This Is the Story of You

by Beth Kephart

  I eased myself to the edge of the bed and uncurved my spine. I tested one foot on the spare bare clearing of the floor, then the other, and I stood. Nothing snapped. I reeled, didn’t puke. There was that path between things. I walked it. Made my way to the sliding door, fit my hands around the shutter crank, fought to draw the gray light back. It took everything I had. Inch by inch, the daylight came in. It beat, like a pulse, against my eyes.

  I thought I’d faint.

  I steadied myself.

  I looked again. The day like acid, and the world I’d known all gone.

  Already the scavengers had come—the gulls greedy as pigeons, the oystercatchers with their brazen bills, an old man whose white whiskers glittered like rubble in the sun. The black rocks had been thrown like World War II tankers across the beach and tossed among them, around them, was smash: planks, tables, porch boards, rooftops, a pair of rubber tires, hangers with their dresses on, particles of window frames, a charcoal grill.

  The empty shelves of a pantry.

  The hats of lamps.

  A chest of drawers.

  A keg of beer.

  My mother’s apron.

  My mother’s apron.

  The sand was a trash heap.

  The sand was for pickers.

  Parts of us were out there.

  “Sterling?”

  I opened my arms. From the headboard she flew. Her heart against my heart.

  “Shhhh. Look.”

  Beyond the beach, bobbing in the crests and troughs of the sea, were two matching ironing boards like surfer boards, and a faceup stereo, and a seagull nest, a birdbath, a teakettle, the wooden hips of a guitar, the wheel of a bike spinning like it had caught itself on a secret whirlpool. There was the swimming fin of an automobile. There was the head of the giraffe from the Mini Amuse and the feet of Wonderland’s Alice, the new monsters of the sea, and now, far away, near the beach’s southern end, I spied a girl throwing cartwheels where the ocean met the sand. She wore red sparkling shoes and a black leotard and a pair of ladybug wings. She cut between the surf and turned like scissors on a seam. I knew her, I thought, or I knew those wings, and then I blinked and she was gone.

  Vanished.

  Only Eva would be able to see.

  On the deck the sand had piled like snow. The wind had torn the railings from their pins. The angle was tilt. I yanked the sliding door across its crooked tracks and the sand of the outside world fell in, across my feet, across the edge of the attic floor. Still wet. Still cool. Not warm. A gentle breeze blowing in.

  “Shhhh,” I told the cat. She licked my nose with her sandpaper tongue. Her whiskers like feathers against the gash on my forehead.

  Through the lower half of the house I could hear the breeze blowing, and a quiet slapping like the ticking of a clock, and the sound of water falling. Sterling’s ears were tall with the sound of it, too, her tail anxious. She put two paws on my shoulder. She looked past me, toward the door where I’d hooked my coat, where the pool of water wasn’t as big as it had been; the water was still receding.

  “Okay,” I said. “All right. We’ll go.”

  Down the narrow path. To the room’s oak door.

  I turned the knob.

  I opened the door.

  It wasn’t until we reached the landing that I knew. Water to the seventh stair. The kitchen like a toilet bowl. The TV on its back. The walls between the things I could see had been erased, like chalk from a board. The curtains were down. The windows were empty. There was fish flop: flat and gray. There was the blue claw of a trapped crab, the glisten of jellyfish, like two fallen chandeliers. Every clock stopped. There was Don Quixote trapped in the teeth of an oven rack and a jar of mayonnaise inside a wicker basket, and I couldn’t remember where things had been, how the sink had stood, where I’d left my plates, where Mickey’s apron had hung, where she’d kept her calendar she’d write our histories on.

  What any of it looked like, clean.

  I couldn’t remember, and there was a brown stain creeping up the slanted stairwell walls.

  The smell was Clorox, saline, fish tail, wood rot, the fresh soil of the floating window box, chemical lemons.

  The sound was the fish dying. It was the curtains drying and the ocean slinking back to the sea. It was the engine of Sterling’s heart.

  Go forth and conquer, Mr. Friedley would say.

  Go forth.

  But there was no out or through.

  Like being marooned in a tree house, that’s how it was. The high and dry parts of the place somehow steady on their stilts, the bottom half of the house broken away. The Zone had washed out from beneath the deck, and so had everything we’d ever stuffed there, and also the dividing picket fences and the dunes and the gangplank with the rope and the footsteps from the night before, when I thought thieving was the worst thing that could happen.

  There was no safe path across the crush and sludge of the first floor. There was no use in sitting on the steps watching the brown stain creep. There was no point in calling for the people I loved, because they were hours away, or blocks away, with troubles of their own, and besides, Jesus, there was no phone.

  Somebody had to do something.

  “Come on,” I told Sterling, and she stood, her front paws on my shoulders, her bottom paws in the cup of my hand, as I climbed back up the steps and into my room and through that one thin path between everything rescued. I turned Sterling toward the bed, told her to stay, be good. I pulled my boots on, then waded out into the drifted sand, measured the distance down.

  It was a freaking long way down, as if the storm had carved another full story out beneath us.

  The gulls were sand gangs now—clumps of them on the driftwood chairs and in the baskets. The birdbath that had sailed out to sea had been returned to the shore, polished, its head in the sand. The old man with the whiskers was gone and if there’d been a girl wearing the ladybug wings that had once belonged to me, she’d quit her game.

  There was no way down.

  Even Sterling, who could fly, wouldn’t dare the leap. Even Eva, hopeful as she always was, erring on the side of love, believing in the things she could not see, would have said, The luck’s not with us.

  On the prow of that deck, I knew Sterling and I had been abandoned.

  The beach was like a bomb had gone off. Haven was Lord of the Flies. It was Survivor. I could see it all from where I stood.

  There was no way out, or through.

  She walked heavy and slow, dragging her boots through the piles of sand, around the banks of broken things, past the boulders. She had a black box like a lunch pail in one hand and a lasso of rope around one shoulder and her short hair was as wild as hair as short as hers could be—her hair like a Chia Pet, Kermit version. Behind her and above her, tied to a stick, was a bright sheet flag—no hint of surrender.

  Scattering the gulls, she came. Flicking her hand at the pipers and the oystercatchers and the photographs and diary pages and magazines that had begun to dry and lift up, paper scatterings. The gulls were crazy as the breeze that sometimes gusted, still, and I stood there, and she came. That flag flapping behind her and her head down low until she was practically under me, in the shadow of the tilted deck, her hand like a salute over her eyes.

  “Found us some rope,” she said. “It should do.”

  Sterling leapt into my arms. Looked down. Growled mean and threatening.

  Shhhhh.

  I was up on the deck, miles high, is what it seemed. She was all that distance below, the riot of the ruined beach beyond her. She made herself a seat on the pleather trunk that had drifted out and drifted back and sunk not far from home. She sat measuring rope length by the forearm and tying knots by her own degrees, her flag planted into the risen sand behind her.

  I watched from up high. I watched her hands, her arms, the long
length of rope turning circles at her feet. Sterling was mewing and impatient and not going anywhere, because we couldn’t go anywhere; we were stranded and there she was, Old Carmen—rescuing me and that cat. I couldn’t understand it. I wasn’t going to ask. I imagined all the others, stranded in Haven, needing in Haven, waking up upside down and ruined and scared in Haven, but Old Carmen had set her compass on me. Call me selfish, maybe I was. Call me scared; I’m not pretending. Consider me banged around—body and head—and woozy with the storm. I was glad as hell to see Old Carmen. I’d have done anything she asked.

  She stood now. Looked up. Said, “Now you go find yourself a decent anchor.”

  “Anchor?”

  “You know what I mean.” She threw her pointer finger toward a place behind her.

  I turned and looked back at the room, the insecure piles of unstable things. Only anchor in that mess was the corner post of my aunt’s old bed. No need to toss a perfectly good bed just ’cause it’s ugly as sin, Mickey had liked to say, and now, in my heart, I was thanking Mickey for looking so far ahead. I was thanking Mickey’s sister for leaving me the attic room and the hurricane shutters, which was, I guess, what had saved me.

  “All right,” Old Carmen said. “Stand back.”

  “Standing.”

  She took her knotted rope by one end. She bundled a strong plank into it. She wound up her arm like a Yankees pitcher, and one toss was all she needed.

  Old Carmen’s arm was excellent.

  “Anchoring it good is all on you,” she said. “I’m waiting.”

  I retrieved the plank that had fallen at my feet. Shook off the sand, freed the end of the rope. I trudged across the deck and into that room and knotted the hell out of that bedpost. Sterling wound her silver thread between my leg as I worked. She listened to me talking, saying, “You’re in on this. Be good.” And then, when the knot was tight, when I had done my best, I unhooked the trench coat from the back of the attic door, slipped it on, slipped that cat into a pocket.

  “You know what to do,” I said.

  She did. She was a real fine cat.

  She waited until my feet hit the ground before she asked: “Anybody else in there?”

  “No, ma’am,” I said. Sterling purred.

  She said, “You sure about that?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Family’s on the mainland.”

  She studied me, gauging the length of my truth. She cupped my face with the rough grip of one hand. Said, “Let’s give me a look at that forehead.”

  I stood on that sand. I closed my eyes.

  “Health,” she said. “First line of our defenses.”

  A line from a story Deni could have penned.

  She dropped my chin, reached for her black box.

  You want to know what she looked like. You want a closer look.

  Here:

  She had sea salt in her hair and a pair of tiny anchors in her ears, a Haven sweatshirt under an oiled jacket, a flannel shirt under everything. She wore a pair of jeans that ran up past her belly and tucked down straight into her camouflage waders—man-size, but they fit her. That black box of hers opened like a metal accordion, fat up to full with fishhooks and bobbins, a spare cap and bandannas, batteries, pocketknives, first aid, matches, a wind-up radio, a compass, a few paperbacks, and in one whole corner, wrapped in thick wax paper, a pile of white-bread sandwiches, smelling of salami and mustard.

  She couldn’t have been five foot zero.

  She was almighty imposing.

  Holding my chin, she swabbed my forehead wincing clean. She put a puff of gauze down where the skin had split, then a Band-Aid, tight over the seam. She asked where I’d gotten such a nasty thing, said don’t leave a wound to the elements, and then she asked me again, how, but I didn’t want to remember out loud. Didn’t want to remember, but the storm came back to me, its unreal power, that stop sign spinning through the howler wind.

  My chin was in her hand.

  Her alcohol rub was some nasty business.

  “Got the gas cut off,” I said.

  “That right?”

  “That’s what they tell us in First Aid and Rescue. Get the gas turned off. I got it turned off. Then I got wind slammed.”

  “Bandage,” Old Carmen said. “In lieu of stitches.”

  There were others on the beach—their long johns on, their pajama feet, their sun hats like umbrellas. They had broken things in their hands, whatever they could carry, and those gulls, they didn’t like it much. Those gulls were pitching an Alfred Hitchcock fit, screaming every time somebody leaned in for the rubble, screaming like they and only they knew what to do with a broken spinning wheel or a shelf of books or the collar of a puppy but not the puppy. Knew what to do. Knew how to value.

  Behind Old Carmen, the sheet-flag flew. Over her shoulder, in the direction I was facing, the Rapunzel ladder swung from the deck that was still standing, tallest thing anywhere, best that I could tell. I’d anchored the rope, and it had held. I’d left the sliding door open to the breeze.

  I couldn’t remember most things, or maybe I just didn’t want to.

  Rest of the place was a landslide smear. Roof rafters, maybe, but no roof tiles, only a handful of clapboards, and because the back door was gone you could see the splinters inside, the smashed dishes, the vertical range top, the black face of the TV laid down like a platter, and the curtains by the bay window dripping.

  “You said no people inside,” I heard Old Carmen saying.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “No living things?”

  I remembered the fish. The crab. The kelp that had hung from a lampshade, its bladders retracting like someone breathing. I remembered everything I’d tried to save, the decisions I’d made, the stash of memories, leaning.

  “Not really.”

  “Only thing in this world isn’t replaceable is people.”

  I nodded.

  “Go on,” she said. “Get what you’ll need.”

  She folded her arms like a catcher’s mitt, and that damned cat stepped right in.

  She said that she would wait, and I believed her.

  I fixed my hands around that rope. I clenched it with my knees. I went up again, dangled and suspended above a world of crumble.

  Doublewide and batteries. Peanut butter and spoon. Wallet. Half-bar phone. Comb. Toothbrush. One canister of Vietnamese sand and Mickey’s favorite pair of earrings, color of the sun going up. That’s what she said when we gave them to her, Jasper Lee and me. We’d walked all the way to Main and the How to Live store, Jasper Lee leaning on both painted canes the entire way and then also in the store: She’d like those best. Don’t cry, I told myself. Can’t cry. The candy corn, some photographs, my journal, my pen, the cans of peaches, the cans of fish, the chips. The hairy cactus with a Pepto bow that Eva had given me one Christmas. My iPod shuffle with the Deni-loaded songs. The silver mug Mickey had made for me out of a wedge of porcelain clay. I found a duffel bag, made it fit. I tossed the tartan to the sand below, and the walrus into the blanket, and in the same fashion I tossed the bag of Friskies, and it went down and down like a bomb that didn’t blow, and there Old Carmen stood waiting, my cat in her arms, like she was a friend of mine.

  Get what you’ll need.

  I had no one. I didn’t ask questions. She had brought a flag with her and it was waving there, and it was not the color of surrender. She had patched together my head.

  It was a long way to earth. The deck was dizzy. From where I stood I could see the giraffe still bobbing in the froth, the folding fingers of a music stand, the front chunk of a boat called Mighty something. All up and down the beach were more and more people out wearing what they’d slept in, picking their life out of the sand, out of flattened tires and laundry machines, out of the clumps of junk where the heckling gulls stood, protecting their possessions. Way out north, a
long the shore, I saw Chang and Mario, tall and short, walking arm over arm, slow and dazed, hardly moving forward, and I wanted to call, wanted to mold my hands into a megaphone—Hey! Hey! Are you all right? Hey! You seen the others? You okay? Who else is there?—but there was a mist between me and them, a mirage rising, and they didn’t see me, didn’t wave, like I stood on the other side of a dream. A wave rolled in carrying a machine on its back. Chang and Mario were gone, a deer standing where they’d been. A baby deer with lots of spots, dipping its hooves into the tide.

  “You about ready?” I heard Old Carmen call, her flag still planted behind her and her black box at her feet, and my cat in her arms. I had no idea of next. I had no options. The deck was a prow cutting the air. The lifeline of rope was still tied at one end to the bed, still snaked across the sandy deck to the ledge, still holding.

  This is what it looked like.

  The shock of then.

  “Cat is waiting on you,” Old Carmen tilted her chin up and said.

  “Sterling,” I said.

  She shrugged.

  “Sterling. Name of my cat.”

  “Fair enough,” she said.

  I half scooted, half crab-crawled across the deck. I swept the loose sand away with one side of my hand. I got the rope up hot and alive inside my hands. Done it before, you can do it again, I said to myself. Bruised hand beneath hand, wobbly foot over foot, my head still dizzy, that bandage like a thought tourniquet, and when the breeze blew at me halfway down and I started to get vomity again, I closed my eyes and counted.

  Heat of the rope in my hands, I went down to shaken sand.

  “We’ll have to pitch ourselves a tent,” Old Carmen said.

  “Tent?”

  “Get ready.”

  Ready for what? I almost asked, and then I remembered: I wasn’t asking those kinds of questions.

  I threw the bag of Friskies over my shoulder. I tossed the walrus around my neck. I bundled up the blanket and tucked Sterling in a pocket, and all this time Old Carmen was plucking up her flag and folding her accordion box. I stood with my back to her, watching the house. I stood there wondering what parts would fall next, and when, and if I’d taken the right things, and what Mickey would have done if she were here, how my little brother would have breathed.