This Is the Story of You (11 page)

She waited until my feet hit the ground before she asked: “Any
body 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, along 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.

“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.