It Will Come to Me (29 page)

Roush Spanier hopped nimbly from his stool and strode over to the illuminated weather map. “Well, as I say, we're seeing those outer bands coming in to Survivor's Island, rolling in, rolling in.” He made rowing motions with his arm. Ruth reminded herself that the outer bands meant bouts of high wind and rain, punctuated by lulls.

“They've got some feisty folks down there,” said Mirielle, “and we love them for it, but those folks have got to understand this is not one to try and ride out.”

“Let me underscore that, Mirielle.” Roush removed his glasses again and squinted directly into the camera. “I can't overstate the seriousness of the situation. This is a catastrophic storm. No amount of plywood is going to keep a structure standing in a Cat Four, so Survivor's Island folks can forget the trip to the lumber
yard. Forget the bottled water. Forget the portable generator. Now, we've been hammering at this message for the last eight hours, but it bears repeating: Do not attempt to shelter in place. Anybody left on the island needs to listen up and pay attention to the compulsory evacuation order and get on out of there.”

“Amen to that, Roush.”

“Don't you have Martinez's cell somewhere?” asked Ben. “There's got to be a way to get in touch—”

“We've never had his cell,” said Ruth. “I keep telling you. We asked and he said he doesn't give it out. Don't you remember?”

“We know it's major bad news for Survivor's Island,” said Roush Spanier, “which is very sparsely populated. It's going to mean trouble here in the greater Spangler metropolitan area as well, but as yet we don't know what kind. Cat Four trouble? I doubt it. Hurricanes have a way of losing steam over land, thank the Lord. Cat Three? Very possible, and Cat Threes are nothing to fool around with—”

“Just a moment,” said Mirielle. “Sorry to interrupt but I'm just getting word that the evacuation order has been extended to Spangler and the whole of Gingris County. It's not mandatory yet. But it's strongly advised.”

“Try him at his office,” said Ben. “It's ten to the hour.”

“I called an hour ago exactly,” said Ruth. “He's not seeing patients. He's probably fleeing. Like everyone.”

As if to illustrate that point, the television screen switched to an overview of snarled freeway traffic. “That's our Doug Bandicot, manning our Channel Nine chopper,” said Mirielle. “How's it going, Bandy? Can you see any break up ahead?”

The only answer was the noise of the helicopter's engine and the thwack-thwack of its blades. The voiceless din continued, finally
overridden by Roush Spanier. Perhaps because the dead air had panicked him, he'd slipped out of his tone of high seriousness and back into character as Channel Nine's Ragin’ Cajun Weatherman. “Lotta folks don't need a ‘vacuation order,” he shouted. “They jes’ grab the dog and the cat and the mother-in-law and they pile in the car and go. When the goin’ gets tough, the tough get goin’. Fn that the truth, Mirielle? Fn that the way?”

Another ten seconds of empty, flapping roar.

“ ‘Course that
can
be a problem. ‘Specially if the dog and the cat and the mother-in-law all got their own cars. Hoo! That makes for a whole lot of traffic, I gar-rawn-tee.”

Ben muted the TV and stood up. “I'm going to take the car out right now and look for him. Maybe I can spot him, if he hasn't found someplace to go.”

“Good luck,” said Ruth. “Two years of trying, and today you're going to find him. He's going to hop in the car and come home with you. Thanks, Dad!”

But Ben was walking past her as she said this and now he was collecting his keys from the kitchen counter. In another moment he was out the door and she was left alone to ask herself why she seemed to feel it a matter of honor to scoff at his anxiety about the hurricane and even his anxiety about Isaac. Somehow she felt she had no choice but to occupy the ground of obstructionism, as if Ben had seized all the territories of worry and concern that had once belonged to her.

She walked into her study, sat down at her desk, called up her document, which for lack of a better designation she'd given the file name “Newthing.” There it was, and there, reassuringly, were the two paragraphs it grew late last night when she approached it with a glass of wine. The second was more than a page long.
On this reading she saw that the opening passages were tight and awkward, like most beginnings. But the second paragraph was better and the last long paragraph was good—rough, but alive. The piece was gathering energy, picking up rhythm and urgency, the sentences knocking one another along like the suspended balls of a perpetual-motion machine. Newthing was a keeper, or at least it would be if she kept up the momentum—precisely what she wouldn't be able to do if Heather paid them this visit that the television had been going on about all day.

Leaving the document on the screen, she returned to the porch and took her place on the chaise. Why was she failing to worry about Isaac? She made a deliberate effort to imagine him on the street, pushing through wind and rain, his head lowered, his long coat blowing. Did that picture alarm her? Not really. Perhaps because he lived in daily extremity, she'd come to think of him as invulnerable to the elements. If cockroaches could survive a nuclear holocaust, Isaac could survive Heather. He'd find a place to hide. He'd be the first to stir and rise when the waters receded.

She tried substituting the child Isaac for the adult. There he was, a toddler, wailing in the slashing rain. She felt an instant rush of adrenalized pity and terror; in her imagination she was sprinting toward him, scooping him up, spiriting him to safety. She'd conducted these thought experiments many times before, trying and failing to reconcile the vanished infant, for whom she continued to feel an unhealed ache, with the adult, for whom her feelings seemed to have dried up as surely as milk dries up after weaning. After a lifetime of feeling too much, it seemed now she felt too little, and her feeling about that was not the flare of guilt she would have felt in early motherhood but a small inward shrug
of acknowledgment. At this stage it hardly mattered how she felt. Like her love, her guilt was no longer necessary.

Glancing at the silent TV, she noted that Channel Nine's wet and windblown Darren Doggett was clinging to a palm tree on Survivor's Island. Then it was back to Roush and Mirielle at the anchor desk, and on to the weather map, where the progressive encroachment of Heather was illustrated and then back to the Channel Nine whirlybird's aerial view of freeway gridlock. How irritated she was by all this, irritated at Darren and Roush and Mirielle and Bandy and the National Weather Service and—especially—at Heather herself, that petulant valley girl of a storm, barging into Ruth's study just as she was starting to get a grip on her writing.

It seemed she was increasingly incapable of appropriate reactions. She felt no fear of this rapidly approaching hurricane; instead she found herself harboring an odd conviction that it was a fraud. She knew quite well that evidence for its reality was mounting—it wasn't some flunky just out of camera range who was splashing buckets of water on Darren Doggett. It wasn't a wind machine that was causing him to stagger and sway. Even so, she couldn't shake a primitive suspicion that Heather was a lot of hooey. Hurricane? What hurricane? She'd never been in a hurricane. But now she was beginning to feel alarm, not at the hurricane but at her own sclerotic thinking. It was as if some squint-eyed crone had taken control of her mind for a moment, some elderly harridan who shouted at neighborhood children when they knocked at her door.

The hurricane was real. “Real,” she said aloud. She got up from the chaise and paced the porch, trying to assimilate the idea that this real hurricane was on its way to do real damage to Spangler
and her house and perhaps to her and Ben and Isaac. Returning to her computer, she called up and printed out the three and a half pages of Newthing, folded them into a rectangle, and dropped them into her medium-sized canvas carryall. Moving around her study, she collected a few other items as well—a yellow lined notepad and two felt-tip pens, a tiny framed snapshot of Isaac in a bumper car at age seven, the ceramic Staffordshire dog.

S
EE YOU AFTER THE BIG BLOW.
These words had been scrawled on a piece of lined yellow paper and Scotch-taped to the door of the Cosmos Club Coffeehouse. Through the window Ben could see that somebody had forgotten to turn off the lazily revolving ceiling fans, and with his presbyopically acute middle-aged vision he could make out the list of specials listed in various shades of Day-Glo pastel on the blackboard above the counter:

Giant Fudgeroo Brownie, he thought. How Pompeian.

He walked around to the far side of the property, where the flagstone patio had been cleared of tables and chairs. Except for the moldering maroon school bus with four flat tires that the owner had once used to transport his now-defunct jug band, the parking lot was deserted. Behind the dumpster at the far end was a derelict aluminum parking shelter. Ruth had always maintained that Isaac spent some of his nights here in a small colony of
homeless men, and Ben did find evidence of habitation—a filthy rucked-up chenille bedspread, crumpled fast-food wrappers, a generalized urine reek, six empty fortified-wine bottles. Was Isaac a wino now, like his bum confreres? That would be a sad irony, because the teenaged Isaac had had such a horror of alcohol that he wouldn't allow Ben to drink a beer in his presence (though for some reason he ignored Ruth's wine consumption). At first Ben had been proud of Isaac for his purity of mind; it seemed of a piece with his aptitude for math and music and his fastidious indifference to the opinions of his classmates. A few years later he'd come to understand this aversion as a symptom, the herald of a proliferating swarm of contamination fears—tobacco-smoke residue in motel drapes, milk within a week of its sell-by date, little girls who might not be wearing underpants.

He kicked the bedspread back a little with the toe of his shoe, as if hoping to uncover some kind of forensic evidence. Nothing but weeds and pebbles. People slept here? What must it be to be a bum? What must it be to leave the world of elevators and credit cards and clean towels? It made Ben's bones ache to think of it. This was a familiar train of thought, and it always ended in anxious ruminations about his own frailties; his hemorrhoids and how maddeningly they would itch after a few days without bathing, his carefully reconstructed teeth and how they would loosen without the quarterly attentions of his periodontist. There was Isaac's youth to mitigate the discomforts a little, he supposed, and the unimaginable compensations offered by his mental illness. Perhaps he'd decided that the only way to escape his fears was to become one with them—no dirty person fears dirt. Perhaps he was also less lonely now: bums, after all, were the only group who had ever admitted him to their society.

Back in the car, he took a turn around the Museum District. Like the rest of Spangler, it was almost entirely deserted. The only vehicle he encountered was a police cruiser driving very slowly down the middle of the street. He passed Martinez's old office building. Farther along that renovated red-brick dead-end block, a couple in a driveway were struggling to tie a kayak to the roof of an SUV. He turned the car around and headed down Tyler Street to Madison, where he turned right and drove around the block occupied by the low-slung, high-modernist Dufour Museum, with its spread of lawns and salaaming live oaks. He'd caught a glimpse of Isaac on the grounds here a year ago, sitting on the very same marble bench facing an architecturally celebrated ecumenical chapel that he was not sitting on now.

He swung back onto Madison, turned left, and drove west along Ferris Avenue, where the gentrified environs of the museums gave way to a scruffy district of head shops and tattoo parlors and sex-toy emporiums. He could see that Isaac's favorite anime bookstore was closed, but even so he parked and got out and peered through the darkened window. The woman who ran the shop had known Isaac for years. For a moment it had seemed plausible that she might have offered him the closed store as a refuge.

Back in the car and continuing down Ferris, he saw a wild, dirty young woman with blond dreadlocks and a missing shoe limping along the sidewalk. He slowed the car and pulled over, meaning to offer help and to ask—if she seemed lucid—whether she knew Isaac. “Excuse me, miss,” he said. The girl kept her head down and slightly turned; her profile was obscured by bobbing clots of matted hair. “Are you all right? Is there something I can do?” Silence. She continued to hobble along, but more rapidly.
He continued to cruise at her side. He was sounding and behaving—he knew—exactly like the kind of predatory creep young girls are warned to avoid, but if anyone should feel an obligation to persist in trying to help a person like her, it was he.

“Do you have a place to go to get out of the storm?” No answer. He tried again. “Maybe you could help me. I'm looking for Isaac Blau. He's big. Very tall. He wears a long coat and a wizard's hat. He's my son.” The girl turned with a look so dazed and puzzled that he felt a stab of simple social embarrassment. Just then, the median-straddling cop, who seemed to have nothing better to do than to trail him at a distance, drew up alongside and eyed him. Ben drove on.

Where do fish go when the lake freezes? Where do bums go when the wind blows? Was there some kind of public shelter around here? Not that he knew of, but now he remembered the Shining Star Ministry, where bums were said to be catechized before they were hosed down and fed and offered a cot. It was not a place that Isaac, with his adolescent contempt for religion, would ever have willingly gone, but in these circumstances he might have been shunted there by Martinez. It wasn't far, on a side street a few blocks down, next to the Lotus, a former Walgreen's drugstore that housed the best Vietnamese restaurant in Spangler. Just last spring he'd been there eating pho with a visiting epistemologist from Stanford, a pleasant, assertive woman with a young family who asked the inevitable chain of questions: