This Is the Story of You (12 page)

Maybe you think you can't fall asleep in the bomb blast of a place
that was just one
e
shy of Heaven.
Maybe you think a rock makes for a bad bed and a stuffed walrus is a demon pillow, and maybe you've heard Old Carmen snore.

I'm telling you.

But there was a fire between her and the rest of us. The crackle of flames. I'd watched the shadows cast by the moon, and my eyes felt heavy. I'd pulled the trench coat to my chin like a blanket and Sterling had come in, soft as silk; she was not the kind of cat who would leave me cold. And after a while I wasn't shivering anymore and my teeth weren't clacking like they'd been and the bruise up my chin didn't throb as hard and I'd grown used to the butterflied wound on my head. I found some kind of music in the space between Old Carmen's snores and the sizzling of the fire and the sound of the waves carried toward shore.

I woke in the hour just before dawn. The tide had rolled in high and begun to retreat again—slide away. Through the smoke of the dying fire, I could see the giraffe way out near the horizon, empty bookshelves in the nudge of low waves, window frames, beach umbrellas, a bike built for two, its back wheels spinning. I saw the mustard- colored door of my own refrigerator, its silver handle like the fin of a marlin. I saw one half of a pair of ladybug wings.

I felt eyes on me and I turned to find Old Carmen up on one elbow, a white-bread sandwich spread on a wax- paper napkin on her chunk of the rock. She pulled her fingers through her Chia hair as a way of straightening up. Offered me half a sandwich. “No, thanks,” I said, because I was busy feeding that cat with the handful of Friskies that was left. “We're going parsimonious, Sterling,” I said. “Rations from here on out.”

Her whiskers, her tongue, her sandpaper nose on the palm of my hand.

“Confusion at sea,” I heard Old Carmen say, and I looked out to where the sun was rising, flamingo pink, just an eyebrow of it now inside the early-morning weather. On our side of the sun six dolphins had come, slow among the floating things, testing their smells, their gravities, pushing the heavy metal around with their noses. They'd dive and then come up with a pair of argyle tights draped around their necks, a pane of curtains, a dark green Hefty bag, and then they'd shake the junk off, dive down again, scavengers hunting for a clean stretch, until the gulls were part of it, and a white crane, a stream of low-flying pipers.

I watched through the dying smoke. Old Carmen finished her sandwich. She stoked the fire. She folded the tarp she'd slept on and looked up at the flag still flying; we had survived our first night after the storm. Down below—half awake, sleep-stunned, murmuring—the survivors were wrapped up in their towels and their blankets, double hoods pulled over their heads, sand inside the tubing of their socks.

A great blue heron sauntered over the keys of the piano.

Far, far away, on the flat sand by the shore, I saw something gold, slow, sure.

I sat up. Squinted hard. I threw my trench coat on, grabbed Sterling.

“Bug in your pants?” Old Carmen asked.

“Deni,” I said. “She's alive.”

“Tell me everything,” she said.
“Everything. How are you?”

She had one arm in a sling fashioned out of a towel. She had the sleeves of that army jacket cranked crooked. There was mud on both knees and a bruise on one cheek. There were tears in her eyes, and her antennae hair had been smacked down flat on her head.

She'd yanked Gem away from the tide and went full throttle when she saw me. She'd tossed one arm out of the machine and waved, frantic. “Hey! Hey! Oh my God, Mira. Hey!” She'd climbed out, then, and beelined—the stretch of sand between us like an obstacle course, both of us limping more than running; such a strange and spastic hurry.

“Jesus, Deni.”

“Jesus.”

“Shit.”

Her voice so raspy and both of us hugging until we'd maybe break, we didn't break, we had not broken. High in my trench coat pocket, Sterling squirmed.

“That's a real fine cat,” Deni said. And she burst out crying.

“Tell me everything.”

This time I said it.

“Cinnamon Nose,” she said. “Is missing.”

She sobbed and I held her. She tried, with her story. Said her house was in one piece and one block down from its original address, a chunk of someone's kiddie pool glued to its side. Said the first floor had been soaked through but the ocean had receded, and in the dark of night, in the howling storm, they'd saved the photographs, the newspaper clippings, the hero's flag, the Reverend's favorite crosses and his best-starched collar, her brother's medal. They'd enacted the emergency plan, put it into action, shuffling and saving, step by step, and then the washing machine had torn loose from its pipes and pinned Deni to the wall, crushed her lungs, and she couldn't breathe to scream, she was dying, but her mother had saved her, dragged and kicked the machine away, tied Deni's twisted arm into a towel, kept saying,
I'm sorry,
and the water was rising and it was dark. It wasn't until Deni was on the second floor with her mom, in the three rental rooms, the saved things as tucked away as anything could be in that storm, that Deni called for Cinnamon Nose and the dog didn't come.

“I looked through all the dark and didn't see him,” Deni said, describing how she'd run from window to window, opening one and calling out into the dark, “Come back here, you beautiful dog. Come back to us.” But the dog was gone.

“He's nowhere, Mira. I can't find him.”

Half of Deni's vowels lost to the rasp inside her throat.

All of her story a heartbreak.

“Everything's chaos,” Deni said.

“Complete and utter.”

“World come to an end. Revelations.” She sobbed. She stopped. She continued. “I kept thinking about my dad and about my brother. How neither one would stand for this. Wouldn't have let it happen. But I did.”

“It was a storm, Deni.”

“Shore up. Right? Shore up. I was prepared. I thought I was.”

“Weather's bigger than the rest of us.”

“I wanted to stop it.”

“No, Deni. All of us. None of us could stop it.”

She held her twisted arm with her still-good hand. She turned and looked toward the beach and all its ruin, the stumps and blasts and char. “Tell me,” she said again, “everything.” She touched the bandage on my head.

“Clobbered by a red octagon,” I said.

“What?”

“Corner stop sign.”

“For real?”

“For real.”

“Jasper Lee and Mickey?”

“Still on the mainland, best as I know. Phones have all gone wonky.”

I told her what I knew. I told her the size of the storm in my house, showed her the color of my bruises, which she called (of course she did) medium rare. I told her about Chang and Mario and the deer and Old Carmen, how she'd come for me with a rope over one shoulder, how she'd knotted the ladder and tossed one end to me, how she had waited, how I had climbed. Down once. Up once. Down again. I'd climbed, and Rapunzel still hung.

“Old Carmen?”

“Serious.”

Deni bobbed her head as she listened. No and yes and are you shitting me, biting her bottom lip, touching the bruise on her face, coaxing her hair back up into its antennae spikes, and when she reached for Sterling, Sterling went on command—out of my pocket into Deni's hands and then up onto Deni's shoulders, where that cat sat, swiping one paw at the gulls who came too close, and now Deni was talking again, more news from her side, news on her mom, who was mostly fine, a couple of scratches from her war with the machine, a sliver of glass beneath one eye, and now back at the house that had sailed off its moorings, looking for whatever church members she could find.

“Pooling their stockpiles,” Deni said. “Charcoal grills, charcoal briskets, charcoal pits, whatever there is that didn't go under.” The idea of it was a community meal. The plan was to incorporate as many live human beings as anyone could find and whatever wares they could come up with—whatever was thawing in the dead freezers, whatever was floating in the pantries, whatever the gulls and the waves hadn't gotten to yet in the aisles of McCauley's.

“The plan is a meal,” Deni said. “At North. The plan is to serve.”

There were more people on the beach—picking and hauling, walking and dazed, zigzagging between ruptures and frames, shattered dishes, copper-bottomed pots, crab traps. The smell of things rotting.

“Total mess,” Deni said.

“Total,” I agreed.

“We need hope,” she said. “We need—”

And I knew, and she knew, that in all our talk there was a name we hadn't said, there was news we hadn't gotten to, there was Eva, who lived in Deni's part of Haven, whom Deni would have looked for first, of whom Deni was not speaking.

“Tell me about Eva.”

“I can't find her,” Deni said, her voice breaking again. “I've looked,” she said. “Her house is gone. It's vanished.”

Nobody Deni had asked had seen Eva. Nobody had seen her parents or her two-year-old sister, Chrissy Sue, born to help save Eva's parents' marriage. Chrissy Sue was Eva's live-action doll. She had orange hair and dark brown eyes and chubby feet and fat fingers. She was the marriage solution that had not worked, Eva's parents fighting louder than before, over the baby's head, as they rocked her and fed her. And now Chrissy Sue was missing and the parents were missing and Eva was missing, but Eva missing was impossible. It couldn't be true.

The tide was swelling around our messed-up pairs of boots. My bruises were throbbing, my bandage itching. Sterling was pacing the beach by now, not going far, looking for places to do her business, because doing business, for all of us, was ranking high among the strategic nightmares. So much water on the island, but none of it useful. Haven was gooey and gross and disorganized, and it was about to get a whole lot worse, and I hope you don't mind that I will not be talking about that part of the story.

The indecency of everything.

“I have to get back,” Deni said, wiping the tears from her eyes. “I promised Mom.”

“Yeah.”

“Meet at Old Carmen's rock later? When the sun looks like noon? A couple of hours from now?”

“Whatever hours are,” I said.

“Whatever noon looks like,” she said.

I needed more Friskies from the rock, more swigs of water, another meal of peanut butter. I needed the toilet that stood on the stilts of what had been my house and I needed the supplies I'd forgotten the first time around, when my head was banged up and I was dizzy and I didn't know if I was dead and if Old Carmen was part of the dying dream I was having. I needed to climb Rapunzel and climb back down. I needed to think. I needed to figure this thing out. I needed to find Eva.

We shook on noon, Deni and I. We hugged. I kissed the bruise on her cheeks, touched her arm in the sling.

“We'll find her,” I said.

We goddamned had to.

It was as if time had ripped open a tomb and the dust of a million years had settled.
The attic was a vague, soft thing. Sand was its only color. The stuff had blown in from the deck through the open sliding door. It had conspired and spread. It had crusted the piles I'd built and the furniture I'd inherited, coated the hook on the wall, the curl of a poster, the animals on the loveseat, the wheels of the roller skates left hanging from the lamp, the mess of clothes I'd stripped away after getting clobbered on the head. The sand had blown in, and it had won. It had claimed the things I'd saved. It was blowing, still.

Sterling leapt and slid across the slippery headboard ledge, catching herself, a startled meow. The closet door swung on its hinges, ticking like a clock. The clothes hung damp on the hangers, sand in the collars and the seams. There was the sound of the gulls in the crippled downstairs and rotting, chemical smells.
I had sense that I wasn't alone.

I wanted to run. I wanted my old cottage back, my life, my friends, my Banuls, the categories of life and living that made sense to me. Seemed like years before. Put things in their categories. Keep them known and safe.

Nothing was safe.

“Hello?”

Someone had been here. There was the trace of footsteps in the damp, crusty sand.

In the sky behind me a cloud slid over the sun. When the sun returned, I was sure: Someone had walked through the sand that had blown through the room, let their weight sink into the crystals. Footsteps—bootprints—that had walked the path I'd left between the salvage I'd collected. There were footsteps, and there was proof, too, of a person having lain down on my bed—something about the way the sand was scattered from the pillow, something of a trace of long legs and strewn arms in the horizontal sheets of sand. The doors to the curio cabinet had been left open, but not by me. That swinging closet door wasn't right, I'd heard the latch latch before I'd rappelled to the beach that first time, Sterling in my pocket. The drawers to my bureau had their tongues hanging out, and I had not left those tongues hanging out. And now, I realized, some of the piles I'd built had been rearranged—divided and restacked, cut through and repositioned. Breezes stirred in the crusty pots and pans. Air rustled inside the old news of magazines, and when the next breeze blew the wings snapped. There was a rise of crisp, white birds.

“Hello?” I said.

The boots had walked the skinny path in the hoarder's city and returned. They had stepped back over the threshold of the sliding door and trailed away through the ever-shifting sands on the tilted deck. Hello to no one. Whoever it had been was gone. He'd cut across the deck and slid the rope Old Carmen had thrown and I'd secured. He'd slipped away, onto the beach, where everything was chaos and the rules had been tossed and nothing was like it had been before, and there was something in his pockets. Or might have been.

He'd taken, or he hadn't.

He'd be back, or he was satisfied.

He'd been looking for something.

Or he'd found it.

Someone had come. Someone had gone. Whatever had been taken was infinitesimal when stacked up against all that had been stolen by the storm. The breeze would blow the stranger's bootprints from the sand. The tide would convert the evidence. There was no one but me who could ever be sure that he'd climbed up, walked through, lain down on my bed, but I knew, and Sterling's whiskers were on alert, and I remembered, as if it had happened in another world, the thief who had crept in and out of the Zone.

Now with the next breeze another flight of crisp, white birds flew—lifted up from the split stack of Nat Geos I'd saved. They were paper birds, pages sailing out of my brother's magazines. I reached for one. I turned it over. I read my brother's words.

This is the story of you:

Stuff: Forams

Chabazite

Olivine

Source: Kapalua, Maui

Ordered: May 8, 2011

Received: July 2, 2011

Fact: Smitherings are lovely.

Smitherings are lovely.

“Jasper Lee?”

I reached out into the breeze. I snatched the next white bird. I read.

This is the story of you:

Stuff: Sea urchin spine (red)

Sea urchin spine (green)

Coral dust

Source: Galápagos Islands

Ordered: March 3, 2013

Received: April 16, 2013
Fact: What you are is still alive.

I sat on the bed, on the shivering sand, where the stranger had lain down before me. I heard Sterling mew and leap. I felt her find my lap. I felt her paws insist, ask questions. There was another crisp, white paper bird now, close enough to snatch. I read:

This is the story of you:

Stuff: Pink garnet

Green epidote

Red agate

Black magnetite

Hematite

Source: Lake Winnibigoshish, Minnesota

Ordered: November 2, 2012

Received: January 4, 2013

Fact: You will always be your own true colors.

One by one the pages that used to be stuffed inside the stack of Nat Geos peeled away, and one by one, I reached for them and read them. The story of sand scooped out of a war. The story of sand from a blackened beach. The story of diatoms and shark-tooth shatters. The story of something wanted, asked for, mailed—mollusks, coral, barnacles, basalt, foraminifera. The stories were of crush and time. They were of broken beauties, missing pieces, legends. They were the stories of sand and the story of my brother. They were somebody crying. They were secrets. They were chasing each other with every breeze that blew in, and Sterling was quiet now, touching her paw to each page, tracing the clumsy letters that my brother had written in the blackest charcoal.

All glory to the survivor.

Live eternal.

Invisible is not the fault of the thing,

but the fault of the person who's looking.

“Jesus,” I said.

“Jasper Lee,” I said.

And I don't know if I've ever missed a human being as much as I missed him.