This Is the Story of You (10 page)

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.

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.