.

I stood there until my feet went. Sneakers instead of boots, twenty minutes in wet wool socks, no feeling in the two smallest toes. I walked home on my heels.

I did not get an answer. I am not going to write that I did. The house was 6 °C and I sat on the stairs with my boots off.

My partner said four words when she came down: "Come to bed." That was the whole conversation.

At 11:50 I wrote the figures on the card. It says 8.6 L a day for two adults and a dog. It does not have a line for the house two doors down.

What I should have had on day zero

• A thermometer in this kitchen. $9. I had to borrow the instrument that answers the question.
• Four 1 L bottles with screw caps, kept for hot water, so warming a person does not come out of the drinking water.
• A daily check on a card for the two people on this street who live alone: temperature, litres drunk, urine, day of the week. Started on Day 2, not Day 15.
• One spare 450 g cartridge, so that 348 g in a day is not 77 percent of everything left.
• Her phone number and her son's, written down. I had to knock.