This Is the Story of You (8 page)

I locked the doors.
I closed the windows. I watted out the cottage—turned on every bulb, every spectrum of bright. The rain was falling harder now and Sterling was mewing and I said
shhh,
and poured her a fresh bowl of milk. I dug into the Friskies, put my hand out like a tray. She went from the milk to my hand, from my hand to the milk, and I complimented her on her bravery, told her wait till she meets Jasper Lee, a real trailblazer in the courage department.

“Doesn't even flinch,” I said, about how Jasper Lee would sit on that hospital bed and open out his arm and take the needle with the enzymes. “Doesn't flinch at the start and doesn't flinch at the end when they take the needle out, swab off the blood, lay down a Band-Aid. He stands up like a grown man. Shakes the nurse's hand. Says goodbye and thank you, politest person you ever saw. They love him at Memorial, and you'll see why, Sterling. You'll see why. You'll love him, too.”

That's what I said.

From the milk to my hand, from my hand to the milk, Sterling's ears were upright and her whiskers were drippy; that cat was a world-class listener. A curious cat, her tail going back and forth, and now I was telling her about Christmas on the island, the lights we string from place to place, the candles in the jars that Jasper Lee always lit. Next I was saying about Halloween and the parade we do down on the beach, Jasper Lee in whatever costume Mickey and he make, piggyback riding place to place:
I don't want to scare anybody.
And after that maybe it was a story I told about how Deni and Eva and I had built those model planes that soared above my brother's room. Landing gear up, I told Sterling. Thrust reversers retracted. The combat aircraft painted to look like weather had already done it in. I told Sterling how Deni had done most of the gluing and Eva most of the painting and how we all three had strung each plane up, standing on Jasper Lee's bed while he sat below, praising our craft skills and engineering. “You sure know your mechanics,” he'd said, and Eva, a straight C-minus in every Ms. Isabel class, almost died laughing before she caught her breath and said how a girl could get a big head if she stayed near my brother too long. It was shortly after that when Eva lay down on the floor and declared the planes eternal. Iwas thinking of this then, got her image in my head—her blond hair, her tip-of-a-turnip nose, her deliberate way of looking at things so she would not miss a detail. Everything to be lived or imagined. That was Eva. She didn't care one whit for terms.

I told Sterling about the little tin men and the road-trip curtains and the canisters of sand from all over the world—the island's best collection. I told her how Jasper Lee was interviewed last year for the local weekly,
The Sand Dollar
—the topic being his expertise in the crush that spills up from the sea. I told her how when the photographer came to take Jasper Lee's pic, he'd said there'd be no pic without my mother and me, because if he was going to be famous,
we
were going to be famous, didn't matter what we knew or didn't know about sand, only mattered that we were family, all for one. The united Banuls.

“Nine years old, and that's what he's saying,” I was reciting to Sterling, who was licking my empty palm with her tongue, then licking herself clean under the shine of every light on. The rain was steady by now, and the winds were stronger than before, but they weren't howling, I didn't think they would be howling. They'd be gone by tomorrow. That fact was promised.

I stood. I checked for a view through the front bay window and the kitchen side window and the windows in the back. But all I could see by now was me. The windows like mirrors, a million reflections of medium and more- than-medium scared. Whatever had gone down in the Zone I'd discover the next day in the sun. We'd faced much worse, but even so, I had a crawly feeling inside.

Every five minutes I checked my phone. No Mickey. No Deni. No Eva. “Come on,” I finally told Sterling, leaving every light on and grabbing the cat's Tupperware litter box and carrying it up the stairs. I slid it next to the claw-foot tub, and the cat purred. Her body swam between my calves, her tail a mop against my bones. There was a trace of warm milk on her whiskers.

“Time for bed, Sterling,” I said, and she looked up at me, like she knew the drill, like she had nowhere else to go. I used the bathroom, took a shower, came back, and we were clean and ready as we'd be for many days now, but I had no idea what we'd gotten ready for.

The biggest prize I ever won at the Mini Amuse was a walrus, stuffed with foam. I dug it out from the couch and named it hers, arranged it nice on my bed. I made sure that cat understood; she was a real smart cat. She put a claim to it at once. Padded it down, curled her body up, licked her front paws, settled her chin.

“'Night, Sterling,” I said, putting my
Wind in the
Willows
T-shirt on and checking the sliding door lock once again and cutting the one bulb in my room. I stood looking out for a while, watching the inscrutable dark. The white teeth on the black sea seemed closer than before. Old Carmen had abandoned her post, gone to wherever she went when she wasn't at home by the sea.

The wind seemed harder, but there was nothing I could do. Tomorrow I would wake to find the sun. Tomorrow Mickey would call and Deni would ask,
You keeping that cat? Holding tight? Need me for something?
And I'd say,
Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm good.
Then Deni would tell me the morning news on Eva.

“'Night,” I said again to Sterling.

One hand on that cat's head.

One on the tusk of that walrus.

Later they would call it Monster, Colossal, Extreme.
They would say twelve hundred miles wide and shattering. One hundred sixty miles per hour and gusting. An eye like a country of cathedrals. Power slurped straight from the sea. Broke the models, broke the measures, broke the rules.

Winner take all.

Sometimes sleep is easy; it takes you sly. Sometimes it runs ahead, leaves you wakeful, tricked in, memories instead of dreams. That night, in my mind, Mickey was home—her long hair in a loose knot, her toenails painted Memorial fake, her hands too small for the cup she was sipping from, the scent of fruit tea rising. That night, Jasper Lee was home, too, of course he was. He was tall, he was fine, he wasn't sick, he'd never been sick, he was sitting by the front door on a wooden stool, waiting on a canister of Cambodian sand. That night, Eva was lighting candlewicks inside mason jars and planting them on every sill, flowers growing like gardens above her ears, and she was saying, “Nope, girl, that must have been a dream. No thief in the Zone, Mira. The world is sweet.” That night, end of that night, there came Deni, climbing the stairs and breathless in the attic, with a haul of Friskies on her back, Santa Claus–style.

“Just in case,” she was saying.

Just in case.

Deni. You call her. She'll be there.

She wasn't there.

It was after midnight, and the rain was blowing hard. It was dark, and Sterling and I were sleeping and maybe dreaming, and you might have thought a locomotive was coming, you might have thought there'd be the big Evacuate Now—the horns that said,
Get yourselves out of here
. But it was late, and we believed what we had been told. That this storm was but a passing thing.

The only thing certain is the past, and even the past is up for grabs—both the textbook variety and the personal kind, and every single one of Eva's lost cities. I'm telling what I am telling, but I have to take it slow. It was dark, and it was night, and it came—a high-tide ride, four stories tall. I checked the records for that; that is the number. A high-tide surge that rose and rose and crashed against the lighthouse stripes, the anchored tankers, the sailboat sweets, the black boulders, the piers and the pebbles and the gutters of the houses by the edges of the sea, the laminated windows, the bridge between us and the world, and all the nests of all the birds in Ms. Isabel's sanctuary and the beard of the great blue heron. A colossal wave was coming, then it came: water tonnage. A mind-of-its-own monster, beating every single odd.

The big wave coming, the big wave crashing—up against the barriers and through the rocks and into the safe parts of the Zone. A wall of sound and then it was back again, closer, harder, at our door, knocking with its frothy fist.

And Sterling stood.

And Sterling growled.

And the lights ticked off downstairs.

And I was more afraid than I'd ever been.

I shot up from the bed. I yanked on my jeans and my Day-Glo waders, my khaki trench coat with the big buttons and the sash belt and the eight never-ending gonzo pockets. I stood, sick inside and off my balance, and listened, and yes: The wind was a beast. The rain was a horizontal slash, it was bullets up against the glass, it was the end of all things. I felt my way across the room, toward the closet. I fell to my knees. I couldn't swallow, could barely breathe, could hardly think, but then my hands were thinking for me—tossing aside the heaps of left-behind things until I finally found the trunk Mickey had prepared just in case “the big one” came, and yes, this was the big one. The big one did come. Out there, beyond me, the ocean was throwing a fit and sucking back. It was rushing forward, it was pissed-off hungry, it was full of rush and gush. I heard it, I could imagine it. It wasn't a dream.

Beneath the wads of old dresses and scarves and useless things, beneath everything my aunt hadn't wanted and my mom hadn't tossed was the kit; I found it, blind, with my hands, dragged it out into the room, opened the lid. Extra water, fish in cans, chips in bags, peaches in sugar syrup, a mother lode of Hershey's Kisses, wrenches, toilet paper, matches, bug spray, candles, all those extra sets of batteries, and plastic sheets and plastic ponchos and the flashlight we called the doublewide.

I switched it on, and I could see.

It was too late for almost everything. Too late to plywood the windows. Too late to call for help. Too late to get out.

Think, Mira. Think. I counted Slurpees. I categorized. I put the moment into taxonomic order: Animalia, Chordata, Mammalia, Primates, Hominidae, Homo, Homo sapiens. Me. I may have been part of something so much bigger than myself, but it all came down to me.

The only defense against the storm would be the hurricane shutters my aunt had left us with—the solitary, rusted pair that ran across the sliding glass door to the deck. I turned the broad yellow eye of the doublewide in that direction. I stood and I walked—one step, another step: Mira Banul, be brave. I reached the shutters, lay the flashlight down, and cranked those things like my life depended on it, because it did. Sterling wound like a silver thread between my legs. “Home of the brave, home of the brave, home of the brave,” I said, and the sound of the rain on the roof and on the walls was so gigantic, the sound of the winds and the surf so much bigger than before, that every time I said “home” or “brave” to Sterling, I couldn't hear a single word I said.

“We're going to be all right,” I yelled, but when I looked down at that cat threading between my legs, beneath the khaki hem of that coat, it looked like she was crying—her mouth wide open, her nose a perfect triangle, her tongue bubble-gum pink. And even though she had the mind and soul of a cat, she was the size of a kitten, and she was frightened. “Hey,” I said, and I picked her up, and I kissed her nose, and I stuffed her into one of the eight never-ending pockets, and that's where Sterling stayed, not really a kitten, not actually a cat—nice and put, her head like a periscope, watching.

I could hear the waves out there, the waves and their teeth. I could hear the wind in the Zone, churning like a greased turnstile, picking things up and throwing things down, to hell with that thief—that was history. The stuff that happened next was up to me. The stuff that would go wrong would go wrong because I was out of a fix, or short on smarts, or too medium. I finished cranking. Sterling was pocket-tucked. My bare feet were hot in my knee-high waders, and the next thing was next.
Go downstairs, Mira. Go careful. Go slow. Breathe.

“Mira,” I said out loud. “You are in charge.”

In the kitchen the sink shivered with the plates I'd left undone, and with the smell of all those lemons, that bleach. The table was standing, the place mats arranged to serve three, the potato growing out its long tail in the tall, scrubbed glass practically glowed, effervescent. The notes we'd magneted to the refrigerator door had ripples in them, lifts and flaps, from the breeze that had made its way in, because now, even in the dark, I could see that there was a breeze in the room—in the tablecloth, in the curtains, in the dish towels, in the wall calendar where Mickey wrote our lives down. The breeze was in the room—in the folds, in the future.

Not a breeze.

A wind.

Coming, I guessed, from Jasper Lee's room, so that's where we went, Sterling and me and the boots and the coat and the doublewide—leaving the kitchen for the hall, nudging the door open with my foot, finding more gust than breeze blowing through the long band of Jasper Lee's windows which had, I guessed, been raised up by the pressure of the storm. I slammed each window shut. I locked each window tight. I caught an image of a girl in the reflective glass—of a girl and the head of a cat in the pocket of a trench coat, silver as a spoon. The girl's hair was plastered and her eyes were big.

The girl was me.

Above my head, the airplanes were dashing back and forth on their strings. On the floor by the door the Bag of Tricks was the loneliest thing I'd ever seen, and the soldiers on the windowsill had nothing on the storm, and the sand, all that prized-possession sand, the Jasper Lee collection—we couldn't lose that sand. I couldn't let my little brother down. I had to save what had so far saved him. That's when I decided, when I figured out my plan. When everything that happened next began.

“We're saving everything,” I told that cat. “We're saving everything we can.”

Categories upon categories of things.

Bermuda sunset sand. Vietnam War sand. Sand off the shore of Lake Placid. Sand dug out of Haven on a birthday and sand sent in from Australia and sand that was red and black and mystery sand and sand my brother had labeled this stuff's pure gold. I slid each canister into the pockets of that trench coat, like rolls of coins, like ammunition, then I followed the light of the doublewide through the kitchen and up the stairs and into the attic room, where I unloaded, hiding the Jasper Lee collection in my sock drawer, among the fishnets my aunt had left behind.

Back downstairs, I swept the army of tin soldiers into the coat pockets, then hurried back upstairs and jangled them in with a drawer full of sweaters. Next on the rescue was the Bag of Tricks. After that: the decorated canes. Later: the Nat Geo magazines and that box where Jasper Lee kept what he wouldn't throw away, also both pairs of shoes that Mickey had paid extra for and the cruising shorts that my brother liked best.

I had a plan.

The plan saved me.

Without the plan I would have gone one hundred percent batshit crazy.

Up I went. Down. Until finally I had what I could get for Jasper Lee and it was Mickey's turn—the battery light thrown down across the square of her room, where I hardly ever went when she wasn't home. It was worse than sad in the bright, striped light. I sat, shivery and shaky, on the edge of Mickey's bed. Ran my hands across the thin, pale quilt, a patchwork, a gift, some lost story. Winter or summer, spring or fall, Mickey's bed had the patchwork on. It was a save I had to make, at least it was something.

Mickey kept her jewelry on her bureau in seashell dishes—bangles, hoops, and macramés. I swept them into my pockets. She kept her useful barrettes beside her favorite barrettes on a little wooden tree; I couldn't remember which was which and so they all went—into another pocket. She had a plastic box of porcelain tiles where she had tested her favorite oxide rubs, and I knew what they meant to her, how she studied them, how this would have mattered, so I took them.

I saved what I could. What I loved, what they loved, what I needed, what would be missed. I had my hands, I had my arms, I had my shoulders, I had eight pockets and a flashlight and I had to do something, because if I did nothing, I'd have died right there and then, I would have sunk down into a dark corner and cried tears bigger than any sea.

The twelve-hundred-mile-wide storm was near and coming nearer, over the heads and through the souls of all my pretty monsters.

I don't know when the dune was breached. I don't know when the gangplank buckled and crumpled and fell. I don't know when the tongue of the sea reached the edge of the Zone or when the winds stirred the water there and drowned the sandy bikes, the woven chairs, the horseshoe rings, the pleather trunk, the half refrigerator, the bright blue bucket Jasper Lee wore on his head, king of the tidal parade. I don't know when the first trickle of water made its way into the house or when the trickle became a flood became what it ultimately was.

I just know that I was running out of time, and that I had something else I had to do, something we'd discussed a million times—at home, at First Aid and Rescue. Switch the natural gas to off. Go out in the roaring rain with a safety-kit wrench and count the valves—first up from the bottom. You turn it ninety degrees: off. You never ever turn it back on. You do this or you could find yourself in a red-hot blaze in the middle of a flood.

“You stay put,” I told Sterling, pulling her from the pocket, laying her down on the walrus, telling her that every piece of everything in that room was hers to watch, by which I meant guard, through which I emphasized:
Don't let me down,
by which I also meant: I already miss you; I'm terrified; I'm doing what I can; please try to trust me
.
Her eyes were like sea glass. Her tail was wild as a flag.

I left her there, behind the shield of the hurricane shutters.

My heart crashed against my ribs.