by Lydia Millet
One collection had been so beautiful I wanted to shrink myself and live in it. There were tiny trees made of twigs he’d snapped off, shrubs made of lichen, a bridge of curved bark. There was a cave made of rocks and a chain of ponds in mussel shells. In a shady bower of leaves and sticks hung a silvery chrysalis, out of which he’d hoped a butterfly would emerge.
It did not.
“OK. But you should probably come back to the house.”
Shel shook his head and signed something—he’d taught Jack some basic sign language.
Shel could talk, but he almost never did.
“We gotta do more,” said Jack. “Evie. It’s important.”
“The storm’s important too.”
“It’s for the storm,” he said. Determined.
“Listen. I’ll give you one more hour. Deal?”
He looked at Shel, who nodded.
“And don’t get separated, either,” I said.
“Buddy system,” said Jack. “Pinkie swear.”
THE CONVOY HAD returned with a fresh load of plywood. Fathers were getting irritable. Fewer tools than hands, so we had to take turns with the hammers.
When Jack got back he came to me and showed me a bleeding finger.
“What happened?” I asked. Then got distracted: Kay was slinking past us, dragging her sister’s doll by one leg. The doll had taken a beating. Seemed to be missing the other leg, and its hair had been shorn off. It had a scalp of blond plugs.
“Tell you later,” said Jack.
I’d just turned back to window-covering when a hand landed on my shoulder.
Alycia’s father, the one with the goatee and Tinder date.
“Uh—Edie, is it?”
“Eve.”
Their family clearly had trouble with names.
“Eva. Do you know where my daughter is?”
Damn. Why me?
I’d tell him about the yacht, I decided. But would I tell him about possible difficulties with its navigation?
I didn’t want to implicate David.
And yet.
I stood there with the hammer. It felt heavy.
“She didn’t choose to come back with us,” I said.
His mouth hung slightly open.
“I’m sorry. You mean she’s still down there? All by herself? On the beach?”
Beside me, Sukey stopped hammering also.
“She sailed for Newport,” said Sukey, blunt as always. “On a yacht called the Cobra. Owned by a venture capitalist.”
“Ha ha! No seriously,” said the goatee father.
“Seriously,” said Sukey.
“You’ve got to be kidding me!”
“Nope,” said Sukey, and went back to hammering.
When the father turned away he seemed stunned.
Then the gynecologist mother came down the steps from the breakfast room. “They’re saying it’s a Cat 4. Winds up to 140!”
“All this hysteria’s for nothing,” said the short father. (Low’s, I recalled with a surge of satisfaction.) He was holding a beer bottle. Hadn’t lifted a finger to help cover the windows, just watched and critiqued. “You’ll see.”
Another mother stuck her head out the door. “Hey. Where’s Alycia?”
Not again. I sighed.
“On a yacht headed for Rhode Island,” I said.
“They’ve got excellent food on that boat,” piped up Dee. “The chef used to work at Chez Panisse.”
I opted not to look at the mother’s face right then. Everyone knew Alycia didn’t eat.
WE STILL DIDN’T have the windows done when the rain got harder. The fathers gave up, clearing throats, shaking heads, retreating to mix their drinks.
When the dinner whistle blew we merged into the dining room, hungry. Rain was drumming steadily on the roof, but the room was enormous and sound faded there. A splendid chandelier hung from a high beam—it had once been Teddy Roosevelt’s. Or so a three-ring binder claimed. It contained the house’s history. “The dude in the wheelchair,” Juicy had nodded knowingly when we read it.
There was also a long table fit for a king. Still didn’t hold us all. The house hadn’t been built for this many guests—special permission had been received to house us in the attic—so card tables were set up along one wall to hold the overflow. Normally we raced each other to sit at those card tables at dinner, due to their reduced proximity to parents.
But there was no food now. The king’s table was empty except for two slumping bags of ripple chips.
A rumble of discontent.
“Head count!” yelled Jen’s mother.
“Dinner,” said Sukey firmly.
“It’s spaghetti,” said Jen’s mother. “Set the table, then.”
David did knives while I did forks. At the cutlery drawer I whispered: “Did you tell anyone else you messed with the yacht’s computer?”
He shook his head, downcast. “Do I have to?”
“Let me think on it,” I said.
But then Alycia’s parents came in. Agitated.
“The Coast Guard got a distress signal!” said her mother. “From the boat she’s on!”
“Are they sending a rescue team?” asked Jen’s father. “First responders?”
“We don’t know! We don’t know!” shrieked the mother.
“We don’t know,” clarified the father.
AS I FORKED up pasta, it struck me the parents had put their drinking on hold for at least two hours. The voice of the weatherman had told them to prepare, so they prepared.
They didn’t do well with long-term warnings. Even medium-term. But they still had reflexes.
“Um Evie, there might be a little problem,” said Jack as I was finishing.
He’d popped up behind me.
I followed him down the steps to the basement. Shel was there, in front of a closed door—a door to the room with the water heater in it, if I remembered right.
“Listen.”
I put my ear to the door. First I heard nothing, then a fizzing sound—no, a buzzing.
“See, they came out of the hive! We didn’t know they would do that.”
“You’re telling me—”
“We wanted to bring all the bees but we didn’t have time. This hive is the biggest.”
I stepped back from the door.
“Jack. You brought a beehive in?”
“One raindrop can kill a bee,” he said.
I thought of him and Shel stumbling across the grounds carrying the beehive and almost raised my voice.
When we got upstairs again, only parents were left in the dining room. The wind was rising. I saw it moving a loose piece of plywood and heard the branches of the big willow scraping the glass walls of the breakfast room.
Outside was pitch black, save for the orange spots of the lamps that lit the footpaths.
“Where is everyone?” asked Jack.
Where they were was watching TV in the library. The image was simple: the steady, spiral whirling of the storm.
“Can we watch something else?” said Juice.
“Hey, guys, turns out there’s a beehive in the house,” I said.
THE STORM HIT full-force in the middle of the night.
I’d lain sleepless on my pad on the floor, listening to the shudder of the walls as gusts buffeted them. So I was wide awake when a branch crashed through the attic window and kept on going, tearing part of the roof off as it fell.
The power’d been knocked out: flipping the light switch did nothing. Rain slanted through the gaping hole.
There was a stampede. I fumbled my way to Jack, who sat on his bed holding Pinguino, and a crowd of us surged down the staircase. Parents were milling, and in the babble of voices flashlights got switched on and candles got lit.
“It’s the big willow!” someone cried.
In the breakfast room water was pouring onto the table and chunks of plaster fell from the ceiling as rain blew in the smashed floor-to-ceiling window. The trunk of the willow was slant
ing overhead. By lantern light I saw outside: the ragged mass of its black roots was torn from the ground.
“Someone! Where’s the plywood?” yelled a father.
“Get me the cordless drill!” yelled another.
“What’s that?” asked Low, pointing out the broken window to the wide lawn beyond.
“Light, please,” said a mother, and flashlights pointed.
“It’s shiny,” said Jack.
“It’s water,” said a father.
“The lake is in the yard,” said Jack.
There was water all around.
“What does the Weather Channel say? How many inches have we had?” asked someone else.
Too many people were shouting. Flashlight spots danced frantically over the yard, an expanse of rainwater that seemed to stretch everywhere. Its surface was slashed and pocked by more rain falling, a blur of pinpricks.
Another meeting was convened in the dining room, but I couldn’t hear what the parents were saying over the pounding of the rain and the drilling of the fathers. The unlit chandelier loomed over us, a dim glass jellyfish in the dark reaches of the ceiling. Candles sputtered on the table. We shifted from foot to foot. Someone had bad B.O.
Since we couldn’t hear the parents we muttered among ourselves. Sandbags. Could you buy those? Or did you have to make them?
I already missed the electricity. With no light or power and some of the walls and ceilings breached, I felt a curious passivity creep over me. What defenses did we have? What could we even do?
When the talk trailed off the crowd moved, bodies bustling out of the room again and carrying us along.
“So what’s the plan?” I asked the nearest mother. “I couldn’t hear.”
“Two hundred garbage bags,” she said. “And plenty of duct tape.”
THERE WERE TASKS, there was wet and cold, there was the black overhead of the sky. I don’t remember the events in order. I know we splashed outside with some fathers to help with weatherproofing. We couldn’t see what they did, but it didn’t look technologically advanced.
I held an umbrella over a father’s head and gazed down at my feet with the headlamp I’d been given: they were planted in water. The bottom edges of the basement windows were already a couple of inches submerged.
The house was an island.
During a lull in the wind I heard voices above me and craned my neck to look. Skinny legs in cargo pants dangled off the roof.
“Hey!” I called. The legs disappeared, and a head and arms came into view. Val. Holding a white garbage bag in one hand. It ballooned out in the wind.
“What are you doing up there?” I called.
“Roof hole! I’m covering!” yelled Val.
They’d put a kid on the roof in a lightning storm.
WE HUDDLED TOGETHER on mattresses and sleeping pads at the dry end of the attic. Within hours the bags Val had taped over the hole were sagging and gaping: when I woke I saw water had spread farther and farther across the room. There was a tide of wetness on the floor. Cool air was gusting in around the billowing plastic.
Jack wasn’t beside me, but Juicy was. Snoring. Low lay in a fetal position in the corner. The sleeping bags were dingy, the pillows were yellowed, and faces were grimy in the gray light of morning. We’d all slept in our dirty clothes.
“Volunteers! Volunteers!” yelled a woman.
The peasant mother was leaning in the door. Her salt-and-pepper hair stuck out in small braids all over her head. Looked like someone had tried for cornrows and ended up with a grimy shag rug.
“We need the boats!” she said. “Any strong swimmers here? The boats got out of the boathouse! The boats are on the loose!”
Juicy and Val and I put on our wet shoes and thumped down the stairs. In the front yard, which was higher ground than the back, we saw parents in cars, desperately trying to fit them onto a grassy knoll that loomed up on one side of the drive.
We waded across the back lawn, water up to our knees. Beneath the surface the grass had turned to mud, and my feet sank. I was glad to get to the real lake, where at least there was deep enough water to swim in.
We swam.
The water was brown instead of blue. Leaves and sticks made fleets of litter and circled lazily. I saw a yellow beach ball floating, a red rubber slipper, a toddler’s plastic dinner plate divided into sections. There was a wading pool, blue and orange and printed with fish. Tangles of purple skipping rope and a basketball hoop.
I thought: Water’s going where it isn’t allowed. Dryness was a temporary state. Like safety.
I swam through the murky brown, Juicy and Val beside me, flinching every time my feet knocked against a solid object.
The boats had lodged under the side of a dock on the far side of the lake, near a broken-down fishing hut. Val slipped a bungee cord from her pocket—always well equipped—and hooked the two canoes together. Juice and I each took a rowboat.
SOME FATHERS MADE a fire in the library fireplace. The warmth didn’t permeate far—a cold draft crept through the house from the breakfast room and the roof—so we hung around the hearth nursing hot drinks. The mothers who usually did the cooking appeared to be on strike. I’d seen two of them snorting lines of coke in the bathroom.
Alycia’s mother was sitting in an armchair in the corner of the library without moving—been there a long time. She’d wandered down a distant road. A mental road, said Rafe.
First she’d knitted with total focus, then she’d unraveled the knitting. She was covered in a blanket, and when I went up to her to ask if she needed something—a courtesy I rarely extended to a parent—the dip in the blanket, in her lap, was full of cut-up pieces of yarn.
She acted like I wasn’t there, plus she was holding scissors. I figured I’d move on.
“She’s dissociating,” I heard a mother tell a father. The therapist, probably. “Detachment from reality. It’s like that time the four of us went down to Cabo. Remember?”
“Oh right. The time with the tranny sex worker? And the donkey in the sombrero?”
“Bill, Jesus,” said the mother. “We don’t say tranny anymore.”
The day felt formless, a crazy woman in her chair snipping, some fathers beside the fireplace talking in stoned voices about utopia. (Their pot was garbage next to the Oracle, said Terry with contempt. But he’d filled a freezer bag with it anyway.) Time ran together in the dark. Day for night, night for day, and the lost power made the house static and dim against the wind.
Then I had an idea.
“We should get our phones back,” I told Terry.
After all, the bylaws had been suspended. The parents were consulting their own phones, those who weren’t cutting up scarves or breathing Purple Kush.
So we waited till the stoned fathers were lying on their backs. They crossed their legs and expressed some thoughts about a workers’ paradise. It would have saved us, said one. If anything could, said another. Capitalism had been the nail in the coffin, said a third.
They’d switched their pot out for cigarettes and were trying to blow smoke rings, but the rings had no holes. Looking over my shoulder to make sure we were still being ignored, I tiptoed over to the painting that hid the safe.
I liked that painting. In front of pine trees with snow-tipped boughs, a brown bear stood on his hind legs. His front paws hung in front of him as though he was begging, and behind him stretched a bright-blue lake, with mountains on a far shore. His posture was humble, his head cocked to one side. Inquisitive.
Before, I’d assumed he was a bear of the past. A rustic bear of the 1800s. The robber barons might have shot him and used him for a rug. But now I could see him as a bear of the future, when men had disappeared from the hills and fields, their old paths overgrown. And the bears and wolves were masters again.
Terry helped me lift it off the hook. The safe door was ajar, and inside were all our phones and tablets. Stacked up like pirate’s treasure, a snarl of chargers and battery packs behind them.
Better than diamonds and pearls.
I was smiling so hard I didn’t even know it for a minute. Then I thought: I’m smiling.
“Yes! Yes! Free the people!” crowed Terry.
At that point we didn’t care if the stoned fathers noticed.
We dumped some magazines out of a basket and piled in the phones. Then we went striding through the house with our shoulders thrown back, triumphant. We yelled out names and passed out bounty. We showered them with devices. We were heroes and paragons. Liberators and saints.
There was still the problem of the power outage, but we agreed to share our spare battery packs.
“Now we can do everything!” said Jen.
Juicy unleashed a string of happy obscenities. Val nodded with an air of satisfaction.
Low had tears in his eyes.
I WAS WORRIED about Jack, with all the standing water. He wasn’t much of a swimmer. So I made him and Shel wear the moldy lifejackets over their beekeeping suits.
From the wraparound porch I watched them wade across the lawn. They were pulling one of the rescued canoes on a cord, and it was piled high with boxes. A mystery. At the edge of the woods they tied the canoe to a tree, and then struggled to carry their boxes toward the treehouses. I watched as their backs and shoulders receded, small columns of white and orange.
“Has everyone got their phones?” asked Terry. We fussed with our devices, scrolling or typing or plugging drained phones and tablets into battery packs. “The backup batteries? Everyone? I got one left. A Hello Kitty case? With pink sparkles?”
“Amy’s,” said David.
“The twins have phones already? They’re, like, eight!” said Sukey.
“Eleven,” said David. “They’re small, and they do a baby act.”
“Asshats,” said Sukey.
“That Kay’s a straight-up psycho,” said Jen.
“Word,” said David.
WITH THE GRAY daylight dimming, no sign of the storm letting up, and the water still rising, we planned to sleep on the ground floor—lay our pads and bags down wherever we found room.
