Weather Woman

by Cai Emmons

  They speak a little of their families. His father, Ivan, the plumber, is a Russian immigrant. His older siblings are married with kids and successfully employed. I’m the loser, he says, grinning.

  On her side: She is the only child of a single mother, her paternity unknown. Her parents met on a train, saw each other a couple of times, but by the time she was born her father was long gone. He said his name was Bert, his last name he never revealed. He was a professor somewhere. Of history supposedly. A big blank. For many years this was a pressing question to be researched and answered, but now it is no longer a topic that interests her.

  He listens closely, his body taut, full of the limber readiness of young boys. She wonders how, at twenty-eight, he has stayed so young. She basks in the rotunda of his attention, sinking into him, becoming him. Both are porous, without boundaries, seeing through each other’s eyes, subsumed in the novelty of Other.

  The weather has taken on the bracing clarity of autumn, but still the afternoons are hot. Early one morning they rent kayaks at Pierce Island. There is no wind, the blue-black water is smooth as Vaseline. The still air transports every sound and scent, salt and seaweed and wet pilings and gasoline from the power boats, mingling with the gunning of motors, the screeching of gulls, the clanking of hydraulic lifts raising boats from the water and wheeling them away to winter shelter.

  They glide effortlessly over the glassine water into the Portsmouth Bay. Everything recedes behind them, there is only the measured splash of their paddles entering and exiting the water. There is only the silhouette of the other set against the flat dark water and cerulean sky. There is only the tent of love and lust that shelters two souls who have found one another.

  Watching her alone in her boat skimming east, his longing becomes a deep trough through which something viscous flows. Women have come to him easily and just as easily he’s let them go. Never has he felt such longing, and it makes him wonder if she will always be a little beyond reach, always drifting away.

  On the morning of the fourth day she awakens before he does. She lies still on her back and watches him sleep, his full lips parted, his cheeks slack. The anesthetic of love can no longer support her denial. Memories are crashing around her again. She slithers out of bed, shivering against the fall chill, the fallen illusion. She huddles under a blanket on the living room couch, thinking of the fires, the floods, the tornadoes. The old woman. Earl. So much can go wrong.

  An hour later he finds her there, weeping quietly. She looks tiny, as if overnight she has shrunk. He sits beside her, rubs her back, but she won’t look at him and recoils from his touch. He makes coffee, brings her a sweater to put over her night clothes, coaxes her outside into the chilly morning for a change of scene. She’s too restless to sit. She stands a few feet from him, separate, tunneled inside herself. Never has a woman made him feel so helpless. He walks to the water’s edge, needing to preserve himself.

  As if pricked, she explodes behind him. “I have to stop this.”

  So she’s done with him, he felt it coming. Perhaps it was too good to be real, or true, or long-lasting, or whatever he thought it was, but the trough of longing still asserts itself, strong as ever, stronger. It fills with ache now, a channel, already dug, labeled, remembered, that will hereafter fill too easily with feeling.

  “I have no idea what I’m doing,” she says.

  “Neither do I. But that doesn’t mean we should stop.”

  “I’m hurting people.”

  “You’re not hurting me. I’m fine.”

  “Killing them.”

  He hesitates. She isn’t talking about him, about them. She means LA, the dead woman. “I don’t think that’s true,” he says quietly. He has no idea what really happened in LA, what she did or didn’t do. Even what he saw is hard to recall clearly. He waits for her to speak again.

  She has laid her mug in the grass and comes down to stand near him, still a few feet away. She stares at the brindled current, surrendered to thought, the sunlight a match to her hair, lighting it to a fiery orange-gold.

  “Can I point out the obvious,” he says. “You have a gift no one else has—you have to use it.”

  “You’re saying I owe the world?”

  “Don’t you owe yourself? Just to understand more. Experiment.”

  She shrugs.

  “You don’t wish you’d let those fires keep burning, do you?”

  She shrugs again. “It’s all stop-gap. Like a doctor treating symptoms. There will be more fires there, and in other places, more devastating tornadoes and storms all over the country. All over the world, for that matter. And I can’t be in more than one place at a time.”

  “Since you can’t do everything, you shouldn’t do anything?”

  “If I’m harming people I shouldn’t.”

  After a moment of quiet something emboldens him, a sudden certainty. She is a phenomenon, a worker of miracles, a possible saver of the world, and he is one of the few who knows. He could be her guide now. He mustn’t misstep. “Wait, just think about it. Let’s say that woman did die because of you—purely hypothetical—but what about all those others who didn’t die because you stopped the fires, all the houses that didn’t burn?”

  “What are you—a cheerleader? You sound like my former mentor, Diane. She was always telling me I could do things I knew I couldn’t do.”

  “She knows about this too? I thought—?”

  “Oh god no, not this. I’m talking about research she wanted me to do. Science. But this stuff—heck no. She wouldn’t ever be able to wrap her mind around this. I tried to tell her, but she ridiculed me, more or less. We had a falling out. She’s the opposite of Lyndon Roos.”

  Shivering, she draws the sleeves of her sweater down over her bony hands and crosses her arms over her belly. Her hands remind him of starfish. “I guess she’s got an academic reputation to protect. I don’t care anymore.”

  “When did you tell her?”

  “Before I went to California. Why? It doesn’t matter. She and I are done with each other.”

  He’s dying to hold her, warm her, inhale the sleep-infused scents of her hair and skin, tell her he’ll help her figure it out. “So what then? You’ll just go back to being a meteorologist? Keep all of this a big secret?”

  “Maybe. I guess.” She shrugs. “Sorry I’m such a downer. I think you should . . . go.”

  The trough fills again, widening to take on this new flood of feeling. Go? Now? “What did I do? I must have done something.”

  “You didn’t do anything. But—I don’t know. There’s too much going on. I’m not good company right now.”

  “I like your company, and I’m happy to help you figure things out.”

  “I have to figure this out by myself. Besides, you want me to do things—and I don’t like being pressured.”

  I could withdraw the pressure and be a good sounding board, he wants to say, but it would sound disingenuous. Maybe it is disingenuous. The fickleness of words betrays him. They wander so easily into perjury. They conceal a multiplicity of truths under a single false banner. Still, what about the last few days? Do they mean nothing to her? Are his own senses so far shot that he’s misinterpreted what was happening?

  “Then this—” He gestures over the lawn. “These last few days have been—what?”

  “I don’t know.” She won’t look at him.

  He goes inside and gathers his things. From the screened porch he sees her still at the river’s edge. She hasn’t moved. Should he go down there and say goodbye? Her entire body is so coiled in on itself he can’t imagine words would touch her. He heads to his car.

  A silver BMW drives up and parks beside his Chevy just as he is getting into it. The man who gets out looks business-like in his pressed khakis and crisp madras shirt, dark shades. “Hello there,” he says, regarding Matt—the cargo shorts, the T-shirt, the psoriasis mobile—with vague disapproval.

  “I’m just leaving,” Matt says, wondering if he should give
his name and offer a hand. “Bronwyn is down by the river, if that’s who you’re looking for.”

  The man nods and strides to the edge of the lawn where he pauses, scanning the black grass. “What happened here?” he calls to Matt.

  “I don’t know.”

  The man steps distastefully onto the burned lawn and heads toward Bronwyn as if crossing a minefield. Now Matt can’t possibly leave. Who is this man? What does he want with Bronwyn? Matt ambles in their direction, keeping his distance, stopping twenty feet from them.

  Bronwyn smiles at the man and shakes his hand, remarkably poised, especially given that she’s still wearing night clothes. She’s an entirely different woman in this moment from the distraught, remote woman he was just talking to, or the sensual one he so recently held.

  “I honestly don’t know,” she says. “I was away for a while and when I got back it was like this.”

  “No one contacted me. You’d think the fire department would have let me know. It’s a matter of record who owns the place. My god, look at this—it’s a miracle the cabin didn’t burn.”

  They disappear inside, Bronwyn avoiding Matt’s gaze. Matt is fairly sure there’s no cause for jealousy—he’s her landlord, for god’s sake, and not the least bit sexy—but he is jealous just the same, of the attention Bronwyn has turned on the man so readily, and of the smile he was able to raise from her.

  Matt hesitates by his car again, one leg in, one leg out, not wanting to be the first to leave. His car’s dermal problem looks worse next to this man’s spiffy silver vehicle. He waits five minutes, ten. Then he gives up and gets in his car and drives off, though he has no idea where he’s going.

  44

  Matt, sequestered in the office/apartment above his parents’ garage, stares out past the driveway to the familiar street of his childhood, mired in memory. It used to be a respectable, solidly middle-class neighborhood of small, sturdy, colonial-style homes, but in the last decade it has gone into decline. Some of the homeowners have allowed their rooves and siding to rot, others have tried to fight entropy with cheap plastic siding or slapdash paint jobs in garish colors more suitable to Florida than Rhode Island, but the worst change to Matt’s eye is the missing shade trees, oaks and maples that used to line the street, sacrificed to a bad infestation of gypsy moths a few years back. It was a good place to grow up, a happy place with a gang of children who played together, roaming from house to house, and adults who got along and babysat for each other, and attended each other’s parties, and knew about each other’s family dramas. Not anymore. Ivan and Marie keep to themselves because everyone else does.

  The ragged state of the neighborhood piggybacks itself on Matt’s state of dislocation. No one expects him to be anywhere or do anything, and while that might once have seemed a desirable state to achieve, it now feels like an indictment. He is rootless and jobless and rejected in love, and the length of his longing seems to increase with every intake of breath. It dilutes the gravitational pull on him so he hovers above the rest of the world. Across the street, kids are jumping on a backyard trampoline and, though he can’t see them, their shrieks are shrill, piercing enough to break glass.

  When he was a kid Ivan used to seize his arm playfully. We check out your properties. You malleable? And Ivan would test Matt’s arm, bending and pulling it like a pipe cleaner. Little malleable. Not so conductive, not so ductile. Durable, yes, and tenacious. Remember, the harder something be, the less tough. The more tough it be, the less hard. Ivan hoped Matt would follow him into the plumbing business, but Matt knew from a young age that that wasn’t going to happen. He wanted to see more of the world than the underbellies of bathrooms and kitchens. But maybe his curiosity is precisely his problem. Maybe if he’d become a plumber he wouldn’t be here in this garage, staring at dust motes, feeling so unsure of his identity. The skills he has depended upon for survival, his charm and ease, his success with women, the very pillars of his personality, all of that has evaporated along with his understanding about how the world works. What will replace these skills to carry him forward?

  His parents are out somewhere—he was awakened by the garage door groaning beneath him as if the sound was generated by the pillow itself—and for the past couple of hours he’s been sitting at his computer, half-dressed, trying to compose an email to Bronwyn. He can’t get the tone right. He keeps rearranging words, but every version sounds either too abject, or too formal. Even if he were to get the words right, it would be a bad idea to send it. She’s obviously scared—scared of the sudden intimacy they shared, scared of her own power. He has to wait for her to make peace with herself, then maybe she’ll get back in touch. Until then, he’s doomed to turn corners and find her green eyes staring at him from the depths of his own brain.

  He splays his fingers and the slight movement brings back the feel of her cheek, her hair, the satisfying curvature of her firm buttocks. He feels for a moment as if he can palm her entire body. He hits delete.

  He arrived here yesterday afternoon and stayed up late last night, listening to the neighborhood noises, a dog barking at the end of the block, the clatter of a garbage can felled by a raccoon, an occasional car passing on a main thoroughfare several blocks away. The relative silence of suburban paradise, some would think, but to him it was almost sinister.

  Moonlight filled the room, a silver liquid, too bright for sleep. He could have pulled the blinds, but the moonlight compelled him as if it was a direct conduit to Bronwyn. This same moonlight was spilling down in New Hampshire. She, too, might have been awake and mesmerized by it, thinking of him. He browsed the internet, reading about joules, teslas, matters of energy he knows nothing about. A cubic foot of air, he read, holds enough potential energy to boil all the oceans of the Earth.

  It is almost noon when his parents’ black Suburban pulls into the driveway and parks. He can see it is stuffed with purchases. He should go out there and make himself useful. Halfway down the steep outdoor steps, a dream comes to him. He and Bronwyn were dolphins whirling around each other, silently, synchronously, never losing touch. There was a transparent membrane over the belly of the Bronwyn dolphin, an aperture through which he could see to her core where a blue flame burned like a pilot light.

  “You just wake up?” Ivan says, spotting Matt’s tousled hair and bare chest.

  “More or less.”

  “You are sleeping champion. Your mother and I, we shoot from the bed with birds. Very early—too early. But you—too late.” He laughs and ruffles Matt’s hair as if he is still ten years old.

  The car is packed to near bursting with cartons of canned goods, super-sized bags of chips, tubs of mixed nuts, a ten-pound bag of whey protein powder, entire wheels of Cheddar and Jarlsberg each almost a foot in diameter, enough toilet paper to supply several platoons for six months. They are shopping for giants, or for a family far bigger than the one they raised. Most of these things will sit for months—or years—on the garage shelves. Is it Matt’s arrival that has prompted this excessive shopping, or have they become hoarders since he last visited? He doesn’t ask, it’s not his problem. He humps several loads to the kitchen only to find, behind the groceries, two fifty-pound bags of potting soil and several flats of flowers whose bright blooms beam out at him like eager children.

  “One bag of soil to the front, one to the back,” Marie instructs.

  “Isn’t it a little late in the season to be planting things?” Matt says.

  “Heck no,” Ivan says. “The good weather, it go on. October, still sunny, still hot.”

  Matt hefts a bag of soil to his shoulder and follows his mother to the front yard. He drops it by the steps.

  “The asters will go in pots along the steps. The sedum and sunflowers will go along the side of the walkway.”

  “Uh-huh,” Matt says.

  “The turtleheads and crocuses will go over there on the side. Or do you think it should be the other way round?”

  “Either is good.” He has no idea what sed
um is. He could barely name an aster.

  She peers at him curiously. “You okay, Matt honey?”

  “Fine.”

  “You haven’t told us your plans.”

  “When I have one you’ll be the first to know.”

  “Okay,” she says, apparently unperturbed by the uncertainty that perturbs him so deeply. She reaches down to clear some dry twigs off the pavers that lead to the street. From the sleeve of her housedress the flesh of her upper arm hangs like an empty pillowcase. He feels alternately sorry for his parents and envious of them. On the one hand their lives are so insular, their concerns—gardening, home improvements, cooking—so repetitive and trivial; on the other hand, they seem so content, so devoid of doubt, so unconcerned about how and when death will take them. Such a stark contrast to Matt who is saddled with more doubt than ever.

  He and his father transport the flowers to the places Marie wants them, and then Ivan goes inside to make tea. Matt sits at the outdoor table in the back yard, squinting into the hazy sunlight while his mother gathers her trowels and spades and gardening gloves from the shed. The kettle whistles inside. Marie joins him, knocking her gloves against the side of the table to dislodge the dirt.

  “Is it a girl that’s making you unhappy?”

  Matt says nothing. He could deny his distress, but knows it must be obvious.

  “I just hope you’ve made your feelings known to her. She might think you don’t care.”

  Matt grunts. He has never made it his practice to discuss his love life with his mother, and even with Ivan discussions about women have always been confined to jokes.

  “You know about your father, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “I’m sure I’ve told you this, haven’t I? After we met we went on some dates to the movies and dinner. I liked him, but I wasn’t sure. He was rough around the edges and his English wasn’t very good back then—he’d only been in this country for a year or so. I told him it wouldn’t work and I started dating other boys. And then I got a letter in the mail from your father. It was a very passionate letter. Very soulful.” She shakes her head, smiling a little. “He said he was very sad without me. He described how good I made him feel and how he saw our future together, all sorts of things I would never have imagined him thinking about. I still remember some things he wrote: I look at ocean, I feel your heart beat. I look at sun and moon, I feel your heart beat.” She laughs. “So romantic. After that I knew he was the one. I never dated another man after that and I never regretted it.”