This Is the Story of You

by Beth Kephart

  “Moving on,” Old Carmen said, and I stood there. Stuck.

  “Counting on you,” she said, and I had no idea why she would count on me, why she would trust me, why she would go to all that trouble with her rope.

  I’m telling you.

  I didn’t know.

  She pointed north with her chin. “Work to do,” she said. “Come on.”

  I remember turning.

  I remember fitting my boots inside her bootprints.

  I remember the whisk of my trench coat across the sand.

  I remember that deer, its hooves in that sea.

  I remember the weight of my things.

  We marched until Old Carmen found a rock she liked, higher than the tide. It was up near the vanished line of the dunes, its own kind of island, with a lime green washing machine to its one side and a piano washed up by the other and a swirl of clothes still on their hangers wrapped around its base, like they were flushing down a drain. Old Carmen walked its circumference to be sure. She rubbed her fist over the rock. Then threw her black box up to the tallest part of the very tall and also quite wide rock. She stopped, before she climbed, to plant her flagpole in the sand. The flag rippled in the breeze like a kite.

  No surrender.

  Rock as tent.

  Into one face of the rock the weather had carved four sloping steps, which is what she climbed, two at a time, her boots squeaking on the green moss, her body growing bigger the farther away she got until she towered over Sterling and me, Brothers Grimm style.

  “You coming?” she asked.

  I gathered the skirts of that trench coat, my bag, and climbed.

  That rock was a freak-of-nature rock, big-room wide. It had its own hard shelves and troweled-out crannies and little pools where the clamshells breathed and the seaweed stoked. It was inside one of those crannies that Old Carmen would build her fire. She had climbed down the rock in search of combustibles (that was the word she used) and then returned with the dry sides of split rafters and the smashed fist of a chair and peg legs from a bed—the stuff that couldn’t be salvaged, she said. The stuff the wreckers would haul off in trash trucks eventually.

  I snapped the blanket out of its folds while she worked. Laid it down over the rock’s black face. I arranged the spoon, the jar of peanut butter, the porcelain mug. At one end of the blanket I stuck the walrus and at the other end the cactus with the girly bow in its hair, and every time I looked up there were more people on the beach—pajama bottoms and winter coats, bunny slippers and waders, people with pictures in their hands or one of the wooden pigs from Uncle Willy’s, which suddenly seemed to be everywhere—like buoys, like anchors, like what the hell?

  Scenes from a zombie movie. Nobody looking like themselves. Hard to tell who was what at first, hard to put the names of the people back on the people—Mr. Xu from Liberty Bank; Jimmy D. of Paradise Custodial; Gloria Fell, who yanked your stuffed animals down from the racks at the Mini Amuse like it was the last time she’d ever be bothered; Eileen, the lady Jasper Lee and I had bought Mickey’s coral earrings from and now she was traveling with a circus of curlers in her hair, mascara smudges beneath her eyes, a pair of man’s chinos under a short lace dress.

  I didn’t want to look, felt like there was something shameful in it. Didn’t want to see, wreckage like glass in my eyes, like a sailing off of hope, but I kept glancing up, my eyes blurring out with the pixilated sun, kept getting lost in my hope for them: Deni. Eva. Ms. Isabel. Mr. Friedley. Any one of the O’Sixteens—I needed proof that they were out there. Something.

  Time turned on itself. Night came on. Sterling was on the rock prowl. There was a chill in the breeze, and that flag overhead. There were the flames that Old Carmen had stirred into the cranny—purple and green at first, small and nothing—until suddenly those flames sprouted and we had a fire of actual proportions. On the first night following the world’s worst storm, Old Carmen and her rock were the one lighthouse. We were the rescue. We were the power.

  Later, darkness fallen, somebody—too hard to know who in that dark—began to bang at the wet keys of the piano, picking a tune out of flats and sharps. Somebody tapped the orphaned keg of beer and if you didn’t mind drinking lager from Dixie cups or porcelain mugs or cereal bowls, you could have yourself some. We went through rounds of candy corn. We burnt a crust onto a dozen marshmallows that somebody found in a bag; what could it hurt, we figured, if we burnt the soggy seawater off? And then somebody sat on top of that washing machine and started telling stories, they were like ghost stories, and I kept looking around for my friends, kept staring into the shadows, and my head still ached.

  I was asleep with the TV on.

  The voices said.

  I was trying desperate to get out.

  Someone.

  Goddamned forecasters. They said the goddamned thing would pass. They said Haven was a long way from trouble.

  It was a voice I recognized, but whose? I couldn’t place it, and then it disappeared, became one note in a large chorus:

  Saved by the storm shutters.

  Saved by roof rafters.

  Saved by the double hill of dunes.

  Saved me? I’ll tell you what saved me. The antique cradle, where my grandma got rocked. Busted apart when the roof fell in. Took me for a ride, then I rode back in. Whole house was gone, and everything in it. But I was alive, thanks to the cradle.

  I think it’s all lost. I think it is.

  Some of it is somewhere.

  Hell, you look around?

  What are you asking for? We’re all looking around.

  Jesus.

  Christ.

  If it is somewhere, I don’t know where. I sure as hell don’t know what.

  People who had tried to walk to Main had news: No Main. People who had gone off looking for some kind of official refuge had found: a flood in the fire station, pipes broken at the school, sand in the rescue vehicles, no higher ground. There was a tanker rammed into the face of Sea Crest Lodge, someone said, and a sail wrapped like a Christmas tree by electrical wires, and there were gulls swimming in the aisles of McCauley’s Grocery Store, a pool in the first floor of the Maritime Museum. Somebody said that the actual lighthouse had tilted at the north end, its stripes fallen into the sea. Someone said Haven had been split into islands, thanks to the speed at which the ocean had rushed to the bay. And also, they said it over and over again: Our one bridge was gone.

  Nobody knew how many had left the island ahead of the storm’s worst parts. Nobody knew if there were any dead. Nobody could imagine how rescue would ever get to us, and did you see Atlantic City, somebody said, but you couldn’t see Atlantic City, that was the point, because all of its lights had gone out.

  Nobody said Deni’s name, or Eva’s. Nobody had enough of anything. Nobody could get dry, even though Old Carmen kept the fire stoked and, after a while, the only noise was the sea and the flats on the piano and the hand-cranked radio, which Old Carmen finally wrangled on— the reporters with their news, their devastating numbers, their global warnings about melting glaciers, acid skies, warming, rising, salinated, hungry seas.

  By the power of the flame we listened. By the twin appearance of the moon—in the sky, low on the sea. The breeze picked up and the chill blew in and we listened, and on that Maytag people sat, and against the rock they leaned, and above their suitcases they gathered—pictures inside, valuables, a change of socks.

  I looked out into the dark, past the flames on Old Carmen’s rock. I told Sterling shhhh, I waited, anxious, for her to return when she went down into the sand, to her private business.

  Old Carmen’s flag rippled back and forth, in the breeze.

  Her snores were like a diesel truck with a broken muffler.

  I found my phone. I turned it on, its light like a fallen star in my hand. Pleasepleaseplease, I thought, the panic rising up
again in me, the awful loud lonesomeness inside the shocked and silent crowd, but there were no bars. There was no line out to Mickey. No Jasper Lee waving back at me.

  Maybe you think you can’t fall asleep in the bomb blast of a place that was just one e shy of Heaven. Maybe you think a rock makes for a bad bed and a stuffed walrus is a demon pillow, and maybe you’ve heard Old Carmen snore.

  I’m telling you.

  But there was a fire between her and the rest of us. The crackle of flames. I’d watched the shadows cast by the moon, and my eyes felt heavy. I’d pulled the trench coat to my chin like a blanket and Sterling had come in, soft as silk; she was not the kind of cat who would leave me cold. And after a while I wasn’t shivering anymore and my teeth weren’t clacking like they’d been and the bruise up my chin didn’t throb as hard and I’d grown used to the butterflied wound on my head. I found some kind of music in the space between Old Carmen’s snores and the sizzling of the fire and the sound of the waves carried toward shore.

  I woke in the hour just before dawn. The tide had rolled in high and begun to retreat again—slide away. Through the smoke of the dying fire, I could see the giraffe way out near the horizon, empty bookshelves in the nudge of low waves, window frames, beach umbrellas, a bike built for two, its back wheels spinning. I saw the mustard- colored door of my own refrigerator, its silver handle like the fin of a marlin. I saw one half of a pair of ladybug wings.

  I felt eyes on me and I turned to find Old Carmen up on one elbow, a white-bread sandwich spread on a wax- paper napkin on her chunk of the rock. She pulled her fingers through her Chia hair as a way of straightening up. Offered me half a sandwich. “No, thanks,” I said, because I was busy feeding that cat with the handful of Friskies that was left. “We’re going parsimonious, Sterling,” I said. “Rations from here on out.”

  Her whiskers, her tongue, her sandpaper nose on the palm of my hand.

  “Confusion at sea,” I heard Old Carmen say, and I looked out to where the sun was rising, flamingo pink, just an eyebrow of it now inside the early-morning weather. On our side of the sun six dolphins had come, slow among the floating things, testing their smells, their gravities, pushing the heavy metal around with their noses. They’d dive and then come up with a pair of argyle tights draped around their necks, a pane of curtains, a dark green Hefty bag, and then they’d shake the junk off, dive down again, scavengers hunting for a clean stretch, until the gulls were part of it, and a white crane, a stream of low-flying pipers.

  I watched through the dying smoke. Old Carmen finished her sandwich. She stoked the fire. She folded the tarp she’d slept on and looked up at the flag still flying; we had survived our first night after the storm. Down below—half awake, sleep-stunned, murmuring—the survivors were wrapped up in their towels and their blankets, double hoods pulled over their heads, sand inside the tubing of their socks.

  A great blue heron sauntered over the keys of the piano.

  Far, far away, on the flat sand by the shore, I saw something gold, slow, sure.

  I sat up. Squinted hard. I threw my trench coat on, grabbed Sterling.

  “Bug in your pants?” Old Carmen asked.

  “Deni,” I said. “She’s alive.”

  “Tell me everything,” she said. “Everything. How are you?”

  She had one arm in a sling fashioned out of a towel. She had the sleeves of that army jacket cranked crooked. There was mud on both knees and a bruise on one cheek. There were tears in her eyes, and her antennae hair had been smacked down flat on her head.

  She’d yanked Gem away from the tide and went full throttle when she saw me. She’d tossed one arm out of the machine and waved, frantic. “Hey! Hey! Oh my God, Mira. Hey!” She’d climbed out, then, and beelined—the stretch of sand between us like an obstacle course, both of us limping more than running; such a strange and spastic hurry.

  “Jesus, Deni.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Shit.”

  Her voice so raspy and both of us hugging until we’d maybe break, we didn’t break, we had not broken. High in my trench coat pocket, Sterling squirmed.

  “That’s a real fine cat,” Deni said. And she burst out crying.

  “Tell me everything.”

  This time I said it.

  “Cinnamon Nose,” she said. “Is missing.”

  She sobbed and I held her. She tried, with her story. Said her house was in one piece and one block down from its original address, a chunk of someone’s kiddie pool glued to its side. Said the first floor had been soaked through but the ocean had receded, and in the dark of night, in the howling storm, they’d saved the photographs, the newspaper clippings, the hero’s flag, the Reverend’s favorite crosses and his best-starched collar, her brother’s medal. They’d enacted the emergency plan, put it into action, shuffling and saving, step by step, and then the washing machine had torn loose from its pipes and pinned Deni to the wall, crushed her lungs, and she couldn’t breathe to scream, she was dying, but her mother had saved her, dragged and kicked the machine away, tied Deni’s twisted arm into a towel, kept saying, I’m sorry, and the water was rising and it was dark. It wasn’t until Deni was on the second floor with her mom, in the three rental rooms, the saved things as tucked away as anything could be in that storm, that Deni called for Cinnamon Nose and the dog didn’t come.

  “I looked through all the dark and didn’t see him,” Deni said, describing how she’d run from window to window, opening one and calling out into the dark, “Come back here, you beautiful dog. Come back to us.” But the dog was gone.

  “He’s nowhere, Mira. I can’t find him.”

  Half of Deni’s vowels lost to the rasp inside her throat.

  All of her story a heartbreak.

  “Everything’s chaos,” Deni said.

  “Complete and utter.”

  “World come to an end. Revelations.” She sobbed. She stopped. She continued. “I kept thinking about my dad and about my brother. How neither one would stand for this. Wouldn’t have let it happen. But I did.”

  “It was a storm, Deni.”

  “Shore up. Right? Shore up. I was prepared. I thought I was.”

  “Weather’s bigger than the rest of us.”

  “I wanted to stop it.”

  “No, Deni. All of us. None of us could stop it.”

  She held her twisted arm with her still-good hand. She turned and looked toward the beach and all its ruin, the stumps and blasts and char. “Tell me,” she said again, “everything.” She touched the bandage on my head.

  “Clobbered by a red octagon,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Corner stop sign.”

  “For real?”

  “For real.”

  “Jasper Lee and Mickey?”

  “Still on the mainland, best as I know. Phones have all gone wonky.”

  I told her what I knew. I told her the size of the storm in my house, showed her the color of my bruises, which she called (of course she did) medium rare. I told her about Chang and Mario and the deer and Old Carmen, how she’d come for me with a rope over one shoulder, how she’d knotted the ladder and tossed one end to me, how she had waited, how I had climbed. Down once. Up once. Down again. I’d climbed, and Rapunzel still hung.

  “Old Carmen?”

  “Serious.”

  Deni bobbed her head as she listened. No and yes and are you shitting me, biting her bottom lip, touching the bruise on her face, coaxing her hair back up into its antennae spikes, and when she reached for Sterling, Sterling went on command—out of my pocket into Deni’s hands and then up onto Deni’s shoulders, where that cat sat, swiping one paw at the gulls who came too close, and now Deni was talking again, more news from her side, news on her mom, who was mostly fine, a couple of scratches from her war with the machine, a sliver of glass beneath one eye, and now back at the house tha
t had sailed off its moorings, looking for whatever church members she could find.

  “Pooling their stockpiles,” Deni said. “Charcoal grills, charcoal briskets, charcoal pits, whatever there is that didn’t go under.” The idea of it was a community meal. The plan was to incorporate as many live human beings as anyone could find and whatever wares they could come up with—whatever was thawing in the dead freezers, whatever was floating in the pantries, whatever the gulls and the waves hadn’t gotten to yet in the aisles of McCauley’s.

  “The plan is a meal,” Deni said. “At North. The plan is to serve.”

  There were more people on the beach—picking and hauling, walking and dazed, zigzagging between ruptures and frames, shattered dishes, copper-bottomed pots, crab traps. The smell of things rotting.

  “Total mess,” Deni said.

  “Total,” I agreed.

  “We need hope,” she said. “We need—”

  And I knew, and she knew, that in all our talk there was a name we hadn’t said, there was news we hadn’t gotten to, there was Eva, who lived in Deni’s part of Haven, whom Deni would have looked for first, of whom Deni was not speaking.

  “Tell me about Eva.”

  “I can’t find her,” Deni said, her voice breaking again. “I’ve looked,” she said. “Her house is gone. It’s vanished.”

  Nobody Deni had asked had seen Eva. Nobody had seen her parents or her two-year-old sister, Chrissy Sue, born to help save Eva’s parents’ marriage. Chrissy Sue was Eva’s live-action doll. She had orange hair and dark brown eyes and chubby feet and fat fingers. She was the marriage solution that had not worked, Eva’s parents fighting louder than before, over the baby’s head, as they rocked her and fed her. And now Chrissy Sue was missing and the parents were missing and Eva was missing, but Eva missing was impossible. It couldn’t be true.