by Cai Emmons
23
Matt would not have returned early to Florida if he hadn’t been so livid at Josh, but he needed to see Josh face-to-face to tell him what a serious asshole he is. Now, however, there’s little satisfaction standing in front of Josh’s absurdly messy desk, papers skating off its edges, three giant computer monitors placed fatuously at the desk’s center, surrounded by a graveyard of Styrofoam take out containers and cardboard coffee cups, the office air foul with musty air and fibrillating dust, Josh’s acrid body odor made worse by the heat, and, worst of all, Josh’s pretty-boy, curl-framed face smeared with an aggressive and gleeful impervious-ness: Whatever you say won’t get to me.
“From what I could see she had it coming,” Josh says.
“You have no idea. You didn’t go there. You didn’t see her. You didn’t talk to her. What you wrote is all hearsay.”
“Do you not understand what kind of an operation we are? Did I not make that clear when you started?”
“She could sue you. I hope she will.”
“I’ve got myself covered.”
“Honestly, how do you live with yourself?”
Josh rolls his chair around the edge of his desk. He’s a lazy son-of-a-bitch. He hates to move, hates to even stand, and he’s begun paying for his lethargy with an incipient paunch that is soon going to render his pretty-boy face not so pretty. Matt hops back to avoid being run over by the chair’s casters, and Josh brings himself to an abrupt stop at Matt’s toes.
“I get it,” Josh says. “You have the hots for her, don’t you? You’re trying to get laid.”
Matt says nothing.
“Not a professional way to go, buddy.” He winks. “I might have to fire you.”
“Go ahead, fire me.”
“Why—you don’t have the balls to quit?”
“Of course I do. I quit.”
“You can’t quit—I’ve already assigned you to a story in Alabama. A hoarder in Huntsville with a couple of houses full of stuff. The third cousin of some Hollywood mogul. Could be good.”
“You’ll have to find someone else. You heard me—I quit.”
Matt immerses himself in the perpetual carnival of South Beach. Its atmosphere coordinates perfectly with the bucking inside his brain. He feels good, he feels bad, he feels crazed, almost desperate. He’s been wanting to do this for ages, but was afraid of not being able to find another job, afraid of those monthly payments, afraid of having to choose a real life. Now, god, he can get through the summer, but after that? Maybe he’ll ask his parents for a loan. Maybe he’ll ask his mother, though he knows she would never give him money without telling Ivan. But his first order of business, before finding another job, before obsessing about the future, is to apologize to Bronwyn. His chances with her are all but ruined, but at least he can clean things up and clarify that he was true to his word—he did not write that article.
He studies the pedestrians coming toward him, wonders how many of them are unemployed, recently fired, recently spurned in love. So many of them are laughing and apparently carefree. He’s pretty sure he does not look carefree, yet he does feel something positive. He’s a man with more integrity now than he had an hour ago. The thought brings a lightness to his step. He’s done with the likes of paunchy, odiferous, pretty-boy Josh who has no belief in human dignity.
24
Tornadoes rise and take possession of the plains, lumbering across them like prehistoric beasts, furious, shape-shifting, coming to redress old insults, bent on annihilation. Each is a mile wide or more. Town after town goes down, a random game of Russian roulette. Transfixed, Bronwyn cannot turn off her computer, which streams Vince’s Oklahoma City station. She perches on the edge of the couch, computer in her lap, afraid of moving, as if the barrel of a chilly gun rests at her throat. Vince is performing as usual, but she sees it differently now. He seems to smile as if he is finally enjoying himself, can only enjoy himself in the midst of mortal mayhem, people being crushed, electrocuted, trapped under the familiar walls of their collapsed houses to perish slowly and quietly, beyond anyone’s view. He struts in front of his maps and screens like a four-star general, puffed-up, believing his mastery makes him desirable, his craggy face a detailed history of archived disasters. “It’s nuclear, folks,” he says, shaking his head.
“People are dying out there!” she yells into the neutral silence of her living room.
Earl is not answering his phone. He is out offering aid, no doubt, in a cellar somewhere with his flock, consoling them, singing hymns and leading them in prayer. Bronwyn can picture Patty Birch by his side, her soft body leaning into Earl, grateful for his leadership. It occurs to her that the two might become a couple, and she is touched by the thought.
The tornadoes keep coming without a lick of remorse. The largest one backtracks suddenly and heads northwest, highly unusual, playing chicken with Vince, defying his predictions, then it whips in the other direction, outwitting him again and heading northeast. It is a taunting, sociopathic, most-wanted felon.
For an instant the camera captures Vince’s shock at being wrong. She sees his lips forming an ‘F’ before the camera cuts away and the sound snaps to silence, and the station broadcasts, for a brief but disturbing moment, the absence of all sound and image, showing only a black screen, as if to say the world has ended.
It is early afternoon. The death toll is over four hundred. The demolished town names ring out from the computer like an incantation. Is it possible that her intervention has made things worse? That unanswerable question haunts her. In an hour she must go to work. She steps outside. The sun persists. It doesn’t feel right. There are at least a thousand miles between New Hampshire and the plains of Oklahoma and Kansas. They are subject to different forces out there. Sometimes the weather systems of the plains work their way to the east coast, but by the time they arrive they have always changed.
She descends to the river’s edge and stares at the turbid green water. A few weeks ago a kayaker drowned not far from here. The incident was blamed on the current which can be strong when the tide is shifting. But from where she stands now it is hard to imagine a strong current. The day is given over to summer’s torpor, not yet infused with the kinetic energy of fall. A water snake breaches the surface then disappears. She closes her eyes, pictures Earl’s back yard and its view out to the alfalfa fields beyond. Could she wield any influence over the tornadoes from this distance? Her brain is stuck in a waltz rhythm: one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three. She seeks a rhythm, but not that one. She needs a rhythm that is less common, repeating itself only after very long phrases, arching throughout her body and dismantling its norms, effacing the usual, letting her electrons organize themselves in new ways.
She elongates her breathing, imagines herself levitating over the miles. She exists for a while in hope, but every once in a while a flag of disgust for Vince steals her concentration. She bats those thoughts away, tries to refocus, waiting, eyes still closed. What is the problem? Is it the distance that’s impeding her? Is it a faltering ability to con centrate? Or is she merely running up against the limits of her capability. She stares at the water wondering if she should go back to the Midwest to help out. Earl would think she should.
She returns inside to a ringing phone. She rarely answers her phone these days, mostly it doesn’t ring and when it does it jars her, its arrogant presumption that she is always available and wanting to talk. She would rather communicate voicelessly on her own terms, through email and text. She peeks at the number without answering. It’s Stuart. She’ll be at the station in a couple of hours, can’t he wait? The ringing stops. She supposes she should call back. It rings again. Not Stuart this time, but a number she doesn’t recognize, a different area code. Curious, she picks it up, says hello.
“Is this the weather lady?” says a quiet female voice.
“Who am I speaking to?”
“This is Patty Birch, remember me? Earl’s friend.”
Bronwyn takes an audib
le breath, surprised and suddenly suffused with dread, wanting to hear what Patty Birch has to say, but wanting nothing to do with it too. She steps outside again, phone pressed to her ear, her body seeming to vanish on its own journey to Kansas. Patty Birch calling can mean only one thing.
“Yes,” she says. “Of course I remember you.”
She listens numbly and gets off the phone as quickly and graciously as she can, promising to call back soon. She sits on the porch couch. Earl. Earl who didn’t believe in naming things. Earl who wanted her to stay. No one else would hold her responsible, but the underlying truth is—she could have done something.
She remembers the day her mother died. She had been recently released from the hospital with a bleak prognosis. The doctor didn’t say so directly, but it was obvious from the way he avoided Bronwyn’s gaze that he expected Maggie to die soon. For a day she lay at home in terrible pain, despite the morphine, eyes closed, moaning a little, her cheeks so sunken she no longer resembled herself, but like some cartoonish version of a corpse. She could eke out only a few words in a row and recognized Bronwyn only intermittently. Sometimes she was racked with shivering, other times she burned with heat. Bronwyn fed her sips of water which dribbled down her chin; she mopped her brow with cool cloths. Near the end of that day she called Hospice and a wonderful nurse arrived almost immediately and, speaking with the soothing voice of a saint, told Bronwyn what to expect. She administered a shot of morphine and together they eased Maggie into a new position. The nurse left promising to return the next day. Alone, Bronwyn did not dare leave the bedside. Maggie hovered in some liminal state, neither dead nor alive, not breathing in any audible or visible way, her heartbeats faint and slow and randomly spaced. Then suddenly, unexpectedly, she was dead. Bronwyn sensed the exact moment. She didn’t take Maggie’s pulse, but she immediately recognized the presence of death in the room with her. Why did it feel so unexpected when it was the very thing they’d both been waiting for? She sat there for a while as Maggie’s face slackened. Bronwyn knew what she needed to do, but it took a long time to find the will to do it. She could not have saved her mother, but Earl she might have saved.
In a state of high alert she answers the next phone call thinking it might be Patty with news that she was mistaken, Earl is not dead but still very much alive. But it’s Stuart again and once she’s picked up she can’t bring herself to hang up. His voice is taut.
“Do you know a man named Vince Carmichael?”
What can she possibly say? She says nothing.
“I had a call from him this morning. He told me you visited his station earlier this week. I don’t know what you think you’re doing but—”
She holds the phone far away from her ear so his voice weakens until it is no louder than a mosquito’s whine. Then it is so much easier to cut the connection. Why give Stuart the opportunity to lambaste her this way? She feels her firing coming, almost welcomes it. She must hold herself together in any way she can. For the moment anger is good glue.
25
Diane tries to reach Bronwyn three times on the drive from Maine back down to Cambridge. Away from Joe, her worry is unbridled, it sweeps through her brain stirring up nightmarish scenarios, and culling long-forgotten memories. Is it possible that Bronwyn has had a breakdown of some kind? That is one possibility, but not likely, she thinks. As anxious as Bronwyn has been at times, Diane has never seen evidence of psychosis. At the other end of the spectrum, and equally disturbing, is the possibility that Bronwyn has some enemy who is attempting to discredit her. Diane certainly remembers the way Bruce and Jim conspired to humiliate Bronwyn. They didn’t want her around showing them up. Now, in retrospect Diane wishes she had put a more definitive stop to that—she could have, she held the power.
Diane has half a mind to stop in New Hampshire and find Bronwyn, but she has no address. Who would know? She can’t think of anyone. There are several Portsmouth exits. She drives past the first one then reconsiders and takes the next. Once off the highway, she heads west toward Manchester. Which river is it that Bronwyn lives on? The Piscataqua? The Squamscott? She should have listened more closely. She drives slowly as if Bronwyn might materialize by the roadside, then she realizes it’s a fool’s errand she’s on—she could drive forever without results. Maybe she should go to the TV station which shouldn’t be hard to find. But if Bronwyn is working it might be hard to talk. She turns around and goes back to the highway, heading south toward Boston again, exceeding the speed limit, wishing she’d stayed put in Maine with Joe. She has things to get done at work, but they can wait, and she won’t be fully focused at work until she knows what’s really happened with Bronwyn.
Perhaps she should not be so invested in Bronwyn, but how does one disengage? She has held Bronwyn under her wing for a long time now, since she first taught her in an earth science class years ago. It was Bronwyn’s freshman year and Diane was also new to Wellesley. Diane was lucky to have the job after having been asked to resign from UCLA’s atmospheric sciences department following the Fiorini debacle. This is a period of her life she still prefers not to think about, but meeting Bronwyn helped her get through that dark time.
Bronwyn drifted into the classroom, tentative as milkweed. She sat in the front row, off to one side, and did not take her eyes off Diane the entire time, scribbling a little but mostly watching, entranced or terrified, Diane couldn’t tell, but definitely different from the other students who dug in their backpacks and immersed themselves in their phones and occupied their chairs as if trying to establish dominion over tiny republics.
Another memory of Bronwyn comes to mind. In the weeks following Bronwyn’s mother’s death, Diane went to visit her in New Jersey in the place she grew up. Bronwyn had finished with the immediate post-mortem tasks—disposing of the body, notifying friends and family, holding a small memorial service—and she had just begun the work of clearing out the tiny house in preparation for selling it.
Maggie Artair had been living in the house for more than twenty years; Bronwyn had lived there for the eighteen years before she left for college. It was a depressing little dwelling—small and dark and cluttered and situated in one of those armpit towns that seems not like a place unto itself, but like a place en route to more important places. It was hard to imagine such a forlorn house as having played a prominent role in Bronwyn’s past.
Bronwyn was unexpectedly gracious and happy to see Diane. It might have been the first time Bronwyn was the one to initiate a hug before Diane did. She showed Diane around and wanted to talk about the death: what it was like to recognize the terminal prognosis in the doctor’s evasive demeanor, the excruciating pain Maggie had suffered after being released from the hospital, how watching that pain made Bronwyn feel helpless and made her contemplate the fragility of human life and the futility of human effort, and how she recognized immediately the moment when her mother’s death arrived. She did not report these things as if the depressing thoughts still inhabited her, but as if they had passed through her and moved on into part of her history, replaced by relief.
Then Bronwyn led Diane outside to a small area bordered by a high chain-link fence where they sat on folding metal chairs on a rectangle of concrete next to another rectangle of bald lawn. There were no plantings, just the yellowish grass that had yet to show any signs of newly arrived spring. “One of my favorite places in the world,” Bronwyn said, laughing, knowing how this would strike Diane.
She used to lie out on this tiny plot of grass, she said, and gaze up at the clouds. It was there where she first fell in love with weather. Diane would have been embarrassed by this last admission, and by everything, had she not been riveted by seeing fully, for the first time, the distance Bronwyn had traveled. Who wouldn’t want to escape this place? Who wouldn’t, living here, need to reach for the clouds? It was that visit that made Diane determined to help Bronwyn get her PhD.
She picks up the phone and tries the number again. She’s leaving a fourth message when a highway
patrol car swoops up behind her, lights whirling a hue-and-cry, arriving as they always do out of nowhere.
PART TWO
Now What?
26
The once-known is now strange. Bronwyn has been on this New Jersey beach dozens of times in her childhood and adolescence, but cycles of storm damage and rebuilding over fifteen or twenty years have made things nearly unrecognizable. New food concessions have sprung up, gaudy and neon-lit; the amusement park has replaced all the old rides; the boardwalk is so jammed with people it’s hard to navigate without bumping shoulders and elbows.
She and Lanny have bought hot dogs for old time’s sake, and now, as they eat, they light out across the beach to escape the pandemonium. The hot sand sears the soles of their feet. Didn’t it used to be whiter sand, not nearly as coarse? Bronwyn doesn’t remember seeing so many raisin-sized bits of black tar in the past. Much as she is a student of flux and flow, devoted to understanding time and nature as sculptors ceaselessly at work, she still wishes this beach were the same as it used to be, charming her as it once did.
Lanny, however, has not changed, or not appreciably. When Bronwyn left for college she found other confidantes to take Lanny’s place, boyfriends and roommates mostly; none of those people have remained close and none of them ever knew Bronwyn as well as Lanny does. Now Lanny has resumed her old role. She knows about Earl and Vince and Stuart and Matt. Bronwyn has told her everything.
It is a moody summer day, hot and hazy, the kind of day that makes it hard to get much done. Most of the kids are in the water, the adults recline in low chairs under umbrellas, or splay themselves on their towels, faces flopped down like depleted seals. The lifeguards drowse on their high perches, hypertrophied muscles slack.
