‘Well,’ Leah says, reaching for Steven’s hand. ‘I’ve got the candles in a drawer right here. Don’t be frightened.’
‘I’m not frightened.’
5. Hurricane Watch
Face to face, the woman and child float inside a bubble of light. Elbows on the warm oak table, chins in cupped hands, eyes gleaming, they have the air of conspirators very pleased with themselves. Shadowy gold from the candle moves like reflected water on their skin.
‘Isn’t this exciting?’ Leah whispers.
‘Yes,’ he whispers back.
‘And what do you think I’ve got hidden under the table?’
‘The photograph box!’
‘How did you guess?’
Steven laughs, leaning across a large carton that is crammed with portraits in fading sepia tones, black and white snapshots with deckle edges, bright Kodacolor prints in postcard size. ‘My pick, my pick. I pick first.’
Steven squeezes his eyes shut and reaches in, his hand delving deep. He pulls out a photograph and holds it against his chest like a poker card.
‘Black and white,’ he says, pleased, sneaking a look. ‘Guess who?’
‘Must be your grandfather. Or me.’
‘Both,’ Steven says. ‘Ten points. See?’
‘Hold it closer to the candle.’
‘Is it very very old?’
‘Ah, that one,’ she says fondly.
‘Is it older than Hugo?’
‘Much older. That was a very long time ago, before we were married. I remember that day. We’d been beachcombing for shells and starfish and I was covered in sand-fly bites. Your grandfather kept offering to rub them.’
‘Did he like me?’
‘He adored you. Can’t you remember that?’
Steven shakes his head.
‘You used to ride on his shoulders through the saltmarsh. Somewhere in the box, there’s a photo of you both on the boardwalk.’
‘Was I three?’
‘No, just a baby almost. But you used to clap your hands whenever you saw a white egret.’
A shadow of a memory brushes Steven, but he cannot hold on to it.
‘It’s your turn, Grandma.’
Leah slides her hand into the box and shuffles the past. ‘Ah,’ she says. ‘Look what I found. It’s Steven with no clothes on!’
Steven wrinkles up his nose. The baby in the photograph is lying on a blue bath towel. He has a cloth toy in one hand. ‘That’s Humpty Dumpty!’ Steven says, startled. Puzzled, he thinks about Humpty Dumpty. ‘We lost him,’ he muses. ‘Where did he go?’
‘Probably off to one of your baby cousins. Your turn.’
‘Abracadabra,’ Steven says. He pulls out a coloured photograph and studies it. ‘It’s you and Grandpa again,’ he decides.
Leah holds the image close to the candle. ‘Oh my!’ she says, startled. ‘How did that get into the box?’
‘You put all of them there, Grandma.’
‘No,’ she says. ‘Not that one.’
‘Grandma?’
‘A street photographer took it. We didn’t know until he tried to sell it to us.’
Steven can see a white line around the edge of his grandmother’s fingers where they are pressed into her cheek. With her other hand, she turns the photograph over. ‘He kept it,’ she says. ‘But I wrote on the back of it first.’
Steven leans in to the candle. There is no writing on the back of the photograph. His grandmother presses her lips against the back of her right hand.
‘What were you and Grandpa doing?’
‘Do you think that looks like your grandfather?’
Steven studies the photograph. All grown-ups look much the same to him. ‘I don’t know,’ he says.
‘It’s not your grandfather. It’s someone I knew from back before that.’
‘What were you doing?’
‘We were riding out a hurricane,’ Leah says.
6. The Eye of the Storm
Sleep approaches like a dangerous calm. Leah blows out the candle. Steven is curled up on the sofa, his head in her lap, and she strokes his hair. Her hand comes to rest on his shoulder. In the flares of lightning, she watches the flutter of his lashes against his cheek.
Francesca is throwing a tantrum beyond the screen-porch and Leah hears the crash of a tree going over but it is happening like a movie in slow motion with the sound turned low. Steven stirs and moans a little but does not wake. Other noises intrude like a cascade of whites and blues, very close, and Leah knows that if she did not have the mute button on for this show, the colours would cut her. Windows come and go, she thinks tranquilly. They blow in, they blow out. Somewhere, definitely, a window has been shattered. Not this room, she thinks. Bedroom perhaps. She should have let Marsyas board them up.
She can feel the sofa tilting slightly, sliding, and perhaps the house? Perhaps the foundations are going? Leah tries to resist, but the house is slipping its moorings, listing into salt marsh and sleep and the dream-past. Soon a man from the National Guard will knock at the door and she will have to climb back up the floorboards, she will have to carry Steven on her shoulder. Your son and your daughter-in-law have laid charges, the National Guardsman will say. Reckless negligence. Failure to evacuate in time.
But the airport was closed, Leah pleads. There was nothing I could do.
Just answer the phone, the Guardsman orders.
Phone? Leah says. Phone lines are down. It’s my alarm.
She gropes for it, knocking candle and photographs, dislodging the past from its box.
Steven sits bolt upright, wide-eyed. ‘It’s Mommy,’ he says, then his head sinks back onto Leah’s lap. His eyes are closed.
Answer it, orders the man from the National Guard.
Leah fumbles for the receiver in the dark. We’re all right, she says. The National Guard are here to get us out. I tried to call before but the lines were down.
What? she says, startled. Who?
She holds the receiver away from herself and looks into it, dazed. It resembles a nautilus shell. When she puts the shell to her ear, she hears ocean. She hears hurricane. She hears the past.
This is so strange, she says. This is very very strange. Where are you?
Steven moves, and Leah extricates one arm from under his shoulder.
She watches words float from the shell in her hand.
It’s been twenty years, says the voice in the nautilus phone.
I know, Leah says. Believe me, I know. But we agreed on that. No contact, we said.
You didn’t give me much choice, the shell says.
You didn’t have to be so absolute, Leah protests. For twenty years, not one word, and suddenly you call in the middle of a storm?
The whole world, he says, can watch a hurricane live these days. We’ve got Francesca on satellite TV. I’ve been watching her coming ashore and I know you’re right in her path. I wanted to know if you were safe.
Leah watches Steven making fish mouths in his sleep.
Where are you? she asks.
It’s daylight here, he says. It’s tomorrow. I know you’re still in the dark.
But how did you find my phone number? she wants to know.
That’s a very curious story, he says. If we met, I could tell you about it. It’s so curious, it has to be fate.
Leah traces the whorls of Steven’s ear with her index finger.
I’ll tell you something even stranger, she says. You know that picture a street photographer took?
I still have it in my wallet, he says. It has ‘Love, Leah’ written on the back.
His voice is like the pull of ocean in the pearled curve of the shell at her ear. She can feel herself being sucked in.
Will you meet me again? he wants to know.
I don’t know, she says. I’d have to make arrangements, I’d have to think … can you give me some time?
Hello?
Hello?
7. Voyage of the Pine Tree Galleon
A small f
leet of rooftops and wardrobes beckons Steven but he steers clear. He knows what he knows. Dolphins brush the undersides of his feet. Jimmy Saunders waves and halloos from a floating table. You’re going the wrong way, Jimmy calls. All the islands have drowned.
Steven keeps his hand on the tiller, his eye on the star. His sails are full of Francesca. The storm surge looms over the branches of his ship like a mountain and Francesca is taking him straight up its green glassy slope. Higher, higher, higher. He knows he will go over the top.
A pirate ship has thrown grappling irons, the pirate has boarded his tree.
I am taking your grandmother and Marsyas hostage, the pirate roars, but Steven sees the white egret and claps his hands, and the angel, sword drawn, comes stepping across the waves.
8. Anatomy of a Hurricane
Initial phase is a simple matter of smoldering tropical temperatures and turbulence. Latent heat is released into the atmosphere which becomes more buoyant. Instability increases. A chain reaction is set in motion and a cauldron of destructive winds spins into orbit and out of control. A hurricane devours everything in its path until it dies of its own exhaustion.
What can never be accurately predicted is the sheer velocity of the sequence from initial disturbance to chaos. Tumult begins without warning and can happen anywhere, any time, at an airport, a book shop, a dinner party: eye contact, latent heat, a mad buoyancy, increased instability, derangement.
‘This is madness,’ Leah protests. ‘This is insane.’
‘Your skin tastes like mangoes,’ he murmurs, ravenous. The room is steamy. The air is bright with the flash of passionbird wings. Leah sees gold, cobalt, emerald green. She smells jasmine. Their bodies give off latent heat, they are buoyant, floating far above any known life, orbiting through the treetop canopy where orchids run mad.
‘You smell like rainforest,’ she tells him.
‘You’re wild as a hurricane,’ he says. ‘We have to go wherever this takes us.’
‘We can’t,’ Leah protests, suddenly panicked. Beyond the path of the storm, she can see the faint shape of her other life. ‘Think of the devastation,’ she pleads.
‘Too late,’ he says. ‘We’ve passed the point of no return.’
But Leah can see the blue arrows. Evacuation route, the blue arrows say. This way lies safety, they say.
9. Reprieve and Other Disappointments
‘During the night,’ the National Guardsman tells Leah, ‘Francesca veered sharply north. She’s going to miss us. Going to slam into North Carolina instead.’
‘So the order to evacuate—?’
‘Cancelled, ma’am,’ he says cheerfully. ‘Should have the power back on soon. I see you lost a couple of windows.’
‘I’ve lost two of my pines,’ Leah grieves.
‘Got to go,’ the man from the National Guard tells her. ‘Got to knock on every door.’
‘Grandma?’
‘Steven!’ Leah says. ‘Be careful. There’s glass all over the floor. We’ve got broken windows, and look at our poor broken pines.’
‘Where’s Francesca gone?’ Steven’s voice is dream-fogged and forlorn. He rubs his eyes and looks warily down at his bare feet.
‘She left us. She’s gone to North Carolina instead.’
‘Would we have stayed?’ he wants to know. ‘If Francesca had come, would you have stayed?’
‘I would have been tempted,’ Leah confesses. She begins sweeping the shards of glass into a pile. She stoops with the dustpan and brush. She looks up at him as glass clinks against plastic. ‘But then I would have thought about you. And I could never tolerate the thought of you in danger.’
‘So we would have vacuated.’ He folds his arms and hugs himself, glum. His words have the weight of accusation.
‘We would have obeyed the evacuation order. It would have been the wisest thing to do, the best thing, don’t you agree?’
‘I don’t know,’ he says. He pulls a chair across the room to the broken window, climbs on the chair, and leans out through the empty frame. He is straining after Francesca. He smells the rich damp perfume she leaves in her wake. ‘Is it the best thing?’ he asks plaintively. ‘Is it?’
‘I don’t know either,’ Leah says.
Weather Maps
She’s black, I’m white, but we’ve been blood sisters since we were twelve years old. We did it with barbecue skewers – the thin kind used for threading shrimp, not the thick kebabs kind – jabbing our thumbs and rubbing them together and sucking our intermixed blood.
‘That didn’t even hurt,’ she said.
‘We’re bionic women. That’s why.’
She grinned. ‘Bionic women.’ She liked that. ‘Nothing can hurt us.’
We had compared welts. She had X’s on her back and buttocks, I had weather maps on my legs. That was why I always wore jeans no matter how hot it was. You could see storm fronts moving up my calves to the soft underside of my knees. You could trace isobars.
‘It’s better when you do it to yourself,’ she said carefully. She waited. She wanted to see if I understood. Then she said casually, as though commenting on a preference for broccoli over green beans, ‘Razor blades are good.’
Our eyes met then and something electric and thrilling passed between us.
‘You can make whatever patterns you want,’ I agreed, ‘and it’s private.’
She frowned slightly, thinking about this. ‘You can’t always keep it private, but it’s still better. Because no one else is doing it to you.’ We were hardly breathing, we weren’t even blinking, just keeping watch, but I could hear my heart and hers, loud as kitchen timers, loud as the band teacher’s metronome, far louder than our voices which were barely above a whisper. We didn’t want the guards to hear. We didn’t want anyone else in the visitors’ room listening in.
‘We make secret weather,’ I said. ‘It only rains inside.’
‘Even though it makes him madder.’
‘Your dad?’
‘Stepdad. My mom’s boyfriend.’ She studied me thoughtfully. ‘Does yours make you take off all your clothes when he punishes you?’
I did not say yes, but she heard me anyway.
‘I wonder why they do that,’ she said.
‘I don’t know.’
That was not true. I did know why, and of course she did too, but I didn’t want to talk about it any more than she did, not then, not now, not ever. This was why, when I made my own weather maps, I did them in hidden places like the inside of my thighs, high up, or the inside of my upper arms. Clothes on or off, I had what you could call cloud cover. ‘Where I do it myself, it doesn’t matter,’ I told her. ‘It’s camouflaged. He doesn’t notice.’
‘What about the blood?’ The way her brows knit, I knew this was a problem for her.
‘I mop it up with washcloths and tissues then throw them out.’
‘Mine always sees,’ she sighed. ‘Then he whips me again.’
‘Where do you do it?’
‘Belly.’
‘You should try this.’ I lifted one arm high and pulled at the front of my T-shirt so she could see. ‘Eye of the hurricane,’ I said, showing my armpit.
She winced. ‘That is real ugly weather.’
‘Category 5.’
‘That’s got to hurt.’
‘You know it doesn’t.’
‘But it’s infected. There’s pus.’
She had to know that that was how you drained off all the sewage and crap, but I said it again, annoyed with her. ‘You know damn well it doesn’t hurt.’
‘Oh shit,’ she said. ‘We are so fucked up. Are we fucked up or what?’
‘We’re fucked,’ I conceded. ‘Call 911. Code Red.’
She put an imaginary cell phone to her ear. ‘Emergency,’ she said. ‘We got vampires here. Code Red.’
I don’t know why but we both started to giggle then. It was funny how laughing always made the guards nervous. We put our crossed arms on the table and buried our faces in them an
d stuffed the fronts of our T-shirts into our mouths but it only got worse. First the table, then the floor, was shaking. One of the guards came over. He put his boot on my chair and touched the gun on his hip. ‘You girls getting hysterical?’ he wanted to know. He patted the front of our shirts the way fathers and stepfathers do. ‘You smuggling something inside here?’
She stared him straight in the eye. ‘You negotiating?’ Her cheeks and her forehead were flushed.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘Ain’t that something? A twelve-year-old whore. Runs in the blood, huh?’ He put his headphones back on and shambled to his desk by the door. He plugged us out.
‘Runs in the blood,’ she whispered, and another gust of stifled giggling descended on us, then lifted and passed. On a blank page in our colouring books, in black felt marker, she drew a man in a chair beside a door and X’d him out with a thick black cross. On another page, she wrote: My name is Tiyah. What’s yours?
I wrote Elizabeth. Then I whispered, ‘Why are we writing?’
‘Elizabeth,’ she said very loudly, ‘why are you whispering?’
We both looked at the guard. He was tapping his foot to the music we couldn’t hear. He was oblivious to us. We spluttered with laughter again.
‘I’ve done it on the bottom of my feet,’ she confided.
‘That’s a good place. He wouldn’t see that. No one would see that.’
‘I do flowers. Daisies. Roses. Gardenias.’
‘But doesn’t that make you limp?’
‘Nah. I’m bionic, right? You want to see?’
We told the guard we needed to go to the bathroom. He pulled his earplugs out and nodded then put them back in. He was used to girls going together. He gave us this prison-guard kind of smile, his tongue hanging out, drool on the side of his lips. ‘You show me yours,’ he said, ‘and I’ll show you mine, right, girlies?’
‘Get fucked,’ she whispered under her breath, after he’d plugged back in.
In the bathroom, she flashed the petals on the balls of her feet. It was beautiful work, like a rainforest bursting out of her sneakers. I showed her the inside of my thighs.
Forecast Page 6
