The Best American Short Stories 2014 (46 page)

But if either sister even hints that catastrophe might not be looming, people's brows ding with irritation. “Have to run,” they mutter. “No time to talk.” Or they say, “Better safe than sorry.” Or “You can't be too careful.” Or sometimes they just regard the sisters with slack-jawed incomprehension.

 

The Illusion of Choice

 

Little Jerry is standing in the darkness beside Ivy's bed. The house is like a cardboard box in the middle of a field in which a pack of wolves is having a silent wrestling match. The sound of the wind against the sides of the house is exactly like the sound of wolf fur against cardboard. The sound of the wind in the trees is exactly like wolves breathing through their teeth. The big branches falling onto the roof and lawn sound exactly like the thumping of paws as the wolves tumble, pounce, and rear. For Jerry, barefoot on the bare floor beside his mother's bed, there is next to nothing between the darkness where he stands and the frenzy of the universe.

“What are you doing here?” Ivy asks in her sleep.

“I'm scared.”

“Why?”

“Because the wind is scary.”

Ivy is not asleep now, but she has not moved from the position she was in when she was asleep. “Were you brave enough to come down here all by yourself?”

Jerry doesn't answer.

“Answer me.”

His answer is too quiet for Ivy to hear. She tells him so.

“I'm sorry,” he says.

“Of course you were brave enough to come down here all by yourself. You wouldn't be here if you weren't. And if you are brave enough to come down here all by yourself, you are brave enough to go back up to bed and go to sleep.”

“I want to sleep in your bed.”

“You know that's not allowed.”

Jerry says nothing. Ivy cannot see him, except as a thumb shape of perfect black in the gloom of a moonless night.

“There's nothing to be afraid of,” says Ivy. “It's only the wind.”

“Is this the hurricane?”

“No. The hurricane won't be here until the morning.”

“Are we going to die?”

“Of course we're going to die. But not in the hurricane. The hurricane is nothing. The hurricane is just a way for the television stations to expand their audiences so that they can sell advertisements for more money. It's also a way for people who have boring lives to feel that their lives are not boring. It's a fairy story, that's all it is, and fairy stories aren't real. So go back to bed.”

“Paulette says the trees are going to fall on the roof and we are all going to die.”

“Paulette is an idiot. Go back to bed.”

“I'm scared.”

Now Ivy is sitting up. She is breathing in a way that is not unlike the breathing of the wolves. “Listen, Jerry, we've been through all this before. Some children allow themselves to become afraid because of irrational ideas. But you're not going to be like those children, are you?”

Jerry makes a very small noise in his throat, but it is nothing like a word.

“Fear is an entirely useless emotion,” says Ivy. “And if I were to let you come into my bed, I would be acting as if there actually were something for you to be afraid of, wouldn't I? And, on top of that, your being in my bed with me would not change one single thing. It would still be the middle of the night. The wind would still be blowing. And whatever is going to happen would still be going to happen.”

“But if the trees fall on the roof, they won't hit me if I'm down here with you.”

“The trees are not going to fall on the roof.” Ivy had been speaking in a fierce whisper, but now her voice is loud enough to be heard in other rooms. She doesn't care. “Go back to your bed this instant.”

For a long time Jerry does nothing at all. Then there is a shifting in the darkness, and she can hear his sweat-sticky feet making kissing noises along the floorboards. The door opens, then closes softly. The latch slides back into the door plate with a minute
sproing
.

Where Jerry was standing, there is now a larger thumb shape of perfect black. It is Ivy's mother in her nightgown.

“How could you treat your little boy like that?” says Ivy's mother.

“I'm doing it for his own good.”

“I never spoke to you so heartlessly,” she says. “I would never have done that in a million years. I was always careful to be sure you and Isabel knew I loved you with all of my heart.”

“Do you think that made any difference?”

For a long time the only sounds in the room come from the wind against the walls. Ivy closes her eyes. When she opens them her mother is gone.

 

This Is This

 

Isabel and Ivy's father slides his left shoe along the floor as if it is filled with sand and stitched to the bottom of his empty pant leg. He moves his left arm mainly by whipping it with his shoulder. He can push the power button on the radio, but he can't turn the knob to tune in the signal. That's why the announcer sounds like he is talking through wax paper. “Hear that?” her father says, as Isabel comes into the room.

“Hear what?” says Isabel.

“Floods,” he says. “Listen.”

But that is the exact instant the kitchen light flickers, goes brown, goes gold, platinum, then permanently dark. The radio is silent. Some motor that is always on in the house is not on now, and the absence of its low, continuous hum makes the wind outside louder.

“Floods,” says Isabel's father. “Floods, they say.”

“Not here,” says Isabel.

“Everywhere,” says her father. “The whole county.”

“But we're on high ground,” she says.

She goes to the window and sees that water in the stream is racing, whitecapped and the color of her lips. It has already embraced the roots of the willow and is lapping at the southernmost leg of the picnic table where she likes to work on her computer.

“The lights are out,” says Paulette, who has just entered the kitchen in her red pajamas with the feet on them and the hatch in the back.

“Go back upstairs,” says Isabel, “and put on your clothes. Tell everyone that they can't come down until they are in their clothes. Shoes too.”

“The wrath of Ivy,” says Isabel's father.

“That's a stupid joke, Dad.”

“I mean the hurricane.”

“I know. But it's still a stupid joke.”

It is an hour later and Isabel and Ivy's mother is sitting at the table, an empty bowl of cereal in front of her. “What are we going to do when the food goes bad?” she says. Her hair is turban shaped and the color of shredded wheat. Her kidney-bean eyes are made huge and concave by the thick lenses of her glasses.

“It's not going to go bad,” says Ivy, wiping Jerry's mouth with the kitchen towel. “You are such a slob,” she tells him. “The fridge will keep the food cold for days,” she tells her mother.

“What about after that?”

“Tuna fish,” says Dr. Soros. “Lots of tuna fish!”

“Guys,” says Gwenny, standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room.

“I wish you had gotten some batteries,” says Ivy and Isabel's mother.

“Guys,” says Gwenny.

“What?” says Isabel.

Gwenny doesn't answer, just looks over her shoulder into the living room.

A braid of lip-red water is flowing across the hickory floorboards. All at once everyone can hear the sound of a cow urinating somewhere in the living room.

“It's coming right under the front door,” says Gwenny.

 

Almost

 

When Dr. Soros panics, he loses all ability to coordinate his left side, so Isabel has to carry him in her arms out to the white van and buckle him into his seat.

As the family exits the house, the flood is flowing ankle deep through the front door. Gwenny, the last to leave, tries to pull the door shut behind her, but the water forms a small mountain against it, and the door flies open again and again. Finally she gives up.

Ivy is in the driver's seat. Isabel rides shotgun. The rest of the family crams into seats beside and behind Dr. Soros. The van's side door slides shut.

Ivy steers the van through the river that has covered their driveway and half their lawn and is flowing through the house. “Where should I go?” she asks.

“Up,” says Isabel. “Where else?”

The road in front of their house is covered by a hissing, pinkish sheet of water. But after a few yards the road is only rainstorm wet and pocked with leaping gray drop-splashes. Ivy heads east, then turns west, then east again, then west—uphill all the while.

“We're away from the worst of it,” says Isabel and Ivy's mother.

Paulette is sitting with her neck upstretched and her eyes fixed on the back of her grandfather's head. She is making swallowing noises. Warm tears mix with the raindrops on her cheeks.

Isabel and Ivy say nothing. Even through the closed windows they can hear a roar so forceful and low, it is more like the shuddering of the earth than an actual sound. Where normally there is only a cattail-clogged trickle, an avenue of red surf pours down the hillside. This is the very stream that has subsumed their yard and is rearranging the furniture inside their house. As the roar becomes louder, the sisters trade glances but still say nothing. They round a bend, mount a crest, and at last can see that the bridge crossing the stream has held. Water shoots in a pink spume out of its downhill side.

Both sisters have been holding their breath. Now their throats unclamp; air flows from their lungs. Ivy smiles, and accelerates.

A tree trunk as thick as an oil drum and as long as a salad bar bucks, rolls, and tumbles through the lip-red water. It is approaching the bridge at the exact same speed as the van. The trunk reaches the bridge first, its rooty end striking one side of the culvert, its snapped-off end slamming into the other. The torrent makes a sound like a lion clearing its throat, because now almost all of the water is prevented from flowing under the culvert, and the water that does flow there rockets over the tree flank in a blade of froth. The water blocked by the tree dithers and roils for the second or two it takes to mount the riverbank, then it surges across the road exactly where the van is driving. Had Ivy's foot depressed the gas pedal by even one more quarter-inch, the van would have made it onto the bridge and to the safety of the high ground on the other side.

 

Sorority

 

Ivy is rendered useless, as are the van's steering wheel, brakes, gas pedal, and motor. The van is swept sideways across the road, tailwise down the embankment, and then sideways again through a cow pasture that is now a red ocean. For a very brief moment after the van has been swept back into the streambed, where the current flows most forcefully, it is pointing in the same direction that the water is flowing, and this allows Ivy to feel that she is driving on the red surf. Then the van hits a steep-sloped pyramid of rock the size of a garage and is anchored there, nose upward, by the current, which roars pinkly around its lower half, smashing all the windows and sweeping away four of the children and both grandparents before Isabel and Ivy, in the front seat, have a chance to look around.

Ivy's eyes are moon bright and blind. She is shouting something, but Isabel cannot hear what it is. The sound of the water has grown very, very large, and Ivy's voice has grown mouse small. The door next to Isabel is gone, and so is the sliding door to the back. Or maybe the sliding door is just open. For some reason Isabel finds it impossible to tell what has happened to the door, and she will never possess more than a shaky hypothesis.

Gwenny—her own daughter, her eldest child—is clinging to the post between the front and back doors with both arms, her cheek bleeding from a row of triangular punctures, her eyes also moon bright. Isabel pushes Gwenny's ribs. “Let go!” Isabel shouts. “Let go! Get out of here!”

At first Gwenny looks at her mother as if she doesn't know who she is. Then recognition dawns, and with it, that sort of pliable stupidity that is a form of trust. She lets go, slides away from the van, but at the last second Isabel shoves her with such force that she lands against the pyramid of rock with half her body out of the water. Her elbows (pointing skyward, angled like grasshopper legs) waver back and forth as she lifts herself out of the water. Then she is kneeling on top of the rock.

Little Jerry has climbed from the back seat, where he once sat next to his grandfather, and is clutching his mother around the neck. Ivy can't unfasten her seat belt. Isabel does it for her, then unfastens her own. When she slides out the door and into the water, she finds that, in fact, it is easy to clamber up onto the rock. Gwenny has vanished. There is a dense wood of black sticks and shining leaves behind the rock. Gwenny is there somewhere. Isabel knows that if she looks again, she will see her.

Ivy and Jerry slide toward the door. As their weight shifts within the van, the van shifts on the rock. They both reach for Isabel, who manages to grab one hand of each, and as the van slides out from under them and rolls with a groan and a heavy sigh into the current, she pulls them onto the rock—but not quite. The river takes hold of their legs and, in an instant, they are dragged back into the red water—Isabel too, still holding on to their hands.

All is roaring and bubbly dimness.

Then Isabel feels gravel beneath her feet and finds that she can stand, her head and shoulders out of the water. She is not sure at first, but soon she sees that she is still holding Ivy's and Jerry's hands, and they are both looking at her with the terrific seriousness of the mortally ill. Isabel realizes that she has been swept into an eddy behind the rock and that the water is only swirling idly around her pelvis and legs. Ivy and Jerry are still in the racing current, however, and Isabel is leaning backward to keep them all from being pulled downstream.