This Is the Story of You

by Beth Kephart

  Six miles end to end, and the day is gray, but we are color, and the traffic is light, and it is yielding, and we are riding the divider lines, south to north, rite of passage. And when a car shows up it honks us on. And when a bike goes by, it rings its bell, and when Chang and Mario and some of the other O’Sixteens show up, casual at first, they run the golden center line behind us, yelping how it’ll be their turn next, how they could beat us any day, you should have told us today’s the day, until they tire of the chase, and Mr. Porter from Uncle Willy’s comes out and stands on the sidewalk and salutes, like we are the parade, like he can remember, still, because he can remember, still, the day he went end to end, on his own.

  The world runs different when you ride it through on wheels. The world runs medium blur, wet-paint style: Haven does. Houses on flamingo legs, houses spilled on pebble lawns, houses with their motorboats up front, like dogs on leashes, and then the swatches of retail, the red and orange of the closed until next summer signs, the high top hat of Rosie’s, the plastic flowers in the barrels by the diner. The big orange Godzilla legs of the water tank. The Alice in Wonderland characters of the Mini Amuse, unwinterized. My ladybug wings are flapping flapping flapping. Eva is riding straight as a pin. Deni is talking mascot talk to the stuffed turtle, and the smile on my kid brother’s face is ear to ear, it’s everything, it’s rite of passage now. His cape flying. His happy soaring. His difference invisible now, and to hell with iduronate-2-sulfatase enzyme, I remember thinking, to hell with recycling mucopolysaccharides, to hell with the name of the disease, to hell with taxonomy, there’s no right name for everything that’s wrong, don’t put a number on Jasper Lee, don’t put a percentage chance, just give him a wide-striped towel with a little shine and call it what it is: a super brother’s superpower.

  It was a gray day. It was November. The sun was waiting at the northern tip, behind the barbershop stripe of the lighthouse. Six miles is a lot of miles when all you’ve got is Modes and a center line. Six miles is lungs burning, feet blistering, one toenail turning blue, we never figure out why. Six miles is talking and whooping and smiling at first, and then it’s a pretty kind of silence above the whirr of wheels. Six miles is winner take all, and we were winners, we took all.

  We were hand in hand at the northern tip.

  We were winners, four across the line, super cape and super mascot, ears and wings end-to-end flying. We were us. We were before.

  In the early evening of the day that Jasper Lee couldn’t come home, I cooked myself more eggs sunny-side up, like I said. I poured milk into one of Mickey’s glitter-glazed bowls and Friskies into the palm of my hand, and Sterling feasted. I left the dirty dishes in the sink because everything else was incredibly clean, and tomorrow would be another day.

  We were supposed to have another day.

  You know those sound machines that pretend to be waterfalls, log fires, whales? Right then the air outside sounded like machine rain on volume low. Like slosh, like slide, like someone shaking a sleeve full of beads. I climbed the stairs. I whistled two three four and Sterling came—her narrow body snaking between my calves, her whiskers like sugar that’s been heated, pulled, and chilled. She said nothing on the stairs and nothing in my arms when I carried her from my room through the open door into the wet dusk. Beyond the balcony there were no stars, no moon, just rain.

  The tide was halfway back and retreating. Far away, a yellow crack of lightning split the sky. The edge of that storm, I thought, blowing out to sea. I pictured it a hundred thousand feet high and a thousand miles wide and a storm eye the size of an island and pretty as a cathedral, because that’s what Ms. Isabel had said, years ago—the eye of a storm is like a cathedral. She read it to us; I remember: “It has been likened to a cathedral with sacred carvings on the walls, stately balconies protruding, even pipe organs reaching to the clear, blue dome above.”

  Sacred carvings. Balconies. Pipe organs. The storm in retreat, putting on its show for the great whales and the ancient sharks and the hidden reefs, the vampire squid, the blob sculpins, the red-lipped batfish with its eyes like two domes. I thought of all those forecasters with their fancy weather machines, their computer models, their barometric reads, their promise: the storm headed the way of oblivion. They were, I’m telling you, sure.

  No danger here.

  No danger there.

  Not the night I’m speaking of.

  Sterling squirmed in my arms, tucked her head beneath my chin, kept herself out of the way of the rain. I thought of Jasper Lee and Mickey in the fake happy colors of Memorial, a line between them and the storm. Maybe Mickey was asleep in the visitors’ chair. Maybe Jasper Lee was sleeping, too, the hospital gown with the blue snowflakes loose around his throat where the tube dug in. Or maybe the second patient bed in the double was empty, so Mickey was sleeping there, the curtain between the two beds drawn open and Mickey’s flip-flops on the floor. Her knees would be tucked up, her body curved like a French Ç. Beep of the monitoring machines. Bar of light beneath the door, storm at her back.

  There was the cool prickle of the rain in my hair, the tide going out, the soft flop of fish out in the watery sea. The wind curled and thickened and the birds flew low and dusk seemed loud to me. Sterling’s tail was going tick tick tick, and her ears were cutting into the underbelly of my chin and her whiskers were quivery and now something changed, something went wrong inside the wind, until Sterling herself was pushing against me, from me, her silver fur turning to muscle. I thought for sure that she was going to fly—out of my arms, over the deck, into the dunes, into the evening, her tail ticking. That she was going back to wherever she’d come from, and already I was sorry, holding her tighter, telling her don’t go, then telling her, promising, that I’d find her true owner tomorrow.

  That’s when I heard them: footsteps in the sand. Footsteps coming from the other side of the blockading fence, then onto the invisible part of the beach, then cutting the corner and heading for the gangplank—our gangplank, the one with the ropy rails that bridged over the dune that kept our house safe from sea treachery.

  It was only dusk, but I could not see. We were not alone.

  My phone in my pocket and Sterling in my arms, my mind roulette-wheeled through the choices I had, the possibilities. Deni with more Friskies, but she’d have called. Eva with news of a lost city found or a boy named Shift, but she was a front-door friend. Old Carmen, but that was stupid, because Old Carmen kept her distance, Old Carmen came and went and bothered nobody; there was nothing I could imagine Old Carmen needing. And then I thought maybe Mickey and Jasper Lee had come home, but I only thought it because I wanted it, there was no chance of that; I froze. Nobody I could imagine was coming for me. But somebody was down there, under the deck, in the Zone.

  “Lock the doors,” Mickey had said, but in Haven, off-season, we hardly did. Lock the doors, but now it was too late, too wet out there, and if I creaked just a little bit on that deck, if I moved, whatever had come would come for me. “Shhhh,” I told Sterling. “Shhhh.” The sound of feet on the gangplank going up, and then heading back down, and now the squeak of the shoes in the wet sand, and the sound of the rain in the breeze.

  If I’d heard the back door open, I’d have 911’d. If I’d heard footfalls on the steps by the ceramic ladies, I’d have screamed. If I’d turned to find someone in the room behind me, I’d have bundled Sterling and taken a flying leap off the deck and into the dunes.

  Nobody out there to hear me.

  But that’s not what happened. What happened is the footsteps stayed inside the Zone. What happened was a bumping and bending and rattling of things, a banging and sliding, a knocking of buckets against lids and tops against bottoms. Beneath the deck where I stood, someone was hunting, noisy and careless.

  Ready.

  Set.

  Now.

  Be still.

  I held Sterling tight. I never dialed my phone
.

  I never heard the back door open or the stairs creak. I only heard, after too much time, the gangplank groaning again, the stranger leaving.

  It was early dark by then. I strained but all I could see was the hunch of a figure lit up by a brand-new lightning strike. A figure fast receding.

  I locked the doors. I closed the windows. I watted out the cottage—turned on every bulb, every spectrum of bright. The rain was falling harder now and Sterling was mewing and I said shhh, and poured her a fresh bowl of milk. I dug into the Friskies, put my hand out like a tray. She went from the milk to my hand, from my hand to the milk, and I complimented her on her bravery, told her wait till she meets Jasper Lee, a real trailblazer in the courage department.

  “Doesn’t even flinch,” I said, about how Jasper Lee would sit on that hospital bed and open out his arm and take the needle with the enzymes. “Doesn’t flinch at the start and doesn’t flinch at the end when they take the needle out, swab off the blood, lay down a Band-Aid. He stands up like a grown man. Shakes the nurse’s hand. Says goodbye and thank you, politest person you ever saw. They love him at Memorial, and you’ll see why, Sterling. You’ll see why. You’ll love him, too.”

  That’s what I said.

  From the milk to my hand, from my hand to the milk, Sterling’s ears were upright and her whiskers were drippy; that cat was a world-class listener. A curious cat, her tail going back and forth, and now I was telling her about Christmas on the island, the lights we string from place to place, the candles in the jars that Jasper Lee always lit. Next I was saying about Halloween and the parade we do down on the beach, Jasper Lee in whatever costume Mickey and he make, piggyback riding place to place: I don’t want to scare anybody. And after that maybe it was a story I told about how Deni and Eva and I had built those model planes that soared above my brother’s room. Landing gear up, I told Sterling. Thrust reversers retracted. The combat aircraft painted to look like weather had already done it in. I told Sterling how Deni had done most of the gluing and Eva most of the painting and how we all three had strung each plane up, standing on Jasper Lee’s bed while he sat below, praising our craft skills and engineering. “You sure know your mechanics,” he’d said, and Eva, a straight C-minus in every Ms. Isabel class, almost died laughing before she caught her breath and said how a girl could get a big head if she stayed near my brother too long. It was shortly after that when Eva lay down on the floor and declared the planes eternal. Iwas thinking of this then, got her image in my head—her blond hair, her tip-of-a-turnip nose, her deliberate way of looking at things so she would not miss a detail. Everything to be lived or imagined. That was Eva. She didn’t care one whit for terms.

  I told Sterling about the little tin men and the road-trip curtains and the canisters of sand from all over the world—the island’s best collection. I told her how Jasper Lee was interviewed last year for the local weekly, The Sand Dollar—the topic being his expertise in the crush that spills up from the sea. I told her how when the photographer came to take Jasper Lee’s pic, he’d said there’d be no pic without my mother and me, because if he was going to be famous, we were going to be famous, didn’t matter what we knew or didn’t know about sand, only mattered that we were family, all for one. The united Banuls.

  “Nine years old, and that’s what he’s saying,” I was reciting to Sterling, who was licking my empty palm with her tongue, then licking herself clean under the shine of every light on. The rain was steady by now, and the winds were stronger than before, but they weren’t howling, I didn’t think they would be howling. They’d be gone by tomorrow. That fact was promised.

  I stood. I checked for a view through the front bay window and the kitchen side window and the windows in the back. But all I could see by now was me. The windows like mirrors, a million reflections of medium and more- than-medium scared. Whatever had gone down in the Zone I’d discover the next day in the sun. We’d faced much worse, but even so, I had a crawly feeling inside.

  Every five minutes I checked my phone. No Mickey. No Deni. No Eva. “Come on,” I finally told Sterling, leaving every light on and grabbing the cat’s Tupperware litter box and carrying it up the stairs. I slid it next to the claw-foot tub, and the cat purred. Her body swam between my calves, her tail a mop against my bones. There was a trace of warm milk on her whiskers.

  “Time for bed, Sterling,” I said, and she looked up at me, like she knew the drill, like she had nowhere else to go. I used the bathroom, took a shower, came back, and we were clean and ready as we’d be for many days now, but I had no idea what we’d gotten ready for.

  The biggest prize I ever won at the Mini Amuse was a walrus, stuffed with foam. I dug it out from the couch and named it hers, arranged it nice on my bed. I made sure that cat understood; she was a real smart cat. She put a claim to it at once. Padded it down, curled her body up, licked her front paws, settled her chin.

  “’Night, Sterling,” I said, putting my Wind in the Willows T-shirt on and checking the sliding door lock once again and cutting the one bulb in my room. I stood looking out for a while, watching the inscrutable dark. The white teeth on the black sea seemed closer than before. Old Carmen had abandoned her post, gone to wherever she went when she wasn’t at home by the sea.

  The wind seemed harder, but there was nothing I could do. Tomorrow I would wake to find the sun. Tomorrow Mickey would call and Deni would ask, You keeping that cat? Holding tight? Need me for something? And I’d say, Yeah. Yeah. No, I’m good. Then Deni would tell me the morning news on Eva.

  “’Night,” I said again to Sterling.

  One hand on that cat’s head.

  One on the tusk of that walrus.

  Later they would call it Monster, Colossal, Extreme. They would say twelve hundred miles wide and shattering. One hundred sixty miles per hour and gusting. An eye like a country of cathedrals. Power slurped straight from the sea. Broke the models, broke the measures, broke the rules.

  Winner take all.

  Sometimes sleep is easy; it takes you sly. Sometimes it runs ahead, leaves you wakeful, tricked in, memories instead of dreams. That night, in my mind, Mickey was home—her long hair in a loose knot, her toenails painted Memorial fake, her hands too small for the cup she was sipping from, the scent of fruit tea rising. That night, Jasper Lee was home, too, of course he was. He was tall, he was fine, he wasn’t sick, he’d never been sick, he was sitting by the front door on a wooden stool, waiting on a canister of Cambodian sand. That night, Eva was lighting candlewicks inside mason jars and planting them on every sill, flowers growing like gardens above her ears, and she was saying, “Nope, girl, that must have been a dream. No thief in the Zone, Mira. The world is sweet.” That night, end of that night, there came Deni, climbing the stairs and breathless in the attic, with a haul of Friskies on her back, Santa Claus–style.

  “Just in case,” she was saying.

  Just in case.

  Deni. You call her. She’ll be there.

  She wasn’t there.

  It was after midnight, and the rain was blowing hard. It was dark, and Sterling and I were sleeping and maybe dreaming, and you might have thought a locomotive was coming, you might have thought there’d be the big Evacuate Now—the horns that said, Get yourselves out of here. But it was late, and we believed what we had been told. That this storm was but a passing thing.

  The only thing certain is the past, and even the past is up for grabs—both the textbook variety and the personal kind, and every single one of Eva’s lost cities. I’m telling what I am telling, but I have to take it slow. It was dark, and it was night, and it came—a high-tide ride, four stories tall. I checked the records for that; that is the number. A high-tide surge that rose and rose and crashed against the lighthouse stripes, the anchored tankers, the sailboat sweets, the black boulders, the piers and the pebbles and the gutters of the houses by the edges of the sea, the laminated windows, the bridge between u
s and the world, and all the nests of all the birds in Ms. Isabel’s sanctuary and the beard of the great blue heron. A colossal wave was coming, then it came: water tonnage. A mind-of-its-own monster, beating every single odd.

  The big wave coming, the big wave crashing—up against the barriers and through the rocks and into the safe parts of the Zone. A wall of sound and then it was back again, closer, harder, at our door, knocking with its frothy fist.

  And Sterling stood.

  And Sterling growled.

  And the lights ticked off downstairs.

  And I was more afraid than I’d ever been.

  I shot up from the bed. I yanked on my jeans and my Day-Glo waders, my khaki trench coat with the big buttons and the sash belt and the eight never-ending gonzo pockets. I stood, sick inside and off my balance, and listened, and yes: The wind was a beast. The rain was a horizontal slash, it was bullets up against the glass, it was the end of all things. I felt my way across the room, toward the closet. I fell to my knees. I couldn’t swallow, could barely breathe, could hardly think, but then my hands were thinking for me—tossing aside the heaps of left-behind things until I finally found the trunk Mickey had prepared just in case “the big one” came, and yes, this was the big one. The big one did come. Out there, beyond me, the ocean was throwing a fit and sucking back. It was rushing forward, it was pissed-off hungry, it was full of rush and gush. I heard it, I could imagine it. It wasn’t a dream.

  Beneath the wads of old dresses and scarves and useless things, beneath everything my aunt hadn’t wanted and my mom hadn’t tossed was the kit; I found it, blind, with my hands, dragged it out into the room, opened the lid. Extra water, fish in cans, chips in bags, peaches in sugar syrup, a mother lode of Hershey’s Kisses, wrenches, toilet paper, matches, bug spray, candles, all those extra sets of batteries, and plastic sheets and plastic ponchos and the flashlight we called the doublewide.