Boca Raton

by Lauren Groff

  Ange thought, darkly, of the glaciers calving even now, of how in the swirl of the oceans, plastic trash made an underwater iceberg of choking hazards, of the poor future-blackened Everglades. We’re all going to die, Ange said.

  Calm down, Freshman Philosophy, Phyllis said.

  They pulled in front of the little house. There were darting black birds in the Meyer lemons, and a hawk drifted in a slow circle over the roof. I’ll get Lily from school, Phyllis said. I want you to take the hottest bath you can stand and a nice long nap, ok? We’ll be back at five with dinner.

  You’re a good friend, Phyllis, Ange said, crying again.

  We’re friends, yes. But I want you to remember that I’m also your boss, Phyllis said. And I never, ever, ever want you to pull a stunt like the one you pulled again.

  Ok, Ange said.

  And when I say don’t come back to work until you’re feeling better, I mean it, Phyllis said. If you’re acting like this when you get back, we’re going to have a very serious conversation. And I don’t want to have it, what with you being a struggling single mother and Lily so sweet.

  Yes. Ok, Ange said. Then she had a terrible thought. Phyllis, she said slowly, what if I can never sleep again?

  But Phyllis was already out of her side of the car, had walked around to Ange’s side, was opening it, and now was escorting her up the sour, rotting walk.

  You should do something about that nasty fruit, Phyllis said, scraping the bottoms of her shoes on the steps.

  Usually takes care of itself, Ange said.

  And then she was on the couch, alone again, and the afghan was over her. Her mother had crocheted it with her own hands. Somewhere in its fibers were small traces of her; it still smelled of her, though she’d been dead these many years. It was no substitute for the woman, of course, but it was warm, and it did comfort Ange, and under its weight, she felt less lost.

  There she rested, staring at the ceiling, as sleepless as ever.

  In the white ceiling, which she had painted herself, she began to see a bobbing sea covered with Styrofoam peanuts.

  At the end of the street, the ocean sighed and the birds softly screamed.

  And then in the ceiling, another vision began to form. It was Lily. But her daughter’s hair was ragged, her lips white with thirst. She was wearing rags and walking alone, northward, on a road so searing hot, it wavered. And not far from her was a line of other quiet, desperate people walking.

  It crashed over Ange, the terrible mistake she had made out of loneliness. The sheer selfish stupidity of bringing a child into the beginning of the end of the world as humans know it. It was an immoral act. Each new body on the earth spelled a faster end to the life the earth was supporting.

  How Lily will suffer. And how all the children born after Lily will suffer even more, having known less of the good life that had once been.

  She was frozen and barely breathing. At last she heard Lily’s voice down the walk, and this alone stirred her. When Lily typed the code into the lock and she and Phyllis came in with a sack of chicken sandwiches, the smell forced Ange to crawl—it was far, much too far to run—to the bathroom and throw up the nothing she had eaten all day.

  Phyllis fed Lily and tucked her into bed. She spoke to Ange, but Ange smiled and nodded and didn’t hear a word. Frowning with worry, Phyllis left.

  Ange rose immediately.

  Sleepless days were hard. They were searing. They were work.

  Sleepless nights were themselves the darkest nightmares.

  She paced, clutching herself, around the little house. She tried music, but all music to her now was full of Teo’s absence; all music poured around the ache he’d put into her, and she turned it off.

  By eleven, Ange had drunk two bottles of wine and was on her third, and no food eaten in days, in forever. Tonight she would drink herself to sleep.

  But as drunk as she was, which was very drunk, sleep still danced out of reach.

  Poor Florida, Ange said aloud. She found herself swaying without pants or shoes on her porch. Poor alligators. Poor ibises. Poor stupid, greedy human beings. Boy, are you all in for it.

  Even now, when she listened, she could hear the tiny rising of the sea. It was the same crackle as rice cereal after milk had been poured in. Or, no, wait, that was the music of fucking coming up on the wind from the parking place in the dunes.

  Even now, when she listened, she could hear the tiny rising of the sea.

  Was the dread darkness out in these whispering trees tonight? Her eyes couldn’t focus to see. And if you can’t see it, that means it doesn’t exist. The book can’t be found; it doesn’t exist.

  It exists! Ange shouted to the darkness, swiftly moving among the trees, but then she backed as quickly as she could into the house and shut the door.

  But this wouldn’t do; this wouldn’t do at all.

  Think, Ange, she said to herself and clapped herself on the cheek to focus. When was there a time when you could sleep like the dead?

  Oh, as a little girl, the wet grass still on her feet in the clean sheets, the fireflies shining and dying in the mason jar beside her. After a day of sunshine, swimming in the pond, wandering through the forest, a night of running down over the dark hills toward the small bright blinking bugs in the wind.

  To be an adult is to live in a tangle of past and future and present all at once. So become a child. So run yourself to sleep.

  She went out the back door to fool what dread was waiting in the trees, and at first, under her bare feet, the ground was prickly sand, then rough sidewalk. It felt strange and good to be running down this well-lit street, past all the houses with all the old people in them sleeping, with only the malignant gleam of the ocean ahead. Faster, make yourself all tired, Ange, and tired, you will stop your brain. Nobody was around to see her pantsless, and she was so drunk, she didn’t care. Let the old men get an eyeful.

  Her legs were so strong and so fast. It was good to be away from the house, to be running; it was so good to run. Her own breath pounded in her ears. Oh, Teo, this is what it felt to fly away from us. I do not condone it, but now I understand.

  There was more sand on this sidewalk closer to the ocean, which she could hear hushing now, and the gardens were full of the white stones that meant plants had a hard time now that denser salt was in the air.

  She didn’t even stop when she hit the road before the dunes, but there were no cars anyway. It was late, and people who could sleep were sleeping in their stupidity. She ran hard across the asphalt into the parking lot surrounded by dunes. But whatever car had been here unspooling its music, whatever fuckers had been here only a few minutes ago were gone, and she was alone.

  All around her the dunes stretched up toward the sky, pale and topped with hardy sharp palms and grasses. Turtles stirred in their sleep, and rats and snakes slept too, all safe, for now, in their dens.

  Just beyond sight, the ocean was chewing darkly at the sand.

  Only the ocean was always awake. Ange and the ocean. Ange being eaten, the ocean that will eat everything.

  She panted until her breath calmed. Her heartbeat slowed. Her feet, she saw, were bleeding. She had run over broken glass.

  Suddenly she saw it all around her bloody feet, the broken glass.

  And at the edge of the blacktop, tossed beer cans gleamed in the moonlight. Plastic bags breathed like lungs. And everywhere were bottle caps and cigarette butts and broken plastic shovels and hair ties and flip-flops and hamburger wrappers and sunblock containers and candy boxes and pull tabs and lemonade bottles and dog toys. At her feet, like a slug, a spent condom.

  She looked at the condom. She lifted her eyes and looked at the dunes. For a moment, she felt harsh carpet on her cheek, heard the ping of the open car door and a dentist’s satisfied snore. She felt the sour disappointment in herself.

  Slowly her hands drifted up from her sides. They met over her abdomen. Her body knew what her brain didn’t want to know, not yet.

 
And Lily came to her, vividly, sleeping in her bed, bathed in the pink night-light. Lily, alone in that house where faces pressed down out of ceiling fans, where there was a bloodstain in the grain of the wood under the living room rug. Where right now a fire could be gnawing that termite-weakened wood, where a murderer could be looming over her bed, where a tsunami sparked by a calving ice sheet would swallow her daughter from below. Born with no real father, born vulnerable, Ange’s daughter. It’d be a miracle if Lily found herself among the saved.

  No. Force the bad thoughts back and imagine Lily waking, standing. Lily calling out, looking for her mother. Here she was coming out to the porch, where the trees whispered excitedly in the wind and the dead fruit fell.

  Mama? Lily said. In the moonlight, in the white nightgown, her bare feet so pale on the porch.

  In the moonlight, shining in her white, sitting down. In her hand, the candle burned to wax. The night almost done. And the thin voices of the believers singing all around.

  I’m coming, Ange said aloud. But already she knew that she could not save her daughter, that there would be no saving, that she would be left behind among the disappointed; she knew that, even so, she had to try.

  Ange limped over the broken glass toward the space between the dunes. Between Ange and her sleeping child was the slightly uptilted street, gleaming gray in the streetlights.

  But as she walked, either the lights went out together all at once, or the dread that had followed her down here on the run gathered itself thickly there in the street, and the darkness fell across the way out; the darkness sealed the gap.

  For more thrilling short stories of the domestic and the wild, read the latest collection from Lauren Groff . . .

  Read it now!

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © 2017 Kristin Kozelsky

  Lauren Groff is the author of the New York Times Notable Book and bestseller Fates and Furies and the thrilling new story collection Florida. Named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists, Groff was also a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kirkus Prize.