Float (19 page)

As the crowd lifted their glasses, a roar of weather shook the house down to its rocky foundations. The windows rattled, and the wind howled in the chimney like a ghost. No one moved. The trees creaked and groaned as a wall of tide reached up from the beach and landed on the lawn with a crash of water within inches of the house. Above the sound of the wind they heard the deafening sound of a wave building strength as it rolled in from the sea, then listened to it crash onto the land. Before anyone realized that the water was upon them, it rushed across the porch, bursting the lawn furniture out from its ropes. A metal chair tumbled over itself three times before it came crashing through one of the windows. As everyone tried to crowd onto the furniture, Chandu barked and snapped at their heels to herd them to safety.

The party was over. As Duncan fumbled with the flashlight in the basement, trying to resuscitate the antiquated fuse box, he heard the sounds of footfalls, breaking plates, and furniture being scraped across the floor as people exited blindly in the dark over his head. The floorboards bowed and creaked under the pressure of the departing crowd, loosening dust and debris that rained down upon his head. He heard Slocum scrambling for the Chinese gong in the dining room, and then he heard him whack it with a metal object, most likely the Crustastun.

“Abandon ship!” Slocum shouted. “Grab food and head for Ten Bells.” Ten Bells was on the next street up from Manavilins, high enough above sea level that they wouldn’t have to move again. The guests hooted and cheered. These were men and women on speaking terms with the outdoors, and they loved nothing better than a good blow. They would have been game to stay on if it weren’t for the possibility of being stranded out on the Cove after the beer had run out. One by one Duncan heard the cars and pickups grind into gear. He looked up at the basement window and saw headlights shine weakly through the storm, then fade away, leaving a teeming black void with nothing to distinguish between the elements. Water, earth, air—it was all the same now. It might be the beginning of the world, or the end of it.

As he stood contemplating the intensity of nature, a wave pounced on the house, letting in gushes of water along the basement window seams, and he got back to business. His hands were unsteady as he replaced one fuse, then another, amazed to find a carton of replacements within easy reach. The lights came on, and he exhaled in relief. There was hope. The blackout had been an internal problem, not an act of God. If the utility lines had been knocked down by trees, he would be unable to leave his mother sitting alone in a dark house, and she would never leave that house with him. Now he could go to Cora with a clear conscience, and who knew—maybe Nod would show up to keep his mother company.

Well, he knew. He just didn’t want to admit it. The very thought of where his brother might be at that moment caused a surge of foreboding to rise up in his chest, but that got pushed back by the demands at hand. With electricity restored, it was probably not safe to be standing in water, not with the building’s history of loose wires. He started wading back to the steps, and as he reached for the banister he noticed that the wine barrels, stored on their sides under the stairwell, were beginning to jiggle as the water rose. It was not unusual after a nor’easter to find that the barrels had floated to different corners of the cellar. He would take a hatchet to them in the morning and chalk it up to the storm.

By the time Duncan returned from the flooded basement, everyone was gone. The rogue tide had retreated as well, leaving the floor soaked and the fire out. There was no human noise, only the deep howling of the hurricane as the wind shook the house like a tambourine. It was now two hours until high tide. Two more hours of increasing assault upon the house. The odds were not good.

“Mom! Where are you?”

He had to wander through the rooms; the storm was too loud to be heard. She was not on the first floor, or the second. For one brief moment he thought she might actually have left with the crowd, but he found her in the epicenter of her insanity, the war room on the third floor.

“Isn’t this exciting!” She held her velvet push-stick with both hands as she shoved the little boats around the painted harbor as if she were playing championship shuffleboard. Chandu paced the perimeter of the octagonal room, pausing at every window to look down at the harbor spreading out over the lawn and tickling the foundation. The noise outside was frightening.

“It’s not exciting for everyone,” said Duncan. “Certainly not for Nod.”

“Nonsense.” She stopped her playing for a moment and looked outside. “It’s in the winds of change that we find our true direction, and he’s finding his. You and me, Duncan, we’ve become fearful of losing sight of the shore, and it holds us back in life. Not so your brother. He’s going to break through, just like your father.”

“Dad didn’t ‘break through,’ Mom. He died.” Duncan picked up her glass from the ship log stand. “How much of this have you had today?”

“It’s an invigorating restorative in tough times.”

“It’s not a restorative, it’s a hallucinogen, and you have to stop.”

She had her back to him as she tapped the glass tube of a barometer on the wall. “Tonic, hallucinogen—we live in mystery one way or another.”

“You live in oblivion, not mystery, and at the cost of not ever leaving this house.”

She turned and flipped her braid over her shoulder. “Look who’s talking. When you showed up at the door a few weeks ago it was like finding a sailboat adrift. Not only have you lost your compass, Duncan, dear, but your binnacle is cracked.”

The wind belted the house, and it shuddered as if it were spinning on its axis. He knew he should see this conversation to its end, but as she would say, this was no time. He had to get to Cora’s while he still could. “I’m going,” he said, and he turned away before realizing he had to at least
ask
the obvious question. “Do you want to come with me?”

Chandu stood still and seemed to be listening for something beyond the storm. His mother fiddled with the end of her braid as she studied the harbor on the floor. “Did you know that the word
hurricane
comes from a Mexican god of storm called
hurakon
?”

“Okay, then, you stay right here and placate your Mexican god. I’m going.”

“Go, but remember this,” she said as she peered closely at the Log. “You can’t change the direction of the wind, but you can adjust your sails.”

“I’ll go by the harbor road in case Nod has pulled up somewhere along the shore,” he said as he headed to the door.

“Wait.” His mother held up a hand and studied the boats. Chandu settled on the floor and rested his head on a stack of Pilot Rules and sighed. “He won’t be along the harbor. If my calculations are correct, he should have been pushed up onto the opposite shore.”

Duncan patted his clothes for his cell phone. “I wonder if the Coast Guard has started an official search-and-rescue for him yet.”

“Don’t bother them,” she said. “They have enough on their plates. Look at this.” She gently shoved a little white boat. “With the flat bottom of the inflatable, Nod should have landed right here, and fairly smoothly at that. He’s probably waiting it out now in someone’s garden shed.” She waved at all the other boats with her stick. “But the rest all have keels and rudders, and they’re going to keep on going with a fury.”

A wave reverberated against the house. “I think I’ll just keep on going, too,” said Duncan. “You know how to reach me if you hear anything about Nod, and I’ll call you if I do. Stay by the phone.”

“‘You have to go out, and that’s a fact. Nothing says you have to come back,’” she murmured to herself as she took a sip of her wine. “Remember that? The motto of the old life-saving organization in town.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Enough of that for now, Duncan, dear.” She moved a cell phone aside and started paging back through the Log furiously, until she got to the year 1913. Duncan picked up the phone and turned it over.

“This is a pretty kettle of fish,” she said. “This could be a hundred-year tide. That changes everything.” She downed the rest of her glass and, armed with her stick, began to push the boats in all directions until they were collected in a tight bundle in the middle of the harbor.

Duncan opened the phone. “This is Nod’s.”

She didn’t look up from her work. “Yes. He must have left it behind when he came up to get your father’s compass.”

“Why would he need a compass to go around the corner?”

“Duncan, dear, use your eyes! It’s a hurricane out there. When you can’t see the nose in front of your face, you have to rely on the magnetism of the universe to find your way.”

Duncan put the phone back on the stand. “Then you shouldn’t have sent him out as the storm was coming in.”

“I’m his mother. I did what was best and gave him what he needed—a little
push.
” And with that she putted Nod’s white boat like a golf ball and let it skid off the land and across the harbor, gliding over the islands and out to the painted sea, where monsters be. “Hmm,” she said. Outside came a crash of water so thundering that Duncan felt it through the bottom of his bare feet.

“What do you mean, he needed a little push?”

“To grow up! ‘Put out into deep water,’ as your father used to say.” She clenched her fist and looked outside at the world, which in its current chaos could not be fathomed for more than a foot or two. “He’s in his element now. Water! Unknown and unknowable to those on the outside, it reveals a man to himself when he becomes immersed.”

“Or it kills him,” said Duncan.

“Duncan, dear, leading a timid life cannot help you avoid the inevitable doom that waits for us. The grappling claw of the sea-puss gets us all in the end.”

“Mom, you need help.”

“As do you. Nod isn’t the only one who needs a little push around here.” She pointed the stick at him. “It’s why I invited Syrie. I found her Dirty Talk mask in your jacket pocket, along with an incriminating photo of you with birds. I wanted to see what was going on between you two. I wanted Cora to know what she had on her hands before she got any deeper into the soup. You’re more at sea than Nod is right now. In fact, you’ve become a navigational hazard.”

“Nothing is going on. Why would you complicate my life like that?”

“To get you out of this house! You can’t follow in my wake, boy. You haven’t the temperament.”

Outside, there was another huge crash of water that shook the house. Chandu stood up again and started pacing. His mother looked out of the window, where, in the complete and utter darkness, inexhaustible waves were rolling in over the miles toward them.

“Well, if you’re really going to go, go,” she said. “Don’t stand here talking to me about it—do it. And you’d better take the Duck, or you’ll never get across the causeway.”

Duncan looked down at where the driveway used to be, now under a foot of water. His mother’s old Jaguar was still there, with water gushing up over its wheel wells. His truck was gone. Syrie must have taken it, trying to keep him from getting to Cora.

“I’ll get to her in spite of you,” he said.

Behind him he heard his mother’s footsteps pounding on the floor, and he turned. Her neck chords stood out like a ship’s rigging as she raised her stick over her head. She had such a look of fatal determination in her eyes that for one horrific moment he thought she meant to kill him. But she continued past him, nimble in her bare feet over the painted coves and inlets, skipping over the submerged pier toward the cluster of boats. Then she held her stick above her head with one hand like a harpooner and released it with a single powerful blow. The stick slid across the painted water, taking the boats with it to the inner harbor, where they skidded and tumbled past the shore and did not stop until they hit the wall.

She put her hands on her hips. “Doesn’t look good.”

“What do you mean?”

“The boats and the tide will be hitting Seacrest’s beach in about an hour.” She consulted the tide chart. “One hour, eight minutes, and forty-seven seconds.”

“What?”

“Use your eyes, Duncan! Look at the floor! When the tide goes out, it’s going to take Seacrest’s with it. Annihilated. Gone. And to think of all the time you used to waste worrying about it going bankrupt. You’ve set yourself on a wrong course, my son.”

Duncan listened to the roaring ocean, and it seemed to be coming from inside his head. “You’re wide of the mark, Mom,” he said. “You can’t predict that.”

She stood at the window and leaned on her stick, but there was nothing to see but pillars of rain slamming on the glass. “It’s the way the old building would want to go,” she said. “I think your father would agree with me on this one. Now leave. At times like this a woman should be alone with her own soul.”

The lobsters were running free in the house, either abandoned by Slocum or liberated by Marney during the confusion of packing up and getting out. While Duncan suited up with rain gear and boots, he nearly tripped over one pulling itself across the living room floor. Freed of their claw bands in prep for their date with the Crustastun, they were now trying to find their way home, nosing about at the bottom of the French windows where seawater alternately puddled and poured into the house. One daredevil hung by a single claw from the heavy drapes. As for the smashed window, someone had thought to barricade it with an upended table, then braced it with the metal lawn chair that had acted as a missile. The wind blew cocktail napkins around the room, where they settled and dissolved like jellyfish on the wet floor. Duncan picked up a couple of the lobsters for Cora and stuck them in his slicker pockets. He should have thought of flowers—he should have thought of a lot of things—but there was nothing wrong with a gift of lobsters. He and Cora might just have a romantic lobster dinner after all—it would just be without the lollypop glaze.

“Good luck, bugs,” he said to the rest of them. “Turn out the lights on your way out.”

After struggling with a ferocious wind that almost ripped the front door out of his hand, he stood on the porch and faced the wild, wet darkness, eerily lit by the glowing bait under the eaves. The sticks shuddered violently on the line, looking like St. Elmo’s fire. At the rate the water was rising, the swordfish might soon be able to reach them. Duncan peeked around the corner where the outdoor furniture had been stored, and it was all gone—gone along with the banister it had been loosely tied to; gone, too, was the box of framed seaweed. A family history in bladderwrack, gone. He huddled against the wind for a moment, letting the storm beat upon him, then he removed his glasses, pulled his hood tight, and turned to make a mad dash to the garage. The wind was right in his teeth. The water was up to his ankles one moment, his shins the next as the wind pushed and pulled the newly formed lake around the lawn. Water began to slosh into his boots, and as he bent to adjust his rain pants over the tops, a great strip of seaweed came flying through the darkness and slapped him on the cheek.

“Damn.” He was peeling it away from his face when the tree under which he stood groaned in a sort of “I’m going to drop this limb on you now” way, so he continued his rapid slosh toward safety. The front path ended, and he had to step into the rushing water of the driveway, pulling himself along by grabbing onto shrubs before making it to the garage, that vast edifice originally built for horses, carriages, and boats. He pushed the heavy sliding door open, and there was the Duck, his one portal to the outside world. He climbed up to the driver’s seat and fumbled under the steering column in the dark and found the key, exactly where it should be. “Thank you, Nod.”

He took the lobsters out of his pocket and settled them on the floor behind his seat. He wiped his glasses dry with a tissue he found in the glove compartment and put them back, then undid his hood for better visibility, releasing a pool of water around him. He secured all the plastic side windows of the driver’s cab. It was not a waterproof seal by any means, and he felt he was facing a hurricane in a pup tent. But it was better than no tent. He turned on the ignition and found the wipers, which he needed even in the garage, what with the rain slamming horizontally through the open doors. He looked over at the house, which was now surrounded by water on all eight sides. On the third floor, the war room’s light shone weakly through the rain, and he saw the silhouette of his mother pass by, her stick on her shoulder.

He shoved the Duck into gear. It was time to move forward. He would drive by Seacrest’s on his way to Cora, on the off chance his mother was right about the building coming down. In many ways, it would be a blessing if it did because then he would be free from Osbert and he could start anew, with Cora, somewhere far away. But he could not think of any of that now. The noise of the drumming rain on the cab’s roof was deafening, and water started to spit in at him from the window seams. His visibility was limited to the few feet that the headlights managed to illuminate, so he had to follow the flooded road by memory. The only indication that he was where he should be was the occasional mailbox lifting its head out of the water like a sea monster. He looked in the rearview mirror but could see nothing, not even to the end of the Duck. He hoped the scuppers were open so the vehicle would not fill with water and slow him down. Or pull him down. And yet, it felt heady to be driving so high up, in such a strong metal beast. It made him feel invincible.

He turned a corner, out from behind the protection of the houses, and immediately felt the wind slam into the Duck, which shook but did not slide across the road. Duncan grasped the wheel tighter. The trees on either side of him swayed back and forth like underwater plants. Out in the darkness he heard but could not see the harbor. The sea continued to boil, undoubtedly crunching vessels lying at anchor and absorbing the debris into its unfathomable maw. Nod, Nod, Nod. Nothing could save him from this storm. The time to save him had been before he’d even left, and Duncan had failed at so simple a task.

Water poured down the windshield in sheets so thick that he had only a second of visibility after the wipers cleared the view, like watching photos being flipped by an unseen thumb. He braked with a lurch when the thumb stopped at the flooded causeway. His headlights shone on the debris washing past with the tide and spilling over into the salt marsh, which was indistinguishable now from the ocean that fed it. Logs, nets, shreds of hulls, lobster traps, plastic fish boxes, small appliances—off they went. Duncan half-expected to see Nod sweep by in the inflatable, and then he thought how easy it would be to get washed away himself. He hoped the Duck’s engine was up to this.

He looked at the fuel gauge. “Almost empty,” he said out loud. He wanted to be angry with Nod, but what with him missing at sea, it seemed a petty thing to contemplate. In truth, he had only himself to blame. He should have checked the gauge before he left. He could have siphoned oil from the home’s heating system. His own bad decisions had led him right to where he was at that moment, out in a hurricane, caught between his childhood home and his marital bed, with only a teaspoon full of diesel to see him through.

It would have to be enough. He only had to get to Seacrest’s, where there was plenty of fuel to be had. He inched the Duck into the water until he felt the tires lift from the pavement, then switched on the propeller. The Duck jerked alarmingly to the right, but it quickly regained its stability and began to chug over the washed-out section of the road to the other side. The wild screaming of the gale made him want to scream himself, but he could not afford to lose concentration as he tried to keep a straight path. He felt a hard bump underneath the Duck and realized he had made it across, even managing to arrive more or less back on the road. He paused to reflect on his success when, off to his left in the harbor, a white fishing boat appeared, lifted from a furrow by a large wave, then disappeared again. Its estimated landfall would be …

He slammed the Duck into gear and did not look back. He rounded the corner into town and was just about to take a breath when he had to brake again. A splintered oak had fallen across the road, exposing a gothic cathedral of jagged roots and taking the electric lines with it. Houses nearby were dark behind their high fences, and their lawns were underwater. He could see the road on the other side of the tree, but there was no way to it. He’d have to take High Ridge into town and hope that the Duck could squeeze through its narrow lanes and negotiate its sharp turns.

He backed up to change direction but was soon stopped again. Another tree, more downed wires. A garage by the road was missing its roof. A car was tipped over on its side. He could wait it out where he was, sitting in the Duck until the roads were opened, or he could try to get back to where he came from. His mother’s house.

“No,” he said. “No, no, no,
no.
” With some difficulty, he turned the Duck around, back to the harbor road, and stopped. He closed his eyes and imagined the short bit of coastline from where he was to Seacrest’s, and he realized that if he could just navigate the Duck the few hundred yards past the stony lump of land that bulged out into the water, he could ride the tide onto Seacrest’s beach. He could do it. He could. He opened his eyes and saw the rolling green tides batter the shore.

“I can’t do this.” And it wasn’t fear of the water that made him say it. The Duck could navigate land and sea, but it could not fly over the walls that stood between him and the water. Right ahead was the “Lightkeeper’s House,” whose raw plywood was swollen with rain and bowing out from the frame. The roof on the fake lighthouse was gone, and he imagined the tower filling with the sea. Usually surrounded by weeds, the house was now surrounded by water. The gate was swinging open and closed, open and closed.

Duncan looked around, tapped the fuel gauge, said a prayer, and gunned the motor. He waited for his moment when the gate slammed open, then steered the Duck into the driveway, scraping both sides of the vessel against the pillars. The gate and the fence were so rotted they just gave way. The driveway turned into lawn that sloped down to the water and became a launch, letting the Duck roll into the harbor. It immediately began rocking and snorting. He was waterborne, and then airborne as a wave picked him up. In that moment he did not think “death” but “life,” and then he could think of nothing through the pumping of blood in his head. The Duck belly flopped back on the water without splitting in half, and Duncan choked out a little laugh.

The compass on the dashboard glowed a fluorescent direction that he could not read because the needle was too jittery. He would have to steer by his gut. If only he hadn’t shied away from the water these past few years, he might have more confidence. He was as bad as his mother. He thought of his father, clinging to his little boat when the squall came up, with nature leaving no options. Duncan hoped that when his father got swept overboard, he did not linger long. That was the worst part. The suffering. The lungs filling with water even as the brain remained on. It was why Clyde Harmon talked about keeping a gun on board. And yet, knowing his father, he would never have equated sinking with drowning. He would have remained positive even as the pressurized world turned slow, dark, then quietly black.

Duncan felt the surf twisting the Duck’s screw, but on it chugged. Off to his lee side, he saw a boat rear up like a great sea beast, leaping clear out of the water then dropping sideways. He thought of his mother’s warning that all the boats were heading this way, toward Seacrest’s, but he could not see through the walls of water that surrounded him. His amphibious vessel powered on without sinking, even as he jerked it back and forth to avoid the rocks and the heaving navigational markers, which appeared and disappeared like deathly phantoms. He thought of his father. “You have to just hunker down and ride out the storm, son,” he used to say in the face of any problem that Duncan brought to him, whether it was math homework as a child or girl problems later in life. He never offered any specifics on these matters, only the one piece of advice: perseverance. Then from nowhere, other words shot through his brain, sounding very much like Winston Churchill: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

He stepped on the accelerator and kept going, buffeted by the storm, which soon felt like an extension of himself, something not to be fought but to be accepted. Since he could not change the water, he would change himself. He would enjoy it, lost in a wild ride into the darkness, thrilling, frightening, and brief though it was. It might be all there was.

The Duck, amazingly, cleared the rocky point without crashing, and almost immediately got swept sideways on a massive swell, propelled toward what Duncan could only hope was Seacrest’s beach. The boat went down on its ear before righting itself. Mountains of black water surrounded him. No lights shone through the mountains, but that could be because there was no electricity in town. Noah’s dove could not find land in this storm, but Duncan refused to panic. His shoulders ached from holding the wheel so hard, and he wanted to let go, at least long enough to put on a life jacket, which was something he should have thought about much sooner than this.

It became clear he would have to do more than just hold on. He could not just ride the wave and hope for the best any longer. Even if he was going in the right direction, the chances of a smooth landing in this storm were nil. He would be battered to pieces on the shore—if not here, then elsewhere. He opened the throttle all the way, even at the risk of running out of fuel, so that he could steer the Duck perpendicular to the waves so it would not get rolled over. The windshield wipers continued to work furiously against the onslaught of water, and there was a brief moment when he was lifted up, as if by a hand, and held aloft long enough to see the glimmer of a light on shore. Seacrest’s. Yes, it was Seacrest’s. He’d made it, and he began to laugh, and in it he heard the crazy laugh of his brother. It was a pure, sweet glimpse into Nod’s soul, now that it was too late. For a moment it seemed as if the ocean stopped moving and the world stopped spinning. It was as if his mind cleared itself of a lifetime of accumulated debris, useless fears and damaging thoughts, and in this clearing, in this clear blue light of heightened awareness, he realized that the keys to Seacrest’s were attached to the ignition keys in his pickup truck, somewhere with Syrie.

That was a problem. But it was not the problem of the very moment. Slowly, slowly, he started to rise again. He smiled at the sight of the lights returning and went higher still. As high as he was lifted, he was suddenly dropped into a valley set down among the high hills of the sea, and the boat shuddered in pain. The cabin immediately began to take on water. He held his breath when it reached his face, and then all the noise stopped as he became completely submerged. He felt his glasses slip off his face and float away, but he could not take his hands off the wheel to save them. A figure appeared before his closed eyes. He was hallucinating, but at least he knew he was. It was Cora, wrapped only in a mist. He remembered what Slocum said about gales subsiding if a naked woman appeared before a sailor. He felt saved, even as he was plunging into the night. It was very dark, but peaceful in a way he could not have anticipated. He was almost calm. He did not even panic as his lungs began to ache. He clutched the wheel tighter. What else was there to do? What went down would come back up, in theory, and at the very lowest point in the swell he felt himself lifted again and all the water drained out of the cab. He breathed. He hoarded air as he felt the vessel begin the cycle again. This happened two times more, and two times more he held his breath and refused to panic. He held on to the wheel and gunned the motor to keep her from rolling under the waves.