by Beth Kephart
I switched it on, and I could see.
It was too late for almost everything. Too late to plywood the windows. Too late to call for help. Too late to get out.
Think, Mira. Think. I counted Slurpees. I categorized. I put the moment into taxonomic order: Animalia, Chordata, Mammalia, Primates, Hominidae, Homo, Homo sapiens. Me. I may have been part of something so much bigger than myself, but it all came down to me.
The only defense against the storm would be the hurricane shutters my aunt had left us with—the solitary, rusted pair that ran across the sliding glass door to the deck. I turned the broad yellow eye of the doublewide in that direction. I stood and I walked—one step, another step: Mira Banul, be brave. I reached the shutters, lay the flashlight down, and cranked those things like my life depended on it, because it did. Sterling wound like a silver thread between my legs. “Home of the brave, home of the brave, home of the brave,” I said, and the sound of the rain on the roof and on the walls was so gigantic, the sound of the winds and the surf so much bigger than before, that every time I said “home” or “brave” to Sterling, I couldn’t hear a single word I said.
“We’re going to be all right,” I yelled, but when I looked down at that cat threading between my legs, beneath the khaki hem of that coat, it looked like she was crying—her mouth wide open, her nose a perfect triangle, her tongue bubble-gum pink. And even though she had the mind and soul of a cat, she was the size of a kitten, and she was frightened. “Hey,” I said, and I picked her up, and I kissed her nose, and I stuffed her into one of the eight never-ending pockets, and that’s where Sterling stayed, not really a kitten, not actually a cat—nice and put, her head like a periscope, watching.
I could hear the waves out there, the waves and their teeth. I could hear the wind in the Zone, churning like a greased turnstile, picking things up and throwing things down, to hell with that thief—that was history. The stuff that happened next was up to me. The stuff that would go wrong would go wrong because I was out of a fix, or short on smarts, or too medium. I finished cranking. Sterling was pocket-tucked. My bare feet were hot in my knee-high waders, and the next thing was next. Go downstairs, Mira. Go careful. Go slow. Breathe.
“Mira,” I said out loud. “You are in charge.”
In the kitchen the sink shivered with the plates I’d left undone, and with the smell of all those lemons, that bleach. The table was standing, the place mats arranged to serve three, the potato growing out its long tail in the tall, scrubbed glass practically glowed, effervescent. The notes we’d magneted to the refrigerator door had ripples in them, lifts and flaps, from the breeze that had made its way in, because now, even in the dark, I could see that there was a breeze in the room—in the tablecloth, in the curtains, in the dish towels, in the wall calendar where Mickey wrote our lives down. The breeze was in the room—in the folds, in the future.
Not a breeze.
A wind.
Coming, I guessed, from Jasper Lee’s room, so that’s where we went, Sterling and me and the boots and the coat and the doublewide—leaving the kitchen for the hall, nudging the door open with my foot, finding more gust than breeze blowing through the long band of Jasper Lee’s windows which had, I guessed, been raised up by the pressure of the storm. I slammed each window shut. I locked each window tight. I caught an image of a girl in the reflective glass—of a girl and the head of a cat in the pocket of a trench coat, silver as a spoon. The girl’s hair was plastered and her eyes were big.
The girl was me.
Above my head, the airplanes were dashing back and forth on their strings. On the floor by the door the Bag of Tricks was the loneliest thing I’d ever seen, and the soldiers on the windowsill had nothing on the storm, and the sand, all that prized-possession sand, the Jasper Lee collection—we couldn’t lose that sand. I couldn’t let my little brother down. I had to save what had so far saved him. That’s when I decided, when I figured out my plan. When everything that happened next began.
“We’re saving everything,” I told that cat. “We’re saving everything we can.”
Categories upon categories of things.
Bermuda sunset sand. Vietnam War sand. Sand off the shore of Lake Placid. Sand dug out of Haven on a birthday and sand sent in from Australia and sand that was red and black and mystery sand and sand my brother had labeled this stuff’s pure gold. I slid each canister into the pockets of that trench coat, like rolls of coins, like ammunition, then I followed the light of the doublewide through the kitchen and up the stairs and into the attic room, where I unloaded, hiding the Jasper Lee collection in my sock drawer, among the fishnets my aunt had left behind.
Back downstairs, I swept the army of tin soldiers into the coat pockets, then hurried back upstairs and jangled them in with a drawer full of sweaters. Next on the rescue was the Bag of Tricks. After that: the decorated canes. Later: the Nat Geo magazines and that box where Jasper Lee kept what he wouldn’t throw away, also both pairs of shoes that Mickey had paid extra for and the cruising shorts that my brother liked best.
I had a plan.
The plan saved me.
Without the plan I would have gone one hundred percent batshit crazy.
Up I went. Down. Until finally I had what I could get for Jasper Lee and it was Mickey’s turn—the battery light thrown down across the square of her room, where I hardly ever went when she wasn’t home. It was worse than sad in the bright, striped light. I sat, shivery and shaky, on the edge of Mickey’s bed. Ran my hands across the thin, pale quilt, a patchwork, a gift, some lost story. Winter or summer, spring or fall, Mickey’s bed had the patchwork on. It was a save I had to make, at least it was something.
Mickey kept her jewelry on her bureau in seashell dishes—bangles, hoops, and macramés. I swept them into my pockets. She kept her useful barrettes beside her favorite barrettes on a little wooden tree; I couldn’t remember which was which and so they all went—into another pocket. She had a plastic box of porcelain tiles where she had tested her favorite oxide rubs, and I knew what they meant to her, how she studied them, how this would have mattered, so I took them.
I saved what I could. What I loved, what they loved, what I needed, what would be missed. I had my hands, I had my arms, I had my shoulders, I had eight pockets and a flashlight and I had to do something, because if I did nothing, I’d have died right there and then, I would have sunk down into a dark corner and cried tears bigger than any sea.
The twelve-hundred-mile-wide storm was near and coming nearer, over the heads and through the souls of all my pretty monsters.
I don’t know when the dune was breached. I don’t know when the gangplank buckled and crumpled and fell. I don’t know when the tongue of the sea reached the edge of the Zone or when the winds stirred the water there and drowned the sandy bikes, the woven chairs, the horseshoe rings, the pleather trunk, the half refrigerator, the bright blue bucket Jasper Lee wore on his head, king of the tidal parade. I don’t know when the first trickle of water made its way into the house or when the trickle became a flood became what it ultimately was.
I just know that I was running out of time, and that I had something else I had to do, something we’d discussed a million times—at home, at First Aid and Rescue. Switch the natural gas to off. Go out in the roaring rain with a safety-kit wrench and count the valves—first up from the bottom. You turn it ninety degrees: off. You never ever turn it back on. You do this or you could find yourself in a red-hot blaze in the middle of a flood.
“You stay put,” I told Sterling, pulling her from the pocket, laying her down on the walrus, telling her that every piece of everything in that room was hers to watch, by which I meant guard, through which I emphasized: Don’t let me down, by which I also meant: I already miss you; I’m terrified; I’m doing what I can; please try to trust me. Her eyes were like sea glass. Her tail was wild as a flag.
I left her there, behind the shield of
the hurricane shutters.
My heart crashed against my ribs.
The wind was velocity, the rain was muscle, the wave and the wave after that surged up over the beach, over the dunes, past the pole legs of the first line of houses, through and across and back. Again and again. Farther. Spasms of speed.
I wrestled the front door until it seemed to break from its frame and the wind tore me out onto the porch. I huddled low. I took the slam of the storm and the sea. The seafoam was up inside my boots and the gas line was this skinny line beneath the big bay window. I fought the winds, took the porch steps down, one at a time, sliding and fighting. On the pebble lawn, the water was up to my knees, and I curled as I walked, I dragged my coat in through the thick foam and the debris I couldn’t see until I was close enough to find the valve that was first from the ground. I found it. I fished around with the jaw of my wrench and I turned and I turned until I had the valve switched to a final off.
Don’t ask me how.
Don’t ask me about the houses where the valves stayed on.
Just this: They sparked blue and purple first, and then they smoked for days.
I remember nothing after that, except for taking a Mary Poppins wind so hard that it cracked my feet behind me, flapped my trench coat like a baby bird cruising tropical seas. Maybe it was the porch rail that saved me, my arms around it in a padlock. Maybe it was the wind dying back, maybe it was one of my Delphinus dolphins, one of my lovely monster friends, but I don’t know, and then I saw it coming—a stop sign torn loose from its corner post and trapped in the wind. Edge over edge, red over silver, it hurtled with the wind, the doublewide catching its slice of speed like an old-time movie reel.
Who was going to hear me?
I remember, and then I don’t remember after that. My thoughts were broken, and then my thoughts went black, and then the world went on without me.
I came to in a pool of rain, a sprawl of knees and elbows on drowning porch boards. I opened my eyes to the sight of the flashlight scraping the storm with yellow line. I thought that the world was broken and what was the point and where was my mother and my brother and my two best friends? Where were they? How were they? Was this living or was this being dead, and then I remembered the things I’d saved: Sand with the socks. Soldiers with the sweaters. Bangles with the underwear. Mickey’s quilt folded. Safe. Dry.
Maybe I’d made a mess, I’d mixed things up, I’d violated all the rules of taxonomy. I’d made a mess, but in the end what mattered most was Family.
I had drummers banging in my head. I had a hot oozing slash across my face. I had something that felt like a bruise on my hand, but the water was rising, I rose, too. I made it all the way to the door that had been slammed back into its frame. I pushed with everything I had.
For a miracle of a minute, everything went still.
The door flew open, wide, and the wind slammed me in.
I dropped to my knees and my pockets spilled.
Down the hall and up the stairs, I heard that found cat crying.
By the shivery light I saw it all. The Bag of Tricks beside the door beside the canes beside the shoes. The hats, the quilts, the forks, the knives, the spoons, the patchwork quilt, the Nat Geos in skyscraper stacks, the early bag of candy corn that Mickey had bought the day before, stopping at the grocery store on her way home from pottery.
It’s September, Jasper Lee had said.
One month from October, she’d said.
She liked a good Halloween better than anyone I know.
The flashlight lay down a line from the door to the bed, like a sidewalk through a city of hoarders. It rose like the sun toward the raftered ceiling and then dropped over curios and the couch and the adoptees from the Mini Amuse, the portrait of my aunt, the safety kit, two glass disks, which were Sterling’s eyes, the stuffed walrus she’d pawed hard and chewed.
“Told you I was coming back,” I shouted, so that she would hear. I thought my teeth would crack from the noise in my head. I thought the ton of storm I wore—in that coat, in my boots, in my medium hair—would drop me to the floor. I thought the split in my forehead was a bruise in my brain, and I was either raining or bleeding. I was alive, but maybe I wasn’t, and I was so incredibly afraid and sad when that cat made a leaping run for me.
“Hey. Hey.”
Her sandpaper tongue on my nose.
I pressed my tears into her fur. I made my confessions— I wasn’t brave enough, I couldn’t do enough. I needed Mickey and Jasper Lee, Deni and Eva, the entire class of the O’Sixteens, Ms. Isabel, Mr. Friedley, saying This, too, shall pass. Over the hurling of that storm I could hear that kitten/cat purr, I could hear her heart motoring on. I could hear her thinking: Mira Banul. Be strong.
For the both of us.
For everyone.
I lowered Sterling steady onto the bed and I fumbled until I got her a meal, and then I peeled every wet thing from my skin and wrung the deluge from my hair, pools on the floor, the storm inside, here. I crossed the room over the heads of the rescued things and dug long johns out of the top bureau drawer, my sweet pink pair, soft from a hundred years of cold Decembers. I found my best jeans and my warmest sweater and pulled on two pairs of knee-high socks. And then I found a spoon and a jar of peanut butter, and I ate it ice-cream style, chased it with candy corn, tried not to think: Mira, you’re dying, or, Mira, you will be dead soon.
I remembered my phone.
Only half a bar of power left, and three missed calls, one text from Mickey:
Need to talk to you.
It was 2:18 according to the phone. I tried five times, but there was no ringing through. Power down, I thought. Save the half bar. Turning off that phone felt like another kind of losing.
You’ll say that what happened next could not have happened next, but it did: I slept. In the long johns, the sweater, the jeans, the socks to my knees, with my head on the walrus and my brain with the stop sign running through it, my arms full of cat, her body running like an engine. They gave us numbers afterward—wind blow, wave rise, the deluge measured in feet and inches. My numbers were my numbers— a cat and me and the flashlight and that trench coat dripping from a hook.
I dreamed us on a cloud and in a cathedral. I dreamed us on a raft way out to sea, with humpbacks and blue whales and a manta ray flotilla and a giant, bucktoothed walrus. I dreamed the ocean full of butterflies, and the butterflies were yellow wings, and the wings were the only eyes beneath the sea. I dreamed myself a water bear, tiny monster of the sea that can survive most anything. I dreamed, and at the bottom of the ocean, there was a race down a centerline, and the eye of the tiger was winning. I dreamed, and there was a stranger with a hood in the shadow of the dark, and there was a stop sign turning over on itself, like the flicker of a horror film. I dreamed, and there were whiskers on my cheeks, there was pressure on my arm, there were two silver paws with unclipped claws kneading.
I opened my eyes.
I closed them.
I would have wished not. Not the squall, the caterwaul, the wail, the crash, not the suck-back of the waves and the starting again. Lay yourself down on a railroad track, and you’ll hear a sound like those waves coming. Lay yourself down and then tell yourself this: You have no place to run.
We had no place to run.
Later, they’d give us more numbers: Forty percent of the beaches gone. Thirty percent of the houses and shops. Seven gutters dug between the ocean and the bay. Nine separate wedges of island. Eighty percent of the roads impassable.
One bridge cut down at its knees.
Twenty-two thousand and two blue Slurpees.
Twenty-two thousand
and three.
In the gray light of Afterward, there was crunch in my bones, the busted hinges of my knees, the bruise that had started to spill down one shin. I could also feel the leak of the volcano gurgle on my fo
rehead. The room was spinning and it was a long time before I could sit up, inch by inch, on that bed. My eyes felt too plastic to see. I moved one hand slow across the bed. The spaces beside me were empty.
“Sterling?”
I’d puke if I moved another inch.
I didn’t move another inch.
Time went in and out.
The room kept spinning.
Like a ship’s figurehead, she sat on the heavy post of the ransacked bed.
It was the tick of her tail that I heard first—thought it was a clock, thought I was dreaming, still. Must have been infinitesimal, the sound of that tail, but that’s what woke me, finally, from my own bustedness.
“Sterling?”
She heard me, leapt down, meowed. She walked a line around me, the kind they draw at murder scenes. I was the vic. She was the detective. She stopped to lick my face.
“Turned off the gas,” I said, when I finally remembered some parts of some things.
Her tail went wild.
“You’ll have to get yourself your own Friskies.”
Her motor revved.
I pointed vaguely to the piles around us. The skyscraper stacks of my rescues. The Leaning Pisas of Banul Life as It Was. The Friskies in there somewhere, though the bag was hard to find with my plexi eyes, first day après storm.
Sterling took a long cat leap to the oak ledge of the headboard, found her footing and paced. I could hear her behind me, paw after paw, gymnast style, her toenails clacking. I closed my eyes. I heard wind in the house and gulls in the near distance. It was gray inside, but it must have been sunlight out there. Someone, I remember thinking, has to be the grown-up here.
