Boca Raton

by Lauren Groff

  When Ange looked up, the house was shivering in her vision; then the dark windows slowly folded inward, like hands. And Ange was sitting in the moonlight with shingles cold beneath her bare feet, and all around was the reedy song of the family, the three babies sleeping in the parents’ laps, the boys all over the rooftop barely visible in white, the candles long ago melted, the breath white plumes in the moonlight. But what’s this? Over the horizon, a thin red string of morning was beginning to grow. And all at once, the family’s song was snuffed out. Morning. The night had passed. They had not been taken. They were not of the elect. They would not be saved. Such a disappointment inside her was like a hard wind roaring. The little boys woke, and together the family wept as the fields sharpened clear and yellow in the dawn.

  Ange came to at her kitchen table with a dry mouth, dry eyeballs from staring, a body aching from being clenched in the hand of horror. And through the gaping windows, this world of here and today, too, was graying into daylight.

  For the second time in her life, Ange had had a waking vision of history. But instead of elation, this time she felt a deep disquiet beating in her blood.

  Still, she rose. She was a competent woman; she was steady. She would not allow visions to sidetrack her. Besides, the mere fact of her daughter, so vivid now in the present—crying because she had a hole in her sock, letting milk dribble down her chin, dancing to the sound of the dishwasher—was so bright. It pushed into shadows any threat from past or future. Day had already dawned in the past. All was remainder, nothing saved. The future was a hurricane of so many elements—plastics and sea risings and drought and hunger—that it was hard to know from which direction the true full stop would come. So Ange showered. She got her daughter ready mechanically. Lily walked to school beside her mother, quiet, frowning, watchful, and ran off to class without saying goodbye or kissing her mother, the way she always did.

  The future was a hurricane of so many elements—plastics and sea risings and drought and hunger—that it was hard to know from which direction the true full stop would come.

  Ooof, Phyllis said when she caught a glimpse of Ange’s face as she came in. Don’t tell me you had another sleepless night. She poured Ange a cup of coffee, reconsidered, then poured it and most of the pot into her own giant mug and handed it to Ange.

  Two in a row, Ange said. I’m going for the record.

  Oh, honey, Phyllis said.

  Ange, who was unused to tenderness, felt her eyes fill with tears and, hating herself for the weakness, turned away, pretending to be busy.

  Her body was deteriorating, she thought in the afternoon, somehow finding herself in the bathroom. She had lost a few hours of the day in a mist, it seemed. The bags beneath her eyes were giant and blue, and her skin had the moist paleness of a frog’s belly. She looked bloated all over. Her joints ached. She’d snapped at Phyllis for misplacing a book she’d needed, she remembered with shame. There was a steel band slowly tightening inside her skull. She sat on the sink and watched the thin hand of her watch tick slowly toward five. When she came out, Phyllis was on the phone and made a few frantic Stay! I want to talk! motions, but Ange pretended not to notice and waved goodbye, then sped out the door and into her evening.

  She had high hopes for sleep tonight: the weather was cool, and Lily was quiet again and went to bed easily. But though Ange lay in bed for hours, no sleep came, and at first she groaned aloud for a while to let her fatigue out, and then she binged on a whole television series she could barely remember when the last credits rolled. There were still three endless hours left in the night when she opened her email. No reply from Lily’s father, of course. In pique, she looked at her in-box of over four hundred messages and threw most of them into the trash folder. Her sleeplessness was bestowing on her a radical honesty tonight, and it told her that if she hadn’t responded in the last month, she wasn’t ever going to. The very last remaining email was Phyllis’s forward of the article about what Miami would look like under the rising seas. Ange sighed, but because it would give her something to talk about with Phyllis over lunch, she had to click it. Within moments, she sat up to look more carefully.

  It was stunning, a near-photographic simulation of what would happen with one inch, three inches, five inches, nine inches of water. Miami Beach swept up and gone. Whole neighborhoods underwater.

  Worst of all and somehow surprising, because she hadn’t thought it through, was how the Everglades would be full of salt water—and soon.

  And under the salt, all the vegetation, all the freshwater fish and birds and frogs and snakes, the wild teeming life of the Everglades, would die. What had been swamp and a mucky cradle of life would be a great black blank at the bottom of the state.

  She moved the map northward. The whole coastline, Boca Raton itself, would be only a thin spit of land between dying ocean and dead sea.

  Her house, this place, was in the path of the swallowing water.

  And underneath what land remained, the dark freshwater sea of the aquifer would be made salty. No potable water out of the taps. No sprinklers shooting green into the lawns. No trees with their deep taproots seeking out the fresh; there would be great dead oaks everywhere, stark as skeletons.

  Without an aquifer, human life in this place would be stupid, impossible. All heat and dust and thirst.

  And then Ange thought of the chicks in the nest; she thought of them a hundred times over, a thousand times, a million times, the dead Everglades a scattering of plastic knots. She thought of the thin trace outlines of people in their beds, each with a little ball of plastic where their innards had been.

  She ran to the bathroom to throw up. Insomnia was going to be an effective weight loss program, she told herself and laughed until tears formed in her eyes. In the dark mirror, her skin sagged on her face.

  She went back to the couch and lay there sleepless, her bones aching, seeing over and over in her mind the water seeping up the street and swallowing their little house.

  She was still feeling ill when Lily came out of her bedroom in the first light of morning. She warily approached her mother and put her hands on her feet.

  What’s wrong? the girl said. Your face is all red and puffy. And your eyeballs have, like, veins in them.

  Oh, Lily, it’s nothing. It’s just, Ange said, I haven’t slept in three nights. I’m so, so, so, so tired.

  Take a sick day, Lily said. Take a nap. I’ll stay home and take care of you.

  I know you would, honey, Ange said and heaved herself to sitting, and her head spun a little bit. Lily made a face at her mother, then went into the kitchen, got the sugar cereal down, and put extra honey on top. She was acting out; she was angry. Since she was a baby, Lily had always been a tuning fork; she rang with her mother’s hidden emotions. Just before Teo left, she’d felt the emotion and responded with colic, baby Lily taking her mother’s side.

  But Ange couldn’t fight her daughter today. She had no strength. She sat next to Lily and stole a few bites of her cereal, and this made Lily laugh, although reluctantly.

  Ange tried to work, but her body felt stuffed with sand.

  She would go for a walk during her lunch break to clear her head, she decided. Let Phyllis eat her salad by herself today.

  But later, Ange snapped to and looked up to find Phyllis frowning at her, having knocked hard, multiple times, on the wood of the desk. On her hip, Phyllis was holding today’s giant lunch.

  My goodness, Ange, she said. You were so pale and staring, I thought for a second you were dead.

  Ange laughed, but dryly. Phyllis’s salad smelled garlicky and good. Who was she kidding? She was too tired to go for a walk, and she was ravenous. She could eat the whole world today.

  Not dead yet, she said, standing.

  But once outside in the good sunlight, Phyllis peeled the top of the Tupperware off, and Ange saw the hard-boiled eggs of her salade Niçoise and had to lay her head on the concrete table to breathe until the nausea passed.

 
All afternoon she did the write-up of the Millerite girl for the professor. It was as thorough as always, but there was no spark in it; she wrote quickly and mechanically and sent the report off as though she were giving away a haunted thing. The relief when she put the journal back in its archival box made her feel boneless as she walked back to her desk.

  For the next few hours, she looked up to see strange flashes of the ocean lapping darkly across the carpet of the library. Then she would blink, and it was the old oatmeal-colored carpet again.

  She would stave off this probable fourth night of sleeplessness the old-fashioned way, she decided; otherwise, she felt as though she would likely die. After dinner, she called her friend Elizabeth, who came over with her little kit of pills. Elizabeth gasped when Ange opened the door. Ange put her hand up to her cheek and said, That bad? with chagrin.

  Elizabeth said, Oh God, so much worse than you can imagine. You’re, like, gray. Like the color of a mouse. You look so bad. Sorry.

  That’s nice, Ange said. She took an angry breath and let it out. You look stunning.

  It was true; Elizabeth was the drabbest of Ange’s friends, but tonight she glowed in red lipstick and shining earrings.

  Date night, Elizabeth said. My mom’s taking the kids. Dave is picking me up in an hour. Tell me about the insomnia. She looked at Ange from the corner of her eye and said, I can see the emotional lability.

  Ha, Ange said. Do you have time for a glass of wine?

  Time for a bottle, Elizabeth said, and they sat on the porch, each in her own blanket, and rocked in the chairs. Ange told about the trash pickup and the chicks, but this time, the dread they’d stirred in her sounded ridiculous in the retelling. She told about Lily’s father and the silence that seemed to be growing deeper and darker. She almost told about her strange vision of the disappointed Judgment Day but held it back; it was her own thing, nothing to share. It was almost time for Dave to pick her up when Elizabeth said offhandedly, So, you ready for me to set you up again? Maybe after a few nights’ sleep you won’t need pills. Maybe what you really need is to get laid.

  Nope, Ange said. No way. Not after the last disaster.

  After twenty years of marriage, I’d love a disaster like the dentist, Elizabeth said.

  Two months after the hurricane, Ange’s friends had grown worried about her because she was spending all her time trying to track down Teo and going around wild-eyed with anger. She had called his mother, who told her nothing; she lived with an image of him asleep in some woman’s bed. She liked him best asleep, his quick face stilled, his eyelashes dark on his cheekbones. To distract Ange, her friends took turns watching Lily and setting up Ange with blind dates. The first three were so boring, Ange pretended Lily had a fever and that she had to get home. The fourth, a month ago, was with a dentist who made a point of showing off his very fine set of abdominal muscles within the first fifteen minutes of meeting her. She laughed in his face but drank four martinis and somehow found herself later in the back of the dentist’s SUV in the dune enclosure at the end of the street. He had at least enough taste to leave the music off so all they could hear was the wind and the ocean and the cars shushing by obliviously beyond the dunes. He fell asleep afterward on the uncomfortable synthetic carpet in the back of his car and even snored a little. She was so disgusted with herself that she took her shoes in her hands and walked barefoot in penitence the mile up to her little house, where Elizabeth was sleeping on the couch and Lily was safe in her bed. The dentist himself, when Ange could bear thinking of him, was faceless in her memories, as though his smooth, shaved crown had grown down over his features.

  Now Dave arrived, and in his headlights, Elizabeth showed Ange the pills. You’re way beyond melatonin or valerian, she said. I’d try Lunesta or Ambien. Honestly, honey, she said, you’re a prime candidate for antidepressants.

  Ah, I’m pretty sure everyone is, Ange said.

  It should be in the drinking water, Elizabeth said.

  You’re the psychiatrist, Ange said. You would know.

  And then there was Dave, stepping up carefully over the mushy, rotting oranges on the path—good, lumpy, smiling Dave—and there were hugs and laughs, and Ange watched her friends move off and felt a pang at their ease with one another, their camaraderie. But she needed no man in her life; she had Lily. She banished the pang dead.

  With great relief, she swallowed the Ambien down with a glass of water, took a hot bath, and lay under her sheet, waiting impatiently for sleep to come.

  But for the fourth night in a row, sleep did not come.

  Instead, a face gradually gathered itself in the spinning ceiling fan. With extraordinary slowness, it sagged downward like a drop of water that grows fat before falling, heavier and wider, all the way toward Ange, who lay frozen with terror in her bed. It was no face she knew; it was a white, droopy, androgynous face, all cheeks and angry chin and huge eyebrows like bird wings. The face grew larger as it came closer to her until she thought there was no more distance to go, and then it stopped a few millimeters from her nose. There it made a series of grimaces, each more awful than the one before. Ange stared into the nostrils, down the glossy throat, wondering if it would soon, now, fall and break into whiteness all over her. Or now. Or now.

  She had no idea how long she looked at the face dripping out of the fan, but slowly her body came back into control, and she rolled out of the bed and ran into the kitchen, panting, with a strange feeling at the ends of her appendages, as though she had dipped her hands and feet and nose and ears in ice.

  She went outside to the orange grove and stood barefoot in the fruit rot in the dark until her heartbeat calmed in her chest. She stepped backward until a tree was hugging her from behind.

  It felt safer out here than it did in the house. For a long time, she stood trembling in the shadows and breathed.

  And then slowly, at the edge of her sight, a great singular darkness collected out of the trunks and shadows of the trees. It loomed, twice the height of a man. When she tried to fix her eyes on it, the darkness seemed to dissolve and gather itself in a different place at the edge of her sight, still closer.

  Ange took a step back, then ran and slipped over the rotten fruit, falling to her knees, up again, quick, quick, over the porch, in through the front door, closing it hard, locking it behind her. She felt the darkness gathering on the porch through the door at her back, inches away.

  She kept the lights off and crept on her hands and knees into Lily’s room, bathed in pink from her night-light, and shut the door. She took off her fruit-stained yoga pants and climbed into bed with her daughter, who murmured and turned over. And there for the rest of the night, Ange lay beside her daughter, eyes open wide to the dark, keeping the dread dark thing outside with tremendous effort, keeping them safe with her focused will alone.

  She was late to work, an hour late, but could not have gone any faster. Moving her body was like shepherding Jell-O. She was wasting away; yet no human could ever have been heavier.

  The note on her desk from Phyllis was in black pen and block letters; she was angry.

  COME SEE ME NOW, the note said.

  Ange sighed and slowly went.

  Sorry, sorry, she said when Phyllis was in eyesight. Sorry I’m late. Last night was my fourth in a row without sleep. I think I’m going nuts.

  But Phyllis was not angry about the lateness, or perhaps she was but was angrier about something else.

  There was someone sitting in the corner, but the sun was sharp from behind the chair, and Ange had to blink a few times to make the person out. For a moment it was Teo, dark and smiling, and relief poured through her and made her knees soft. But then she made out the professor who had given her the Millerite project. He was plain, balding, with round green glasses, and he wore too-tight polo shirts; he would have fit in anywhere in Boca. She had always thought he had a crush on her, but it didn’t seem that way anymore. He nodded, unsmiling.

  Ange, Phyllis was saying, I didn’t know yo
u were a creative writer.

  What? Ange said. I’m not. I mean, I took a class in college, but . . .

  The professor and Phyllis frowned, and the professor said, I was intrigued by the report you sent. I didn’t know we had a journal like the girl’s you cited. So I got pretty excited to see it myself and was waiting when Phyllis got here this morning.

  But neither of us can find the book, Ange, Phyllis said.

  Huh. That’s weird, Ange said.

  We can’t find it in the catalogue either, the professor said.

  It took Ange a moment, but thinking had become so very difficult. You think I stole it? she said.

  Then she saw their faces and said, Oh my God, you think I made up a primary source.

  Phyllis said, her voice now rich with sympathy, I think you’re not yourself right now.

  I’ve never been more myself. Thank you, Phyllis, Ange said. Follow me.

  She marched as quickly as she could to where they stored the delicate and damaged books. She found the row, the shelf. But her body stopped short in disbelief. The place where the metal box had been was gone, the two boxes beside it having somehow swallowed the shelf where it had been, having somehow squeezed themselves together.

  I . . . , she said, but there was no end to that sentence. Phyllis and the professor looked at her with pity.

  There has got to be an explanation, Ange said.

  I’d sure like to hear it, Phyllis said dryly.

  Me too, the professor said.

  But Ange had nothing. It was all inexplicable. She sat down on the oatmeal-colored carpet, put her face in her hands, and cried.

  I think you might need medical help, Phyllis said, driving her home.

  No, I just need sleep. I need it so badly, Ange said. I feel like I’m going to die.

  You’re not going to die.