We Are Unprepared (29 page)

Me: It was me! I told everyone you were there, Pia. I was terrified for you. Are you okay now?

Pia: Yes, they took me to a pop-up medical site in Shelburne, which is where I am now. It took a while to recover, but I'm okay. It was scary. There were all these people with terrible injuries. Some of them died, Ash.

Me: I don't know what to say. I'm so, so sorry.

Pia: Thanks. I'm fine now. I've met some interesting people here, too. It's not as bad as it sounds.

Me: I'm just glad you're okay.

Our conversation continued like that for a while: Pia reported on the tragedies she'd seen and I stumbled along in the typed equivalent of speechlessness. I was sad for her, sorry for the responsibility I took for her experience, confused about what I was supposed to say. She didn't ask much about what had happened to August and me; I didn't expect her to. Finally, we had to go. Computer time was strictly enforced and I had already spent too much time at the one in front of me. I was unsure of how to conclude such a discussion and relieved to be rushed off without time to consider it.
I love you and I'll find you tomorrow
was how I signed off. She said something similar and that was it. We needed to make a plan for how to find each other, figure out our lives, but it would not happen on that day.

Once I knew Pia was alive, I could breathe again. The choking sensation that had been strangling me for weeks loosened around my neck, and I began to believe that life would go on. But how, I couldn't fathom. It was difficult to imagine a poststorm world in which Pia and I returned to one another—almost as difficult to imagine a world in which we were apart. Still, something changed when I left her in The Storm—or she chose not to join me. (Which had it been?) There was a lot of death around us in those days and we couldn't yet tell the difference between temporary changes and permanent endings. Whether our marriage could be saved after all that had happened was unclear.

I roamed around the cinder-block high school that had become my communal home like a zombie after that, watching others as they worked to stay upbeat and plan for the rest of their rearranged lives.

During lunch the next day, it was announced that Interstate 89 had almost dried out and road crews were hoping to open parts of it up within a few days, which elicited a round of tepid applause. Most people had nowhere to go, but it was the first hopeful thing we'd heard in a while.

The day after that, the bathrooms on the east side of the shelter clogged up and the entire wing had to be cordoned off.

Salt packets and napkins ran out in the cafeteria.

An old man died in his sleep.

These were the details of our lives: large and small, meaningful and minute. We responded to everything with equal attention because our physical and mental survival depended on both. We pondered the existential challenges of this new, devastated world while praying to God that the coffee supply didn't run out. In a different life, I would have thought it a humiliating existence, but coffee takes on a new flavor when it's the greatest available pleasure.

Pia and I chatted online every day for a week until finally the main road between her shelter and mine was scheduled to reopen. She said she could get a ride to Isole with the next delivery of supplies, which was two days away. I was thrilled. The promise of holding my wife again was the most hopeful news I'd received since August left. All of a sudden, the doubt and confusion I'd been feeling with our distance faded. I was sure that seeing her, smelling her, feeling her, would be curative; our bodies would remind our hearts why we needed each other.

TWENTY-FIVE

ROAD IMPROVEMENTS TURNED
out to be more complicated and time-consuming than state officials anticipated, so Pia's arrival was delayed by several days. This was nerve-racking for me personally, but it also heightened tensions at the shelter because it delayed the delivery of supplies. We had learned to live without things like paper towels, but the absence of toilet paper, tampons and Advil was taking its toll. One afternoon a fistfight among three restless teenage boys broke out in one of the hallways and, though I was among the adults who helped break the guys up, part of me envied their freedom to express the frustration we were all suppressing. The living arrangement couldn't last much longer.

After the fight, the adults at the shelter agreed on the need to open the doors and allow for more exposure to the outside. Up to that point, the flooding had been so deep and polluted that no one went through the heavy doors of the high school unless they were accompanied by rescue workers. But the sun had been out for days and anyone with a pair of boots could wade through the muck by then, so it was time to get some air.

I was among the first to get outside. I borrowed a pair of too-large wellies from the man who slept three cots down and just roamed for a while under the direct sun. The water was ankle deep with a dark, oily reflective quality from all the filth it held. We were told that it was mostly farm waste runoff, but we knew better. It smelled like chemicals we couldn't identify and human sewage when the wind blew from the east. Livestock were decomposing in it—maybe people, too; we weren't ready to consider that. Still, the sun was hot on my face, I had two working feet and it felt good to be outside.

I roamed around the high school grounds for two hours on that day, down the main road to a gas station that had been abandoned and back across the underwater baseball field. A total of five trucks had passed in the time I was out, each creeping slowly through the poisonous pool and stuffed with people whose desperation was clear from afar. I couldn't have guessed where they were going; it seemed unlikely that there was anywhere to escape
to
. I suppose they were in search of the people they'd lost in The Storm, other desperate people in equally bad places.

When I finally went back inside, a volunteer directed me to the locker room to shower and change immediately—a precaution we all agreed upon before opening the doors. I took a threadbare pink towel from a bin and made my way down an empty hall. As I turned the corner for the men's room, a small, hurried body nearly crashed into me. It was Maggie.

“Ash!” she yelled and threw her arms around me in a quick hug. “I wondered if you would be here! I'm so glad you're okay.”

I felt a surge of relief and excitement; it was like a dream to see her standing there. In all my anxiety about Pia, I'd been working to
not
think of Maggie. I had decided that I didn't deserve to miss Maggie or to wonder what could become of us. I had almost convinced myself that she wasn't real at all—and then there she was, standing in front of me. Her hair was pulled back into a messy ponytail and she had a smear of dirt above her left eye. There were new freckles on her face, as though she had been outside while the rest of us turned gray indoors.

“Maggie! What are you doing here? Are you staying here?”

“No... Sort of.” She stuffed a package of bandages into the back pocket of her jeans and straightened her T-shirt, which said Central Vermont Slalom Finals 2009 in fading blue letters across the breast. “I was here for the first few days—down on the other end by the theater—until I could get to my parents' house. I'm just volunteering now. How about you? Did you lose your house?”

“I think so. I don't know, really,” I sputtered. It seemed as though years had passed since we had last seen each other, and bringing her up to speed on all that had happened was too daunting.

“Is Pia here, too?”

“No, she's in Shelburne. We're going to see each other soon.”

“Of course.” Maggie nodded. “I'm glad she's okay.”

We looked silently at each other, considering who we were supposed to be at that moment. I wanted more than anything to hold on to her, but I couldn't allow it. It wasn't just her that I wanted either. I wanted to feel more of what she had reawakened in me. After weeks of moving anonymously and robotically through my days in the shelter, seeing her reminded me that I was
known
by someone, was more than a ghost in Isole. I wanted to see Peg and Salty, too, to hear their stories about how the rest of the town had fared. Seeing Maggie reminded me of my place in Isole. It was my home.

“Do you have a car that can get around in this?” I asked Maggie tentatively.

“I do!” She seemed eager to change the subject. “My dad's truck gets me here. There are only a few open roads, but it's enough. Do you want to go somewhere?”

“Can we get to our road? I want to see my house. And August and Peg. Have you been back?”

Maggie shook her head. “Our road is still underwater. I think it will be another few days before it dries out. Is there anywhere else you want to go?”

Somehow, I knew the answer to this question immediately.

“Yeah, can you take me to see my friend Crow?”

She smiled. “I know Crow. Everyone knows Crow. Sure!”

Maggie didn't ask why we needed to see Crow. She knew that I'd been lobbying locals for the dredging project, so maybe that explained the odd request. Mostly, I think she was happy to do something away from that place, which had developed sharper edges in the previous few days. And maybe she was content to just go somewhere with me.

On a normal day, in our previous lives, the drive up to Crow's hill would have taken about fifteen minutes from the high school. But on that day, it took over an hour. We crept slowly through the still-flooded main streets, leaving a spray of ugly liquid in our wake until we reached the foot of the small, unrecognizable mountain our truck would need to climb. Fallen trees blocked the most direct route, so we tried another back road that state crews appeared to have cleared. Wide patches of trees around us had fallen during The Storm, which made the face of the mountain look like the aftermath of a horror movie up close. Road crews had cut and cleared a narrow passage up the road, barely wide enough for our truck, and we prayed not to meet any oncoming adventurers as we drove.

We could barely breathe as we took in the devastation around us. Houses that had been tucked cozily into that forest for decades lay flat among the trees that once protected them. There were colorful remnants of the lives spent there—clothes, toys, furniture—peeking through fallen walls and piles of crumbled brick chimneys. Because we were slightly higher in elevation by then, we had left the flooding and entered a drier phase of desperation, where The Storm's destruction could be viewed unobstructed, baking in the afternoon sun. (It was still March, but the weather had stopped tracking with the seasons.)

The possibility that Crow might not be alive came to me slowly as I worked to understand what I was looking at. No one on that hill would have survived if they attempted to ride The Storm out there. Was his shelter that strong? It was one of those regions that I'd heard about on the news and over quiet conversations about the “missing.”

Maggie made a choking sound and I saw that she was crying as she held tight to the large leather wheel of the truck. The tears streamed down her face and dripped from her chin to her fading jeans, but she made hardly a sound. I wanted to reach across and touch her hair, but I didn't. I just sat there in the passenger seat feeling it, too. I would have cried if I could, but I was so hollowed out by my own loss and regret by then that crying seemed too much effort.

About a half mile from Crow's driveway, the cleared path that we had been following stopped abruptly. There was a massive pickup truck parked off to the side by a fat tree stump and a chain saw. Apparently, that was where the road crew's work had stopped. We had no other options but to leave our own truck in the middle of the road and walk the rest of the way.

We climbed out and began walking. I led the way with Maggie close behind. She had stopped crying by then. I could hear the crunch of her hiking boots as we focused our heads down on the mess of branches and uneven earth beneath us.

“There's a tree farm on the other side of this mountain,” she said from behind me. “My family and I used to go every year in early December to tag our Christmas tree. Always a balsam; it had to be a balsam. Then we'd go back a few weeks later when it was ready and my dad would cut it down with this dull handsaw that he insisted on using. I think it had been my grandfather's.”

We took a few more silent steps and I drifted into my own winter memories. Collecting evergreen boughs in the woods for my mother. Dragging new sleds up ancient hills...

“And now it's all gone,” I said. “We get so attached to these rituals and places. It feels like it matters...but maybe it doesn't.”

“What?” Maggie stopped abruptly and looked up at me as I turned around to face her. Her arms hung limp at her sides. “You don't believe that nihilist bullshit, Ash.” I had hurt her. “You're devastated by the loss of these
places
. I can see it all over you. I love that about you. You just saved a seven-year-old boy you barely know, so don't tell me none of this matters... Jesus.”

She began walking again and passed me on the left. Was she angry with me? I wanted to tell her that she was right, that those woods mattered more to me than almost anything and I was sick over what had become of them. But instead I said, “I know August really well.”

It was a relief to arrive at Crow's driveway and turn our attention back to the task at hand. We had to climb over several fallen trees and used our hands to fight through the bramble to get to the opening where his humble house sat. Because his home was located at the top of a hill and out in the open, it appeared to have fared better than many of its neighbors at lower elevations. I searched for signs of life as we made our way to the front door, but I saw nothing. Electricity was still out and phone lines were down for hundreds of miles. If there was anyone there, I imagined it to be the most isolating kind of existence.

Maggie stood silently behind me as I knocked on the door. One light set of knocks, and then a harder round. No one came. We shuffled our feet and looked up at the sun, which was lower now as it was close to four, but still warm on our skin. I considered checking in with the vague deity I'd been talking to in those days but couldn't summon the focus. After another minute, I stepped away from the door and began walking around back with Maggie in tow.

As we turned the corner around the back of the house, I saw Crow's large, intimidating German shepherd sleeping in the shade. He lifted his head but didn't bother with us. Next to him sat a rusty lawn chair that was fully reclined with its back to us.

“What do you want?” a young female voice said from the chair.

Someone was there, but it wasn't Crow. I jogged a few steps and looked down to see a girl of maybe sixteen lounging in the chair with her eyes closed and an old magazine draped over her stomach. It looked as if she had been sunbathing, but she wore tight jeans and a black T-shirt with the name of a band I'd never heard of. She was frightfully skinny and pale, with visible blue veins that snaked around her bare ankles. Her toenails were splotched with chipping black paint.

“Is Crow here?” I said. “I'm a friend of his.”

“What kind of friend?” she asked, with no apparent interest in opening her eyes or engaging further with me.

“A friend from...his meetings and from town. A regular friend. So he's alive?”

The girl snorted and opened her eyes. “Yeah, he's alive. He's in there.”

She pointed to the shed that housed Crow's bunker. I nodded and motioned for Maggie to follow. With the worry of Crow's whereabouts behind me, I was free to indulge my curiosity about how his little shelter had endured The Storm. I walked quickly toward it and swung the large wooden door open.

The thin metal door behind it was closed, but not locked, so I gave two light knocks and then stuck my head in. Crow was sitting on the couch beside a pile of old photos. The interior of the room looked untouched by The Storm. Everything was more or less where I remembered it to be, but with a few lived-in additions. A cup of old coffee sat on the tiny kitchen table with lumps of souring milk floating at the top. There was an armload of dirty clothes pushed into a corner.

Crow was staring forward at nothing in particular. He took a noticeably long time to look up and acknowledge our presence but smiled slightly when finally registering me.

“Ash. How are you, man?”

“I'm okay,” I said, moving a step forward to lean against the wall that the little bed folded into. “I wanted to make sure you were all right...and to see how things were going up here. You know my friend Maggie.”

Crow smiled a little wider, but his body remained wilted. “Nice to see you, honey.”

“This place looks great, Crow!” I went on. “It's, like, the only place in town that looks the same after The Storm. You were right about all this, you know?”

“Nah.” Crow shook his head and looked at the floor. “I wasn't right about shit.”

Something was very wrong.

“What do you mean? What happened?”

Crow took a deep breath and leaned back into the sagging couch.

“That girl out there?” He pointed through the metal walls. “She's my daughter. Smartest thing you'll ever meet. She lost her mom in The Storm—my ex-wife. I could have saved her, but I didn't. Now I'm alive and she's dead. For what?”

His eyes were searching into space again, glassy and vacant. We were barely there to him.

“Crow, tell us what happened,” Maggie said softly from my side. I could feel her body slide down effortlessly into a cross-legged position on the floor, where she would sit while we waited for his story.