This Is the Story of You (9 page)

The wind was velocity, the rain was muscle, the wave and the wave after that surged up over the beach, over the dunes, past the pole legs of the first line of houses, through and across and back.
Again and again. Farther. Spasms of speed.

I wrestled the front door until it seemed to break from its frame and the wind tore me out onto the porch. I huddled low. I took the slam of the storm and the sea. The seafoam was up inside my boots and the gas line was this skinny line beneath the big bay window. I fought the winds, took the porch steps down, one at a time, sliding and fighting. On the pebble lawn, the water was up to my knees, and I curled as I walked, I dragged my coat in through the thick foam and the debris I couldn't see until I was close enough to find the valve that was first from the ground. I found it. I fished around with the jaw of my wrench and I turned and I turned until I had the valve switched to a final off.

Don't ask me how.

Don't ask me about the houses where the valves stayed on.

Just this: They sparked blue and purple first, and then they smoked for days.

I remember nothing after that, except for taking a Mary Poppins wind so hard that it cracked my feet behind me, flapped my trench coat like a baby bird cruising tropical seas. Maybe it was the porch rail that saved me, my arms around it in a padlock. Maybe it was the wind dying back, maybe it was one of my
Delphinus
dolphins, one of my lovely monster friends, but I don't know, and then I saw it coming—a stop sign torn loose from its corner post and trapped in the wind. Edge over edge, red over silver, it hurtled with the wind, the doublewide catching its slice of speed like an old-time movie reel.

Who was going to hear me?

I remember, and then I don't remember after that. My thoughts were broken, and then my thoughts went black, and then the world went on without me.

I came to in a pool of rain, a sprawl of knees and elbows
on drowning porch boards.
I opened my eyes to the sight of the flashlight scraping the storm with yellow line. I thought that the world was broken and what was the point and where was my mother and my brother and my two best friends? Where were they? How were they? Was this living or was this being dead, and then I remembered the things I'd saved: Sand with the socks. Soldiers with the sweaters. Bangles with the underwear. Mickey's quilt folded. Safe. Dry.

Maybe I'd made a mess, I'd mixed things up, I'd violated all the rules of taxonomy. I'd made a mess, but in the end what mattered most was Family.

I had drummers banging in my head. I had a hot oozing slash across my face. I had something that felt like a bruise on my hand, but the water was rising, I rose, too. I made it all the way to the door that had been slammed back into its frame. I pushed with everything I had.

For a miracle of a minute, everything went still.

The door flew open, wide, and the wind slammed me in.

I dropped to my knees and my pockets spilled.

Down the hall and up the stairs, I heard that found cat crying.

By the shivery light I saw it all.
The Bag of Tricks beside the door beside the canes beside the shoes. The hats, the quilts, the forks, the knives, the spoons, the patchwork quilt, the Nat Geos in skyscraper stacks, the early bag of candy corn that Mickey had bought the day before, stopping at the grocery store on her way home from pottery.

It's September,
Jasper Lee had said.

One month from October,
she'd said.

She liked a good Halloween better than anyone I know.

The flashlight lay down a line from the door to the bed, like a sidewalk through a city of hoarders. It rose like the sun toward the raftered ceiling and then dropped over curios and the couch and the adoptees from the Mini Amuse, the portrait of my aunt, the safety kit, two glass disks, which were Sterling's eyes, the stuffed walrus she'd pawed hard and chewed.

“Told you I was coming back,” I shouted, so that she would hear. I thought my teeth would crack from the noise in my head. I thought the ton of storm I wore—in that coat, in my boots, in my medium hair—would drop me to the floor. I thought the split in my forehead was a bruise in my brain, and I was either raining or bleeding. I was alive, but maybe I wasn't, and I was so incredibly afraid and sad when that cat made a leaping run for me.

“Hey. Hey.”

Her sandpaper tongue on my nose.

I pressed my tears into her fur. I made my confessions— I wasn't brave enough, I couldn't do enough. I needed Mickey and Jasper Lee, Deni and Eva, the entire class of the O'Sixteens, Ms. Isabel, Mr. Friedley, saying
This, too, shall pass.
Over the hurling of that storm I could hear that kitten/cat purr, I could hear her heart motoring on. I could hear her thinking:
Mira Banul. Be strong.

For the both of us.

For everyone.

I lowered Sterling steady onto the bed and I fumbled until I got her a meal, and then I peeled every wet thing from my skin and wrung the deluge from my hair, pools on the floor, the storm inside, here. I crossed the room over the heads of the rescued things and dug long johns out of the top bureau drawer, my sweet pink pair, soft from a hundred years of cold Decembers. I found my best jeans and my warmest sweater and pulled on two pairs of knee-high socks. And then I found a spoon and a jar of peanut butter, and I ate it ice-cream style, chased it with candy corn, tried not to think: Mira, you're dying, or, Mira, you will be dead soon.

I remembered my phone.

Only half a bar of power left, and three missed calls, one text from Mickey:

Need to talk to you.

It was 2:18 according to the phone. I tried five times, but there was no ringing through. Power down, I thought. Save the half bar. Turning off that phone felt like another kind of losing.

You'll say that what happened next could not have happened next, but it did: I slept.
In the long johns, the sweater, the jeans, the socks to my knees, with my head on the walrus and my brain with the stop sign running through it, my arms full of cat, her body running like an engine. They gave us numbers afterward—wind blow, wave rise, the deluge measured in feet and inches. My numbers were my numbers— a cat and me and the flashlight and that trench coat dripping from a hook.

I dreamed us on a cloud and in a cathedral. I dreamed us on a raft way out to sea, with humpbacks and blue whales and a manta ray flotilla and a giant, bucktoothed walrus. I dreamed the ocean full of butterflies, and the butterflies were yellow wings, and the wings were the only eyes beneath the sea. I dreamed myself a water bear, tiny monster of the sea that can survive most anything. I dreamed, and at the bottom of the ocean, there was a race down a centerline, and the eye of the tiger was winning. I dreamed, and there was a stranger with a hood in the shadow of the dark, and there was a stop sign turning over on itself, like the flicker of a horror film. I dreamed, and there were whiskers on my cheeks, there was pressure on my arm, there were two silver paws with unclipped claws kneading.

I opened my eyes.

I closed them.

I would have wished not. Not the squall, the caterwaul, the wail, the crash, not the suck-back of the waves and the starting again. Lay yourself down on a railroad track, and you'll hear a sound like those waves coming. Lay yourself down and then tell yourself this: You have no place to run.

We had no place to run.

Later, they'd give us more numbers: Forty percent of the beaches gone. Thirty percent of the houses and shops. Seven gutters dug between the ocean and the bay. Nine separate wedges of island. Eighty percent of the roads impassable.

One bridge cut down at its knees.

Twenty-two thousand and two blue Slurpees.

Twenty-two thousand

and three.

In the gray light of Afterward, there was crunch in my bones, the busted hinges of my knees, the bruise that had started to spill down one shin.
I could also feel the leak of the volcano gurgle on my forehead. The room was spinning and it was a long time before I could sit up, inch by inch, on that bed. My eyes felt too plastic to see. I moved one hand slow across the bed. The spaces beside me were empty.

“Sterling?”

I'd puke if I moved another inch.

I didn't move another inch.

Time went in and out.

The room kept spinning.