Eveningland

by Michael Knight

  The Kagero was fueled. Fixed for crew. He had been trying to imagine the boat as part of a construct in one of the word problems he’d loved in math class as a kid. Two trains approaching at such and such a speed from such and such a distance. Word problems transformed the abstraction of arithmetic into something more concrete, something a boy who was good with numbers anyway could really get his head around. In this case, he had a hurricane, roughly 300 miles wide and 230 miles from shore, twisting forward at 13 knots. Approaching from the opposite direction, at 25 knots full-bore, would be his boat, his at least until he handed her over to the Japanese. If his math was right, they still had time to get the Kagero to the western edge of the storm, get the wind behind them, use the hurricane’s own force to flee instead of battling it head-on.

  He needed to get home. Tell Nora. He didn’t have much time to spare. He dropped the phone into his pocket and hurried out into the hall, security lights burning in the stairwell as he descended, his footsteps echoing him past the receptionist’s station in the lobby, her desk all squared away as if no hurricane was coming and she would be reporting for work as usual any minute. The full brightness of the sun washed over him when he stepped outside and he waited a moment for his vision to adjust, distant shouts wafting his way from the Kagero. As he turned to leave, a breeze kicked up, raising miniature whirlwinds in the dust, and Angus thought he heard a voice calling his name. The breeze passed, the dust settled. Angus listened but the voice did not call out a second time.

  The first thing Muriel noticed when she came to was a faint, throbbing pain behind her ear. She must have hit her head on the sink when she went down, blacked out. The second thing she noticed was that she was wet, soaking really, from hair to heels. She could hear the water still running in the tub. Mostly what she felt, beyond the pain and its accompanying dizziness, was acute humiliation. She moved her arms a little, felt the water swirl. Maybe half an inch deep. Cold. It occurred to her that if she could move her arms she could likely stand. So she pushed up on her elbows, rested like that, breathing, letting the light-headedness wash over her until she was steady enough to reach for the lip of the sink and slide her hips back and pull herself into a sitting position, water rushing down her spine from her wet hair, her blouse, water sloshing against the walls. She rested again, let the dizziness rise and fall. One of her sandals was floating behind the commode. The other was still in place on her left foot. She toed that one off as well and gradually, both hands gripping the sink, pulled up to her feet—her hips, her back, her knees and elbows, all of her shaky and in pain. But she was standing now. That was something. There was a phone on her daughter’s nightstand. Maybe ten paces away. All she had to do was get there and she’d figure out who to call. She didn’t want to bother with an ambulance. How would it look to let herself be seen by strangers in such a state? She braced herself first on the doorframe, then the bureau, lunged the last few steps, letting her momentum carry her to the bed, but when she’d swung her legs up and propped her back against the headboard, she found not a single phone number anywhere in her memory, not the shipyard, not her daughter or her sons, not her friends, not even her own home.

  For what felt like a long time, she lay there on Doodle’s bed awash in muted panic. The panic was not a response to pain, which was bearable, as long as she kept still, but to this troubling emptiness of mind. Muriel had always prided herself on being a resourceful woman. She understood that she needed to do something about her situation but hadn’t the slightest idea what that something should be. She closed her eyes and linked her fingers in her lap and concentrated on a memory more rote even than phone numbers, something she could remember without having to use her memory much at all. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now, and at the hour of our death. She repeated the prayer and repeated it again, silently, running the words over in her head without considering what they meant or why she had chosen this prayer in particular and gradually, like a kind of ether taking effect, the reason it was so important to do something in the first place wavered and blurred and Muriel’s panic began to fade. She combed her fingers through her hair, patted it into place, let her gaze wander the room. Doodle’s silver brush set on the bureau, her snow globe collection on a shelf. On a child-sized rocking chair in the corner sat a stuffed rabbit with a dozen strands of Mardi Gras beads wrapped around its neck and a pair of Muriel’s old sunglasses perched on its brow. She could hear the faucet in the bathroom. There must have been a reason she’d turned it on. Most likely for Doodle’s bath. That child was so easily distracted. She was probably puttering right now in Muriel’s closet or at her vanity or in her jewelry box. She drew a breath to call her daughter’s name, sighed it out, let her eyes drift shut. Her husband would be home soon and she was so tired all of a sudden. She’d just rest here a minute, not too long, then she would open her eyes and life would begin again.

  Nora heard the back door open, Angus’s keys clattering on the counter, water running in the kitchen sink. She figured he was rinsing dirty dishes before stowing them in the washer. A minute later, he poked his head into the den. With Murphy at her breast it was hard to notice much else about the world, but now that his father was here, she counted nine dirty diapers, seven wads of tissue, six half-empty glasses, three banana peels, and two baskets of unfolded laundry, all of it brought into high relief by the spotlight of her husband’s gaze. These last few days, he’d been at the office more than he’d been home. She watched him wince at the mess, recover. He crossed the room and kissed both her and the baby on their respective brows.

  “Rough morning?” he said, and though his tone was solicitous, Nora couldn’t help hearing a backhanded insult in the words, as if the state of the room, the house, was evidence of her shortcomings.

  “Fine,” she said.

  He brushed the hair back from her eyes.

  “You stay put. I’ll pick up.”

  Like she’d been about to drop the baby and spring to her feet. He hustled into the kitchen bearing diapers and banana peels, made another trip for the glasses and the tissues, then whisked back through in the other direction. “He smiled today,” she said, but Angus didn’t answer. She could hear him tidying in the bedroom, making the bed. When he returned, he’d changed into an old fishing shirt and worn-out jeans. Running shoes. He sat cross-legged on the floor and started folding laundry, his eyes on the TV. Satellite photos. Hurricane Raphael as seen from outer space.

  “He smiled,” she said again.

  Angus beamed but even in that moment, she could tell he was distracted.

  “A real smile,” she said. “I smiled at him and he smiled back.”

  “I’m sorry I missed it,” he said.

  She dipped her chin to look at Murphy, eyes shut tight, mouth working, his fist balled against his cheek. What Angus couldn’t understand was how he consumed her, not just her time but her consciousness. She didn’t mind the mess. She hardly noticed. Angus was under the impression this was a rehashing of an argument they’d had when they got married. Nora refused to hire help because she wasn’t the sort of woman who had a maid. Who cared if the house wasn’t perfect all the time? And it was true. She did feel that way. But this was something else. There was a kind of power in her single-mindedness, purpose. Angus never second-guessed her but he let her know he felt left out, sighing and pouting around the house, and she couldn’t altogether blame him. She had to remind herself sometimes to let him hold the baby, to listen when he spoke. Like now—his mouth was moving but it was like hearing him through a pane of glass.

  “What?”

  “I said Raphael looks like the real thing.”

  She watched Angus shake out a pillowcase, wrinkled from being left so long in the basket. It was clear that something was on his mind but it was too hard to puzzle through. He could just come out with
it if he wanted her to know. He folded the pillowcase and set it on a stack of bedding.

  “They’re saying 120-mile-per-hour winds.”

  “It reminds me of a stain,” she said.

  He looked at her, eyebrows bunched up in a question.

  “The satellite stuff. The pictures. They look like stains.”

  “There’s something at the yard,” he said.

  He went on but Murphy pulled loose of her nipple while Angus spoke and it was about time to switch breasts anyway, so her attention was focused on making sure he had a proper latch. Her husband’s voice was in the air but not something she was fully conscious of, like the white noise machine next to Murphy’s bassinette. He was saying something about going back to work, a boat that needed his attention, and even as his words washed over her, half-absorbed, she knew she should be angry. He was talking about leaving her alone with their child during a hurricane. But she wasn’t angry. In a strange way she felt relieved.

  “What we’ll do,” he said, “is chart a course around the storm then come back after it’s moved inland. I want you to go over to Momma’s house. Or Doodle’s. I’m not sure where they’ll be.”

  “Can’t somebody else take care of this?”

  He stared at her a second, then went out into the foyer, rattled hangers in the closet there, returned wearing a raincoat. His hands were in his pockets.

  “I need to do this myself,” he said.

  Doodle wanted to take a shower before walking over to her mother’s house. After all, this hurricane was coming and she hadn’t washed her hair last night and she might as well start off clean if she was going to have to rough it for a while. She stopped by Kathleen’s room. Her oldest daughter was texting on her cell phone, stretched out on the bed, her feet propped against the wall, her head dangling off the side, hair draping toward the floor in a way that was particularly lovely to Doodle. Kathleen was sixteen, blonde, hair curly like her father’s. Except she was going through a stage when she didn’t like her curls. She wanted to look like everybody else, but Doodle knew the day would come when she’d be glad.

  Her sister was reading a mystery novel on the floor at the foot of Kathleen’s bed. Lucy, speaking of stages, was eleven years old, and spent most of her time following Kathleen around with a book, pretending she wasn’t paying attention, wasn’t memorizing every detail of Kathleen’s walk, her mannerisms, her turns of phrase. Kathleen could be a handful but Doodle would always be grateful to her for allowing Lucy to hang around without having to be told. Once in a while Kathleen pretended to be annoyed, as if she felt some obligation, but Doodle had the idea that she secretly appreciated the audience, that she lived a great deal of her life performing for her sister as if her existence was being filmed.

  Kathleen glared at Doodle upside down. “What?”

  “We’re going to Momma’s for the hurricane.”

  “And?”

  Kathleen kept staring until her mother backed out of the room.

  Doodle took her time in the shower, flipped through a magazine while blow-drying her hair. Her given name was Deidre but her father had called her “Doodlebug” when she was a girl and her mother and her brothers had shortened it after a while. Fondly. The way families do. Her friends picked up on the nickname in school and it stuck because it suited her.

  Kathleen was still texting when Doodle looked in again.

  “I’m off to Momma’s,” she said.

  Kathleen didn’t bother to reply.

  Lucy glanced up from her book. On the cover was a close-up of a woman’s hand holding a martini glass filled with diamonds. Though you couldn’t see beyond her wrist, somehow the image suggested that the rest of her was naked. Murder is a Girl’s Best Friend.

  “We’ll be over in a minute, Mom.”

  “Right,” Doodle said. “Okay.”

  Outside, a breeze sizzled through the boxwood and the hydrangea and Doodle’s potted plants. She lowered herself into a wrought-iron chair on the patio and lit the single cigarette she allowed herself each day. Usually she waited until after dinner, smoked with a glass of wine or with a martini if her husband, Russell, was having one, but Russell was at an orthodontics conference in Chicago and she was spending the night with her mother. Only her husband and her daughters knew she still smoked and she’d sworn them to secrecy. Her mother thought it was tacky for a woman to smoke and her friends all thought she’d quit as a New Year’s resolution.

  The patio looked out over a wide expanse of lawn, the big magnolias, the mossy oaks. Her mother’s great-grandfather had bought the property way back when this was still the country, before the rest of Mobile came seeping uphill from the river like a flood. First a few more houses. Then a school. Then the banks and the grocery chains. All the development was in place long before Doodle was born, but even as a girl, she’d had the sense of being marooned on a tranquil island in an ever-shifting sea of traffic and neighbors and barking dogs. Thirty acres. Right in the middle of town. Most days, the trees between the houses were teeming with cardinals and robins and wrens, the air musical with call and response, but now all she heard was quiet and she felt a tremor of anticipation. She knew it was absurd but she was excited about holing up with her mother and her daughters while a hurricane raged outside. She mashed the cigarette out and hurried across the lawn and up the back steps to her mother’s house.

  “Mom?”

  Nothing.

  “It’s me, Mom.”

  No response.

  She could hear water running upstairs, assumed her mother had had the same idea she did about cleaning up before the storm, and it pleased her to imagine the two of them thinking alike. She found a pitcher of iced tea in the refrigerator and poured herself a glass, considered calling Russell while she waited. She wanted him to know where he could find her during the storm. She sat at the kitchen table. The clock on the microwave said 10:24 am. The table was situated beside a window and she surveyed her mother’s view, measured it against her own, thought of her mother in this very spot on the mornings since her father died, her mother gazing out toward the land she’d saved for Percy. The hired man, Dixon, kept those acres mowed, kept the shrubbery in check, but still Percy’s lot looked down-at-heel, comparatively speaking, the grass mossy and threaded through with clover, dead limbs on living trees, leaves piled up under the magnolias, altogether lacking in design. She wondered, briefly, how closely her mother’s expectations of her life reflected the end result but shook the thought away before it had a chance to gain real purchase and the thought wisped into the air above her head, where it hovered for a moment before dissolving, as if it had never crossed her mind. She looked at the clock again. 10:38. It occurred to her that the water she could hear was not running in the master bath, so she followed the sound through the dining room, past the mahogany table with hand-carved legs, vines and flowers twining up through the wood, past the matching sideboard and the secretary in which was kept her mother’s wedding china. In the entry hall, a grandfather clock stood sentry by the door. From there, she went on up the stairs and creaked over the landing and found her mother in bed in the room of Doodle’s childhood. Her hands were folded neatly in her lap.

  “There you are,” she said.

  Her mother’s eyes fluttered open and she smiled like she’d been in the middle of a pleasant dream.

  Doodle saw, then, a finger of water crooking in from the bathroom and she felt the first inkling of fear, a faraway dawning that something wasn’t right, but already her mind was working to rid itself of the notion.

  “Did you fall asleep, Mom? Have you seen this mess?”

  “It’s time for your bath,” her mother said.

  Did she sound a little slurred? It was hard to hear over the water. Doodle waded in, twisted the taps. She pulled the plug and dried her hands.

  “What are you talking about?” she said.

  When h
er mother spoke again, her voice was faint. “Your father will be home soon,” she said. “He’ll want you kids ready for bed.”

  Angus pressed against the rail to let a Mexican kid go by. Maybe eighteen, nineteen, a length of extension cord coiled around his shoulder. He didn’t nod or smile, just brushed past Angus like he wasn’t even there, and Angus wondered if this kid had any idea what he was getting into. Double time might have sounded like good money but Angus would have bet double again whatever the kid would earn tonight that he had never been at sea in a blow like what was coming. Neither had Angus, to tell the truth, but he’d heard the stories from his father.